[wxnx]

This is really interesting as someone who works as part of a group who takes products similar to this to market! Thank you for sharing.

You mentioned the medication is as effective in women as it is in men. While I understand men are underserved in this space and so I respect the decision to focus on that population on that basis, I'm curious if there are business elements to that decision as well? Would you ever expand to serving women, given that they seem to be a larger potential customer pool?

[rich-cartwright]

Sweet what's the group you're part of? Sounds interesting.

It's obviously a great question about the focus on men, and something we think a lot about.

My take: the whole industry is focused on women, and there are already cool companies taking a medication approach with branding clearly focused on women: https://www.joincalibrate.com/, https://joinfound.com/, https://www.formhealth.co/

I'm a fan of what these folks are doing. But you speak to any Fellas (our name for our customers!) and they know those programs aren't aimed at them. Every week we hear something like "I'm fed up of being the only guy in the group".

From a business side, the bet we're taking is that if we manage to crack the messaging/framing/branding for the male audience, that's a great business. Plus how men think about their health is drastically changing as concepts of masculinity change, so the potential customer pool is growing rapidly.

In terms of future expansion: we don't know yet. At least not for the coming few years - there are a lot of bigger guys out there we want to help (35 million men have obesity)!

[wxnx]

Thanks very much for answering!

Sorry, if I'd had the foresight to use a throwaway I'd drop a link to our group, but I prefer not to publicly associate my HN account with work. We're a small team of software and data engineers, machine learning scientists, and health policy folks at a large research institution in Canada that take on clients to work on stuff like this (from early stage research to approvals to deployment). I'd be happy to reach out with my contact info privately if you're interested, just let me know.

That makes sense! I wondered if it had something to do with the group component, and I agree that the customer pool is growing.

Congratulations on the launch!

[rich-cartwright]

Sounds really interesting. Would love to hear from you: my email is [e-mail]

[agentdrtran]

Do you have any options for people in one of those programs to transfer over?

[rich-cartwright]

Yep we've actually had that happen already. Happy to help if you'd like.

To reiterate thought: I have nothing against these programs, from the outside they look really solid & I overall really support the direction of treatment.