Hims Won't Let Go of Its Wonder Drug

The shape-shifting telehealth company has spent the past year trying to cash in on GLP-1s, the hottest drug to hit weight loss in decades. It could all slip away.  By Madison Muller and Devin Leonard

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hymns won't let go of its wonder drug. The shape
shifting telehealth company has spent the past year trying to
cash in on GLP one's, the hottest drug to hit
weight loss in decades. It could all Slip Away by
Madison Muller and Devon Leonard read aloud by Mark Leedorf.

(00:21):
George's Doughnuts and Merriment is the kind of spot locals
line up outside on the weekend where you can order
a flight of fry to order sugar dusted doughnut holes
served with Valona chocolate fudge sauce. On this sunny morning
in March, the French bestro style cafe in San Francisco's
West Portal neighborhood is bustling with stroller pushing moms eyeing

(00:41):
the glass case filled with treats including strawberry champagne, brioche,
and buttermilk old fashioned cake doughnuts. This hedonist destination also
happens to be the co creation of Andrew Doodam, chief
executive officer of the telehealth company Hymns and Hers Health,
which for more than a year has been selling GLP
one's America's most coveted weight loss drugs. Doodam, a fit,

(01:06):
meticulously groomed thirty seven year old, is sitting at the
white marble counter wearing a corduroy baseball cap, a quilted jacket,
and off white converse sneakers, digging into a cottage cheese
parfe while playing with chat GPT on his phone. He's
been asking the app questions such as can I leave
chicken out for three hours? And Viking stock price analysis.

(01:29):
Viking Therapeutics is a San Diego based company developing its
own weight loss shots. Doodam himself a GLP one microdoser.
According to Silicon Valley longevity devotees, the drugs can potentially
increase your Lifespan has also loaded his labs into chat GPT,
asking it for health advice so he can become super optimized.

(01:52):
He and his wife Leah opened George's in January. Turns
out it's a lot harder to make money from donuts
than from weight loss drugs. Thank god we have our
other jobs, he says. It's the other job that in
recent months has been the topic of fervid conversation, disdain,
and intrigue among any number of groups. Pharmaceutical companies, short sellers,

(02:14):
Meme stock investors, MAHA or Make America Healthy Again leaders,
and of course, those trying to find an affordable way
to shed a few pounds. Doodam launched Hymns in twenty
seventeen as an Instagram inspired telehealth start up that would
fill a void in the fragmented US healthcare system, enabling
customers to buy drugs on a subscription basis almost as

(02:37):
easily as they could purchase razor blades from Dollar Shave Club. Today,
Hymns is a public company that last year had two
point two million subscribers, one and a half billion dollars
in annual revenue, and in early July a market value
of almost eleven billion dollars. Hymns started by offering generic

(02:57):
viagra and rogaine, two of the most popular drugs in
recent history, in pursuit of millennial guise too chagrined to
seek in person council from a physician about their hairline
or bedroom performance. Hyms bedecked New York subway cars and
the walls above urinals in San Francisco with intentionally cringey
tough to turn away from ads such as those featuring

(03:19):
a cactus rising from its Planter Doodam corralled celebrities to
sell the company's pills and creams, and provided other products
people might prefer to have home delivered in a plain
brown wrapper, a Climax delaying spray, for example, or its
omg ring couple's vibrator with twenty five different pulsating modes

(03:40):
for the twenty six year old male who may have
self doubt issues because of some condition, whether its stress
induced or hereditary. Hims's ability to help solve that has
been very successful, says Michael Cherney, an analyst a healthcare
investment bank leeringc partners in true Silicon Valley fashion. Hymns
pivoted whenever possible to the next hot product, providing COVID

(04:03):
nineteen tests during the pandemic and later online therapy and
generic prozac. Then last year the company entered the blistering
GLP one weight loss drug market. Demand for Novo Nordisk's
we gov and Eli Lilly's zep bound so outstripped supply
that the US Food and Drug Administration temporarily allowed what

(04:23):
are known as compounding pharmacies to brew their own versions
using virtually the same ingredients. Historically, all drugs were effectively compounded,
meaning pharmacists mixed them up from raw ingredients themselves, but
with the advent of the modern pharmaceutical industry, the process
moved into highly regulated facilities. Still, the FDA didn't worry

(04:46):
if small pharmacies customized drugs for individual patients, such as
children who could more easily swallow a syrup than a pill,
but by the early two thousands, much larger compounding operations
had sprung up. THEDA allows these facilities to make copies
of commercially available drugs in the case of shortages with
GLP ones, compounding pharmacies found themselves with a rare and

(05:09):
lucrative opportunity. They could churn out these drugs for telehealth
companies that sold them to patients at steep discounts. The
market was flooded with copycat medicines, even though they'd never
gone through the FDA's approval process. On the day in
May twenty twenty four that Dudam announced Hymns would sell
its own compounded version of week GOV for one hundred

(05:31):
and ninety nine dollars a month, as opposed to thirteen
hundred and fifty dollars for the brand name drug. Its
stock shot up almost forty percent. Unlike most of its
telehealth rivals, Hymns already owned two compounding pharmacies. Next, it
s meant thirty one million dollars to purchase the third one,
which would allow it to manufacture its own injectable products

(05:52):
such as GLP ones. Then, in February, Hymns acquired another
manufactory facility for an undisclosed amount so it could produce
some of the key ingredients in its weight loss shots,
giving it the ability to make them from start to finish.
As far as Dodam was concerned, compounded glp ones were
here to stay, and Hyms was all in. The company

(06:14):
doesn't disclose its g LP one sales, but Morgan Stanley
says that in the fourth quarter of twenty twenty four,
they accounted for thirty percent of its total four hundred
and eighty one million dollars in revenue. The Investment Bank
estimates Hymns was responsible for as much as twenty percent
of the prescriptions for compounded GLP ones in the US
during that period. It seemed, however, there was no way

(06:37):
Hyms's new growth engine was going to last. Novo was
spending billions of dollars to boost its manufacturing capacity. How
long would it be before it made enough of zempic
and we goovy to end the shortach? Not long, it
turned out. Hyms shares had soared to an all time
high of nearly sixty nine dollars this past February. Then,

(06:58):
the same month, the FDA declared the shortage over, Novo
could make enough of its medicine to meet demand, giving
pharmacies that were compounding it sixty to ninety days to
wind down their GLP one operations. Him's shares tumbled even
as Dudam assured investors the post shortage situation wasn't a disaster.

(07:19):
Part of Hims's pitch is what he calls personalization, meaning
it takes drugs already on the market, such as Viagra,
turns them into chewable tablets, adds winter green flavoring Taylor's Dosages,
and voila. The result is its cheekily named hard mints.
Doudam argued that as long as the company kept customizing
its GLP ones, everything would be fine, but he wasn't

(07:43):
leaving anything to chance. He's courted President Donald Trump's administration,
trying to ingratiate himself with Health and Human Services Secretary
Robert F. Kennedy Junior, the chief standard bearer of the
vaccine skeptical food die loathing MAHA movement. RFK Junior has
questioned the need to prescribe glp ie medications for weight loss.

(08:04):
But perhaps Dudam's attempts to position Hymns as an anti
pharma agitator might help persuade the FDA not to come
down on the company if it continued selling compounded drugs
after the shortage was over. Our FK Junior has come
in as a force of change, says Alex Beinfield, founder
of Blue Duck Capital Partners and of Bullish Hymns investor.

(08:26):
What other force of change is there within the industry
at this point in time, I would argue that it's Hymns. Meanwhile,
Dudam also went ahead and wooed some of the very
pharmaceutical companies he's demonized. In April, he announced a partnership
with Novo to sell we Govi at a discount, saying
it validated his long held assertion that Hymns wasn't just

(08:47):
doing to drug stores what Warby Parker had done to
your local optometrist. It was building a futuristic portal, one
he promised would be the new front door to healthcare.
By late June, however, what had seemed from the start
and unlikely union imploded spectacularly, with Novo accusing Hims of
the selling of illegitimate knock off versions of WEGOVI that

(09:10):
put patient safety at risk. Doudam fired back on X
that the Danish company was misleading the public. All of
it raised the question of whether Hymns is in fact
the future of anything. Dudam had wanted to become an
investment banker, but after arriving at the University of Pennsylvania's
Wharton School in two thousand and seven, he realized he

(09:32):
was lousy at accounting and detested excel, so he settled
on start ups. The San Francisco native had always been
a high achiever, at one point during his childhood performing
cello at Carnegie Hall. In high school, he released his
own tunes online, including a Christian pop single Fall from
Grace that begins It's a Beautiful Thing when the Angels

(09:55):
Fly You to the sky. Wharton at the time was
a breeding ground for the creators of direct consumer startups,
including Warby Parker and All Birds, which did end runs
around retailers with their hip websites. In twenty thirteen, with
backing from prominent tech investors like Peter Teel and Mark
and Dreesen, Dudam and a fellow, Wartengrad, founded Atomic Labs,

(10:19):
a San Francisco startup incubator. Atomic would create numerous companies
in industries including real estate, financial technology, and artificial intelligence,
yet they've all been eclipsed by Hymns, which would ultimately
become Doudam's sole focus. He traces its origins to his
two sisters, excoriating him for failing to take better care

(10:40):
of his face than dragging him shopping, where he dropped
three hundred dollars on fancy French lotions. His befettlement, along
with the amount of money he spent, inspired what he's
described as Hymns's raisondetre, making life easier for guys at
a loss. When it comes to self care, there were
plenty of other reasons to get into direct to consumer

(11:02):
health care. States were loosening their telemedicine laws, making it
easier for companies to offer drugs online. Generic Viagra would
soon be available. Surely, there was money to be made
from providing an in house version, priced at a premium
that customers would be willing to pay in exchange for
the ease of skipping a trip to the doctor and
having their drugs mailed directly to their door. Hymns would

(11:25):
lure customers with a minimalist, pastel hued website, an esthetic
designed by a branding firm that had worked for Warby Parker.
The site's racy tone blended empowerment and droll self deprecation,
and its male models, recruited from Brooklyn's Green Point neighborhood,
appeared to be enjoying a new standard of masculine self fulfillment,

(11:46):
shampooing their hair, cleansing their faces, basking in post cooedal bliss.
To handle the actual prescriptions, Hymns enlisted a network of
physicians to prescribe drugs. Virtually A lot of people would
ask me, is this legal? Says Melissa Baird, Hims's former
chief operating officer and now an advisor to the company.

(12:07):
We'd be like, yes, yes, it's legal. We have a
lot of lawyers telling us that. A year after launching
Hymns in November twenty seventeen, Dudam started Hers, which offered
birth control pills, dermatologic treatments, hair loss products, and Addie,
a controversial pill intended to stimulate the female libido. He
also wrangled celebrity endorsements puffing weed and eating Popeyes with

(12:31):
Snoop Dogg, who subsequently appeared as a cartoon character in
a Hymns ad for erectile dysfunction. Dudam also dined at
the home of the then engaged power couple Jennifer Lopez
and former MLB All star Alex Rodriguez, tapping them in
twenty nineteen to promote Hymns and Hers skincare products. Other
celebs eventually included Miley Cyrus and NFL legend Rob Gronkowski.

(12:56):
As anybody who's searched for Hymns online and then been
stalked by its ads knows, the company is a relentless advertiser.
It spent fifty nine million dollars forty percent of its
total revenue on marketing in twenty twenty, amassing about two
hundred and ninety thousand subscribers by the end of the year,
but its business practices also came under criticism. The FDA

(13:19):
requires pharmaceutical ads to include a list of potential side effects.
HEMS didn't bother with any such cumbersome verbiage, and its
ads for ed and hair loss treatments, saying it was
marketing a brand rather than specific medications, pretty much the
mantra it would continue to use with critics over the years.
Then there was the ease with which its customers were

(13:40):
able to obtain drugs. There was something to be said
for simplifying the process scheduling an appointment with your doctor,
getting a prescription, waiting at the drug store, worrying about insurance,
but Hems reduced it to little more than a box
checking exercise. In twenty twenty, Bloomberg BusinessWeek reported that six
current and former doctors working for Hymns said the company

(14:02):
saw them as marketers whose job was to keep its
sales figures growing. I don't feel like I'm practicing medicine,
one of them said, I'm just serving the company selling
their products. Hyms said then and says now, that it
never interferes with its doctor's decisions. Once the pandemic arrived,
demand for telehealth services exploded, so did opportunities for such

(14:26):
companies to go public. In twenty twenty one, HYMS did
just that in a special purpose acquisition company deal with
oak Tree Acquisition, valuing it at one point six billion
dollars and opening at ten dollars a share. By the
end of the year, Hyms's stock price dropped to around
six dollars, and it remained mired in the single digits

(14:46):
for much of the next two years. Doodam didn't have
to worry about losing his job he owned the majority
of Hims's voting shares, but selling healthcare directly to consumers
wasn't as simple as providing them with razors. Investors didn't
seem particularly impressed with Hyms's continuing pursuit of the latest
celebrities or its unveiling in twenty twenty three of AI

(15:09):
powered intelligent diagnostics. Then there was the company's emphasis on
what it describes as customizing drugs for individual users, in
which it tweaks widely used ones. We do personalized doses
for almost fifty percent of our offerings, Patrick Carroll, hims's
chief medical officer, told Business Week last year, but not

(15:31):
even putting Viagra into an easy to take winter green
mint or making modified blends of its Lopez endorsed hair
loss foam seem to move the stock. We'll be right
back with Hyms. Won't let go of its wonder drug.
Welcome back to Hyms. Won't let go of its wonder drug.

(15:53):
Almost everything else was rising, Hyms's subscriber numbers, its revenue,
and of course, its annual marketing budget. But Doodam needed
something that would get Shares out of the doldrums. The
GLP one craze was in full effect and hundreds of
thousands of people were already buying the drugs online by
the time Hymns finally announced it would sell its compounded

(16:14):
weight loss shots in May of last year. Doodam said
one of the reasons Hymns took so long was that
he wanted to make sure it would have enough supply
to meet demand. If we don't after a month or two,
it's a brand risk, he told Business Week at the time.
That wasn't the only risk. Compounders were allowed to step
in to make copycat drugs only during an FDA declared

(16:37):
shortage as a stop gap, but there was never a
question that Lily and Novo would eventually resolve their supply issues,
thus closing the regulatory door to the compounders. Doudam however,
saw another loophole. While Hymns would start selling compounded GLP
ones that had identical doses to the brand name versions,
it would also offer personalized shots with dough u is

(17:00):
adjusted for patients as specified by a doctor. That meant
once the FDA declared the shortage over, Doodham said there
was nothing to stop Hymns from continuing to sell the
latter GLP ones the personalized dosage we expect to be
able to offer indefinitely, he said last August. Several months later,
Hyms added an ex FDA Deputy commissioner to its board

(17:23):
who'd written compounding rules for the agency to help make sure.
As Doodam puts it, the company was extremely blue chip
in its regulatory approach. If it misjudged the situation, the
company warned investors in its filings with the u S
Securities and Exchange Commission, it could face legal enforcement actions,
including injunction seizure, civil fine, and criminal penalties. Doudham's appetite

(17:48):
for risk was catnip for short sellers like Paul Sarrow,
founder of Cedar Grove Capital Management, previously a strategy analyst
at Rowe. Himms's chief competitor, he's no longer involved with
the company. Sarah first bought HIMS shares last year, planning
to hold them long term. He says he changed his
mind after hearing Doodam talk about how Hymns would still

(18:10):
be able to sell compounded GLP ones once the shortage
was over. When you're disrupting healthcare, you have to push
the boundaries a little bit. Emphasis on a little bit,
he says, as soon as you cross a line, you
end up going to jail. But once Hyms's share spiked
after its fory into weight loss drugs, it became the

(18:31):
darling of a different investing set, memestock day traders, much
like the ones who bid up Game Stop and AMC
Entertainment during the pandemic. To them, Hyms's willingness to challenge
the status quo was a David and Goliath story, With
news seemingly coming every other week. There were plenty of
twists and turns to keep track of, and Jonathan Stern,

(18:52):
a thirty year old software engineer, was up for the task.
In August, he quit his job to start Hym's House,
part stock trading tip Hub, meme swapping forum, and Fanboy Clubhouse,
which now includes a substack newsletter, a lively discord chat room,
and a podcast devoted to all things Hymns. Participants parse

(19:14):
the company's stock price fluctuations, its provocative ads, and every
announcement it makes, including its ever changing ed offerings, most
recently its five in one SEXRX plus hair health pill.
Dear God lol LLLLL wrote someone under the handled Nighthawk
about the seemingly magical male curle Med, a Discord user

(19:37):
who goes by Apollo, recently sent Stern a wheel of
Parmesan cheese from his farm in northern Italy. He was
just so grateful, Stern, says. Stern, who oversees his online
community from his apartment in Manhattan's East Village, speaks worshipfully
of Doodom, who he says has skyscraper ambitions and a
real chance of disrupting the multi trillion dollar healthcare indo

(20:01):
relishing his newfound meme lord status. Dudam appeared on the
Hymns House podcast early this year. You all have some
of the best questions out there, he told Stern and
his co host Patrick Lester, a Washington lobbyist and fellow
Hymns enthusiast. If you guys are looking for jobs at
major banks or anywhere. Let me know. Doodam's podcast appearance

(20:22):
was soon followed by Hyms booster and convicted felon Martin Screlley,
famous for running a company that acquired an anti parasitic
drug and then raised the price by five thousand percent.
Screlley said he's been super impressed by Hyms. I know
the GLP one space like the back of my hand,
he said, because I am the pharma bro. Shortly after,

(20:45):
Mark Cuban, the billionaire former Shark Tank judge now steering
the Mark Cuban cost Plus drug company, a start up
selling discounted generics, showed up on the podcast saying Hymns
was doing a good job, but he has reservations about
its foray into copycat weight loss shots, something cost Plus
decided against. We chose not to because I don't want

(21:07):
to be in a position where I'm getting sued by
Lily or Novo. Cuban said. It's still a gray area
and there's no way around it. In October, the FDA
declared the shortage of ter zeppetide, the main ingredient in
Lily's drug zep bound over that didn't affect hymns. It

(21:28):
had never sold copycat versions of Lily's weight loss drugs,
but with Novo ramping up production, it was only a
matter of time before the agency did the same for
the main ingredient of its drugs, semic glutide. Ideally, Dudam
needed the regulator to delay a decision as long as possible,
if not indefinitely. That seemed unlikely under the outgoing Joe

(21:48):
Biden administration, but perhaps the incoming Trump White House would
be more accommodating. Trump and Dudam might have seemed like
unlikely allies. Dudam, the grandson of Palestinian immigrants, had written
a post earlier in the year on x decrying Israel's
genocide in its invasion of Gaza and lionizing pro Palestine

(22:09):
campus demonstrators, some of whom have been accused of fomenting
anti Semitism. Keep going, Dudam urged them, it's working. Hyms
shares tumbled, and he soon deleted the post, saying his
remarks had been misconstrued. Meanwhile, the President elect would soon
endorse a plan to clear the Gaza strip and turn
it into what he promised would be the Riviera of

(22:31):
the Middle East. Although Trump's soon to be Health secretary
RFK Junior was hardly an ozembic fan, he was itching
to shake up the FDA, which he called a suck
puppet of Big Pharma. HIMS donated one million dollars to
the returning president's inauguration That resulted in a flood of
negative comments about Dudam's recently opened donut shop on Facebook

(22:54):
and YELP. I know some folks will just want to
go eat donuts and forget about the whole mess, But
person I can't and won't, vowed a columnist in a
local food newsletter called Tablehopper. That's not why I live
in San Francisco, but the seven figure contribution might have
been well spent. In January, Doudam posted a photo on

(23:15):
x of Baird, then the company COO, smiling beside RFK
Junior at a party following Trump's swearing in. Dudam praised
Trump's and RFK Junior's shared commitment with Hymns to vanquish
one of the nation's deadliest diseases. Let's start addressing the
root causes of conditions like obesity and put the power
back in the hands of the individual patient. Doudam wrote.

(23:38):
The following month, Hymns dropped a sixteen million dollar ad
during the Super Bowl, replete with MAHA laced grievances as
childish gambinos, this is America, throbs. The screen flashes with
grainy images of protruding bellies, junk foods spilling from convenience
store shelves, supermarket tabloids, pedaling bikini body diets, ozempic style injectors,

(24:00):
and one hundred dollars bills spewing from a money printing machine.
This system wasn't built to help us, the narrator says,
it was built to keep us sick and stuck, but
not anymore. The imagery brightens as a woman collects a
brown box at her doorstep from Hymns containing a weight
loss drug described as affordable, doctor trusted, and made in

(24:22):
the USA. The narrator's voice softens. This is the future
of healthcare in America. Outrage swiftly ensued Pharmaceutical Research and
Manufacturers of America, the industry's chief lobbying group, branded the
ad misleading and deceptive. Two US senators, Illinois Democrat Dick

(24:42):
Durbin and Kansas Republican Roger Marshall called on the FDA
to reprimand Hymns for failing to disclose the possible side
effects of its drugs, such as vomiting and diarrhea. The
FDA didn't reprimand the company, and a Hymns spokesperson says
the ad did not advertise one treatment or solution, but
aimed to raise awareness. Social media erupted with complaints accusing

(25:05):
Hymns of fat shaming. Worse, perhaps for Doudom, the Maha
crowd was less than thrilled with the commercial. Mark Hyman,
the health and longevity guru and a longtime friend of Dudam's,
bemoaned to the commercial on Instagram. The cure for obesity
isn't semiglutide. It's fixing our food system, so corporations stop
profiting from making us sick and addicted. But that won't

(25:28):
make the Super Bowl ads, will it? CALLI Means, a
Maha movement leader and White House Health policy adviser, posted
on x that HEMS was an evil company that is
illegally misleading consumers. Hims says. Doudam later tried to smooth
things over with Means. Others see his company's efforts to
stir up controversy as a familiar strategy employed by the

(25:51):
likes of Uber and Airbnb. The playbook is exploit the
gray area and build a user base, says Jeffrey Parker,
a professor at dart With College and co author of
Platform Revolution. Then once there's a threat of regulatory backlash,
use the people who are benefiting to try to change
the regulation. In late February, the FDA declared the Semaglue

(26:13):
tide shortage over, and HIM said it would soon be
ending the sale of its brand name Strength Shots. As
the company's shares plummeted, some of its GLP one customers panicked,
assuming they'd no longer be getting theirs. Are you effing
kidding me? One posted on Reddit. I literally just signed
up and got my first injections last week. I am pissed.

(26:35):
I'm literally crying from frustration, wrote another. When some of
them messaged Hims, however, they were told they were receiving
personalized doses and therefore nothing would change. Meanwhile, Doodam cashed
in ten million dollars of his own shares just before
the ruling came down. Him says Doudam has a pre
established trading plan that triggers stock sales. Speaking with Business

(26:59):
Wen in March in San Francisco, Dudam is hardly contrite.
He argues that investors who dumped his company's stock after
the FDA decision, most likely institutional ones and not the
true believers, are failing to discern the obvious Hymns. He says,
is building a completely different distribution model for the healthcare
industry that will transform it as sweepingly as Netflix has

(27:22):
done with Hollywood. He accuses Novo and Lily of behaving
like movie studios that tried to prevent blockbuster films from
being shown on Netflix, even though that's what the public wanted.
It didn't stop Netflix, Dudom says, and it won't stop Hymns.
Everyone's just getting lost in the weeds, he says, means
the MAHA hardliner disagrees. It's just a distribution channel, he

(27:47):
says of Hymns in an April interview with BusinessWeek, It's
not innovative. The reality was Dudam needed the drugs. According
to Bloomberg's Second Measure data compiled from National Credit and
Debit Kardak activity, hims's year over year sales growth has
been falling In the month since the FDA decision, HIMS
submitted documentation to the regulator showing its customers still couldn't

(28:10):
get the real GLP ones, arguing the shortage wasn't really over.
We have thousands of people telling us that every day,
Doodam says, we're sharing that data with the FDA. Other
telehealth companies are making similar please. IVM Health, which bills
itself as the number one rated weight loss provider, has
enlisted first term Trump administration Press Secretary Sean Spicer to

(28:34):
help make its case. Spicer says that in the hope
of shedding some pounds, he tried to buy some brand
name drugs, which was impossible until he teamed with IVAM
and started using its compounded version of zepbound. He warns
that if the FDA doesn't allow such knockoffs, people in
his position are going to turn to the black market.
It's a no brainer, Spicer says, to me, it's a

(28:56):
test of whether there's a willingness to take on big pharma. Hymns,
IVIM and others seem to be pinning their hopes on
Trump's FDA Commissioner Marty Macery. He was previously Chief Medical
officer of Sesame, a telehealth company that once sold compounded
GLP one's, but whether that means a more laisy a
faire approach on his watch remains to be seen. The

(29:19):
agency is concerned about the proliferation of compounded GLP one drugs,
an FDA spokesperson said in a statement, pointing to dosing
errors that can arise when patients use this syringe to
self administer the medicines, as is the case with compounded versions.
Compounded drugs should only be used in patients whose medical
needs cannot be met by an FDA approved drug. Doodam

(29:42):
says HYMNS has been having good conversations with the Trump administration,
but drug compounding isn't at the top of its priority list.
The core focus is on vaccines and autism. He says,
everything else has been relatively frozen. A Health and Human
Services Department spokesperson calls this false. In the meantime, Doodam

(30:03):
tried working with the very pharmaceutical companies he was disparaging.
HYMNS failed to forge a partnership with Lily, then opted
not to sell its drug at the discounted price, instead
marking it up at roughly three times what patients without
insurance would pay. You'd have to work really hard to
come up with a worse deal, says Brian Read, a

(30:23):
communications consultant focused on drug pricing. Lily moved quickly to
distance itself from Hymns, issuing a statement that it had
no affiliation with the telehealth company. A Lily spokesperson says
it has been unable to find a compatible relationship with
Hymns given Doodam's stance on unlawful compounding. Doodam had better

(30:44):
luck with Novo, which has been desperately seeking ways to
claw back market share from arch rival Lily. In April,
Hymns and Novo announced a partnership that would allow Hims
to offer a month's supply of week go Ovi for
five hundred ninety nine dollars, about half its US list price.
It was more than double what Hyms has been selling
compounded GLP once for, but for Doodom this was a

(31:08):
sign the drug makers would finally be coming to the
table because of his company's superior distribution system. This announcement
is really the beginning of our organizations working together on
what could be a very broad road map over many years,
many markets, many countries and many different types of product
categories and treatments. He said at the time, the two

(31:28):
companies had been spending quite a bit of time together
sharing meals over the past few months, and were culturally aligned,
Doodam said. Early on, though, there were signs something was
amiss when HEMS competitors Life MD and ROW issued a
press release with Novo saying they'd be offering the drugs
at a lower introductory price. Hyms scrambled to announce an

(31:50):
even cheaper deal for customers who pay upfront for the treatment.
It wasn't clear why Novo would permit Hymns to sell
real wegovi while the telehealth company still offered a faux
version it claimed was personalized. According to FDA regulations, some
pharmacies can continue to sell such compounds if they're produced
in limited amounts. Lilly had recently sued telehealth companies for

(32:14):
allegedly selling mass produced imitations of its drugs while claiming
they were the small batch stuff, and Novao would shortly
do the same, dismaying the compounding industry. Compounder stelling scripts
for custom formulations for individual patients is perfectly legal, says
Scott Brunner. CEO of the Alliance for Pharmacy, compounding the

(32:36):
industry's trade association, the drug makers should be ashamed of themselves.
Even so, investors took the Novo deal as a sign
Hymns was safe, at least for the time being. Its
shares rallied, and by May the same month, Hymns laid
off four percent of its workforce. Dudam officially became a billionaire.

(32:56):
At a downtown Manhattan event space in mid June, Hymns's quieter,
female centric brand, Hers welcomed beauty influencers, models and press
with green Apple vodka cocktails and Jalapeno Margarita's for the
launch of its first of its kind prescription hair loss gummies.
As guests wandered over to the blowout bar and picked

(33:18):
up custom embroidered silk pillowcases, they sampled placebo versions of
the green apple flavored gummies. Women really drive the narrative
of healthcare. Hers chief medical officer Jessica Shepherd told Business
Week at the event, I would expect that Hers can
be at the same level of Hymns, or even push
past that. A daily prescription gummy made with the hair

(33:40):
loss drug monoxidil and the vitamin biotin is hardly a breakthrough.
Monoxidil is generic rogain. Monoxidil is generic rogain, something Hymns
has been selling since its inception in pills, chewables, and
topical sprays. It's also readily available from other telehealth providers.
The new offering is similar to a lot of the

(34:01):
other items Hymns is pitching as part of its future pipeline.
No matter how zealously Doodam describes them, AI diagnostics, home
lab testing, testosterone, none of them is particularly novel among
telehealth companies. Less than a week after the gummy splash,
Novo issued a press release concerning its partnership with Hymns.

(34:23):
The Danish company accused HIMS of engaging in illegal mass
compounding of its copycat Wegovi under the false guise of personalization.
Novo executives said they'd expected Hymns to bring this to
a halt. Unfortunately it didn't stop. Ludovig Healthgott, executive vice
president for product and portfolio strategy, told Bloomberg News, that's

(34:45):
why we ended the partnership. Doodham says it all came
as a surprise to him. Hours later, he responded with
an ex post accusing the drug maker of pressuring his
company to steer patients to Wegovy over its personalized options. Yeah.
Deutsche Bank analysts wrote that when they perused the Hems website,
it was difficult for us to find a pathway that

(35:07):
led to the Novo branded product as opposed to the
Hymns compounded product. Hyms's shares plunged thirty five percent, erasing
four hundred and fifty million dollars of Doodam's net worth,
according to Bloomberg Billionaire's Index calculations. The next day, though,
Dudam is surprisingly serene. Maybe it's because he's in Maui.

(35:28):
I've got three babies running around naked near the pool.
I'm just making sure no one drowns, he says, Family
Vaca this week, which has turned out to be an
interesting set of days to take off. Doudam had recently
hired executives from Amazon and Memestock Maven Robinhood and told
investors Hymns will generate six point five billion dollars in

(35:49):
revenue by twenty thirty. Poolside over off camera Zoom, he
says that Hymns will continue selling compounded we GOVI, and
that it will be personalized for individual use, like practically
everything else the company sells. As for the Novo deal,
he says it fell apart because Novo wasn't ready for
this brave new world where its drugs will inevitably be

(36:11):
sold alongside more inexpensive versions. They've been losing a tremendous
amount of market share, he says, this is public right,
a huge amount of turmoil with management turnover, and I
think they're just under real financial strain to try to
drive sales. Doudom isn't worried about consequences. They might take

(36:31):
legal action, he says. Others might take legal action again
when things are hurting their bottom line. In this way,
people do all types of things. As for his take
on Lily, Lily's a three headed beast. It's hard to
understand them. They're a little more slippery than most would like.
He insists that one day soon the drug makers will

(36:52):
come around. Over time, I think they'll see this is
where the future is going. Doodom is willing that future
to come as soon as possible. After it realized Novo's
ozembic patent in Canada would soon lapse. Hymns pounced, announcing
it would soon be selling a generic version there. It
will be years before Novo's patents expire in the US,

(37:14):
But perhaps Doudam is banking on regulatory non enforcement. The
FDA is being gutted, says Nathan Cortes, co director of
the side Center for Law Science and Innovation at Southern
Methodist University, referring to widespread agency cuts. If you're a
company regulated by the FDA and you're doing something that

(37:34):
might push the boundaries, you're not as worried as you
would be when the FDA is fully staffed. Hyms says
none of this influence is how it operates its business,
while the FDA says agency changes won't affect its ability
to protect the public. In the meantime, devotees on the
Hymns House discord have their eyes peeled for Donham's next

(37:54):
stock triggering move. They plan to meet in New York
when shares hit one hundred dollars. As of mid July,
they were below fifty dollars, but it will take more
than that to shake their faith. As long as there
is momentum, we hold night Hawk posted earlier this year,
Unless Andrew is in prison with Jessica Nix and Biz Carson,