Seventeen–year–old Ashley Qualls bought her two–storyhouse in Southgate, Michigan, with her own money. This is where she lives with her mother and little sister. A probate judge tried to tie up her money for a while because she is underage, her parents are divorced and according to him, her family was “fractious.” Qualls needed access to her money to grow her business, so she hired her own attorney and made the plea for herself and the business. She won the case and became an emancipated adult at 17.
Qualls built and owns Whateverlife.com, a company that makes web page templates for thousands of teenage girls who visit her website every day. The templates are free and downloadable to use on www.myspace.com and other social network sites. Recently, she hired Internet developers to make tutorials for the site that teach HTML and web–site building.
Whateverlife.com brings in between $50,000 and $80,000 a month.
At nine years old, Qualls spent hours on the family computer in the kitchen playing computer games and teaching herself HTML. Her mother would beg her to get outdoors and play.
Qualls did not know what was in the future. But she was in training for entrepreneurship and business Olympics.
The training lasted about five years before she launched her first website. During those early years, she even built a computer in her living room.
Like many teenagers, she refers to herself as a dork and a nerd. But she is a vivacious girl with a friendly personality and good taste in design and music. And that is part of the key to her success.
Teenage girls, the niche she has cornered on the Internet, relate to her. She also started a Whateverlife magazine with a Dear Sheri section (like Dear Abby) and hired writers.
The magazine site is a place where teenage girls congregate.Qualls gets more traffic on her site than AmericanIdol.com, CBS.com and even Oprah.com.
In 2004, Qualls decided to build and post her own web page to show her friends her portfolio of web designs and templates she had developed over the years. She did not get any traffic at first.
But in 2005, she customized the templates to put on the social network site, www.myspace.com. She began posting a few templates a day, and traffic increased. Then she started posting dozens of web page templates daily. Traffic exploded.
She had to get her own dedicated server, but she didn’t have money. It was all she could do to get $10 from her parents occasionally to go to the mall.
Her web host contact suggested that she try using Google Adsense to generate income. This Google service places ads on websites and shares the revenues with the website owner. The more traffic, the more money the ads generate. Qualls’ first check from Google was for $2,790.
These last three years have been a whirlwind experience of learning, growing pains, joys, trials and expansion for her business and her life. She is a true CEO and has received an MBA-type education since 2005.
Qualls knows she needs to stay ahead of the competition and keep offering a great product with web designs that are fresh and alive. There are other companies springing up on the web that offer web template designs, too.
She now has her own business consultant, Robb Lippitt, who she pays $200 an hour to help her keep on track. He helped the fast–growing ePrize company of Detroit reach $30 million and now helps entrepreneurs like Qualls find success.
One of Qualls’ latest innovations is cell phone wallpaper that can match a MySpace page. She’s hired developers overseas to help on this and plans on charging between 99 cents and $1.99 per download.
She has expanded her advertising beyond Google over the last year. She’s been discovered by companies who want to place their ads on sites in niche markets that have a lot of traffic.
She’s been offered $1.5 million to sell her business, but refused. She’s been offered $700,000, a new car and a $2 million budget for an Internet show. But she says she loves what she does and is going to see how far she can take it.
Qualls dropped out of high school after she received that first check from Google. But she is working on an associate’s degree online. She’s visited her dream city, New York, twice now and has vacationed in Hawaii with her best friend.
Whateverlife.com features colorful and creative web templates and designs, banners, boxes, icons and glitter. With tutorials, instructions and codes to build websites, it is a paradise for HTML lovers, especially teenagers.
Qualls’ humble beginnings, youth and early rise to success can only make us realize that the opportunity for a “whateverlife” of happiness and success is within our reach. Our greatest dreams and highest goals just wait for our unique input of dedication, focus and continued vigilance and diligence.
