Young Entrepreneurs - Catherine Cook
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Catherine, Dave and Geoff Cook, now 18, 19 and 29, respectively, still run MyYearbook.com with a team of about 45 employees. The site currently has more than 1.7 million members worldwide. While Catherine attends Georgetown University, she returns home to Skillman, N.J., most weekends to work on the site, and Dave and Geoff are in the office every day.
When Catherine Cook was fifteen, she and her brother, Dave, we flipping through high school year books. Thinking about how people like to sign one another's year books, and the advances in technology since yearbooks were invented, the pair came up with the idea on an online, electrinc yearbook, which would enable classmates to communicate with one another ongoingly.
They leaned on older brother, Geoff, a recent Harvard graduate and web entrepreneur, to lend them $250,000 and some of his expertise, and started MyYearbook.com.
Initially, the site was just for the New Jersey high school attended by the younger Cooks, but a merger a few months later with a quiz site, Zenhex.com, set the stage for massive growth, with MyYearbook growing over 44% from November to December 2005.
The Cooks set out to find investors to take the site to the next level, but struggled to find investors who would leave creative control in the hands of the young founders.
In 2006, when Catherine and Dave were only 17 and 18 years old, the U.S. Venture Partners and First Round Capital provided them with $4.1 million in funding. That same year, Nielsen NetRatings ranked MyYearbook.com one of the top sites for kids between 12 and 17.
MyYearbook.com is free to users, and makes it money from advertising sales. Catherine doesn't disclose exact amounts, but she will say that revenues are "seven figures".
Catherine attributes the success of MyYearbook.com to its ongoing close relationship with the company's niche: high school students. "We really listen to the suggestions of our members," she says.
3.3 million: number of visitors to myYearbook.com in June 2007.
70.5 million: number of visitors to MySpace.com during the same period.
$900 million: amount of advertising revenue social networking sites will draw in 2007.
$2.5 billion: amount that advertising revenue is projected to reach by 2011 for social networking sites.
Sources: Chronicle research; Emarketer; comScore Media Metrix
MyYearbook grew 407% from December 2006 to December 2007, with over three million Christmas trees decorated on the site in December 2007.
According to Hitwise, myYearbook.com ranks seventh in overall market share in a custom category of the 53 leading social networking sites, but it also shows by far the fastest growth rate.
"We will be number three on that list by the end of this year," says Geoff Cook. "We care deeply about the user experience. We care deeply about our advertisers. And we believe that is the formula for success."
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