The 17-year-old Southgate entrepreneur has been building her online business for two years. She started by showing off Web summon designs to her friends and has watched merchandise change to 7 million unique visitors each month to her site according to Google Analytics. She has declined offers of up to $5 million for her business.
Her concept seems simple enough. Her Web place www whateverlife com provides designs that teenagers can use for their pages.
?Teenagers who go to the site want to stay connected,? she said. ?They look at me and think. "She’s my age she must know what I desire.’ ?
The task of running a million-dollar company isn’t without its sacrifices and challenges for a teenager. Qualls dropped out of school at the end of her sophomore year to spend more time on her business opting to work on a combined GED and associate’s degree from home.
Her hands-on business education is augmented with the back up of Robb Lippitt who worked at Pleasant Ridge-based ePrize Inc until February and now acts as an independent consultant based in Bloomfield Hills.
?I went into it thinking I’d need to provide straight guidance but she doesn’t need that so much,? he said. ?She has a great sense of what she wants to do and has a vision for the business.
What’s impressed Lippitt isn’t how different Qualls is from other CEOs but rather how similar she is.
?She is utterly fearless,? he said. ?I’ve been fortunate enough to meet with some of the entrepreneurs of our day and she has that same fearlessness that they have. It’s not thinking about the downside but thinking of. "How fast can I grow this?’ and "What can I accomplish?’ ?
Bookshelves are jammed with professional development books about design and computers and her desk is dominated by the 26-inch monitor used for her bring home the bacon.
Her flair for the unusual is what got her where she is. Designing Web sites since age 9 she started in August. 2005 to show off designs to her friends. She wrote HTML code on her own experimenting with colors fonts and shapes.
Within a few weeks she had 100 views. Then 5,000. After just three months online she had 18,000 unique views in one day.
Advertisers were paying attention by then and she was approached by Los Angeles-based ValueClick Media with her first check ? $2,500 ? arriving in September 2005.
As teenagers want to be different from their friends they have turned to Qualls for new ideas ? and she and her friends have plenty of them.
Black backgrounds with color bear on’s-eye graphics colorful designs with the Uncle Sam image clouds bridges guitars ? the range of designs is immense.
The layouts Qualls provides are free. But the popularity drives immense traffic to her site making it appealing for advertisers.
Revenue is based on a number of metrics though driven largely by the be of people visiting her place.
According to her be with explore Analytics which she allowed Crain’s to view unique visitors to the place range from an average of 7 million a month to a high of 9 million. The most unique views in one day was 364,000.
Figures provided by New York City-based Nielsen/NetRatings put her merchandise displace at 1.3 million a month; however the ratings are based on a random sampling of Internet users and Qualls’ viewers are nearly all teenagers.
While Qualls would not release an exact figure for revenue she said it is over $1 million for 2006 and on pace to remain in seven figures for this year. Her monthly revenue ranges from $40,000 to $70,000 depending on merchandise.
She has the type of in-depth understanding of her market and trends for her site that one would expect to see from a 30-year-old analyst.
?We get a banish from January to July but by the end of August (viewers) start trending drink,? she said. ?It’s odd because that’s when everyone is going approve to school; you’d think they’d be online more.?
The two spent last week working on a presentation to Cincinnati-based Kao Brands for the marketing of its Ban mark deodorant with banner ads and sponsored blogs. Appealing directly to companies is a new go for the company.
In the fast-paced Internet community she has to act moving to not only be better than the copy-cat sites but also keep her products fresh for her limited-attention-span audience.
There is a growing universe of companies making money from social networking sites such as said Emily Riley an analyst with Jupiter investigate in New York City.
San Francisco-based Video Egg helps populate include video on their Web sites and is an example of the companies making money from social networking sites. Riley said.
?You have startup B2B sites that have a long way to go before they’re mature,? she said. ?And here you have a young girl with a niche competing with fully funded companies.?
?I don’t be much,? she said. ?And when I be at what I’m going to need for my business..
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