Why I Built RxPost: The Status Quo in Pharmacy No One Was Willing to Fix

Picture a brightly colored tote.

If you've worked behind an independent pharmacy counter, you know the one I mean. It's usually in the back, sometimes in a hallway, sometimes wherever it will fit that week. Tossed inside is all the medication that didn't sell before it expired. Nobody's proud of it. You know someone, somewhere, a patient could have used that medication. But it's there, in every pharmacy in the country, a box of outdated drugs, quietly costing small businesses their margin.

I spent 20 years behind that counter working as a pharmacy technician: Rite Aid first, then a grocery pharmacy, Ralphs/Kroger, but for most of that time, it was in independent pharmacy, where it feels more like family than a job. But in every single one of those pharmacies, I watched the same thing happen. Good medication, medication somebody needed, sitting on a shelf until it expired, while three miles away another pharmacy was unable to fill an emergency order for the exact same drug.

That's not a supply problem. That's a connection problem.

I remember the specific moment it stopped being background noise for me. We had a drug going out of date in about six weeks, a maintenance medication, expensive, the kind you don't want to just eat the loss on. I got on the phone and started calling other independent pharmacies in the area, one by one, asking if anyone needed it before it expired. We only had that rapport with three or four nearby stores. It took me a good chunk of an afternoon to move product that should have taken five minutes to place in front of the right pharmacy.

I did that more times than I can count over the years. Finite calls. Texts to other stores we knew. I've even seen pharmacy Facebook groups that are trying to find buyers for old inventory. It was word of mouth held together with hope, and it worked exactly as well as you'd expect something like that to work, which is to say: barely, and only if you already knew the right people.

The chains don't have this problem, not really. They have internal transfer systems, corporate purchasing power, and enough locations that surplus in one store usually finds a home in another without anyone breaking a sweat. Independent pharmacies don't have that infrastructure. For many, we're on our own islands, each one buying and holding inventory in isolation, each one absorbing the loss alone when something doesn't move in time.

I didn't set out to be a founder. I had no business background, no network of people who'd done this before, no playbook. What I had was two decades of watching the same avoidable loss happen over and over, and a stubborn belief that somebody should build the thing that connects those islands to each other. When nobody did, I decided I had to try, even though I had no idea, at the start, what building a company actually required.

The first version of RxPost was rough. It came out of pitching a group of computer science majors at UC Irvine to build a simple marketplace, to list drugs and transfer money. I had no idea that would be the first of many, many, many... pitches. And of course it was a lot of trial and error, trying to translate what I knew from the counter into something a pharmacy owner could actually use in just minutes. I wasn't building for a hypothetical customer. I was building for the version of myself who would be my own customer, and for every tech and owner I knew who was experiencing the same exact problem, invisibly, all over the country.

That's the part that still drives me. RxPost isn't solving an abstract inefficiency. It's solving a problem I lived, one prescription at a time, for 20 years. Every listing on the platform represents a phone call somebody doesn't have to make anymore, which means more time for that pharmacy to spend helping a patient.

Independent pharmacies are the backbone of a lot of neighborhoods. They deserve infrastructure that was actually built for how they operate, not adapted from something designed for a big-box retailer's supply chain.

If you've got a tote full of outdates like that in your back room right now, I built this for you.