Girl Power

By: Chuck SalterWed Dec 19, 2007 at 8:23 AM

No rich relatives? No professional mentors? No problem. Ashley Qualls, 17, has built a million-dollar web site. She's LOL all the way to the bank. :)

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From her basement office, Ashley Qualls has made Whateverlife.com a destination for millions of teenage girls.

This summer, Ashley's pals--from left, Shayna Bone, Bre Newby, and Jen Carey--will also be her employees.

Slideshow: The CEO Who's, Like, 17
Meet the founder of Whateverlife.com -- a teen who transformed her hobby of designing MySpace layouts into a boomingly lucrative online business.
Whatevercash.com
How Ashley financed her business.
Her Space: A Guide to Ashley's World
"It's all about giving girls what they want," is the way the 17-year-old explains her success.
Teen Traffic
Here's how Whateverlife.com is ranked by Quantcast, which analyzes traffic to more than 20 million sites.

In January 2006, a few months after that first payday and six months before her 16th birthday, she withdrew from school. Instead of taking AP English, French, and algebra II, instead of being a straight-A sophomore at Lincoln Park High School, Ashley stayed home to nurture her budding business and take classes through an online high school. "Everybody was shocked," she says. "They asked, "Are you sure you know what you're doing?' But I had this crazy opportunity to do something different."

That "something different" was Whateverlife. The name came to Ashley in a moment of frustration. After losing a video game to Bre, she dropped the controller and blurted out, "Whatever, life." She liked it instantly. She thought it would be a great name for a Web site, for "whatever life you lead."

Now her life is centered around working in the basement of the two-story, four-bedroom house that she bought last September for $250,000. It's located in a fenced-off subdivision in the community of Southgate, a couple of blocks removed from Dix Highway, a thoroughfare dotted with body shops and convenience stores. She lives with her mother; her 8-year-old sister, Shelby; three cats; two turtles; a rottweiler; a hamster; and a fish.

Ashley's home office is the physical embodiment of her Web site. The business brings in as much as $70,000 a month, but there's not a whiff of corporate convention. It's fun, whimsical, and unabashedly pink. Pink walls. Pink rug. Pink chairs, pillows, and lamp. Even the blue, green, and silver stick-on robots dancing on the wall have tiny pink hearts. It's a teenager's version of the workplace, which earned raves when she posted pictures on MySpace:

"SOO FLIPPING CUTE!"

"OMG I want that office."

"Geez. That's just incredible. I'm what ...almost ten years your senior and I am inspired by you."

The space reflects Ashley's personality, like everything else about her business. Therein lies one of the main reasons for Whateverlife's success, says Robb Lippitt, whom Ashley considers the only good thing to come out of her legal issues. When her lawyer realized she was running her company alone, he arranged a meeting with Lippitt, the former COO of ePrize, an online promotions outfit that is one of Detroit's fastest-growing companies. Having helped build ePrize to $30 million in annual revenue and 325 employees, he now helps other local entrepreneurs scale the mountain. In April, he became her $200-an-hour consultant and first business mentor.

Since Ashley, his youngest client ever, had never taken a class in accounting or read a business book, she needed a crash course on the basics, such as maintaining two accounts, business and personal. "She was running her business like a piggy bank," says Lippitt, 38.

But he found her to be a quick study and, in many ways, a natural entrepreneur. "She lacks experience, but I was blown away by her instincts," he says. How she makes her layouts compatible with social-networking sites other than MySpace, so her company isn't tied to one site. How she decided to offer her designs as cell-phone wallpaper, creating a new service and revenue stream based on existing inventory. Ashley, he realized, has a vision for Whateverlife that goes beyond a MySpace tools site. It could be a multifaceted community for girls.

Convinced that her fans need help building Web sites, she hired developers in India to create an easy-to-use application and wrote one-teen-to-another tutorials. After the site builder launched in May, though, she told Lippitt she was disappointed by delays and early bugs. Hiccups were common, he assured her; he expected modest results, maybe a few hundred users. But 28,000 signed up in the first week. "There are CEOs across the country who would be dancing in their offices if they got that reaction," he says.

Ashley is the demographic she's serving, which gives her a powerful advantage over far more experienced adults trying to channel their inner teen or glean clues from focus groups. Her site looks and sounds like something made by a teenager, not something manufactured to look that way.

The risk, of course, is that she could lose touch with her audience as she outgrows it. But Lippitt says she already grasps the importance of understanding her customers, not simply assuming they share her taste. She conducts polls about their favorite stores, celebrities, and American Idol contestants. She solicits feedback on new features. And she's thinking of the next step: "I may have to hire people younger than me."

Some days I miss school. I miss the laughter, the lunch lines, the jackass of the class, the evil ass teacher, sometimes I even miss the drama. --August 4, 2006; 1:30 a.m.