Maddox: a college student who sold a gaming website for a 6-figure sum

Let’s be honest, you don’t need a massive, world-changing idea to build a real business. Maddox built DuckMath, an “unblocked games” website. Think back to when you were in 10th grade, bored in the computer lab, trying to play games without the school network blocking you. That is exactly what this is. People jump on the site, click a game like Plants vs. Zombies, and just play it directly in their browser.

Here is the kicker. It is basically an attention trap. Maddox funnels people onto the site from social media and gets paid by Google AdSense for every ad they view. The longer they play and the more pages they click through, the more ads they see and the more money he makes. It is not glamorous. But it works.

So, how do you actually get eyeballs on a site like this? You don’t just launch it and pray. The reality is, for two years, the site did absolutely nothing. Maddox started by copying a younger kid he saw on TikTok, just posting his unblocked games link daily, five days a week. But the real magic happened when he cracked the code on volume and format. He researched his competitors’ best performing videos on TikTok, broke down their hooks, and simply worked twice as hard. He created a basic visual format—literally just recording his laptop screen with his phone for a quick dopamine hit, then telling people to go to the exact link.

And then he cranked the dial. Three different TikTok accounts. Posting three times a day, five days a week.

He didn’t stop there. Every single TikTok video was cross-posted to Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and Snapchat. Most people ignore Snapchat, but he was pulling 20,000 views a pop from it. He kept iterating. He studied the engagement on yesterday’s videos, tweaked the hook, and made three more. He even trained someone he mentored to pump out videos in his exact format, and paid his girlfriend $200 a week to post videos too. Total volume. Absolute consistency.

Tech stack used by Maddox

It started as a total duct-tape job on Google Sites. Just dragging, dropping, and embedding games into frames. It looked terrible. But it proved the concept. Later, he rebuilt the entire thing using React after learning it during an internship, heavily leaning on AI vibe coding to do the heavy lifting.

To keep it running fast and lean, he uses Cloudflare for site hosting and a database for static data. Cloudflare is completely free, except for his domains, which run about $200 a month. For the backend-handling user authentication, leaderboards, and saving user data like coins, he uses Supabase, costing $20.

He used to run Google Analytics but switched to PostHog for running A/B tests. He snagged $50,000 in free credits through their startup program.

To handle the massive social media distribution, he uses an automation platform called Repurpose.io to cross-post his TikToks to YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat. He also runs a Discord server to hype up new features for a community of up to 7,000 members. And of course, Google AdSense is plugged right into the site with a little snippet of code to auto-put ads everywhere and collect the cash without him having to talk to anyone.