CUSTOMER STORY — WEIGHT CARE
The math finally worked at scale.
A GLP-1 weight-care startup was growing fast and losing margin faster. Moving to Tessic — 0% medication markup, $25 flat per completed consult, no revenue share — flipped its unit economics in a single quarter.
0%
Medication markup
+22 pts
Gross margin per patient
+38%
6-month retention
Zero markup on medication and no revenue share completely changed our unit economics. Every patient we add now makes the business stronger, not thinner.
Co-Founder & CEO, WEIGHT-CARE STARTUP
01 — THE CHALLENGE
The wall they hit.
The startup had the hard part figured out: a brand patients trusted and a marketing engine that produced demand on schedule. The weak point sat after checkout, where its telehealth platform marked up every vial and took a percentage of every subscription.
At small volume the spread was tolerable. At scale it was fatal. The markup on semaglutide alone erased most of the contribution margin on a new patient, and the revenue share grew in lockstep with the company. The better the brand performed, the more it paid its own infrastructure.
The founders modeled year two and stopped. Under the incumbent platform's terms, doubling the patient base roughly doubled the losses. They needed the clinical layer at cost, or the business did not work.
02 — THE SOLUTION
What Tessic stood up.
The brand moved to Tessic on the Grow program. Medication now passes through at wholesale with 0% markup — the price on the pharmacy invoice is the price the clinic pays. Consults are $25 flat when completed, and Tessic takes no percentage of revenue on any plan, ever.
The migration was not a rebuild. Tessic stood up the storefront and patient portal under the existing brand, credentialed providers in all 50 states under the brand's name, and moved active patients onto the subscription and rebill engine without a gap in refills.
Grow's automation handled the rest: refill reminders by email and SMS, automated care workflows, and dunning that recovered failed payments before patients ever noticed a lapse.
03 — THE RESULTS
Where they are now.
Gross margin per patient rose 22 points in the first quarter after migration, with no change in patient pricing. The gain came entirely from removing the markup and the revenue share — same patients, same medication, a different clinical layer.
Retention followed. With dunning recovering failed payments and refills running on schedule, six-month retention climbed 38% against the prior-platform cohort. Recurring revenue is now the majority of the business.
The company put the recovered margin back into acquisition — the flywheel its old platform made impossible. It bills month-to-month and stays for one reason: the clinic performs.