Cheap shot & I hope someone did the same when you guys launched and I hope it made you struggle.
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.
Execution is everything though.
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.