Ashley Qualls is a bit of a throwback for me – she built her business in the MySpace days. Though I personally have no experience with the platform (and I suggest most people my age don’t either) I think that her idea is certainly adaptable to the current social media landscape.
Ashley received a lot of positive feedback for her MySpace page designs. People loved her work and creativity. She decided to make these MySpace page designs available for purchase. Apparently people truly did like her designs because they sold well – to the tune of over $70,000 a month in revenue!
There is certainly a lesson to be learned here: when people compliment you on something that you’ve created, it just might be a business idea. Ashley certainly thought so. She figured that if people liked her designs enough to compliment her, they might be willing to pay a few dollars for one of them.
The other great lesson from Ashley’s business is that the digital world offers some amazing business opportunities design-wise. After all, once a template is put together it can be sold an infinite number of times with little work and additional input from its creator. This allowed Ashley more time to focus on designing new templates and ideas instead of having to keep creating the same product again and again.
In fact, Ashley decided to drop out of school to devote more time to her business. This is another great lesson that can be learned from her story – entrepreneurs have to make sacrifices. While Ashley probably would have loved to have finished school she realized that she had a serious business and that if she continued to stay in school it would be at the cost of her business. Sometimes as an entrepreneur, difficult decisions have to be made.
In conclusion, Ashley had a great idea and capitalized on it in a way that was flexible and extremely profitable. However, she had to make some sacrifices in the process.
It is always very impressive to see how young entrepreneurs build amazing businesses. It definitely is true that entrepreneurs will have to make sacrifices, I believe it is part of the risk analysis that all entrepreneurs must do in pursuit of any venture.