ASHLEY QUALLS

17-year self-made millionaire

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Place of Birth: Lincoln Park, Michigan

Net Worth: $8+ millions

Ashley Qualls, 20, is an American entrepreneur from Lincoln Park, Michigan. Ashley Qualls’s web site, Whateverlife.com, is a favorite destination for young girls looking to “pimp” their MySpace page with awareness ribbons, buttons, quotes, and glitter—all of which can be pasted on top of more than 5,000 layout designs.

Initially, the site didn’t garner much attention outside Qualls’ coterie of gal pals. But within a year after she began designing customized MySpace pages, the site was generating 60 million pages views a month. Even better, it was generating more than $50,000 a month in sales. Qualls has since landed a couple of big marketing deals.

The extent of Whateverlife’s popularity was made clear three years ago when Columbia Records decided to bypass radio and promote the Jonas Brothers—then a barely known pop act—exclusively online. The company placed a three-part video on Whateverlife, and within two months some 60,000 JoBro fans uploaded the video to their MySpace pages.

She turned down an offer from MySpace for $1.5 million (plus the car of her choosing). It’s a decision she may live to regret: Whateverlife traffic has dropped precipitously, from 7 million visitors a month to around 550,000, according to the web-measurement firm Quantcast. Last year, her business generated $1 million in revenues. She took $8.00 from her mom and turned it into over $1,000,000

“I’m stubborn and I’m independent. I like the feeling that it’s my company, and I want to have the say-so in everything.”

“I love it. You can create so many things. The possibilities are endless.”

Teenage Millionaire Ashley Qualls from StapleNews on Vimeo.