Catherine Cook: myYearbook at $20 Million at 20
GROWING UP:
When Catherine Cook was growing up, she would set up little libraries in her house with her brother and rent out books to their parents for a small charge. It is evident that she had a plan from when she was a child. When she became old enough to attend high school, Catherine and her brother officially launched “myYearbook.com” which is a social networking site that allows people to meet each other in a low-stress fashion. She received a $250,000 investment from her older brother Geoff to start their business.
TODAY:
Catherine is now 20 years old and is currently a junior at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Catherine’s site, myYearbook.com now has over 20 million members. Given the fact that Georgetown is a tough school adademically, it’s amazing that Catherine still finds time to manage a business. Between studying marketing, operations and information management, and psychology, Catherine still trains the staff at myYearbook’s HQ in Pennsylvania a few times a month. The site has changed its name to “MeetMe.”
THE BUSINESS:
There, eighty employees are working hard to make myYearbook the premier way to meet new people online through ice-breaking games and features. It’s working: myYearbook is ranked in the top 25 most trafficked websites in the United States according to comScore and it pulls in 20 million dollars in yearly revenue.
As co-founder, Catherine Cook keeps busy developing new features and leading myYearbook into the future of social networking. She’s also an active myYearbook user and every new member’s first friend.
– See more at: http://juniorbiz.com/catherine-cook-interview#sthash.4pd2UoDc.dpuf
It is amazing to see someone so young make millions of dollars. I would be very interested in learning more about why she wanted to do this in the first place.
I love stories like this where the entrepreneur starts out just working on an idea they have in college and it grows to become a thriving business. Interesting exposition of how MeetMe managed to grow in the highly competitive social networking market when social media giants like Facebook and Twitter are dominating the scene. I guess that it’s the interactive dialogue with other people that you don’t really know that really distinguishes MeetMe.