Startups and the Magic of Seven

by Sam on June 15, 2010

Startups and the Magic of Seven

An interesting thought from Keith Rabois on Quora:

To be truly successful on the Internet, you need to build something that becomes one of seven sites that a large swath of users will regularly use

I think this is a great way to evaluate companies one is thinking of joining, building or investing in.

Initially I wasn’t sure on the significance of seven, so I did some googling. Turns out that seven (plus or minus two) is a “magical number” in psychology initially cited in a paper by George Miller of Princeton University. Sometimes known as Miller’s Law, it argues that the number of objects an average human can hold in working memory is 7 ± 2.

While I haven’t used Rescue Time in a while, I’d be curious to look at its data set to see how regularly individuals’ top seven sites change and what are the key prompts: changes in lifestyle? Fads? New technologies? Job related? I imagine for most people there are 2-3 websites that will rarely change (ex: your preferred search engine, likely Google), but as you move to sites 5-7 I’d be interested to know more about turnover.

  • samirsoriano

    Interesting — what about products that serve websites? Like how many content blogs run on wordpress, or the ad networks that serve impressions on these 7 most visited sites — or is it better to be the actual name brand that everyone remembers when they type the URL in (or click the bookmark).

  • http://leveragingideas.com/ Sam Huleatt

    Well products that serve websites would likely be in the top seven for
    people whose jobs it is to service websites. I don't believe he means
    one of the top seven websites in the world, but one of the seven key
    websites for a significant demographic

  • http://www.matteovision.com/anti-aging/buyhgh-humangrowthhormone/ Andy

    Very interesting obsrvation. I was born on 7th Oct. :)

  • mail order brides

    I do like your article, as its topic is very close for me. I also believe in the magic of number, but to tell the truth, in good magic. I believe that the number 7 promises us something good and positive and at the same time I try not to pay attention to bad signs and by the way there were occasions when these bad signs turned out to be good one. For example, in the University at exams I got question #13 and answered them excellently. So I think that the main thing is to look for only positive in everything!