DEV Community: Maddox Schmidlkofer

How Creativity Helps Get Customer Interviews for a B2B2C Startup

Maddox Schmidlkofer — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 19:36:34 +0000

This story and guide explain how we managed to get over 15+ customer calls with zero monetary incentive targeting the B end of a B2B2C tutoring platform.

Why

Starting in late April and early May, Thomas and I set out to build a tutoring platform. We needed to talk to both ends of our customer segments, which meant setting up lots of calls.

But heres the catch: why would anyone want to spend their time talking to you without being paid?

We didn’t want to spend money, so we needed volume. And honestly, we needed even more than expected because as we later learned we messed up at the start (pro tip: read The Mom Test).

The Problem

Talking to students was relatively easy, I am a college student with plenty of friends willing to help for free*.

Tutors, though? Not so much.

Thomas had been a tutor but not super recently, and I had zero experience. We had to brainstorm:

Where do you even find tutors?
What type of tutors do we want?
Why would they take the call?

Since we were building an online tutoring platform, we wanted to talk to online tutors. Our pitch?

We told tutors the conversation could help them make more money and be part of building something new. Not the strongest call to action, but with enough volume, it could still work.

The Solution

Then Thomas had a big brain moment: competitors.

Platforms like TutorOcean and Wyzant allow you to message tutors directly, and these tutors are already incentivized to respond quickly.

So, the plan:

Send messages to relevant tutors.
Expect a low response rate, but make up for it with volume.
Use a bit of automation to make the outreach manageable.

Conclusion

After a bit of persistence, we completed all the calls we needed. Success.

When you’re just starting, getting those first customer conversations is the hardest part. Especially if you dont have someone already in that niche. Be creative, think about where your target customers already are, and look for ways to outsmart the systems in place.

*Not totally free, Did some gift card giveaways.

How to Use TikTok as a Free Marketing Platform and to Validate B2C Ideas

Maddox Schmidlkofer — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 16:03:06 +0000

My Story

I was on TikTok all day, so I had a good idea of what videos worked and what didn’t. I started posting my product, and my videos did pretty well—I averaged about 1,000 views per post. I kept posting daily for about a year and learned a ton about TikTok’s algorithm, accounts, how to make a great video, and how to scale.

How to Make a Great Video

Steal. That simple. Your product has already been made, I can assure you. Go find a viral or popular video and copy it word for word.¹ You can’t learn everything, and why learn when someone else has already done it?

You should also try being creative and posting your own videos. Find which ones do well and double down. “Oh, X video got 200k views—I’m going to copy X video and see if I can get the same.”¹

Accounts

TikTok does not like when anyone tries to game their system, so game it correctly. What I did was “hire” other people to post videos for me on accounts that are already warm.² I also made my own accounts (don’t make more than three on the same phone—buy more phones). A lot of people like to hire UGC creators; I haven’t done that yet, so I can’t comment on it.

Scale

Scale is harder for organic TikTok. To get scale, you need more phones, more warm² accounts, and more new³ content. Keep posting until you find a format that works for your business; then either post ads for it or make a document you can hand off to other people. I also recommend using a re-uploader that takes your TikTok videos and posts them to Shorts, Reels, etc., to help with reach.

Conclusion

Start posting daily now: you’ll gain a following and have a platform to sell your stuff.

Some extra tips:

Post 1–2 times a day on each account.
Check which videos bring you people and do the best—copy them.¹
It’s easier to market something if people don’t hate you for marketing it. Your product has to be cool or help people.

Good format examples

Stats-building app: Post about discipline, memes about stats, relationship things, etc.
Health app that tells you if foods are bad: Fear posts—scan a food people think is good but actually isn’t; walk up to someone scanning things at a store.

If you can’t think of ideas, just see what others do. Overall, TikTok is a great platform, and you’re missing out if you aren’t using it for your B2C app!

When I say copy, I don’t mean just download their video—remake it with your own assets and face, but follow their script and cuts. Change it up a little if you want. ↩
A warm account is a real person’s account or one with some history of watching and interacting with videos. ↩
If you repost anything, TikTok will know and ban your account—don’t do it. ↩

6 Months of Building, 1 Customer: What I Learned

Maddox Schmidlkofer — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 17:53:52 +0000

Spent 6 months building and finally got my first customer. Here’s what actually worked and what didn’t.

A Dark Start

For 6 months I’ve been actually getting into startups and making something people will pay for. For these past 2 months in the summer, I’ve been working full-time on such.

It’s been hard seeing myself work every day and see no real validation. I think because of this I kept switching back and forth between projects, not actually making something that people lose time and money not having (thx Hayes Bounds ).

Never Back Down Never What?

Let me say that consistency is key. I have a daily journal where, like a sprint review, I say what went well, what went wrong, and what is my plan for tomorrow. This lets me consistently reflect, learn, and grow, and I think this is one of the main factors of achieving my first customer. I have daily goals as well, which include posting to 4–5 different platforms daily.

I keep up with all of this while continuously reflecting. This keeps me up with the times and lets me quickly pivot when I see something isn’t working (however nothing ever feels like it’s working in the early days). Make sure to never give up on your true goal.

Try New Things

As a part of what I was talking about with consistency, I make sure to learn and grow. Always try new things, as this new thing could be the reason why your project blows up.

With blogbott I’m still trying to figure out who my target audience is. I tried going for founders first but no founders wanted it. I realized I’m probably missing key audience on Facebook, those who have Shopify and ecommerce stores. Most of the people who try out my tool were those with ecommerce or passion projects (directories etc). Me trying new things lets me quickly iterate and find who wants blogbott the most.

The First

I got an email about an error in blogbott from someone trying it out. I helped fix it. He then bought it. Told me he found it off Facebook (cool, now I have some evidence of something working).

This success correlates to my never giving up on blogbott and trying new avenues and ideas. I have no idea if I’ll stick with blogbott, as I’m no longer sure if I can properly market it. However, this gives me some new hope.

Conclusion

Hopefully my findings help you guys out. I want to thank all of my friends for giving feedback, and supporting me especially Hayes Bounds & John Gaynor who help support and stay real w me!

If you want to try out blogbott.com and give me feedback pls do so!

Monetize Your Side Project Fast: The Neo-Entrepreneur Playbook

Maddox Schmidlkofer — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 18:50:59 +0000

Today I'll be sharing my playbook on how to make money from something you've made. I went from 0 to 10K ARR, and I'm going to try and help everyone do the same.
This won't work all of the time, but I think it's a great way to ideate, start, and succeed in generating revenue from something you've made.

Stick to what you know

the entrepreneurship & startup area is very, very competitive now. check twitter and you'll see. With this new uprising in competition, you need differentiation, and you need a head start.

To gain a head start, you can do many things. 2x your work by getting a cofounder, pay other people to help (not recommended), or you can start in a place you know.
Starting in a place you know means being in a community where you have

A following/voice (know how/who to advertise to)
Super In depth knowledge
You know your customer (because you are your customer)

These items make it easy to not get lost creating something no one wants, and make it easy to get customers. You know how to build for them, as you are them. "eat your own food" - Gustavo Rodriguez-Rivera.

EX1: for my project duckmath. I was a student who wanted to play games in school. I know everyone in my entire school was on tiktok; as such, all students are on tiktok, right?

EX2: for my project quackprep. I am a college student who wanted to study past exams not found elsewhere. I know everyone at purdue used boilerexams (validation). I am in a purdue reddit with mostly purdue students, I am in the purdue snapchat which has 30k+ purdue students (easy access to audience). easy.

Create something In 2 Days

There are too many people creating for you to take more than 2 days to create something. You're spending a week, a month, a year?? I spent 7 months creating something no one wanted. I won't do that again.

We have cursor, chatgpt, loveable etc now; you CAN make whatever you are making in 2 days.
Ai generated blogs which go onto your website? 2 days. 3 different directories? 2 days.

If you truly can't do it in 2 days, slap up a waitlist in an hour and gather validation before you create.

Validation before Creation

It's easier to market a product that's already built, but we don't always get that luxury. Talk to people, call companies, tweet about it.

Make sure everything you do daily is known. "I built this, talked to this guy about it, took the prof's mic and got up and lectured about it." Post it everywhere and build a following. Make sure everyone knows about it. So when the day comes and you open the doors to your crappy vibe-coded SaaS, everyone who follows you wants it.

If this isn't full time for you, just spend an hour or so a day talking about it.
Also no one is going to steal your idea, *t's probably not even original anyway.

Growth

At some point 1 of your 20+ failures will start to gain traction—maybe it's that keyword you were trying to rank for, maybe your reddit post blew up.

Spend more time than usual on that project; if it keeps going up and you keep getting good signals, then drop everything else and 10x that project.

Conclusion

Overall times have changed, and I wish I was back at the times when if you didn't know how to code it you couldn't make it, but times have changed. Everyone and their brother is doing a startup.

If you want financial freedom then you should do one too. I recommend first making a directory (listing of services). they are easier to market, take <2 days to build, and don't take any maintenance. John Rush does great on this. I hope I have helped you guys in some way, and if you have any questions contact me. Thanks for reading!

From TikTok Scrolls to $10K ARR: My First Win as a Entrepreneur

Maddox Schmidlkofer — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 11:07:46 +0000

Follow me as a show you my journey from 0 to 10K, and I teach you lessons I had to learn with this process.

How It Started

Starting off in high school I was super into TikTok and all that. Wish I wasn’t though, but it did set me off on the journey I’m in today. I was watching my hours of TikTok one day and I stumbled upon a video by Zach Yadegari showing off an unblocked games site he had made. It seemed so simple and easy to me, I’d seen people making tons of things before, but this one seemed like I could make it. I can make this I thought.

Getting Started

Learning web dev from nothing was hard especially since most of school had really brought killed my confidence as we had a teacher for CS that never actually taught, just showed us videos. Super sad. I had picked back up coding because of a project I made for Rust, which was a script to combat the recoil. This brought back up my confidence, and was probably the only reason I thought I could make a unblocked games site. I instantly started building my project DuckMath (a different name at the time). I quickly figured out how to get games and show them to people. It was fun to make! I was hooked.

Intuitively next, I needed people to use it. So I decided to use TikTok to post ads. One of the great things about entrepreneurship now is that someone has already paved a path for you. I had seen what worked with TikTok advertising an unblocked games site, so I just started posting. Videos usually did poorly, but I was consistent.

I knew the more videos I posted the better I would do, so I tried getting friends on board. I went around asking & convincing my closest friends to come help. I’ll cut this part short as it has been said time and time again, but most people don’t care as much as you do, and most aren’t cut out for this life. If you find someone you are lucky.

I stayed consistent posting 5 days a week, and it was growing. An unblocked games site is something so easy to advertise, and this fact was helping me tremendously.

A year or so late it was stagnant. I was posting daily, site would slowly VERY slowly grow. That was my first year of college.

Second half of my 2nd year of college I locked in (blog post about that coming soon), and decided to learn more about entrepreneurship in general. I read books, watched Y Combinator, until I thought I was ready. This gave me new ideas of getting more people to work for me, fostering a community, and actually thinking about the videos I was posting (following trends, being different).

duckmath.org is now doing quite well and while the summer spells a bad time for revenue, I’m happy to say I’ve achieved $10K ARR from DuckMath.

What's Next

If you liked this pls follow me everywhere. I am currently working to foster a community of people who like what I’m making.

I’m currently building blogbott.com (AI blogs) & coldcallbot.com (auto cold emailing). I’m sure tomorrow I’ll have two different domains I’ll share with you. Recently it’s been a try and fail repeat, but at some point something will work. I’m sure.