By John Goss, Founder of Adegen
I got an email last week that brought back every feeling I had when I was 19 years old and watching my hairline disappear in the mirror.
It was from a mom named April, and I want to share it with you because I think a lot of people can relate:
"Hi John, My name is April and I have been following you for some time now. I have an 18 year old son who is struggling with his hair thinning and has been for the last few years. We went to a dermatologist who did a ton of bloodwork thinking that maybe my son had a deficiency of some kind because he didn't believe it to be early or hereditary hair loss. Unfortunately, the bloodwork did not show a deficiency and he recommended my son use Propecia or Nutrafol for men. We went the route of Nutrafol because I did not like the possible side effects I read on Propecia. After 6 months or so, he did not see any results. We discontinued use and then tried Spartan shampoo. Also have not seen results after 6 months or so of using.
I have a big ask of you though... are you able to maybe have some sort of Zoom or video chat with him to encourage him to not give up just yet? I know it's a strange request maybe, but I'm desperate to help him get his hair back. This has truly affected him and his confidence. He seems down a lot over it and I'm really running out of ideas on how to help him. I've been stressed over this because I can't fix it."
Reading this, I felt like I was looking at a letter written about me fifteen years earlier.
April's son did everything right by conventional wisdom. He saw a doctor. He got bloodwork done. He tried the "safe" supplement route. He tried the specialty shampoo. And after a full year of hoping and waiting, he's worse off than when he started. Not just physically, but emotionally. Because now he believes nothing works.
That belief is the most damaging thing about this whole situation. The idea that you've tried everything and nothing is going to change. It is not his fault. It is the predictable result of a system that is deeply broken in ways most people never get to see.
I want to explain exactly how that system broke, and why the answer isn't that hair loss is hopeless. Because it isn't.
My Own Spiral Into "Natural" Solutions That Made Everything Worse
When I first started losing my hair, I did what most people do. I went to a doctor. I was recommended and started on finasteride and standard minoxidil. And when those didn't give me the results I wanted, I figured the "medical" route had failed me.
So I did what a lot of people do next: I turned to supplements.
Saw palmetto. Biotin. Pumpkin seed oil. Herbal DHT blockers. I bought into the idea that maybe the pharmaceutical approach was wrong and "all-natural" was the answer.
What happened? My hair loss accelerated.
Not only did the supplements not help, they gave me a false sense of security while my follicles continued to miniaturize. I lost ground I could never get back, and I was left feeling completely hopeless.
My thinking was: "Well, the medical route didn't work. The natural route didn't work. I guess there's just nothing you can do."
Can you relate? Because I hear some version of this almost every day.
But here's the thing. That logic is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of why your options appear so limited in the first place.
Why You've Only Heard of Two Hair Loss Treatments (And It's Not Because They're the Best)
Minoxidil (Rogaine) and finasteride (Propecia).
These have been the only FDA-approved treatments for hair loss for over 30 years. Minoxidil was approved in 1988; finasteride in 1997.¹
Thirty. Years.
In a world where we've mapped the human genome, developed mRNA vaccines in under a year, and put AI in everyone's pocket, the official options for hair loss haven't changed.
Why?
It's not because nothing better has been discovered. There are ingredients with compelling clinical data: caffeine, tretinoin (retinoic acid), are only two of them. Studies have shown these are as effective or more effective than the two "approved" options.² Without a doubt they are absolutely more effective when adding to minoxidil, than minoxidil alone.
But most likely you've never heard of most of them. And here's why.
In 1989, the FDA passed a rule saying if you claim a product treats or prevents hair loss, it needs to go through full new drug approval. This made sense at the time. There were a lot of snake oil salesmen making ridiculous claims, and the FDA wanted to protect consumers.
The problem is that FDA approval now costs somewhere between $985 million and $2.8 billion, with an average around $1.3 billion according to recent research.³ ⁴ And to justify that investment, you need something you can patent. Something proprietary that competitors can't copy.
But you can't patent caffeine. You can't patent tretinoin (it's been around for decades). You can't patent most compounds or well-known molecules, no matter how effective they might be for hair loss.
So no one is going to spend a billion dollars proving that caffeine helps with hair loss, even if the science supports it. The economics don't work.
This isn't the FDA being evil. I actually think they were trying to do the right thing. But the unintended consequence is a system where truly effective ingredients can never get "approved," and consumers are stuck with the same options from 30 years ago.
Enter the Supplement Loophole
So what happens when there's a billion-dollar market of desperate people and no new approved treatments?
Companies get creative.
Here's the loophole: you can sell a supplement for hair loss as long as you don't claim it treats hair loss. You just have to put some fine print at the bottom saying "These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease."
Most people don't read that because the people writing it don't want you to really see it. Or if they do, they don't understand what it means.
What it means is: we're allowed to market this to you with hair-related imagery and testimonials, but we're not actually claiming it works, so we don't need to prove anything.
This is how you get supplement brands charging $80-100/month for biotin, saw palmetto, and a few other ingredients that have little to no clinical evidence for actually stopping pattern hair loss.
And I get it from a business perspective. It's the path of least resistance. You don't need to go through the unimaginable challenge of starting a pharmacy that requires a separate license in every state. You don't need to deal with state-by-state regulations. You don't need to find or pay for advanced chemists formulating complex topical solutions. You just need a good marketing team and some nice packaging.
But the result is that millions of people like April's son waste months or years on products that were never going to work in the first place. And they lose precious ground they can never fully recover.
I'm not going to name most of these companies. But I will call out Spartan directly, because they took before/after images from our private Adegen Facebook group (images where the customer explicitly thanked Adegen for his results) and used them on their website to sell their products.
Here's the original post from our Facebook group:
and here's that same image on Spartan's website:
And they're not the only ones. Here's another company called Peptonix using the exact same stolen images to sell their "Advanced Copper Peptide Solution":
Same customer. Same photos. Three different companies claiming credit for the results. Only one of which actually produced them.
This is what you're navigating when you try to find a real solution. And this is why the question isn't just "what works?" It's actually "who can you trust?"
The Telehealth Illusion
But now it's not only supplement companies. There's been a huge shift in the last few years toward "telehealth" hair loss brands.
Here's the thing most people don't realize: the majority of these brands are nothing more than marketing fronts. They don't have their own pharmacy. They don't formulate their own products. They contract with the same handful of backend fulfillment pharmacies, selling the exact same generic compounds packaged as their "unique solution." And they also shop around to the lowest bidder and pressure the pharmacies for the lowest price which ultimately leads to lower quality and less effective treatments.
Different branding, same minoxidil/finasteride from the same facility, marked up for the DTC customer.
And some have taken it even further.
You may have seen the recent story about Medvi, the telehealth startup that the New York Times profiled as a shining example of AI-powered efficiency. The company reportedly did $401 million in revenue in 2024 with just two employees.⁵
What the Times didn't mention? The company allegedly created over 800 fake doctor profiles on Facebook using AI-generated photos. They used AI to create fabricated before-and-after images. They've since received an FDA warning letter, suffered a data breach exposing 1.6 million patient records, and are facing a class action lawsuit.⁶ ⁷
Some of those before-and-after images had people's fingers literally blending into their phones. The telltale signs of AI-generated imagery if you know what to look for.
So the hardest question right now isn't "what treatment should I use?" It's "who the hell can I trust?"
What I Did Instead (And Why It Took a Decade)
Now, I need to be honest with you. I am biased. I have a financial interest in you buying from Adegen. I self-funded this company entirely, and I want it to succeed.
So take everything I say and do your own research.
But here's what I will tell you about why Adegen exists.
When I realized the supplement route was a dead end and the standard medical route wasn't optimized for my needs, I didn't give up. I got obsessed. I started researching the actual science: why minoxidil fails for 40-50% of people (it's an enzyme conversion issue⁸), how tretinoin can upregulate that enzyme, how particle size affects absorption, how DHT does its damage through a pathway most products completely ignore.
And I realized that to do this right, I couldn't just slap a label on some generic formula. I needed to start a pharmacy. I needed to get licensed in every state, which is an unbelievably complex process where some states require both the pharmacy and individual pharmacists to be separately licensed. I needed to hire chemists who actually understood how to create stable, soluble, effective formulations. Because it's not just about the ingredients. It's about the delivery vehicle, the emulsifiers, the complex chemistry steps that make everything work together.
Think of it like baking a complex pie. You can have all the right ingredients, but if you don't understand the chemistry of how they interact, the sequence of steps, the temperatures and timing, you end up with ingredients that are not stable and fail.
The easier path would have been to make a supplement, build a nice website, and run some ads. But I'd already been on the receiving end of that approach and it didn't feel good to say the least.
So instead, I spent over a decade building something I actually use myself. Something I could stand behind. Something that addresses the actual biochemistry of why treatments fail.
That's the long game. And I believe (maybe naively) that the person who provides the most value and builds the best products eventually wins.
Here's the Truth
Not all supplement companies are bad. I take supplements myself. There are legitimate uses for them in overall health.
But if you think a supplement is going to stop hair loss, I highly encourage you to think again.
The mechanisms behind pattern hair loss are well understood. DHT binds to receptors, triggers miniaturization pathways, and slowly strangles your follicles of blood supply. Biotin and saw palmetto don't address this. They can't. It's not that you're not getting enough nutrients even through a suboptimal diet, it's that those nutrients are not getting to where they need to go; the hair follicle. So unfortunately you can take supplements by the mouth full and it's not going to solve your problem.
What breaks my heart about April's email isn't just that her son wasted a year on products that were never going to work. It's that now he feels hopeless. He thinks nothing works.
But real solutions do exist. They're just not always easy to find in a market flooded with noise, fake doctors, and billion-dollar marketing machines.
If you're in that place right now, where you've tried things that didn't work and you're starting to lose hope, please don't give up. The science of hair restoration has advanced enormously. The problem is that most of that science hasn't made it to consumers because the economics of FDA approval don't allow it.
That's the gap I've spent over a decade trying to close.
P.S. If you're worried about side effects from finasteride or dutasteride, I highly recommend reading [What the Clinical Data Actually Shows About DHT Blocker Side Effects]. I used to be terrified of these medications too, until I actually looked at the true data. The reality might surprise you.
References
- U.S. Food and Drug Administration. NDA Approval History for Minoxidil (1988) and Finasteride (1997).
- Kwon OS, Pyo HK, Oh YJ, et al. Promotive effect of minoxidil combined with all-trans retinoic acid (tretinoin) on human hair growth in vitro. Journal of Korean Medical Science. 2007;22(2):283-289.
- Wouters OJ, McKee M, Luyten J. Estimated Research and Development Investment Needed to Bring a New Medicine to Market, 2009-2018. JAMA. 2020;323(9):844-853.
- Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Cost of Clinical Trials for New Drug FDA Approval Are Fraction of Total Tab. 2018.
- The New York Times. Profile of Medvi. March 2026.
- Futurism. AI-Powered Drug Marketer Medvi Responds After Allegations About Fake Doctors and Patients. April 2026.
- Aiia. 800 Fake Doctor Accounts, One FDA Warning Letter, and $401M in Revenue. April 2026.
- Goren A, Shapiro J, Roberts J, et al. Clinical utility and validity of minoxidil response testing in androgenetic alopecia. Dermatologic Therapy. 2015;28(1):13-16.
