Like most CEOs, Ashley Qualls worries about staying one step ahead of her competitors, works long hours and keeps a sharp eye on her roughly $1 million in revenue.

Unlike most CEOs, Qualls isn't old enough to vote.

The 17-year-old Southgate entrepreneur has been building her online business for two years. She started by showing off Web page designs to her friends and has watched traffic grow to 7 million unique visitors each month to her site, according to Google Analytics. She has declined offers of up to $5 million for her business.

Her concept seems simple enough. Her Web site, www.whateverlife.com, provides designs that teenagers can use for their www.myspace.com pages.

Her advantage: She is the demographic she's aiming for.

“Teenagers who go to the site want to stay connected,” she said. “They look at me and think, "She's my age, she must know what I like.' ”

The task of running a million-dollar company isn't without its sacrifices and challenges for a teenager. Qualls dropped out of school at the end of her sophomore year to spend more time on her business, opting to work on a combined GED and associate's degree from home.

Her hands-on business education is augmented with the help of Robb Lippitt, who worked at Pleasant Ridge-based ePrize Inc. until February and now acts as an independent consultant based in Bloomfield Hills.

“I went into it thinking I'd need to provide straight guidance, but she doesn't need that so much,” he said. “She has a great sense of what she wants to do, and has a vision for the business.

“My role is to help her understand the pitfalls she might encounter.”

What's impressed Lippitt isn't how different Qualls is from other CEOs but rather how similar she is.

“She is utterly fearless,” he said. “I've been fortunate enough to meet with some of the entrepreneurs of our day, and she has that same fearlessness that they have. It's not thinking about the downside, but thinking of, "How fast can I grow this?' and "What can I accomplish?' ”

Her office tells the story of her double life.

Bookshelves are jammed with professional development books about design and computers, and her desk is dominated by the 26-inch monitor used for her work.

But the walls are pink.

Speckled with robots.

Her flair for the unusual is what got her where she is. Designing Web sites since age 9, she started www.whateverlife.com in August, 2005 to show off designs to her friends. She wrote HTML code on her own, experimenting with colors, fonts and shapes.

“I used to be excited when there were two people on the site and one was me,” she said.

Within a few weeks, she had 100 views. Then 5,000. After just three months online, she had 18,000 unique views in one day.

Advertisers were paying attention by then and she was approached by Los Angeles-based ValueClick Media, with her first check — $2,500 — arriving in September 2005.

As teenagers want to be different from their friends, they have turned to Qualls for new ideas — and she and her friends have plenty of them.

More than 3,000 to be exact.

Black backgrounds with white bull's-eye graphics, colorful designs with the Uncle Sam image, clouds, bridges, guitars — the range of designs is immense.

The layouts Qualls provides are free. But the popularity drives immense traffic to her site making it appealing for advertisers.

She is currently getting revenue from ads placed by Google Analytics and ValueClick Media.

Revenue is based on a number of metrics, though driven largely by the number of people visiting her site.

According to her account with Google Analytics, which she allowed Crain's to view, unique visitors to the site range from an average of 7 million a month to a high of 9 million. The most unique views in one day was 364,000.

Figures provided by New York City-based Nielsen/NetRatings put her traffic lower, at 1.3 million a month; however, the ratings are based on a random sampling of Internet users and Qualls' viewers are nearly all teenagers.

While Qualls would not release an exact figure for revenue, she said it is over $1 million for 2006 and on pace to remain in seven figures for this year. Her monthly revenue ranges from $40,000 to $70,000, depending on traffic.

She has the type of in-depth understanding of her market and trends for her site that one would expect to see from a 30-year-old analyst.

“We get a spike from January to July, but by the end of August (viewers) start trending down,” she said. “It's odd because that's when everyone is going back to school; you'd think they'd be online more.”

Lippitt said that she hasn't even scratched the surface in potential advertising revenue yet.

The two spent last week working on a presentation to Cincinnati-based Kao Brands for the marketing of its Ban brand deodorant with banner ads and sponsored blogs. Appealing directly to companies is a new venture for the company.

It was also Qualls' first PowerPoint presentation and Lippitt, as instructor, gave her an “A.”

“What she put together would be (the) envy of any advertising executive,” he said.

Like any CEO, Qualls worries about her competition.

In the fast-paced Internet community, she has to keep moving to not only be better than the copy-cat sites, but also keep her products fresh for her limited-attention-span audience.

There is a growing universe of companies making money from social networking sites such as www.myspace.com, said Emily Riley, an analyst with Jupiter Research in New York City.

San Francisco-based Video Egg helps people include video on their Web sites, and is an example of the companies making money from social networking sites, Riley said.

“You have startup B2B sites that have a long way to go before they're mature,” she said. “And here you have a young girl with a niche competing with fully funded companies.”

Qualls has invested nearly all the profits into her business, minus a $2,000-per-month salary.

“I don't need much,” she said. “And when I look at what I'm going to need for my business, I feel like we don't have enough money anyway.”

Her next frontier is the cellular phone.

Teenagers who want to be different from their friends will soon be able to access Qualls' designs for their phones at a cost of 49 cents to $1.99 each or through a membership at $9.99 a month. The designs will be the same as the designs for MySpace pages and will be available through her Web site but also through a portal that can be accessed by cell phones.

“I know it sounds funny, but they want to be able to have their MySpace page match their cell phone,” Qualls said.

She also wants to build more of an online community. She's created an online magazine, for example, and plans to build on that.

Lippitt has been impressed with her ability to stay nimble like a CEO but remain a teenager.

“She's in a transition to direct advertising sales, she's living with her mom and sister, finishing high school and college courses,” he said. “That's a lot to juggle all at once, but she's been really high-energy in managing it. But that's what an entrepreneur does.”



SOURCE

People paying to have their myspace customized are

what about her?

used a freeroll to win 500k online and then won a wsop event for a 2 million dollars at the age of 18

http://www.poker-king.com/poker-king-articles.php?article=251

p.s. her?