Catherine Cook was 14 when she came up the idea myYearbook which later became MeetMe. The idea came to her when her family moved and she and her brother started attending a new high school. They didn’t know anyone and decided to flip through the school’s yearbook to see if they recognized anyone. The effort turned out useless and Catherine thought what if everything could be put online.
With the help of her older brother Geoff, who is 11 years older than her and had experience with startups, they launched myYearbook in 2005. The new site was met with success. By 2006 the site had over 1 million users. They weren’t making enough money however and brought in investors to help fund the sites expansion. Their pitch to the investors was that they were MySpace for highschool. In 2008, myYearbook partnered with a game developer to add games to the site to better engage users.
In 2009 Catherine added an instant messaging client to the site so that users could message in real time. By 2010, users on the site were posting over 1 million posts per day. During this time they decided to redesign and expand the site to reach an older demographic of people instead of only attracting high school students. This decesion brought them $23 million in revenue.
In 2011 myYearbook was bought by Quepaso, a Latino social networking site. In 2012 the two companies combined into one and was named MeetMe. The re-branding was successful and MeetMe quickly took over the world as one of the biggest social discovery platforms. One simple idea a teenager had turned into a multi-millionaire company, allowing people to meet each other all over the world.
