Magic, a startup less than a week old, has appeared out of nowhere, and it’s taking the Internet by storm. Here’s how it works: you text them at (408) 217-1721 with whatever you’d like them to get you, be it a pizza, screwdriver, plane tickets to Boston, or whatever else you can think of that can legally be delivered. You enter your credit card information on an encrypted site (payments are managed by Stripe) and tell them your address. Then, they get it to you. The company’s business model basically boils down to “Uber for X,” in the words of founder Mike Chen. It’s an all-encompassing service that attempts to do anything and everything. Magic is available anywhere in the US, and will deliver “anything you want, as long as it’s not illegal” according to their website getmagicnow.com. On Monday morning, three days after Magic’s creation, they had received 18,000 texts and increased their staff size by about six times from 2 or 3 at inception to 18 employees. It’s been posted on tech forums Product Hunt and Hacker News, and Mashable gave them publicity on Monday with an article, making it one of the fastest-growing companies in recent history.
We’ve seen several Uber-like delivery services sprout up in the past few years, including Push for Pizza, Unwind Me (massages), Minibar (alcohol), Resy (reservations), and Canary (medical marijuana). Magic is aiming to do everything these services do, albeit in the more stripped-down medium of SMS. As of this writing, requests are overwhelming the staff, so don’t expect to get whatever you ask them for within the same day. It’s unclear how the business will be sustainable, or exactly what the delivery fee is, though Magic’s site assures that it’s free to talk to them, and the full cost of delivery is shown before customers are billed.
When I texted Magic for a coaxial cable, I was given position #4403 in the waiting list, with the option to pay a $50 VIP fee to advance to the front. Hopefully Magic will find time to hire more staff to fulfill delivery requests in a more timely manner, but to be fair, the company is literally three days old at this time of writing. Expect an update to this story in next week’s Technically Speaking.
This is the same concept as getwish.co I think these on-demand services are going to continue to blow up as we keep getting wealthier and lazier as a society
Wow, I’d never heard of Wish before but it looks exactly like Magic, even down to the URL. I wonder how Wish is doing now with Magic around.