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.

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.

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.

> - 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"?

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.

Mike,

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?

For the curious, looks like more info here: http://www.davecraige.com/magic/

Yes, thank you. That is the whole story. You can read it if you want.

I spent over $3,250 traveling to Silicon Valley. I spent over 60 hours of intense work to do a project for free for them that they requested.

I delivered them a beautifully custom 38 page research report that you can see here: http://f.cl.ly/items/3f3u1e14273P2v2a1Y2J/CAP1.pdf

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.

> I spent over 60 hours of intense work to do a project for free for them that they requested.

That might be where you went wrong.

At the time, Magic was one of the hottest startups in the Valley. I was willing to hustle hard to get my foot in the door.

But I agree with you, I need to be more judicial with my time in the future.

Sounds like you got hustled. But it's a lesson learned, so at least there's some value there.

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 would definitely like to hear the response to this before I signed up for their service!

Thanks for posting that.

Thank you

UPDATE: I reached out to the founders Mike and David on January 7th about this thread.

I received no response yet, but my twitter account was promptly blocked by David. http://f.cl.ly/items/1x3Y1h2n0i1Q1F3e1H1f/Screen%20Shot%2020...

I will be reaching back out to Mike in a week and will update you guys. Thx.

UPDATE 2 : I have reached out to Mike three times now. Still haven't heard anything back. Possible stonewalling.

Thank you so much for your comments, feedback, and kind words!

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 :)

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.

It's an SMS, not specific to iMessage.

Then the messages would be green. I'm curious about this as well (unless they're just photoshopped).

When I was experimenting with Twilio that was the only aspect that was a little disappointing. I wanted blue messages. :)

Pretty sure they're just photoshopped and they don't use iMessage in reality. The font/kerning/size/alignment looks off from here.

the blue message bubble is iMessage specific.

It's evidently photoshopped, based on the message bubble padding. Definitely just an error.

Or on purpose since since the blue messages are meant to look better with the UI so that you prefer using iMessage when possible.

If they were using a regular phone number, they could achieve this by using the Messages app on iOS, and controlling it with AppleScript.

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.

This looks really interesting. Just wondering, in your FAQ you have:

Q: Where is Magic+ available?

Anywhere you need it. Magic+ is there to make your every desire and need happen, wherever you are.

# Does this mean that we can actually use it in other countries like the UK? Do we need to use an area code?

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.

So maybe putting the number that we can text from outside the US networks on the website might help.

What about for people who don't live in the US?

Thanks for bringing this up. We've adjusted these bullet points to make them more accurate.