@goeric thank you, Eric 🙌

@iamsebj we don't have an ETA for that at the moment, but we hope to expand in the future 🌍

@andrewrickards why don't you ship OUS btw? Claims complexity overseas make it tough I imagine, and US market is big enough on its own for now?

@chris_tolles1 at the moment we're only equipped to ship domestically, and these were formulated with FDA regulations (and US diets) in mind! That's not to say that we won't adapt to expand our reach moving forward, but we don't have a timeline to share just yet.

Hey @jonmorehouse! I believe that part of it comes down to the type of company + legal requirements that exist around patient care. There are some great tools out there that can help companies easily get set up for compliance (like Heroku Spaces for example). As a direct-to-consumer supplement company that does not collect/store patient data, we’re mainly focused on the relationship we can create with each and every subscriber and have designed and built a custom tech stack in-house. I believe the future of tech in health and wellness comes down to creating that 1:1 relationship with customers that software can empower — it’s a balance of simplicity and capability that can provide the most value in supporting this relationship. I believe the most transformative technologies are going to help keep people connected to the products and services they care about, but ensure that it happens from both sides. For example, rather than a customer reaching out to us, we’d use our technology to proactively reach out to customers in anticipation of exciting milestones or support we can provide. As for tech stack... we use GatsbyJS on our site (for its fast SSR React capabilities), Ember.js powering our Checkout funnel + Account Management areas (allowing for easy manipulation of customer data for dynamic pages), and Rails on the back-end (because it’s still the most productive server-side framework). We have our tech stack shared publicly here too: https://stackshare.io/ritual-com...

@alexander_ingram appreciate that, Alexander!

@edisonjoao6871 our new product Essential for Men is tailored to the dietary needs of men. There are some subtle differences between our men’s and women’s products, reflecting the differences in their dietary gaps observed in the average American diet. You’ll see Essential for Men has vitamin A and zinc included, whereas Essential for Women does not. The components of Essential for Men are designed to help fill nutrient gaps in the diet for men at their particular life-stage, which is the real benefit of the product. So far, we have heard very good things from men about their experience taking the product as well as the taste and sensory characteristics of the capsules. Because we use evidence-based ingredients, and bioavailable forms of nutrients, we are eager to put Essential for Men in our clinical research program. To see how we have demonstrated our results with Essential for Women in the past please check out our clinical study page here https://ritual.com/clinical-study.

@drnima why did you compare to a placebo instead of another product? You showed that the nutrients in your product showed up in the body. Seems like a pretty modest claim that many other products would make similarly.

Hey @chris_tolles1 the reason we compared our product vs a placebo was to characterize the effect of our multi as accurately as possible in gold-standard, double-blind, placebo-controlled randomized design. The main reason for us testing this way is 3-fold (1) to document the nutrient status changes accurately vs a true non-active comparator (that would essentially mimic a non-multivitamin user), (2) to not introduce study design limitations that a comparator product would introduce (including unblinding and introducing a number of variables making it difficult to make conclusions from, such as different nutrients, different nutrient levels, and nutrient form differences), and (3) by design allowing our peer-reviewers and customers to see the numbers, and visual representations of nutrient status shifts through 12-weeks consumption. A limitation with clinical trials is always the number of questions you can ask, forcing you to choose what your top priority or primary outcome of interest in test --- because this dictates your sampling, and powering, subject recruitment level etc. Now that we have characterized our product, I think it is a perfectly reasonable question to ask how does that compare to another product of interest, but we felt that it wasn’t the right place to start (given the above limitations of testing that way). Hope that makes sense!

@drnima thanks... but what % of your customers are replacing an existing multi vs. taking one for the first time? If high % replacement, they want "better" - not just "functional" (putting aside the reasonable debate about whether increased nutrients provides any function). If high % first time, they want "effective"... and do you have any data that regular old multis would NOT do what your study showed Ritual did? That to me seems like the red herring here. You imply these results are compelling... but compared to what? "Look it's better than a placebo!" is a bit 🤷... and that's the only thing you showed. I respect the rigor of the study but considering how weak the evidence is for multivitamins in general, it feels like this is a very compelling piece of marketing but pretty weak actual science (hence not published?). I'm not trying to be a jerk - just some straight talk on supplement stuff up in here. And super-appreciate your time spent on a thoughtful reply!

@edisonjoao6871 you should note the study Nima points you to didn't look at benefits at all - it was 100% focused on "the thing in the vitamin showed up in your body." It was also not published, which means no peer review. It's literally Ritual saying "trust me on this one." Do you?

@lucky_jeffman keep us posted with your feedback! Excited to hear what you think.

@omid_majdi happy 3 years!

@drnima supercalifragilisticexpialidocious interestante