Magic: The Story of an Accidentally Founded, Wildly Viral Startup

BY DAVID PIERCE
02.25.15 |
10:34 AM |
PERMALINK

WIRED

When I moved to Brooklyn, my roommate hooked me up with his weed dealer. He laid out shockingly specific instructions for contacting the guy. First, I had to text a certain number with the message “Is this mm?” Those capitalizations, that punctuation. If I was cool, I’d get a text back from a different (and ever-changing) number with the menu for the day. The prices were non-negotiable, there were no questions; I was to reply with a product name and a number of grams. It was complicated and felt somehow dangerous, but it worked: With just two texts, I summoned a carnival of cannabis to my front door.

Magic, a new company that was never meant to launch but this weekend went completely viral, is that text-message delivery system gone global (and legit). This is an awful cliche and I hate myself for writing this, but it really is Uber for everything. As in, you want something, they get it for you. There’s no brilliant algorithm behind it, no clever hack—just a bunch of people using every service, trick, and tool they can find. They’ll order from Instacart or Seamless; they’ll call the manufacturer or go to the store. Magic is the aggregator of aggregators, a dispatcher for every service and store on earth. Depending on how you read it, it’s either an impossibly cynical commentary on the sad state of our own resourcefulness, or an earth-shattering productivity tool.

You just text a number and tell it what you want. You can ask for anything: a burger for dinner, or four tickets to the game tonight. Magic can find you the part you need to fix your bike. It can literally buy a car and charge it to your credit card. Think about all the times you’ve ever said “I would give anything to not be doing this right now.” Magic will do that thing for a few bucks.

Personally, I wanted headphones. So I found the number on the website, and wrote “I need a pair of JayBird BlueBuds X.” (I hear they’re good.) Then I stared at my phone as if it might suddenly sprout wireless earbuds. Instead, I got a text back: “Welcome to Magic! Due to high demand, you’ve been placed on our waitlist.” I was #178 in line. Another text promised that I could tweet and Facebook about Magic to move up the list, so of course I did because what else is social media for? A few minutes later I was still #178.

Jaybird

Magic sucks at waiting lists, but, then again, it wasn’t supposed to have one. It wasn’t even supposed to be a company. It was just something Mike Chen and his buddies made to see if it would work.

Chen is CEO of Bettir, a fledgling company developing a blood-pressure app inside the Y Combinator startup accelerator. The app is all about personalized coaching, chatting with you to explain what your blood pressure means and how you can improve it. Building their back-end system led Chen and his four co-founders—Ben Godlove, Nic Novak, Michael Rubin, and David Merriman—to wonder: how much can you really do over text? What if you could just say “I want a pepperoni pizza” or “I need the soonest possible reservation at Nobu,” and it would just happen? You wouldn’t have to worry about the how, the where, or the by whom—that would be somebody else’s problem. All you’d have to do is send a text.

So he registered a phone number using the business-friendly internet calling service Twilio, and texted it. “We made this number as a test,” Chen told me, “and I had a few people standing by.” Chen’s first request was a demo for his co-founders. He texted the number asking for chicken fried rice, and his co-founder Michael Rubin made sure it got delivered. Their exchange amounted to paying your buddy a few bucks to order Seamless for you.

MAGIC’S FIRST ORDER: CHICKEN FRIED RICE

It worked, so Chen sent the number to a few of his friends for them to use, too. Then he made a simple website, so he didn’t have to explain it to each person individually. “Very quickly,” he says, “they emailed me back, saying ‘hey is it okay if I share this with a few of my friends?'” He said, “Sure,” and started thinking about doing some user studies to develop this idea into a real product. Then, this past Saturday, his site mysteriously appeared on Product Hunt, that curator of cool products in Silicon Valley. It also hit Hacker News and immediately jumped to the top. In a matter of minutes, Magic went from 30 users to thousands.

The team scrambled, enlisting friends and family members—and at least one co-founder’s girlfriend—to start answering requests. There are still just 10 to 20 people on the team, according to Chen, though he says others have probably been hired while we’ve been on the phone. Still, though: If you text Magic a pizza order right now, odds are good one of its founders is calling Papa John’s.

Or, in my case, Insomnia Cookies. After I paid $50 to jump 178 spots in line, I got a VIP number and texted again. By now I was hungry, so I ordered a dozen chocolate chip cookies. Five minutes and $26 later, they were supposedly on their way—but they never arrived, and I never heard why. I never got my money back, either.

In Magic’s quest to have everything “just handled like magic,” as Chen described it (with the third or fourth accidental pun of our conversation), Magic’s people apparently forgot to give the delivery guy my number. Since all I’d ever done was send a text to a mysterious number, I had no way to find out.

Okay, so Magic is not to be trusted with my $26. Clearly, the best thing to do was try and give them $26,000. To test Magic’s limits, I then came frighteningly close to buying a 2015 VW Jetta.

Volkswagen

“I want to buy a 2015 VW Jetta,” I wrote. The very friendly person on the other side of my text conversation said sure, they could help, and asked me a dozen questions about colors, and interiors, where am I located, and do I want a CD player. Suddenly I realized: Oh my God, they’re actually going to buy me a car. I’m excited about the future, but not yet ready to blow my credit limit with a single text.

They would have done it, though. As my magician—which is really what Magic’s workers are called—reminded me, Magic’s goal is to do anything, anytime, as long as it’s legal. Need someone to stand in line for you, clean your apartment, help you plan your party, or find you a tiger? The tiny team at Magic is down. (They’re looking into the dubious legality of tiger-purchase now, and I get the sense Chen really hopes Magic gets to buy one.)

“You know what?” Chen says, dead serious. “People do want cars, and they do want helicopters to Vegas right now. We’re not here to say what you should or shouldn’t want, we’re here to make it possible to have.” If this company has a mission statement, that’s it.

“PEOPLE DO WANT CARS, AND THEY DO WANT HELICOPTERS TO VEGAS RIGHT NOW.”

Luckily for Magic, Chen says most people’s immediate needs are more “Thai food” than “tiger.” When I tried the app again a few hours later, still in the midst of the company’s viral explosion, I just wanted dinner. I asked for “a good bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon” between $17-$25, plus a butternut squash and chorizo soup from the diner downstairs, which definitely exists, but isn’t exactly on the menu. After a few texts about my address and my chorizo nationality preferences, the conversation just went silent. An hour later I gave up and ordered Seamless for myself, the old-fashioned way. My magician eventually resurfaced, full of apologies and promises for future chorizo, but not until I was already finished eating.

I’ve never once actually gotten what I wanted from Magic.

Let me repeat that. I’ve never actually gotten anything from Magic. Chen assured me most people are having far better experiences, but the service is clearly already slowing against the influx of requests. Food is the most common type of request, and the easiest to fulfill thanks to apps like Seamless and DoorDash. But it’s only going to get tougher for Magic. “Uber for everything” is easy enough to pull off when you’re a bunch of funded entrepreneurs with money to spare and a hankering for fried rice, but making Magic work for anything, anywhere and fore everyone is much harder. Even with all the helpful dry-cleaning services and food delivery apps it can turn to, scaling with this exponential demand is nigh impossible.

If they can somehow figure it out, though, there’s always money to be made selling convenience. The company’s business model is simple: Get you what you want and charge you a little extra for the service. Magic makes you pay before it does anything, and the cost represents the price of your order plus the time and effort spent to acquire it. I never negotiated the price with a magician, though I’m sure you could. Everything is paid using Stripe, another Y Combinator startup, which you sign up for from a link in Magic’s response to your first text. Chen says Magic never even sees your credit card information. (His response to my question about what the company does with all the private information it asks you to send in a text—names, addresses—is less convincing, and consists mostly of not allowing photos in the office. Clearly, Magic’s viral hit happened so fast the team hasn’t given privacy a real thought yet.)

The basic model can work. Chen says he’s already seen overwhelmingly that people are willing to pay a little more to just not worry about anything. There’s no system for figuring out how much to charge for an order, though, which has already cost the company money when projects were harder than expected. Every single task and interaction is currently handled by a person, which will quickly become untenable. As he describes building dozens of software iterations just in the last 48 hours, Chen already sounds like he’s forgotten what his bed feels like.

But he’s sold on Magic, and Bettir is rapidly getting out of the blood-pressure business. He’s even still using the service himself, as crazy as it sounds. And he knows he’s riding a rare wave of virality, so he’s committed to getting Magic right and doing it quickly. He has to figure out how to scale, how to automate, how to hire enough contractors all over the country and pay them well enough that they’ll stick around long enough to upend an entire industry with a little technology and a lot of elbow grease. It sounds insane. It also sounds like Uber.

I never did get that Cabernet. But at 11:22 on Monday night, I got a text. There’s a place with the perfect wine for me, it said, but it’s closed. “But I will be in touch with you tomorrow,” my magician wrote, “with a tasty treat. :)”

I saved the number.