A flashy website that is run by a team of professionals from a posh office in Silicon Valley would be losing millions of dollars year after year. A simple, average looking website that is run by a teenager from her small bedroom would be making millions year after year.
The teenager's name is Ashley Qualls. She is the founder of Whateverlife.com.
Fast Company of Mansueto Ventures, recently published a fascinating feature article on Ashley, a teenage entrepreneur from Detroit who has made a substantial amount of money online by targeting a niche market. Her niche is fulfilling the needs of teenage girls on Myspace.com social networks.
MySpace is a popular social networking website offering an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music and videos internationally. MySpace makes it easy to express yourself, stay connected with your friends and make new ones. It is currently the world's sixth most popular English-language website and the sixth most popular website in any language.
The article says, "Ashley is evidence of the meritocracy on the Internet that allows even companies run by neophyte entrepreneurs to compete, regardless of funding, location, size, or experience-and she's a reminder that ingenuity is ageless. She has taken in more than $1 million, thanks to a now-familiar Web-friendly business model. Her MySpace page layouts are available for the bargain price of nothing. They are free for the taking. Her only significant source of revenue so far is advertising "
According to Google, Ashley's website attracts more than 7 million individuals and 60 million page views a month. Quantcast ranked Whateverlife.com No. 349 recently out of more than 20 million sites. This means Britannica.com is behind her website.
So what does this young girl actually do?
It all started as a hobby. She began dabbling in Web-site design eight years ago. when she was just 9 years old. She taught herself the basics of Web design when she was not playing games on it.
Ashley created the site in late 2004 when she was 14. Originally she created it as a way to show off her design work to her friends and others. No one was interested in it. Then she figured out how to customize MySpace pages. As many of her classmates asked her to design their pages, she began posting layouts on her site daily, several at first, then dozens. She has come along with the right idea at the right time.
Think of her products as MySpace clothes; some kids change their layouts nearly as frequently. "It's all about giving girls what they want," Ashley says.
By 2005, her traffic had grown and her shared webhosting account could not stand it; she needed her own dedicated server. Ashley could not afford the monthly rental. Now she owns seven dedicated web servers. Her Web host suggested Google AdSense, a service that supplies ads to a site and shares the revenue. The greater the traffic, the more money she would earn.
In less than two years since Whateverlife.com took off, she has dropped out of high school, bought a house, and rejected offers to buy her young company for $1.5 million and a car of her choice. She supported her father and her elder brother and now she supports her mother.
How does she come out with so many designs every day? She outsources the work to designers in India!
A friend sent me the story with these comments written by a blogger - he did not mention the blogger's name. I am sure thousands of young Indian students will find these suggestions very useful in building their websites:
(1) It doesn't matter who, what or where you are. You can be a high school student in Detroit with no business or web experience and build a successful business. In New Yorker cartoon, a dog typing away at a computer tells his friend, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." True, on the Internet, no one knows I am a dog.
(2) Build a website business around something you're passionate about. Ashley didn't start her site with the plans to make it a huge business, she started it because she found something she was interested in and just wanted to help. That passion for your topic is extremely important.
(3) It helps to be your demographic. Just like Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, a popular social networking website, there is a huge advantage to being the audience you are targeting. You understand their needs, their wants, what they are thinking, and what they do and do not think is cool.
I am waiting to write your success story.