Thanks! Yeah, honestly, after deciding to launch this we released a really minimal landing page which I saved here: http://getmagicnow.com/index-old.html - As you can see I made that in about 20 minutes, and was not expecting this. After someone posted it on Product Hunt I spent whatever time I could polishing it up. In general though, I agree, simple websites are much better. Thanks for the kind words.

Hm, well here's a startling difference between the HN and Product Hunt community.

The PH comments:

  This website looks extremely untrustworthy, purely from a design standpoint. I feel a lot of potential users would be put off by this!

  Interesting idea. Terrible site design. Unclear if they're charging for this added convenience.

http://www.producthunt.com/posts/magic

ProductHunt is just a useless hype machine for starts that don't hold any real value at all.

There are those that would say HN is no different.

Not true, Product Hunt delivers quality traffic, with high-level people who are hungry for products and convert very well.

> Not true, Product Hunt delivers quality traffic, with high-level people who are hungry for products and convert very well.

Are you a human being talking about other human beings, or a "market opportunity" about-talking "quality traffic" that "converts very well?" I should write a "quality traffic" bot with "good conversions," then post it on Product Hunt.

High quality SV echo chamber traffic.

I was under the impression a lot of people use it for idea generation/competitive intel & that (in marketing terms) PH is a (small) traffic/link hack...

In other words I'd be interested to find anything on the quality of its traffic.

Hi!

We launched one of those landing-only email-catching product pitches on Product Hunt and Designer News. It went amazing. We never even topped #1, yet we got lots of useful feedback and more than five hundred emails of potential customers, some of them high-profile (think @google.com or @abc.com)

The quality is very high.

That commenter at PH could tell the original design took 20 minutes, and if you only have resources to allocate 20 minutes to a product page design, how good can the product be? I think there are more in this community would agree about the original design without completely writing off the product's potential.

This was pretty funny, actually. They saw the old version I mentioned above. I was surprised when someone posted it on there and I was actually glad that the reaction was lukewarm, because we didn't think we were ready to launch.

And then...boom.

Time to trade up the chain?

Well, I agree with it. "Anything you want, just give us your credit card number". No explanation of who they are or why I should trust them. Hell, they even accept Bitcoin!

While you have changed the copy and a few other things a little, I was quite amused at how people on ProductHunt considered it untrustworthy mostly through virtue of using Times New Roman rather than a nice Sans. An interesting example in the psychology of running counter to fashion..! :)

Not just the design. No Terms and Conditions, no incorporation, no IDs of owners/operators - really doesn't seem like a legitimate business (despite money being handled by Stripe).

That was my thought when I looked at index-old. It kind of makes it look like an early-mid 2000s website, as well as unfinished.

The typeface of the older design appears as Helvetica on OSX. Edit: realized this is likely due to changing the default font years ago, unbeknownst improving the experience of sites like these. New typeface is certainly an improvement either way.

Times in Chrome on OS X

How come you removed the part of the FAQ that mentioned your fee? I think everyone knows you have to charge one and we're totally cool about it. Did you just feel that subject was best saved for later in the signup process, or did you want to keep the door open for alternate means of revenue?

We noticed that people were more confused by the ambiguity of the nondescript fee, than us just saying that we'd tell you the total amount. You are right though, we do need to figure out a better way to explain this. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know.

"We quote you one simple price that includes everything: The goods, the delivery, any expected gratuity, all service charges including our own, and any applicable taxes and fees. What you see is what you pay."

Can they use that verbatim? Because they should.

Sure, consider it a gift. Now go forth and change the world. (Or at least the world of laziness.)

It's part of the secret sauce. If Magic is worth something, then so is knowing their numbers.

One thing is that it says chatting is free and there are no hidden fees. It doesn't say how much extra it is costing.

Tip is included.

I suspect just like the concierge at a hotel, the cut comes from the provider of the service (a dozen roses for 100 bucks - they can afford some affiliate fees from that)

If you visit the direct link: http://www.getmagicnow.com/access.php without adding an email address it still says that "You've been placed on the waiting list!". Simple error, but easy to fix so there is no confusion. Great service!

If you visit this link, you can pay them $5,000: http://getmagicnow.com/pay.php?p=500000

Payment pages should really be linked to an order ID of some sort, without which customers shouldn't be allowed to pay. Otherwise, lots of things can go wrong. Depending on how they have configured things on the server side, a customer could change the amount being paid and the system would consider the ticket paid, cheating them out of money. Or a customer could follow an old link and wind up paying twice if they thought it didn't go through the first time.

If you visit this link, they can pay you $5,000: https://magic.bettir.com/?p=-500000

Whoa, seriously? I'm going to guess you're joking since they probably implemented "customer order of amount x".

Edit: they've fixed this now.

I'm not joking, click on it and try to pay. It shows an invoice of ($5,000), a.k.a. $5000 negative dollars. I didn't enter real payment information to see what happens next because of really idiotic interpretations of what constitutes "hacking", but it is a really bad design choice on their part that took me about half a second to find.

Founder, if you're reading this: was this an in-house build or did you outsource this?

The answer is probably they spent around two days building this before demand grew left them zero time to improve infrastructure. Which is more or less good.

Less good? Infrastructure breaking because of load is one thing (concurrency/DB issues) but nothing like this should ever be exposed to the user on general principle.

Stripe doesn't let you send money to cards.

I'm glad to know Stripe's API is sane but you cannot ever rely on that when designing something like this!

Wait, what?

Great MVP, great focus. Few thoughts -

Make sure top phone # is tappable on mobile browsers.

Examples that don't make me question your ability to deliver - airline example seems to be hiding complexity (I question it as I read it), others really good

fyi, there's a typo in the FAQ: "we'll let you know the total price so you can confim"

Thank you. Fixed!

The font on the new page much better.

Is this available in Canada?

We can't do everything in Canada but we can definitely do some things. Try us.

Just take a look at Google's initial page when they started.

But how can you disrupt without parallax?

... And thanks. I thought I was the only one who thought the video fad was dumb. Now it's just a toll booth for getting a product presented, and I never watch them. How about others? Do you find videos actually useful or are they just glitz?

I hardly ever watch product videos. I'm usually in locations where It would be rude and I don't want to put in earphones just to find out what's going on. But I'm a curmudgeon, and may be an outlier.

I groan when my questions aren't answered in print on the page, I don't want to watch a video either.

I will happily join you in outlier-land. I want to be able to read - and quickly grok - what a product is about. Needing to watch a video to understand a product is a marketing fail, IMO.

We should form a club! We can have meeting where we show videos that we all ignore, while we chat over drinks.

I thought that was this site. :)

I'd join that too. I never liked videos that are just some person reading from a script. Just give me the script, I'd rather read it at my own pace and time, and I don't care if you really want to be youtube-famous.

When I want to know what a product does or how I might find it useful, I prefer text. I don't have to wait for a video to get to the point.

However, when I've decided to actually try it out, I find the video extremely useful as I expect it to demonstrate the onboarding process for me (ie how do I get started quickly).

thinking that everybody prefers reading is a typical programmer bias. A good number of people will prefer watching a video. Same with voice, most programmers prefer email or chat for work related discussion. Almost all the sales people I know would rather pick up the phone and sort the issue by talking.

Do both and you can cover both camps. Doesn't have to be as boring as a plain transcript, obviously.

(I very rarely watch videos and much prefer screenshots or descriptions.)

It's not about what people like but about what works.

I don't mind videos but I hate those non informative mood videos.

This site doesnt need video because the information is already there.

Most people can't watch video during work hour. We should always treat video as 'optional extra'.

Case in point, technical support/call center and room where you're constantly 'monitored'(NASA control room/datacenter NOC etc).

Glitz IMO.

Annoying glitz too if they include information in the videos that isn't in text form on their website. Videos play at one speed, I can't fast forward the video if I'm a faster "video-watcher" like I can with reading. And if I'm on a VPN I'd rather avoid loading the video altogether if I can avoid it, which is what my browser plugins are for.

Well, perhaps I could just watch the videos faster, interesting thought experiment.

if youtube in focus on chrome, then shift+> for faster playback

> Do you find videos actually useful or are they just glitz?

If I'm legitimately interested in a service and want to know how it works, sure, but if I just want a quick overview to decide if I'm interested I'd rather have something simple like some text and images.

I don't have time to watch a video for every thing I look at. Give me text that can processed in seconds, not video that takes minutes.

It's extremely rare for me to indulge a linear narrative when I'm looking for information.

My vote goes for the short 1-minute video with understandable presentation of how the product works and solves my problem rather than reading paragraphs of text.

Its also refreshing that afore mentioned good copy got right to the point and told us what they do. No silly vaguenesses about a coming awesome product that they never really describe and then some email sign-up so that they can notify you when they actually have something to sell you.

Just what they can do for me right now. Hat's off. Good luck.

+1 no giant full-width+full-height responsive image

Okay this looks really interesting! And with no full-width+full-height responsive image, I can proceed... it's something different, something not exactly 100% what you would expect...

So intriguing... so what, dear MagicMan, is it? Would you kindly answer dear Sir, because I'm uncertain, and curiously in need of an answer before I text myself down the rabbit hole...

IT JUST LOOKS SO INTERESTING!!! ;-)