Magic: How to launch a product so no one will ever use it again
tghw.com
tghw.com
Oh right, because that experience sucks mightily. I have this lovely full color screen that can display menus, location and delivery times, let me search by cuisine, choose various customizations, etc etc. Then a "magic" computer sends the orders to the restaurant via an already configured and tested system so they are expecting an order and can fill it quickly and efficiently.
Or alternatively, thanks to this innovative new startup, I can SMS to some random number and say "I want food or something do you have any burritos" and then have them text me back, etc, etc.
BUT WAIT says the new startup. IT'S NOT JUST BURRITOS, in fact it's not just food. You could ask for a burrito today and a flight to Cancun tomorrow, and you only have to put one phone number in your address book.
Aha, the real value proposition emerges. This startup uses their proprietary technology to know that Seamless or Instacart or Expedia exist already, and then they use it for me. Except it takes twice as long, without the UI/UX those services have perfected, and costs 30-50% more money.
Step one: Landing page
Step two: Corner the market on taking SMS messages and using them to punch orders into existing apps, using skilled college graduate US based labor.
Step three: VC/YC EXPLOSION
Step four: Profit
As for why people want a personal assistant to shop for them when they could just use an app, think about it this way:
To get things (even online), I have to:
* Decide what *specifically* I want (brand, item, size, etc.)
* Decide where to get it from
* Obtain their website or app
* (often) Sign up for an account
* Enter a bunch of information to order what I want
* Follow up if it's late or wrong
* Decide what type of thing I want
* Tell someone to make it happen
I think what you, and the parent article, are responding to is that it's really hard to actually have an always on-call, fast-acting butler at your service.
The value proposition: People can fire-and-forget an order for anything. Someone else handles the details. People with more money than time -- a great market to serve -- prefer to trade the former for the latter. Cheapo McCouponClipper will sift through the apps individually.
Do you go to the grocery store and tut-tut people in line? Don't they know they can get batteries cheaper at BatteryWorld? Vegetables cheaper at the farmer's market? Windex cheaper at Bob's Industrial Cleaning supplies? Why are they at a general-purpose store with a larger markup?
But it doesn't matter. The incredulity of objectors who ask "Why don't you just install 20 apps and save some money?" will be superceded by people who just want to use the service.
Cut them some slack and think about how hard it would be to pull this off with such rapid growth without having any delays or issues during the first phase of rapid growth. Dealing with high levels of traffic and orders is hard, dealing with high levels of growth is a lot harder still.
Amazing they managed to ship the order at all.
Even if everything had gone perfectly and I hadn't spent over an hour waiting for responses, I still wouldn't use this service. To pay more for a worse interface? No thanks.
"Everything is amazing right now, and nobody's happy."
But in this case, waiting an hour and a half for a middle man to do what it would have taken me 2 minutes to do wasn't worth the extra $9 they were asking for.
I didn't make an order, but I fail to see how you could have been surprised by this. They have no idea how much demand they were going to have at launch, and it's not a service that can scale easily.
When I first signed up, they wait-listed me. Then, a few hours later they let me (and apparently everyone else) in. They didn't need to do that, but they did.
Of course, if you're intimately familiar with all the various services available to you in SF then this is not going to be a useful service. I mean that perfectly straight, not sarcastically; they basically tried to charge you $9 to "know Postmates existed". But there will be a lot of people who may still be willing to pay for not knowing all those various services. I'm personally skeptical but it's at least worth a try.
(I can't speak to the complexity of keeping track of the SF services, since I don't live there, but my impression is that it's challenging.)
If Magic wants to be competitive, it needs to have services equal to or better than existing options. (The Postmates comparison mentioned in the article is valid). That's the way it is with all startups and "they're just figuring themselves out" is not a sympathy granted by the marketplace.
But people did use it, enough that it caused them to be horrendously slow. This means they should put more money into making it bigger. If there are a few hundred "innovators" (in the Everett Rogers/Crossing the Chasm sense) who were so alienated by bad service during the beta that they will never ever use it again, even when it becomes a good service...well, that sucks but has no bearing on the ultimate success or failure of the service.
If you're going to beta test something, you have to expect it to have a few flaws. That's the point.
Maybe in disneyland, but that's mostly how things go down in the real world. It's a startup, first week, got hammerred by HN heavily, probably others, that's as much as they can handle. Things will go fine, they just need the time to adjust.
"Wow, everyone! This is truly amazing. We released Magic under 48 hours ago as an experiment and a side project, and now the traffic and requests are streaming in faster than we can handle."
First user experience during the hockey stick phase being 'poor' is to be expected for anything with this degree of growth. Try scaling anything through three orders of magnitude in 24 hours and you'll get why.
The amazing thing to me is that your order got delivered at all.
But they were. Because they were using an invite-only signup to limit the amount of new users they can take in, they could make a reasonable assumption about how busy they could get at rush times.
Besides, the people on the other side aren't robots - at the very least they could've apologised for the late replies and explained about how busy they were. Because they're humans - or so the website claims - and that means they should show a bit of humanity and empathy and whatnot.
TBF I don't really think they hire actual humans, that just doesn't scale. Especially if 90% of their users just want to order food - reasonably predictable input, that.
The bigger problem is that their service is just a simple middle man. They don't provide delivery services, they just choose which service to use. For the examples they gave (food delivery, grocery delivery, airline tickets), it's never going to be worth it to me to have them charge me an extra 25% to pick between the three services that will do that for me (Postmates, Instacart/Postmates, Hipmunk). What's more, SMS makes it more difficult to order. Postmates' interface is much better than trying to text an order in.
It's not that this is just an MVP. It's that this service really only takes away the decision of which other middle man to choose, and there's just not enough value there.
Seriously, who wants to chat with a service whose latency is about 19 to 31 minutes?
It should be MVP + metrics + quiet A/B testing and iteration for months before launch.
1. Build something
2. ???
3. Profit!
1. Build something
2. Reduce convenience, increase price, piss people off, but get press
3. Profit!
According to the team, this was a side project, they had put a crappy landing page out there (with Times Roman as a font and got some flak for that) and somebody else submitted it to Product Hunt and it took off. They quickly improved the landing page and started handling orders.
Now almost everybody reading HN knows them. They chose a brand name that is easy to remember. If they get their shit together in 6 months and relaunch, they will be totally fine. Most early stage startups can only dream of the kind of visibility they got.
The bigger problem is that this kind of surprise success doesn't necessarily validate the idea, but at least now they can see and start to measure retention.
At this level of growth any action that you did not automate away will bite you in a terrible way. And that's what all the handbooks say right: wait with automation until you've found your product:market fit. But what if that outruns you?
Who is their target market? Let alone if I saw another service hitting up my site like this I would likely try to find out why customer's weren't finding it on their own or using it on their own, two things which would be at the top of the list to improve all the time.
Perhaps to give people a separate billing point to reduce exposure of personal information? Look I just paid thirty bucks for a pizza and Pizza Place will never know it was really for me!!! Seriously the only convienence I can see if reducing the number of entities with my CC info
(Or people on HN who understand irony, apparently.)