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.
That's the salary of a full-time assistant who would be on call only 8-12 hours a day.
If you are the kind of guy who is rich enough for a personal assistant, I'm pretty sure $100/hour isn't unreasonable
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.
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.
http://dannybaranowski.blogspot.hu/2012/06/idioms-for-idiots...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's something odd here. This smells wrong.
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.