Delivery Startup Magic Explodes In Its First 48 Hours

A Silicon Valley startup called Magic, which promises to deliver anything a customer wants anywhere in the U.S. (as long as it’s legal, physically possible and not too “unusual”), has already logged 17,000 requests in its first 48 hours of operation, TechCrunch reported on Monday (Feb. 23).

That’s a startup founder’s dream. It’s even more dreamlike for Magic, because the service wasn’t actually intended to be launched as a business — it was a side project put together over a weekend by a team of developers working on a blood pressure monitoring app called Bettir. Co-founder Mike Chen told TechCrunch that the idea was to create an on-demand service that would let customers order any task — say, food or a driver — via text messaging, to avoid the few extra steps required with an app.

The team created the system, told a few friends, and it went viral, Chen said. By Monday he had to stop registering new customers, put potential customers on a waiting list and call in friends and family to help handle the order volume.

The good news for Chen’s team — and his friends and family — is that they don’t have to actually deliver the goods, like GrubHub’s new food delivery service, or even manage a TaskRabbit-style collection of freelancers. Magic is purely a middleman, taking orders, figuring out who can fulfill them, and calculating the cost. The customer making the request then gets a link to make a payment using either a credit card or Bitcoin.

The bad news? Chen and his staff have very little idea how much many of the requests will cost or how difficult they’ll be to fulfill, which makes pricing a crapshoot. And while there’s automation in place to handle the texted requests, each order still requires a not-especially-scalable human being to figure out how to make the requests happen.

According to Chen, those requests have already included having sushi and flowers delivered to a boat in San Francisco (which actually took two tries), getting help to get out of court, and having a live tiger delivered to a customer’s door. That last one hasn’t happened yet, and may not — it depends on whether the delivery would be legal. If it is, and the customer is willing to pay the not-yet-determined price, Chen said Magic will make it happen.