ChatPEP is an AI research assistant for peptides. It grounds every answer in peer-reviewed research, flags interactions, does the reconstitution math, and remembers what each user is running.
Peptide research is scattered across journals, forums, and anecdotes. ChatPEP puts the science in one place and keeps the answers honest.
This one was bigger than code. I built the product, then built the business around it: pricing, lifecycle email, an affiliate program, and an Instagram presence that runs itself.
Timeline
May 2026
Built in a month
First commit on May 14, live on Vercel the next day. By the end of the month the core was in place: streaming chat, a curated knowledge base with retrieval, academic search, a safety layer that screens every message, a reconstitution calculator, and stacks.
- Answers cited from a curated knowledge base plus academic and web search
- Safety sentinel that blocks unsafe inputs and routes crisis messages to help
- Dosing and reconstitution calculators
- Interaction alerts against existing medications
June 2026
Public launch and paid plans
Shipped the marketing site, Stripe billing, and Google sign-in, then launched on a freemium model. Anyone can ask their first questions free, no card required, and upgrade when the product proves itself.
Four plans, from a free daily allowance to Frontier with unlimited questions and Pulse. June 2026
The growth system
Built the acquisition engine in the same codebase: segmented email drips capped per day, welcome and nudge sequences, landing-page experiments, and an optimizer that reweights campaign variants from their own results. The goals and recovery angle out-converted the safety angle by more than five to one.
July 2026
PEP 2.0: Memory and Pulse
Expanded the library to 64 compounds. Shipped Protocol memory, which carries conditions, medications, and regimens across conversations. Also shipped Pulse, which checks in on active protocols and surfaces relevant research before users ask.
August 2026
Affiliate program
Launched an affiliate platform so creators and communities in the peptide space earn by referring users: partner pages, affiliate-run stores with FTC disclosure, per-partner Stripe offers, and claim-at-signup. A conversation audit the same month reshaped onboarding, the daily free cap, and in-app checkout.
September 2026
Instagram on autopilot
Handed marketing to Topics.so, my own content studio. A brand kit, a cast of eight generated faces, and two autopilot series publish to @chatpep on a schedule. The series test the aspiration angle against the safety angle and rewrite their own playbook from the numbers.
September 2026
iOS
Restructured into a monorepo with a shared API, added Apple sign-in and a persistent regimen profile, and started the native iOS app in Expo.
Impact
- A live product answering real peptide questions every day, with paying subscribers.
- A growth engine spanning lifecycle email, landing-page experiments, affiliates, and an Instagram presence that runs itself.
- Built and operated by one person, from the retrieval pipeline to the ad copy.
My role
Founder and sole builder. I designed and engineered the product, set the pricing, ran the campaigns, built the affiliate program, and now run marketing through Topics.so.
- Next.js
- OpenAI
- PostgreSQL
- Prisma
- Stripe
- Vercel