At just the age of 14, Ashley Qualls launched her own interne site: Wheteverlife.com. Stemming from a personal passion and hobby- as many successful ventures do- this site supplied design layouts and HTML tutorials for social media, namely Myspace. Taking advantage of the extreme popularity of this social media platform at the time, Ashley was a able to generate an immense number of views on her site in a short period of time. In just three years, she had surpassed big name sites such as cbsnews.com for traffic, ranking in the top 400 of all sites.
Ashley generated revenue from adds on her site. In the first few years, her monthly revenue shot up to a staggering $70,000. This is a testament to her awareness of the social media market and the needs of users in this market. At such a young age, Qualls was able to integrate advanced software into her website to enable it to handle such a large number of users. Confident in the immense growth she had seen and her own ability to continue to grow her company, Qualls turned down an offer of 1.5 million dollars for her company from Myspace co-founder Brad Greenspan saying she wants to “see how far [she] can take it.”
Qualls showed great confidence in herself and her brand by turning down the huge offer from myspace.com. I’m pretty curious to see if that decision will pan out for Qualls or if she will end up regretting her decision.