Show HN: Add “Magic” to Your Business
blog.sendsonar.com
blog.sendsonar.com
This was a great demonstration of an interesting piece of technology, that has been met with an overwhelmingly negative response. It's designed really well and I can see it being especially useful for small businesses with a more personal approach to client management.
Author, whomever, this is great work. I can see it being very useful for certain applications. Really nice, well-written and simple ruby gem too :)
Luckily, there weren't too many negative comments but I was happy to address their concerns. Can't make everyone happy (especially on the internet).
What does "feeling" have to do with it?
I can't agree with that. Criticism is valuable. You can't learn anything from a pat on the back as you can from criticism. That's not saying that some of the things aren't deserved.
As an example I always get frustrated when the manager/owner of a restaurant walks around and says "is everything ok?" rather than "what can we do better or what wasn't perfect?" (in other words invite comments that may be negative).
Enough with the attaboys.
As far as HN what you typically can't learn from is downvotes without an explanation of why a downvote was received.
It's like being that restaurant owner and having people take one bite of their steak before complaining that it's not as good as the steak from the place down the street.
"Send a blackbox a message and you get something - on demand!"
That's art. Or it's an incredibly sad state of affairs with what qualifies as "technology" and is a horrible commentary on modern societies values. Or a reflection of it - imitating it I suppose.
"Magic" & "Yo" - The future is bright.
More likely it's an abstraction (via the blackbox) of the way we build internet services and ordering. That something so simple neared 500 comments and 1,200 upvotes on HN suggests to me that for 10+ years we have built ecommerce in one way, when people would rather it in a different way. No continual re-creation of accounts, of declining newsletters, declining warranties and insurance, of re-entering shipping details, etc.
Or avoiding phone ordering processes that involve waiting on the line, repeating details three times, clarifying specials and so on.
How is something that saves us time and allows us more time with our families and friends a horrible commentary on society's values? Surely the interest in Magic is a commentary on how off many of our assumptions are when building online/phone ordering processes?
Part of our identity and love of capitalism is shopping as entertainment. We love advertising and responding to brands that we identify with. What if this is all a lie, as you imply?
I just find it all very interesting.
Freedom of choice was the old way. Freedom from choice could be the new way?
I find it brilliant, disgusting, tempting and shocking all at once. I'm not sure if it's a civilization in decline and on the eve of revolution or if it's a beautiful thing.
You don't get an emotional response from just saying "Pizza" and a price comes back and you reply with a "Yes/No" and then it arrives? Where is the service that says "Pizza" and "Yes/No" for me? Clearly that's the only place the form can go.
I guess it's the infantilization of society?
I also don't really see the difference in values between buying flour and making obtaining a pizza really easy. Why is buying flour okay, or dealing with the details of ordering pizza yourself okay, but handing off the last little bit of the pizza ordering is reflective of decay?
I think it has to do with the fact that you surrendered choice in where this pizza comes from. You have no agency in the quality, labor conditions, ingredients, etc of the pizza. You have reduced your "freedom OF choice" to "freedom FROM choice".
Devo was right.
If anything, having people within the blackbox means you might get a better choice rather than just the closest or cheapest choice.
"FOOD"
And a short time later food (possibly Soylent to keep the baby food aesthetic right) shows up. If I can do this while wearing a VR mask showing a strange new world with bigger people that talk, even better. I want to be an infant again.
Maybe they can add a feature where it can hear me shriek out and automate this process.
In your scenario the UX may be broken since Seamless can do this much faster I think?
So, creating a single-business-specific Magic seems kinda useless.
You're right though, the aggregation is definitely a big part of it.
Many companies already offer that kind of service, e.g. https://www.americanexpress.com/us/credit-cards/benefits/det...
Oddly enough, my insurance company just started offering up that type of service too....
Processing the order is currently manual. You're back in the call center era. For the back and forth, you'd probably be better off using voice. As in, the customer calls the service on the phone.
The big advantage of web ordering is that the user gets to browse the catalog and select. They can find out if it's in stock before they order. The order gets captured correctly and automatically. There's one central service for buying, and it's called Amazon.com.
For me, I'd rather send a few text messages back and forth than sit synchronously on a voice call for 15 minutes.
Companies are able to handle a much larger volume of text messages than they could via voice (sync vs async).
At least for me, I send thousands of text messages per month but only do a few voice calls.
Since Magic says you need to send them your credit card and address info the first time you use their service, my guess is that they would have to record that info so next time you text message, they just look up your credit card by your phone number (probably not in stripe, most likely in a separate database they keep). They can associate your stripe customer id with your phone number so they don't have to store raw credit card numbers (let stripe handle that!).
also, we're built on (and love) twilio:)
Deleted comment
"At Sonar, we offer a drop-in javascript widget so you don't have to write code. Twilio is a more low-level solution."
[edit] Thanks Matt, that's what I was looking for.
If I posted something I had poured my heart and soul into for months/years and had to deal with sarcastic vitriol from someone who completely misses the point of what I'm trying to accomplish, I wouldn't feel comfortable posting my work here. I'm personally very grateful there is a community like HN where negativity and closed-mindedness is grayed out.
How often do you ignore text messages?
s/Below is out you get started/Below is how you get started
The FCC is in the process of cracking down on companies that use long codes for marketing and interacting with customers. It's too amenable to fraud.
You should be using short codes which have strict requirements for opting in, opting out, and restrictions on spam.
If this is using long codes you are setting yourself up for fines and legal problems if you use this service.
There's a distinct difference between marketing/spam and customer service/support. When a customer initiates the conversation via text, it is generally seen as an assumed opt-in.
Our issue with short codes are that they are very expensive ($3000 setup fee and cost per text after that) and a 12 week approval process. That just doesn't work for our use case.
The laws definitely need to be updated though.
I've also done many text projects for small businesses using Twilio with long codes. I sincerely hope the FCC would prioritize cracking down on scamming robocallers (a major nuisance) before they crack down on small businesses attempting legitimate communication with their customers.
Now is probably not the time to be using long codes.
Not ideal of course. Best to have geographically isolated short codes to minimize this. But it's better to be FCC compliant.
http://www.usshortcodes.com/get-a-sms-short-code/sms-short-c...
I'm a pretty risk-averse person and I can't imagine in any way the FCC cracking down on the use of long codes for legitimate two way communication with an existing customer. On the other hand, using long codes for mass marketing campaigns and you'll probably be shut down by the carriers and possibly sued, no FCC action required.
As for porting your phone number over... a quick search found this: https://www.twilio.com/help/faq/phone-numbers/i-already-have...
Feel free to send me an email: vishal@sendsonar.com.
how can you get those kind of operators, hopefully at low prices? odesk?
I don't see why hiring evening and night staff would be that different apart from training. It's probably a bit more difficult to find people that want to work the night shift... some companies get around this by rotating staff between the day and night shifts regularly to give everyone a chance to lead a normal life.
"Lady luck please let the dice stay hot..."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Explenation: In the animee there is a phone that can call a number which makes anything happen or done. You have a billion credit. Too bad you die if you use all the money.
Cheap shot & I hope someone did the same when you guys launched and I hope it made you struggle.
Execution is everything though.
Did they write about the routing? No. They advertised their product piggybacking on a frontpage story.
Look, if the same thing would happen but Magic would be an established company, I'd say it's brilliant, but it's not. And it matters.
Opportunistic? Maybe. But we love SMS and we love Magic so why not show other companies how to apply that awesomeness to their own business?
It's hilarious that I'm being downvoted for being exactly right.
The fact is that you're freaking out about something nobody else here really cares about. "Piggybacking" on the popularity of something else is a tried and true marketing technique. When McDonald's tweets something featuring a trending hashtag that's only tangentially related, they're "piggybacking" on its popularity. Magic itself is "piggybacking" on the popularity of the services it navigates for you.
More importantly, this isn't going to hurt Magic one bit. You could build a "clone" of magic yourself in less than a day: set up a stripe account, build a low-fi landing page, and own a phone. Boom. You're done. Hell, you could build a Sonar clone on Twilio without too much effort (nb: I've never used the service, but I'm referring to the basic feature set). The trick would be making the same kind of splash that Magic made, and therein lies the challenge.
In summary: calm down and you'll stop losing so many Internet points.
This is really just slapping the "magic" name on "sms-based customer service." That's entirely different from magic.
For reference, almost everybody knows how to wash their car, but that hasn't put car washes out of business. McDonald's doesn't succeed because nobody knows how to make burgers, or that their special sauce is thousand island.
Restaurants, maid services, landscaping, etc., all benefit from the same aims -- if they can provide convenience to the users willing to pay for it, and do so in a way that compels those users to keep paying for it, there will be space in the marketplace for them.