Did Magic die? Was it absorbed into another corporate entity?
Example article from 2015: https://www.vox.com/2015/2/25/11559368/i-tried-out-magic-the-new-text-message-concierge-and-it-was-far-from
My thought was (and someone on their side could have seen this as well) it would make a great piece for earned media later as I could say I got the job at getmagic by using the service...which is the kind of thing you'd want your growth person thinking about.
They were almost allergic to this idea the entire time, it was kinda crazy the friction I got from what I was asking them to do. I was also doing it as a test of them as well, so glad I thought of that angle.
I actually ended up starting usedouble.com (GPT3 for spreadsheets) to automate a lot of the work Magic was doing, as it felt quite expensive to have a human do those rote tasks. It often requires less verification as well, as the assistants often can make mistakes because they are not culturally familiar with the target task. For example, we used them to categorize a bunch of grocery products, and would see mistakes like putting frozen naan in the bakery section (where in north america grocery stores you'd expect that to be in the Frozen section). So it's interesting how GPT3 actually ends up being more accurate for things like this.
And athenago is terrible compared to just hiring from onlinejobs.ph
They charge you $3k/mo and pay the EA $700/mo, that's a ridiculous price to pay for a recruiter. Just spend $1500 a month on onlinejobs and you'll get somebody much better, and they'll never leave you.
They went from high quality concierge service, to low quality virtual assistant work, in a gradual shift.
Now they're essentially reselling upwork/fiverr services, as when you ask for something they will likely end up using this. It's down to a very small amount of use cases, frankly, as their service is no longer high quality. They also pulled some fast ones on me throughout that time; for example, as they lowered their prices, they conveniently grandfathered me into the older, higher price while still lowering the quality of their service.
Even when using them successfully, they seem to spend ages doing the most inane, basic things and over-bill for it.
Nowadays I use Chatterboss (https://chatterboss.com/). Magic's only useful feature is that it's humans available 24/7; but on Chatterboss the assistants know you and your business inside and out at least. Though I have my own share of issues with CB too (such as their super weird pricing which feels like buying a car and being sold twenty options which aren't so optional).
To be honest, this is why I'm excited about ChatGPT. The past month, I've used ChatGPT for many tasks I would have previously handed out the same way (in the same english!) to a virtual assistant. And ChatGPT just gave... better results, and gave them almost instantly.
It’s nice to be able to respond, “I’ve done 1 already, 2 is too far a drive, and 3 is not my vibe, give me 3 more options” and get a good result. I even asked it “what would the iCal format for doing this activity next Tuesday at 11am look like” and it generated one reasonably close (though in UTC time zone).
When I got the report back, I discovered that they told all of my competitors that they were calling on my behalf to find out their pricing structure and referred to me by name.
I also asked them to call all the flower shops near me to find orchids. They responded next day “we called 10 shops near you and none have them” I found this to be odd so I called one place I had used before. They had them.
I think they should change their name because it’s not magic.
The quality/cost of service have dropped off imo, I used to rave about them circa ~2017 but the intelligence of the service really dropped off.
The idea is great, I still use them once in a blue moon, but the execution is in this uncanny valley of not being cheap enough for rote work (like compiling expense spreadsheets from texted receipts) and not intelligent enough for complex research tasks.
What about the idea is great? There are few economies of scale, no automation, no long term edge, and it is completely dependent on the existence of cheap labor.
It's simple enough to argue that's not enough to make it "great". I would say just about as simple as it is to argue that it is.
Unfortunately they seem to be in that cursed valley of only supporting tasks that anybody can do with 10 minutes of googling, and the chance of them screwing anything else up is too high to be worth the risk of setting $100 on fire for zero results. I don't think that will be a solvable problem with humans until ML mostly takes over.
Nothing you can do when you're in the US and the person that stole from you is in the philippines.
Would never use them again.
I went to remove my credit card information from their records today, and it turns out you cannot actually do this yourself which is a red flag. I had to open a request with them to do it.
When I used it, they charged you for every minute your "operator" was busy. Apparently my operator was standing by awaiting a response from the contractor to do the delivery for my burgers, so I was billed for that entire time they were waiting.
83489 is their sms.
We eventually canceled due to the phone calls being billed at 15 minutes each (which is still fair, we are too small of a company to justify the cost).
Overall, i think something like magic needs to stay for the long haul.