Hims & Hers, the telehealth company best known for selling erectile dysfunction pills, didn’t set out to reinvent the wheel. 

Like DoorDash for food delivery or Uber and Lyft for taxis, Hims took things that existed already but made them more convenient. Now, CEO Andrew Dudum wants you to think of his company like another successful startup: Netflix.

The streaming giant used to offer only movies that were long out of theaters, much like how Hims predominantly sells generic drugs. But now, not only is Netflix a platform where filmmakers are eager to put out blockbusters — it also produces its own Oscar-nominated films. 

“I don’t think that’s very different at all from our orientation,” Dudum said in an interview with Sherwood News. “By owning that customer relationship, by understanding deeply what customers are yearning for, what they need, where there are gaps in care, we are in a really unique position to both partner and eventually bring to market world-class treatments.”

Right now, Hims sits at a crossroads. Its stock vaulted more than 800% from the beginning of 2023 to a peak this February. Then the government revoked the ability for compounding pharmacies like Hims to produce copies of popular GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, which accounted for about 15% of the company’s revenue last year. That sent a shock through the stock, which has now dropped roughly 60% from its peak. 

With its fastest-growing contributor to revenue now crimped, Hims has to figure out where to go from here.

Making generic meds cool

When Hims first launched in late 2017 — just as patents for Viagra and Cialis expired, making them fair game for generic competition — it was primarily known as a sleek and discreet service for men suffering from balding or impotence. Unlike typical generic drug makers that stay mostly behind the scenes, Hims doubled down on its brand and spent big on marketing. 

Through its tongue-in-cheek messaging, the company hit a sweet spot: it became a well-known name but sold drugs that it didn’t develop itself, instead capitalizing on selling commoditized versions of drugs whose patents had expired.

In 2018, its first full year operating, it brought in $27 million in revenue. Last year, Hims brought in $1.5 billion in revenue, a more than 5,400% increase over six years. It’s been consistently profitable since December 2023. 

In that time, it’s added treatments for mental health and weight loss, including compounded GLP-1s last May, and now has its eyes on new frontiers like hormone treatments. It ran a Super Bowl ad this year that was met with pushback from Big Pharma and lawmakers, who said it didn’t include proper warnings. 

Dudum said Hims is doing what it has to do to give consumers access to medications they otherwise couldn’t afford, even if it means pushing the envelope.

“There are often times where pushing on behalf of what we believe is right on behalf of the consumer puts us at odds with other parties,” he said. “I just think that’s the reality of our organization.”

“Poking the bear”

Hims, like other platforms, got into selling GLP-1s during the three-year shortage of semaglutide, the active ingredient in Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic and Wegovy. That shortage designation allowed compounding pharmacies to sell copies of the drug.

On February 21, the Food and Drug Administration took semaglutide off the shortage list, ending Hims’ ability to continue selling exact copies after an off-ramp period. 

One former Hims employee said the end of the shortage was always looming over the company. “Things there move fast,” he told Sherwood in an interview. “That was always a risk.”

About $230 million of Hims’ $1.5 billion in revenue in 2024 came from GLP-1 drugs, and it’s unclear what this chunk of the business will look like this year. Hims said it expects revenue from its weight-loss business to reach $725 million in 2025, but investors are having a hard time pricing that in considering the threat of lawsuits from drugmakers or FDA enforcement activity. The stock is volatile and has the highest short interest ratio of the S&P MidCap 400 Index. 

From the get-go, Hims and its peers marketed their model as a cheaper way to access popular, expensive drugs. That pushes the limits of how compounding pharmacies are supposed to present themselves: as a way to temporarily fill gaps and provide personalized doses, not as a competitor to a name-brand drug, according to Scott Brunner, CEO of the trade group Alliance for Pharmacy Compounding. 

“In my view, that’s poking the bear,” Brunner said in a February 25 press conference.

Drugmakers, which made over $40 billion from selling branded GLP-1 medications last year, didn’t hide their disgust. They developed ad campaigns calling into question the safety of compounded GLP-1s. 

When the FDA took semaglutide off its shortage list on February 21, Dudum released a statement focusing on the company’s ability to offer personalized versions of the drugs. This could mean removing or adding nonactive ingredients to avoid allergic reactions, or, more commonly for Hims, producing dose sizes of semaglutide that Novo Nordisk doesn’t offer. 

Days later, Dudum told analysts that the company would shift its focus to selling liraglutide, an older and less effective GLP-1 drug, as well as oral medications and supplements. 

It’s unclear how much in sales will still come from personalized semaglutide, though Dudum said the company’s weight-loss revenue goal is achievable without overreliance on any one treatment. The picture is murky: the company sold $230 million in GLP-1s last year, as well as other weight-loss drugs. Now revenue from semaglutide will likely slow down, and the company will try to make up the difference — and grow sharply — by selling more of the older weight-loss drugs and adding access to full-price branded drugs like Eli Lilly’s Zepbound.

Dudum said Hims offers personalized versions of semaglutide because there’s less variation in commercial doses and higher rates of side effects. “We see the clinical necessity of that personalization to be actually extremely high,” he said.

One of the company’s patients told Sherwood she was unsure why she was on a personalized dose, and inferred it was because she answered in the onboarding questionnaire that she was less concerned about side effects. She, along with many others on noncommercial doses, was told the FDA news wouldn’t affect her:

Hims has even used some of its ad revenue to promote petitions urging the FDA and Congress to “protect access to affordable compounded GLP-1s.”

Access to the drugs is becoming more broad. Both Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk have announced direct-to-consumer programs for patients without insurance coverage. Eli Lilly recently announced a partnership with Amazon Pharmacy after previously reaching a deal with Ro, perhaps the most direct peer to Hims, to sell vials of Zepbound. An announcement on Zepbound availability from Hims on April 1 that was misinterpreted by investors as a partnership with Lilly made the stock jump, underscoring how eager investors are to see those products reliably on the platform. 

Ro, a privately held company with a higher share of insured patients, also sold compounded semaglutide to help fill the shortage gap, though it is a smaller part of its business. Dudum told analysts in February that he’s talked to Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk about partnering, but its scale as well as reimbursement rates for branded GLP-1s are barriers. 

A Novo Nordisk spokesperson said compounding semaglutide is illegal “except in rare circumstances.” The FDA declined to comment on this story, except to refer to the agency’s information on compounded drugs.

“As the FDA has warned, compounders cannot rely on mere pretextual differences between unapproved compounded drugs and FDA-approved medicines — under the guise of making ‘personalized’ drugs — in order to evade federal law,” Novo said. 

Michael Botta, president and cofounder of Sesame, a telehealth platform and Hims competitor, also said he didn’t think Hims’ plan would pass scrutiny. Sesame’s former chief medical officer, Marty Makary, is now head of the FDA.

“The idea that you can compound a patented drug that is not under shortage in any kind of scale that would be suitable for the Hims customer base? I don’t think it’s supported under the law,” Botta said. 

An origin story more like a tech startup than a healthcare company 

Perhaps capitalizing on the fact that men are not particularly good at confronting stigmas, Hims offered a way to make it easy to obtain care for two awkward and embarrassing conditions. The New York Times quipped that it was “Finally Putting Some Fun in Erectile Dysfunction” and Vox called it “Glossier for Dudes.”

Hims & Hers, first just known as Hims, was born out of Atomic Labs, a startup incubator. Since at least 2019, it has paid Atomic Labs between $3.2 million and $4.6 million for office space and other operating expenses, company filings show. Until last year, Dudum was still disclosed as a part-time employee there.

Dudum retains nearly 90% voting rights despite owning less than 10% of the company, a dynamic that isn’t uncommon in Silicon Valley. The most prominent example of a CEO with outsize voting power is Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, who owns about 15% of the tech giant while retaining roughly 60% of the voting power. 

Jack Leeney, managing partner of 7GC, an early investor in Hims, described Dudum as “thoughtful” and unique among Silicon Valley founders in that he’s not “the typical ‘move fast and break things’ type of guy.”

Hims went public in 2021 via a blank-check company, also known as a SPAC, sponsored by Oaktree Capital Management. That firm sold its remaining stake in December, according to data from FactSet. Oaktree declined to comment on its involvement in Hims’ IPO or the sale of its stake in the company. 

“A lot of SPACs have not been ready for prime time,” said Jay Ritter, a professor at the University of Florida who studies IPOs. “But Hims not only did have substantial revenue at the time of the SPAC merger, but has been able to grow that revenue substantially and become profitable.”

The stock is a darling among retail investors, often discussed on X and in Reddit forums, despite having relatively low retail ownership. “It’s an extraordinary company, with news pretty much daily, a pretty controversial product, and quite a bit of price volatility,” said Jonathan Stern, author of the Hims House Substack, which gives daily updates on the company for retail investors. 

When asked why the business is so popular with retail investors, Dudum said they are likely Hims customers. 

“That’s one of the beautiful parts of our business in the public markets,” he said. “People who know the product, who know the service, who have experienced it and have been empowered by it and feeling better, those are the people going and buying shares of the stock. It’s actually just that they love the product.”

April 14, 2025: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that all of Hims’ weight-loss revenue in 2024 came from GLP-1 drugs. The company also sold other weight-loss drugs.