Subversive · Sep 4How Honeydew is Reinventing Telehealth for Skincare
Targets severe acne and Accutane, the hard cases rivals skip, and treats a few thousand Accutane patients a month. Adding Florida after six months in New York doubled the business, acquisition is about 70% paid and 30% organic, and the first doctor visit needs no credit card. Next come eczema, psoriasis and lifetime skincare.
Tips
- Add more states quickly once a second market proves demand▶ 18:20Adding Florida doubled the business overnight, and going national has been transformational.
- Work with many small, authentic creators instead of one big influencer▶ 30:45The million-follower creator's video did not outperform $100 to $200 micro influencer videos.
- Let patients see a doctor before asking for a credit card▶ 35:24They have kept this policy for three and a half years, and other telehealth founders were surprised by it.
- Start with a narrow niche and the hardest version of the problem▶ 22:21Honeydew became the lowest cost provider in the nation for many of its medications through exclusive deals.
- Tailor onboarding to the intent of each acquisition channel▶ 34:50The team began only on Google and found Meta traffic behaved very differently once they launched it.
- Treat pricing and packaging as seriously as product market fit▶ 49:10David names pricing and packaging as his main focus for the next six months.
- Do not skip Google search if your problem has uncompetitive keywords▶ 27:36Google remains the largest channel despite most consumer companies defaulting to Meta.
- Show up personally in the subreddits where your customers ask questions▶ 28:10Customers have come directly from David's Reddit engagement.
- Use real people in ads for trust-sensitive healthcare products▶ 32:25They use Upfluence as a creator engagement platform and rely heavily on manual DMing.
- Use an LLM to route inbound patient messages by owner and urgency▶ 43:05David says health tech enabled services are now investable thanks to this kind of efficiency.
- Buy commoditized AI diagnostic tools instead of building them▶ 42:27Such tools already have great accuracy and adoption is happening today.
- Plan provider hiring ahead because demand swings daily but hiring is slow▶ 20:15For eight weeks in a row they offered same or next day availability to over 90% of the country.
- Expect national scale to mean fifty smaller companies of state rules▶ 16:09One Texas application took six months and was rejected, requiring a letter about a gap year 30 years ago.
- Skip gimmicky offline acquisition experiments in a single state▶ 18:00Zero signups in a full month at the mall booth.
- Expand from the core condition into lifetime skincare and adjacent conditions▶ 38:10Early experiments on deeper services show good results.
- Offer a cash price when insurance makes the prescription unaffordable▶ 23:40Over a third of prescriptions for derm conditions are never picked up.
- Build the product and operations before heavy investment in marketing▶ 25:37Current acquisition mix is roughly 70 percent paid and 30 percent organic.
