It would be a vast understatement to say the market for telehealth companies selling erectile dysfunction medication is saturated.

Hims & Hers and Ro were among the first to capitalize on the wave of generic Cialis and Viagra entering the market in late 2017. They portrayed themselves as lifestyle brands, pairing pills with sleek packaging, influencer marketing, and a direct-to-consumer ethos aimed squarely at younger men.

Since then, dozens of smaller startups have followed their lead. Many ED treatments offered by these companies are compounded pills disguised as breath mints or gummies that come in a sleek container rather than a transparent orange pill bottle.

By all accounts, there isn’t much room for a new competitor. And yet in May, Grindr Inc. — the gay dating and hookup app — said it was launching its own ED telehealth brand, known as Woodwork.

“ED and other sexual health is where we saw a lot of white space,” said Henry Bird, a vice president at Grindr who’s leading Woodwork. “Grindr, if nothing else, is a lot about having sex and finding connections. So, it’s very adjacent to our core use case.”

Grindr CEO George Arison unveiled Woodwork on the company’s first-quarter earnings call, noting that a large number of the app’s users have reported using ED medications in the past. In the future, Grindr and Woodwork might integrate, like bundle subscription deals, he said. 

The company is building a suite of products (dubbed a “Gayborhood”) capitalizing on its audience of millions of gay and bisexual men on their platform. Arison has previously said Grindr is a “great distribution engine” for future business opportunities.

Telehealth brands are nothing if not marketing companies. Woodwork, like many smaller telehealth companies, does not employ doctors or pharmacists itself — it just does the branding and interface. (Bird ran advertising at Grindr before leading Woodwork.) This is why so many exist: the up-front capital cost is low, and there are already several plug-and-go medical networks and compounding pharmacies built for these kinds of businesses.  

But the fact that Grindr found a customer to speak to in a market where dozens of brands are competing to enhance young men’s sex lives suggests the ED telehealth companies were all targeting a specific type of guy. 

Hims, BlueChew, and Ro are frequent sponsors of bro-ey podcasts and sporting events. Their ads often imply a heterosexual relationship, referring to the user’s partner as “her” or “she.” Some of their ads are testimonials from women who say their partners use it. 

Woodwork, meanwhile, has the same sleek DNA as its straight peers, but is loaded with images of fit men in little clothing fondling each other. The lumberjack-coded models on the site hold logs between their legs in some of the photos, the same kind of playful innuendo as Hims’ phallic cactus ads. The product is a mint-flavored compounded ED treatment, similar to those sold by Hims and others. 

It’s “authentically gay,” as Bird puts it. “Sexy, approachable, but also a bit of a wink and a nod to it,” he said. 

Some of the ED brands have advertised on Grindr in the past, according to Bird. Hims recently began advertising on Sniffies, a gay hookup app that’s earned a reputation as an even raunchier Grindr. Hims, Ro, and BlueChew did not respond to a request for comment.

How ED ads went from Bob Dole to Grindr

Woodwork shows just how far advertising for ED has come since late Kansas Sen. Bob Dole became the first spokesperson for Viagra in 1998, the same year the drug came to market. In his commercial, the former Republican presidential candidate sat in a leather armchair and spoke of erectile dysfunction — a nascent term at the time — as a side effect of prostate cancer. 

Arthur L. Caplan, a medical ethicist who consulted for Pfizer on Viagra, wrote in Stat News in 2023 that the most important advice he gave the drugmaker was “that the pill needed to target a disease.” Without that, he wrote, the pharmaceutical giant would be vulnerable to “conservative moral criticisms that Pfizer was selling a ‘sex’ pill and encouraging promiscuity.”

Cialis, a rival ED drug made by Eli Lilly, came out in 2003. The drug needs more time to take effect but lasts longer than Viagra. By then, the world was more familiar with ED, but the risk of a pharma company coming off as too risqué was still there, said Matt Beebe, who ran branding for Cialis at Lilly at the time. 

Some ideas that were thrown around had Lilly’s executives “squirming in their seats uncomfortable,” he said. Beebe now runs his own executive advisorship, DriftRock Advisors. Lilly’s CEO at the time, Sidney Taurel, often settled for ideas that he had personal reservations about, Beebe recalled. 

“The whole thing was touchy and challenging and complex, because you have this conservative Midwestern company trying to jump in and play this game that had a lot of edge to it at the time,” he said of the Indianapolis-based drugmaker. “The goal here was to show Wall Street that Lilly could commercialize products and market.”

Cialis went for the “softer side of the guy,” Beebe added. The commercials featured jazz music and the iconic two bathtubs next to each other. The brand sponsored the PGA tour and turned away from a deal with the NFL. Viagra eventually leaned more into the “manly aspect” — it partnered with NASCAR and recruited athletes as spokespeople. 

Are men OK?

Both Viagra and Cialis appeared to target older men who likely have some sort of healthcare plan that covers branded medication. Once generics entered the market in 2017, all of a sudden the market grew. The marketing changed, too.

“BlueChew wanted to position itself as a treatment for young men who wanted stronger and longer-lasting erections, not for older men who were having trouble getting aroused,” Ubiquitous, an influencer marketing firm used by BlueChew, wrote in a blog post explaining the strategy. (BlueChew did not respond to a request for comment.)

Ben Wills, a sociologist at the University of California, San Diego, who studies digital health, said these platforms often market their products based on a perception of masculinity that is uniquely heterosexual. “Queer sex has less of a rigid script lurking in the background,” he said. 

BlueChew is known for engaging with influencers, some of them heterosexual couples. Ro partnered with former Denver Broncos tight end Shannon Sharpe to promote its ED pill. Hims has a YouTube show where its in-house urologist chats with comedian JC Mendoza. 

“In the 2010s, they shifted because they realized that the market where they could make a ton of money was younger men who were just insecure,” Andrew Smiler, a psychologist and author who studies masculinity, said. “It feels like the advertisers have really moved more directly to address men’s insecurity in the bedroom.”

Smiler said insecurity is a lever advertisers often use to sell products to women, and one that in more recent decades has also applied to men. This comes amid a growing body of evidence that men are falling behind in education and the labor market. 

“If you’re kind of an average guy, and you’re not making big money and you’re not really on a track to make big money, then you better look damn good,” he said. “And you better make sure your dick works, because those are your only selling points in the dating market.”