Cool, another scammy internet company preying on people's insecurities. Glad the NY Times spent the effort to tell us about it and didn't spend any time questioning this company [1].
[1] https://www.fda.gov/inspections-compliance-enforcement-and-c...
So maybe the NY Times thought it was enough to make people question the ethics of the company to add a sentence or two of "AI-generated images/website", but in reality I think people read this as a positive solo entrepreneurship story and missed the ethical grey area and the fact that this indeed took thousands of unseen humans to build.
Maybe, but it felt like this was meant to support the idea that the company is scrappy / under construction.
While the service providers are experiencing massive growth they are happy to share. When growth plateaus they will go after every cost reduction, including squeezing out non-value added resellers. Especially those with warning letters from the FDA for making false claims, as noted below.
As a distributor your value add was always making me markets. Once made, those markets are now trivial to take direct unless there is some advantage to having a local take a risk on stock- holding. I have worked in distribution and seen Amazon refuse to deal with the distributor and go direct as soon as they see decent sales, for instance.
I think the point of this article is that AI enables people to do so much more? Much of marketing is creating engaging content and AI allows people to create more than ever.
So the 1.8B is effectively sales on a lead-generation opportunity where he gets to capture 20% of the sale (assuming that since his net profits are 16%), and then the backend guys do all the work and probably profit the remaining bit, assuming this line of business has ~50% margins, to these companies doing the actual work they're basically spending 20% on sales and marketing to Medvi. Because this is subscription-based, most of the costs are acquisition, and preventing churn (which is why he hired 7 contractors).
As another poster mentioned - basically this guy is dropshipping GLP1 with no moat, and my guess is that he was keeping quiet and making money till the market got saturated and now he gets to use his success as a puff piece to parlay into a bunch of other verticals like supplements, mealprep, and all that.
This guy's success is basically predicated upon him managing the branding and experience -- so good for him, but this is a middleman opportunity that is likely already going away due to me-toos (and that's why he's milking it one last time on NYT).
This is borderline illegal.
This must largely be going into testing and generating marketing content? I am extremely curious about his processes.
Yes - to be applied in less nefarious and dubious ways.
I didn't follow up what became of her startup idea, but there's no way she could have ever gotten it off the ground in just two months, like the guy from the article and his brother. More like two years...
> By the end of last year, Medvi had reached $401 million in annual sales and amassed 250,000 customers. It produced 16.2 percent in net profit, or $65 million, with spending going to the fees for telehealth platforms, marketing and then software. Hims, by contrast, had a net profit of 5.5 percent last year.
Truly, if you look over his website, you would not think this is a company that generates millions in profit a year.
He claims he has switched over from using AI-generated profits to real customer testimonials. That's a misrepresentation, if not a lie.
Most of the images still look like they have the unnatural fuzziness of AI images.
Website is also coded as one long-scrolling page, again suggesting this is a company who does not offer a unique product with value proposition.
Honestly, this is a company that looks like it succeeded only by optimizing employee head count and customer acquisition cost
And if that's what it takes to succeed, fair play.
Even the quiz flow to check eligibility is using old icons and just feels super spammy.
His ads must be crushing it, I guess?
I'm highly suspicious of these revenue claims because how is he doing any of the marketing? Tiktok bans you if you post ugc content saying anything about peptides. FB doesn't allow medicine to be marketed nor does google. If he's dropshipping how is he doing the marketing?
So not one person, not two, but many.
The border of legal and illegal is a good place to make money and change.
They were already warned by the FDA: https://www.fda.gov/inspections-compliance-enforcement-and-c...
The whole business model probably just comes down to high demand over supply and traditional primary care doctors not being ready to keep up with prescribing it, though? It's a temporary gap being filled in. I wonder how long it can last.
The willingess to break a bad law is a sign of a good person.
He basically chose a sector where customers are desperate (weight-loss drugs), slapped a website and an interface for connecting with a drug prescription provider together, did effective marketing, and now his business generates millions a month in profit.
Like, there are a half dozen companies like his running around that essentially offer the same product and prices because they are all customer interfaces stop the same provider.
Do not universalize your temptation to graft
In this case GLP1's clinical effects are widely understood though, so it is immaterial if an "artist's depiction" (artificial agent's depiction) is of a real person or purely hallucinated.
https://bsky.app/profile/masnick.com/post/3miwsjejfhk2i
"Turns out basically every aspect of that story is bullshit and the story should be retracted."
Maybe I should just stand on the street and be a 3-card-monty...
When injected. One of the products this scam company was selling is oral Tirzepatide pills, which don't do anything.
Sorry, but your implied argument is flawed.
My actual argument was the ride-sharing addressed systemic racism that yellow cab companies did not, that is a good thing.
What net good would fentanyl do to society? If it exists, then yes, sell it. Clean, reliable fentanyl might be a good thing, I don't know.
The fentanyl using part of society thinks it is great. There you go.