April 30, 2021

Josh Clemente:
Cool. I think we’ve got a quorum here. Let’s go and jump in. So first off, I want to welcome Jesse. Jesse’s our newest Levels team member, Ops Specialist. We’ve got a slide for him in just a minute, but very excited to have a new face on the team and looking to learning and growing together. Some big stuff on the conferences side, things are starting to open back up again. We have real life conferences being planned, and Levels is booked for the Life Itself Conference in San Diego in September, which is really exciting. It’s a huge production. We’ve got some fun, potential experiments that we’re going to be able to run with the audience, so excited for that one. And then we’re also booked for the virtual conference from Bulletproof, the Biohacking Conference, which starts next week, so it’s cool.
Josh Clemente:
Community stuff, the calls are continuing to add a ton of value. I talked to Sam at length this week about how much he’s been learning from the Community Calls, and I think they’ve been just generally value-additive across the board. So I just want to thank everybody for starting that initiative. And then the Getting Started Cohort, this is sort of a spinoff of the Wearable Challenge. Very excited for this one. We filled that very quickly, and this will be a fun experiment to see how the community elements of going through the Levels experience with other people, who are at the same stage as you, can clarify and enhance the experience.
Josh Clemente:
And then we had a really cool example, which you can see here on the screen. Somebody just sent us this basic product feedback, but included a little snippet of, “Yeah, it’s really cool how other members just jump in and provide this great support when I posted it on social.” So that was kind of a shock, because people are behind the scenes supporting and guiding each other through their experience, helping to clarify when there’s a confusing meal that they post on social. These are the early signs of a movement and a really good indicator that we will be able to continue to lean into community and see benefit without having to, say, scale coaching necessarily. Very cool stuff.
Josh Clemente:
Next, I want to highlight the, and David’s not on the call today, unfortunately, but I just wanted to highlight the absolutely staggering pace and, as Sam would say, velocity this week. I think 13 features and updates were shipped, and there was progress on a number of much bigger efforts behind the scenes. Most notably, I just want to highlight we had two versions of the social export go out this week. So v2 was driven by member feedback. We had like a complete feedback loop accomplished in a matter of a few days, and that sort of velocity and iteration timeline is what sets us apart, I think, and is really amazing to see.
Josh Clemente:
On the podcast side, just want to quickly throw some numbers out there. We’ve had 1,100 downloads on the main podcast, Whole New Level, and 8,500 downloads on Metabolic Insights. I listened to all of our Metabolic Insights on the plane yesterday, and they’re awesome. This is these little bite size snippets are just, they’re just cool to have a whole feed dedicated to them, and you can just listen to them on repeat, and they’re different, and you get a lot of just varied education from it. So it’s actually not surprising, but I think a number of us on the team were not able to picture how this would work out. Clearly, it’s resonating, so very cool.
Josh Clemente:
And then this one blew me away. We’ve hit $2 million in 2021 revenue, so since January. To put a point on that, we hit a million in lifetime revenue in October, so since the company had started through October, we had a million, and since January, we’ve hit two additional millions. We’re not in growth mode, we don’t care about revenue enhancement. It’s just crazy to see those types of numbers, and it’s exciting.
Josh Clemente:
Okay. On the imagery we’ve got here, a ton of VIPs have joined, celebrity trainers, celebrities themselves, celebrity scientists, like Jeff Volek, all entering the Levels program right now. It’s hard to predict where these things go, but it’s exciting to see the residents happening in all of these varied communities, and many times relationships kind of just blossom and turn into affiliations, turn into research partnerships, so this is really cool to see. Business Insider, Wall Street Journal, we had a feature in Insider, and then Wall Street Journal, we expect, after a really good call between Casey and one of the writers, to see an article coming out in the next week. We’ve spoken with Under Armour, a whole bunch of teams, across Whole30 and professional sports are using and have key stakeholders on the teams evaluating Levels right now.
Josh Clemente:
And then just generally, there’s a ton of awesome quotes here. This week was really interesting to me to go through our member feedback and through my own emails and just see how many people are using words like transformational about their Levels experience. We have one person here, who lost 30 pounds in four months, using what they learned in the first month of Levels. We have one person up here in the top, on the Facebook group, who shared a testimonial, basically saying that they had reversed their pre-diabetes using Levels, and obviously pre-diabetes is not a diagnosed condition. It’s a metabolic characterization. You’re heading in the wrong direction, essentially. And so meaningful changes in A1C using CGM is profound, and I love to see it.
Josh Clemente:
So I think that’s about it for now. A couple of other really cool VIPs, talked to a board member of Peloton, who’s very excited about what we’re doing, and just generally an awesome week for behind-the-scenes movement building. Okay. I want to say hi to Gabe Mendoza. Many of you have probably seen this name, seen Gabe on Community Calls, seen him on the Facebook group, because he is by far one of the most active in the Levels community. And Gabe and I are constantly chatting through Instagram and through other means, and just really appreciate his perspective and the rigor that he puts into learning about his own health and generally what health means for the broader population. So Gabe, we’d love to hear a couple words from you, man. Thanks for joining us.
Gabe Mendoza:
No, thank you, and I appreciate it. So yeah, I’ve been on a health journey here. I just wanted to kind of communicate that it always these people that are biohackers and whatnot. We always get, “Oh, you have good genes and good genetics, and you can’t,” or whatever. So I’ve been on a journey for 10 years, and I’m always constantly digesting health and wellness. And I heard Levels come across about a year ago in a podcast and jumped on, and ever since, have just been completely enthusiastic about the prospective way we can use this technology, not only in enhancing people’s lives, but really truly changing the medical industry and the use of preventative care.
Gabe Mendoza:
Many tangents to go on, and I’ve had discussions with Casey and Sam and Josh and couldn’t be more appreciative of their time and energy in allowing me to shoot my ideas off at a company I truly believe in. I was an early endorser of WHOOP, and totally see the trajectory of Levels being very, very similar. So congrats to your team, first of all and foremost, and I look forward to continued engagement.
Josh Clemente:
Awesome. I know you featured in a number of our early initiatives that we’re pushing out there and also in kind of like the behind-the-scenes community stuff. I think one of the examples in that DM shout-outs on Instagram was you. Not surprising at all. You’re quick to offer advice, and I love it. Ben, jump in here. Help us all understand the extent to which folks like Gabe joining our community are indicative of the future trajectory for what we’re building.
Ben Grynol:
Yeah. So Gabe, and thanks for being here, Gabe, it’s been awesome to see everything that’s been happening on Facebook and through things like those Instagram DMs, but what’s ending up happening is that people in the group, let’s use Facebook as an example, people recognize this person is helpful, and they see that person being helpful to other people. And so when people see Gabe responding, they take more stock almost from Gabe being a verified Levels source, they take stock, and they say, “Oh, this person knows what he’s talking about,” because it sounds like it, but when the community sees us interacting with Gabe, saying, “Thanks, Gabe. Appreciate you jumping in here,” that builds additional trust. And so the more nodes, if you think about it as a network of nodes, the more of these nodes that we have that are really strong in the network in the community, the more trust that gets built out and the more that we see that being extrapolated pretty wide. So it’s awesome that you’re setting the example, Gabe, and just love to see all the engagement. So truly, thanks for everything you’re doing,
Josh Clemente:
Plus one. Yeah. Really appreciate you joining the call. Looking forward to hearing a couple of more anecdotes throughout the meeting, and I know the team loves having early supporters onboard, because it’s the most meaningful part of what we’re doing is making sure that it’s resonating with real people out there in the real world. So thanks again, Gabe.
Josh Clemente:
All right. Jumping up to intro Jesse. Jesse and I connected initially, I have no idea. Chronological time is not a real thing for me anymore, so some number of months ago. He was recommended to me as a really potentially perfect intellectually-aligned individual, given his background as both someone who is living with type one diabetes and also someone who’s working towards a master’s in public health. So the first conversation was really exciting, really engaging, and loved Jesse’s perspective.
Josh Clemente:
And then a few weeks later, I guess we started to think about, “All right. We’re kind of hitting the limits on our ability to keep up with cadence with our members.” And yeah, one thing led to another, and Jesse has now joined our team to help us continue to provide what I consider to be the best member support I’ve ever seen. I’m not on the receiving end, unfortunately. I would love to be able to be, but our team just continues to exceed expectations, and having people like Jesse join is just such a great signal and such a great boost for what we’re doing. Jesse, we’d love to hear a couple words from you on the slide, off the slide, whatever you’d like to share.
Jesse Lavine:
Yeah. Thanks, Josh. Hi, everyone. My name is Jesse Lavine. I am just bubbling with excitement to be here and to be a part of the team. Josh and I connected in March, and I’ve been watching these forums, so it’s pretty surreal to be a part of this now. So a bit about me. I have been living with type one for the last 15 years and have worn CGM for the last seven years. Wearing a CGM has completely changed the way that I’ve approached managing my type one.
Jesse Lavine:
I’m currently working towards a Master’s in Public Health in Social and Behavioral Science at Temple University. I’m doing that part-time and remote and currently live in Houston, but I plan to take advantage of their culture and hop around some. I went to undergrad at Pitzer College, where I studied human biology. During that time, I was involved in some way or another with a number of diabetes organizations, including T1D Exchange, College Diabetes Network. After graduating with Beyond Type 1, I got the opportunity to ride a bicycle across the country with a team of 20 people, all living with type one diabetes. That was a very peak experience.
Jesse Lavine:
And from that transitioned to one of our sponsor companies to Atlanta, which is a health foods startup. I wore a number of hats there from partnerships to customer support to packing cookies in boxes, the warehouse, and most recently, I was in Chicago where I ran ops and was a fronted house captain for an underground fine dining club. I spun that into a really fun project called Dynabetics, which was where I coached chefs on how to carb-count meals and invited the T1D community of Chicago to share experiences over an awesome meal. Done a little bit of T1D coaching over the last year, and currently have a T1D education app for adolescents, but it’s on hold at the moment. I’m really excited to be working with and learning from everyone here at Levels and their broader network of amazing partners that Levels has cultivated relationships with.
Jesse Lavine:
And for me, Levels in this role just connects a lot of dots in my past, just from startups and roles in customer service and ops and my public health degree and all the diabetes things I’ve been involved with. So yeah, super-excited about that. And fun fact about me. My few favorite places to dance are on a bicycle. It doesn’t matter if it’s stationary or moving in the grocery store aisles, where I’m most likely reading nutrition facts and labels and in the kitchen where I love to cook. So I really enjoyed connecting with some of you so far, and excited to meet everyone else. Super-excited to be here. That’s it. Thanks for listening.
Josh Clemente:
Love it. As always, team, whenever a new person joins, give them a few days to get settled and then start reaching out and try and have some conversations, get to know each other. There’s obviously a ton of overlap with Jesse and many of those on our team. I know we have several people who love cycling, to name a few. We also have dancers in kitchens. So I think Dr. Case we would like to discuss choreography with you. Excited to continue building the team. It’s awesome. These are my favorite updates. Thanks, Jesse.
Josh Clemente:
All right. Quick culture slide. I want to shout out Justin. I’ve seen a number of shipped features and updates happen this week with Justin’s name attached, and it’s really cool to see people hit the ground running so quickly. Thank you, Justin, for not only that, but then also sharing a user guide that I found just really fascinating and insightful. So Justin shared his health journey that’s totally separate from Levels, but I think it helps to build an appreciation for why he’s such a great fit for our team. And so I highly recommend it. If everyone has not read his user guide, please do. Obviously, read everyone’s user guides, but really appreciated this one.
Josh Clemente:
And I also wanted to just throw in the tutorial or the number of tutorials that Justin added for React and I think also GraphQL. I’m not an engineer, but I know that adding these sorts of additional learning resources for everyone to get access to is just great, and it’s not necessarily required, but very helpful. So appreciate that, Justin.
Josh Clemente:
And then Braden and Mercy. Braden has been stepping up to continue to organize these additional explorations, like Community Calls, Hiring Responses, all the communications associated with them. That’s outside the core requirement of keeping the CSAT scores high and keeping people who are in our main membership group moving. So just thank you for setting aside that time. Similarly with Mercy, continuing to push the logistics for these rapid pop-up research programs and exploration programs we’re doing and making sure people are continuing to get their products on time and making sure that all of the order information and updates are in the right place where we can find them and continue to coordinate. So thanks, everyone, for just putting on added hats. It’s hard, I know, but we appreciate it, and it doesn’t go unnoticed. All right. David is, once again, out this week, so Andrew and/or Alan, I’m going to hand off Product & Eng slides for you.
Andrew Conner:
Yeah. So yeah, the new Sharing is back in. We had one a long time ago, and it was not nearly as good as this, so thank you, Murillo, for getting this across the finish line. It looks awesome. Yeah. There’s great feedback for it.
Josh Clemente:
Yeah. I think this one also I just want to highlight we got this great feedback immediately, and then it was, I think, incorporated into v2 posthaste.
Sam Corcos:
Yeah, I think the interesting thing about it was how we shipped v1, we sent it out to people, a whole bunch of people responded, we got feedback. We shipped version two within the same week based on that feedback, and just the cycle times are really incredible.
Andrew Conner:
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. It’s fantastic. Right now is a special time in the company, where we can iterate and try things, and I think being able to launch things that may not be perfectly right, but then us being able to roll with it and improve it really quickly means a lot to customers, and it means that the product velocity’s a lot faster. So that’s awesome. Now, there’s v3.
Josh Clemente:
Incredible.
Andrew Conner:
Yeah. So the Sleep Report is progressing. Here’s earlier concepts that Alan had done. And then the Nighttime Low Glucose Card for education is going out. This is awesome. This is a really common question people have of why did my glucose go to something. I personally have had it dip in the 50s, and if you Google, you’ll find very conflicting information, especially when treating diabetes. It can be a dangerous thing, and for someone with a healthy pancreas, it’s not necessarily. It’s really nice that we can automatically detect certain environments and be able to bring the education to where the person is versus letting them have to understand a textbook first.
Andrew Conner:
Oh, okay. Yeah, they were out of order. Cool. So this is the Sleep Report. One of the directions that Alan has proposed that I think is really neat is thinking about the Levels experience transforming throughout the day. The most important thing for a lot of people when they wake up is what was the metabolic impact of the sleep? How did yesterday finish up? That sort of stuff. Throughout the day, that changes and becomes more of motivation, encouragement. Towards the end of the day, it’s about how has my day been going? And so there’ll be a lot more of this, of incorporating the arc of a day into the app experience where it changes throughout the day.
Andrew Conner:
A couple of tweaks to the medical consult form. This is really nice. It’s great for us to be able to respond to problems that we’re noticing, and so noticing that people were dropping off, coming up with solutions for this. We’ll see how this goes, if it is sufficient, but it is really awesome. The partner codes have been launched in the user console by a non-engineer, JM, so this is awesome. I’ve been constantly blown away with everything you’ve done and redo all.
Josh Clemente:
That deserves a shout out.
Andrew Conner:
Yeah. Xinlu jumped in and really quickly saw an issue that I think Braden mentioned in the ops channel. Had a solution really quickly to fix password reset case insensitivity. And so this is something that people were running into, and that is fixed. And then this is your Signup Flow. It is available for probably my review, and this will enable self-serv subscriptions, so way less ops overhead for someone to subscribe. Really neat. This also includes new subscriptions for different cadences, so instead of just monthly, we can have every other quarterly, whatever makes sense for customers. And so that’s really powerful that it’s not a binary, you’re doing it all the time or not. We’re embracing what people are interested in.
Josh Clemente:
Very excited for that one.
Andrew Conner:
Yeah. And then standby emails, they were disabled a long time ago. I never re-enabled them. Hao jumped in, noticed the problem, and this will be going out up shortly.
Andrew Conner:
So we have a new visualization for Steps. It’s incredibly important for us to be able to bring in other data that’s available. Steps is really neat, because a lot of phones measure steps, even if they don’t have another wearable. So for a lot of our customers, they have an Apple Watch or WHOOP or something like that. Long term, we’re going to be able to glean data, but a lot of people are just carrying around a phone. And so this is really neat for us to build up a proxy for activity to start to …
Andrew Conner:
The most important thing right now is that we’re collecting the data. Long term, this will become very meaningful in closing feedback loops. It is not just food that people have in their control, and so this is incredibly exciting. It will be going out pretty soon, and so we’ll be able to have the data, which is important, but also show this visualization to customers. And this is more design iterations on this, including the new Zone Review.
Josh Clemente:
Yeah. I love the stacked concept that Alan came up with too.
Andrew Conner:
Yeah. It’s so incredibly exciting seeing Alan rethink a lot of our prior primitives, and so we’re going to see a lot of improvements and a lot of iteration with how we’re conveying information to people, which is the goal of what we’re doing.
Alan McLean:
Cool. Yeah, Andrew. Just a couple of quick design updates. So we’ve been looking a lot at the Zone Scores and the language that we’re applying to some of these, and as we were redesigning some of the Zone Review pages, we were looking at ways that we could align the score and better explain that to our users. And so we’ve come up with some iterations here on how to apply color and language. This is an experiment. We’re going to move a little bit away from things like outstanding or poor to evaluate a glucose response and more of a descriptive language that is slightly more objective, but also avoids some of the pitfalls that potentially rewarding people for maybe drinking alcohol, which we know is not great for you, but also causes a lower glycemic glucose response. And you can see us trying to carry some of that over into the analysis page to. Also, next slide, yep.
Alan McLean:
We’re also looking at colors, and we’ve got I’m calling it version 0.2. We’re going to start trying to address some of the little bit of the muddy colors that can happen sometimes when we transition from green to red, and so we’re introducing some sort of intermediate hues. And I think this is an interesting existential question, too, because right now we’ve got the benefit of having a really strong point of view on glucose, but if we start expanding down the road into other metrics, do we want to shift to potentially more of a semantic, like heart rate is red, sleep is purple, different colors for different kinds of metrics, versus right now we’re applying color to judgements or to describing good and bad. So that’s something we’ll tackle down the road, but for now we’re going to double down on this point of view that different glucose responses have different values associated with it.
Alan McLean:
And then finally, big one, we had a bit of a breakthrough this week. David and I jamming on wire frames, looking at how we can reevaluate the way you get from the different parts of the experience to others. We’ve got some iterations on the dashboard, My Data section, and we’re starting to dive into some of the sub-areas as well. So looking forward to start digging in a little bit more deeper next week and getting into visual design.
Josh Clemente:
Awesome. Thank you, Alan. Thank you, Andrew. I’ll just take this summary here.
Andrew Conner:
This is [crosstalk 00:24:46] It’s really awesome. It’s seeing things crank out at full speed.
Josh Clemente:
Yeah, it’s crazy. Everything we just covered is this week, so hard to believe we’re not just listing things that happen at Levels. This is this week’s progress. So very cool to see this velocity continue to accelerate. All right. Brief hiring update. Continuing to get benefit from the reporting here, just showing how we are moving candidates through. There’s a lot more happening behind the scenes, a lot of coordination. We’re still trying to hit our stride, I think, on how to use the tools we have effectively, especially as we’re dealing with massive volume. So thanks to everyone continuing to move candidates through. Just try to keep everyone up to speed. Even if we can’t get to the next step with an individual this week, just letting them know with a quick note that we haven’t forgotten about them is really helpful to just manage expectations, so thanks to everyone helping out behind the scenes. And for those outside/inside the network, please continue to refer people to these pages. We still have several open and important roles, and we really need great people. Miz.
Michael Mizrahi:
Cool. I think we’ll hear a little bit more about Getting Started Cohorts from Ben, and we’ve heard a little bit already, but really exciting progress on that front. I wanted to call out the response rate. So some context here. We are sourcing members for Getting Started Cohort from our own wait list, so these are not Wearable-sourced members. So Josh sent out an email campaign to about 330 people on the wait list. That email coming from Josh at Levels has an 80% open rate, exceptionally high, and we converted 15% within, I think we gave them, a 48-hour deadline, or it may have been 36, two days to sign up. We said sign ups close Wednesday at 6:00 PM, and we filled the cohort with 45 and now 50 members with the snap of a finger. So really encouraging that there’s a lot of gunpowder in the wait list and we can use it effectively, so that’s great. We already called out Mercy. Thanks, Mercy, for keeping that cohort moving, tight turnaround times, quick consults, and delivering 50 kits in a week. It doesn’t happen on its own, so thanks for the tracking there.
Michael Mizrahi:
Other quick update, welcome, Jesse, to the team. He’s been getting onboarded this week, finding his way through our documentation, doing some shadow sessions. Excited to have him join, and it’s also a forcing function for the team to better document our processes and resources. And so there’s a lot of unspoken process that exists between Laurie, Braden, and Mercy, which is great when we’re three people, but as soon as we add another one, some of that starts to break down. So we’re using this opportunity to really beef up our docs, so thanks for all the progress there, Mercy, Braden, Laurie. Good to see there.
Michael Mizrahi:
And then a whole bunch of updates this week. A few of them covered the reset password bug, some of the standby list email reactivations, Subscription Signup Form coming soon. And also a quick update that performance covers are now shipping with, or kits are now shipping with six covers. We do a lot of extra refills for people missing covers, who run out of them, who need more than four per two sensors. So we’re going to get ahead of that and just increase that supply there and get rid of that entire workflow of having to refill performance covers. It’s a significant amount of time, effort for us for Truepill for members, and they’re no longer a scarce resource. So we’ll stay ahead of that and just be very generous with those. That’s it from here.
Josh Clemente:
Cool. I’ve been having good results with the experimental covers that do not have a center disc to remove or not remove, and so it’s got a bonded center piece. I think we’re going to be leaning into those. We’re distributing them now, Miz, is that right?
Michael Mizrahi:
Yeah. There’s about 5,000 of those in the mix, and then we have 20,000 of the old style, and then we’re going to refill with the backed ones. So might be a mix for a while, but we’re on it.
Josh Clemente:
Awesome. Ben.
Ben Grynol:
So growth weekly recognized revenue, $110,000, which is, again, another significant week. That was driven by the Getting Started Cohort, so we had so many orders that were fulfilled, that’s 53, really pushed this week higher than average. Monthly, we’re at $561,000. Best month yet in the history of Levels as far as recognized revenue goes. The reason being is, to reiterate, we are very much in controlled growth mode, so the intent is not to drive revenue. It’s a byproduct of things like the Salesforce pilot was recognized this month, these Getting Started Cohorts, and the more that we see these small experiments we’re doing start to compound, it’s really putting us into a different bracket than we had thought. So we are going to make sure that we’re not exceeding this drastically, because it’s going to put too much pressure on our infrastructure. So as far as cash in the bank, $10.2. Sitting well there. Next slide please.
Ben Grynol:
A little bit of housekeeping for Notion, so three memos this week. One is around LIFE ITSELF. If you want to read about that, we’ll be doing a slide in a couple weeks once we have a call with their team, but high level, it’s founded by Dr. Sanjay Gupta and Marc Hodosh, who founded TEDMED. Casey has two speaking spots at it, and a really high profile event for Levels to be a part of, 500 members from the health community, deep expertise and thought leaders. So it’s an incredible opportunity, and it will be interesting to see it come together.
Ben Grynol:
Getting Started Cohorts, that is a memo around everything that we’re doing on top of the Wearables infrastructure, which I’ll talk about in the next slide. And then Mike and I, Mike D. and I, have been digging into infrastructure for Member Feedback Calls 2.0, which he’ll highlight. As far as Wikis, the Growth Wiki has been overhauled and updated so that active documents are in there, and anything that is deprecated is now archived, but you can still find everything. And then Member Insights, we have a Wiki where we’re putting things like tools that we’re using and platforms for some UX research, as well as the experiments that we’re running. Next slide please.
Ben Grynol:
So Growth Theme is the First Touch Point. We hear this often that people want more support from Levels or from community experts, those being people like Gabe, right? And this is a member from a Community Call yesterday, who’s actually on the wait list. So we’re running an experiment with that in itself to find out what do people perceive Levels to be like before they’ve even started the experience? And thematically, we hear very similar things to people who’ve gone through the experience, which is, “I don’t know what this metabolic health thing is about, but I want to learn more, and I feel that I need support.” And so it reinforces the importance of us really having these strong first touch points. The experience and the journey starts from the first email that goes out.
Ben Grynol:
People that were part of that call yesterday ended up joining this Wearables experiment that we’re doing or the Wearables Challenge infrastructure we’re using for we’re calling it Levels Community Cohort One. And briefly on it, you can read more in the memo, but the idea is that will people have a better experience by A, having support from a verified expert or people they trust, and B, will they have a better experience because they’re going through something together with a group where they know that there is a finite number? So more to come, but a really fun experiment that we’ll be doing starting May 10th. And onto Mike.
Mike DiDonato:
Thanks, Ben. So as Ben said, we’re taking a look at our Member Feedback Calls and working on version 2.0, specifically taking a look at the process for who we talk to and why and then the questions that we’re asking. It’s important to note that we do keep these calls more conversational and interview-style to build rapport and get better feedback, but at the same time, we want to make sure that we have a set of questions that we can ask across all calls. Ultimately, the primary reason for this, we want to make sure that we have consistent member feedback, that we’re being as efficient as possible with both our and our members sync time, and then thinking about the future, the ways to make this more scalable, whether that’s other people taking calls or asynchronous processes, like the Member Journaling Initiative that we launched.
Mike DiDonato:
And then finally, one thing that we’re looking at, encourage everyone to take a look, it’s in the Member Feedback Slack channel, I think Ben did a Loom on it, we’re looking at a platform called Dovetail. It’s pretty interesting. It’s for ways to make. One of the things it does is it gives you the ability to make the qualitative feedback more quantitative. And I think that’s it.
Josh Clemente:
Cool. I think this is probably Feedback Calls version five or six, but yeah, we’ll go with 2.0 for now. All right, Mercy.
Mercy Clemente:
Okay. So this week on social, Instagram, we hit 27,000 followers. A common theme on Instagram this week was realizing what an impact pairing fats and proteins with your carbs can make, so that was interesting. Twitter, we hit 13,700 followers. There wasn’t really a common theme on Twitter. It’s kind of all over the place, but one big thing was people were seeing spikes and then realizing, “Wow, I’ve been eating whatever it was for all this time.” This one on the bottom right, cilantro rice, he always thought was really healthy, and then he tried it and spiked well above 120. And now he is realizing, “Holy cow, all this time I’ve been eating this, I was very wrong to assume it was healthy.” And then just at the very top, that Facebook post in our Levels group from Sarah Tickle about how Levels is working for her. Josh pointed that out at the start of the slide, but I just thought that would be a nice one to add in, because that’s super exciting for her. And that’s it.
Josh Clemente:
Thank you. Tom?
Tom Griffin:
All right. So big week. Going to speak quickly here, but I’ll run through some fun updates. We’re exploring partnership opportunities with Whole30, which is one of the largest diet and just really nutrition movements in the US. Salesforce, I’ll hit on more in the next slide, but we’re two months into the three-month pilot. We are kick-starting conversations with Joe Rogan, his team about podcast sponsorships, and they also manage many of the other top shows. This will be for a few months from now to coincide with launch, but it’s honestly huge that we’re even having these conversations. It’s very difficult to get in touch with the right person over there.
Tom Griffin:
As Josh mentioned, we got connected to three very well known doctors in the functional medicine and metabolic health research space, really legends with super large social reaches. Two celebrity nutritionists and trainers in the program, Mona Sharma just joined, Will Smith’s nutritionist, and then Magnus, who has been in the program. He just completed one month and could not be more psyched about the company. And the first thing he said to me on our call was that we seemed to be all over the celebrity LA scene. He’s talked to three or four people in the last week who’s using the product. Turns out they’re all related to Kelly Lebeck, but I still acted like it was all just organic spread. And then lastly, Mike D’s really just been killing it in the pro sports world. He’s just been networking his way through the LA scene, among some other teams. Next slide.
Tom Griffin:
Could I actually get a … Oh, no. We’re good. All right. So I want to provide a brief update on the Salesforce Corporate Wellness pilot. Again, we’re two months into the three-month pilot, and we’ve begun to organize some of the feedback that we’ve been getting, both subjective and objective. I show this slide with the heavy caveat that we have not yet meaningfully dug into the data, not to mention nearly all of the self-report feedback that we’re going to get is going to come in a post-pilot survey that we’re going to send out. Having said that, running through some of the numbers on the left side of the screen, so 109 total participants, 14 dropouts. I’ll talk a little bit more of that about why.
Tom Griffin:
And the quotes on the right, 75% rated themselves as confident or very confident in food choices prior to the pilot, which was interesting. This was something that actually David flagged in terms of survey methodology that we can revisit in the future. We didn’t actually have control over the format of this survey, but this was interesting. Some engagement stats, 104 average activity logs per person, which feels pretty high. 59%, which feels a little bit low, have been active within the last week. We don’t yet know if this is because people are in between sensors or if there’s been a significant drop off, but we’re going to dig into that. NPS score of 21 is lower than average. Average is in the 60s. This is not surprising at all, just kind of given the super-different demographic here that we’re dealing with, but we’ll be curious to see how that shakes out. And then 100% CSAT score. Also, not surprising, because we got the best damn support team in the land.
Tom Griffin:
Then moving over to the right side of the screen, these are just three themes of feedback that we’ve gotten. So positive, a lot of people have reached out proactively and just said that the product’s been amazing and has changed their behavior and led to all sorts of positive outcomes. In the middle, too many people, I would argue, just seemed generally confused about the pilot itself, so not even about Levels, but just what they were signing up for, the Salesforce pilot. Salesforce said that they got this feedback a lot, so they need to improve communication, probably a little bit on us as well. And then lastly, we did have four people who had discomfort and then dropped out as a result. And one other quick thing. Of the 14 dropouts, 10 dropped out prior to even applying their first sensor. They just decided they, in fact, didn’t want to move forward with the program based on commitment or confusion around what it was. That’s it.
Josh Clemente:
Really insightful. Looking forward to closing the loop on some of the open items, but this is great experiment. One way or another, we’re going to learn a lot from it, no doubt. Thanks, Tom. Haney.
Mike Haney:
Yeah. So a couple of pieces up this week, a really great thought leadership piece that we’ve been working on for a long time about fructose. This started as a kind of debate, is fructose good or bad for you, and as we dug in more and as we went learned more from some of the great medical advisors that Casey’s been interviewing and we’ve been in touch with, it became pretty clear that, “No, it’s bad for you. It does a lot of bad things inside your body.” And so this is a really good explainer. The other thing I want to point out with this piece that was great is speaking of our great medical advisors is Dr. Perlmutter was able to review this for us, made some really good suggestions and tweaks to it, so it’s a stronger piece. And we really benefited from his feedback.
Mike Haney:
Also have another great Five Questions up this week with the CEO and co-founder of Routine. She was really interesting. Closing the loop on another person who’s been mentioned, the member who saw the great drop in her A1C levels, we’ve already reached out to that person, and we’re going to do a Five Questions interview with her as well. So I’m really loving this format and being able to just contact and reach out and do stuff with more members. So as anybody crosses anybody’s radar in the community groups or just anecdotally who has an interesting story or an interesting experience, definitely put us in touch with them. These interviews have all been super-interesting, and I think each one of these is providing some kind of unique insight. Like with Rachel, she had a baby just a year ago, so she talked a lot about being a new mom, being really busy, and how Levels helped.
Mike Haney:
A couple of good pieces coming up. We got a really great idea with Ben Bikman to excerpt his book, Why We Get Sick, which most of us have read and we know is just such a great, simple explainer on insulin resistance and its effects across the body. We look at that and say, “Well, that’s the kind of stuff we want to write,” and so we agreed with Ben that we’re going to be able to just grab wholesale some chapters out of there and put them on the blog, which will be nice. Low-lift ways for us to get good content, so we’re going to start having those come through. Also, looking at finally doing some stuff around data from our systems, thanks to some of the work that Gabe and JM have been doing around looking at our data and what foods consistently produce poor logs.
Mike Haney:
And then the last thing I’ll just mention at the bottom, I haven’t showed any metrics for a while, so I just wanted to show this week’s newsletter. We’ve been doing AB testing with almost every newsletter, either on subject line or story topic. This week we tested Cold, the big Cold story against Chia. I think our probably universal hypothesis was that Chia would vastly outperform Cold, and in fact, they were almost identical, which I don’t know exactly what the learning is from that. I think it’s that it’s not as simple as people just want nutrition advice. They love the nutrition advice. These are really good open rates, but they like other things that might affect metabolic health as well. At least, that’s my theory right now with this performance. That’s it for content.
Josh Clemente:
Awesome. Love all of it. Thank you. Cool. We are at the individual contributions segment, and quick scan here. Okay. I think we’ve got it right. Haney.
Mike Haney:
Yeah. On the professional side, I’ll say also plus went to Jesse joining. I was just blown away by that slide of his background and resume and experience. The quality of folks that are coming into this company is really stunning across the board. On a personal side, today is my dog’s ninth birthday, so that’s our exciting bit here in the house.
Josh Clemente:
Enjoy the celebrations. Jesse.
Jesse Lavine:
Yeah. Super-excited to be part of the team, and I think that’s both personal and professional. And also really looking just to get up to speed on onboarding and help scout.
Josh Clemente:
Awesome. Yeah, looking forward to it. Gabe Mendoza.
Gabe Mendoza:
Well, first and foremost, thank you so much for just letting me get into these calls. It’s incredibly inspiring to see such a powerful team moving this thing. Very encouraged at the reach-out to members. I think developing that trust is integral for the growth of the company, and I can just bounce ideas with Ben on how to do that and seeing other companies that do that. Personally, I became an uncle last week, and I’m traveling up to Philly on Monday, so I’m looking forward to meeting the little nugget. I have two of my own, as you can see, but I like to play with other people’s kids because I can give them back.
Josh Clemente:
When you’re in Philly, you’ll have to reach out. Maybe we can grab a coffee or something. Stacy is out, I believe, this week. Gabriel.
Gabriel:
Yeah. So Levels related, just to echo what was said earlier about Justin joining, it’s been great having him on the team. I’ve been really impressed by the quantity and quality of his work. It’s been really exciting. Personally, weather’s getting better in Chicago, and I’m looking forward to spending some more time outside.
Josh Clemente:
Nice. Dom.
Dominic D’Agostino:
Hey. Well, excited to hear all the updates, and I’m excited to be teaching my last med school lecture, physiology, for the semester today. I have a summer class, but I’ll have a lot more time to work on the Florida Medical Clinic Study, Levels study, we have IRB approval for that, and also have more time to devote towards generating content around this topic. So excited about that.
Josh Clemente:
Love it. Congrats on wrapping up. Mike D.
Mike DiDonato:
Yeah. For me, it definitely has to be all the engineering stuff, all the new features in a week. It’s pretty nuts. I think we could have done an entire forum on all the work that everyone in Eng & Product and now on over at Design. It’s pretty amazing. Personally, I got some blood work done recently, and I’m excited to dig in a little bit further and get some more labs done to see what’s happening internally.
Josh Clemente:
Write up the experiences. Hao.
Hao Li:
Yeah, I’m just excited about the Coke experiment. It’s funny. The strict glucose actually spiked lower than the Coke, but I didn’t get a crush with Coke. So it’s funny how I expected something will be different with movement, like activity involved.
Josh Clemente:
Yeah. I’ve been enjoying those experiments myself. I think that these examples are going to be really great for showing how simple it is to modify something dramatic. Sam.
Mike DiDonato:
I did not enjoy it. Just throwing that [crosstalk 00:46:10]
Josh Clemente:
Sam.
Sam Corcos:
Yeah. I would be remiss if I didn’t say I’m excited about the velocity. Oftentimes, as teams get bigger, velocity actually decreases. You reach some sort of an asymptote. And as we grow the team, we seem to be increasing the amount that we’re shipping, which is really exciting. So it’s very cool.
Josh Clemente:
Definitely. JM.
Josh Mohrer:
Yeah. On a similar note, this is really my favorite stage in startup land. We have a team, we have a product, things are moving really, really fast. I suspect we’ll look back on these as the good old days, so I’m really enjoying that. On a personal note, it’s my daughter’s birthday weekend. Actually, it was her birthday yesterday. Her party is on Sunday in Central Park. As I’ve said here previously, birthday’s here are like religion, so it’s like that. Actually, I had a dog and thought a dog was a big responsibility at the time, but a kid is much more substantial, as I’m sure Haney would agree, but that’s for anyone who’s like, “I have a dog, I get it.”
Josh Clemente:
Fair point. Alan.
Alan McLean:
Awesome. I’m really encouraged and excited about all this sort of Member Insights, user research stuff that Ben and team are kicking off. I think it’s a really good signal of a well rounded team that’s so focused on what people want. So for me, I’m really excited about that. And then on the personal side, we’re starting to plan a trip to New York, so it feels like the world’s becoming open again, at least in the near term or in the long term. So excited about planning that out.
Josh Clemente:
Very nice. Tom.
Tom Griffin:
Yeah. So this isn’t my typical wheelhouse, but I think I also have to go with engineering velocity this week. From my perspective, I literally Slacked out early in the week that I felt like a surprising number of people were not completing the medical form. And then within days, David had specked out and shipped a new process, which I just couldn’t believe. So that was really cool to see. Also, the conversations with Joe Rogan’s podcast advertising team were just exciting for me. That show, along with a number of my other favorite podcasts, are on the docket, and we’re going to get product in the hands of those hosts. And again, many other companies spend years just trying to get in touch with these people, and we’re already there, which is really exciting. Personally, I got a TV this week, and it’s the first TV that I’ve ever owned in my life, which I feel really frankly conflicted about, but it seems like a milestone, nevertheless, because I’ve never had a TV.
Josh Clemente:
Sorry to hear that. That you’ve got one, not that you’ve never had one. Casey.
Casey Means:
Yeah. Man, so many exciting things this week. I have to say I’m really excited about what’s happening in community with the Getting Started Cohorts and the Community Calls and all the Members Insights. It definitely feels like just massive, massive progress that’s so positive for our members and our learnings, but also the movement, so kudos to the whole team involved in that. Personally/professionally, I took a quick trip to LA for a longevity summit yesterday that I was asked to be a part of, and the buzz about Levels was just permeating the entire thing. I have not been out enough, I think, because it was not surprising, but also surprising. Really big names were there and were just like, “Oh, my God. You’re with Levels?” It just totally floored me. So LA knows about Levels. It’s just very exciting. I don’t think it will ever get old that people know what we’re doing, so very exciting.
Josh Clemente:
So cool. Justin.
Justin Stanley:
Levels-wise, I’m super-excited that we’re actually doing these decisions already. I was expecting this to be three months out, but we’re already just shipping them, and that’s really, really fun and exciting. And then personal-wise, I’m in that book club for the Three-Body Problem, and I’ve been reading it, but I’ve been using an audiobook, and it’s my first time actually listening to an audiobook of a novel. I was surprised that they actually changed the voices as they read it, and it’s really immersive and really cool. So I’m excited to finish that up this weekend. I’ve got three hours left.
Josh Clemente:
Love it. Jhon.
Jhon Cruz:
I’m excited about the development velocity. It’s crazy to see multiple requests being open in March every single day. That’s amazing. And personally, we are locked down in Colombia again, so I’m having some funny activities at home with my family.
Josh Clemente:
Sorry to hear that. I hope it’s a quick back-to-normal. Murillo.
Murillo Nicacio:
Yeah. Can you hear me okay? Yeah, all right, cool. So just excited about just all the progress that’s been made on the app. And not only that, we’re starting to see a lot of Alan’s work just making it into it, and you start to see this new face to the app. It feels really, really, really polished, and it feels really, really good to be in that space. So yeah, just appreciating that. And personally, I’m just excited for having a chill weekend. It’s been kind of a hectic week, just dealing with a lot of Portuguese bureaucracy. So just excited to just chill out on the couch for a bit.
Josh Clemente:
Nice. Miz.
Michael Mizrahi:
On the work side, I think the Community Cohorts have this creeping suspicion in a good way that there’s more there than we realize. And so I think pulling back the cover on that, it’s going to be really interesting. I think there’s a lot to Community, a lot to the effects that that has to the experience, and so very, very excited to see the results there, and thanks to David and Ben for pushing that along. We have five weeks until we, or a few weeks until we start seeing the early indicators, but looking forward to that.
Michael Mizrahi:
On the personal side, so I started road cycling about a year-and-a-half ago and haven’t gotten on the dirt/gravel much, but discovered that last night, and there’s this whole new world opening up to me that I’m very excited to dive into. It’s fun to feel like a kid again, feel like a beginner again, and just learn new things and get excited about a space. So that’s that. And then fireside this afternoon. I’ve got to plug that, 2:00 PM Pacific. Looking forward to some good conversation, just seeing you all in a different format.
Josh Clemente:
Very nice. For me professionally, I got a chance to jaunt down to Miami the past few days and meet a bunch of people who are investors, supporters, members of Levels. And similar to Casey’s experience, it was pretty weird and surreal to have everyone be like, “Oh, that’s the Levels team over there. Let’s go say hi and congratulate them on basically achieving success already.” And I was just like, “How do you A, know about us, or B, think that we’re done?” It was just crazy. Everyone’s just stoked about it. Yeah, we have the attention of the health community, broadly speaking, and of the startup community as well, because of the way that we’re running the business in addition to the subject matter.
Josh Clemente:
Personally, I’m very excited, this is semi-professional as well, about the team growth, continuing to have interesting, cool people like Jesse joining is really fun, and I think that it’s a personal excitement to just have people with unique experiences and backgrounds come aboard, because it’s going to lead to a ton of opportunity for experiences. And I’m going home this weekend to see my brother, who just got back from deployment, which is cool.
Sam Corcos:
Related to that, I was in Austin last weekend, and I was just walking around a random hotel lobby and saw over my shoulder a guy in Figma, making specs for a new Levels competitor that we haven’t discovered yet. So clearly, people are paying attention. It looked pretty early. I’ll put it that way. Rudimentary, but that’s okay.
Josh Clemente:
Good luck to that person who is sketching out Figma. You probably are going to see this at some point. Laurie.
Laurie Morrison:
Hi. It was exciting to hear from Gabe and Jesse, of course, and gosh, the new hires and everything they’re doing is amazing. I’m super-excited about the subscription form that’s coming. Thank you, Jeremy. And personally, my husband and I have appointments for our vaccine on Sunday. Really looking forward to that, so things will get a little bit easier.
Josh Clemente:
Awesome. Ben, finish us out.
Ben Grynol:
Yeah. Pumped on Getting Started Cohort. So hat tip to Mercy and Miz and Josh and everyone, David as well. Making this come together in a week-and-a-half from idea to actually executing it is pretty cool to see, so stoked on that. Stoked on Jesse joining the team. And personally, Gladwell dropped a new book this week called Bomber Mafia, so I’m digging into that. Then simultaneously reading a book called Working Backwards, which is a really cool book about Amazon. So that’s it.
Josh Clemente:
Okay. Mercy, it’s your turn.
Mercy Clemente:
Professionally, the design engineering product stuff, that looks amazing, and it’s amazing that it’s only been one week, and all that stuff has gotten done, so echoing what everybody else said. Also, Jesse, so happy to have you joining. We can use the help on ops, so it’s great to have you. And then personally, my younger brother is coming home for the first time in four months, I think, so it’s going to be nice to see him. And that’s it.
Josh Clemente:
Plus one. So we don’t have a story this week. I’m just going to share some pictures of my recent trip to Montana, which was totally off-the-grid in the Absaroka and Bridger Mountains. You can kind of see here, these crazy clouds that were hanging over us. It felt like we were at a very high elevation and the clouds cleared, and you could see this Himalaya-esque snow-capped peaks in the distance, which is one of the views of where we were hiking. Had a Sprinter van conversion, which you can see in this picture in the distance. Cooked some elk steaks over an open fire, along with some Romaine and made a [inaudible 00:56:52] sauce and generally just got out into the middle of nowhere and got a lot of elevation. It was cool. Came across this old mine. Fun trip. Enjoyed doing these things. Highly recommend everyone if you’re taking cool trips, share photos. It’s always fun. And with that, thanks, everybody, for the craziest week of velocity yet and for the new members for jumping in and helping us to achieve success, bit by bit.