Building a passion project to 1k users after a $120k exit

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There is a specific kind of clarity that comes from having already sold a business you did not care about.

Maddox Schmidlkofer built his first project, Duckmath, at 16 - an unblocked games platform he made so he could play games at school. It grew to roughly 1.5 million monthly users and around $15k a month, and he sold it to a competitor for $120k last November, at age 20. Before that, he had already sold a browser-based cloud gaming platform, Maddoxcloud, for $15k.

Two exits in, with money in the bank and a CS degree in progress at Purdue, he made a deliberate decision: the next thing he built would be something he actually cared about, not just something that worked.

That became Tallow, an iOS app that scans grocery products and tells you what is actually in them - seed oils, additives, processing level, lab-tested contaminant data - with every figure cited back to its source. It has over 1,000 users, a 4.9-star rating, and brought in around $650 in the last seven days alone.

Here is how he built it, and why he is treating it differently than the first two.

Duckmath made money, but it never meant much to Maddox beyond the challenge and the payout. After selling it, he decided his next venture needed to come from a niche he genuinely cared about.

Over the past couple of years, he had gone deep on clean food and seed oils - reading labels, researching ingredients, and getting frustrated by how difficult it was to actually know what was in the food he was buying. That frustration became the idea for Tallow.

Scanner apps already existed in this space - Yuka is the well-known example - but most stop at a simple traffic-light score without showing the reasoning behind it. Maddox wanted something that explained the why, not just the verdict.

He validated the idea the way he validates most things: by posting. No business plan, no extended research phase. He made videos about seed oils and clean food, watched what resonated, and confirmed there was a real, engaged audience that cared about this as much as he did.

With $120k from the Duckmath sale, he was not building out of financial necessity. That gave him room to build the product properly instead of optimizing for a quick flip. He calls Tallow his third and final startup - not because he is done building things, but because this one is meant to last.

Maddox built Tallow mostly solo. After five years of coding, the engineering side did not intimidate him. The real difficulty was building a scoring system he could actually defend.

The Tallow Score runs from 0 to 100 and is built on four weighted pillars: seed oils, additives, processing level using the NOVA classification system, and plastic exposure. The score then adjusts based on sourcing signals like organic, grass-fed, or wild-caught. Getting that weighting right took considerable iteration.

For the underlying data, Tallow pulls ingredient information from open food databases, cross-references additives against EU bans and FDA flags, and surfaces lab-tested data on microplastics, PFAS, heavy metals, and pesticide residue from sources including EWG, Consumer Reports, FDA testing, and peer-reviewed research. Every figure is cited back to its origin - which is the core differentiator from a simple traffic-light app.

Tallow is built as a lean native iOS app with the heavier logic pushed to the backend:

The product has grown well past a simple scanner: Kid-Safe Mode, Smart Swaps, lab-tested data, and the crowd-sourced restaurant map have all been added since launch. The restaurant map in particular introduced a new technical problem - handling user-submitted data - that the original barcode-scanning architecture was not built for. Android and web are next, which will mean restructuring parts of the stack to share logic across platforms.

Tallow runs as a freemium subscription: the scanner and a basic score are free, with three paid tiers ranging from $9.99 a month to $29.99 a year.

The notable number is the conversion rate, not the pricing. Tallow's paywall converts at around 84% - unusually high for a consumer app. Maddox attributes this entirely to the funnel, not the price point. Users do not casually browse into Tallow. They arrive from a video about seed oils or ultra-processed food, already convinced the problem matters, and the app is the obvious next step.

His expansion levers follow the same logic: more top-of-funnel video traffic, platform expansion into Android and web, and features that deepen engagement - Kid-Safe Mode, Smart Swaps, and the restaurant map all give people reasons to open the app repeatedly rather than scan once and forget about it.

Tallow had no launch event. Growth has come entirely from short-form content on TikTok, Instagram Reels, and similar platforms - videos about seed oils, clean food, and what is actually in everyday groceries.

Maddox treats the video itself as the funnel. Someone watches a video about microplastics or a concerning ingredient, the concern is already there, and Tallow offers the obvious way to check their own food. That sequence is why the paywall converts so well - the content does the qualifying before anyone installs the app.

He deliberately runs multiple content accounts in parallel. Platforms throttle accounts and suppress videos more often than most people expect, and having backups means a bad week on one account does not stall the whole funnel. He also repurposes content into Reddit and Facebook to extend the reach of each piece.

His read on what works: consistency and volume beat any single viral hit. He watches which angles resonate - content framed around "what's really in your food" performs strongly - and creates more in that direction, while staying careful not to make unsubstantiated claims. Sensational content travels fast; credibility is what keeps an audience long-term, and he prioritizes the latter.

Revenue tracks content almost one to one. Strong video weeks produce strong revenue weeks. He is candid that this is the current reality of the model, not a long-term guarantee, and that some of the tailwind comes from outside his control - the broader cultural conversation around clean food and ingredient transparency happens to be loud right now, and that timing has helped content travel further than it might have a few years ago.

The goal for Tallow is straightforward: become a lasting business, not another project that gets flipped. Maddox has called it his third and final startup for a reason - this time there is no plan for a quick exit.

In the near term, that means expanding past iOS-only into Android and web, which are by far the most requested features and represent a large pool of users he is currently missing entirely. It also means deepening the features that bring people back repeatedly - the restaurant map, Kid-Safe Mode, and Smart Swaps are all steps toward Tallow becoming part of someone's routine rather than a one-time scan.

Credibility remains the long-term focus. In a category full of hype and oversimplified scoring, Maddox wants the data and methodology behind Tallow to keep getting more rigorous: deeper lab citations, broader ingredient coverage, and a score people genuinely trust. Longer term, he sees Tallow potentially becoming a broader trust layer for food decisions - not just scanning a product at the grocery store, but evaluating where you eat as well.

You can try the app and look at the methodology yourself at tallow.app. For more on his other projects, visit maddoxschmidlkofer.com, and he posts most of his content as foundbymaddox.

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