Girl Power, Cont'd

Ashley is different from the recent crop of high-profile teen entrepreneurs. True, her eighth-grade class did vote her "most likely to succeed," but it's safe to say they were predicting 20 or 30 years out, not three years removed from middle school. She created her company almost by accident and without the resources that typically give young novices a leg up. Catherine Cook, 17, started myYearbook.com by teaming up with her older brother, a Harvard grad and Internet entrepreneur. Ben Casnocha, the 19-year-old founder of software company Comcate and author of the new memoir My Start-Up Life, is the son of a San Francisco lawyer and has tapped Silicon Valley brains and bank accounts.

But Ashley had no connections. No business professionals in the family. No rich aunt or uncle. In the working-class community of downriver Detroit, south of downtown and the sprawling Ford plant in Dearborn, Michigan, she bounced back and forth between her divorced parents, neither of whom attended college. Her father is a machinist, her mother, until recently, a retail data collector for ACNielsen. "My mom still doesn't understand how I do it," Ashley says. To be fair, she did go to her mother for the initial investment: $8 to register the domain name. Ashley still hasn't spent a dime on advertising.

It all started as a hobby. She began dabbling in Web-site design eight years ago, when she was 9, hogging the family's Gateway computer in the kitchen all day. When she wasn't playing games, she was teaching herself the basics of Web design. To which her mother, Linda LaBrecque, responded, "Get off that computer. Now!" For Ashley's 12th birthday, her mother splurged on an above-ground swimming pool--"just so she'd go outside," LaBrecque says.

Whateverlife just sort of happened, another accidental Web business. Originally, Ashley created the site in late 2004 when she was 14 as a way to show off her design work. "I was the dorky girl who was into HTML," she says. It attracted zero interest beyond her circle of friends until she figured out how to customize MySpace pages. So many classmates asked her to design theirs that she began posting layouts on her site daily, several at first, then dozens.

By 2005, her traffic had exploded; she needed her own dedicated server. Ashley, who had bartered site designs for free Web hosting, couldn't afford the monthly rental, not on her babysitting income. 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'd earn.

"She would look up how much she had made," says Jen Carey, 17, one of her closest friends. "It was $50. She thought that was the coolest."

The first check, her first paycheck of any kind, was even cooler: $2,790.

"It was more than I made in a month," her mother says.

"It made me want to do even more designs," Ashley says. But first, she went on a shopping spree at a nearby mall with Bre Newby, her best friend since third grade. Ashley walked out with eight pairs of jeans from J.C. Penney and an armful of other clothes. Without a credit card or a bank account, the 15-year-old paid $600 in cash--the most she'd ever spent.

"Before, I would ask my mom, "Can I have $10?' and she'd say, "No, you have to wait a few weeks,'" Ashley recalls.

She hasn't asked since.

In January 2006, a few months after that first payday and six months before her 16th birthday, she withdrew from school. Instead of taking AP English, French, and algebra II, instead of being a straight-A sophomore at Lincoln Park High School, Ashley stayed home to nurture her budding business and take classes through an online high school. "Everybody was shocked," she says. "They asked, "Are you sure you know what you're doing?' But I had this crazy opportunity to do something different."

That "something different" was Whateverlife. The name came to Ashley in a moment of frustration. After losing a video game to Bre, she dropped the controller and blurted out, "Whatever, life." She liked it instantly. She thought it would be a great name for a Web site, for "whatever life you lead."

Now her life is centered around working in the basement of the two-story, four-bedroom house that she bought last September for $250,000. It's located in a fenced-off subdivision in the community of Southgate, a couple of blocks removed from Dix Highway, a thoroughfare dotted with body shops and convenience stores. She lives with her mother; her 8-year-old sister, Shelby; three cats; two turtles; a rottweiler; a hamster; and a fish.

Ashley's home office is the physical embodiment of her Web site. The business brings in as much as $70,000 a month, but there's not a whiff of corporate convention. It's fun, whimsical, and unabashedly pink. Pink walls. Pink rug. Pink chairs, pillows, and lamp. Even the blue, green, and silver stick-on robots dancing on the wall have tiny pink hearts. It's a teenager's version of the workplace, which earned raves when she posted pictures on MySpace:

"SOO FLIPPING CUTE!"

"OMG I want that office."

"Geez. That's just incredible. I'm what ...almost ten years your senior and I am inspired by you."

The space reflects Ashley's personality, like everything else about her business. Therein lies one of the main reasons for Whateverlife's success, says Robb Lippitt, whom Ashley considers the only good thing to come out of her legal issues. When her lawyer realized she was running her company alone, he arranged a meeting with Lippitt, the former COO of ePrize, an online promotions outfit that is one of Detroit's fastest-growing companies. Having helped build ePrize to $30 million in annual revenue and 325 employees, he now helps other local entrepreneurs scale the mountain. In April, he became her $200-an-hour consultant and first business mentor.

Since Ashley, his youngest client ever, had never taken a class in accounting or read a business book, she needed a crash course on the basics, such as maintaining two accounts, business and personal. "She was running her business like a piggy bank," says Lippitt, 38.

But he found her to be a quick study and, in many ways, a natural entrepreneur. "She lacks experience, but I was blown away by her instincts," he says. How she makes her layouts compatible with social-networking sites other than MySpace, so her company isn't tied to one site. How she decided to offer her designs as cell-phone wallpaper, creating a new service and revenue stream based on existing inventory. Ashley, he realized, has a vision for Whateverlife that goes beyond a MySpace tools site. It could be a multifaceted community for girls.

Convinced that her fans need help building Web sites, she hired developers in India to create an easy-to-use application and wrote one-teen-to-another tutorials. After the site builder launched in May, though, she told Lippitt she was disappointed by delays and early bugs. Hiccups were common, he assured her; he expected modest results, maybe a few hundred users. But 28,000 signed up in the first week. "There are CEOs across the country who would be dancing in their offices if they got that reaction," he says.

Ashley is the demographic she's serving, which gives her a powerful advantage over far more experienced adults trying to channel their inner teen or glean clues from focus groups. Her site looks and sounds like something made by a teenager, not something manufactured to look that way.

The risk, of course, is that she could lose touch with her audience as she outgrows it. But Lippitt says she already grasps the importance of understanding her customers, not simply assuming they share her taste. She conducts polls about their favorite stores, celebrities, and American Idol contestants. She solicits feedback on new features. And she's thinking of the next step: "I may have to hire people younger than me."

n a Wednesday in early June, the gang's all here after school. Well, everyone except Bre. Shayna Bone, 17, and Jen--outfitted in matching Whateverlife T-shirts, featuring row after row of multicolored hearts--sit at a table reviewing their W-4 forms. It's official: The staff is doubling for the summer.

Mike Troutt, 16, who's stretched across a white L-shaped couch, won't be joining them. A past contributor to the Whateverlife magazine, he's working as an apprentice at a local tattoo shop for the summer. He's contemplating where he'll get his first tattoo, he announces. Tomorrow's the big day.

As usual, Ashley is working away at her computer, a new desktop with a touch-screen monitor, one of three computers in her basement. Often, she's up at 7 or working into the wee hours on a "designfest" with Bre, fueled with music and Monster energy drinks.

In just 15 minutes, she creates a layout. Blue and pink streaks on a black background with blocks of pink rap lyrics. Her fingers race across the keyboard as she tries different fonts, sizes, compositions, switching out HTML coding as she talks. "Don't worry," she tells a wary Shayna, "I'll teach you."

Ashley the CEO, who has no fewer than 14 hearts on her business card, is both utterly familiar and a complete mystery to her friends. In some ways, she's the same old "Ash"--or "AshBo," a nickname they coined because she didn't have her own room at one point (Ashley + hobo = AshBo). She still plays The Sims, still giggles when Jen laughs like Eddie Murphy, and is still up for silliness, like standing by the road holding a sign that says, HONK IF YOU BELIEVE IN THE LOCH NESS MONSTER, or taking breaks on the swing set down the street.

AshBo looks even younger than 17. She has straight brown hair with light streaks down to the middle of her back. She has a French pedicure, like Jen and her mother. Her clothes are nothing fancy. "I don't need $2,000 shirts," Ashley says. "I'm fine with Target." Or a University of Michigan sweatshirt over a summer dress.

In other ways, she's an alien among normal teens. She can go on about hiring freelance developers, studying site-traffic trends, calculating ad rates, maintaining low overhead (her main operating expense is seven servers). "Sometimes when I talk about the site, my friends just stare at me," she says. She carries a BlackBerry and a Coach bag (a recent birthday present to herself). Her friends tease her about her last ring tone, which consisted of The Donald, someone they couldn't care less about, barking, "This is Donald Trump telling you to have an ego!"

Whateverlife has definitely brought out a bolder side. "One minute, she's joking around with us, and then, "Oh, guys, hold on, I gotta take this call,'" says Mike. "She turns it on like a light switch." She's no longer the shy 15-year-old who would ask her mother or father to make a difficult phone call. Who didn't know how to respond to advertisers' cold calls. Who didn't know how to negotiate. Now, it's "Is that the best you can do for me?"

"Something clicked," says her mother, who can be direct herself. "She's not letting people walk over her."

At one point, Ashley takes a call upstairs in the kitchen, where a fax machine sits on the countertop. The company that's building the application for her cell-phone wallpaper is on the line. The developer walks her through the latest mock-up, answering Ashley's questions. She's one of those teens who has mastered the art of talking to adults as a peer, of making eye contact rather than looking down or away at a moment's blush.

Her mother, whom Ashley hired recently to keep the books, listens in, hand on hip, a cigarette cocked. Afterward, she asks, "What was he talking about?"

Ashley translates. She'll ask her mother for advice, but she doesn't necessarily take it. "I'm stubborn, like her," she says. Ashley has more leverage than the typical teen. She's the breadwinner. And yet for all her newfound independence, she still needs to be driven everywhere. She hasn't taken driver's ed because she wants to take the class with a friend, not alone.

Occasionally, she feels the tug of her old life, traditions like Lincoln Park's Spirit Week, when she'd paint her cheeks orange and blue, the school colors. More than once, she has returned, just for the day, hanging out in her French teacher's classroom. Ashley wonders if she'll be allowed to participate in graduation. By then, she may have already earned an associate's degree in design, at Henry Ford Community College.

She's determined to bring her friends along for this strange and wonderful ride. They rode in the limo to her over-the-top sweet-16 party at the local Masonic Temple, where guests wore pink Whateverlife rubber bracelets and the door prize was an Xbox. She took Bre on a family vacation to Hawaii, Ashley's first flight. And when the friends go out--tonight it's to Chili's--she picks up the tab.

This summer, she's the boss. One of Ashley's friends had pitched in making layouts last year, but things got a tad awkward when Ashley thought her friend's productivity was dipping. Now she insists they've made up--BFF. But after the misunderstanding, she wrote up employee guidelines. She wanted to spell out her expectations. Lippitt is impressed. She's learning from her mistakes, a challenge for any new entrepreneur.

"I told them I need a minimum of 25 layouts a week to get paid," Ashley says. "It's just business."

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