Customers Keep Asking for Medication Access

In 2025 I quit Ambience Healthcare, the billion-dollar unicorn where I built AI for doctors. What I wanted to do instead of working for insurers and health systems: spend my career enabling people to take better care of themselves.

So I entered consumer healthcare. Aligning myself directly with patient incentives — structurally serving patients from the start with no insurance in the way. But which problem to tackle? Consumer healthcare is gargantuan: bill fights, insurance navigation, care coordination, trials matchmaking, direct primary care. Last year, we searched for the right place to start.

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We did a lot of building:

AI Diagnoses. 5000+ people tried our online symptom checker in 6 weeks. But interviewing users revealed they were comparing us to ChatGPT and Gemini. The path to monetization pointed toward becoming a full telehealth company—routing to human clinicians for billable procedures. This was a great idea, but we didn’t realize until the end of the year that competing on CAC is best done by raising LTV. 

Full-Service Concierge. Everything that didn’t need a medical license, we whitegloved for our patients. We helped one patient figure out their Xolair injection schedule across the US and Korea. We found in-network specialists and coordinated referrals. We coordinated with compounding pharmacies. Even with Quest integrations and full-time manual hours spent preparing for each specialist visit, none of our patients missed us when we dropped service. Maybe we didn’t find the right patients, but as far as we can tell, there isn’t a particularly juicy opportunity here.

Personalized Remedies. Inspired by Nikita Bier’s B2C playbooks, we wanted to test the theories for ourselves. People love personality tests and natural remedies, so we combined them. Through trygarlic.ai and 23questions.com we saw the manifestation of two key principles: a) latent demand and b) fast time to value. People understood what we were offering quickly, and they wanted it. Our biggest customer feedback? To integrate garlic supplement shopping into the site. It’s remarkable how much people get invested when the value you deliver is immediate and clear, even if that value is small.

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So where does 2026 point?

There’s a common thread that users kept pointing us to across all of our experiments: they really care about access to medication. With AI diagnoses, users lit up when we showed them DoorDash med integration mocks. In our concierge work, patients already knew the drugs they wanted—it was getting them that created logistical hell. And with trygarlic, users were directly asking us for concrete supplement recommendations to buy.

From first principles, this also resounds: Americans face absurd friction accessing medications they can safely self-manage. Forced en masse through PCP visit hoops to refill meds for conditions they've already managed for years. And it’s good business too. We make money from simplifying the demand path people already go through. And we’ll be able to afford competitive CAC from the higher LTV generated by targeted, higher value recurring chronic patients.

Since December, we've built usetemi.com: request meds done simple. No office visits, no appointments. Licensed clinician review. Prescriptions sent directly to your pharmacy. We're focusing on basic meds to start, but as we work with our team of clinicians (first BAA contracted!), we hope to expand our offerings to include a full spectrum of medications and new prescriptions.

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If you’re in California or Texas, we’d love for you to give it a try. Let us know what you think, if it worked for you, or if there’s something with your medication access you think we can make even simpler for you.