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davecraige

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Hi, how's it going?

I'm Dave Craige, an entrepreneur from Virginia. I currently live in Colorado.

Over the past 8 years I’ve been intensely focused on building a real web business with actual traffic and revenue. Real visitors. Real revenue. As you are well aware, there is a lot of talk about traffic on the web, however, a majority of people aren’t able to actually get traffic and revenue for a site.

Over the past few years we have been blessed to see our site DenimBlog.com get an incredible amount of traffic and revenue. Over 4.3 million visitors and 16.7 million pageviews a year. Our focus on creating excellent content has enabled us to bring in millions of people to our site.

My team and I are putting together a brand new startup called http://www.Tugboat.io . We are creating a simple, clean site overflowing with some of the most important and useful information on the web that you can use to grow your web traffic and your business.

No fluff, no clutter, just solid information you can actually use.

We can't tell you everything right now, but we would love to have you join us as we slowly pull back the curtain and begin to share some of the exciting things we are working on.

Please check out our site and enter your email to become one of our supporters and early adopters.

Thanks for checking out my profile!

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Magic+ 11 years ago

UPDATE 2 : I have reached out to Mike three times now. Still haven't heard anything back. Possible stonewalling.

Magic+ 11 years ago

yea Mark, you are right. I did learn an expensive lesson.

One of my main frustrations though was that this was a very highly regarded YC company. Should consumers expect this disrespectful behavior to be accepted from other YC companies as well?

Should YC founders be expected to be able to simply pick and choose which customers they want to arbitrarily delete?

I can completely understand if this was a fly by night operation. But YC is basically the Harvard of startups and this was completely out of left field for me.

Magic+ 11 years ago

At the time, Magic was one of the hottest startups in the Valley. I was willing to hustle hard to get my foot in the door.

But I agree with you, I need to be more judicial with my time in the future.

Magic+ 11 years ago

I think that is misleading.

I believe the employees are only paid $15 an hour.

Magic+ 11 years ago

Yea, I gave Magic access to setup recurring donations to two charities I support.

Unfortunately they closed my account and stopped the donations. They provided no information on when the last donations went out so I could resume them.

They went completely dark.

Magic+ 11 years ago

Yes, thank you. That is the whole story. You can read it if you want.

I spent over $3,250 traveling to Silicon Valley. I spent over 60 hours of intense work to do a project for free for them that they requested.

I delivered them a beautifully custom 38 page research report that you can see here: http://f.cl.ly/items/3f3u1e14273P2v2a1Y2J/CAP1.pdf

I was treated like a second class citizen and tossed to the side. My account was deleted. I contacted all 4 of the founders. Not one would respond. They went dark.

I would hope that no one else gets treated as poorly as I was and experience this type of disrespect.

Magic+ 11 years ago

Mike,

As you know I had a very bad experience with Magic as well.

I worked for you for free for a week and on boarded 63 new customers for you. You guys arbitrarily deleted my account, and abruptly shut off my autopay donations to numerous charities we had set up together.

Then you went silent and wouldn't return any of the ten messages I sent to you asking for access to my personal records and information regarding my numerous charity donations.

How can I encourage others to use your service if I was shown such an unprofessional and disrespectful experience?

Magic+ 11 years ago

A few thoughts and questions

1. This is fascinating to watch

2. How is Magic going to compete with Facebook M and www.GoButler.com? Butler does all the things Magic does but for free. And Facebook M is being rolled out to more and more people.

3. Is there space for a premium concierge assistant that gives even better service than Butler or M can do? What prevents Butler or M from simply rolling out a premium $25/hour service and undercutting Magic if this segment proves valuable.

4. Isn't the real money in massive scale. Will Magic simply be a small concierge shop for the very wealthy and will we all use Facebook M for most tasks in the future?