A few days ago, one of the developers of Bettir took a break from working on the blood pressure monitoring app. Little did Mike Chen realize, that project would come screeching to a halt as another created on a whim would go viral over the weekend.
In his downtime, Chen created a very basic (I’m talking 20 minutes from start to finish) website for a service called Magic. The site offered up a phone number and the promise to fulfill any (legal) wish – all you had to do was send a text to request what you wanted.
Chen passed the link around to a handful of friends and thought he might one day redesign the site if it ever became popular. The viral nature of the Internet ensured he’d have absolutely no time for a redesign – or sleep, for that matter.
As Chen tells Mashable, the first person to use the service asked for a wrench to fix his bike. The Magic “team” which consisted of 2-3 people got right to work and had a solution for the user in no time flat. Apparently the user must have been happy with the results as news of the service spread like wildfire.
Within just a few days, the service was closing in on nearly 18,000 incoming messages.
As you can imagine, trying to keep up with demand has been absolutely insane. The support team swelled to 18 users by Sunday evening. Chen said they recruited friends, family, family of friends, past employees – basically whoever they could get to help.
When a user requests a service or item, the team gets the necessary information together and replies back with a quote for the job plus a small markup for their time. If the user agrees, they pay for the service using their credit card or Bitcoin through mobile payment service Stripe.
Does this sound like a service you’d take advantage of? Think it's the next big thing? Let us know in the comments section below.
https://www.techspot.com/news/59838-magic-uber-demand-simply-text-request.html
