---
title: "Sean Cook of Tea: Inside the Architecture to Empower Women With Dating Safety Tools"
url: "https://authoritymag.co/articles/sean-cook-of-tea-inside-the-architecture-to-empower-women-with-dating-safety-tools"
publisher: "Authority Magazine"
author: "Authority Magazine Editorial Staff"
authorUrl: "https://authoritymag.co/authors/authority-magazine-editorial-staff"
interviewee: "Sean Cook"
company: "Tea"
category: "Tech"
datePublished: "2025-05-07T02:42:35.286Z"
dateModified: "2026-11-12T17:05:38.172Z"
tags: "Business"
---

# Sean Cook of Tea: Inside the Architecture to Empower Women With Dating Safety Tools

*The founder of Tea shares how his background in top tech companies led him to build a vital platform dedicated to protecting women in online dating.*

> When I look at the technology landscape in 2025, I’m disappointed that the glorification of building AI products that often solve problems that don’t exist has distracted founders from focusing on addressing serious, real-world issues.

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T*here are millions of apps out there. Many are very successful, but most are not. What are the steps taken by successful app makers that distinguish them from unsuccessful ones? In addition, many people have ideas for an app but don’t know where to begin. What are the steps you need to take to create a successful app?* *As part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Sean Cook.*

*Sean Cook is the founder of Tea, an app that provides dating safety tools to women. Sean was inspired to create Tea after seeing his mother get catfished while online dating. With a background leading product development at top Bay Area tech companies like Salesforce and Shutterfly, Sean has combined his expertise in technology and problem-solving to create a platform where trust, safety and empowering women come first.*

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**Thank you so much for joining us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you grew up?**

I grew up in Philadelphia and was taught the importance of giving back and looking out for others, especially the women in my life. From a young age, I was taught to stand up for what was right and to use whatever skills I had to make a difference.

As I got older, I became fascinated by technology and how it could solve real-world problems. That passion led me to San Francisco, where I spent a decade learning how to build products in the corporate world.

After years of working for other companies, I realized I wanted to create something that had a direct, positive impact on the world. After witnessing my mother’s struggles with online dating, I was inspired to create Tea, an app designed to provide dating safety tools for women. It was a way to combine my technical expertise with my core values — protecting others and making the world a better place.

**Most of us have been around a lot longer than apps have. What were your hobbies and interests in your youth before anyone knew what an ‘app’ was?**

Growing up, it was all about making music! I learned a bunch of instruments and participated in all sorts of different bands and choirs. In high school, I put this knowledge to good use and would visit an after-school program in an underprivileged part of Philadelphia where I regularly taught students music lessons. My passion for music has continued into my adult years, and I still produce pop music, play in bands with friends, and perform piano at cocktail bars.

**It has been said that our mistakes are our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘takeaways’ you learned from that?**

Tea’s biggest challenge has been scaling our infrastructure to support our rapid user growth. We had a viral moment in January that even caused Tea to have an outage for a while! If I could do it again, I would be open to spending a bit more on our hosting technology so Tea never goes down for our users again!

**I tend to meet two types of app developers; people who are passionate about app development and technology and people who started an app because they saw it as a means to solve a problem. Which camp would you put yourself in, and how did you arrive there?**

I’ve always thought of technology as being a tool that can be used to drive a positive impact in the world. When I look at the technology landscape in 2025, I’m disappointed that the glorification of building AI products that often solve problems that don’t exist has distracted founders from focusing on addressing serious, real-world issues.

I developed this point of view after struggling to see how my work building products that helped sales and marketing professionals do their job a tiny bit better was making a difference in the world. While I had many wonderful experiences in these organizations, I knew I could make a more direct, positive impact in the world by starting Tea.

**Entrepreneurship is a marathon, not a sprint — though I suppose sometimes it’s both at the same time. What kept you motivated to develop your first minimum viable product, and how have you kept your momentum since then?**

I was inspired to create Tea after witnessing my mother’s online dating experiences; I was shocked by how easy it was for catfish, scammers and criminals to take advantage of women on dating apps and how little traditional dating apps do to protect users. With this inspiration, I built Tea, an app that empowers women with dating safety tools so they can research their matches and make safe dating choices. I’ve been able to stay motivated ever since by reading the thousands of positive messages and reviews women leave about Tea. They tell us on a daily basis that we are literally saving lives and making the world a safer, better place and we could not be more proud to continue pursuing our mission of helping women find love safely.

**Ok, thank you for all that. Now let’s shift to the main focus of this interview. Can you tell us a bit about your app? How does it help people? What do you think makes it stand out? What are you most proud of?**

Tea provides dating safety tools women can use to look their online dating matches up to make sure they’re not a catfish, a criminal or in a relationship. Tea makes running background checks, criminal record checks, phone number lookups, sex offender searches, and reverse image searches easy while also providing a nationwide, anonymous forum for women to safely share dating experiences and get advice.

We’ve helped over 500,000 women avoid catfish, criminals and cheaters by making it simple to verify that your online dating match is safe and who they say they are.

We believe Tea has grown rapidly in popularity because, until now, running these types of safety checks has been very difficult and expensive to do. We’ve brought all of this technology into one simple experience in a way that has never been possible before.

We are most proud of the [thousands of positive reviews women have left](https://www.teaforwomen.com/reviews)that express how Tea has literally saved their lives, helped them avoid dangerous situations, and avoid toxic, unsafe relationships. We sleep well at night, proudly knowing we’re solving a serious real-world issue that has been generally overlooked by dating apps and the technology community.

**Approximately how many users or subscribers does your app currently have? Can you share with our readers three of the main steps you’ve taken to build such a large community?**

Over 500,000 women have joined Tea, making it the largest group chat in America. The community has grown almost entirely through word of mouth; women love having a safe, anonymous space to share dating experiences, ask for advice, and leave honest feedback on past partners. We’ve been focused on building a product that enables women to connect and empower each other with real, unfiltered dating insights and the community has been growing entirely on its own.

**What is your monetization model? How do you monetize your community of users? Have you considered other monetization options? Why did you not use those?**

Most of the app is free to use but our suite of dating safety tools requires a $14.99/month subscription. If we could, we would make the app completely free, but we need to pay the data providers that help our users run the safety checks. We proudly donate 10% of our profits to the National Domestic Violence Hotline to help women in need.

**Can you tell our readers about the most unconventional tactic you’ve used to test, market, or gain feedback on a product? What did you try, what was unique about it, and what was the outcome?**

Our users have actually created their own flyers with QR codes that they’ve hung up in women’s bathrooms around their city! We feel this is a testament to the value of our community. Women want to spread the word because they know the more women that are on the app, the more valuable the community becomes.

**What are some of the strategies you have used to improve your products and build on their success?**

The #1 strategy we use to improve Tea is simply asking our community of women what they want us to build next! By consistently asking for product feedback, we’re constantly being made aware of the highest priority things we can be doing to make the app better at helping women find love safely.

**Thank you. Here is the main question of our interview. Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things one should know in order to create a very successful app? If you can, please share a story or an example for each.**

**1. Make sure you find a very specific problem that greatly pains a large number of people that is not being addressed** **and pour all your time and energy into solving this problem without distracted by anything else**. For Tea, I saw how important finding love was for the women in my life, and how challenging and dangerous online dating was. After seeing that dating safety was a serious problem that greatly affected a huge number of women, I knew it would be a valuable product to build. Most tech founders fail multiple times because they build a product no one needs, but we’ve been successful out of the gates because we focused on solving a real-world problem that desperately needed a solution.

**2. Once you’ve identified a problem worth solving, you need to focus on building an extremely simple product that is well-designed and very intuitive to use.** If someone needs help using your product, you’ve failed. People have extremely short attention spans, and will immediately abandon your product if it doesn’t make sense to them within seconds. The product needs to focus on solving one core use case very well and should do nothing else until this use case has been perfectly solved. For Tea, we’ve made it so all you need to do is enter a phone number, and we’ll return a full background check about the individual, if you upload a screenshot of a dating profile, it shows all the places that individuals can be found online. Great apps make very complicated technology feel simple, and Tea makes it easy for women to access difficult-to-find safety data.

**3. You need to focus on marketing and distribution, not just building a product, from day one.** We learned this the hard way with Tea; we spent months building an awesome product, but couldn’t get anyone to try it once it was available! The joke among entrepreneurs is that first-time founders focus on building products, and second-time founders focus on distribution. If we were to start over again, we would start building an audience from day one so that when our product was available, we could get immediate traction and feedback to grow and improve the product. Don’t build in an echo chamber!

**4. Ideas are a dime a dozen; it’s execution that matters.** There have been a handful of competitors that have tried to compete with Tea, and they’ve even gone as far as copying major parts of our design but nothing has worked because an obsession with user experience and relentless iteration are the key to building a successful product. We’ve had so many of our users tell us that they thought about starting an app just like ours but it’s the “doing it” that actually matters. A mediocre idea with great execution beats a brilliant idea with poor execution every single time.

**5. While solving an important problem is necessary to build a successful product, you also need to make sure you work on something you care deeply about because you are going to spend a LOT of time on it.** We’ve been working around the clock on Tea for 2.5 years now, and we’re only getting started; you should be prepared to spend 10 years working on a technology startup. Part of being an entrepreneur is failing time and time again, and the key to being a successful entrepreneur is simply never giving up. If you don’t care deeply about your mission, you’ll quit when things get hard so make sure you care and believe deeply in what you’re doing.

**You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)**

If I could start a movement, it would be one that accelerates global action on climate change by making sustainable choices the easiest and most affordable options for individuals and businesses. Too often, doing the right thing for the planet feels inconvenient or expensive, but that shouldn’t be the case. My movement would push governments to implement aggressive climate policies, businesses to adopt truly sustainable practices, and technology to make clean energy and low-carbon living effortless. While I’m focused on dating safety today, building a product that addresses climate issues will be my next project!

**How can our readers further follow your work online?**

You can follow me on [Linkedin](https://www.linkedin.com/in/seancook1/) but to really keep a pulse on what I’m building, I’d love to invite all women to join us on Tea! You can search “Tea” on the app stores or visit us at [www.teaforwomen.com](http://www.teaforwomen.com).

**This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!**

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Source: https://authoritymag.co/articles/sean-cook-of-tea-inside-the-architecture-to-empower-women-with-dating-safety-tools (Authority Magazine, Tech). Interviewee answers are first-person statements of the guest. Index of all pages: https://authoritymag.co/llms.txt