Do you play the game Draw Something on your smartphone? Yes? Well, then, guess what? You just helped make Charles Forman $180 million richer! Er, probably not as exciting for you as it is for him, eh?

Anyway, Forman just did an interview with the New York Times in which he talked about the sale of his company OMGPOP to the company Zynga (which also owns FarmVille and all of the “…With Friends” games) thanks to the runaway success of his hit app Draw Something. OMGPOP was sold to Zynga last week for $180 million, with Forman himself pocketing somewhere in the neighborhood of $30 million. And, the most interesting part of the story? Forman reportedly had just $1700 in his bank account when he made the sale, which is far cry from what he’s got in there now.

“I had $1700 in my bank account yesterday,” he told the Times, “and now I have a whole lot more…It’s the kind of money where I’ll be wearing whatever I want when somebody invites me to a wedding.”

You can definitely say that again! Forman’s story highlights the make-it-or-break-it attitude that you have to have if you’re the developer of an app. There are literally millions of different apps out there and lots of people pouring all of their finances into them in order to try and help them succeed. But you need a certain amount of skill—and a whole lot of luck—to actually turn a profit off of an app. Before Draw Something, OMGPOP ran through a handful of other apps to try and make it big. But they finally struck gold with Draw Something, which has been downloaded about 35 million times since it was released in early February.

And, just that quickly, the company went from small and struggling to the hottest thing on the market. Just ask Charles Forman. “It’s one for the record books,” he said. “It is something I did not expect.”

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