A lot of skepticism here, which is understandable given the somewhat unbelievable scope of what they are promising.
I'm a very active user of Magic+, so I'll give my perspective. (and of course I've been working with them from the beginning at YC, so you're also free to discard my opinion as biased)
For me, Magic+ is basically the impossibly good personal assistant, kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man, or Emily in The Devil Wears Prada. Unlike a conventional assistant, it's available 24/7, always happy to take on more work, and capable of accomplishing just about anything.
Obviously the $100/hr price point puts it out of reach for most people, but my expectation (as an investor) is that as the tech improves, they will be able to bring down the price while maintaining or even improving the quality of the service (I call this the Tesla strategy).
For me however, $100/hr is totally worth it since it effectively increases my leverage and enables me to get more done in less time. I've used it to plan events for YC founders, answer questions that are hard to Google (they will find the right experts and ask them), and provide unique and memorable gifts to friends, family, and business partners. I'm used to paying a high price for quality professional services such as accountants or lawyers, so $100/hr for the best possible assistant feels completely reasonable and rational.
>but my expectation (as an investor) is that as the tech improves they will be able to bring down the price while maintaining or even improving the quality of the service
Call me skeptical, but where exactly is the tech involved? Currently this is just text messages going to people + people doing the things.
One possibility would be through AI (a bit of a weasel word most of the time, honestly), but Google and Apple are both miles ahead on NLP, so by the time you can parse "get me a peperonni pizza", Google will have been doing it for free for the past year , and include a 10% off coupon for the pizza!
Considering your value is based almost entirely on getting things done through an assistant that understands English, it looks like costs are basically how much you pay the assistant themselves... Maybe you can get away with paying them $20/hour (and equipping them with good tools to do the common stuff fast).
The Tesla strategy works (well, in theory) because so much of the cost of the good is based in things that are continuously getting cheaper (batteries).
But here... What's driving down the cost of the assistants? Seems like the solutions are much more about HR-style "innovations" , business partnerships, and the like than anything coming out of MIT.
I sincerely hope the strategy isn't "find the cheapest human labor possible"
We are highly focused on software that automates and/or makes parts of Magic and Magic+ more efficient. Most of the founding team are engineers, including myself. At this time we can't say much about our specific technical approach, other than that it is a very difficult problem, we have a novel approach, and we are making progress.
There's a decent amount of innovation that can make the assistants more efficient, so you can improve profitability without driving down wages. But there's also something else:
Since a high percentage of services will likely end in a transaction, there's a huge opportunity to become the Amazon-scale retailer of services. I find I don't even google products I want to buy anymore, I just immediately search Amazon. Amazon is my retail UI. If Magic can do the same thing in this space—become the service UI—I'd imagine it won't be long before more revenue comes form partnerships than directly from consumers.
Personally, Amazon's UI has a long way to go and doesn't look like it's going to get better anytime soon.
If you know what you're looking for, it's fine, but as soon as you try to comparison shop it falls apart fairly quickly.
I've gotten into the habit of looking for experts on other sites that do hands-on comparisons for the thing I want to buy (some recent examples: rain jackets and fitness meters). Amazon is honestly a terrible UI for this sort of thing.
I know that they're trying, but at this point they've lost my trust that what they show in search results is relevant unless I'm being extremely precise.
So, if the market shows that UI is what causes Amazon dearly, and that the market prefers a magic like messaging interface, how long will it take for Amazon to offer a magic like service at a price point that is affordable to everyone. Compare that with the time and effort required for Magic to become a retailer with Amazon's efficiency. I'll bet on the former.
The sad thing is - UIs generally don't matter if there's anything else making your product special. You can make your users as miserable as you want, and they will still use your service. Companies know it and prioritize effort accordingly.
Craigslist's UI is great! High contrast text. All links are obvious (no iOS style "is that colored text or a button"). It loads quickly. I can find the information I need without hunting around a bunch of ads masquerading as useful content.
As an added bonus, I don't have to relearn how to use it every 6 months when the design team gets bored and decides to redo the whole thing for no good reason.
There are a few additions I'd like to see (PadMapper style apartment search being the big one), but all things considered I like Craigslist a lot more than most websites.
Compare it to Amazon where half of the items are miscategorized, sort by price doesn't actually sort by price, and sort by average customer rating is way too literal. In what world do I want to see something with a single 5 star review over the one with 191 reviews, 94% of which are 5 star, and another 4% are 4 star? But that's tucked away on page 7 of the results after all the items with nothing but a single good review. Amazon's got issues to work out.
Whats up with the negative karma here? People don't like the truth? Every day people get business off the ground in the face of serious negative criticism. People telling them they can't do something. Telling them that it isn't going to work. There is no way it would scale etc. Someone who decides that something isn't possible is just one less competitor for me!
You don't have to automate the parsing of queries to produce leverage here. Every time they answer a query successfully, I would imagine they add that to an internal repository of information. So the technology play would be less on the "figure out what they want" front and more on the "deliver exactly what they want" front.
Need an on demand helicopter in NYC? Great, Magic knows just who to call for that because they already did it for Justin Kan. Need to rent the Exploratorium? Great, they can do that too.
For more common requests that fit neatly into other on-demand services offering, they could ostensibly partner directly with those folks and integrate with them. That way, Magic could have their own master dashboard to purchase services with minimal effort.
that isn't technology though, you just might use technology to keep track of it (wiki/whatever). Maybe that's what paul meant by "technology" but that isn't a Tesla play by any stretch of the imagination.
Shaving 5 or 10s off average handle time with smarter tooling is absolutely technology. In fact, it's probably the most widely used technology on the planet.
As someone who works in that space, helping people do similar things with greater accurately and quickness delivers a surprising amount of value... when you're talking about deploying that across 250+ desks.
The target isn't to throw technology at 99% of all requests, but to deploy it on the smaller portion of the process it's suited to. The only thing faster than 100% machine is 99% machine + 1% human.
Excuse me if this is a bit naive, but I've always had the impression the whole point of Magic is to build the AI side. Maybe not communicating back to the user... perhaps that part's always done by a human, but a human with machine-aided decision making. I would love to see the internal interface that Magic's personal assistants are using today.
Doing every task by hand with people probably doesn't scale. Maybe for $100/hr it does, but that could just be their way of targeting tasks for executives because they have a higher percentage of profit. I expect they're using the data from requests today as training to recognize narrow patterns to be automated tomorrow.
Edit: I found this in their FAQ.
> Q: Do you use AI to fulfill my requests?
> Magic+ is fulfilled through a combination of top-tier executive assistants and concierges, paired with intelligent software. Our unique combination of humans and software is what enables us to consistently deliver an unparalleled level of service.
You're looking at AI as if it would be their primary product.
They don't need to compete with Google or Apple on the front of AI as a polished product. Not now, anyways. All they need to do is make something that works. They can get away with building something that wouldn't even be beta-worthy for big tech companies to release. To Magic, AI could simply mean more efficient infrastructure, keeping human interaction in place of UX.
The more efficient they get, the more they can lower the price. The more they can lower the price, the more users they'll have. The more users, the more revenue, the more cash to spend on improvement.
AI doesn't have to roll out of MIT looking like Jarvis just to be useful.
People are fairly predictable. Presumably they'll build software to handle common requests quickly. Google pizza is a good example, but i doubt google will do pizza, dry cleaning, and travel booking all in one shot. (but they might). It seems like these folks can find a local vendor for service X, have a button on some internal software to send it out, then just leverage that for all customers in that city. presumably the oddball requests get tracked similarly. "i want an elephant" might take a while the first time, but the software should remember contacts and whatnot to make it easy if they ever get the same request.
That's a bit naive, as with Facebook M this is tapping into the huge market of AI-like personal assistants.
We may not yet have the technology to create a Jarvis, but we can make a person a lot more efficient at their job with some clever tools.
For example, in the website there's a request that mentions getting a private helicopter booked to LAX in 3 hours. A personal assistant would have to look up private aviation companies that fly out of a base nearby the GPS location of the user, guesstimate the closest one and most likely call to book as the online bookings might not be automatically processed and it's a short notice.
With today's technology, you can parse that request so that the software automatically picks up "Helicopter booking", from: GPS to: LAX. If it's right, the operator accepts it and it creates a checklist: 1) Call "Bob's helicopter co." 2) Enter exact time of booking: [ ] 3) Click to book car for booking_time - travel_time at [current_location|office|home] 4) send nice reply to customer.
Once you've done this a couple times, you write new software that automates the call step by filling in a form online, or sending an email to the receptionist, or both.
More importantly, since you log every action the operators take, you take decisions on what to automate based on data. Are our employees spending 24% of their time on google maps? let's add a database of businesses so they can simply choose from a list.
There are a lot of simple questions that are hard to find answers for if you don't know where to look, and those answers are often unique or only marginally repeatable. Take travel assistance, for example. If all you need to do are basic pre-travel concierge tasks, that's one thing, but what happens when your client tells you something like "I'm going to be driving from Denver to Salina, Kansas today with two young children in the car. I need several energy-releasing entertainment options along the route, as well as a family friendly hotel room in KC that's near the stadium and offers onsite guest laundry (machines, not full service)." None of this is hard, but it requires multiple web searches, probably a few phone calls, and hopefully some local expertise. Once an adequate database is compiled, software can help quickly retrieve viable options and minimize human intervention. Human curation will still be absolutely mandatory and expected in a service with this cost.
Note: I just drove from San Jose to Raleigh with two young kids, including a day from Salina, KS to St Louis. We found the most amazing place to stop, and I highly recommend it to anyone driving E-W or W-E on I70. The Moon Marble Company (https://www.moonmarble.com/) is not just a handmade marble shop. It has the best collection of retro toys I've seen anywhere in my life. We spent 3 hours browsing!
It might not be necessary but it does help scale cheaply. You could have people pick up the phone and order food for you when requested, but if they can route that through an API 99% of the time it costs a whole lot less time & money.
I'm not sure a binder and rolodex scales very well. I'm willing to be convinced.
Have you ever worked with a really great Grand Budapest Hotel style concierge? They really can do pretty interesting things, if you tip well and are willing to pay. But, you gotta go to that hotel and talk to that one guy. The software scales that person.
"Get me a pepperoni pizza," is a phrase anyone with some basic nlp chops should be able to understand using freely available code. Here's an example that could get you started but on a different domain. http://deeplearning.net/tutorial/rnnslu.html
Google, Facebook, many other companies (perhaps not Apple) publish many of their research findings and a lot of innovation is coming straight from academia.
To answer your question more directly, the hardware, software and data required to run an effective machine learning platform is getting cheaper and more powerful every year, which should drive down price if they can replace human tasks with AI solutions.
AI is the obvious future for this yeah. I think the tech right now probably just centralizes around building really good customer profiles and excellent tools for assistants so that any assistant can pick up work for any customer.
I sincerely hope the strategy isn't "find the cheapest human labor possible"
As evil as it seems, that's probably a sane strategy - as actual automation eats the job market, the number of unemployed, or those seeking multiple/alternate employment, will rise. These will more and more comprise displaced white collar workers. This will make the employment market a buyers market (moreso than it is already) and will result in decreased labour costs.
So - call me cynical, but if that's their plan, it's robust - if potentially evil - at least it'll be providing employment.
This is weird to me. It may not be pushing the bar forward on AI or NLP, but it uses one of the most commonly used interpersonal communications technologies today to put a human experience in front of a seemingly boundless personal assistant.
Look, it may not be Tesla, but there are a couple of unicorns that seem tech savvy now, that weren't so much for the first little while. AirBnB comes to mind - their analytics now are probably amazing, but they started as a website with a database. Doesn't make them any less of a technology company.
Leveraging technology to break down barriers (immediate, constant, on-demand availability and scalability of a personal assistant) is a technology solution to a problem.
It's still not really a tech company, though. Maybe you could call it a "remote company" or "virtual company" due to how they operate, but in my opinion, you can't really call yourself a technology company if you haven't programmed or engineered some sort of software or hardware.
The issue with incorporating tech is that it speeds up requests and breaks this billing model. Changing the billing model in the future is of course possible, but in the near-term it strongly disincentives the team from trying to automate requests.
One possibility is being able to classify requests much more accurately, so that they get sent directly to a specialised "magician" that can complete the task very efficiently.
I don't think they would want to bring down the price.
Right now Magic is targeting price insensitive users, which provides an ENORMOUS advantage because they can always pick the most expensive options when executing a request. They basically remove one of the variables regular people have to optimize for, and it makes it much easier to make users happy.
If they're dropping the price to where price-sensitive users get involved, they're going to have to make far more complicated decisions about what flowers at what price point make someone happy, or what seat on what airline makes sense.
>User: Can you get me an Ipad pro tonight?
>M+: Sure. I'm assuming you want the best model - 128GB with LTE in Space gray?
>U: Yeah
This process of comparing available options against prices, data plans, and features would have taken at least half an hour for me.
Right now, they can just disregard the price completely and offer whatever is the easiest to do/get/access.
This is a purchase normal people would spend hours agonizing over. Should I get the 64GB model or the 128GB? Should I get the latest one, or one generation older? Should I get the slightly more expensive gray/white one, or stick with black?
But that's okay. It's not meant for everyone, and that's perfectly fine with me
Ok, so why is this so unbelievably interesting to everyone here? I mean, seriously, its been ten hours and this thing is still at the top of the page, and that is very long time for a HN story. For something that doesn't seem particularly innovative nor useful for a typical person, it has a huge amount of support here. Which is especially confusing because this indicates that somehow there is a massive number of price insensitive people people on this site that somehow do consider this useful, a fact that doesn't seem born out at all by the usual activity. It seems like this is a massive attempt to make an enormously overpriced service seem reasonable to people that can afford it but normally wouldn't even consider it.
As another commenter pointed out, HN has a lot of young people making $150k+ and this is just a way for them to "optimize" their time and be more "productive".
In reality, this is just a way for them to pretend that they have the same luxuries as the actual rich who came from money.
Services like this will last only as long as the bubble in the valley.
$100/hr is $200K/yr or $350K to get you $200K after taxes.
Plus inefficiency or loss of fidelity to intent from the delegation, which adds a cost.
I'd think $450K - $600K income before this makes sense.
// Also note the contact and meeting management class of tasks require always on engagement. At that point, you're better off with your own company-supplied EA who is in the flow and can carry your personal prioritization prefs so you don't think about any part of that process.
You don't have to use them all the time, though... there's plenty of things I couldn't afford to do all the time but sometimes it's worth paying extra for, a service like this could be one of them. If something urgent comes up that Magic+ could fix in 15minutes and that I don't have 15 minutes to use and it can't wait, a $25 fee could easily be justifiable, even if my salary was only $50k. The same way as most people wouldn't have a chauffer, but that doesn't mean taxis aren't sometimes worth paying for.
But how do you know how long a request will take? Maybe I think a request will take 15 minutes, but in reality it takes 3 hours. I make less than $100k/year. There's a big difference to me between $25 and $300. What if I start the request, decide it's taking too long, and ask that it's cancelled? Can it even be cancelled? And then am I charged for the time used and get nothing in return?
To use your taxi analogy, I can get in a cab and ask "About how much will it be to get from A to B?" and probably get a good estimate (or not even have to ask with Uber and the like). Does that exist for this service? Maybe public transportation would be better for me depending on the answer.
It sounds to me like, at least from their perspective, they wouldn't want a poorer customer like me.
Hey Paul, this value proposition resonates with me (especially the comparison with lawyers and accountants) and I'm the target customer... But I enthusiastically tried Magic when they first launched and it was full of fail (big promise from Magic, no delivery on a keg of beer from the East Bay). I certainly would have paid a lot for it. Skeptical that it'd be any different this time around? [Edit: typo]
Hi, this is Mike, one of the founders of Magic. Really sorry to hear about your experience here. Did you get a refund? If not, please text in to 83489 and mention this post, and we'll be sure to get it to you.
I can absolutely admit that when Magic first launched, we were over capacity and a certain percentage of orders went awry. I hate that this happened, but we really did not predict that the website would go viral so quickly. In fact, today, we still have such high demand for the service that there is a long waitlist for the regular service, and our $100/hr service is getting a lot of signups very quickly as well.
This is part of the reason that we created Magic+. We wanted to make sure that people who had a very high bar for service quality would be able to use the service right away and be guaranteed to have the absolute highest level of service, no matter what.
I completely understand that given your past experience with Magic, you might not want to try Magic+. However, I can confidently say that if you try it, you will find that it feels very different from the Magic that you tried. Your keg will be there.
As you know I had a very bad experience with Magic as well.
I worked for you for free for a week and on boarded 63 new customers for you. You guys arbitrarily deleted my account, and abruptly shut off my autopay donations to numerous charities we had set up together.
Then you went silent and wouldn't return any of the ten messages I sent to you asking for access to my personal records and information regarding my numerous charity donations.
How can I encourage others to use your service if I was shown such an unprofessional and disrespectful experience?
I was treated like a second class citizen and tossed to the side. My account was deleted. I contacted all 4 of the founders. Not one would respond. They went dark.
I would hope that no one else gets treated as poorly as I was and experience this type of disrespect.
yea Mark, you are right. I did learn an expensive lesson.
One of my main frustrations though was that this was a very highly regarded YC company. Should consumers expect this disrespectful behavior to be accepted from other YC companies as well?
Should YC founders be expected to be able to simply pick and choose which customers they want to arbitrarily delete?
I can completely understand if this was a fly by night operation. But YC is basically the Harvard of startups and this was completely out of left field for me.
I'd be interested in seeing the founders respond to this.
We have stories like this every now and then with various companies, and here's something that makes me wonder: assuming that both parties are neither evil nor stupid (which I think is fair assumption in most cases), how exactly such situations happen? There's a lesson for every founder and manager hiding here.
I was screwed over by some startup founders that tricked me into working for free under the guise of "demonstrating mastery of Rails" and "proving my culture fit," but I wouldn't call those guys evil, just jerks.
So how does a situation like that happen? You justify it to yourself to cut corners in order to succeed, and because you're a job creator in America, you're entitled to respect in the end.
I actually have a personal assistant, but for many tasks, Magic+ is simply better (and completely responsive 24/7, which I would never demand of an employee).
They are exceptionally good at getting things done. A regular person could spend hours or days researching the best way to get something done, Magic already knows. There are real scale effects here.
I never heard of this before but it sounds it scales better to big and small jobs, and is more efficient use of available manpower.
Say you have a huge job, or many small jobs, that one personal assistant couldn't do at once alone. Or if you don't have enough jobs at all times of the day to keep your personal assistant busy. etc..
Its kindof analogous to renting time on a server farm vs owning a pc.
>>Obviously the $100/hr price point puts it out of reach for most people, but my expectation (as an investor) is that as the tech improves, they will be able to bring down the price while maintaining or even improving the quality of the service (I call this the Tesla strategy)
What tech?
Tesla's strategy is working because they are using the high prices of their luxury cars to pay for serious technological innovation and build infrastructure for economies of scale on the expensive components (batteries).
Without knowing what type of technology (beyond SMS) powers Magic/Magic+, and why it can't be easily replicated by competitors, it's difficult to buy into your optimism.
How would you compare it to concierge services of Platinum+ cards? Especially when it comes to dining and travel accomodation? Do they have also access to reserved slots in concerts or restaurants?
I think that knowing them personally makes a big difference on your decision to use their service, regardless of if you are an investor or not.
People tend to give their business to people they trust (or to people recommended by people they trust).
Just like I think I'd be wary to contract a faceless lawyer to handle my next divorce, I think I'd be wary to contract a faceless personal assistant to handle any important aspects of my personal or business life unless I'm really desperate.
So if my rationale were applicable to many others, Magic+ main challenge would be solving how they can overcome the trust roadblock.
> For me however, $100/hr is totally worth it since it effectively increases my leverage and enables me to get more done in less time.
Also, because you can afford it.
If you only need assistance a few hours a month, I can understand the need for such a service, but why not just hire a virtual assistant that speaks perfect English, and works 40 hours a week for around $2000 a month (or less!). Multiple companies, including Zylun.com offer access to such talent.
> Obviously the $100/hr price point puts it out of reach for most people
$100/hr for competent assistants 24/7/anywhere is a steal for any kind of organization like investment banks, enterprise sales, consulting firms, that send their people into the field to do high pressure, deadline-driven work.
Another potential revenue generator for Magic, partner with large organisations so they can offer the service to their employees. If the global corporation where I work can trust files of thousands of employees to a third party cloud sync service, I'm sure this can be done.
last minute accommodations, car rentals, plane tickets, restaurant reservations, location scouting, ballroom rentals, all these things can be outsourced.
companies are already paying amex, travel agencies, and junior associates for this kind of thing. not to mention actual assistants that make 75k+
Looks like the reception isn't doing too well. I remember when Magic launched here on HN and it BLEW up. I was one of the people who tried it out. I live in NYC and actually had a poor experience.
The first two times, I said "hey I want a sandwich with [x]" and I got it but it took a lot longer than if I just clicked the necessary buttons on Seamless. Then I kept getting random calls from time to time from pizza delivery men saying they were downstairs.
They were very apologetic and nice about it, but really it just wasn't worth it for me. The CTO (I think) reached out to me some months later asking why I stopped and well it's the same answer: very little utility for someone like myself. If I were rich, hey sure why not boss someone around for random things (though I don't know why I wouldn't just hire someone I can trust). However, if you're middle income or even a little higher, what's the point really? Everything else is basically on-demand in this new uber-fied world.
I had a very similar outcome with Magic after trying really hard to rely on it. One of their suggested usages is to order flowers for someone, so I tried that on two different occasions.
The first time around, I asked for flowers, and got a picture of some flowers that they could send to my recipient. I didn't like the flowers in the picture, and so they picked another set of flowers per some feedback from me. The flowers arrived, and the recipient was touched, but my lingering feeling was that I would have spent the same amount of time ordering online, and it would have been easier to find the right kind of flowers if I had done so.
The second time I tried to order flowers was a complete disaster. I was ordering them for a special occasion, and Magic had told me they would be delivered within an acceptable time frame. However, the flowers never showed up. I was not notified that they had not showed up - instead I learned that they had not showed up after one of the more embarasing birthday calls of my life. Magic was very nice about it, refunded me and delivered the flowers late for free. The error may not even have been their fault. However, the extra layer of abstraction between me and the flower delivery person in this case seemed to make the whole situation worse.
I use a lot of different do-things-for-you services these days. In theory Magic is a service I should be totally hooked on, but these bad experiences killed it for me. What's the point of a service that does everything for you if it makes things more complicated or harder to get done?
That's the problem with depending on companies like that. There's zero accountability, you can do absolutely NIL to hurt them, but if they fuck up, it can do big damage to your affairs.
I had a flower shop almost fail on the delivery - we agreed on the flowers, date and place, and then... they forgot. They simply forgot about the delivery. Luckily I called them in time and they managed to get their shit together and deliver the bouquet literally minutes before I was about to suffer a big embarrassment if the flowers were not there.
Thanks for bringing this up. I've addressed similar comments elsewhere in this thread so I'll try not to repeat myself much.
- We really feel terrible that some early Magic users had a less-than-magical experience after our initial, spontaneous launch. I'm really sorry about that. I'm glad that you got your refund. If you're interested, reach out to us and we can probably track down exactly what happened and what broke down in the chain of operations.
- This is part of the reason that we created Magic+. We wanted to be able to hold a very high bar for top-tier service and guarantee that you would have it at all times, no matter what.
- We'd love for you to give Magic+ a try and compare it to your experiences with Magic. I'm highly confident that you will feel a major difference, however I understand if you don't feel inclined to do so after your past experience.
> - This is part of the reason that we created Magic+. We wanted to be able to hold a very high bar for top-tier service and guarantee that you would have it at all times, no matter what.
This is really not addressing the issue in my opinion, it would go a long way if you offered more details on what steps has been taken to improve the service, the process, the monitoring and the reliability of the service.
Saying "Well we know we dropped the ball so we are going to make it more expensive in hopes less people use it is really not an strategy that inspires confidence"
This doesn't sound right: You are suggesting to use your more expensive service when even your basic service wasn't working well for him. Why aren't you saying him to try the basic Magic service again, is it because it's still not "fixed"?
I'm really sorry that your initial experience with Magic last year wasn't ideal. We have come a long way since those initial days. Believe it or not, we actually did not plan that original launch -- rather, we released the website and number to a few people and it went viral practically overnight. We set up a waitlist as quickly as we could, but there definitely were some people in the beginning who did not have a good user experience. I hope that if you asked for a refund back then because you were dissatisfied, that you got one. If you didn't, please feel free to text in now and claim it.
Some of the themes you're bringing up here actually point to why we created Magic+ in the first place. Magic+ was developed as a response to the needs of the most active and demanding users of our standard Magic service. In particular, a common demand was to hold a very high bar for quality and seamlessness of experience.
Right now, some of these user-requested experiences are more expensive to deliver than the original Magic pricing model accounted for. Our plan is to offer Magic+ at this price now, because there is good demand for it at this price, and drop the price over time to reach a larger and larger market. $100 dollars an hour is a lot, but our most active users tell us that for this level of elite service, it's a bargain.
I just noticed something strange in the screenshot. It seems to imply that Magic will work over iMessage. As far as I know, there is no publicly available API for iMessage so I'd be curious to know how this works.
Setting up a Mac to programmatically send iMessages is trivial. I have a custom solution running that receives data over HTTPS and runs an AppleScript to send the specified text to the desired number or address via the Messages app using an iCloud account not tied to any mobile phone number.
Hey it's no worries -- just sharing my experience and conclusion upon the product. Poor experiences aside, the product isn't for me because I think it's equally as easy to just use the specialized service (e.g., food delivery website for food delivery). Nevertheless, I can see a use-case for the wealthy and hope the best for you guys.
Yes, you can use the service from other countries. Magic+ is actually really convenient when you're traveling. We have phone numbers that work internationally.
You don't even need to be that rich to have an assistant 24/7:
Personal Assistant™
Offers MasterCard® Black cardholders the convenience of a personal assistant, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Going beyond the service of a concierge, Personal Assistant is available to free up time for busy cardholders, with services such as:
Child care services (such as pick-up and drop-off at school).
Pet care.
Personal shopper (domestic and international).
Location and purchase of rare gifts.
The MasterCard® Black Personal Assistant service will answer virtually any request that money and ethics can buy.
Crap, this could have really saved me over the last month - what's the catch? Have you used something like this? I think my last card had it (calling it "Concierge") but my current bank doesn't mention it anywhere.
Typically cards with extra features either (at the low end) charge a monthly fee or (at the higher end) have minimum requirements such as a minimum net worth for the holder or a minimum monthly or annual spend through it. Lower end would normally be a small fee and fairly basic bonus features (travel insurance, gadget insurance, airport lounges) while I'd expect any half-decent concierge service to be aimed at attracting richer customers. The minimum worth/spend requirements basically mean the extra services offered are there to attract people who will give the card creators more % by spending more money, giving them enough profit to offer free services.
> If I were rich, hey sure why not boss someone around for random things (though I don't know why I wouldn't just hire someone I can trust). However, if you're middle income or even a little higher, what's the point really? Everything else is basically on-demand in this new uber-fied world.
Judging by the price and the copy in the page, I wouldn't be surprised if it's actually targeted at rich people.
Yes - plus appears to be targeted at rich people ("I need to have 6 convertibles by tomorrow"). But remove that trailing `/plus` at the end of the URL and you have their base product Magic, which isn't.
Ok. I must seriously be missing something here. I'm usually the last person to complain about shilling, because even on the very rare occasions that I am confident that some sort of "astroturf" operation is going on I usually find it to be a somewhat valid or at least entertaining form of promotion and don't care that it is clearly just advertising.
But seriously, this thread is absurd. I truly do not understand how a significant portion of this site (even knowing that it is probably largely made up of affluent, educated people) consider this to be even a reasonable value proposition. I'm not incredibly affluent or anything, but by any standard short of the true "1%" I am extremely well off. However the level of wealth required that a blind commitment of $100/hr for trivial delagatable tasks is way beyond anything I would consider using, especially considering the significant upfront purchase that seems to be required. What ten hours of random bullshit that I not just need done, but would entrust to a stranger without known qualifications is worth $1k? Not much...
But this comment section is filled with well crafted top level praise of the service with a staggering amount of popularity for what seems to be an extreme luxury service. Compounded by very "reasonable" objections with immediate and solicitous responses by accounts claiming to be representatives humbly begging for an opportunity to right their wrongs and improve the service.
This whole thing looks like a finely tuned campaign to leverage highly-regarded social media in a wide scale blitz to make the absurd product seem reasonable. Seriously, I'm staggered at this comment section and the popularity here.
And this "target market" excuse seems like crap. If the "target market" is extremely rich folk who would consider dropping $100/hr on miscellaneous unskilled labor with almost no real guarantee of reliability or quality, then they wouldn't be blitzing a random social media site to improve their image (which they explicitly are doing with mr. cmikec running around). They'd focus their efforts on true premium clients and demonstrate some sort of solid guarantee of their reliability that a suspicious rich person might actually accept. This whole thing looks like an attempt to make random $100/hr requests somehow seem reasonable to people who can technically afford it but typically wouldn't even consider it if they didn't see it as a "normalish" thing to do.
I look at the data on these posts all the time and can assure you that the interest in this one is genuine. There's nothing implausible about a startup attracting attention on HN anyhow—especially when the startup started on HN.
People are much too quick to jump to a "shilling" explanation when other people's interests differ from their own. We need a name for this bias.
Perhaps someone sent a request to Magic+ along the lines of "I want Magic+ to become the number one item on HN"? It's legal, it's possible - and they're on it. It'd make a decent demo!
What? A personal assistant is someone that you know, that you vet, that you can gauge the skills and reliability of, and that you can hold genuinely accountable. And you are comparing hiring this person on a full time basis to an ad hoc and in many cases inferior "assistant" who is only available for a fraction of that time with no guarantee or indication of quality ahead of time.
And not just that, but only extremely rich people have truly personal assistants, and if they can afford them then they probably don't need this apparently mass-marketed service. Most "personal assistants" are hired by a company that the said "rich person" is involved with, making it a company expense. And why would a company with the resources to hire a personal assistant (and likely other flexible personnel) go to some $100/hr service when they have their own employees to service their general needs and who can be responsible for tracking down and hiring the specialists who actually do those tasks.
I mean, seriously. You could hire a full-time minion to go out and find and pay specialist deliverers, caterers, etc. for a similar or smaller cost than it takes to hire someone unknown and unreliable to do it ad hoc for a quarter of that time, given that 40hr/month estimate.
You completely hit the hammer on the head with both this comment and the parent. I just assume that a big amount of 20-25-ish developers here that make $180.000 are excited at the prospect of having a personal assistant to match their other unreasonable status enhancing purchases.
As if any 'rich person' would spend any amount of time texting some random employee and give them access to his e-mails. If I were rich and would deem myself in need of a PA I would want to know them very well before allowing them access to my personal information and I would expect them to take care of certain things without me having to tell them what to do all the time, let alone text them.
You are discounting a strong trend: expensive products become commodities.
Plus there are degrees of richness. It's easy to name examples where rich people have been trusting their personal information to faceless entities for years.
> to match their other unreasonable status enhancing purchases
You don't know the purchases of the audience you are referring to.
Hiring good people and keeping them happy is enormously difficult, time consuming, and expensive. Finding the right person can easily take a month or more--and the process must be repeated each time you lose your employee. The better and more qualified the employee, the more likely he or she is to go on to better things. If you can find a good person for $48K yearly, then you will also need to pay benefits, bringing the cost closer to $72K. To keep your employee happy, he or she will need time off, probably during times that he or she would be most useful to you. Your assistant will need to sleep, too, perhaps during times that you may be awake and hungry. You will also need to pay your employee for many hours in which they are not engaged in helping you because you haven't asked for help.
In short, I cannot imagine having the kind of wealth that would be needed to hire and maintain a group of employees that could assist me around the clock--and would do all of this without imposing a significant additional burden on my life. But I and probably many others can imagine paying a few hundred dollars for assistance with burdensome tasks.
Given their example scenarios, I'm pretty sure Magic+'s current target customer is actually the "true 1%", and it's not at all surprising there are a relatively high number of those people on HN (investors, successful startup founders, etc)
It would be reasonable to consider that there are many use cases where this is truly a useful product.
I participate in competitive events (video games and card games) where I generally only have 10-15 minute gaps to leave throughout a 15 hour day in a foreign city. I would happily spend $20 to have somebody find the best available food which can be delivered to me and order that food. I wouldn't ever want to pay for an assistant, since I only would need this service 2-3 times per month.
And that is the exact market for Magic+ - people who would happily pay for a personal assistant at that rate, but don't have enough work to benefit from hiring a real assistant. I've spoken to friends seriously about hiring an assistant which would split their time to help 8-10 of us, with us equally splitting their salary. This is a more elegant solution to that.
Enough to dominate the top of the front page for 10 hours? And populate the comment section with numerous high ranked glowing/apologetic comments? This is the sort of activity that usually accompanies massive news that rallies wide community interest or support, not a niche service that only a handful of extremely rich people should seriously be interested in, even on a site like HN.
I saw that the post had 400 comments so thought it would be something huge. Turns out its Yet Another Personal Assistant hidden behind a UI. There really isn't that much to discuss about it which hasn't already been done to death by all the Facebook M posts.
Welcome to Hacker News, where people's conflict of interests are not disclosed.
I agree with OP- this is an absurd tool. If you can pay $100/hr for an anonymous 'personal assistant' you can pay for a real personal assistant. This is another example where rich SV-elite are making out of touch predictions on the market.
Out of touch may be a tad bit harsh -- I see it as being not aligned.
When you live in SV and make your 125k+ salary you're going to come up with a lot of pretty damn good useful things for yourself -- but not everybody else.
I am from an immigrant family and parents combined income was ~75k for my entire life (in Canada, no less, where we pay much more for the same products as our neighbors down south). You can reduce the cost of access or improve the experience but at the end of the day we simply didn't have the disposable income to even make use of Amazon in any kind of life changing way. It just wasn't that big of a deal until I started making the kind of money that the benefits of Amazon became obvious.
Most of SV hype is around products that simply don't apply to MOST people. This is also why you REALLY notice when someone strikes to the core of universal affordable (if not totally free) services - Google, Facebook, AirBnB, Uber etc. The big successes (in the consumer space) are ones that have the blanket appeal across income ranges.
For now, Magic+ is not one of these.
I kind of just wrote straight through and realized I didn't make any solid 'points' but hopefully something resonates. The basic idea is that most things being done by SV are STILL things that most people CANNOT afford.
> Welcome to Hacker News, where people's conflict of interests are not disclosed.
A statement about Hacker News that could just as easily be made about the world in general doesn't carry any information about HN. Many (perhaps most) of the claims I read about HN fall in this bucket.
> If you can pay $100/hr for an anonymous 'personal assistant' you can pay for a real personal assistant.
Isn't this a matter of batch sizes? I might pay $100 for the occasional hour but couldn't hire a full-time personal assistant. I wouldn't hire a full-time accountant or dentist either.
I'm trying to figure out why I (too) am having a strong negative reaction to this. Let me think out loud:
I'm fortunate enough to have a real personal assistant. She's amazing, she knows me, she does fantastic work, and I pay her a fair and reasonable wage (including health care) that's far less than $100/hour. So let's put me in the category of "people who can afford a personal assistant" but not quite in the category of "people who demand to meet Tina Fey & Amy Poehler on demand."
I would NEVER in a million years consider replacing my assistant with a faceless nameless AI-assisted service. I have a number of friends who are also fortunate enough to have assistants. They would NEVER consider replacing their assistants with a faceless nameless AI-assisted service (at least one friend has an assistant that's been with him for years and is basically part of the family).
And with the examples they give, Magic+ is painting a picture of both a service and user that's highly specific -- wealthy enough to afford these luxuries, but not willing to make the investment of hiring a real person to build a real relationship with to perform these tasks.
So the whole thing feels....dismissive. I guess that's the best word I can come up with. Dismissive of money ("Entertain me with Tina Fey - I will pay for her presence."), dismissive of human contact ("I don't want a real assistant - I just want to text a service to do my bidding.") Dismissive of warmth. It's sort of what I imagine a caricature of a dystopian tech billionaire would want -- all of the somethings with none of the someones.
I dunno. It just feels ... off. Sorry I can't come up with something better. But as the target demographic (I think?), I'm feeling like the pitch is very off-target and off-putting.
Welcome to the future. This is what happens when you have a highly concentrated, morally bankrupt nouveau-riche out-of-touch with greater society drives "innovation". It's only going to get worse as the bubble continues.
I work in tech (but started and sold several companies previously). Of the first three friends who have assistants that come to mind: two are CEOs and one runs a hedge fund. I guess no surprises :)
I just signed up to see if they could renegotiate my Comcast price for me. It turns out you have to buy either 10 hours at $100/hour or 40 hours at $75/hour to get started. That's way too steep to try something out.
Considering that many kinds of common requests would likely involve waiting on hold, I'd be surprised if they didn't contract out to some cheap automated service to handle "wait until this goes off hold and then connect me to them".
But that's not the actual problem. Let's say the hold time is a random 10 to 20 minutes. What's your personal assistant supposed to do in the meantime?
They can't reasonably do anything that requires making calls or other real-time interaction in case the first phone call is picked up.
Even if they could make them do some non-time-sensitive secondary task while they're on hold on some primary task they'd still suffer some time wasted due to overhead & distractions.
Then I, as someone who manages a remote development shop and pays Comcast in the several thousands a month for Internet access, would be pissed that -I- don't get such access.
Why on earth should Magic have a "preferred relationship" so they can make money letting their customers skip the line I'm waiting in?
I feel like, if your income is such that you care about your Comcast bill, you are really not the target market for Magic+. This is aimed squarely at the Rolex-and-Lexus set.
An hour of my time is worth more than an hour of their time costs. And that's without counting the headache of doing it. Considering it would save me money for less than I would "spend" doing it myself, I don't see how it's not an application for most people.
He's not going to hire Magic+ for 40 hours per week. Many services are $100/hr or more, they're just rarely billed out that way, because people have this reaction. If you have a moderate amount of disposable income, you can afford to have simple requests filled by Magic+ for $15-$30 (10-20 minutes of personal assistant time) several times a month.
The viability of the product for a solid middle class user really just depends on if Magic+ can fill the type of requests that you'd want to offload in a time-efficient manner or not. Some people in this thread say they're hyper-efficient and specially trained to do so, so it may be worth a try.
> If you have a moderate amount of disposable income, you can afford to have simple requests filled by Magic+ for $15-$30 (10-20 minutes of personal assistant time) several times a month.
Well, except that--as the grandparent post said--the minimum buy is $1000 for 10 hours. That puts it well outside "casual purchase, might come in handy" and into "must have a specific, long-term use in mind" for the typical middle-class income.
Yeah... I would be up for trying it (if they now or in the future allow European customers), and could imagine liking it enough to be willing to put in $1000 to last me a while, but not without trying it for a few $10s first.
Maybe they are choosing to price out those of us who would use occasionally but not often, or maybe it's an acceptable downside to benefits they get from having other people pay that lump up front. (For example, maybe they've found that in the first $200 of spending people aren't convinced, but if they're forced to spend another $800 then they start to appreciate the service more and are less likely to stop using it.)
You're right. I missed the comment about a minimum buy-in. That definitely puts it outside of the reach of someone who may find it useful for simple, occasional tasks. I guess they still want those people to use standard Magic.
I was just reading about a company started by 2 brothers that does exactly this. If I can remember the name, I'll post back. Maybe I saw it in Bloomberg? Anyone?
That's us! I don't want to do a sales pitch or any thing, but if I can answer any questions about the service (or Comcast or whoever), feel free to ask away!
(also our hosting isn't handling the traffic super well, so if you have any trouble visiting the site, but want to sign up or have questions, feel free to shoot me an email personally at ben@billfixers.com
We've been experimenting with it, and have worked with a few dozen businesses thus far (mostly in familiar territory like cable, phone, and cell, but also some SaaS expenses, shipping/parcel costs, etc.). Feel free to email me at ben@billfixers.com if you'd like us to look into your particular vendors!
I really am not a fan of the hyperminimalistic "we can do anything trust us!" landing pages that every text-for-personal-assistant seems to think is brilliant marketing copy.
There are examples of Magic+ requests, but no real-world examples of outcomes and whether the request was filled successfully to the customer's satisfaction.
Relatedly, the $100/hr is suspicious because it's impossible to audit the time spent by the assistant. (Contrast with flat fees stated upfront from the normal service.)
Thanks for the feedback. Magic has been in an interesting position as a startup ever since our website went viral in Feb. 2015. Starting then, we've had more demand than supply for our product every single day. That's why we never iterated our original landing page -- marketing was never our biggest problem, in fact it was our smallest. That said, I completely agree with you, that there would be much more powerful ways of communicating that you can trust us. Most of our signups come from word of mouth from real users at this point though, so it's not as much of an issue.
For our $100/hr Magic+ product, we display detailed reports daily to users that show exactly how time was used down to the second. I agree that communicating this correctly is key. If you're interested in trying it, I'd love to hear your feedback on how we display this information.
Even if the time is broken down, what's the incentive to be as efficient/cost-effective as possible? I get that cost is not the primary driver here but surely it is not open-ended.
Also, invariably with a complex task, there's going to be a lot of dead time spent waiting while coordinating.
Isn't that effectively a problem for any hourly based service? What's the incentive for a lawyer, accountant, developer, anyone to be as cost effective as possible? Surely the answer to that (happy customers, repeat business, referrals) would apply here as well. Even if hypothetically it wasn't as efficient as possible yet they still managed to deliver quality results, whats the problem? You're paying for results not effort, no?
If we aren't efficient and cost-effective, we won't be able to retain users and our product experience will be severely harmed. Whether we are charging hourly or not, it must be the case that the value we offer the user is greater than or equal to the cost that the user is paying.
Needless to say, at Magic we hold ourselves to a very high standard when it comes to product quality and value. And, we use the product ourselves and we pay hourly.
Maybe in that scenario, "time spent waiting", they don't charge? Seems like they wouldn't want to waste those cycles, but I see your point with regards to incentivisation.
Yeah, pretty hyperbolic. There are a lot of cases where they will have to say no or "sorry, we'll have to set that up for another time". Some requests are simply not always possible.
To pick one of their examples:
"I need to rent out the Exploratorium this weekend."
What if someone already rented it out? Or it's under construction? Or there's a special event? Or *?
I wonder whether one could use Magic to hire a prostitute in Nevada, given that they're a California company presumably incorporated in Delaware.
Which is a more localized version of the question I really want to ask: if Magic ever expands outside of the US, could I use it to order Cuban cigars to be shipped to Canada from Cuba? The US would never have to import them—so no illegal/trade-sanctioned act is occurring—but an American company is still profiting from the exchange.
Given unlimited funds, anything possible is easy for the guy writing the cheque.
If I was willing to foot the bill, you could probably do any of the example magics listed (assuming you had my details/logins to email/calendar) in an hour or two.
2) Do the Magicians post a surety bond to Magic for liability-related losses? Does Magic have third party fidelity bonds to help defend against suits brought against them due to fraudulent actions by (I assume) contractor Magicians? Disclaiming all liability and hold harmless agreements can be problematic in reality, given the example market of impulse iPad Pro buyers could easily be envisioned to have enough resources to litigate Magic into oblivion.
3) Do Magicians undergo any kind of background checking?
If I'm going to trust a service with information otherwise protected by regularly rotated credentials and TFA - and I'm not beyond doing that, since the pricing for dependable and trustworthy (and bonded/insured) assistants for ad-hoc tasks doesn't seem too offensive to me - I'd want to know my risks.
I know that doesn't make for magical copy on a landing page, but it's a selling point. I used the original Magic pretty early on, getting a rather esoteric accessory for some discontinued on-ear studio monitors, and I was impressed by their professionalism. If the pricing goes to the next level, the professionalism needs to follow, in my opinion.
I use Magic and they provide incredible service. They've been able to accomplish pretty much everything I've asked, including some requests that I thought were borderline outlandish, such as having food from a restaurant across the country sent to me via chilled overnight air mail for a friend's birthday as a big flashy surprise (friend's favorite restaurant).
If you value your time more than your money, then they're an excellent service that gives you a new suite of capabilities for making that tradeoff. They have been able to arrange everything I've asked them to do. What I like about them is that I can make a request without having any idea how to go about getting it fulfilled, and Magic will figure out how - they'll do the research and find a solution. They are familiar with service providers for all sorts of unusual tasks and will set them up for you: personal chefs, car servicing pickup, garbage pickup - for everything I've asked they've had an answer.
They are primarily limited however by their staff on the ground or lack thereof. Although they've been able to organize couriers in several cities to accomplish tasks, they have occasionally been unable to find couriers on the day of a request. Magic is a generalist service: they can do virtually anything, but not necessarily within the same hour you ask. They're worse than specialist services like Postmates at tasks like basic food pickup and delivery (mostly due to lower availability of couriers). Magic is most useful when your need is unusual and a typical service won't be able to get it done - or when you want a complex problem to be solved and don't want to have to think about or manage the solution. At such a task, they excel, and they've always come through for me in the end.
The Magic staff are very friendly and personable, as well. Their customer service is a tier above any other company I've interacted with. They handle requests with unusually high intellectual and emotional intelligence, and care. (Disclaimer: I haven't used Magic+, only the original Magic which has been surprisingly cheap for the value it adds.)
> such as having food from a restaurant across the country sent to me via chilled overnight air mail for a friend's birthday as a big flashy surprise
Maybe I'm missing something here, but this is making me seriously think about what Magic's target market is. What kind of income would a person need to fathom affording something like that? I know people who I would consider "wealthy" on a first-world scale but this seems like a service suited for millionaires only (not that there is anything wrong with that, of course).
What kind of income would a person need to fathom affording something like that?
What kind of income do you need to spend $200 on a Valentine's dinner? Probably not $1k a month. It's a stretch at $2k but not impossible. It does not feel "absurdly not socially normative" at $3k -- I did it when I was a young twenty-something.
To the extent that there is a real class-based difference here, it may be "degree of comfort with the notion that 'there is probably a way to spend money to achieve this without needing to do anything else.'" It's like, I don't know, a bureaucratic process which requires someone to go down to City Hall and stand in line for half a day. The middle class is capable of buying their way around that but it doesn't generally occur to them to try; the upper class don't even hear that that was a requirement because the very expensive person they use to handle legal issues already subcontracted it out.
Yeah, but wouldn't it be a lot more than $200? We're talking Magic's $100, however much the meal cost, plus the cost chilled overnight mail would be insane.
They don't chill the whole logistics chain, they just put the food in an insulated box with some dry ice and send it with the rest of the overnight packages.
Yep -- see http://orderboxesnow.com/ for FedEx's first-party options, which are the upper bound on expense (for the chilling, not the overnight delivery).
This is what I appreciate about Magic, by the way. I simply asked for food from the restaurant, specifying that leftovers were fine. Chilled overnight didn't even occur to me; I did not have any idea at the time how they might accomplish it, and I was prepared to be told it was impossible (or insanely expensive).
They figured out that chilled overnight delivery was possible, and got a local service to handle the logistics of picking it up from the restaurant, packing it into the box, and shipping it. It turned out rather nicely, and not nearly as expensive as I expected. It's not even really that much work and effort, when all is said and done.
You wouldn't need an extravagant income to do something like that. I just did a quick check and it costs less than $150 to overnight an 8lb package from NY to SF with 8am delivery. So the markup over just buying the meal at the restaurant is going to be less than $300 once you add refrigerated packaging and pay somebody to order it, pick it up, package it, and ship it. That's pricey if you're doing it every week, but for a special occasion that's not unimaginable for somebody even at the low end of middle class.
I think most middle class people would think $300+ for a meal is wildly extravagant. And would think a $300 gift for "a friend" is on high end of gifts.
Semantics, but if you're struggling, you're not middle class. At least not in the classical sense.
It's a shame the downward pressures that have made "struggling to get by" the middle class norm. The whole point of the thriving middle class (in the US at least) was that, with a willingness to work, you could live comfortably, with a house and two cars and 2 kids.
This isn't meant to be insulting or directed at you - it's just a new definition of middle class, that the struggle builds character or your struggling is an indicator of your value or lack of hard work, that I find almost infuriating.
Bullshit. I'm not "rich", but I'm a single guy making an great salary and my purchasing power is probably in the 95% of the the US. I don't even really think twice about purchases of anything that costs less than 3 digits if I have any desire for it. But $300 dollars for a meal as a gift to a friend? And not even that great of a meal? The fuck? That is absurd. I wouldn't even be above buying someone an xbox if I felt like it, but a $100/hr "convenience" charge is stupid money.
He used regular Magic, which is not Magic+. Magic is significantly cheaper. (Drop the plus from the URL). You submit a request, they give you the total, you confirm it, that's what you're charged.
I wouldn't consider myself rich either, but I do fairly well for myself as an unmarried guy in his 20s, and there are some friends that in some situations I wouldn't hesitate at all to spend a few hundred dollars on them. Some of them have done the same for me.
If you don't think twice about buying things under three digits, depending on frequency, just not doing that for frivolous things for a few weeks could afford you the ability to do something that might ultimately be a much more valuable memory. There's plenty of crap I've bought and barely used that would have been much better used taking a good friend out to an extravagant meal or event.
Well for one thing I did point out that I'd be fine dropping an xbox on a friend if I felt like it, just not a moderately expensive meal with a $100+ dollar markup on it. Especially considering there are countless delivery services easily accessible that do that sort of thing already; 30 seconds of googling isn't worth dropping an extra $100-200 because I couldn't be bothered to find the name of a cheaper service.
>If you don't think twice about buying things under three digits, depending on frequency, just not doing that for frivolous things for a few weeks could afford you the ability to do something that might ultimately be a much more valuable memory. There's plenty of crap I've bought and barely used that would have been much better used taking a good friend out to an extravagant meal or event.
I mean, that's what I'm talking about. I've never felt like my ability to splurge massively (e.g. buying a ticket at an airport to go on a suddenly planned trip) was impaired by my frivolous $50 purchases whenever I felt like it. I may not buy moderately expensive stuff without even considering whether I actually will use it (so maybe I'm not as rich as I think) but I don't have to even consider stuff like expensive taxi rides or bullshit novelty experiences when I'm bored.
Really - a $300 birthday gift to your friend? According to this website[1], the median American family has a combined income of 81k and spends about 1k of that on gifts. That's for the whole household, so more like $500/year for your friends. You're probably not going to blow half of that on one friend's birthday dinner.
Of course there are plenty of people for who this is reasonable, but please don't be so ignorant of what "middle class" means.
>According to this website[1], the median American family has a combined income of 81k and spends about 1k of that on gifts
And some people are a bit more generous than that. Or only have 1-2 friends that they go "all out" for. Small $20-40 gifts for a few friends/coworkers and 1-2 $200-300 gifts for the close friends lines up with your estimate just fine. Especially since they said could afford to and not will do so.
I'm middle class and spent three times the average you cited because I budgeted it accordingly for the last year. This year was atypical, but was very much possible.
You don't need to be upper middle class to afford a one off large purchase. Maybe if you're struggling in the lower ends of the working class - it could be difficult. I don't see where you're finding fault with their statement... if anything you're supporting it.
She's a very special friend, and I hadn't done much in the way of thoughtful gifts for her birthday in the last several years. She loves the restaurant and hadn't eaten there in about five years. The restaurant actually burned down shortly after we left the city to move to Seattle :-( We thought we'd never have it again. (I love the restaurant too, so it was kind of a gift for me as well.)
When I learned that the original business had been rebuilt and re-established, I thought I'd put together an extra special surprise for her birthday this year.
What was special about this birthday present was it seemed like an impossible feat, on first impression, and she had no idea how I did it. That's why what Magic did was so magical. Imagine having for your birthday dinner food from your favorite restaurant in the whole wide world, from a restaurant 2000 miles away, that you thought had burned down! Entirely unexpected and quite delicious!
Shipping rates are significantly reduced if you do high volume - if Magic does a lot of shipping (and it sounds like they would, with the services they offer), they could probably negotiate a far lower rate than you could.
I do somewhat extravagant things like this for my wife every anniversary divisible by 5 years; I've not used magic to do it, but most nice restaurants can make something like this happen if you call and ask.
It ends up being something a few times more expensive as a night out at the restaurant, so it's not cheap, and you don't get the ambiance, but my wife is very attached to memories, so the touch of "somewhere we visited on a romantic trip" is quite nice, and more appreciated than e.g. jewelry that might be as or more expensive.
Ordinary people do this all the time. People have Chicago pizzas shipped to LA, and Lockhart barbecue shipped to Boston. When you go to touristy "destination" dining spots, they almost invariably have signs saying they ship food.
This being the case, all Magic is really doing here is helping you find out which restaurants will ship, and perhaps making some phone calls to arrange shipments that aren't advertised.
> What kind of income would a person need to fathom affording something like that?
Depends heavily on how often they did it. A quick estimate suggests that a request like that would cost a few hundred dollars at most: the cost of the food itself, packing it in an insulated box with cold packs (some restaurants can do that themselves, and if not, a shipping service could most likely do that quite cheaply), and about $100 to ship a package weighing a few pounds overnight. Absolutely in the "luxury" category, but a few hundred dollars doesn't seem wildly outlandish for someone making an average tech salary to choose to spend on a meaningful birthday gift for a close friend.
(I say "meaningful" because I'd tend to assume that the reason for the restaurant across the country would involve some kind of shared memory with the place, rather than just a wild whim.)
I have no idea what sort of food you're ordering from across the continent or what sort of business its coming from, but unless its "generic slop/carton-packed stir fry", I would know anything I pack into an overnight express delivery thing is going to arrive the next day looking like generic slop/carton-packed stir fry regardless of whatever it originally was.
Hell, we were asked to take some pastries from our city roughly 700 kms home for family on Christmas, and although we carefully packed them, stored them with freezer-blocks in an insulated container, and carried them completely supervised on our lap in an aircraft cabin the entire way, they arrived worse for wear...but still kinda presentable and edible.
If I hired this out to an overnight courier for $100, + $100 for magic, + $100 for food, i wouldn't be half surprised to find it had been forcefully jammed into my letter box or met with handling/turbulence during transportation...
UPS rate calculator for overnight cross country shipping of a 7lb package is $285, not "about $100".
All this rounding down is the difference between "a few hundred" and likely "just shy of a thousand dollars". A few hundred in shipping, a couple of hundred for a meal that's not "cornershop Chinese", the time for the service. Etc.
> UPS rate calculator for overnight cross country shipping of a 7lb package is $285, not "about $100".
I used FedEx overnight for a 5lb package, which came to less than $100.
> a couple of hundred for a meal that's not "cornershop Chinese"
I'd assumed a meal for 2-4 people at most, thus roughly $50-100.
> the time for the service
Given foreknowledge of the services needed to put together such a request, that should take a small fraction of an hour; 15-30 minutes, so $25-$50.
Put all of that together, plus the chilled packaging, and $300-400 seems like a reasonable estimate. Both of us made many assumptions based on lack of data.
Not to nickel and dime, because I appreciate your response. I had a hard time getting FedEx's rate calculator to show up on my Mac...
Still, UPS at 5lb from NY to SF Next Day Air Early is still $150+.
If I'm overnighting a meal it's probably not going to be a $25/head dinner. I'll go out and enjoy that but it's not an 'across the country' experience. It's not even a steak from a non-steakhouse. Here, it's a chicken alfredo with no appetizer or sides.
2-4 people is going to be more than 5lb after you load up on dry ice.
Anyway - like you said, I'm also erring on the higher side of "what, to me, would make a meal worthwhile to ship like that". But hey, we had a civil discussion about it. Yay us.
> If I'm overnighting a meal it's probably not going to be a $25/head dinner. I'll go out and enjoy that but it's not an 'across the country' experience. It's not even a steak from a non-steakhouse. Here, it's a chicken alfredo with no appetizer or sides.
I think we've both relied on our own local price scales here. I don't live in San Francisco; here, $25 per person will generally get you any entrée and dessert on the menu, from anywhere other than a high-end steakhouse or similar.
And in any case, I was making the assumption that the selection of meal was driven more by some specific shared nostalgia than by five-star cuisine. If anything, I'd be less inclined to attempt to ship the latter, since quality would suffer more from transit than nostalgia would.
> 2-4 people is going to be more than 5lb after you load up on dry ice.
I don't think you can even ship dry ice via normal shipping processes; it falls under "hazardous substances". The couple of times I've had chilled items shipped (http://www.spokandy.com/product/murphys/ , highly recommended), they arrived packed in gel-like sealed "ice"packs, still cold to the touch.
> Anyway - like you said, I'm also erring on the higher side of "what, to me, would make a meal worthwhile to ship like that". But hey, we had a civil discussion about it. Yay us.
Indeed!
Going back to the original point, the examples given on the homepage for this service certainly target people with seven-figure salaries. But I could imagine people using it for somewhat saner purposes while having "just" a high-five-figure/low-six-figure salary.
I haven't used the $100/hour Magic+, but I've used Magic several times. I ordered sushi when it was first announced and the HN comment about my experience got a lot of interest.
Once I used it to order fried chicken from a deli that isn't available via any delivery service. That was nice.
The coolest thing by far was using it to buy a gift. I follow an embroidery artist on Instagram, and noticed she was doing a pop-up shop in Chicago (I live in Seattle). I directly inquired about commissioning pieces or buying her existing pieces, but it just wasn't possible – this pop-up shop was the only way. I showed Magic a few of the pieces I liked best on Instagram, gave them a price limit (no idea even how much they were selling for), and described how there were only a few of these things available and they'd probably be gone fast. They sent someone there and managed to get one for me and mail it!
Another service for the 1%. This one will go the way of homejoy. These kids don't understand how tight the household budget is for nearly all Americans.
You can smell the elitism dripping in their examples on the site. Private helicoptors, $31 grocery delivery... most people will pay a little extra for convenience, but this is ridiculous.
The problem with Homejoy, in my opinion, was not price. It was the fact that it made little sense to keep using them after you found a cleaner you liked. As a middle man, they simply did not provide much value.
Magic feels more like Uber to me. You don't use Uber once, then establish personal contact with that one driver, never using Uber again. The value of Uber is that you can get a driver on-demand, at any time, wherever you are; this is not possible if you just have one driver's cell phone number. Similarly, asking Magic to send some flowers to your girlfriend doesn't mean that you'll never have a use for Magic again. It's a middle man that can provide value repeatedly.
Magic's generality is why it might actually stand a chance. For instance, you could probably use it as a makeshift Homejoy, asking for them to find you a cleaner who will come to your place once every two weeks. Once they find you a cleaner, you won't need them for that particular service again, as you'll have personal contact with the cleaner. But because of their generality you'll be able to find many other uses for Magic most likely.
With Homejoy, you could avoid the middle-man and go straight to the person doing the work. Here, you don't meet the person doing the work and the middle-man is where your time is saved.
I predict a few things for the future of this service (and this kind of service):
1. A lot of frustration from customers and a lot of churn. An effective personal assistant, or office manager, or whatever, effectively begins to read the mind of their employer. Lack of face-to-face, and what I imagine will be a lot of assistant churn, will result in very poor "mind reading" abilities. Cost of training a new assistant is much higher than actually having one, at least for folks who utilize their services a lot.
2. A race to the bottom on price, exacerbating the problem of assistant churn. $100/hr leaves a lot of room at the bottom, but it'll drop to the point where people in the US aren't willing to do the job of magic assistant.
3. $0 is the cost of Siri, Google Now, and Alexa. They truly suck right now, for almost everything except taking the place of a keyboard, but will get better. There's a limit to what "virtual" assistants can do for you; at some point you need a meat robot to go physically do stuff for you, if you want assistance beyond what technology can do.
Not to trash talk the idea or the company, at all. I haven't tried it. I can't think of anything it could do for me that I wouldn't rather hire an actual assistant for. At $100, you can get several hours of real human time, in your local market. Someone you can meet, and develop a rapport with. I'm ordinarily not on the side of the fence that insists that the personal touch is important (I don't like car dealers and want them to disappear, I don't like sales people at any store and generally want them to disappear, etc. because in general, they know less than me about what I'm shopping for and just serve to annoy me and occasionally lie to me to try to manipulate my decision). But, in this case, there is real value in a real live human having access to your daily life or work so they can be most productive about helping you get shit done.
This sounds a bit like Uber for personal assistants. So for people in the top 1% they can now have 24/7 personal assistants at probably about the same cost as they previously paid for a 9 to 5-er.
Then a middle man skims most of the profits while all of the personal assistants of the world lose job stability and end up having to work 80 hours a week as "personal contractors" to try and break even with what they previously made in a 40 hour work week.
“Find someone to train me like Jason Bourne.”
“Get me a mobile dentist to my office ASAP.”
“I want to meet Tina Fey and Amy Poehler.”
“I need to rent out the Exploratorium this weekend.”
“I need 6 convertibles tomorrow for rent.”
“Organize my team for a town hall tomorrow.”
“My 1 pm ran over. Bump my meetings back 1 hour.”
“I’m out of the office today. Check my email and let me know if there’s anything urgent.”
They're going way over the top here to market it to busy douchebags. I thought about using it until I saw who they think I might be.
These are all real requests that our users have actually used Magic+ for. We obviously cant divulge their identities, or show photographs, etc. (since these are personal things), but it's important to convey how people really use the service. I'd love ideas on how we can communicate this point better. Part of what our users love about Magic+ is that you truly can do some pretty amazing things with it.
If that conveys how people really use the service, then, to many people, it also conveys that the people who use the service are, on average, lazy rich douchebags. If that isn't what you want to portray about your brand, you might want to reconsider your examples.
It conveys that the users are rich, yes. What about it makes them lazy or douchebags? Assuming you're rich, is it a logical use of your time to, for instance, go through the process of tracking down and renting a bunch of cars for some event online? Or would it make more sense to pay someone else $100/hour (considerably less than the opportunity cost of doing it yourself) to do it for you?
Does wanting to meet a celebrity make you a lazy douchebag? Or is it the presumption that it might actually be possible? Renting a venue last minute? Perhaps they lazily left it until the last minute, but perhaps there's another explanation?
The Jason Bourne one is eccentric at least, but surely wanting to engage in that kind of extreme training is anything but lazy.
Most of those things would probably cost you a whole lot less if, unlike 80% of the examples, they weren't "extreme/extravagant request, NOW NOW NOW!".
If there's a way to anonymize data (or even just flag requests as anonymous in content), it'd be nice to have a bit more of a randomly picked live feed.
I think some of the incredulity is that there's... an authenticity skepticism as to how much these represent average requests (and therefore responses). But like you said -- if you don't have a marketing problem, who cares what the HN peanut gallery says. ;)
These aren't supposed to be average requests, they are there to demonstrate how Magic+ can handle even really difficult tasks without easy solutions (order me a pizza).
As other people stated, if there isn't some kind of detail on the fulfillment then it's not demonstrating anything. Forgive my skepticism, but a chat log doesnt count for much in an age where CGI'ing uncompleted UIs on device screens in startup project videos is "acceptable".
So the choice is between exorbitant claims + no detail or some exorbitant claims + some average claims + no detail.
They wouldn't necessarily have to. I'm sure there are events they attend that a sufficiently wealthy person could get a ticket or invite to. Then it would just be a matter of introducing yourself.
This is like Tesla entering the market with a high end sports car, or Uber entering the market with only black cars. They're targeting a smaller niche of wealthy early adopters to tweak the service and revenue model and will eventually move downmarket to address a broader customer base (if they're successful with this initial niche). This is an ideal niche to start with because a) they have the money for it b) they're more tech savvy and generally forgiving of product shortfalls for bleeding edge services and c) they have lots of connections and can spread word-of-mouth more effectively (think Chris Dixon). It will be interesting to see if this becomes more of an API for other on-demand platforms such as Seamless or if it will be standalone. Also curious to see how this will stack up to Facebook's M and if they've built something defensible enough to pose a real threat.
The metaphor is faulty. Uber hasn't brought down the cost of limousine service, and it didn't make cars cheaper or more efficient to create UberX -- it just tapped into a larger market of drivers who were willing to do commodity work for less money.
You don't pay people $100 an hour for commodity work. Unless you're so rich that price doesn't matter, I guess.
Perhaps I should have extended it a bit more--as someone else commented, they will likely drive the price point down as the tech improves and they're able to do things algorithmically which will reduce overhead. The Tesla strategy is probably a better fit here than Uber, though.
Yeah, I understood what you were getting at. That's why I was emphasizing the difference between commodity services (like driving a cab) and services that require specialized skill (like being a concierge that can get you into the restaurant, tonight, or a meeting with a celebrity). The former you can "scale" by throwing relatively unskilled people at it. The latter takes training, connections and experience.
Even Tesla isn't a good comparison. Tesla is making cars, the task that invented the assembly line. This more like applying "the Tesla strategy" to the job of a butler.
Good morning,
I read all your email while you slept. Your wife is very pretty. I wrote a message to your son telling him you loved him. He responded "you're not my real dad". I also hired that Visual Basic expert who emailed you yesterday. Don't worry, I already charged your AMEX $230 for the trouble.
This would be a real risk if you hired an ordinary personal assistant. This is actually exactly the sort of challenge that traditional assistants pose and that Magic+ is designed to fix.
Magic+ is actually not just one person, but it's a software-driven service with a highly trained team of professional assistants that are held to a very high bar. They are managed, supervised, and trained by us so that you don't have to worry about it.
And, on top of that, every task and request is managed from beginning to end using custom software that is designed specifically to monitor the execution strategy and enhance both the quality and the reliability of the output. It's difficult for me to say more right now about how this works without disclosing IP that we cannot disclose at this time, but I hope to be able to say more about how this works in the future.
A good way to think about Magic+ is that it's a natural-language command-line interface for complex tasks that require some human interaction. A component of how we handle your email is more like a ~/.procmailrc file that can pipe things to a highly-supervised human assistant than it is like having a random person somewhere in the US logged in to your Gmail. You tell us how you need things done, using natural language, and it gets done, assuming it's possible.
Again, I recognize that this explanation is not as detailed as it could be, but I hope that it helps. I will think about how we can explain this better before we are able to disclose the inner-workings of our software.
I have a real assistant. I've known her for years and trust her. I don't know who you guys are hiring, who will see my info, whether your internal systems are secure, etc. I've used magic before and liked it but clearly there is a signicant loss of privacy cost that is paid in addition to the hourly rate.
Have you thought about having a separate privacy policy for your Magic+ customers? Specifically regarding the potential for you to sell data to "Other companies whose products or services may be of interest to you" which is a pretty broad spectrum.
I do understand how the software layer plus having multiple assistants working on a single person makes it "safer" than the SPOF of a traditional assistant (and I'm sure you've already thought of ways to have the software handle all PII while the assistants just support with the bits that require manual labor)
However, I feel like the killer feature of this kind of product should be Trust. That's worth paying for.
That plus the minimalist website copy and secrecy around operations makes it seem a bit niche for the startup crowd. And that sucks, because I want the AI assistant winner to be a newcomer, and not the usual suspects :)
Why did you think it was satire? They're just trying to offer a personal assistant service over the air, nothing that beyond imagination. Likely costs less than actually employing someone.
I too thought it was satire. Two of their examples are "I need to buy $2500 worth of electronics tonight like it's nothing" and "get me a private helicopter tonight for $3500", all the while paying $100/hour for the privilege.
I understand some people spend money like that, but it seemed more likely that someone was making a joke about absurd wealth and the startup scene than a real business. If the Onion wrote an article about it, I wouldn't bat an eye.
Best of luck to the Magic+ team (honestly), but this product clearly isn't for people like me.
It's funny seeing half the commenters here saying "surely no one could afford that" and the other half saying "surely any middle class person could use this to splurge on a $200+ gift for a friend on occasion". It's as if people aren't aware of the wealth gap.
You wanna know what's great about actually employing someone? They can actually devote their full attention to you. They'll also get the door for you; can Magic+ do that?
That person you hire can't split themselves into 10 people on demand, nor are they easily replaced if they go on vacation or get sick. This seems to me the PA equivalent of using AWS rather than owning and maintaining your own servers. There are some potential drawbacks, yes, but there are also a lot of potential upsides, depending on your needs.
I'd love to try this, as there is an out-of-production bag that is probably out there but I could not find this holiday season.
People aren't mentioning this here, but the real sticker shock is not $100 / hour but rather that to get that price you have to be ready to pay $1000 now or sign up for a $3000 a month subscription (that also begins now)
The low-key information page doesn't really set you up for that level of commitment to check things out.
I think it makes sense that they only want people who are serious about it. If they didn't have a high up-front entry cost, they'd inevitably end up with lots of pranksters 'trying out' the service with ludicrous/dumb requests ("make my wife love me again"; "buy twenty pizzas, then hurl them into the ocean at this exact point") and bogging things down.
Sure, but can't this reasonably be handled with a $100 or even $150 option? I've never dumped a grand into trying out a 'crazy internet thing.' i.e. uber or airbnb.
Since it is $1000, it is hard to not see this as anything but something for the very wealthy. Which may be fine, but the info page doesn't make it sound like it is for that sort of folk.
Many of our users give us access to various aspects of their personal and work lives in order to gain the benefit of efficiency and saved time. We also set up users who don't want to share their primary email with email addresses at our domain.
Yea, I gave Magic access to setup recurring donations to two charities I support.
Unfortunately they closed my account and stopped the donations. They provided no information on when the last donations went out so I could resume them.
It says it works from anywhere, but then only gives a number that works from within the US. How are you supposed to use this service while in another country and not having access to a US sim card?
The regular version of their service still appears to be US-only[0] (last FAQ item). I suspect that Magic+ is also US-only and they've neglected to mention it specifically on this page.
If you are in the target group that is willing to pay $100/hour for a virtual assistant at the beck and call of an SMS, then the $0.20 or so for the SMS roaming charges seems like small change...
Text this number to get a regular human assistant for $50/hr: xxxxx
Using Magic-, you have a regular power - highly trained Magicians can ask regular people for help with minor tasks. Send our very normal people a text message 24/7, and you can get help doing your very magical things.
I'm currently living abroad and don't speak the language very well. So I hired a virtual assistant who speaks the language and English. He charges $7.50 USD an hour. I only pay him for time it takes to complete my tasks. I rarely even pay $100 for the whole month.
This is like people getting mad at Heroku or Github when some commodity host costs a tenth the price. Thankfully you have a choice and no-one is forcing you to use it.
I'm deeply skeptical of this. It would be worth $100/hr to hand off highly complex task like planning a wedding (from their copy), but it's impossible--there is way too much interaction and iteration necessary on tasks like that.
For things you can realistically text to have done, the task has be crystal clear, and basically atomic. If I've already done the work of making it crystal clear and atomic, then it's not worth $100/hr anymore, because it's just rote busy work at that point.
I would love to see more comments that provided value to other readers. There is so much expertise and intelligence in this forum, but so many discussions contain only what is easiest: obvious cyncism. It's kind of fun banter once in a while, but gets old and isn't worth spending the time reading.
I said to myself that I'd start less HN comments this year with "I'm in a wheelchair and..." but:
I'm in a wheelchair and access to a personal assistant (especially for travel arrangements) would be excellent.
Access to a personal assistant in the departure country and the arrival location (to check just how wheelchair accessible that Days Inn wheelchair-accessible suite really is) would be phenomenal.
There's a business idea there, just that the market is small and difficult to cater for (lots and lots of different needs)
I'm one of the lucky ones and I'm relatively well off, but 100/hour (~$140AUD/hour) is way, way out of my price range.
That's exactly the comparison I wanted to make as well. I thought of the original Magic service as "a Visa Black Card concierge-service automated and scaled enough to target the middle class"; this just returns it to the parent concept.
Presumably the people using Magic for that sort of thing were the upper-class "money left on the table" that's being picked up here. Most Magic requests, from what I take it, are more for the same lazy-person-making-100K things like to-your-door grocery delivery that other services provide.
I've used Visa Signature concierge a couple of times and have found it to be very 'meh'. The last time I called them they seemed to have limited the scope of what they'd do to making reservations and travel arrangements.
Visa Signature concierge is very meh in comparison to the amex platinum from my experience. (I've not used a centurion concierge, though reportedly it's the same service - I find it hard to believe that they're treated with the same service level considering the requirements and fees to be eligible for a centurion card, however)
The Amex concierge team has been able to find me items at local stores when I needed things ASAP that I was having trouble finding, and also managed to snag me a limited release item that was only available at the companies' location. (That was expensive, but still less than I saw them for being resold for online. I imagine a courier service could have been used if I was familiar with any in the area, since it was basically a 'drive there, pick up, drive to UPS store, ship' type request)
The number of interactions (over email) that I need to have with them to get even a simple request like a restaurant reservation done from Amex Platinum concierge has made me look around for alternatives.
FWIW, even Facebook's assistant 'M' is far better at handling tasks that Platinum concierge.
not sure what the amex platinum version is like, but I wasn't that impressed with the visa infinite version.
I asked them to go through the craigslist of another city and find a certain car for sale, then return a list sorted by mileage and price. They couldn't do that for whatever reason and just offered to give me the KBB value.
Took me 5+ minutes to navigate their phone menu, enter my card number and get to the service.
If you can establish a business around this, that would be great. But personal assistants are more than just money and skills. There's lots of trust involved created over the years. I think people would be more comfortable if this was completely AIed (may be it can be promoted as that in a sly way) as compared to sending task requests to unknown (although trained) people. But that's just me. I really do think that this is bad example of technology. But looking at the examples, it may just be the thing nouveau riche are looking for.
>Third-party vendors and other service providers that perform services on our behalf, as needed to carry out their work for us, which may include identifying and serving targeted advertisements(...)
>Other companies whose products or services may be of interest to you
...
That sounds pretty bad even if it wasn't so vague. This is a bloody premium service...
If they log in as you to a third-party website (e.g. so they can change your calendar as in one of the examples), that information could be used by the third party to serve you targeted ads.
For example, if you ask them to get your Macbook fixed, and put a reminder in your calendar for when it's ready, that may result in you being served Apple ads.
How about a service that answers texts like, "where can I find a warm place to stay tonight?" or "please get the welfare department to correct their mistake and reactivate my food stamps."
> Get you reservations at places that nobody else can
How is this possible? If it were true then anyone wanting a reservation at "places that nobody else can" would go through Magic+, and then what? There are more rich people than available seats at hot restaurants...?
Based on everything I learned about this space from starting, operating, and later selling a company that does exactly this in the summer of 2014 [1] [2], I'm bullish on this idea. I think it's definitely a step in the right direction and incentives are starting to line up.
The "I'll do anything for you by SMS" space (I call it the "Houdini app" space) space affords the middle-to-upper class in first world countries (where labor is much more expensive) the same power you'd get if you were in a country where labor is much cheaper.
Example: in Lebanon, where I grew up, the middle-to-upper class of the population has: a stay-at-home maid ($200/mo), a driver ($300/mo), and a concierge at the bottom of their building ($30/mo), who will take care of pretty much anything for you. This is possible because labor is so cheap. I'd say you have to be in the 0.1% in the US to be able to afford this (since labor would cost you much more), but in third world countries, it's within reach of probably the top 15% of the population (by income).
I think the most successful concierges have a "fixer" mindset - you give them a very loosely defined need, and their job is 1) coordinating and finding a solution, and 2) actually following through and executing on it. The fixer's advantage is 1) the end user trusts them, trusts their taste, and there is a pre-existing relationship with the customer, and 2) the user has a general idea of what they can and cannot do.
The real value Magic brings is that they can be the fixer for your day-to-day life. If I were Magic, I'd change the pricing to $200/hour, but only charged if the task is actually completed. That way, the incentives really line up in that 1) they're more incentivized to complete the task successfully, 2) users trust them a lot more and know that they will get their money's worth, and 3) they develop the "fixer" brand, where Magic gets you what you want, and you only have to pay if it gets done.
Lots of important technologies start off as "toys for the rich" - I could see that happening here too. What I am curious to see, is how they plan on bringing the cost of the service down. Or if it's possible to get a big enough market share at this price point.
crazy. my family also lived in lebanon(zahle), and they had two maids, a driver, and a lady to come to the house and roll grape leaves for them but they still had to get their water delivered, which did cost a lot. they were not rich by american standards at all.
good thoughts..would be great to get these services on the cheap out here. Lyft of grape leaves rolling? ha.
The $100/hr price point would make if and only if they are able to accomplish tasks that cannot be accomplished by a single hired assistant.
"Personally email all my 1,200 new customers today, get me feedback in 2 hours."
"Make sure this story hits top page on Reddit/HN."
These are probably weird examples. But the expectation here would be to get a superhuman, who does task a random human simply cannot do. Group work is what I expect I'm paying for. Otherwise, I can hire a freelancer online for $1000 a month.
I somewhat agree. But more than that I don't this service is really comparable to a single dedicated EA. It feels more like TaskRabbit++.
The most valuable thing about having good EA is the relationship e.g. you often don't need to ask them to do things as they know you well enough to preempt the requests, they take initiative, which is always going to be lacking in a service like Magic+.
I think it speaks to the whole PG inequality essay. This is clearly a catalyst for a more natural equilibrium. It seems to me the main service provided by Magic+ is liberating money from those who have more than they know what to do with.
Thanks for the feedback. You're right, you bring up a good point that isn't explained as much on the website as it could be. We actually track time down to the second and display really detailed reports to users every day about how the time was utilized. Quite often a simple request can end up being $3-$4.
Is there a way to set a maximum price or time you're willing to pay for each request? My biggest hesitation about using something like this would be that it would end up costing way more than I anticipated - something I expect to take 30 minutes could take 4 hours cost $400 instead of $50.
I know why detailed reporting is important, I just have to assume that anyone paying for this is not price sensitive.
Transparency and trust, one would imagine, are the core pieces of the business maybe even in front of task execution so it makes sense, but still, if I bought a 1200 ipad via SMS because I was too lazy to drive to walmart I probably don't need the reciept.
I use Magic occasionally and it's been wonderful every time. It's definitely not something I would use everyday, but it's been great for:
- a time I needed a replacement power supply cable, and really didn't have the time to research where to get it, and needed it urgently.
- a couple times where I needed a dinner reservation for relatives or friends visiting
- quick questions about things to do or places to go
I really loved the $3,750 helicopter ride to the airport, like your average joe has that much money to blow so they don't have to sit in traffic. I guess I'm just not in their target demographic?
There's also business use cases to think of. I've often had to spend what on a personal level would be an obsene amount of money but in a work context was justified. Most common examples for me have been very long taxi journeys, last minute and therefore way overpriced flights, and same day international shipments. I've never needed a helicopter, but for example if there had been some screw-up that meant I badly needed to get an unreleased product to a press event in the next few hours then sure I'd have spent a few thousand on a helicopter rather than waste the hundred thousand spent on the event. (Side note: sounds like a "should've been better prepared" situation, but I've seen this happen with so many companies in the tech industry. Normally solvable by expensive taxis or couriers rather than helicopters, though.)
Ahh, the people who can't read. It says magic+ is paid, magic is free.
Also, pretty sure a service like this doesn't give a shit what the website says. If you are reading the website, it's either not for you or you have an interest in tech news and the exact pricing structure doesn't matter to you anyway.
Pretty sure this service doesn't need to advertise.
Before we rolled out Magic+ today, we did quite a number of split tests regarding prices and messaging. We also have had a private beta of Magic+ going for some time. Venturebeat as well as a few others seem to have screenshotted our website when it was in various stages of being split-tested.
@cmikec it wasn't just split tests on the messaging. if you signed up last week you ONLY got texts telling you to sign up to a payment plan. If you sign up today then it offers you the paid version OR the free version
That's still split testing of the messaging... in that one message gives different information about their services than the other. Different information being leaving out the free option. Clearly they wanted to see if a higher % signed up to the paid option depending on whether the customer knew about the availability of a free option.
I'd love to know how they manage to scale such high quality service. They say they use "top-tier executive assistants and concierges", but it's hard to scale high-quality employees.
How does it differ from other concierge services, such as the one connected to American Express cards? What have others typically done well and poorly, and how does Magic+ overcome the limitations?
I'm wondering if this trend to pay for limited use, or "human micro-services" is good for society. Soon I'll have to bid for work as a developer and will have no idea if I'll be able to eat today or sleep under a roof. God help me if I'm sick.
Progress and efficiency is great, but I wonder if we (you and I, common devs) are digging our own graves.
So I haven't used Magic in a while. I'll probably start using it again now.
Last time, I used it as follows:
1) Lunch for my cofounder and I at demo day since we had dietary restrictions. Worked perfectly.
2) went drinking with everyone after demo day, and we drove. Didn't plan out who was DD. Magic sent us a driver to drive us home in our car. Was one of the Magic founders' sister.
3) Had flowers sent to my wife, just to let her know I was thinking of her while I was away. Said they were the best flowers she had ever got, and got lots of compliments from family and friends.
Yesterday, I was just thinking about using Magic to get a bunch of things done, housekeeping wise within the company. Really timely to see this. I'll be using them for everything from fixing my glasses, to cleaning up my books, and more. I'm hoping to have them take care of the mundane things so I can focus on more important tasks like coding and such.
> Q: What about the purchases that I make through Magic+?
> There is no markup on the purchases you make through Magic+. We find you the best deals that we can on every purchase, and we negotiate strongly with vendors. Often you will save more money using Magic+ than if you had done things yourself.
Granted, but they're also making $100/hr to fulfill your request. Sure, people are greedy, but I feel like you could staff some pretty honest, capable, and reliable dispatchers at $33/hr (using a standard 3x billing vs salary multiplier).
"Magic+! I need the schematics of this building sent to my phone. And hack a satellite with infrared imaging so I can see where the terrorists are." - Jack Bauer
Right, this is text-message-only Zirtual, at $100/hour. They also include the standard Magic physical services as well, but I don't see why you'd pay for physical at $100/hour plus the Magic surcharge, when you can use Magic alone or Zirtual alone.
2. How is Magic going to compete with Facebook M and www.GoButler.com? Butler does all the things Magic does but for free. And Facebook M is being rolled out to more and more people.
3. Is there space for a premium concierge assistant that gives even better service than Butler or M can do? What prevents Butler or M from simply rolling out a premium $25/hour service and undercutting Magic if this segment proves valuable.
4. Isn't the real money in massive scale. Will Magic simply be a small concierge shop for the very wealthy and will we all use Facebook M for most tasks in the future?
And how can we guarantee that people behind magic+ don't get any conflict of interest ?
Let say, for example, that i need a cab to move me from airport to the hotel with a bike to make the thing more complicated for a lambda traveler.
How can I know in advance how much I will have to pay ? that the deal is decent ? that the guy will actually come ?
I understand that they target rich people but I imagine one does not simply want to pay 200% more than usually a helicopter ride...
Presumably they make their money from repeat customers, in which case ripping off their customers is probably not an optimal strategy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repeated_game
It's probably not that difficult to actually facilitate meeting Tina Fey. There are agencies that handle celebrity appearances, and many celebrities will do appearances for a fee.
It's expensive, but not particularly outlandishly difficult.
Some of the comments posted here make me wonder about how broad and diverse the HN reader base is. The demographics are just unbelievable, if not surprising.
Bitcoin was nowhere near as popular of a payment option for Magic as some people expected it to be. For simplicity's sake, we did not include it right now in the Magic+ service. If you would like to use Magic+ via Bitcoin, please text in and mention that fact, and we will certainly accommodate.
$100 per hour, or $800 per day or $160k/year at 200 working days after holidays and weekends. That's arguably close to what the wealthy people who this is currently targeted at should pay a great assistant anyway.
So I challenge the amount of money Magic needs to pay the very best assistants, not the price to the customers. And while the automation will increase the amount of time spent on the job by each assistant delivering outcomes, it's a very exhausting day for them to deliver this sort of level of service non stop.
Over time the automation will increase the margins, but for now the best assistants will be setting themselves up to be poached by the best clients.
I'd be interested in seeing what failed requests look like. Can't really promise to solve everything so I'd like to know what mitigation strategies etc. are used when no acceptable solution can be found.
The service is $100 an hour, which is bananas, but I guess that's not too surprising when their target customer is someone who casually buys two iPad pros like a normal person buys packs of gum.
Interesting discussion, but I would postulate that people on HN are typically the ones who wouldn't appreciate - or even understand - such a service. Also, if you are fixated on the details, e.g. "do I need this to reserve a flight today" then you will certainly not get it. You could alternatively think about the big picture, i.e. removing all the limitations and bottlenecks of a personal assistant, and also scaling it up.
What if I ask magic+ to find me a competitor as effective as magic+ but for free (or lower price) ? Or to offer me free services ? Haha, I caught you !!!
Out of my world, but I could see why the super-rich might like something like this. But I guess they have their own personal assistants for this stuff anyway.
To me, 1% is rich, but not "super rich". The 1% net worth cutoff in the US is somewhere in the single-digit millions. I'd say "super rich" starts around a 9 figure net worth (hundreds of millions). That's more like the 0.01%.
> Q: How quickly will I get what I want after requesting it?
> As soon as possible.
So... it's not magic.
At their price point, it's only worth using the service if you have huge amounts of disposable income or your request is near impossible to fulfill on your own. It's basically a service that answers the question, "How much are you willing to spend to do X?" Where the amount is determined by them after the fact.
> It’s $100/hr to use Magic+. You only get charged for the minutes you use it for. If your request takes 12 minutes, you’ll only be charged for 12 minutes.
This could be affordable in small does depending how much time a human is allocated to do the task. I wonder if it's possible to know the estimate before you commit to buying.
For what it's worth, I've used the service twice and it worked out great. People tend to complain more than praise (there must be some psychological concept to explain this...), so that's my two cents.
This crap makes my socialist leaning side come out. Another unnecessary service that no-one needs, yet people with too much money will probably use. Where's Karl Pilkington's Bullshit Man when you need him.
What if i ask magic+ to ask magic+ for a time consuming task. Since i'm not asking magic+ myself anymore, should i pay anything apart the 2 minutes it took to ask magic+ from the inside?
How is this that different that Google Now? Except there are actually people (at least some of the time) at the other end, rather than massive amounts of logged data and code?
...because you are paying them? Quite a bit? If you are paying $100/hr for something, it is probably pretty important. I really don't see the comparison to Google Now at all.
What is it with all the comments about the service being for "elitist" or the "1%"?
People are paying for a convenient service - nothing special about it. Some pay the neighbors kid $20 to mow the lawn, others pay Magic $100 to get something done that would otherwise be a hassle for them. Same shit.
Seeing this makes me feel ashamed to be a part of the tech industry. This is why people despise the 1%. Show some taste/humility/discretion. A "service" like this is so narrowly focused on the ultra rich, that it should be marketing in high end magazines/direct outreach.. not on hacker news.
I completely disagree. This service targets people who peg a higher value to their time than $100 / hour and/or are too busy to take on other tasks. This is valuable for anyone that runs their own business or who has an actual dollar amount pegged to their time (a large portion of HN readership), not just members of the 1%.
E.g., cancelling a doctor's appointment takes 10 minutes. Even if you bill your time out at $50 / hour, you've now saved yourself the trouble of making a random phone call for 16 bucks and remain focused on what you're actually good at.
I think, while I make a reasonable salary, I must be a bit more frugal than the large portion of HN readership in that I can always find 10 minutes of my day to cancel a doctor's appointment as opposed to paying $16 (the cost of lunch and a drink) for someone else to do it.
Someone who values their time at $100/hour, working 40 hours/week, is making over $200,000 a year. I'm not sure if that technically qualifies as the 1%, but I think it's close enough to the GP's point.
I don't know if you've ever been self-employed, but billing out 40 hours per week is very hard. $100 / hour can afford you a middle-class lifestyle (assuming 25-30 hours per week AND fully employed, more realistically you can fill 70-80% of your time).
$100 * 26 * 40 ⇒ $104k ⇒ and then slice off the employer portion for FICA and SS and you're looking at a pretty modest figure.
$200,000 isn't even 5% in SF. The fact is that there are a lot of rich people and I am sure this service provides an amazing utility for them. No need to be jealous. I am sure they don't need to advertise on HN, it's more of a look this too exists.
I'm a developer and I bill as much as $250/hour. I could totally see paying someone $100/hour to make something happen so that I could focus on a paying task.
Problem is that most tasks likely to waste my time are things that would take longer to delegate (due to detailed instructions, needing to answer questions about needs, needing to set them up with the ability to pay bills...) than to just do myself.
How is this distasteful? First off, $100 for a "we'll do whatever you want service" is not restricted to the ultra rich. But they also say they charge by the minute, not by the hour. If something only takes a few minutes, you pay ~$8.
So was Tesla initially. That didn't make it unworthy of tech news coverage. As this sort of technology matures and become more accessible to the general public, it has a reasonable chance of being the "next big thing". That makes its launch newsworthy to the people in the industry.
What's the technology here that needs to mature? Honest question, but it seems like just a high-end personal assistant on-demand that uses text messages to communicate. It's not obvious to me what the tech is.
> PS you guys flagged a recent post with Obama's gun control executive action, but leave this one on??
Well, obviously a startup product launch post is going to show up popular on HN. Considering the community here you _would_ expect posts about startups to be more popular than some political discussion (unless directly affecting startups in some way). What does the former even have to do with the latter?
I'm a fairly highly-paid web dev and I don't have a curated personal website. Shocking, I know. I'd just rather spend time on other things, like paying work
Your personal site is irrelevant. A business that is public facing should have a good website, and theirs simply is not designed well. If you can spend $x building this service you can spend .01x on your website.
I'm genuinely curious: what's wrong with their website?
There's a logo, one-sentence explanation (with further details beneath), examples, FAQ, and footer. So the content is all there. Furthermore, it's minimal-looking, and minimally coded, and all on a single responsive page.
Isn't this the ideal for a modern website that's also expected to work on mobile devices?
First one sounds vaguely illegal. Second one sounds illegal without wife's permission, otherwise I'm sure they would do it. Last one I'm sure someone could figure out.
I'm a very active user of Magic+, so I'll give my perspective. (and of course I've been working with them from the beginning at YC, so you're also free to discard my opinion as biased)
For me, Magic+ is basically the impossibly good personal assistant, kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man, or Emily in The Devil Wears Prada. Unlike a conventional assistant, it's available 24/7, always happy to take on more work, and capable of accomplishing just about anything.
Obviously the $100/hr price point puts it out of reach for most people, but my expectation (as an investor) is that as the tech improves, they will be able to bring down the price while maintaining or even improving the quality of the service (I call this the Tesla strategy).
For me however, $100/hr is totally worth it since it effectively increases my leverage and enables me to get more done in less time. I've used it to plan events for YC founders, answer questions that are hard to Google (they will find the right experts and ask them), and provide unique and memorable gifts to friends, family, and business partners. I'm used to paying a high price for quality professional services such as accountants or lawyers, so $100/hr for the best possible assistant feels completely reasonable and rational.