LifeMD, Inc. (NASDAQ: LFMD) Q1 2021 Results Earnings Highlights
Justin Schreiber, CEO
“…Having served over 300,000 customers and patients since our inception, we continue to pioneer the future of healthcare, providing greater access to high quality, convenient and affordable care in 49 states, while converting more and more people to the possibilities of telehealth, as evidenced by our growing patient rolls.
While the country continues to emerge from the COVID pandemic, which frankly helped accelerate our industry and our business, I am very pleased to report the LifeMD’s growth and acceleration show no signs of slowing down. Indeed, demand continues to build to record levels. We sensed [ph] a broader tectonic shift is happening that will radically change the way healthcare is delivered to and experienced by millions of Americans. We are excited to be a part of it. And we are committed to our mission of increasing access to healthcare through direct to patient telemedicine. LifeMD stands at the vanguard of a healthcare revolution.
I can say without hesitation that our explosive growth and strong patient conversion rates to our subscription based models have done nothing but trend positively in 2021. And our fantastic results standard evidence of the trend.
In the first quarter of 2021, we grew revenue by over 300% as compared to the same year ago period, and up 41% sequentially from the prior quarter. In addition to this phenomenal growth, we’ve also begun to see the early results of beginning to optimize and scale aggressively, by better leveraging our cost structure, while planting the seeds for building a leading telehealth business with profitability in mind.
In the first quarter of 2021, we saw an approximate 15% to 20% improvement in customer acquisition costs versus the prior quarter and record level gross margins exceeding 80%. This coupled with the fact that 92% of our revenue currently comes from recurring subscriptions, is laying a very strong foundation for predictable growth over the long-term, while also paving our pathway to profitability.
At LifeMD our core domain is in technology and marketing, more specifically our direct response marketing expertise, and in our ability to scale businesses on our holistic digital health platform quickly and efficiently.
That said, we have a bigger mission in mind. And our primary goal has been to support the new permanence of patient centric care through telehealth. The global pandemic surely accelerated the mass adoption of telehealth in 2020, and we use that as an opportunity to really entrench our customer base in products and services that have made a positive difference in the lives of our patients.
To propel our narrative as pioneers in digital health, we also want to remind investors who are new to our story, that LifeMD predates COVID and will endure long past the pandemics retreat. We have built a platform that has the ability to support tens if not hundreds of direct to patient telemedicine offerings and seeing the value of our offerings, our patients are overwhelmingly choosing subscription based products and services, which have been fueling our significant sequential growth. In fact, for the first time in company history, more than 50% of our telehealth revenue came from the rebuilding of already existing patient subscribers.
As an industry leader in telehealth customer acquisition, our growth potential remains massive. We are operating in open whitespace of a nascent industry with a total addressable market of nearly a trillion dollars. To get to where we are now, we placed a strong emphasis on a few strategic imperatives that have really transformed LifeMD’s potential.
First, we have built a robust patient care process via our digital health platform with unlimited expandability across other indications. In the last week of the quarter, we launched Nava MD, a direct to patient clinical tele dermatology services brand for women, which added further diversification to our growing portfolio of companies. Nava MD is our third launch in four years, and we look forward to further developing the brand.
In addition, as I’ve spoken about before, we continue to anticipate launching our namesake LifeMD primary care platform later this summer. We believe this launch, coupled with our very successful current and future conditions specific telemedicine brands will provide LifeMD with a powerful and differentiated end-to-end direct to patient telehealth platform.
Second, in order to support our rapid revenue growth and brand expansion, we have strengthened our management team with leadership set to play pivotal roles in managing our growth. This includes rounding out our executive team with the hires of a Chief Digital Officer, a Chief Medical Officer and Chief Financial Officer. These hires, coupled with the previous hires to our executive team have given LifeMD a formidable leadership team with significant direct to consumer healthcare and regulatory experience in scaling high growth businesses.
In summary, our first quarter of 2021 was not only marked by record topline performance, it also saw us make significant strides in solidifying the infrastructure, which will enable LifeMD to scale efficiently towards longer term profitability…”