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Comment by cmikec | Hacker News Reader

Thanks! Yeah, honestly, after deciding to launch this we released a really minimal landing page which I saved here: http://getmagicnow.com/index-old.html - As you can see I made that in about 20 minutes, and was not expecting this. After someone posted it on Product Hunt I spent whatever time I could polishing it up. In general though, I agree, simple websites are much better. Thanks for the kind words.

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Hm, well here's a startling difference between the HN and Product Hunt community.

The PH comments:

  This website looks extremely untrustworthy, purely from a design standpoint. I feel a lot of potential users would be put off by this!

  Interesting idea. Terrible site design. Unclear if they're charging for this added convenience.

http://www.producthunt.com/posts/magic

This was pretty funny, actually. They saw the old version I mentioned above. I was surprised when someone posted it on there and I was actually glad that the reaction was lukewarm, because we didn't think we were ready to launch.

And then...boom.

Time to trade up the chain?

ProductHunt is just a useless hype machine for starts that don't hold any real value at all.

There are those that would say HN is no different.

Not true, Product Hunt delivers quality traffic, with high-level people who are hungry for products and convert very well.

I was under the impression a lot of people use it for idea generation/competitive intel & that (in marketing terms) PH is a (small) traffic/link hack...

In other words I'd be interested to find anything on the quality of its traffic.

Hi!

We launched one of those landing-only email-catching product pitches on Product Hunt and Designer News. It went amazing. We never even topped #1, yet we got lots of useful feedback and more than five hundred emails of potential customers, some of them high-profile (think @google.com or @abc.com)

The quality is very high.

High quality SV echo chamber traffic.

> Not true, Product Hunt delivers quality traffic, with high-level people who are hungry for products and convert very well.

Are you a human being talking about other human beings, or a "market opportunity" about-talking "quality traffic" that "converts very well?" I should write a "quality traffic" bot with "good conversions," then post it on Product Hunt.

That commenter at PH could tell the original design took 20 minutes, and if you only have resources to allocate 20 minutes to a product page design, how good can the product be? I think there are more in this community would agree about the original design without completely writing off the product's potential.

Well, I agree with it. "Anything you want, just give us your credit card number". No explanation of who they are or why I should trust them. Hell, they even accept Bitcoin!

While you have changed the copy and a few other things a little, I was quite amused at how people on ProductHunt considered it untrustworthy mostly through virtue of using Times New Roman rather than a nice Sans. An interesting example in the psychology of running counter to fashion..! :)

That was my thought when I looked at index-old. It kind of makes it look like an early-mid 2000s website, as well as unfinished.

The typeface of the older design appears as Helvetica on OSX. Edit: realized this is likely due to changing the default font years ago, unbeknownst improving the experience of sites like these. New typeface is certainly an improvement either way.

Times in Chrome on OS X

Not just the design. No Terms and Conditions, no incorporation, no IDs of owners/operators - really doesn't seem like a legitimate business (despite money being handled by Stripe).

How come you removed the part of the FAQ that mentioned your fee? I think everyone knows you have to charge one and we're totally cool about it. Did you just feel that subject was best saved for later in the signup process, or did you want to keep the door open for alternate means of revenue?

It's part of the secret sauce. If Magic is worth something, then so is knowing their numbers.

We noticed that people were more confused by the ambiguity of the nondescript fee, than us just saying that we'd tell you the total amount. You are right though, we do need to figure out a better way to explain this. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know.

"We quote you one simple price that includes everything: The goods, the delivery, any expected gratuity, all service charges including our own, and any applicable taxes and fees. What you see is what you pay."

Can they use that verbatim? Because they should.

Sure, consider it a gift. Now go forth and change the world. (Or at least the world of laziness.)

One thing is that it says chatting is free and there are no hidden fees. It doesn't say how much extra it is costing.

Tip is included.

I suspect just like the concierge at a hotel, the cut comes from the provider of the service (a dozen roses for 100 bucks - they can afford some affiliate fees from that)

If you visit the direct link: http://www.getmagicnow.com/access.php without adding an email address it still says that "You've been placed on the waiting list!". Simple error, but easy to fix so there is no confusion. Great service!

If you visit this link, you can pay them $5,000: http://getmagicnow.com/pay.php?p=500000

Payment pages should really be linked to an order ID of some sort, without which customers shouldn't be allowed to pay. Otherwise, lots of things can go wrong. Depending on how they have configured things on the server side, a customer could change the amount being paid and the system would consider the ticket paid, cheating them out of money. Or a customer could follow an old link and wind up paying twice if they thought it didn't go through the first time.

If you visit this link, they can pay you $5,000: https://magic.bettir.com/?p=-500000

Wait, what?

Whoa, seriously? I'm going to guess you're joking since they probably implemented "customer order of amount x".

Edit: they've fixed this now.

I'm not joking, click on it and try to pay. It shows an invoice of ($5,000), a.k.a. $5000 negative dollars. I didn't enter real payment information to see what happens next because of really idiotic interpretations of what constitutes "hacking", but it is a really bad design choice on their part that took me about half a second to find.

Founder, if you're reading this: was this an in-house build or did you outsource this?

The answer is probably they spent around two days building this before demand grew left them zero time to improve infrastructure. Which is more or less good.

Less good? Infrastructure breaking because of load is one thing (concurrency/DB issues) but nothing like this should ever be exposed to the user on general principle.

https://i.imgur.com/yJDY3m2.png

Stripe doesn't let you send money to cards.

I'm glad to know Stripe's API is sane but you cannot ever rely on that when designing something like this!

Great MVP, great focus. Few thoughts -

Make sure top phone # is tappable on mobile browsers.

Examples that don't make me question your ability to deliver - airline example seems to be hiding complexity (I question it as I read it), others really good

fyi, there's a typo in the FAQ: "we'll let you know the total price so you can confim"

Thank you. Fixed!

The font on the new page much better.

Is this available in Canada?

We can't do everything in Canada but we can definitely do some things. Try us.

Just take a look at Google's initial page when they started.

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