Launch HN: Fella (YC W20) – Tackling men's obesity using medication and coaching

Thanks Matt!

Few things:

1. As we said in the post, men represent only ~10% of those using weight management services in the US, despite representing ~50% of those with obesity. Pretty fascinating to reflect on the reasons why.

2. There are only ~5000 board-certified obesity doctors in the US, roughly one for every 70000 Americans.

3. Binge Eating Disorder is the most common eating disorder, and has above 20% clinical prevalence in those above 40 BMI.

Maybe most importantly: the bias towards willpower and the stigma against medical treatment for obesity (medication or surgery) is very real, especially among family doctors. This will change over the coming decade, but it's deeply routed.

Best intern we ever had ;)

Sweet what's the group you're part of? Sounds interesting.

It's obviously a great question about the focus on men, and something we think a lot about.

My take: the whole industry is focused on women, and there are already cool companies taking a medication approach with branding clearly focused on women: https://www.joincalibrate.com/, https://joinfound.com/, https://www.formhealth.co/

I'm a fan of what these folks are doing. But you speak to any Fellas (our name for our customers!) and they know those programs aren't aimed at them. Every week we hear something like "I'm fed up of being the only guy in the group".

From a business side, the bet we're taking is that if we manage to crack the messaging/framing/branding for the male audience, that's a great business. Plus how men think about their health is drastically changing as concepts of masculinity change, so the potential customer pool is growing rapidly.

In terms of future expansion: we don't know yet. At least not for the coming few years - there are a lot of bigger guys out there we want to help (35 million men have obesity)!

Interesting question. We're no longer coming at this from an ED angle - I could & should write a whole blog about this at some point! Quick take: tackling obesity from a wider health angle (metabolic health, psychological health, behavioral health) is more needed than a narrower focus.

A impressive co focused on serious, udner-eating EDs is https://equip.health/ if you're interested

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