Why Hims & Hers Is Betting Ozempic Is Just Your Gateway Drug

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Hims Started As A Hair-Loss Company. It May Have Accidentally Built The Future Of Medicine.

The Real Hims & Hers Product Isn't a Drug. It's a Shopping Habit.

A few years ago, the GLP-1 debate was simple. Do these drugs work?

That question is obviously long over, and the more interesting question now is what happens next. I obsess over this space, and I think Hims & Hers just told us, if you know what you’re looking at.

The media narrative is clean: take Ozempic, lose 40 pounds, stay on forever. Hims & Hers doesn’t actually need that story to be true. Honestly, their business works better if it isn’t.

Here’s the part nobody’s saying out loud: a huge and growing share of GLP-1 prescriptions today aren’t going to people chasing 40-pound losses at all.

They’re going to people:

who want less food noise

who want to drink less

who’ve already lost the weight and just want to keep it off.

The “obesity drug” story is already out of date, and Hims, a company built on volume, recurring subscriptions, and a frictionless intake form, is one of the best-positioned companies in the country to feel that shift in real time.

So forget “telehealth company selling Ozempic.” The actual playbook is becoming the front door for personalized medication at scale, and that phrase is doing a lot of work, so let’s unpack it…

A “front door” company isn’t selling you a drug. It’s selling you the first decision in a long chain of decisions, and then staying in the room for every one after.

You sign up for Hims.

Fill out an intake form.

Get a prescription.

Get a recurring shipment.

That’s the door. But once you’re in, the relationship doesn’t end…it opens up.

Next check-in: how’s your energy? Any nausea? Sleeping okay? Hair thinning? Libido down? Each answer isn’t a complaint, it’s a cross-sell.

Low energy…maybe a B12 add-on.

Hair thinning…a separate prescription for that.

Trouble sleeping…something for that too.

Suddenly you’re not “on Ozempic.” You’re on a stack; your own personal cocktail, quietly assembled one check-in at a time, each piece billed and shipped on its own subscription.

That’s “at scale.” A real doctor doing this for you (actually tracking side effects, adjusting protocols, adding and subtracting things over months) used to be expensive, slow, and reserved for people with concierge care.

Hims’s bet is that software plus a thin (and I’d argue thin) layer of clinicians can deliver a watered-down version of that to millions of people simultaneously.

Not “we sell Ozempic.” More like: “we sell you a little of this, a little of that, forever, and we adjust the mix based on what you tell us.”

And “personalized” is the fragmentation part.

Once you’re the front door, you don’t need every customer to want the same thing. Someone walks in for weight loss and walks out, six months later, on a GLP-1 plus a sleep aid plus a hair-loss treatment plus a libido prescription (none of which they were thinking about on day one).

The company didn’t have to predict that. It just had to be standing there, asking the right follow-up questions, with the next product already in inventory.

Behind the paywall: who actually wins, and who’s about to get left behind.

If the playbook is “own the front door, let the protocol sprawl” — here’s what’s coming next:

What doesn’t work - and why most “GLP-1 brands” launched in the last two years are walking straight into a trap they can’t see yet)

What works - the actual blueprint, and why it has nothing to do with weight-loss messaging

Who wins - a handful of companies, some obvious, some you’d never connect to this thesis, all quietly positioned for what comes next. One is in my own portfolio. I didn’t back it for this reason.

If you’ve ever wondered what happens after the prescription, this is that answer.

So if the playbook is “own the front door, let the protocol sprawl,” the next question is who’s actually built for that and who’s going to get steamrolled by it.

What doesn’t work: any brand that built itself around a single SKU and a single story. A lot of “GLP-1 companies” launched in the last two years are exactly this: beautiful packaging, weight-loss-specific messaging, a brand voice that only makes sense if the customer’s goal is “lose 40 pounds and look amazing doing it.”

The problem is the moment that customer’s needs shift (which they will, almost immediately, because side effects show up fast) that brand has nothing else to offer.

It built a door that only swings one way, and now it’s watching its customers wander off to find their B12 and their hair-loss script somewhere else.

What works: owning the relationship, not the reason someone walked in. The company doesn’t need to know on day one whether this person is here for weight loss, PCOS, or perimenopause, it needs the infrastructure (intake, recurring check-ins, the ability to add and adjust prescriptions) to keep saying “yes, we have something for that too” for as long as the customer keeps showing up. Hims is doing this. So, in different ways, are a handful of companies almost nobody is connecting to this thesis yet.

Take Function Health. On the surface, it’s diagnostics (bloodwork panels, biomarker tracking). But it’s actually a front-door play for the next layer down: once someone’s stacking three or four prescriptions and asking “is any of this actually working,” they need a way to measure it. Whoever owns that measurement layer becomes the place people return to, no matter which combination of drugs they’re on.

Diagnostics becomes the front door for the second decision, the same way the prescription was the front door for the first.

Or take Monarch. Looks like a four-wall fitness concept. The real bet is sequencing: once the weight comes off…especially on a GLP-1, where muscle loss alongside fat loss is a real and growing concern…the next need isn’t more weight loss, it’s strength, mobility, not losing muscle and bone density along with the fat.

Monarch is positioning itself as the next door GLP-1 users walk through once the first door has done its job. I’ve sat in diligence calls where founders pitched almost exactly this thesis (before GLP-1s gave it a name, before “muscle preservation” was a headline).

Then there’s the layer almost nobody’s pricing in: protein brands built for GLP-1-sized appetites, body composition tracking that goes beyond a bathroom scale, bone density diagnostics (a category I’ve called “the skeleton in wellness’s closet” for a reason), and recovery platforms built for a body that’s quietly going through a lot.

None of these companies sell GLP-1s. All of them get more valuable because the front-door model exists, because users keep getting routed to “what’s next” instead of dropping off after one purchase.

That’s the tell.

Smartphones spawned entire industries that had nothing to do with manufacturing phones. GLP-1s are doing the same thing, quietly, to an ecosystem that has nothing to do with the injection itself.

The biggest mistake I see right now is underwriting today’s GLP-1 user (and today’s GLP-1 company) as tomorrow’s. The winners won’t be the ones with the best weight-loss messaging. They’ll be the ones built to not care what the customer walked in for, because they’re built for everything that comes after.

Hims figured that out first. The question I keep coming back to is: who else already has, and just hasn’t said so yet?

All the best,

Rachel & WGV Team