Publisher Success Story: WhateverLife.com

August 22, 2007 9:21 pm / 2 Comments /

I love publisher success stories like this one in Fast Company about WhateverLife.com. Reading about how people succeed online always gets me excited about what is possible through the web, and how anyone with some hard work, basic skills, and a little luck can create a very successful online business.

While WhateverLife.com is definitely not my cup of tea, it’s an impressive story of a high school student with some basic HTML skill building a web business many would really enjoy owning.

I think there are three basic lessons that can be gathered from the long article and applied to any web ventures:

  1. It doesn’t matter who or where you are. You can be a high school student in Detroit with no business or web experience and build a successful business. On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. In some ways, having a ton of work and business experience can be a hindrance because you become trained to see why things WON’T work instead of driving to just achieve your goals.
  2. Build your site around something you’re passionate about. Ashley didn’t start her site with the plans to make it a huge business, she started it because she found something she was interested in and just wanted to help. That passion for your topic is extremely important.
  3. It helps to be your demographic. Even though I’m much more experienced on the web and in the web business world, Ashley would do a better job of building WhateverLife.com then I would because she is the target audience. Just like Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, there’s a huge advantage to being the audience you are targeting. You understand their needs, their wants, what they’re thinking, and what they do and don’t think is cool. I’d have a hard time relating to the audience of high school girls.

Hopefully Ashley made good decisions passing on her buyout offers and continues to build WhateverLife.com.

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  • KMG

    I loved the story in Fast Company and I too checked out Whateverlife.com.

    I was impressed, and even though I am a 42 year old, happily married, mom, I put in my phone number to see what my “Perfect Lover” match was. I did it because I was interested in her site, inspired by the article, and wanted to see how it was she’s making money.

    I received a lame text message that I’ve since forgotten.

    After a while, I received a few other really inane txt messages obviously geared towards teenagers. There were only a few, and I didn’t know where they were coming from. I didn’t connect it to Whateverlife.com.

    I now know how Ashley makes her money.

    I was charged $19.95 to find my perfect love match. I did not know I was going to be charged this exorbitant fee to have mere garbage sent to my phone occasionally.

    I was robbed.

    In my opinion, Whateverlife.com is pure thievery.

    Ashley should be ashamed, and so should her money hungry mother.

  • Robert

    How does one make a site like whateverlife.com ? I have a baby to feed and I do graphics for companies, but nobody is willing to pay me anything over 12 an hour. The irony of my situation is that I delivered pizzas before going to college and made near 17 an hour. Now with a college degree and a decade of exp. I cannot make enough money, I have no benifits and my talent and skill level is well above average. I am deliverig pizzas again at night and doing graphics during the day. I wish I knew a site with tutorials of how to make a myspace comment site, I have a pretty original idea.

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