How a Florida kid’s “stupid app” saved his family’s home

http://pando.com/2014/04/30/how-a-florida-kids-stupid-app-saved-his-familys-home-and-landed-him-on-the-main-stage-of-facebooks-f8/

by jamesjyu • 12 years ago

202 90 12 years ago

pando.com

gdilla• 12 years ago

what a great story. chapeau, young michael. you are the unstartup!

diminish• 12 years ago

As much as I like the story, those stories are like exceptional lotto millionaire stories which keep the app rush alive, despite growing stats that overwhelming majority of app entrepreneurs can't make enough for a living, just with one app. So other kids, don't put too much hope on the possibility that you could do the same. But it could help you land a nice job..

jonny_eh2• 12 years ago

He's not even making much money off this app.

    He needs to rebuild the app with a better monetization strategy so he — and Schlofman — can start making decent money off it.

So even if you're a genius like this guy and make a killer app, it's not likely to make you much money.

dpcx• 12 years ago

"much money" and "decent money" are very different things, potentially. If he's helping pay his parents mortgage, he's making "much money".

moistgorilla• 12 years ago

He made a ton of money off of the first two apps. Enough to pay for his families housing and the education of himself and his sister. But I agree, the app market isn't too reliable for making money. I see much more opportunity for building your resume using the app market instead

poopsintub• 12 years ago

He just gained experience programming apps. Give him time and he'll be better at monetization. 300k impressions a day should yeild over a 6-figure yearly salary.

mikestew• 12 years ago

But it could help you land a nice job.

That's the advice I give to aspiring app store millionaires: on average there's no money in the app store, but there's plenty of money to be made making apps for someone else. Throw something on the store that's above the level of flashlight app, and point to it when in contact with a potential employer. There is no ??? step, you just move straight to Step 4: Profit.

FLUX-YOU• 12 years ago

Can't be that easy. Maybe if the employer is looking to pay you 10 an hour.

sergiotapia• 12 years ago

When there's a gold rush, you don't go out looking for gold. You sell the shovels. Tons of money to made building apps for someone else.

yaeger• 12 years ago

I feel the same about open source in general.

People may think "If I write something and it gets enough attention, facebook or google might buy me out" or something to that effect. Basically a get rich quick kind of deal.

You only have to write one! thing, cash a multi million dollar check and be set.

While that may have happened in the past a couple of times, wanting to start an open source project just because of that possibility would be nearsighted. But starting such a project to promote oneself is not.

It is a great addition to your CV. Something future employers can directly check up on.

nsxwolf• 12 years ago

I've been in the App Store since opening day and in all that time I have made a grand total of $26, far below what I've paid to be in the program.

My wife is going to let me do one more app, and if it doesn't earn enough to break even, I am instructed to shut down operations.

I am very impressed with and jealous of this kid's success.

owenversteeg2• 12 years ago

Same story here, down to the dollar amount, except I was in the WP7 store. I say was because earning cents an hour wasn't a terribly attractive proposition.

wtbob2• 12 years ago

Out of curiosity, what are your apps?

I don't have any iOS devices--I'm just curious.

yoshyosh• 12 years ago

Most app entrepreneurs wouldnt go as far as he did w/ regards to marketing. I think that was a big takeaway in the difference of drive. Most stop at facebook ads not working if even that. Extrapolate that approach to problem solving and you start to see a big diff in this entrepreneurs approach compared to others. I agree that luck is involved but don't let that blind you from the other ways he set himself up for a better shot at that.

habosa• 12 years ago

True but there is enough money in apps to make it fun and worth it as a hobby. I make Android apps and while I had a big flop with a game my two non-game apps have made me a nice chunk of money. I enjoyed making them and there's enough money in it that I'm not wasting my time. Plus it helped me get my job.

pnathan2• 12 years ago

It's not precisely a lotto. He has resilience, horse sense about what people like, and evidently a very high capability of negotiation. While he did manage to hit some luck, he has some skills and capabilities which will take him far if the horse sense doesn't leave with the onset of fame.

mattgreenrocks2• 12 years ago

What I love about this kid is that he admits it's a "stupid" app. If we could get a lot of SV to admit the same thing, perhaps we'd have a healthier culture.

But no, it's business-y-fake-success-killing-it-bullshit all the way down.

maaarghk• 12 years ago

absolutely what I came here to post, props to the kid for this. I am sick of companies like pretending like their app will "change the way people <whatever>". No it absolutely will not. It's a runaway success sexting app, or a runaway success "stupid game" - just admit it and I'll respect you more for it!

mattgreenrocks2• 12 years ago

I recently saw Phacility's copy (company behind Phabricator code collab tool), and I tell everyone about it: "Phabricator, except you pay money for it."

Actually, the entire Phabricator (http://phabricator.org/) site is so anti-business-y it's delicious. The bottom of the page links to Pokemon. I realize it's just it's own sort of marketing aimed at people like me, but it is worth pointing out.

spada• 12 years ago

Agreed. I own a stupid website that's getting some attention recently. it's so much easier talking to reporters and other interested parties when i'm not pretending it'll have any impact beyond making some people laugh and perhaps cringe.

dperfect• 12 years ago

It's easy (or easier) to call your own app "stupid" when it's a single-person effort. As soon as you bring on other people to help, it's hard to call it "stupid" - not because the app changed and not because you think it's any less stupid at that point, but simply because by calling it "stupid," you're ascribing the label to someone else's work (which may or may not be welcome).

For a team to maintain that perspective (that their app is not going to solve world hunger any time soon) requires some real humility and open communication. You've got to take it seriously enough to produce quality work, but not so seriously that you convince yourself it's anything more than a stupid app at the end of the day.

joshlegs• 12 years ago

As soon as you bring on other people to help, it's hard to call it "stupid"

only if they have egos you have to worry about offending. egos can be a really horrid thing.

visakanv• 12 years ago

As soon as you bring on other people to help, it's hard to call it "stupid"

Depends on the people you bring on! If you're upfront about how you feel about your app, and make sure that they relate/agree, I don't think it should be that much of a problem.

krisgenre• 12 years ago

You know the biggest reason for Steve Job's success was his ability to call stupid things stupid.

differentView3• 12 years ago

His father lost his job, and in 2012 their family home was foreclosed on.
They had to move into a much smaller apartment, and at the age of 16, Sayman found himself in the strange situation of helping his parents make the mortgage payments on the new place.

This part sounds strange to me.

windsurfer2• 12 years ago

You missed the phrase "He also started pitching in for his and his sister’s private school tuition." What kind of family, so obviously down in luck, would pay to have a member of their family go to a private school?

jnbiche4• 12 years ago

A family zoned for a very low-performing school -- not uncommon in South Florida.

yebyen• 12 years ago

There is a great "opportunity cost" for a kid, or maybe that's not the right expression, of leaving one school and going to another.

For me, I moved and changed schools my senior year of high school. I was happy to do it. I had lots of friends at my old high school, my parents bought a business that was located an hour from our residence, and they pitched the idea of buying a house and moving.

I was in a private school, Catholic, but professed atheist so not very popular with my religion teacher, among other religious teachers, and it was causing my overall GPA to suffer when I had long been a Straight-A student. I switched to a public school more local to the business, graduated third in my class (better than my previous rank in about equal class size), and wound up being able to go to RIT (Rochester, NY) on a decent set of scholarships, with lots of help from my parents.

But more importantly I had just recently gotten really good at making friends, and recognized that taking a year to make some new friends before going off to college was going to be good practice for later.

Anyway, there was no end to the line of people ready to tell me how good it was of me to go along with the idea in my last year of high school, and to not throw tantrums or put up a zillion roadblocks, tell my parents they were ruining my social life by making me change schools, or feeling any of the thousand other ways that a teenage kid can feel gravely slighted by their parents or family when they need to move or make some other major change for some reason, when they are just trying to go on living their lives and do what's best.

A lot of my friends would not have been nearly so happy to move and change schools, I'll admit that. I mentioned enough things that went well, so it's also easy to recognize that any of those things could have turned out differently.

Crito• 12 years ago

Parents optimizing for the long-term benefit of their children over current comforts for themselves isn't exactly unheard of. It is apparent that this is a family which believes that it is important for their children to receive an education from that school.

Maybe they know the kids are technically/scientifically inclined so they are sending them to a school with a better science program than the local schools. Maybe they are religious and believe that their children need a religious education. Whatever it is, it's because how their children are educated is more important to them than owning a home.

reverend_gonzo• 12 years ago

My family was very much working class, probably around the same income as this family, in central Florida, and both my brother and I went to a fairly expensive private school.

Why?

The public school system in Florida is known to be very bad. My parents felt it was more important for their children to get a good education than it was for them to eat out, go on vacation, drive a nice car, etc. I am eternally thankful to them for that, and, in my opinion, since they were never able to save for retirement or have an emergency, my brother and I are just that.

My guess is that this kid's parents also felt the same way. Obviously, they made the right decision.

PhasmaFelis• 12 years ago

A family that wants the kids to have a better chance than their parents did.

jnbiche4• 12 years ago

In poor and lower-middle class families, it is quite common for a teenage son or daughter to contribute to the rent or power/telephone bill out of the money they make working minimum wage jobs.

If Mom and/or Dad are also working minimum wage jobs, it's impossible to pay mortgage payments in even relatively-inexpensive large cities.

As a personal anecdote, my grandmother helped her family pay the rent when she was a teenager by working as a waitress. Her father had died at a young age. My parent's and my generation were both fortunate enough to not have to worry about this.

Unfortunately, here in the US, this type of family arrangement will only increase in the future, given the fact that this generation is the first generation in modern US economic history where the a generation is worse off financially than their parents were at the same age.

differentView3• 12 years ago

The part I found strange was the mortgage they're paying on a new place, meaning they purchased another home. If the family was struggling financially, how could they have qualified for a loan to purchase another place so soon after having their previous home foreclosed?

andrewfong• 12 years ago

Yeah, I found it weird too. Why are they paying mortgage on an apartment? Maybe they meant he's paying rent? Or maybe it's really a condo?

sliverstorm• 12 years ago

Yes, technically an apartment is rented and a condo is owned, but I have met plenty of people who use the terms interchangeably.

Which does kind of make sense, considering they are in all other regards the exact same thing.

differentView3• 12 years ago

A condo would be strange as well, why would (how could) they have purchased another place so soon after having their previous place foreclosed upon.

kenrikm• 12 years ago

It could have been a short sale which does not damage your credit as much. Also the house could have been purchased on the dads credit while the condo was purchased on the moms. Another possibility, it's semi-common in South Florida to "rent to own" in condo type communities, they are usually on bad terms but you don't need to go the normal bank route. There are ways it could happen, though it does strike me as odd the way it was phrased.

Source: While I live in the valley now I grew up in Miami and still own a house there.

brianbreslin2• 12 years ago

Interesting he goes to private school which runs about $14-18k/year. Belen Jesuit prep in Miami

msandford• 12 years ago

Is anyone else surprised by the quality of reporting from Pando on this one? I thought it was all SV link-bait but this reads like real, actual news.

Swizec2• 12 years ago

You know what, this is a wonderful age we live in. A 13 year old kid can make money off iOS apps, at 17 they can make serious money.

When I was a kid the best I could do was have opensource stuff out there used by thousands of people. Personal gratification was high, but my wallet never got anything out of that, there just weren't any decent distribution channels for non-free stuff. And this was less than ten years ago.

Kudos to the kid!

hansy• 12 years ago

A wonderful age indeed. I see building apps becoming the new "lemonade stand" for kids.

ben336• 12 years ago

... there's slightly more work involved in one of those things.

anatari• 12 years ago

No doubt there is more opportunity today than before as the Internet has grown, but 15 years ago, I got my start as a young teenager selling shareware, which was quite common back then. I don't have any data on this right now, but I bet the economics of it was better back then for the little guy too because there was so little competition versus the millions of apps out there now. I made more money back then selling shareware than 99% of people do now selling apps.

Swizec2• 12 years ago

Well back when I was a teenager nobody even implanted the idea that "Hey, you can sell this stuff you know?" in my head. I just did it because it was fun and everyone else was doing it for free, so I did as well.

It took me ages to realise that you don't have to just give your software away for free and that is fine too.

ForHackernews• 12 years ago

What a ridiculously overwrought writing style. This is why Pando is terrible:

Instead, it took sheer force of will and a refusal to back down to any of the obstacles he faced. That, and an unholy faith in the power of Google to answer his questions.

Don't get me wrong, this kid is pretty awesome, and I'm happy for his success. But let's be serious: He got lucky with a silly fun app that caught on.

sp332• 12 years ago

Lucky, yes. Hard-working, undoubtedly! And she was surprised that he trusted that Google has all the answers, that's all.

josefresco• 12 years ago

Did you even read the article? What I found most striking was the he didn't just "get lucky" ... he may have gotten lucky once but he had numerous setbacks that he had to overcome, and did so very creatively.

From his creative Instagram marketing, to his deals to get a server, to his numerous app enhancements and rewrites to address problems, he's got a lot more than "luck" on his side.

Your could argue the Flappy Birds guy got lucky, but this kid had multiple successes, setbacks and kept (and keeps) fighting to move to the next level.

eldude• 12 years ago

It's pretty alarming that the net financial outcome of all his efforts and 4Snaps' popularity and success is not enough to even pay his private school tuition. No doubt the intangibles will transform his life (network, fame, Zuckerberg, experience, etc...), but as a commentary on the viability of the app store for monetary gain in games, it's pretty bleak.

As a developer, it was wildly successful (can't overstate that enough). As an entrepreneur, it was a big failure. If, as an entrepreneur, you're jealous of his success, you need to reevaluate your priorities and consider a change of profession.

Too much Silicon Valley navel-gazing here.

hatu• 12 years ago

I think of it as Google and Apples failure mostly. Current app stores are terrible for new app discovery. Even for games which used to be a lucrative market a couple of years ago there seems to be just a handful that take in most of the money - which causes Google and Apple to showcase them more hiding all the new interesting lesser known apps.

simonlebon• 12 years ago

sounds like a drink! "Silicon Valley navel-gazing"

Maybe "Silicon Valley navel-gazer" would be better.

caffinatedmonk2• 12 years ago

Do you have any advice for kids who code? I am 14 years old and I started programming when I was 12. I primarily write open source software.

luisivan2• 12 years ago

Focus on doing things that matter, not stupid apps/games. I started coding when I was 12 as well. Great age to start!

coralreef• 12 years ago

Any kid who ever started anything did it because they loved it, not because they thought it would one day matter.

ttty• 12 years ago

"Never give up" and "believe it will work"!

newobj• 12 years ago

Make sure you have fun. (i.e. I offer the opposite advice of luisivan :)

kirse• 12 years ago

Log out of this website, turn away, and never come back. Assuming you want to keep your coding as natural, fun, and creative as possible. You likely don't have the awareness and wisdom yet to remain untarnished by the many garbage influences you'll find on a site like this.

Keep doing your own thing and building confidence in exploring your own paths, because there's a whole world out there that's going to tell you how things should be done and what defines success (to them). They're even going to sound really smart and appear to be doing things right based on some metric for "success", but only you personally can figure that out for yourself. It'll be harder to wrestle with figuring out your values, but will be far more worth it in the end, always stay true to what you want to do.

Once you build some confidence and consistent integrity in your values and your own life approach, then come back.

peterwwillis• 12 years ago

This, a million times.

@caffinatedmonk I can't tell you what to do, but I can tell you what I regret. I regret not learning the boring structure of programming. The general terms and ideas about programming languages, computer science terminology, low-level stuff like kernel and operating system design (and thus hardware design), even some of the math to understand and talk about algorithm efficiency. All of that is necessary once you get a little older and want a really cool, creative job. Most of us put off learning the boring stuff because it never seems as important as the fun stuff you can do now, and then we have to deal with those consequences later in life.

Also, i'd suggest you keep working in open source. There's a lot of professionals and good best practices to be found in open source software. Important stuff that seems to be missing in the code released on HN (another reason to get out now!). Follow the good open source examples, make some cool things or contribute to others' projects, and start building a mini resume out of code you've done.

As more practical advice: you can learn programming languages like .NET, Java, C++, PHP and Python if you want to get crummy corporate jobs that are a dime a dozen. More fun stuff will probably be in some obscure language. Figure out what kind of programming excites you, then look into what kind of projects there are like that out there and what languages and tools they use.

Oh, and for god's sake have some fun. Computers aren't everything. Go outside, climb a tree, read a book, hang out with people. Computers will last forever; youth won't. (Sorry, I know that's off-topic)

pmelendez• 12 years ago

I agree with you with that one need some good judgement to avoid being contaminated with bad influences and attitudes that you can find here, but... at the same time I can understand his need of looking for a guide or a mentor.

Probably he is in the right track though. A lot of people find good mentors just by contributing to an open source project.

baby• 12 years ago

I did that as well. Find what makes you code. For me it was coding games and websites. I could show them to my friends and that was pretty cool :) motivated me a great deal.

lmm• 12 years ago

Don't tell people your age, they won't take you seriously despite any evidence.

Working on a corporate team is nothing like contributing to OSS on your own, you will have to relearn a lot of stuff. It's fine, just don't get frustrated when it happens. In fact a lot of programming I felt like I "learned again" as I grew older, e.g. having used a functional language and coming back to Python I found myself writing it very differently from how I had before.

Learn a variety of weird languages. There's not much to be gained from knowing both Ruby and Python (except maybe when you're looking for a job), but if you've used Haskell and Smalltalk and Erlang and TCL you'll learn things from each that make you a much better programmer.

Never stop learning. Pay attention to that little voice in your head that says "there must be an easier way to do this" - it's usually right.

wtbob2• 12 years ago

Do what you love. Right now you're a kid: your room and board are taken care of; you have the freedom to try a million different things and see if you like them (heck, you might discover that you don't want to code for the rest of your life: that's alright too).

Read lots of code, and write lots of code, and have fun. If you're suited for it, you'll know.

pnathan2• 12 years ago

I started coding when I was 13 (over half a lifetime ago!). I do have some advice, but it's a bit long for a HN comment made at work - hit me up on email if you like.

d12345m• 12 years ago

“[It] was the most stressful time of my whole life,” Sayman says. “It will help me as an adult in the future because I learned how to be [stressed]. Now I understand adults completely.”

This quote makes me want to drop everything and walk off into the forest.

MattGrommes• 12 years ago

The tone of this article is hilarious. Someone made an app, all by themselves! With no VC help! It's amazing! It wasn't that long ago that in the wreckage of the first .com bubble people could make websites, then apps, without millions in funding. This story is awesome, this kid is awesome, I wish stories like this weren't such "news".

freditup• 12 years ago

Neat to see the community and parental support a kid who's willing to go outside of the usual methods of learning (school) and do things on his own. Not a real fan of the article though, seems unnecessarily patronizing to me: "His braces give him a charming little lisp." Really?

tomjakubowski• 12 years ago

(perhaps? (= it '(a pun)))

cbhl• 12 years ago

It isn't clear from this article... is there an Android version of his app? Or is he iOS-only?

jakebellacera• 12 years ago

Honestly, this is cool. A lot of kids just sort of "stumble" into all of this and it's inspiring in a way.

theycallmemorty• 12 years ago

“I knew this was going to be a huge app. I knew it because my sister liked it before it even existed.”

Must be wonderful to have a validated idea fall in your lap like that!

How a Florida kid’s “stupid app” saved his family’s home

Related Stories