Pony Party, a teen millionaire

Just your standard, basic human interest story from Yahoo!’s “People of the Web” column…

This is Ashley Qualls.  She is 17 years old, and the CEO of a million-dollar business she started herself 3 years ago.

She started a website, whateverlife.com, to provide backgrounds and themes that personalize a MySpace page.  The site attracted a lot of traffic, which attracted advertisers, which attracted dollars. 

Ashley has been able to move her family (herself, her single mother, and a sister) from a one-bedroom apartment into a 4-bedroom house.  She has made her mother, Linda LaBrecque, the business’ manager.

Ashley is the head of whateverlife.com, a website she started when she was just 14 – with eight dollars borrowed from her mother. Now, just three years later, the website grosses more than $1 million a year, providing Ashley and her working class family a sense of security they had never really known.

[Her mother is] proud of Ashley. Prior to starting the business, she says, her daughter was too shy to even order a pizza by phone. Now she’s making presentations to business executives.

Ashley has even turned down a deal for her own reality television program. “I’m really stubborn, like my mom,” she says, “So I know what I want from business. And I don’t want that. I like my privacy. I like to hang out with my friends. I don’t want cameras following me around.”