Fascinating. I work in this space sort of, there's still a ton I don't understand. What is the legal space like? Are you at risk of being shut down on a dime if the FDA decides Lilly can meet demand? Are you able to compound small molecules legally like orfoglipron? Are you only going after tirzepatide, or are mono agonists too available to justify? Are you ready for the retatrutide gold rush when that gets approved?
anonymous391084 2 hours ago [-]
I think most people on gray market GLPs will vary their dose, take tolerance breaks, etc to meet their personal weight loss goals, this stuff isn't that complicated. Where I think where the real technology opportunity is, is having a personalized endocrinologist for TRT/HRT. Bodybuilders have incredibly sophisticated trackers with hormone/ester PK models and the ability to adjust and tune your personal model based on bloodwork results. Most men's clinic, online or in person, are nowhere near as advanced. Prescribing for most of these guys is binary, or adjusting your dose is something that's done in response to some sort of a problem like hematocrit or gyno, rather than trying to keep levels in-line with whatever health goal you have. I don't think most guys really need the full TRT dose of 140 mg/week to feel energetic again, but depending on your fitness goals you can go well beyond that safely as long as you are paying close attention. There have been a couple of "high tech HRT" apps but I don't think they are really all that sophisticated, maybe daily dosing or includes a tasso device or whatever, but nothing afaik with multi-hormone PK modeling and testing feedback, so it could be right up your alley.
lloydarmbrust 31 minutes ago [-]
The dosing starts out surprisingly simple. The magic is in the feedback loop: asking the patient how they're feeling, if they're getting the effects they want, and then having their doctor review and approve a new dose.
Point taken that RUO people are just yoloing this, I was one of them. Now, I can tell you that having a doctor in the loop with my health is very helpful.
rootsudo 2 hours ago [-]
You know the answer was obvious and I didn’t think to submit this to ycombinator since the idea is basically you’re front running a compounding pharmacies. This is combining a compounding pharmacy and an MSO.
At the same time, nothing is stopping you from hiring a fractional medical director and doctors alongside NP. I ran the numbers and 50k is is all you need to get a service agreement with a compounding pharmacy, back office tasks, incorporation, social media marketing policy to essentially drop ship your product as you use off the shelf products for charting and then begin expanding state coverage.
The July Medicare glp1 coverage also makes this most opportune.
Biggest barrier I thought was / is the credit card processing. You need to carry a certification for that.
HIPAA not an issue, BAA with most orgs that offer a saas products.
So damn. The glue isn’t really hard. Really didn’t think this would qualify as an ycombinator mvp. But here I am used
To pitch decks promising exponential growth of subscription for cloud services.
As for personalized peptides in general, are you going to be marketing non FDA approved ones?
Or just stick with what’s already popular, generic wegovy, zepbound, etc. the market seems highly thin as a new MSO appears everyday using smartiq alongside med spas that offer more questionable inpatient services.
While manufacturing controls supply chain / logistics, the external pressure from every compounding pharmacist scaling into peptides now makes me wonder the longevity abo it this. You can literally pop on subreddits and see the flavor of the month telemedicine practice offer teaser rates of $99 for 60mg/month tirezepatide.
Oh and not forgetting the elephant in the room, gray market and china manufacturing which allows anyone with a telegram account to directly order whatever chemical name they read with no doctor oversight. It’s what, sub $1/mg now from the major vendors for tirezepatide?
lloydarmbrust 25 minutes ago [-]
You seem to know a lot about this, and I was nodding along with a lot of your points as I was reading.
I was Stripe's first customer in 2010, so we solved the credit card processing issue :) it turns out that being in YC is good for more than just money.
You are right about HIPAA, everyone thinks this is much harder than it actually is, but GCP, OpenAI, Linq, everyone has given us a BAA.
We're definitely not trying to go after the market of people that are comfortable buying from Chinese suppliers and risking their health. When I built my mask factory, our masks were absolutely more expensive than Chinese masks, but what people were buying was a guarantee that it would meet certain filtration requirements. Some people are willing to pay for safety, but it's not important to everyone.
The only thing I really disagree with with you on is that this isn't a YC-scale company.
We are growing 56% compounded week -over-week, and I have every expectation we'll do $10 million this year, $100 million next.
We are making something that people are already buying and getting it to them in a safer, more cost-effective way.
ipsum2 15 minutes ago [-]
Off by one letter compared to "Roman", which is a GLP prescriber farm, but you already knew this :). Hoping for a lawsuit to boost your fame?
I guess I don’t look at company Wikipedia pages very often but this one seems particularly “written by corporate”.
joshgachnang 3 hours ago [-]
Hey, I love the idea and the fully integrated approach! The feedback loop sounds great, and overall far better than the pretty generic companies I've dealt with for GLP before.
I've led building an EHR totally from scratch at one company and currently advising another as they build their EHR, both totally integrated approaches in industries where you usually have lots of disconnected care (adolescent serious mental illness and ABA/autism care). The state-by-state regulatory challenges are very real! If you want to chat, my email is in my profile!
This is a really beautiful site. Thank you for sharing it.
I think the only thing that separates us is that we manufacture the drugs and probably own more of the supply chain than they do. But they're doing a much better job on the front end.
andsoitis 17 minutes ago [-]
You're welcome.
Yeah, they are pretty polished. But I've been with them for a few years and in the beginning their site was very much not polished, however, their products, service, and focus were a beacon.
zachthewf 2 hours ago [-]
Looks interesting. What's your plan on the legal front? Bet the company on the compounding lawsuits breaking in your favor, or do you have a backup plan?
BTW: when you say you manufacture the drugs, I assume that means you're buying from an API supplier, but do you actually mean you're synthesizing it yourself?
lloydarmbrust 2 hours ago [-]
We are co-manufacturing the API, and then we are bringing it in-house in the next 9 months.
The legal cutout that we have is on the personalization front, which is very well protected. The trick is that most compounders are not actually personalizing, and we are. Our feedback loop allows us to do real personalization on a week-by-week basis.
arjie 1 hours ago [-]
Familiar name. Same guy who made the masks during COVID-19?
derektank 1 hours ago [-]
Second paragraph, “During the pandemic, I built one of the largest mask manufacturing factories in the US”
arjie 36 minutes ago [-]
Haha, entirely my fault but the default font greys out the text so I always just click through to the site instead of reading the Launch HN / Show HN copy. Regardless, I will take my well-deserved brickbats.
defrost 1 hours ago [-]
Second paragraph:
The path to RonanRx is fairly unconventional. During the pandemic, I built one of the largest mask manufacturing factories in the US. We could make a million masks in a day. We converted raw polypropylene pellets into finished pallets of masks.
lloydarmbrust 38 minutes ago [-]
Yeah. Armbrust Inc. It's me.
Reubend 3 hours ago [-]
You manufacture the drugs yourself? That's impressive, and it feels like an interesting company.
Your website sucks though. We can tell you vibe coded it quickly and didn't put much thought into it.
lloydarmbrust 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, we incorporated the business 10 weeks ago, and we've been focusing everything on the infrastructure of the actual product people are getting.
These messages are very helpful, though, to help motivate me to get our team to fix this, so I do appreciate it.
mohamedkoubaa 2 hours ago [-]
I think you should focus on the fundamentals, this kind of feedback is inevitable and I'm sure you anticipated it anyways.
lloydarmbrust 2 hours ago [-]
Building a startup, everything is important, but you do have to stack rank. This is getting to the point where it's probably the most important thing. And it won't take that long to fix.
nyorai 60 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
didgeoridoo 3 hours ago [-]
Please have a human rewrite your site copy. Literally every second sentence is a Claudish rhetorical contrastive. Maybe shallow/unfair, but especially when dealing with something medical I’d love to know that it’s not slop all the way down.
andy99 21 minutes ago [-]
It’s funny, it’s obviously understandable why someone would vibe code a placeholder website, we’ve all probably done it. But I’m realizing a basic unstyled html thing with minimal copy is probably a better signal at this point for startups, it makes it clear you are still working on it rather than giving up the impression you might think your vibeslop is the finished product.
lloydarmbrust 3 hours ago [-]
Fair criticism. It is AI slop all the way down. The only thing we focused on was the clinical aspects of the onboarding and the technical ability to be able to legally write a prescription and make and ship drugs, which was very complicated. We were able to accomplish this in less than 10 weeks. But I have not had time to go through all the marketing, and I apologize.
tristanMatthias 3 hours ago [-]
Ironically even this comment feels AI generated :/
lloydarmbrust 2 hours ago [-]
My wife tells me all the time I sound like AI. I blame my childhood.
mapremap 1 hours ago [-]
I blame your fine-tuning.
lloydarmbrust 24 minutes ago [-]
She’s been doing supervised fine-tuning since 2017.
Rendered at 01:33:29 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Point taken that RUO people are just yoloing this, I was one of them. Now, I can tell you that having a doctor in the loop with my health is very helpful.
At the same time, nothing is stopping you from hiring a fractional medical director and doctors alongside NP. I ran the numbers and 50k is is all you need to get a service agreement with a compounding pharmacy, back office tasks, incorporation, social media marketing policy to essentially drop ship your product as you use off the shelf products for charting and then begin expanding state coverage.
The July Medicare glp1 coverage also makes this most opportune.
Biggest barrier I thought was / is the credit card processing. You need to carry a certification for that.
HIPAA not an issue, BAA with most orgs that offer a saas products.
So damn. The glue isn’t really hard. Really didn’t think this would qualify as an ycombinator mvp. But here I am used To pitch decks promising exponential growth of subscription for cloud services.
As for personalized peptides in general, are you going to be marketing non FDA approved ones?
Or just stick with what’s already popular, generic wegovy, zepbound, etc. the market seems highly thin as a new MSO appears everyday using smartiq alongside med spas that offer more questionable inpatient services.
While manufacturing controls supply chain / logistics, the external pressure from every compounding pharmacist scaling into peptides now makes me wonder the longevity abo it this. You can literally pop on subreddits and see the flavor of the month telemedicine practice offer teaser rates of $99 for 60mg/month tirezepatide.
Oh and not forgetting the elephant in the room, gray market and china manufacturing which allows anyone with a telegram account to directly order whatever chemical name they read with no doctor oversight. It’s what, sub $1/mg now from the major vendors for tirezepatide?
I was Stripe's first customer in 2010, so we solved the credit card processing issue :) it turns out that being in YC is good for more than just money.
You are right about HIPAA, everyone thinks this is much harder than it actually is, but GCP, OpenAI, Linq, everyone has given us a BAA.
We're definitely not trying to go after the market of people that are comfortable buying from Chinese suppliers and risking their health. When I built my mask factory, our masks were absolutely more expensive than Chinese masks, but what people were buying was a guarantee that it would meet certain filtration requirements. Some people are willing to pay for safety, but it's not important to everyone.
The only thing I really disagree with with you on is that this isn't a YC-scale company.
We are growing 56% compounded week -over-week, and I have every expectation we'll do $10 million this year, $100 million next.
We are making something that people are already buying and getting it to them in a safer, more cost-effective way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ro_(company)
I've led building an EHR totally from scratch at one company and currently advising another as they build their EHR, both totally integrated approaches in industries where you usually have lots of disconnected care (adolescent serious mental illness and ABA/autism care). The state-by-state regulatory challenges are very real! If you want to chat, my email is in my profile!
Good luck with your venture!
I think the only thing that separates us is that we manufacture the drugs and probably own more of the supply chain than they do. But they're doing a much better job on the front end.
Yeah, they are pretty polished. But I've been with them for a few years and in the beginning their site was very much not polished, however, their products, service, and focus were a beacon.
BTW: when you say you manufacture the drugs, I assume that means you're buying from an API supplier, but do you actually mean you're synthesizing it yourself?
The legal cutout that we have is on the personalization front, which is very well protected. The trick is that most compounders are not actually personalizing, and we are. Our feedback loop allows us to do real personalization on a week-by-week basis.
Your website sucks though. We can tell you vibe coded it quickly and didn't put much thought into it.
These messages are very helpful, though, to help motivate me to get our team to fix this, so I do appreciate it.