Pep AI · B2C · peptide and GLP-1 tracker
Sign nearly every creator in your niche before running paid ads
$30K then $50K revenue in months 1-2; ~$100K in 70 days
What they did
What happened
- Stage
- 0-3 months post-launch
In their words
Cedric Roberge - I speedran an ai app to $100k in 70 days.
… are starting to become like this huge trend. The apps always seem to be kind of lagging behind e-commerce and health and just like the supplement D2C space. What was your approach to making your app better than the stuff in the market? Because I noticed this as well. Like I went on the app store and I was searching like peptides and all the apps back in January or December, like you said, were not very good or that none of them had high revenue.
So what was the difference? Like how did you make 100K when everyone else wasn't really doing very well? Yeah. And to kind of just expand on what you said at the beginning as well. So like GLPs are just weight loss drugs and peptides can be for recovery and serve a ton of different purposes, which gives us more to market, if that makes sense. You know, what I did was I looked at all these successful GLP apps. None of them are doing influencer marketing. They're only running ads. And so I didn't want to start running ads until we had winners. So what I did is I did a lot of research on a lot of successful apps that came out this year, like CalAI, Quitter, and all of them really focus on their influencer marketing.
So I went and found pretty much every peptide creator in the space. I mean, there's not pretty much everyone who's making like consistent videos about peptides works for PepAI or works with us. And so I went and got every single one of them to post about PepAI. And then that just blew up. First month, we did $30,000 in revenue. Second month, we did $50,000. And this month, we're on pace for $80,000. The influencer marketing has been key. And we just started running our ads this month. And all I've done is taken our winners, so all the ones that performed really well on TikTok and Instagram, put it on meta ads.
And now that's skyrocketing as well. How profitable are ads that you just like copy paste over from organic? You know, there was some trial and error at the beginning. Some of them we tried like giving scripts to people, trying to kind of copy what worked for some of these GLP apps. And those ones failed. So what we did is, you know, we lost some money on that. But then once we took our winners, those ones performed really well. From what I've …
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More from this episode
- Pay new creators ~$200 for a trial month; sign the winners for 3 monthsCore of the creator program behind most revenue
- Pay creators a one-time 20% of each sale on top of their feeCreators post more than agreed and put in more effort
- Give every creator a tracked link and discount codeShows who to keep and whose rates to cut
- Make creators keep your app link in their bio for the whole deal'A ton of downloads' in two weeks with no posts
- Send creators past winning videos as ideas, then let them make anythingFounder says creators love working with them; content performs
- Post educational slideshows that end with the app as the tracking toolBeat talking-head videos, per the guest; no numbers
- Run top creator videos as Meta ads and raise the budget every week~$2.50 per download; profitable by the guest's math
- Give creators scripts copied from competitors' ads and run them as adsLost money; replaced by organic winners
- Test a cluttered AI-made image ad listing ~8 featuresBest ad at under $2 per download, beating video
- Run peptide creator videos as TikTok adsTikTok kept rejecting them as medical advice; moved to Meta
- Give under-25s a short onboarding and older users a longer oneLonger flow works well for 25+, per founder; no numbers
- Show 'try it free' slides before a paywall with $40/year and $10/month plans
- Build the most-requested features, like a dose calculator, after legal reviewCalculator 'drove a ton of traffic'
- Remove or simplify features nobody uses
- Collect feedback everywhere, including creator calls, and ship 2-3 updates a week
- Tell creators about each new feature as a reason to postCreators all want to post about new features
- DM 1,000+ creators a week with one message, then get them on a callSigns many creators every week; delegating made it scale
- Skip creators with no real comments or few niche videos to avoid bought viewsEarly signings with bought views brought zero signups
- Review each new creator's first video before it goes liveA few redos; most videos were fine
- Give creators lifetime access and text them almost daily instead of view bonusesCreators do more than the contract, including TikTok Lives
- Repost as many creator videos as possible on the brand account
- Raise a small angel check for marketing; pay developers in equityFunded the creator program from launch
- Enter a trending niche where existing apps do no marketingFounder claims the app helped start the peptide-tracker trend
Tags: tiktok, instagram, saturate-niche-creators, contrarian, organic-first