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A comment on Magic: How to launch a product so no one will ever use it again.

Re:Magic: How to launch a product so no one will ever use it... by jacquesm on Monday February 23, 2015 @10:34AM (#9094802)
I've launched something (once) that went from 0 to breaking in less than 10 hours. I aged at least a couple of years and it took weeks before we managed to get a grip on the situation. We were about as unprepared as could be. This is what all of you starter-uppers are dreaming of, but when the growth is higher than you can handle you're going to have to move really fast if you want to capture your potential. Unfortunately we had no idea what we were doing so I'm pretty sure those first weeks cost us dearly. Fortunately for the magic people their scaling issues are something that can be overcome and I really hope that they'll do well because of this.

Cut them some slack and think about how hard it would be to pull this off with such rapid growth without having any delays or issues during the first phase of rapid growth. Dealing with high levels of traffic and orders is hard, dealing with high levels of growth is a lot harder still.

Amazing they managed to ship the order at all.

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Re:Magic: How to launch a product so no one will ever use it... by tghw on Monday February 23, 2015 @10:49AM (#9094898)
Like I've said elsewhere, it's not the MVP-nature or the beta that's really the problem. It's that they want to start a service that charges 25% more in exchange for selecting which service to use, with a significantly worse user interface. It took me much longer to type in the order on my phone that it did to select the order from Postmates, the service they likely were using to actually do the delivery.

Even if everything had gone perfectly and I hadn't spent over an hour waiting for responses, I still wouldn't use this service. To pay more for a worse interface? No thanks.

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Re:Magic: How to launch a product so no one will ever use it... by Cthulhu_ on Monday February 23, 2015 @10:36AM (#9094815)
At the very least they should've set up an auto-reply that explains they've been flooded with unexpected high load, with an average reply duration of half an hour or whatever it was at the time.
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Re:Magic: How to launch a product so no one will ever use it... by jacquesm on Monday February 23, 2015 @10:37AM (#9094826)
Would you suggest they do that during or after trying to deal with said unexpected high load?
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