There was two years where I just sat there and really did nothing while I was just making money. This is Maddox, a college student who built a simple website that made $15,000 a month. But it didn't start that way. For years, nobody even knew about it until one day, something changed. And from there, I randomly made $200, $40 in a day that I didn't even expect. He took his site from hundreds of users to hundreds of thousands of users. And then a few months later, he sold the business for over six figures. I asked Maddox to come on the channel to break down everything. And in this video, we'll dive into the business that he built, the TikTok strategy that got him millions of views and how he sold it for six figures while still in college. All right, let's get into it. I'm Pat Walls and this is Starter Story. All right, Maddox, welcome to the channel. It is great to have you on. Tell me about who you are, what you built and what's your story. My name is Maddox Schnidelkoffer and I built an unbought games website that makes $15,000 per month. I launched it four years ago, but then last four months, we went from five to 150,000 daily active users and from about a thousand a month to 15,000 a month. And today I'm excited to share more about how I virally marketed this simple website. Okay, 150,000 users with a gaming website. I'm super curious about what did you actually build? What kind of business was this? Would you be able to pull up your website and some of your analytics to show how much money this business is making? Just to quickly mention, though, I did actually sell this business just a few weeks ago for 120,000. So the owner did change how the site looks a little bit, but it basically looks the exact same as it did. This website is duckmath.org. It's an unbought games website. The biggest thing people want to be able to do is they want to go on the site and play whatever game they're looking at. So for example, let's go Plants vs. Zombies. You get on the site, you click a game and then you can play the game. It's super simple. So I funnel people in from all my social media platforms and I get people to spend as much time as possible on the site because that's how Google pays me. I have this platform called Google AdSense where basically every view on an ad that someone views, I get money from it. So I have about 1.5 million users a month and off of each of those users, I get around one cent. First, also the good stuff, which is the money. So here is AdSense. Here is the all time dashboard that you can see making like nothing. And then we have the jump when I started really trying on marketing. Probably normal day was around six to seven hundred, something like that. So just for my main account, I've gotten 4.6 million views. I'd iterate every single video. So the day before I would post, I would check how it did. I would check the engagement rates. Make sure that that video was good. Is there anything I could do better? If there was, I'd always try to change something because I'm always trying to make my videos better. All right. Well, thanks for showing me all that and congratulations on selling your business. I mean, that's amazing. You did this basically from your dorm room. That's insane. And that's part of the reason I wanted to bring you on. You're doing this already while you're in college, but I am curious what your background is. How do you even get into this? How do you get to this point where you build and sell this business? I was scrolling through TikTok one day and I saw a kid younger than me saying that he made an unblocked game site and he was just telling everyone to go use it. And I was just like, how is this kid younger than me making something look super easy? I was just like, I can do that. It was relatively easy. It took me about a week or two and it was really crappy at the start. And obviously I saw this kid marketing on TikToks just like, all right, I got to do the same. So I started marketing it daily on TikTok, five days a week, Sundays only post one time and it never turned out too much. Fast forward like two years and I had made $240 in a day passively from Duck Math. That day just happened to be the best day that was purely just luck. And I was just like, Duck Math sitting here and it's been getting all this money. I've been doing nothing to it. So why not start actually marketing it? So I looked at what my competitors are doing, try to make the best videos possible and pull the crazy marketing stunt, which was just pure volume of videos. I love that because it's this concept of like follow the money. I see a lot of people kind of fall for this trap. Sometimes they have something that's like making money. It's sort of passive. And then they go, okay, this is too silly. This can't be an actual business. This isn't something that I can sell for six figures. I'm going to go start these B2B things because it seems more serious. But once you went all in on this and you just tried a little harder on it, that's when it started to really, really working. I want to jump back a little bit and just learn about how you built this, the design, the tools, the stack, coding languages. How did you actually build this site? It was definitely an incremental project. The first site was actually on Google sites was just this drag and drop. And I would just embed the games from online or wherever they were, frame it in the thing. It looked terrible, but it did work after I got a few thousand people. I also had done my internship where I had learned to react. And I was just like, hey, react is pretty cool. I'm going to switch my entire site to react. So this was around the time when AI first started to come out and especially when vibe coding got big, I really never touched the coding part anymore. It made it a lot easier to just focus on the marketing part for the design. I have never been a good designer. I just kind of copied what people were doing. So the design is super simple. Later in time, I got into a B testing to make sure people stayed at the most amount of time on the site, but also making sure that they clicked as many pages as possible. Because another thing about ads is the more pages that they look at, the more ads that they see and the more money that I make. Thank you for sharing how you built it. Super cool, cool to see you kind of come from a little bit of a developer background, but also using a lot of tools to simplify and keep the team lean. What I want to talk more about is growth, though. You showed me earlier that graph of AdSense revenue over time and it was pretty low. And then all of a sudden it spiked really high for a short amount of time. And then you sold it. I want to hear how you did that. The main thing was just volume for me. I made three TikTok accounts. I was posting three times a day, five days a week. And that was cross posted to Instagram reels, YouTube shorts and Snapchat. Most people don't look at Snapchat, but we consistently hit 20,000 views and above from Snapchat. So I definitely would not sleep on Snapchat. I would look over the videos and be like, all right, we just posted these yesterday. How did they do? What's the engagement like? How can I make them better? Instantly after that, I would go and make three new videos. Now I would learn every single time and I would always try and get better. The type of videos I were posting were relatively simple, just kind of like little dopamine hits. And so I think a really important thing is that I researched and initially copied the best of my competitors videos from TikTok and just worked two times harder than they did. I would see that they would post once a day, maybe once a week. So I made sure I get more volume and I do the same quality. One of the big things I did was get someone else who I mentor to actually do the videos so I could save more time doing other things while the person I mentored actually could pump out really quality videos following my format. Okay, this is super cool. I think a lot of people watching this might be wondering, what is a successful piece of content that grows this business looks like? Would you be able to pull up one of your highest performing videos? I got like millions of views and show me like why it worked and like what kind of impact it had on your business. So here's most popular video on the Duck Math main account. It got 2.1 million views on TikTok. This is not the normal type of content that you would think gets a business money. This video took me about 30 minutes to make. Honestly, pretty crappy content. I'm just filming things with my phone. The quality isn't great. I'm just filming my laptop, me playing something. It's basically just a really nice visual hook. After the hook, I show them, hey, go to this exact link. So here's it on Instagram, 3.2 million views. So actually more than TikTok, same exact video. I just had an automation platform literally upload this for me. So I didn't have to do any more work. 5 million views in total, which is crazy. So I found a working format and I kept pumping it out. So this might have been part 30 of this series and I just kept trying different hooks. So while I don't have the exact number, my guess would be I got a thousand dollars from the single video. Maddox's story is not about building, guys. It is all about growth. He went from a few hundred users to thousands in just a couple of weeks. But here's the thing, Maddox didn't get lucky. He had a system for finding viral formats coming up with hooks and creating content that got a ton of attention on his website. And this is exactly what we break down in the starter story, build organic short form playbook. This is a free resource that you can download right now packed with real founder case studies and the actual strategies that are working right now on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube shorts. All of these strategies and playbooks are backed by real data from founders just like Maddox and who we talk to on this channel that are actually doing this and seeing real results and building real businesses. So if you're ready to crack distribution, marketing and short form content to grow your business, just head to the first link in the description to download the playbook for free right now. All right, let's get back to the video. OK, cool. Organic short form. That seems to be something that's working for a lot of people. I know people that watch this channel have seen that coming up over and over again. I want to switch topics a little bit to the sale. I know you sold this business. Walk me through how that sale happened, why you decided to sell and what you're working on now. So I had seen about a year before I decided to sell that a bigger company had bought a smaller game site exactly like mine. So I contacted them and I told them all my stats and then I got lowball at $100,000. So I came back with a counter offer. We both agreed. And then we use escrow as a middleman to transfer the money. So I think for selling, I slightly regret it now because I don't have anything currently working that how I like it to be. But in reality, if I really thought about it for like 10 minutes, I'd be like, yeah, selling was still the correct move. OK, what I also love about this is it has this kind of amazing three part component, which is you built the app. You built something that anybody could really build. You finally figure out and cracked marketing and found a way to truly get this in front of millions of people. And then you sold it. So if you're starting over in 2026, which kind of sounds like you are, you're starting another company. How are you going to approach things so that you can grow even faster this time and maybe not make some of the mistakes that you made before? What's your playbook for 2026? Pretty simple. Pick a niche that you know how to market in. If I knew how to market to college students, I'd maybe make an AI college studying tool. If I knew how to market to games, general, I might do a game server hosting platform. So pick a niche that you know to market in and then build a super quick MVP in like two to three days with the help of AI or however you're going to build it quickly. And then you might want to do these things kind of in the same time, but you're going to research 10 to 20 of your competitors. Best videos that perform the best, that got the best conversions. Find what's all similar about them. What was the hook like? What was it called the action like? Understand why they went viral and basically write down how you can copy them or basically use their format to get the same outcome that they did. And you're just going to start posting daily on TikTok. Make sure to make mistakes, but always keep getting better. You know, your first video isn't going to be great, but you're 100 shares. Hell will be see if people like it iterate. And if it starts to get big, you see something changing, maybe your life's changing. Maybe you want to go out and on this, just go all in. Most likely it will become big. Well, I'm excited to see what you build in 2026 and what you build next. Another question I have for you is around tech stack and how you build. Obviously you started this a couple of years ago. All the tools were changing. I know you're probably using a lot of AI to code stuff now. What stack are you using and what tools are really working for you? What's been really great for me is Cloudflare. They do all of my site hosting. I have all of my domains on Cloudflare. And I also have a database where I can store static data. Cloudflare is completely free other than the domains, but those are like 200 amounts, something like that. And then I have super base for the back end and for off. And that lets me do authentication, leaderboards, coins, basically saving all user data. And that's $20. And then for analytics, I used to have Google analytics, but I switched to post hog. And I got into their startup program where they gave me $50,000 in credits for free, which helped me a B test, which was super important. You have so many users coming in, you have so much data and you always need to keep getting better. So that's what the AB test allowed for us to do. And then Google AdSense, they pay me and just auto put ads on the site. I really don't have to do any work for them. I don't have to do any code. I just put in a little snippet of code and they just do the rest. They're really nice because unlike most ad platforms, I don't have to talk to anyone. I just add my site and they put ads on it, which is super nice. Then I have this platform called repurpose.io. It takes my TikTok videos that I post and then cross post them to all the other platforms I was cross posting on, which was again, YouTube videos, Instagram videos, Snapchat videos, which made it super easy. I don't have to do any work there. And we also had a Discord, I think up to 7,000 members now. We used it for a community to hype up new features, stuff like that. And then I was also paying my girlfriend to post like maybe five videos for 200 a week or one video for 200 a week, something like that. So she was also very helpful. Okay, so last question that we ask all founders who come onto the channel is if you could go back in time before TikTok took off, before you decided to go all in on your site and skip the B2B tools, what would be your advice to young Maddox and really what would be your advice to anyone who's watching this right now is made to this point in the video? What's your advice? I definitely learned a ton, but the biggest thing was staying consistent. This would have never came to be for me if I'd stopped any of those four years that I had the site posting a daily on TikTok. I never forgot about it. I'd make site changes. But the biggest thing was I just stayed consistent with it. I never forgot about it and I kept incrementally working on it. I kept posting TikToks. And from there, I randomly made $240 in a day that I didn't even expect just because I kept staying consistent with it. So if all else fails, just stay consistent with your project, but make sure you know when to drop it. All right. Well, thanks for sharing that. That's a great advice. I'm curious. One last question is I know you sold your business. What's next? I thought I wanted to go out of the gaming niche, but I found myself back in here making a cloud gaming platform called MaddoxCloud.com. It's cloud gaming, but for phone games instead, so you can hop on there and play like whatever suits your needs. Well, good luck with it. Thank you for coming on and sharing all this, being so transparent, sharing how much you sold for and everything super helpful for a lot of people watching. So thanks for coming on and hope to have you back soon. Yeah. Thank you, Pat. Cool. So what'd you think? So I think it's super cool what he built. I think of it like it's just his hobby and he built sort of a website around something he's just really curious about. And I liked what you were asking about, like for the people who say, is this a real business or a serious thing? It's almost like, of course it is serious. Serious business doesn't mean it has to be like a serious topic. It's really cool to see a kid who's like, I just like doing this stuff. I just kind of started sharing it about it online. It was probably not that hard for him to share just because he was like really interested in all this stuff. I like that he built a business around just like his interest and that can also be a serious business. Yeah. One way that I think, because it's something that I went through as well and I think a lot of people watching this, it's a really important thing, especially as you get a few years into building stuff and trying to find something that actually works. There's two different types of businesses when you're starting out. There's the ego business and then there's the business you're actually meant to build. The ego business is what people will congratulate you for because it is a real business quote unquote, or it's like you watch a lot of YouTube videos. You hear about Sass, you hear about these B2B. He had mentioned that he had tried the B2B thing because that was the ego business, the business I was supposed to build, what real entrepreneurs build. But really the real business that you kind of mentioned a little bit is like, it's not serious, but it makes money. And if it's making money, that's the direction that you should be going in as an entrepreneur. Sometimes it's not in the most mature of industries, whether it's gaming or whatever, websites and games. There's some of the biggest businesses in the world actually. So as an entrepreneur, I think you have to make a decision of, am I building for customers or am I building for what other people who are not my customers will think about me and how serious it is. It's more of a deep nuanced topic, but it's secretly very important thing that I think I personally had to go through as well because I had started some other B2B businesses while starting this business starter story. This was the real business I was meant to build. And then yeah, I think the other thing I'm thinking about is just how crazy it is that TikTok and short form just works, man. How many people have we talked to that basically say, I just started sharing on TikTok and boom, it blew up. That still blows my mind. Yeah, starter story, as you guys watch this channel, we like to find people that just blew up in the last year because we want to find the fresh stuff that's actually working. We don't want to share something from 10 years ago. This is what is usually the case is that there's some sort of tactic or marketing channel that shot it up like crazy and that usually ends up being the case. So if you are still watching this at this point and you realize that it is the time to build, it is 2026. As he shared in the video, using AI tools, you can put something together in three days. You should definitely check out starter story build. It is our platform where in just a couple of weeks, you'll come up with an idea. You'll build it with AI tools and you launch it and get it in the hands of actual real users. If you're ready to build, if you got an idea or if you want to just help finding an idea and building something alongside lots of other people within starter story build, check the link in the description. You can sign up. You can get started right now. Thank you guys for watching this episode. We'll see you in the next one. Peace.
