- The Weekly D-Briefs
- Posts
- Hims & Hers
Lesson: Access is the product. Compliance is the edge.
I never used Hims & Hers. But I noticed them early. Before them, I noticed Ro. Same general idea, healthcare without the waiting room. But Hims & Hers scaled in a way Ro didn't. They showed up everywhere. Social first, then Super Bowl ads, then the stock conversation, then the regulatory headlines. What caught my attention wasn't the product. It was the model. Most people hate going to the doctor. Not because they don't care about their health, but because the process is exhausting. Scheduling. Waiting. Co-pays. Referrals. Time off work. Hims & Hers looked at all of that friction and built something that felt more like a direct conversation and less like a system you had to fight your way through. That's not a loophole. That's a legitimate reimagining of how access to care should feel.
They built it before weight loss medications became a cultural moment. By the time drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy, injectable weight loss prescriptions that took over every health conversation in America, dominated the market, Hims & Hers had already crossed $1 billion in revenue. Hair loss. ED. Acne. Anxiety. Categories where people had the need but avoided the conversation. Hims & Hers made those conversations easier to start and private enough to actually have. The weight loss wave didn't create them. It revealed how well the model worked when applied to something the entire country was already talking about. According to their 2025 earnings, Hims & Hers hit $2.35 billion in full-year revenue, a 73% increase year-over-year, with 2.5 million subscribers on platform. That's a platform story, not a drug story. Now the FDA has restricted its compounded version of those weight loss medications. Novo Nordisk, the pharmaceutical giant behind Ozempic, is suing them. The SEC has opened an investigation. The stock dropped nearly 40% from its highs. Every headline reads like a brand in trouble. But that's the wrong read. Every brand that moves against the traditional healthcare system will hit regulatory walls. That's not a sign the model is broken; it's a sign it's threatening enough to push back against. The regulatory pressure is real. But a brand with 2.5 million subscribers and a profitable platform doesn't disappear because one product line gets challenged. It adapts.
Where the Real Edge Lives
The friction that built this brand isn't going away. Healthcare isn't getting cheaper or easier to navigate. That's structural, not cyclical. Their real edge is the subscriber relationship. Once someone trusts a platform with something personal and keeps coming back, that's not easy to replicate. Legacy healthcare never built that kind of direct relationship at scale. Hims & Hers did, and they built it with licensed clinicians and required consultations, not shortcuts. That clinical layer is what makes the trust real. Compliance isn't the ceiling here. It's the foundation. Protect that, and the platform holds regardless of what any single product line does.
Three Signals That Matter
Signal 1 - Founder/Operator Takeaway
Hims & Hers made compliance the growth strategy, not the obstacle. In regulated categories, the brands that build the clinical layer in from the start are the ones that survive scrutiny later. That's the playbook worth studying here.
Signal 2 - Consumer Insight
The subscriber isn't buying a product. They're buying the feeling that their health is handled, without the system getting in the way. That's harder to copy than any single medication. One product line gets restricted, and the platform still holds if that feeling remains intact.
Signal 3 - Investor/Market Lens
The stock drop is a product line problem, not a platform problem. Two consecutive years of profitability and 2.5 million subscribers don't unravel over one regulatory challenge. The real watch item is global expansion; the $1.15 billion Eucalyptus acquisition is a big bet on replicating the U.S. model abroad while the domestic environment settles. That either compounds the growth or compounds the risk.
That's my read on it from actually building in the CPG space
Stick around. I’m just warming up.
Subscribe here for more → The Weekly D-Briefs (or forward this to someone building something meaningful)