Tech entrepreneur Catherine Cook cofounded the social network MeetMe with her brother Dave Cook back in high school and has grown the platform over the last decade.

Catherine Cook On ‘Meet Me’

“We like to think of ourselves as the mobile version of the bar or coffee house where you can go and meet new friends and connect with new people,” Cook told uInterview exclusively, defining MeetMe. “MeetMe actually started under a different name, MyYearbook, back in 2005. My brother and I were actually flipping through a normal high school yearbook and we were new in our high school, and really it was a way for us to make new friends.”

At first, the Cook siblings started off small, launching it solely at their New Jersey high school “using gorilla marketing strategy to get people to join.” What did that look like? “Wearing t-shirts that said things like ‘Answering the questions that matter most,’ ‘Who are your friends’ friends and are they hot?” Cook explained. “We got maybe 400 people to join in the first week and we were like, ‘This is amazing!’ But then nine months later we have a million people join.”

Now that MeetMe has branched out, location has become crucial to their business model. For practical reasons, it’s important for MeetMe to link people up who are in the same general geographical area. It’s also important that the users that are paired for a chat are active.

“The main way that we connect people is based on where they are, so it’s very location-based,” Cook said. “And we also do age and gender matching, so people can find people near them that are ready to chat right now. Recent activity is very important because you don’t want to send a chat to someone and have them not be an engaged user. Then, what’s the point? They’re not going to respond.”

As for advice Cook has for other young entrepreneurs looking to carve out a niche in web and mobile tech, she believes it’s important to find failure as something constructive and to not be discouraged by the sheer volume of tough decisions that need to be made.

“The most important thing for any entrepreneur really is being able to embrace failure and realizing that you’re probably going to fail. Not every feature launch you have is going to be a success. Not every change is going to have game-changing results, so when you do launch something, fail fast,” Cook shared, “But really the most important is being able to make those decisions, because it’s hard when there isn’t necessarily a clear way to go.”