She's 17 years old, and she declined a 1.6$M offer.
It was a lowball offer. The article says she has $70,000 a month in revenue.
Teenage Girl's MySpace Layouts Worth Millions, Drops Out Of High School
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Re: Teenage Girl's MySpace Layouts Worth Millions, Drops Out Of High School
#12Insanely great. Reminds of that post about K->12 students doing startups a while ago... maybe they can do it, after all.
yes, but i think it's a logical leap to propose that you can teach it at that level. i'm not entirely convinced it can be "taught" at any level.
Exactly. This was a bright girl whose hobby turned out to be really lucrative, she grew into it completely naturally. This let her get better at it without running into the normal motivational difficulties a typical teenager would see.
Re: Teenage Girl's MySpace Layouts Worth Millions, Drops Out Of High School
#13Re: Teenage Girl's MySpace Layouts Worth Millions, Drops Out Of High School
#14I forwarded this article to my sisters, who are around that age.
Re: Teenage Girl's MySpace Layouts Worth Millions, Drops Out Of High School
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was a lowball offer. The article says she has $70,000 a month in revenue.
Didn't mean to criticize her, but to add more information. Anyone like to valuate her startup?
4 times revenue? So around 4 million. I'd still be surprised if she took that offer.
Her best method of growth seems to be competing with Weebly with her page generating software. I assume that unlike Weebly she'd be willing to put ads on the pages of her users, so that could also be very profitable.
Re: Teenage Girl's MySpace Layouts Worth Millions, Drops Out Of High School
#16I forwarded this article to my sisters, who are around that age.
This will inevitably become standard fare to boost one's high school resume for college. What's special is that this girl did this on her own initiative without rich or highly-educated adults to guide her along the way. She did something for fun and it worked out. I hope you stress the fun, socializing aspect to your sisters and not a money-making scheme, since that will just them off from the idea.
Maybe there just haven't been enough rolemodels for girls to look up to.
Re: Teenage Girl's MySpace Layouts Worth Millions, Drops Out Of High School
#17I actually get this magazine in paper (thanks for that Delta Airlines!) and was pretty surprised by that story too. I think it's yet another plentyoffish style story that makes the web look a little more democratic than it really is.
Re: Teenage Girl's MySpace Layouts Worth Millions, Drops Out Of High School
#18I forwarded this article to my sisters, who are around that age.
This will inevitably become standard fare to boost one's high school resume for college. What's special is that this girl did this on her own initiative without rich or highly-educated adults to guide her along the way. She did something for fun and it worked out. I hope you stress the fun, socializing aspect to your sisters and not a money-making scheme, since that will just them off from the idea. Maybe there just…
My standard speech to them is that hacking is the ultimate in flexibility: whether they found a startup, make a standard career of it, or choose another path (such as marriage/motherhood, the popular choice in my family's subculture for young women), they will always be able spend some time hacking, wherever and whoever they are.
As far as earning money, they're working at retail stores earning single digits/hour to earn spending money; if I was a bit richer, I would hire them to learn hacking/build an app as a way of earning at least that amount. Money-making is definitely not a turn-off for them.
One more thing: it's not just that there are too few role models for women; there's too much peer pressure not to be a girl geek. For guys, being a geek has a certain cachet to it; people treat you as smart. This is not true for girls. So there's more pressure for girls not to do hacking/engineering/other geeky things. This is my observation, anyway; YMMV.
Re: Teenage Girl's MySpace Layouts Worth Millions, Drops Out Of High School
#19It's awesome to see not just a young person succeeding on their startup, but a female as well. Clearly female hackers are more rare than their male counterparts, so bravo to Ashley for blazing her own trail.
She's more a designer than hacker, but nonetheless, she's really good. It's not my cup of tea for my own sites, but her design sense is impressive for one with so little experience and training.
Current design fad in our world are gradients, big fonts, and reflections. Hers is pretty refreshing, but in order to achieve those effects, she used a lot of unorthodox methods.
I don't know if it's some sort of layout software that's doing it, or she did it by hand, but it's a lot of absolute positioning.
I still think very page-like and being semantically correct when it comes to my layouts. Her methods gives me something else to think about. In addition, if her page source is any indication, CSS and HTML is nowhere near the expressibility that is required for complicated layouts. If it were, her source would be more semantically valid, and she wouldn't be using divs for the buildings and all the little windows in the upper right corner.
Re: Teenage Girl's MySpace Layouts Worth Millions, Drops Out Of High School
#20First post!!
Very inspiring, saw this on digg. I am glad to see some women internet entrepreneurs. Also, that sector of the market is very hard to break into, try doing a search for myspace layouts. These websites are plagued with ads. She said in her article she focused on user design and branding which is key.
As much as we all hate myspace. We have to think also, there is a new younger breed of myspace users that are learning html, javascript, css, etc. becoming web designers/developers who might not have learned or wanted to learn elsewise. That is what I think is still great about myspace and other customizable sites.
- Joey Primiani