Pep AI: The Business College Student with 0 Coding Experience. How Does He Gain Money?

A 22-year-old in Oregon turned a TikTok trend into a subscription app without writing the code himself. The useful part for the rest of us isn't the app. It's the order he did things in.

Most of us have scrolled past a trend at 11 p.m., thought "someone should build something for that," and gone to sleep. Cedric Roberge, a student at the University of Oregon, didn't. He watched peptides (injectable compounds people use for weight loss, recovery, skin and tanning) blow up on TikTok, and he noticed something the videos skipped over: lots of the people trying them had no idea how to dose or track them safely.

A few months later his app, Pep AI, was being called the most popular peptide and GLP-1 tracker on the App Store. It had been on a billboard in Times Square, and Replit, the platform he built it on, said it was bringing in roughly $130,000 a month. He was 22, and by his own account he had never written a line of code.

Who is the guy behind the app?

Cedric isn't a computer-science prodigy, and Pep AI wasn't his first try. Before it he built UniYard, a student marketplace for his own campus, and promoted it the old-fashioned way: standing behind a table and talking to strangers. That detail matters. He had already learned the least glamorous part of business, which is getting a stranger to care. When the second idea came along, he wasn't learning that from scratch.