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Michael spent the next weeks fixing problems in the app and trying to get publicity for it. “I watch my son, every night and every single day, staying up until four or five a.m., working on the app, doing his homework, sleeping two or three hours, and then going to school,” Cristina Sayman said. He submitted the app to the store in May 2013, in the middle of his final exams. He wasn’t used to programming multiplayer games, coordinating between users or processing images.īut after bootstrapping and hacking his way through, Michael created “4 Snaps.” Players take four photos and ask other players to guess their word.
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The mechanics of the code were way more complicated than those he’d worked with before. Michael said he knew it was a great idea for an app, because his sister loved it before he even invented it.īut apps are easier dreamed up than done. The game was to take four photos, slap them into a collage, and make her friends guess the word she was acting out. She was basically playing a hacked iOS charades game that Michael had created. The next great idea came when Michael watched his younger sister, Mariana, play on her phone. “It’s like he became the father of the family. “Sometimes I’m embarrassed to say everything Michael did for us,” Cristina Sayman admits. He was still a full-time high school student, but he helped pay the rent on the small apartment his family moved into.
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“We had to cut the TV in the house, we had to cut the internet, we had to cut a bunch of things, we ended up losing our house,” he told Fusion.īut Michael stepped up. The family struggled with whether they would have to move back to Peru. In 2012, his family home was foreclosed on after his father lost his job. “I didn’t know what to do at that point.”Īt the same time, Michael’s family was struggling. “The competition was incredible,” Michael said. But once he branched away from the Club Penguin theme, he found it hard to get users. It was a basic app that he created quickly. Michael with Apple CEO Tim Cook and a soulful, photogenic dude in the background After success, some shit goes wrongĪfter that success, Michael decided to code a Club Penguin-themed game. “After the first check arrived I was like, ‘Oh my gosh he’s earning more than me!’” his mom, Cristina Sayman, said. On the first day, Michael made $40, then $120, and $179. “They didn’t know what it meant that I was in the top ten.”īut his parents started to realize what the app could mean when the money started rolling in. “I woke my parents up to tell them, and they’re like ‘That’s nice,’ and then they went back to sleep,” Sayman told Pando. But there were only 150,000 apps in the iOS store in March 2010, and his rose into the top ten. Michael registered his app, which was a pretty basic collection of links to the tips and tricks on his website. His mom said she’d give him the money, but if he couldn’t make it back in app sales, he’d have to work off the rest at the family’s Peruvian chicken restaurant. But his family was struggling financially.
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Michael asked his mom for the $100 he needed for the Apple app store developer registration fee.
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“I just went on the internet, tried to figure out how to do something, and got it done.” Everything hinged on $100 “My school didn’t offer computer classes so that’s what I had to do.” “It was a horrible process of learning, absolutely the worst,” Michael told. So he pieced together a basic coding education with a patchwork of Google tutorials. But there was no one to teach him how to make this. Michael wanted more traffic on his website and decided a mobile app would help. I know, right? The game description is, “a virtual world for kids, guided by unwavering commitment to safety and creativity.” It’s adorably dorky. It’s a multiplayer world, set in a penguin-filled winter wonderland. 14-year old Michael was working on his website, a WordPress blog where he shared tips and tricks for Disney’s Club Penguin, his favorite game. It had been about a year and a half since Steve Jobs announced the opening of the iOS app store. Rewind five years and you’d find the chubby-faced, middle school preteen, sitting in front of his computer in Miami. Today, Michael is making, “more money than (he) ever imagined” and providing for his entire family. “He was like, ‘I love 4 Snaps, I love what you’re doing.’ Everything he was saying, I was just freaking out,” Michael, now 19, told Fusion.

Zuckerberg showered him with compliments about his number-one iOS app. Michael Sayman, one of Facebook’s youngest employees, first met Zuckerberg when he was 17. You don’t have to be a teenage prodigy to pry your way into Mark Zuckerberg’s nerdy, Autistic-spectrum heart, but it certainly helps.
