Million Dollar First Week

A story about how Hims achieved $1M in sales their first week through deep customer research and understanding.

"The way we did that, reflecting on it, was having a very solid understanding of the type of guy we were going after, the messaging that worked, type of brand that resonated, and the type of offering we knew they wanted to buy.

While people say we did a million dollars in our first week, they think we launched and suddenly people started running towards us. That's where there's a big education gap. In fact, there was probably two and a half years before that when we were really understanding our person. We were getting customer insights, talking to men, asking them about how it made them feel to be losing their hair, struggling sexually, or feeling like they didn't have energy.

Some key insights were that stigma is a huge problem. There's this concept of men being too tough to take care of themselves, brushing it off - this toxic masculinity that we had to crush as a brand to encourage people to take care of themselves.

There's also the telemedicine component. I'm the last person who wants to go to doctors, and I'll really only go if I'm bleeding from the head or have broken an arm. So if I could make that easier from my phone - 90% of our orders take place on mobile devices - talk to a physician, click buttons, answer questions, take photos, and then get access to the things I needed, that makes it simple.

While we had an incredible first week, I don't want to undervalue the fact that it was probably 2 years of work to understand the customer in order to launch on that day and say we have a high degree of confidence what we're launching people are going to love because we've been talking to them for a really long time."