... and having to wait almost 1.5 hours for it, most of the time wasted by waiting for the "Magic" reply.

Seriously, who wants to chat with a service whose latency is about 19 to 31 minutes?

Had he not attempted to sign up at the same time he was going to order the burrito it would have been much less time.

The story is about a very disappointing first user experience and how it led me to never want to use the service again. The burrito is just a side plot.

I think that the 'magic' people were simply not prepared for a runaway success. Wait a while to give them a chance to get their act together and try again.

First user experience during the hockey stick phase being 'poor' is to be expected for anything with this degree of growth. Try scaling anything through three orders of magnitude in 24 hours and you'll get why.

The amazing thing to me is that your order got delivered at all.

> I think that the 'magic' people were simply not prepared for a runaway success.

But they were. Because they were using an invite-only signup to limit the amount of new users they can take in, they could make a reasonable assumption about how busy they could get at rush times.

Besides, the people on the other side aren't robots - at the very least they could've apologised for the late replies and explained about how busy they were. Because they're humans - or so the website claims - and that means they should show a bit of humanity and empathy and whatnot.

TBF I don't really think they hire actual humans, that just doesn't scale. Especially if 90% of their users just want to order food - reasonably predictable input, that.

If it takes 30 seconds to route a request and you have 5 people stand by you can process 10 orders per minute before you get a backlog.

First, they had an invite wall when I signed up. I was ~4000th in line, but they let me in anyway. This was their first mistake.

The bigger problem is that their service is just a simple middle man. They don't provide delivery services, they just choose which service to use. For the examples they gave (food delivery, grocery delivery, airline tickets), it's never going to be worth it to me to have them charge me an extra 25% to pick between the three services that will do that for me (Postmates, Instacart/Postmates, Hipmunk). What's more, SMS makes it more difficult to order. Postmates' interface is much better than trying to text an order in.

It's not that this is just an MVP. It's that this service really only takes away the decision of which other middle man to choose, and there's just not enough value there.

You're just not the target market. I'm not either, but despite that I can easily see that their target market does actually exist.

Do they just keep your CC # on file?

They use Square, so you set up a payment method attached to your phone number, and they use your phone number to check out.

On one hand, I get where you're coming from, but come on:

"Wow, everyone! This is truly amazing. We released Magic under 48 hours ago as an experiment and a side project, and now the traffic and requests are streaming in faster than we can handle."