Investor With No Coding Experience Builds ‘$1.7Mn SaaS’ Using Replit

Brad Lindenberg, co-founder of Quadpay and currently leading the United States operations at an investment firm, stated on X that he has developed a project called Biography Studio AI, which can create full-length biographies of someone using only voice prompts. 

Register for Cypher 2025 | India's Biggest AI Summit & Expo from the Heart of Bengaluru >>

Lindenberg added that he has never coded before and built the project solo using Replit. “It’s a passion project that took eight weeks to build and $1,500 of tokens, which Replit Agent estimated would have cost $1.7 million and a team of eight to build over eight to 12 months without AI.” 

With this project, he aims to remove the friction of writing a book and bring down the high costs associated with it, from tens of thousands of dollars to just $119. The platform offers a free trial, but with a paid plan that costs a one-time payment of $119, users can generate unlimited chapters and produce a full-length book. 

“It enables anyone to be interviewed by AI via voice and to preserve their memories forever in rich, elaborate detail in written, audiobook and podcast formats, narrated back in your own voice,” Lindenberg said. 

He added that the project is integrated into various services, such as Stripe, ElevenLabs, and OpenAI’s real-time voice, as well as other services that help make the app functional. 

Source: Biography Studio AI

He called the whole project a “steep learning curve”. “For example, I had never used GIT before, but I now have dev (Replit IDE), staging (Replit deployment URL) and production (Railway) that deploys when I merge to main,” he said in a response to a user asking him about a challenging aspect of the project. 

“I think the ‘first prompt’ gives you a big dopamine hit of velocity and speed relative to what you are used to however actually making an end-to-end product requires a lot of patience and time, but way less than coding,” he added. 

Lindenberg, who co-founded the unicorn startup in the buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) sector called Quadpay, wanted to see how far he could go with a tool like Replit, without any staff, and just “raw agency and curiosity”. 

For context, Replit is a platform that helps users build applications without writing code, but using natural language prompts and letting AI do the magic. Amjad Masad, CEO of Replit, acknowledged his project and said, ‘It’s a golden age of entrepreneurship.” 

Over the past few months, this practice has gained significant popularity. Andrej Karpathy, a former OpenAI researcher, called the phenomenon ‘vibe coding’. This allows developers to build prototypes and push them to production quickly. 

Recently, a Brazilian ed-tech firm built an application using Lovable, a similar platform, and earned $3 million in just 48 hours. 

Startups like these, which offer platforms that let users build using AI, have also observed unprecedented levels of growth. 

Recently, Replit surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), representing a tenfold increase from the $10 million ARR it reported at the end of 2021.