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A.I. Helped One Man (and His Brother) Build a $1.8B Company
81–90 of 91 posts
Re: A.I. Helped One Man (and His Brother) Build a $1.8B Company
#82"That gave Matthew Gallagher breathing room to fix some shortcuts he had initially taken, like swapping out the before-and-after weight-loss photos for ones from real customers. Some photos on Medvi’s homepage remain A.I.-generated." Cool, another scammy internet company preying on people's insecurities. Glad the NY Times spent the effort to tell us about it and didn't spend any time questioning this company [1]. [1]…
I’m pretty sure the writer included this and other details precisely so that readers would understand the ethics of this company.
> I’m pretty sure the writer included this and other details precisely so that readers would understand the ethics of this company.
Maybe, but it felt like this was meant to support the idea that the company is scrappy / under construction.
Re: A.I. Helped One Man (and His Brother) Build a $1.8B Company
#83help me understand this. This guy is dropshipping glp-1's from a company that has a network(?) of trusted vendors which they get from the big pharma companies. And now he's doing the dropshipping thing of building a brand I'm highly suspicious of these revenue claims because how is he doing any of the marketing? Tiktok bans you if you post ugc content saying anything about peptides. FB doesn't allow medicine to be ma…
It's in the article—he buys advertising on news sites. They claim to have verified his financials
Re: A.I. Helped One Man (and His Brother) Build a $1.8B Company
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it a problem? Bc I know there is survivorship bias and also still want to hear about the successes, so what is the problem then?
How many readers don’t know that? And how many fall for the false reasoning of those success stories?
You are assuming most readers are dumb. I do not have that assumption.
Re: A.I. Helped One Man (and His Brother) Build a $1.8B Company
#85So if I understand this correctly, Medvi is basically a frontend to white label telehealth services, with wildly successful targeting on an exact niche (GLP-1 served online).
So the 1.8B is effectively sales on a lead-generation opportunity where he gets to capture 20% of the sale (assuming that since his net profits are 16%), and then the backend guys do all the work and probably profit the remaining bit, assuming this line of business has ~50% margins, to these companies doing the actual work they're basically spending 20% on sales and marketing to Medvi. Because this is subscription-based, most of the costs are acquisition, and preventing churn (which is why he hired 7 contractors).
As another poster mentioned - basically this guy is dropshipping GLP1 with no moat, and my guess is that he was keeping quiet and making money till the market got saturated and now he gets to use his success as a puff piece to parlay into a bunch of other verticals like supplements, mealprep, and all that.
This guy's success is basically predicated upon him managing the branding and experience -- so good for him, but this is a middleman opportunity that is likely already going away due to me-toos (and that's why he's milking it one last time on NYT).
Re: A.I. Helped One Man (and His Brother) Build a $1.8B Company
#86So if I understand this correctly, Medvi is basically a frontend to white label telehealth services, with wildly successful targeting on an exact niche (GLP-1 served online). So the 1.8B is effectively sales on a lead-generation opportunity where he gets to capture 20% of the sale (assuming that since his net profits are 16%), and then the backend guys do all the work and probably profit the remaining bit, assuming t…
Bingo. Couldn't have explained it better myself.
Re: A.I. Helped One Man (and His Brother) Build a $1.8B Company
#87Re: A.I. Helped One Man (and His Brother) Build a $1.8B Company
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speak for yourself. My skin crawls. Do not universalize your temptation to graft
Just the other day I was downvoted and called out for suggesting that perverse incentives are hard to resist, yet here we are with the Times (apparently) showcasing another such instance. In this case GLP1's clinical effects are widely understood though, so it is immaterial if an "artist's depiction" (artificial agent's depiction) is of a real person or purely hallucinated. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=475810…
> In this case GLP1's clinical effects are widely understood though
When injected. One of the products this scam company was selling is oral Tirzepatide pills, which don't do anything.
Re: A.I. Helped One Man (and His Brother) Build a $1.8B Company
#89"That gave Matthew Gallagher breathing room to fix some shortcuts he had initially taken, like swapping out the before-and-after weight-loss photos for ones from real customers. Some photos on Medvi’s homepage remain A.I.-generated." Cool, another scammy internet company preying on people's insecurities. Glad the NY Times spent the effort to tell us about it and didn't spend any time questioning this company [1]. [1]…
I’m pretty sure the writer included this and other details precisely so that readers would understand the ethics of this company.
I had a few people from my life send me this article because they know I've been a software engineer for 20 years and were thinking "wow, see you could do this too!". None of them noticed they were misleading customers. None of them knew the FDA sent them a warning. All of them thought this person was really smart for using AI to create a company on his own, no other humans involved.
So maybe the NY Times thought it was enough to make people question the ethics of the company to add a sentence or two of "AI-generated images/website", but in reality I think people read this as a positive solo entrepreneurship story and missed the ethical grey area and the fact that this indeed took thousands of unseen humans to build.
Re: A.I. Helped One Man (and His Brother) Build a $1.8B Company
#90[flagged]