When Ashley Qualls was offered $1.5 million and a $100,000 car for her company, her e-mail reply
When Ashley Qualls was offered $1.5 million and a $100,000 car for her company, her e-mail reply
When Ashley Qualls was offered $1.5 million and a $100,000 car for her company, her e-mail reply was simple: Whatever. At the time, she didn’t even have a driver’s license. Qualls’s company, Whateverlife, started as a hobby creating wallpaper for MySpace pages that she gave away for free. Qualls enlisted her friends to help design backgrounds and write articles for Whateverlife magazine, a section of the site. As MySpace grew in popularity, so did the number of people looking for layouts to use on their pages. The traffic at Whatever life began to grow exponentially. For the seeming simplicity of its product offering, Whateverlife.com was soon attracting more viewers than sites of Oprah, Teen Vogue, Cosmo Girl, Martha Stewart, VH1, and Fox News. Even though the 2,600 wallpaper downloads are still free, today the company generates $50,000 to $70,000 a month in ads posted by Google AdSense on the site.
As that revenue increased, latent family problems surfaced, and Qualls ultimately ended up in Wayne County Probate Court, where a judge determined that neither Ashley nor her parents could adequately manage the business’s finances. The judge appointed a conservator until Qualls turned 18. The conservator put Qualls on a strict monthly budget. Anything she wants to spend over that amount, she has to ask first. When her lawyer realized Qualls was running the company solo (at 16), he encouraged her to hire Robb Lippitt, former chief operations officer at ePrize, as a consultant to help her navigate the explosive growth her company was experiencing and the problems that went with it. For example, as the company grew, so did Qualls’s need to make sure employees, including her mother, were doing work. When it looked like her friends’ productivity was dipping, Qualls drew up employee guidelines that spelled out her expectations: a minimum of 25 layouts a week to get paid.
Rapid growth has been fueled by an ever-growing audience of site visitors. When Qualls launched her series of Web tutorials on how to build and maintain MySpace pages, Lippitt expected modest results, but 28,000 users signed up the first week. Traffic like that prompted Qualls to begin working with offshore developers in India to build other Web applications. Her site debuted a unique video tool called Nabbr that music companies use—successfully—to launch viral marketing campaigns. And Qualls plans to start selling cell phone wallpapers that match the MySpace designs on Whatever life. Lippitt is also pushing her to cultivate direct relationships with advertisers rather than rely exclusively on AdSense. Building Whatever life has been a tumultuous, yet valuable, undertaking. Brad Greenspan, cofounder of MySpace, offered Qualls $1.5 million for her company. When she declined, he came back with a second offer of $700,000, a car, and a $2 million budget to create her own Internet show. Qualls still declined. She wants to see how far she can take her business on her own.17
Critical Thinking Questions
1 Do you think rapid change is a natural outcome of entrepreneurial activities? Explain.
2 Should Qualls consider bringing Lippitt in house? Lippitt is self-employed. Should he consider becoming an employee of Whateverlife if Qualls makes him an offer? Why or why not?
