Young Millionaires at 20 years old making applications and video games
Can you earn more than $1 Million before you are 20 years old with an application, platform, or video game? The answer is YES. Today we will learn the exciting stories of ten young people who used their talent and creativity to build million-dollar businesses in the digital industry… How did they do it?
1. Michael Sayman
When Michael was 13 years old, his parents, a Peruvian and a Bolivian who had immigrated to the United States in search of opportunities, were fired from their jobs, so the boy began to think of some way to help them.
Guided by his passion for technology, he set out to teach himself programming to develop an app that he could sell in the Apple store.
Day after day, he would spend hours in front of his computer looking up tutorials and creating prototypes. Her parents were puzzled and believed that she was just wasting her time.
After several weeks of development, he managed to create a video game based on Club Penguin, his favorite computer game.
The first time he submitted the game for review, it was rejected; but he did not faint. He researched how to meet the requirements and worked on it for a few more days. In the end, the video game was accepted and put up for sale in the app store for a price of ¢99 cents.
Every time the game was downloaded, Michael received 70% of the total purchase.
In just a few days, the video game became a resounding success, reaching the number 7 position in the list of the most popular applications in the store.
In 3 weeks, he managed to win 5 thousand dollars. A few months later, she was already earning between $100 and $300 a day. In total, it was downloaded by more than 2 million people, allowing the boy to earn more than 1 million dollars.
His parents, who were thinking of returning to Peru, were surprised to discover their son’s wonderful talent. The family was able to pay off their debts and ensured financial stability.
Over the next few years, Michael created other apps, but none had the impact of his first project. It wouldn’t be until three years later that he would manage to create his next big hit. It was a turn-based game where the user was given a choice of words. Once the user chose one, he had to take 4 photos based on the word chosen. These images were sent to his opponent, who had to guess what the word was based on the photos taken.
The app was released on the store in August 2013 under the name 4Snaps and became the number 1 app on the word game list. The application was free and had microtransactions. In just a few months, it surpassed 2 million downloads. The game became so popular that at the time it entered the top of the most downloaded apps, even above Twitter.
After this success, the young man managed to attract the attention of important companies such as Facebook and Google, which offered him attractive contracts to count on his talent as a developer and project manager.
2. Juliette Brindak
At the age of 10, Juliette created a series of animated characters she called “Cool Girls”. Her mother, who is a designer, took the characters and helped her perfect them. She also, designed a couple more characters based on self-portraits that Juliette and her younger sister, Olivia, had done.
The two little ones had a lot of fun playing with their characters and making them live various adventures.
As Olivia began to get older, Juliette noticed that she and her friends talked about typical topics for girls her age, such as falling in love and changing their bodies.
Concerned that these conversations might lead them to develop insecurities or make bad decisions, she decided to resume her childhood hobby and create a new series of characters she called ” Miss O & Friends”, which were inspired by Olivia and her friends.
Her purpose was for these characters to be a positive role model for them.
Seeing the results of her initiative, she thought she could use her characters to make an impact in the lives of many other girls and adolescents, so she created an exclusive social platform for girls where they could safely discuss the issues they faced. were happening to them and receive good advice, in addition to playing, learning, and having fun.
Currently, Miss O & Friends is one of the most popular sites for girls on the web, has a valuation of more than 15 Million dollars, and is supported by the powerful company Procter & Gamble.
3. Nick D’Aloisio
At the age of 12, Nick developed a passion for technology and learned to code.
At the age of 15, while reviewing for a history exam, he came up with the idea of an application to read news on mobile devices and began working on it.
He launched the app under the name Summly and became the youngest person in the world to receive a round of technology venture capital. His partners and investors included well-known businessmen and celebrities such as Li Ka-Shing, Rupert Murdoch, Ashton Kutcher, Stephen Fry, Yoko Ono, and Pincus Marcos.
Two years later, Nick sold his app to Yahoo! for 30 Million dollars, becoming at the age of 17 one of the youngest millionaires in the technology industry.
4. Robert Nay
From a very young age, Robert became passionate about technology and computers.
At the age of 14, a friend of his father’s suggested that he create an app. He found the idea interesting and immediately began to investigate how to do it.
Filled with determination, he learned to code from a book he checked out from a public library and created a physics-strategy video game called “Bubble Ball”.
The game was a smashing success. In just three weeks, it surpassed 2 million downloads, displacing Angry Birds from first place among the most downloaded free video games in app stores at that time.
In 2012, the boy was recognized as one of the most promising young people in the technology industry according to Forbes Magazine‘s “30 Under 30” list.
Currently, Robert continues to serve as CEO of his company “Nay Games”, which is fully dedicated to the development of mobile apps and video games.
5. Brian Wong
In 2010, 19-year-old Wong was fired from Digg.
While searching for a new job opportunity, a plane ride inspired him to build a million-dollar business. The boy observed that the vast majority of passengers were playing on their mobile devices, but noted that the advertising in video games was unnatural and added little value to the user experience.
With this in mind, he began to wonder how to fix the problem and thus make the advertising stop being hated by users.
It occurred to him that the solution was for brands to offer rewards connected to achievements and milestones in mobile games, making advertising part of the experience. Thus the Kiip platform was born.
Kiip currently sends achievement-based rewards to 100 million consumers monthly and has raised more than $32 million in venture capital from companies including Relay Ventures, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, True Ventures, Verizon Ventures, and Crosslink Capital. His clients include companies such as Procter & Gamble, Pepsi, and Disney, among many others.
Brian, for his part, was demoted from his position as CEO of Kiip in 2019, after an arrest warrant was filed against him for alleged felony sexual assault. The trial is still ongoing.
6. Christian Owens
At the age of 10, Christian received a Mac from Apple as a gift and began developing applications for Mac OS X; This is how “Mac Bundle Box” was born, the first business that allowed him to bill 1 million dollars in the first two years of his life.
Years later, he launched his second big business: Branchr Advertising, a pay-per-click ad network that generated $800,000 in revenue in its first year.
Currently, Christian is 26 years old and the CEO & Founder of Paddle, a platform that helps software companies with subscription billing, payment, sales tracking, and information management functions.
7. Jordan Casey
At the age of 9, Jordan taught himself to program through books and tutorials he found on the Internet. Three years later, she developed a video game called “Allien Ball vs Humans”, which achieved millions of downloads on the Apple app store in just a few weeks.
Motivated by the results obtained from his first development, the young man founded “Casey Games”, a company with which he has created more than five popular video games.
After the success of his first company, he created “Techware”, an application that allowed teachers to manage grades, exams, and student information; but currently, the app is no longer available.
Today, Jordan is 21 years old and is working at SCNE, a space management platform aimed at bars, restaurants, cinemas, and other companies in the entertainment industry.
8.Adam Hildreth
At the age of 14, Adam created ‘Dubit Limited’, a youth social network that became the UK’s most visited teen website in 2004. The large community that he had created was especially attractive to companies like Coca-Cola, which were seeking to position themselves and market products to a youthful audience.
Eventually, the company pivoted its business model and is now a market research agency geared toward the children’s market. Among its clients are well-known companies such as Cartoon Network, Discovery Channel, Disney, Mattel, and Netflix.
Thanks to the success of his first company, at the age of 19 Adam became one of the 20 richest young people in the United Kingdom, with an approximate fortune of 3.7 million dollars.
Years later, the young man founded “Crisp Thinking”, a company that develops software to protect children on the Internet from abusers. According to a study by the University of Cambridge, this software is 98.4% effective in detecting potentially dangerous online conversations.
Currently, Adam is 36 years old, still serving as CEO of Crisp Thinking, and has a personal fortune of more than $38 Million.
9. Catherine Cook
When Catherine was 14 years old, she came up with a million-dollar idea while looking through her school yearbook with her brother Dave. The idea of this pair of boys was to create an online and interactive version of the yearbook.
They shared the idea with their other brother, Geoff, and they immediately went to work on it. This is how the social platform “MyYearbook” was born.
The site became one of the top 25 most visited sites in the United States and generated revenue of more than $23 million per year.
MyYearbook later merged with Quepasa Corporation, and in June 2012, the platform changed its name to MeetMe.
In 2017, the young entrepreneur and her partners founded “The Meet Group”, a business group with which they sought to centralize the management of their main platform and other sites that they eventually acquired, such as Skout, Tagged, Lovoo and Growlr; all of them united under the purpose of helping users to connect and interact securely.
In 2020, The Meet Group was acquired by the ParshipMeet business group for $500 million.
Catherine is now 30 years old and serves as the Senior Vice President of Marketing at The Meet Group.
10. Freddy Figgers
When Freddie was born, his parents abandoned him in a dump, condemning him to an uncertain future. Fortunately, he was found by a kind old couple who took care of him and gave him all the support he needed.
At school, he suffered bullying. His classmates made fun of him and called him a “trash baby”; however, his father was always by his side encouraging him.
When he was 10 years old, his father gave him an old computer that he had bought for about $24. Although the computer was broken, the little boy managed to repair it using parts from an alarm clock radio.
That computer became his most precious object. Every day after school I would spend hours in it playing games and learning about programming.
Thanks to the skills he developed, he landed a part-time job repairing computers for $12 an hour.
At the age of 15, the young man decided to drop out of school to venture into starting his own computer service and computer repair business. Months later, he already had dozens of clients and was earning enough to help his parents financially, which filled him with enormous satisfaction.
Two years later, when the boy was 17 years old, his father began to suffer from Alzheimer’s.
Due to Alzheimer’s, his father used to leave the house scared and disoriented, so he would end up lost and it would take hours to find him.
Freddie noticed that when his father ran away, he sometimes forgot to put on his shirt or pants, but he never failed to put on his shoes, so it occurred to him to take the shoes, open the soles and embed a device that had a microphone, a speaker, and a wide-range network card that could be linked to your computer.
Eventually, Freddie sold the smart shoe technology he had developed to care for his father for over $2 million. Unfortunately, it is at the same time that his father’s health begins to deteriorate and he passes away.
With the money earned from the sale of his first invention, he invested in the creation of “Figgers Communications”, a company that today is worth more than 60 Million dollars and that has achieved success by bringing development, technology, and high-speed connections to rural areas that no other communications company had dared to reach.
Today, Freddie is 31 years old, has a personal fortune estimated in the tens of millions of dollars, and continues to develop products like the smart shoes that helped his father. Another of his inventions is a glucometer that connects to a mobile app to prevent deaths caused by diabetic coma.
Thus we conclude these ten interesting cases of young people who managed to build millionaire businesses before the age of 20 thanks to their creativity, talent, and passion for technology, becoming a benchmark for many other entrepreneurs who also want to venture into the digital industry.
