App Industry Vet Vivek Girotra Launches His Own Company, SurpassMD

AGS veteran and SurpassMD co-founder Vivek Girotra explains why GLP-1 weight-loss care is the company’s starting point, with hormone health, HRT, TRT, and peptide-based care on the longer-term roadmap.

App Growth Summit audiences have known Vivek Girotra through several chapters of his career. He has led growth across gaming, consumer subscriptions, and fintech; contributed to AGS conversations about privacy, acquisition, retention, and international expansion; and in 2022 joined the fireside chat How to Launch Your 100th App. In 2023, he delivered the keynote 10/10: Ten Lessons from a Decade in Marketing, drawing on more than ten years of work across India, the United States, and the Middle East to share practical lessons about marketing, life, and career growth. That experience now shapes how he thinks about health: every touchpoint, from the first question a person searches to the follow-up after treatment begins, is part of the experience.

Now Girotra is building SurpassMD’s online GLP-1 weight loss program as the first part of a broader metabolic health company. We spoke with him about moving from app-growth operator to company builder, what consumer technology gets wrong about health, and why weight loss is only the beginning of the SurpassMD plan.

I sat down with long time friend and colleague, Vivek, to discuss his new venture. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

 

Why move from app growth into GLP-1 care and metabolic health?

Vivek Girotra: I have spent most of my career helping consumer businesses grow. The categories changed, from gaming to education to fintech, but the fundamental questions were often the same: Why should someone try this product? What makes them trust it? What brings them back? And does the product create enough value to deserve a place in their life?

Over time, I became more interested in applying those questions to a problem with deeper consequences. Health affects everything else you want to do. It affects your energy, your mobility, your confidence, and how fully you can participate in your own life.

SurpassMD came out of that idea. I co-founded the company with Scott Park, and we did not want to build another company that was good at generating a transaction and then disappeared. We wanted to build around the full journey: helping someone understand their options, take an informed next step, and receive practical support that continues after that first decision.

 

Why describe SurpassMD as a metabolic health company, and why start with weight loss?

Vivek Girotra: Weight loss is immediate and concrete. People know when it is affecting them, and many have already tried to address it on their own. It also gives us a clear place to make GLP-1 care more affordable and easier to navigate. But the larger issue is metabolic health.

Our mission is to help people get metabolically healthy and stay that way. Weight is where we start, not where we stop. It is the most immediate entry point because it is where many people are actively looking for help, but treatment is only stage one. The wider work is metabolic health: the habits and markers that show whether someone is becoming healthier, not just lighter.

Over time, we expect that work to extend into hormone health, including testosterone replacement therapy and other forms of HRT, and into peptide-based care when the evidence, clinical standards, and FDA regulatory pathway support it. We are beginning with weight care, but we are building toward a longer relationship with a person’s health.

Our vision is: A world where your health is never the reason you didn’t. Didn’t take the trip. Didn’t get on the floor with your children. Didn’t sign up for the hike. Didn’t say yes to an opportunity because your health made the decision for you.

That is much more meaningful to me than chasing a number on a scale.

 

The weight-loss market is already crowded. What is SurpassMD building differently?

Vivek Girotra: There are already plenty of GLP-1 telehealth providers, but many are built around the first order. The transaction matters, but the experience around it is often fragmented. One company may offer access to treatment. Another app offers tracking. Another sells coaching, workouts, or content. The person is left to assemble the journey and determine what to trust.

At a practical level, a person should not have to stitch together a content site, a clinic, a pharmacy, a tracker, and a coaching product. They should be able to find useful information, understand what a GLP-1 weight loss program includes and costs, complete an assessment, and know what happens next. People should also have flexibility in how they pay. SurpassMD accepts HSA and FSA cards and offers Klarna flexible payment options at checkout. An independent licensed clinician should determine which treatment, if any, is appropriate and explain the decision. If medication is prescribed, the person should receive it reliably from a licensed pharmacy, know the status, understand the next step, and have a clear way to get follow-up support.

That is what metabolic health means to us in practice. Treatment is stage one. The system around it should help someone understand what is happening, track whether they are becoming healthier rather than only lighter, and stay engaged after the initial transaction. A prescription is never guaranteed, and clinical decisions belong to licensed clinicians. SurpassMD’s role is to make the surrounding experience easier to understand and use over time.

 

Which lessons from app growth translate most directly to healthcare?

Vivek Girotra: The biggest lesson is that acquisition cannot rescue a weak experience. You can buy an install, a lead, or even an initial transaction. You cannot buy lasting trust.

Growth teams sometimes treat onboarding as a series of screens to optimize. In health, every screen can represent uncertainty. Why are you asking for this information? Who will see it? What happens after I submit it? Am I eligible? What am I agreeing to?

That means clarity is not just copywriting. It is part of the product. The handoffs matter. The follow-up matters. Support matters. Privacy matters. Clinical judgment matters. If those elements are disconnected, the funnel may look efficient while the actual experience is failing.

The other lesson is that retention begins before conversion. People stay with products when the initial promise matches the experience they receive. That is true in mobile apps, and it is even more important in healthcare.

 

What does full-funnel thinking look like inside SurpassMD?

Vivek Girotra: In app growth, the full funnel connects the promise in the ad to the app-store experience, onboarding, activation, engagement, and retention. If one handoff breaks, the growth system breaks. Healthcare has a direct parallel, but the stakes are much higher.

When someone is looking for advice, can we give them clear information at the right moment? Can they complete the assessment without confusion? Can a licensed clinician determine which medication, if any, is appropriate and explain what happens next? If treatment is prescribed, can the system get it to them reliably and keep them informed? Do they know how to use it, where to ask a question, and when someone will follow up?

Tactically, that means mapping the milestones and the handoffs: the first visit, education, assessment, clinician review, treatment decision, pharmacy fulfillment, delivery, follow-up, and ongoing support. At each stage, we ask what should be instrumented, what should be automated, and who owns an exception. That is the same discipline we apply to a full-funnel mobile experience. Growth is not a department layered on top of the patient journey. Growth is what happens when the whole journey works.

 

How will the free SurpassMD app and its AI advisor fit into that experience?

Vivek Girotra: The app is in beta, and it will be free.

Some popular weight-loss programs charge around $200 a year for app-based tracking and guidance. We think people should be able to access a useful core experience without adding another annual subscription.

The SurpassMD app is being designed to help people pursuing weight loss track the information that matters, understand their patterns, and receive useful guidance in one place. It will also include an AI advisor that can organize those inputs, identify patterns, answer practical questions, and suggest a manageable next step.

The app should be useful on its own. For people who may also need clinician-led care, it can provide a clearer path into SurpassMD. The AI advisor will not diagnose a condition, prescribe medication, or overrule a licensed clinician. When a question requires medical judgment, the app should say so and direct the person to an appropriate clinician.

 

Has becoming a company builder changed how you think about growth?

Vivek Girotra: Completely. When you are running growth inside an established company, you inherit a product, an operating system, and usually a set of assumptions. As a builder, you are responsible for the assumptions too.

You cannot say conversion is someone else’s problem, fulfillment belongs to another team, or retention begins after marketing has done its job. You have to look across the entire system.

Healthcare makes that accountability even sharper. A broken notification is not just a lifecycle metric. It may leave someone confused about what happens next. A vague claim is not merely weak positioning. It may create the wrong expectation. A support delay is not just a bad review waiting to happen. There is a person on the other side trying to make a health decision.

That changes the standard. Growth still matters, but it has to be built on an experience worthy of growth.

 

What does success for SurpassMD look like several years from now?

Vivek Girotra: I want SurpassMD to become a trusted metabolic health company that people can enter through a clear, approachable front door and stay connected to over time.

Success would mean accessible care when care is appropriate, useful tools even when someone is not pursuing treatment, and technology that removes friction instead of adding more. The aim is sustainable progress, not a temporary transformation.

The company will begin with weight care, but the mission is larger. That is the goal behind SurpassMD’s broader metabolic health mission. Success is when more people can say their health stopped making decisions for them. They had the energy to participate. They felt confident enough to say yes. They could focus on living their life instead of constantly managing around what their health would not let them do. That is the company I want to build.