# Batteries Included

> The future of software is not the software itself. It is how quickly you can get your customer to the outcome they actually wanted.

Author: Maggie Tang
Published: 2026-09-02
Canonical: https://www.loyalist.com/blog/batteries-included/

Remember the feeling of getting a remote-control car as a kid. You beg for it for months. It finally shows up. You tear open the box, grab the remote, flip the switch — nothing. Then you see the fine print: batteries not included.

Think about how strange that arrangement is. The car is finished. It was designed, molded, assembled, shipped across an ocean, and wrapped. Ninety-nine percent of the work is done. And the whole thing sits dead in your hands because of the last one percent, two AA batteries that would have cost the manufacturer a few cents. The missing one percent cancels the other ninety-nine.

Software does this to customers every day. The vendor gives you access to a generic and unconfigured platform, and you have to integrate it with the rest of your stack, clean up all of your data on your own, and train your team – you supply the batteries. The last mile is the hardest part, and vendors have absolved themselves from the job.

At Magic we have the opposite philosophy. We call it *Batteries Included*.

*Batteries Included* means we judge ourselves on getting the customer to their outcome. A hospitality operator doesn't want a guest intelligence platform. It wants regulars to be recognized when they walk in.

*Batteries Included* is a way of thinking, and a skill we've had to develop as a team. In practice, finding the batteries means working backwards to understand what's actually standing between the operator and what they are trying to accomplish. It can be different for every customer and every feature, and the missing one percent is often not in the product at all: it's the quality of their data, a decision they haven't made, a first step they don't know how to take.

A few examples from our own work:

- **The guest data isn't clean.** The same regular shows up under 10 different profiles, so marketing journeys were unreliable and figuring out who the actual regulars are gets hard across millions of guests. Early on we cleaned guest books by hand. Eventually we built [Guestbook Studio](/blog/introducing-guestbook-studio-what/), giving operators AI agents to do it at scale.

- **They don't know where to start:** Which tags to set up, which emails to send, which reports to use. We used to do strategy calls with them, and make templates as starting points, but over time we noticed the right starting point depended on the type of venue, so we turned what we'd learned into an AI use case generator, tailored to that specific venue's data.

- **They don't want another platform to log into.** Sometimes our customers don't own a laptop, are on the floor all day, or never check their email. We needed a way for the product to work for them - whether it was a daily text or writing it back into a platform they check, or sending mobile notifications. We needed to meet them where they are.

If done right, *Batteries Included* is something our customers feel. Every outcome we deliver makes it easier for them to bring us the next problem, knowing that we are their partner they can count on. Ultimately, what they remember is that the product has never once sat dead in their hands, waiting on a couple of batteries.

So we hold ourselves to the standard the toy company should have held: the thing works the moment you turn it on.

Maggie

## Frequently asked questions

### What does Batteries Included mean?

It means we hold ourselves to the outcome rather than to the software. A platform that technically works but sits unused is not a result. So the last mile, the data cleanup, the first configuration, the training, is our job and not something we hand back to the operator to finish.

### Why is the last mile so often left to the customer?

Because it is the hardest part and the least uniform. Every venue has different data, a different stack and a different starting point, so it does not package neatly into a feature. That is exactly why leaving it out breaks the whole thing. Ninety-nine percent of the work is wasted if nobody can turn the product on.

### What does that look like in practice?

Three examples from our own work. Guest books full of duplicate profiles, which we first cleaned by hand and then built Guestbook Studio to do at scale. Operators unsure where to start, which became a use case generator tuned to that venue's data. And teams who never log in, which is why the product reaches them by text, by mobile notification, or inside a platform they already check.