In 2004, at age 14, Detroit native Qualls launched Whateverlife.com, conceived as a personal portfolio with pictures and graphics she created. Later, she offered free MySpace layouts and tutorials for teens who wanted to learn how to do their own graphic designs and coding.

A quote from Qualls on her Web site says the site’s name means “for whatever life you lead.” She goes on to write that her goal is to include “information and fun things for anyone and everyone,” and she seems to be making big strides in that direction. (Qualls did not return multiple calls seeking comment.)

In Pictures: How To Make A Million Before You Turn 20

Whateverlife.com, which Qualls owns outright, claims to nab 7 million individual visitors a month and counts Verizon Communications as an advertiser. In March 2006, Qualls reportedly received an offer (from an undisclosed buyer) for $1.5 million, but turned it down.

Now 17, Qualls is an emancipated minor. While considered an adult in the eyes of the law, she knows she has a long way to go, evidenced by an entry on her MySpace.com page: “I have lived a lot in the past three years and have only a few things to say about it. There is always so much to learn.”

In 2014, Yelp even managed to become profitable, an achievement that had previously eluded it. It’s a big milestone for a ten-year-old company; While Yelp’s $36.5 million profit last year is approximately what Google spends reupholstering its beanbag chairs, it was a big deal for a company that had spent its entire life wandering in a desert of red ink. “We’ve had to endure nearly 10 years of the bears saying, ‘Oh, a money-losing Internet company–what a surprise,’” says Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp’s CEO and founder.

In fact, he says, Yelp could easily have crossed into the black years earlier, although it would have required pumping the breaks on hiring and other areas of investment crucial to sustaining momentum. “We always knew it was up to us to choose the time and place,” he says. “The nice thing about the last couple quarters was we didn’t actually slow our growth.”

Things have generally been going Yelp’s way lately. In September, a storm cloud that had been looming over the company for four years suddenly dispersed when a federal appeals court ruled against the plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit accusing Yelp of giving better reviews to businesses that bought advertising. He faces a challenge when it comes to setting strategy now that Yelp is a publicly-traded company. In its early days as a startup, Stoppelman was able to make gutsy calls with a minimum of deliberation. Two that proved particularly crucial to long-term success were deciding to invest a large share of Yelp’s then-modest resources in developing an app for the iPhone when it first arrived in 2007; and electing not to devote significant time and money to Facebook’s first developer platform, which came out around the same time but quickly withered from a lack of support.

On the rare occasions that he has to make a snap decision, he says he’s glad to be able to draw on the credibility that comes from being a founder-CEO. “It’s helpful to be able to say: This company is my identity. I know how and why it was built in the first place and I know where to take it in the future,” he says.

That sort of maneuverability may come in handy as more and more competitors take the model Yelp pioneered of user-generated business reviews and iterate on it. After all, that old saying about opinions cuts both ways: Yes, Yelp has them by the millions, but it’s hardly alone.

Stoppelman is dismissive of efforts by the biggest of the Internet giants to muscle in on his turf. “The reality is it’s very hard for somebody in a particular core business to go completely outside that business,” he says. “If I had a dollar for every time someone said, ‘The new product from Google is going to kill Yelp,’ ‘the new product from Facebook is going to kill Yelp’ – I would be a very happy man if I was getting paid for those headlines.

And Fitzgerald notes that the number of reviews submitted by Yelp’s users, an important measure of engagement, has steadily grown by about 20 percent annually. “They’re continuing to scale the model,” he says.It’s clearly the case, however, that advertisers are willing to pay more to companies that can offer them not just consumers’ awareness but also their actions. Yelp’s $134 million purchase of the food-delivery service Eat24 in February was a big step in that direction; more quietly, it has been building out its transactional platform, which 60,000 local businesses now use.The future holds a lot more of that, Stoppelman says: “Whatever it is the consumer might want to transact with, we want that to be able to plug into Yelp.

Matt Mickiewicz born  is an internet entrepreneur best known as the co-founder of SitePoint. Mickiewicz also cofounded the web companies Flippa, 99designs and Hire.In 2008, Mickiewicz spun off 99designs from SitePoint,which went on to raise $35 million in capital from Accel Ventures, Michael Dearing / Harrison Metal, Dave Goldberg (SurveyMonkey), Anthony Casalena, and Stewart Butterfield (Flickr). In June, 2009 Mickiewicz and Harbottle launched Flippa.com,the largest marketplace for buying and selling websites in the world. In the fall of 2012, Mickiewicz co-founded DeveloperAuction.com which raised $2.7 million was later renamed as

If you’re a fan of witty t-shirts, you might already be obsessed with Threadless, a site that combines e-commerce with community.Here’s how Threadless works: Absolutely anyone can submit a shirt design that features absolutely anything. New designs are posted each week and the site’s 2.5 million community members vote on which they like best. The most popular shirts get printed and the artist receives $2,000, $500 in Threadless gift cards, and royalties from the sales of their shirt.

“We wanted to give artists an outlet to make the things that they were creating on their computers real,” founder Jake Nickell told Business Insider. He and Jacob DeHart founded Threadless back in 2000 as a spin-off of an idea that Nickell had on a now-defunct web forum called Dreamless.Nickell was working his way through art school at the time, after rejecting a full-ride for a computer engineering program. He was burned out on computers. After all, he had worked as a web developer since he was 15, a job he scored after teaching himself to code.He discovered his love of art by ditching the glowing computer screen and picking up a paint can. He would create big, colorful graffiti around town in Crown Point, Indiana, where he lived. Once, his own dad called the cops on him.

He joined the web forum Dreamless because it combined his two passions: Art and technology. He started a thread where he asked fellow members to submit t-shirt designs, so he could print the best ones for the group to wear. Most of those first t-shirts were techie inside jokes but people were getting into it enough that he decided to build a website to host more user-submitted designs. He would sell the t-shirts for under $20.The site grew bigger and bigger until eventually Nickell and partner DeHart needed to hire their first employee to help keep up with the demand. Nickell was a junior in college.

Today, Threadless sells millions of t-shirts per year. More than 1,000 designs are approved for voting each week. The t-shirts the company prints rarely flop because Nickell and his team have proof that people want them before they’re made. The company now has about 80 employees.The site has been live for 13 years, but Nickell doesn’t want to stop innovating. He and his team have a few new features on the horizon and he’s working on a way to refine Threadless’s royalties model.