We often get asked how many people work at Majestic. I’m not going to answer, but I’ll explain why I can’t.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Margaret Mead.
I saw this quote – or at least a variation of it – on the wall of a pub called “Nine Fine Men” at New York, Las Vegas. The pub name comes from nine US Presidents born of Irish descent. At the time, Majestic had less than nine employees and had just made quite an imprint at Pubcon – a conference of several thousand website owners, SEO managers and experts. We had already seen trillions of URLs and had a profitable business with investment.
The problem is in the original question; “How many people work at Majestic?” In a modern crowd-sourced business, success and scale are based on many things, but not necessarily employees. Majestic achieves its scale of crawl with the help of a cast of hundreds. They are not employees, exactly, but it would be absolutely wrong to say they did not have a vested interest in Majestic being successful. Most of these guys also run ISPs or find themselves with extra bandwidth which we can tap into. But they certainly “work” for Majestic… just not in the way that employment law would understand.
Then there are Majestic’s Ambassadors. Many volunteer to spend significant amounts of time helping out with Majestic, including manning stands at conferences and giving in-depth demos.
Our customers act as one huge marketing team. They talk about us, they re-tweet us, they use us and we work hard to turn customers into advocates. It brings our costs down and that means we can keep our prices lower making our data set not only incredibly advanced, and “Bigger, Faster and Fresher” than other sources, but also at a lower cost of entry. So one should add our customer’s efforts into the mix when you ask “How many people work at Majestic?”.
In one sense, we are still a small team. But we have developed scale:
- Maybe as many as a thousand servers and computers (we haven’t counted) work in harmony to collect and collate data from the world wide web
- We launch new functionality at a frightening rate, through clever processes and a clever, committed team
- We deliver data to your laptop or browser with incredible speed.
Q: How many people work at Majestic?
A: Everyone.
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Great motivating post, Dixon. I think the first time we met, at SEOCampus Paris back in the day, you told me you had more servers than humans in the then beginning team, but that was not a bad thing in any way as quality matters more than quantity.
July 25, 2013 at 2:04 pmNo doubt that if they’re as engaged and resourceful as you are, guys in your team and network are out to change the world – at least of SEO but maybe even beyond 😉
Keep up the good work !
Great post Dixon. I still think there must be thousands of you!!!
Cheers
July 25, 2013 at 2:43 pmGeorge
The best answer to this question is always “all of them”
July 25, 2013 at 3:42 pmInteresting response. Anyway it doesn’t really matter, what matters is the quality you’re providing.
July 28, 2013 at 5:08 pmThe whole number of employees concept is definitely changing. Even car dealerships have a group of people they outsource different tasks to. It could be truck toppers, window tinting or what have you. My company operates with only a couple true employees, and then several local people that help with different writing tasks.
July 31, 2013 at 9:26 pm