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There’s a lot of Miami in Michael Sayman’s first startup. He just raised $3M to build it

Nancy Dahlberg
Nancy Dahlberg
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By Nancy Dahlberg

A first-time founder raising a $3 million seed round in seven days in this environment with no product to show is no easy feat. And we’re not talking one deep pocketed backer or a  rich uncle. A cap table full of Bay Area and #MiamiTech venture funds and angel investors invested in Michael Sayman’s new startup, Friendly Apps.

Just as the saying goes, they are betting on the jockey. And this jockey has a lot of tech chops, being recruited to work at Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg when he was only 17, then working at Google, Roblox, and most recently Twitter as an engineer and product designer. Products he worked on included Instagram Stories, WhatsApp Status, YouTube Shorts and the Roblox Graph. “I’ve been waiting to invest in Sayman since he was 17 and in braces,” tweeted Weekend Fund investor Ryan Hoover, founder of Product Hunt.

Longtime #MiamiTechies remember his 4 Snaps app, an instant global hit that he developed as a young teen in Kendall, the son of immigrants from Peru, to support his family. Sayman released a memoir earlier this year, App Kid, about his experiences.

With his new startup, Friendly Apps, Sayman hopes to help people connect through technology in ways that are friendly to their mental health and physical well-being. The round was supported by BoxGroup, Weekend Fund, Shrug Capital, Day One Ventures, Betaworks Ventures, SRB Ventures, and from Miami, 305 Ventures, Core Ventures, Flamingo Capital, angel investor Mark Kingdon and others. The round also includes founders and operators from Snap, TikTok, Instagram, Meta, Google and Tesla, as well as “teachers, mothers, students, and immigrants from diverse backgrounds who will all be crucial to helping us reach for our goals,” Sayman said.

“I can’t believe it. Honestly, it’s  surprising but exciting. Chaotic too, which is good. It’s always good to be a little messy,” said Sayman, about the lightning quick fund-raise. “What’s exciting is having this being based out of Miami, and making sure that there’s a lot of folks that are American and aren’t as well and I think that combination is exciting.  And for the tech, it’s going lead to a lot of different ways of approaching the problems that that consumers face.”

Sayman said it was much harder attracting investors outside of tech than inside, but that was important to him.  “When you’re trying to build an app that’s focused on making sure that people have physical and mental well-being, I think it’s going to be important to have psychologists and therapists and teachers and mothers to be able to advise on how do you actually build a product that is healthy for people,” he said.

Sayman moved back to MIami in mid-2020. The idea for Friendly Apps had been floating around in his head for years. What took so long to start a company?

“I think I was always scared of the potential for instability. Growing up I was used to a very chaotic life with the recession and the restaurant business my parents tried to keep afloat, and that led me to just saying I need to have a stable, big company job to keep things going. And ultimately, I realized after all these years that I have this stability, I’ve achieved it, I don’t need to worry about that. And in the process, I think I got to benefit from being able to learn from the experiences of these big tech companies.”

And a lot of that learning was what not to do, such as developing social apps that become addictive – by design –and then toxic to well-being. “When I see the stuff that’s been built in the past, and I see the reasons why things have been built, and the incentive structure and so on, I ended up realizing that there are so many different ways that these things can be built,” Sayman said.

Sayman, who builds apps overnight for fun, says he is focusing on building using a core set of values around making products that align with mental health and physical health and hopes to incorporate learnings from his own experiences growing up in a Latino immigrant household. He’s looking to build products that help people achieve their goals and not detract them from those goals. He’s inspired by apps like Strava and Duolingo that tend to be utilities — tools that people have that improve their lives. “We see a lot of social networks today that have drifted from their original missions and become more like entertainment apps now and I think there’s some value in putting utility back into those functions.”

Think of Friendly Apps as an incubator/studio. Sayman will try a bunch of experiments for different types of apps with the same goals of mental and physical health, “Since I don’t have the exact implementation answer right off the bat, I think the most important way to go about it is actually to iterate as fast as possible. I think my ability to build apps in  24 or 48 hours will help.”

 WHAT SAYMAN’S #MIAMITECH INVESTORS SAY

“I’ve followed Michael for quite a while. He has that magical ability to imagine a compelling consumer app, then spend a night building it, get it in the app store, rinse and repeat. He’s a unicorn. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to invest.” – Mark Kingdon, Quixotic Ventures

“Michael Sayman has a long track record of building products that delight users and so when he came to us with his new idea we couldn’t wait to partner with him formally.” – Zaid Rahman, 305 Ventures

“We have been getting to know Michael for years and are very intrigued by his take on what’s missing in collaboration across social media. Judging from his past work, we’re excited to see where he takes his ideas from paper to MVP to scalable platform. Also, another gem of a founder from Miami — #miamitech for the win!”- Chris Adamo, Flamingo Capital

“The relationship between social media and mental health is fragile and can easily turn sour when one’s self-perception and validation are tied to online profiles. Here is where Friendly Apps come in! Friendly Apps aims to build apps that help people grow, connect, and learn in healthy & friendly ways. We’ve known Michael for a long time and was very happy to hear when he decided to pull the trigger and be a founder. We are also very happy that Miami is well represented in his cap table!” – Yagiz Sozmen, Core Ventures

Follow Nancy Dahlberg on Twitter and email her at [email protected]

Nancy Dahlberg
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