Before Catherine Cook was an entrepreneur herself it was her brother Dave Cook that was the first entrepreneur in her family. The experience from Dave would end up helping Catherine with her business venture.
Being a new student at her high school Catherine Cook wanted a better way to get to know her classmates. One day Catherine and her brother Dave were flipping through their yearbook and started to brainstorm. After noticing how useless the information was that the yearbook had to offer she decided to do something about it. Catherine looked up to her brother Dave and thought that if he could have a successful start-up company she could to.
Catherine started the online social network website with the name MyYearBook.com. Which today is better known as MeetMe.com. At the time Catherine looked at Facebook and knew that it was a social network for people that you were already friends with. But Catherine’s goal for MeetMe.com was different. Catherine wanted to make a site that was meant for you to make new friends instead of just interacting with the friends you already have.
So through interesting quizzes and games and other aspects of the site Catherine achieved her goal. Catherine Cook is now worth $30 million dollars and MeetMe.com now gains 86,000 new users every day along with 300,000 new photos every day.
This is such an interesting concept. So many people have trouble making friends in a new place. Even just approaching someone new is such a daunting task for so many individuals. Through this website, it sounds like you could already have a connection with someone before you met them, making it that much easier to say hi and to make a new friend. It’s a great way to integrate technology into a problem that many of us have.
I think this could even be used, not just in schools, but in a corporate settings too. Being the “new guy” is rarely desired and MeetMe.com could play a vital role in integrating new employees into companies too.
Nowadays Facebook and other social media sites create this shallow sense of friendship that creates this sense of loneliness. MeetMe does a great job at trying to eliminate that and help people make lasting meaningful relationship and make the connections real rather than just a bunch followers that “like” you posts.
It’s amazing that she gained such success just by looking at something like Facebook in a slightly different way. This is a great example of how in class we talk about every idea being built off another idea. Her ability to take something so established as Facebook and differentiate her own idea from it is incredible.
It seems like it is literally a friend model of a dating site. Kind of cool, I wonder if it would allow people to connect with people from other towns or if it would only match people within their own town.
Pretty cool idea. I wonder how many people actually use this. I have never heard of it catching on anywhere.