I had an absolutely horrendous experience with Magic a few years back. I wanted them to find out how much all my competitors charged hourly so I asked them to call and ask but was very clear “you cannot say you’re calling on my behalf. Do not mention me.” I told them this stipulation multiple times.

When I got the report back, I discovered that they told all of my competitors that they were calling on my behalf to find out their pricing structure and referred to me by name.

I also asked them to call all the flower shops near me to find orchids. They responded next day “we called 10 shops near you and none have them” I found this to be odd so I called one place I had used before. They had them.

I think they should change their name because it’s not magic.

Yeah, my experience is that they really don't follow directions with precision and they seem to always identify themselves.

The quality/cost of service have dropped off imo, I used to rave about them circa ~2017 but the intelligence of the service really dropped off.

The idea is great, I still use them once in a blue moon, but the execution is in this uncanny valley of not being cheap enough for rote work (like compiling expense spreadsheets from texted receipts) and not intelligent enough for complex research tasks.

> The idea is great

What about the idea is great? There are few economies of scale, no automation, no long term edge, and it is completely dependent on the existence of cheap labor.

They were offering a service that people have a need for, at a price point that makes it affordable to people, who previously could not have afforded it (the alternative being hiring a personal assistant).

It's simple enough to argue that's not enough to make it "great". I would say just about as simple as it is to argue that it is.

Yeah in the end when you recognize that they just try to be middlemen, you realize you're better off finding a remote personal assistant that remembers prior context.

I guess that makes it less like a valley and more like a plain of negative value.

There was some British one I’d use to get primark jeans when working/staying in the city, it was kinda cool if you are a disorganised piece of shit but was pretty expensive.

It's magic as long as you don't look behind the curtain!

Anon for a reason; At one point they were looking for a growth person; on a lark I tried to use their service to apply for the job by signing up and using their service to do/coordinate the various steps.

My thought was (and someone on their side could have seen this as well) it would make a great piece for earned media later as I could say I got the job at getmagic by using the service...which is the kind of thing you'd want your growth person thinking about.

They were almost allergic to this idea the entire time, it was kinda crazy the friction I got from what I was asking them to do. I was also doing it as a test of them as well, so glad I thought of that angle.

That was actually quite a clever idea. It would have definitely caught my attention as a tech hiring manager. I guess you learned that the company doesn't think about growth media like you do. That's unfortunate as their service would seem to lend itself to creatively unconventional approaches.

When I applied to Atlassian, I had actually been tired of banks and searched Google for “Best startup in Sydney”. HR was in rage that I hadn’t kept the screenshot ;)

They transitioned to a more traditional b2b virtual assistant model. We used them at my previous startup to do a lot of data entry work and spreadsheet clean up. They weren't great for EA-like tasks that require more nuance. athenago.com was much better for that.

I actually ended up starting usedouble.com (GPT3 for spreadsheets) to automate a lot of the work Magic was doing, as it felt quite expensive to have a human do those rote tasks. It often requires less verification as well, as the assistants often can make mistakes because they are not culturally familiar with the target task. For example, we used them to categorize a bunch of grocery products, and would see mistakes like putting frozen naan in the bakery section (where in north america grocery stores you'd expect that to be in the Frozen section). So it's interesting how GPT3 actually ends up being more accurate for things like this.

>athenago.com was much better for that.

And athenago is terrible compared to just hiring from onlinejobs.ph

They charge you $3k/mo and pay the EA $700/mo, that's a ridiculous price to pay for a recruiter. Just spend $1500 a month on onlinejobs and you'll get somebody much better, and they'll never leave you.

I used Magic throughout, on and off for several years. They are on getmagic.com now.

They went from high quality concierge service, to low quality virtual assistant work, in a gradual shift.

Now they're essentially reselling upwork/fiverr services, as when you ask for something they will likely end up using this. It's down to a very small amount of use cases, frankly, as their service is no longer high quality. They also pulled some fast ones on me throughout that time; for example, as they lowered their prices, they conveniently grandfathered me into the older, higher price while still lowering the quality of their service.

Even when using them successfully, they seem to spend ages doing the most inane, basic things and over-bill for it.

Nowadays I use Chatterboss (https://chatterboss.com/). Magic's only useful feature is that it's humans available 24/7; but on Chatterboss the assistants know you and your business inside and out at least. Though I have my own share of issues with CB too (such as their super weird pricing which feels like buying a car and being sold twenty options which aren't so optional).

To be honest, this is why I'm excited about ChatGPT. The past month, I've used ChatGPT for many tasks I would have previously handed out the same way (in the same english!) to a virtual assistant. And ChatGPT just gave... better results, and gave them almost instantly.

What kind of tasks have you accomplished with ChatGPT? I'm curious because the obvious things I can think of (like scheduling a meeting) would require it to talk to other APIs. I'd love to hear what worked for you.

I used them as a “virtual travel agent” similar to the prompt on https://github.com/f/awesome-chatgpt-prompts#act-as-a-travel...

It’s nice to be able to respond, “I’ve done 1 already, 2 is too far a drive, and 3 is not my vibe, give me 3 more options” and get a good result. I even asked it “what would the iCal format for doing this activity next Tuesday at 11am look like” and it generated one reasonably close (though in UTC time zone).

Writing-related tasks, primarily. Also, brainstorming, and quick initial research.

Had one crappy experience with them where I lost a bunch of money due to the operator not knowing how to use google maps to tell that they were buying tickets two hours away from where I lived. I asked within 15 minutes. They couldn't get the tickets refunded. I got charged for the time they spent asking for a refund. Never used them again, not worth the hassle.

Unfortunately they seem to be in that cursed valley of only supporting tasks that anybody can do with 10 minutes of googling, and the chance of them screwing anything else up is too high to be worth the risk of setting $100 on fire for zero results. I don't think that will be a solvable problem with humans until ML mostly takes over.

I have tried magic a number of times with the same task: given a set of constraints on distance, price and a few other factors, find all the properties in an area that match. I have never once gotten a result that looked like it was curated by a human. I would get data back that was obviously erroneous, like a house priced for a dollar, or multiple rows with different data for the same property. In each case I was given a refund but maybe once a year or so I find myself trying them out again, only to be disappointed.

I signed up for their service, was assigned a virtual agent. I did some background check on the person assigned to me and found she had stolen cc details & funds from a customer of hers in the past.

Nothing you can do when you're in the US and the person that stole from you is in the philippines.

What tools/services did you use to run the background check?

I just did a google search of her name. Ran into a website from a former client lamenting she'd stolen his identity, lamenting there wasn't much that he could do about it and warning others.

I tried them for a specific task: finding surf camps for a specific date range and then calling them to check availability. I provided a list of ones I’d already looked into. They re-did the same list and charged $79, despite their marketing saying it would be $20.

Would never use them again.

Similar to other comments here, I've tried Magic and was disappointed with the quality of work. Recently my business has been using https://hellopareto.com/ (no affiliation, just a satisfied customer).

https://getmagic.com is the service you are referring too.

Looks like they pivoted to a more classic virtual assistant provider?

Their pricing page is my ultimate pet peeve - a pricing page that shows no pricing.

Agreed but fwiw in b2b SaaS (their current target customer) it’s very painful to anchor your prices publicly.

True, but that's where the "Starting at" trick comes into play or don't have Pricing be a top level link on your landing page.

That's good copy - most new founders I've worked with didn't do that, but hopefully that messaging is more common now? Whether it is or not, I'm taking it with me :)

Thanks all for the warnings and information. I've been using Magic on and off for the last four years, mostly for travel planning. Their quality of work is not what it used to be.

I went to remove my credit card information from their records today, and it turns out you cannot actually do this yourself which is a red flag. I had to open a request with them to do it.

Check out travelperk.com for travel planning. They have a concierge service at a fixed 25 EUR / trip. They're not as good as they could be, but I like them a lot.

I asked them to bring me In N Out and they ended up charging me $120. I never used them again.

When I used it, they charged you for every minute your "operator" was busy. Apparently my operator was standing by awaiting a response from the contractor to do the delivery for my burgers, so I was billed for that entire time they were waiting.

We had them on a repeating task to call our shop on Wednesday and remind our forgetful technicians to take out the trash. Sometimes the techs would still forget. I was thinking about giving Magic access to the CCTV to verify it actually got done so we could have a non smelly work space...

We eventually canceled due to the phone calls being billed at 15 minutes each (which is still fair, we are too small of a company to justify the cost).

Overall, i think something like magic needs to stay for the long haul.

There are services to do automated calls that are much cheaper than $15/call (like https://www.remindercall.com, no affiliation). I'm curious why you used magic for that task.

I actually use my Alexa for this...

I used it last week. They did a bunch of calling around searching for out of stock parts. Still works great.

83489 is their sms.

I’m still using it monthly. Still works fine for my small needs.

i still love the idea -- but would need to be called 'Concierge' to become a facilitator of 'all the things'.

Still around. I just used it last month in Paris.

block

The one time I tried them, I asked how much their staff made per hour, and if they were W2 employees or contractors. They said they couldn't tell me that. I said I didn't think much of their service if they didn't even know that.

Do you routinely demand compensation details from people you interact with?

If I’m paying them to answer me, yes.

No.

They get $5/hr (based on https://getmagic.pinpointhq.com/en/jobs/51639)