Transcript
Josh Clemente:
All right. Let’s jump in. I am once again, out of breath from a pre-meeting workout. These Recent Achievements slides are always tough for me to keep going through so we’ll jump right in. This week, I want to highlight first off, the strategy on the backside towards experiments. We’ve got a memo in draft mode, a lot of great thoughts in it. Encourage everyone to review this when it’s ready, but also to consider ways in which we can experiment with the existing product offering, the existing systems we have in place, while we are in this beta mode where we have the benefit of the doubt and the circumstances, so to speak. There are several that are in work already. Member journaling, getting started cohorts. Tom is pushing four to five new pro dashboard pilots with various teams. We’ve got wait list calls. A lot of stuff happening with the excess resources that we have while we’re not in growth mode. And of course, we want to keep these very lightweight, low engineering overhead, but this is a good week for that strategy.
Josh Clemente:
Quick announcement. We sent this out to the announce team, but Mike Denato has transitioned into the growth team fully. A lot of the work he was doing around member insights, member success, basically fits right into the functions of growth that we’re going to be building, community et cetera. He’ll be looking into and pushing many of the experiments that we just discussed as we approach scaling. We launched our full podcast feed this week, publicly. This is really exciting. I mean, we have two episodes publicly facing right now, but a lot more recorded, which Ben will be trickling out and the social team will be getting out in front of our audience, so that’s great. And then I wanted to shout out the content pieces that came out this week, highly actionable. We got a lot of great responses from them, and I have to just say I’m completely drowning in levels content. I’m way behind on podcasts, way behind on the clubhouse sessions, way behind on blog pieces. It’s a pretty amazing feeling.
Josh Clemente:
We had three exciting accounts of levels in the wild. These are all down here in the corner, various sources, some are existing members, some are people on the wait list. One was miss in what looks like a coffee establishment, just seeing it. But these are increasing in cadence. It’s unbelievable. Community stuff is continuing to progress. Sam took another call this week. Thank you to Sam and Ben and Baden for making those happen. Facebook group has exceeded 800 members. We have 111,000 on the wait list. Our total mailing list is on the order of 125,000, which includes our previous customers and existing members. Promising conversations with Dr. Lustig. Those of you who don’t know, Robert Lustig is a pioneer in the metabolic health space, specifically fructose metabolism. He’s a very, very hard charger, so conversations are … you got to be sharp and Casey handled this one like an absolute pro. Read the notes. Hopefully we will have something we can work on together with Dr. Lustig in the near future, and highly recommend The Hacking of the American Mind in the meantime.
Josh Clemente:
We had some IRB semi breakthroughs in the sense that we have a lot more resources opening up on the IHMC side, pushing towards the contract with them to just really get this research program underway. A lot of interesting stuff scattered about on the slide as well. The most interesting I think, that we didn’t touch on is Tia Mowry who starred in Sister Sister in the nineties. She has 8.6 million followers, loves the product, and is excited to get more involved. Scott Panchik, and not pictured, Shane Orr, who are CrossFit legends on the athlete side and the coaching side are really loving Levels as well. This points to the progress we’re making in the CrossFit space. Casey had a really great coverage in Crunch Base this week, which is exciting. And we had another awesome Ali Spagnola video drop. I think I covered it all. Oh yeah. Miami Dolphins, head nutritionist, and one of their top draft picks of 2020 currently using Levels.
Josh Clemente:
All right, jumping ahead. I want to welcome Dr. Sara Gottfried. She’s on the call with us today. All of us have seen and heard of Sara’s work, and several of us have been able to speak with her at length, and we are working together on sponsored research at Jefferson at the Marcus Institute that she works at. And there’s a lot of really amazing synergy between her work and what we’re trying to achieve. Sara is a luminary in the space, and specifically as it relates to hormones and the way that they can be driven off the rails by chronic lifestyle choices. So with that, Sara, I’d love to have you and Casey jump in and chat and/or hear some of your thoughts on what we’re doing.
Sara Gottfried:
Well, thanks so much, Josh. It’s really awesome to be with all of you and great to see that last slide of all the things that you’ve achieved. I’m just so happy to be part of what you guys are doing. I know Casey is on the call too, and I want to thank her for reaching out to me. I’d love to report a bit on what we have over at Thomas Jefferson in terms of our collaborative research with you guys, where we’re heading, maybe some headlines about it, but I just want to check in with Casey first. Casey, is that what you want me to cover? Anything you want to add?
Casey Means:
That would be fantastic, yeah. I think the team would love to hear what’s going on at Thomas Jefferson and your work at the Marcus Institute.
Sara Gottfried:
Awesome. Well, let me say first that Casey hit it out of the park with the CEO of Jefferson, Steve Klasko. She also met with Larry Merlis, who’s the executive VP of innovation and strategic partnerships. I don’t know what happened in that conversation, but I basically got an email from Steve Klasko right after it, where he was just very excited to work further with Levels. And I share that at the top of the hour, because this is, as you probably know, very unusual in academic medicine, because in all the places that I’ve worked from Harvard to MIT to UCSF there’s just not this level of openness. Looking at this metabolic health crisis that we’re in and thinking in an entrepreneurial way about how we consolidate together with these types of partnerships. So that’s the foundation for this work that we’re doing at Jefferson. I’m the director of precision medicine at Thomas Jefferson University, the Marcus Institute of Integrative Health. And I’d love to just tell you a bit about what we have planned, what we’ve done already with some of the funding that you’ve provided.
Sara Gottfried:
I have a really busy clinical practice. I see primarily executives, professional athletes, VIPs, and somehow a lot of professors. And these are folks with pretty high net worth, meaning they’re able to do multiomic phenotyping. And I’ll explain more about what I mean by that. What we’re doing in particular with Levels is we’re funding a number of things. First, we’re doing a systematic review and meta-analysis of the earliest biomarker changes that occur in pre-diabetes and I’ll just type in a chat. We’ve got a protocol that’s been published and I’ll put that into chat so you can read more about that.
Sara Gottfried:
We had to do this work anyway to really understand the critical transition from health to pre-diabetes to diabetes. And so we thought, why not formalize it and publish it. So your funding has helped us with this. We’ve got a team, we’ve got a data scientist and a librarian for the search strategy and so forth. This is underway. We also have a pilot study of just 12 patients where we’re doing deep phenotyping. And the concept with this pilot study is that we’ve got four subjects that are stone cold normal, so normal metabolic health. We’ve got four subjects that have prediabetes using the ADA definitions. And then we have four subjects that are teetering in between. And we thought that would be the most interesting, if I put on my hat as a bioengineer, that would be the most interesting way to look at these critical transitions in homeostasis from normal metabolic health to prediabetes because it’s that transition that I’m most interested in.
Sara Gottfried:
You might be asking, okay, well, what are you looking at? What’s different from what’s been done already? We’re looking at multiple ohms. We’re looking of course at the genome. And we know that’s important, not just the glucose and insulin pathways, but also using more of a precision and functional medicine lens, we want to look at detoxification, methylation, mitochondrial function, oxidative stress, and some of these other factors, cellular pathways that are so important for metabolic health. We’re looking at the microbiome. My personal favorite in the microbiome is looking at Akkermansia muciniphila and we’ve got some really interesting time course data. I’ve got one subject in particular with prediabetes and we have 500 measures of his full microbiome. Metagenome hasn’t been completely mapped on all of those 500 samples, but we’ve got a really good data set.
Sara Gottfried:
We’re also looking at clinical labs, of course, things like adiponectin, C-peptide and so forth. We’re looking at the connectome with wearables with CGMs, of course. We’re interested in micro RNA. I can talk more about that if you have questions about it. We’re doing stress phenotyping, mostly looking at the Dutch IV cortisol awakening response, as well as diurnal cortisol and cortisol metabolites. We’re looking at imaging in some of these subjects, not all, especially looking at FDG-PET and cerebral metabolism, which I think is such an important story to go along with peripheral metabolism. First part is this systematic review of meta analysis. Second part is this pilot study of 12 subjects. And within that group, that’s primarily exploratory. Some of the subjects for instance, are on statins and I want to be looking at their CGM data as they go on statins. Some of these folks are … they’ve got other reasons for their glucose issues. Some of them are professional athletes. And I think you guys know that space quite well.
Sara Gottfried:
The third study that we want to do, and this is probably 2022, is a clinical study where we take what we learned from this pilot study and we then look at N of 1 experiments that are designed to really, how do we customize an intervention for an individual but then also generalize it? How can we learn from it and generalize it to a more mainstream group. That’s the third phase of this work. And I’ll just mention very briefly that I’ve got a meeting on Monday with a physician that I’ve been working with for a long time whose focus is on cancer. And she’s very interested in partnering with Levels together with me, to look at early diagnosis of breast cancer and prostate cancer. We know these folks are not metabolically healthy. And to really understand if we do a pretty dramatic dietary intervention over a three to five day period, what happens to their CGM data and also what happens to their micro RNA?
Sara Gottfried:
We’ve got some really interesting markers that we’ve identified that change with nutrition, and I’d love to have that CGM data to back up. I’ll pause there. I just wanted to give you some headlines of this research that we’re doing, and I’m really excited on your focus initially with athletes and influencers and how you want to move now to mainstream folks. And I feel like I’ve got one foot in both worlds, and so I hope to really be able to support and help that transition.
Casey Means:
Sara, thank you so, so much for outlining that. I think I can speak for everyone on the team and probably anyone who’s listening that it is honestly just viscerally exciting to hear about the things that are in your pipeline for your research. This is exactly what we are so passionate about, which is really understanding the mechanisms of insulin resistance, the biomarkers, and the cellular pathways that are involved in that. So we can start really thinking about how, at scale, we’re going to help people understand these biomarkers and learn about their metabolic health and be as healthy as possible. And I just want to reiterate for the team, I mean, Sara’s metabolic research, and her writing, her speaking, have truly shifted and modernized the [inaudible 00:13:32] of understanding of strategies to approach metabolic health from a root cause perspective and understand biomarkers that are most relevant to metabolism and this is very personal for me. Actually, Sara’s three books, The Hormone Cure, The Hormone Reset Diet and Younger, which everyone should check out, these are three books that I was listening to on my … well, The Hormone Cure and The Hormone Reset Diet, which were out when I was in residency, I was listening to them in the hospitals and it completely shifted my thinking as a resident in surgery and actually was really a foundation for me shifting what I wanted to do in my career.
Casey Means:
Just a short anecdote I wanted to share, I wrote Josh, I actually looked this up, I wrote him an email in July, 2019, almost two years ago, after our first call, and I listed the people who were the key people that could really help Levels achieve our mission. And Sara was at the top of the list. And I wrote, Sara is the thought leader in NF 1 trials and blood glucose monitoring. One of the first people I ever saw who was recommending that healthy people, bolded, check blood sugars daily and promoting the message that insulin resistance starts decades before full-blown metabolic syndrome manifest. This is incredibly full circle to have you here. I can’t tell you how grateful we are that you’re going to be working with us.
Casey Means:
One other thing I want to note for the team is that Dr. Gottfried is actually a Harvard MIT trained OBGYN and practiced OBGYN for many years before creating this really unique practice that she now has. I think we all know there’s huge opportunities for women’s health, with glucose in particular, and so excited to dialogue with you on that as well, Sara. But we’re just really thrilled in our shared mission and to support you and work together on this. So thank you so, so much for being here.
Sara Gottfried:
Thank you, Casey. Can I say one quick comment?
Josh Clemente:
Absolutely.
Sara Gottfried:
So thank you for that. I appreciate it so much. I loved meeting you. I think it was three plus years ago in Portland when I was giving a talk on the gut brain axis, and I think I had a CGM on and I wouldn’t shut up about it. One thing you mentioned that I think is important, I want to just emphasize, is that I work with both men and women and my hope is to get in these studies that we do together, an equal mix. Although certainly the people who tend to come to precision medicine, it’s more women than men, but you know what, what we also know is that women tend to have much greater consequences of the disrupted glucose signal at earlier levels. So we know for instance that when it comes to coronary artery disease that women tend to have complications with a fasting blood sugar of 115. So this cutoff that was defined for diabetes of 125, that was defined in men, it was not defined in women. So really understanding some of these sex differences I think helped to elevate all of us, not just women’s health but men’s health too, so that we can have a better sense of how we can personalize going forward.
Josh Clemente:
That’s an awesome, I think, cliffhanger for what’s to come. I want to say, I have six sisters and a mother, almost all of my family, all the women in my family have used Levels so far, and the differences are astounding and obvious. And so I am also personally just invested in making sure that we can proliferate the N of 1 and help the individual understand where they fall and how to get better and certainly, we need to be sharper on sex differences for that. So thank you for joining, thank you for your thoughts and yeah, just really excited to have the team meet you and looking forward to the future.
Josh Clemente:
I’m going to jump forward. All right. Quick culture slide. So John quick shout out to you. John’s been with us for a long time. He originally started as a contractor in 2019 actually, so one of the OGs and he wrote his first and best long form memo this week. I just want to highlight that. Memos are hard. They take a lot of time and oftentimes the documentation process can feel unnecessary, overwhelming when things are already working. But I do want to just call out that it’s always important to take that time and to put these thoughts on paper for the entire team to look at and mull over and then incorporate into their workday.
Josh Clemente:
Then also, John was highlighted this week as well for his consistently high quality poll request. You’ve been at work with the product team and with the engine team now for longer than most on our team, obviously so the poll requests that John’s producing are a great way to get started for those of you who are just jumping in the code base. Obviously, things can always improve, but it’s amazing to have people who are setting the standard. So thank you, John, shout out for this work, appreciate you and for the team, keep solving the health of the middle wealth health crisis. I have to say that every week, otherwise Sam will get angry with me.
David Flinner:
The screenshots and everything that John provides are super helpful as we iterate very fast on the product updates. A really good week for the product team. Xinlu launched a new improvement to the Export Your Data feature. And as we all know, we are only stewards of our members’ data and it’s their data. It’s our responsibility to make sure they have access to it and treat it securely. I’m excited about this because now people can export their zones, not just their glucose data and also the data can now be exported in users’ time zone, so it’s much more user friendly to read. Previously, we just had it in UTC time format, which is good for compatibility, but this is more readable, so awesome work on that next. Next slide.
David Flinner:
Justin pushed out his first user facing change this week. It’s hard to see here, but there’s a little tool tip, help icon next to the zone score in the upper right hand corner there. Nice work on that. This is just a way for people to access the zone score explainer page but previously that was not visible at all, so that’ll be good. That’s going live later today. Next slide.
David Flinner:
Also with this week’s launch, the reintroduction of the share feature is going back out. Maria worked on this and it just lets you export out a picture of the zone show that you can more easily share instead of taking a screenshot and this will be useful because we do see a lot of people wanting to focus on the top part of this share, not so much the education cards at the bottom or the zone comparison section, so makes it nice and easy. Next slide.
David Flinner:
Awesome. I mentioned this last week, but Jeremy has been working on the Subscription Signup Flow for our members now that we’re fully onto the [inaudible 00:20:33] system. It’s going to be on the Levels UI. It’s working pretty well. I think he’s going to be finishing that up perhaps today or next week, but it’s a nice way to self-service sign up, pick the subscription that makes sense to the member. We know not everyone wants every month, but you can do it quarterly, things like that. And yeah, excited to see that go live. Next slide.
David Flinner:
This week and last week we’ve been working on our first integration of step count. This has gone … this is a really good example of quick iteration internally between engine and our new design team. You can see my mock on the left, which was overlaying steps on top of an already way overloaded chart and then John had some ideas around heat maps and together with Alan, we were iterating on a few different concepts between a heat map below the glucose chart or a bar chart below the glucose chart. Next slide.
David Flinner:
Through some pair design sessions that Alan did with the team we’re landing on this new experience where instead of overloading the zone show, we’ll actually create a fork, in two different directions. So you’ll have a zone review and then you can go deeper, you can see in the upper right hand corner of the graph to get additional metrics there. We’re not hitting you over the head with everything at once, but if you want to get more analysis, you can tap that and there’s a new surface for this. This is the direction we’re thinking about now. Next slide.
David Flinner:
Similarly, Sleep Details page. This has been on live for internal testing from last week. You can see my spec on the left and then Alan’s spec on the right which we arrived at, which introduces the notion also of your last meal. That’s really helpful to tell the story of like, “How is your sleep actually affected by potentially your last meal as well?” Gabriel’s been working to implement this. There’s a lot of big changes that are required to do it this way. Yeah, I guess that’s it. I’ll hand it off to Alan now. We wanted to touch base on some of the upcoming changes that Alan’s thinking through.
Alan Mclean:
Cool, thanks. First design update. I’m excited to talk a little bit about what we’re doing and I just grabbed a bunch of screens shots and dropped them in so you get an idea on the kinds of things that we’re looking at. We’re right now, this information architecture project is informing a lot of different, both small and big areas of the experience. I think, those colorful circles there are looking at how can we make the dashboard, in essence, really a signature experience that people really just want to come back to and see? Essentially, can we find a way to visualize that glucose data in a really new and compelling way that excite our users. On the left we’ve got, starting to look at charts and the potential there to do some iterations on how we apply color. I think color is going to be a theme of work that you’ll probably hear me talk about quite a bit in the future. And there on the right, we’ve got a little screenshot of, as we start to explore, how do we surface insights in a compelling and quick way for our users?
Alan Mclean:
Potentially, we’re going to look at using some kind of story format, can we use a model that people already know really well? And use that to drive engagement to this information and education that we’re surfacing. Then, on the bottom, both small and large, we’re looking at where does everything go? Looking at potentially talking about consolidating some of these pieces of information in sections, into new areas, looking at iconography color and so on. If you go to the next slide, just to riff a little bit here on the zone pages and just explain some of this, I think, on that notion of color and information hierarchy there’s, I think we have two camps of users in essence is the very data savvy and data literate and those that potentially need a quick glance view.
Alan Mclean:
As David was speaking about there, this is an elusion to some of the new zone page work here. We still have the score. We have a little text summary for those who are a little intimidated by charts. If they want, they can dive in, go to the go deeper section. Next slide.
Alan Mclean:
And so the hope here is that we can do justice to both of these kinds of users and even our data savvy users sometimes they’re in a rush, sometimes they’re in the gym and you’re on the go, and so they don’t always have time to actually scrub through that data. But when they do want to, we want to give them a really beautiful, the full screen experiences dedicated to it, rather than trying to serve both on the same surface. We view them as essentially distinct needs. Yeah. And that’s it for design, I think you’re going to hear a lot going forward about colors and shapes and so on.
David Flinner:
Yeah. Super excited about that. Thanks Alan. Let’s see. Call out. I think I covered most of the stuff here. Just the other things … still in progress on our in-app programs, that’s still code complete. It’s blocked on me adding more of the program content. So more to come from me on that and yeah, that’s, I think that’s it. Strong week.
Josh Clemente:
Strong week. Awesome updates. Thank you both. And thanks everyone who is whose name is here and not here contributing in the backend for all these progressive updates. All right. Fast hiring update. This visual report gives you what you need to know. We’re progressing candidates into calls on a number of different career opportunities. Still going to keep the software developer open. We’re seeking outside help with our general counsel role. I’m communicating with a few people this coming week that A16 put us in touch with thank you A16 for that help. And then head of research remains open. So everyone watching this, please continue to refer people to Levels who you think we may fit the descriptions at these pages.
Josh Clemente:
All right. Ops update. Braden, were you going to take this one or I know Miz is out today? I can take it. Quick ops update. So we have migrated over the past few months, we’ve moved from an individual practitioner network where we had a number of doctors who were doing individual consults with our members to that plus the Truepill/Steady MD network, which is a very large, fully national network. We’ve been experimenting with turning up the gain on the Truepill/Steady MD side, and seeing how that works out. We’re now at about 75/25 split. That’s going really well. It improves the experience specifically on the follow-ups. Essentially, they have a defined protocol for how to follow-up with someone who they need more information from. This has been a good experiment. Wasn’t guaranteed it would work, and it’s really nice for volume to know that we can rely on that Steady MD network.
Josh Clemente:
The standby drip campaign, so during the first four to five weeks of standby time, we need to keep people aware of their order process. Braden is leading the charge on that. Thank you to Braden, thank you for the team too … we do have this wait list inside of a wait list experience where once you sign up after waiting on the wait list for who knows how long, you’re then stuck with five weeks of standby time. It’s really important that we try to optimize and provide a delightful experience there. Data export feature now includes zones. This is huge. It’s in a JSON format, which is a little bit harder to interface with than CSV. We can continue to iterate there, but it’s really awesome that we’re providing this data for our members. Thank you Xinlu for getting that out there.
Josh Clemente:
And then we have a new performance cover iteration, which I think everyone should be getting in their kits now. This includes, instead of having to keep that little backing disc in the center on, or remembering to, this now includes a central disc that is bonded in place. The idea is that people will not peel the center disc off and end up sticking it to their sensor and not being able to replace. Please trial these and try to ruin the experience and see if you can or cannot and provide feedback because we really need to get to a point where these are fail proof. Okay. I think that’s it for op side. Thank you ops team, over to Ben
Ben Grynol:
Growth, you’ll see weekly recognized revenue is extremely high as compared to average, so $145,000, that’s due to a push from all the sales force pilot order so there are recognized this week. Monthly we’re at $420,000, surpassed our goal of 300,000, and 10.2 in the bank and sitting well there. Next slide, please. We have seen this slide before, we will revisit it quickly. We have three podcasts and all three podcasts are officially launched across all the podcast players, major ones, Apple, Spotify, you name it. The three podcasts are metabolic insights, that is the aggregation of all the audio articles from the blog and that’s what Haney updates on a weekly basis. Levels live sessions, this is a feed for any clubhouse sessions or teaching or conference sessions that Casey or Josh are a part of. And then A Whole New Level is our branded pod where we have these narrative driven episodes and it is very much an amalgamation of a number of informal conversations. Exciting to get them all up and launched and thanks to everyone for all your help in doing so. Don’t forget to like and subscribe. Next slide.
Ben Grynol:
Website, we are working with Reactive. Reactive is our WordPress agency that we brought on board to help take the site to another level. They’ve got through the initial audit and maintenance and performance updates that’s being plugins and things like that and now they’re starting to ship work. They’ve got two things initially shipped over the past couple days, and that is the Advisors section, as well as the disclaimer at the bottom of the website that says, “Levels is not a product meant for health diagnosis of any kind”, so that is there and that’s good to have. And then they’re shipping the Twitter feed later today, and so the Twitter river is a better rendering feet of all these aggregated tweets that we can swap in and out and then it allows us to actually have more of an on-brand experience, so that is nice. Next slide please.
Ben Grynol:
Transition, we are aware, Josh highlighted quickly, member-insights is what we’re going to be working on with Mike D. What we’re planning on doing is taking what he was doing previously with feedback calls and starting to create some insight that we can action across the company. That being themes that might relate to content or product or even business model considerations. Member insights, that is the slack channel that I highly recommend, there are 13 people in there. I highly recommend we’re all in there because this is where we’ll start to dump some of the call notes and things like that as opposed to the feed that we’ve got, the member feedback that is the ongoing fire hose of NPS score updates.
Ben Grynol:
What we’re going to be doing in the transition is a number of things, but really focused on experiments, which is nice that Josh highlighted that. We’ve got a ton on the go: member journaling; getting started cohorts; micro communities; and nutritionist pilots. So we’ll keep updating everybody with more detail, but in the interest of time, we’ll pass it to Mike so he can go deeper on nutritionist pilot, and some of the other things we’re doing.
Mike DiDonato:
Thanks Ben. Ben said, we’re continuing to do our feedback calls but we’re thinking ways that we can use them to better inform product and growth and design. Had a good conversation with David to start that process and this week is a little bit lighter on calls, we had some reschedules, but wanted to highlight a quote that came out of one of the calls because it highlights the importance and the effectiveness of our metrics when they work right, to help inform our members about their decisions and what to do next. Personally, I’m pretty excited as everyone has been to follow along in the design channel to see the improvements that David and Alan are working on to make one thing in particular, the zone show, more easy to understand and actionable in that moment.
Mike DiDonato:
Then, another quick update on the Nutritionist Pilot, we released our summary memo on Wednesday. Definitely encourage everyone checks it out. A couple highlights, big learnings. I think I mentioned this last week, personalized recommendations and suggestions and then the other one was just being able to connect with someone about the information that they’re gathering because they’ve never seen it before. And then once you start with Levels, you have all this information. One other thing that people indexed on was speed of responses. As we think about planning for the next pilot, it’s obviously a scalability issue and one thing I want to call out, Alan had a really interesting idea. I think it was Alan and the doc to maybe pilot a week and a synchronous review by a nutritionist. Going forward, what we’re going to do, we’re going to do larger group formats, most likely, and then might play around with the call format and cadence to maybe see if there’s an asynchronous way to do this and/or maybe just change up the frequency.
Mike DiDonato:
Then for this first pilot, we did engage with our existing network of nutritionists who used Levels and love Levels, and it’s definitely something that we want to go ahead and continue to [inaudible 00:34:20]. That’s it.
Josh Clemente:
Awesome. Thanks team. Mercy.
Mercy Clemente:
Okay. So this week we hit 26,700 followers on Instagram. One common theme on Instagram was just testing different foods. People were really shocked by the Snickers bar result. We had a lot of feedback in that center photo of Zachary Gilbert. I don’t know why it was very so surprising to our followers, but they were flabbergasted. The BossBabe podcast launched this week, great job, Casey. That also, was really positive, a lot of positive feedback from our members or members and followers actually for that one, they really loved it. Twitter we’re at 13,600 followers. This top tweet Fried Ricing Myself to Death, I thought that was pretty interesting where this one member said he used to eat a ton of fried rice and then he wore Levels and was pretty much fried ricing himself to death every time, and he just realized that. So yeah, the focus on Twitter this week was on hunger and when they wore their Level sensor, they realized when and how much to eat rather than what exactly they’re eating, which I thought was really interesting. That’s it for social this week.
Josh Clemente:
Nice. Thank you, Tom.
Tom Griffin:
Sweet. All right. So real quickly on this slide, continuing to make really strong inroads in the CrossFit community and pro sports more broadly. We had a couple of great highlights this week in terms of just organic social media posts, I mentioned this on slack, but getting the number one or number two CrossFitter in the world to do a video, IG feed post is just not normal in our space, having worked in this world for a few years now so people just love levels and love interacting with our team and they do a lot for us in a very organic way, which is incredible. We’ll go to the next slide.
Tom Griffin:
As you can see, I have my [inaudible 00:36:16] my slide, which I’m excited about. All right. So to quickly zoom in on how we think about some of these pro sports partnerships and frankly, how we think about many of our partnerships more generally? To put it most simply, we’re always asking ourselves the basic business question of what is our return on investment? What value are we getting as a business relative to the cost required to execute the partnership? The two broad, main sources of value for us are: brand awareness, so just building our brand, spreading the word, PR value, et cetera; and then revenue, can we sell product to this community and the audience that surrounds the community? Our editing content there it’s under brand, but arguably there’s a special premium emphasis that we put on generating high quality content that we can distribute across our channels.
Tom Griffin:
Just to quickly give you a sense of how we think about say like the NFL versus the CrossFit community, the NFL, no doubt is better brand awareness, it’s bigger reach, more mainstream, journalists writing about Levels would think it’s a bigger deal, but we have pretty good reason to believe that the revenue potential actually in a community like CrossFit is, is greater than NFL. In short, that’s because people who follow CrossFit also participate in the sport and spend money improving in it, which is not the case for people who follow the NFL.
Tom Griffin:
Lastly, it’s probably an order of magnitude, more expensive to work with the NFL than CrossFit. Takeaway from here is that just, if we decided to spend money on sponsorships and pro sports, it may actually make more sense for that to be within CrossFit than the NFL, which I think is counterintuitive for some people. So there’s more nuance here than this slide, but wanted to just provide a snapshot of the high level framework that we use when thinking about some of these partnerships.
Josh Clemente:
Awesome. Thank you, Tom. Haney.
Mike Haney:
A quick update on content, three pieces go up this week. This is a nice week that shows my ideal scenario, where we have a really nice, big, deep dive, which this week was our cold exposure piece. Everything you ever want to know about brown fat and uncoupling protein, and then a really actionable service piece, which is our new column, Foods We Love. You’ll see more of these coming and then a member story. And this week was our new five questions format with one of our members, which was great. Along those same lines coming up, some of the stories and the works and other Foods We Love column on flax. We’ve got an interesting piece unpacking the idea of cravings, like why do we crave things? And can we change the cravings that we have when we start to change our habits? And then the team that led our breathwork session for the assemblages, doing a piece for us on the effects of breathwork on metabolic health and on glucose, we just got a draft of that in.
Mike Haney:
Then, a couple of nice things coming up in the next week. Kickoff with Reactive, the team Ben mentioned on thinking about the next iteration of the blog, and then another agency we’re working with to think about the next duration of the newsletter. So those projects are both kicking off in earnest in the next week. That’s it for content.
Josh Clemente:
Amazing. Thanks Haney. Okie doke, crushed it. Haney, you are kicking us off with the individual contributions.
Mike Haney:
Cool. I’ll say on the Levels side, I know this is a little bit of a repeat from last week, but still super excited to have Alan on board, had a lovely conversation with him this week and just seeing that update come through this week. It’s so upleveling, the product, and I think it’s going to be awesome. And on a personal level, we just booked a trip for next month to LA. A post-COVID vaccinated blowout, staying in a nice hotel, renting a Tesla, all the things my son will really dig. So I’m excited to be back out in the world again.
Josh Clemente:
Which Tesla did you go with?
Mike Haney:
The brand new Model X. We decided if we’re going to do it, let’s do it.
Josh Clemente:
Yeah. The Fabergé egg of Teslas as Elon would say. Awesome. Alan.
Alan Mclean:
You guys are making me blush over here. I want to say I’ve had such a really wonderful time just collaborating with you all. It’s been so great getting such timely feedback. Everyone’s pitching in there and David especially, has been an amazing and partner. I’m really enjoying my time here. And then on the personal side, I got vaccinated on Tuesday as well so feeling hopeful for the future. On a personal and professional aspect, so that’s good.
Josh Clemente:
Oh, sorry. I was muted. Yeah, that’s awesome. Laurie.
Laurie:
Gosh, I’m excited that the members will be able to personalize their subscription. That’s just wonderful. That’s going to save us a lot of time. It’s great that Jessy is coming on board in Ops. We’re excited about that. Am I excited to clean out the garage this weekend? Yes and no. Because underneath is a game room, but over the last couple years it’s become a catchall. So yeah, I’ll let you know
Josh Clemente:
Enjoy. I think Sara had to jump unfortunately, but Sara, if you’re on the call, please feel free to share. All right, Justin.
Casey Means:
Not on anymore.
Justin Stanley:
Yeah. I’m just super excited about all the design stuff. I love things that look polished and give good glances of information and just make it easier for the user. I think Alan’s doing great work on that. And then personal, my husband Sean’s birthday on Sunday so we might probably go to a restaurant. We’ll see. But yeah, that’s like once a month leaving the house situation for me. So excited.
Josh Clemente:
Enjoy Sam.
Sam:
Yeah. Well I was going to say Alan, but I feel like I’m just jumping on the bandwagon.
Josh Clemente:
Cool. Mike D.
Mike DiDonato:
I was going to say Alan too, but don’t want to be a broken record. Sorry, Alan. I’d say two things, Haney and the content team, it’s crazy how much content I think Josh said at the top of the meeting, but there’s so much awesome content I definitely get behind as well. And the other thing is, I took a look at our website and just seeing our advisors on there. It’s super powerful and super awesome to see people that were on our list in the early days, be happy to be part of what we’re doing. It’s pretty awesome. Personally, it’s supposed to be spring on the east coast. Current weather says otherwise, but I’m excited for warmer weather, although that’s annoying to say.
Josh Clemente:
Ditto. Andrew is not on the call. Casey.
Casey Means:
Plus one, Alan. So inspired by the conversation we had last week. Getting the green light to move ahead with the Life Itself conference and we have two speaking roles there, which is incredible. Fauci is going to be there, Bill Clinton, lots of other great people, amazing. And talking with Dr. Lustig, that was incredible. He really gets what we’re doing and it’s very exciting to see that. So just amazing. Just like what Mike D. said, just these incredible people who definitely see our vision and want to help us achieve it again. Well, personally, I’m back in California after a couple weeks in Phoenix, Arizona, and it’s really good to be back. I get together this weekend with some friends from Switzerland who are in town, who started a [inaudible 00:44:25] company there and yeah, it’s going to be nice to meet them in person.
Laurie:
Nice. Enjoy that. Stacy.
Stacie:
I’m really excited about the design work as well, especially because that means that David isn’t asking me what I think of design concepts before I have coffee each morning. It’d be like 7:30 AM and he’d be like, “What do you think of the box?” So Alan, I’m so excited that you’re the first point of contact for that now. And otherwise it’s going to be like 70 degrees tomorrow and we’re just thrilled about spending the day outdoors.
Josh Clemente:
Love it. Ben.
Ben Grynol:
Hat tip to Baden. He’s been instrumental in setting up all these community calls, super organized with it and there’s a ton of work that goes in. So appreciate that immensely and hat tip to Stacie and Haney for all the work in helping to launch the podcast and getting that out to the audience. Personally, super excited after six years of having a trach, Theo went through a multi-stage process. He got this call on Monday that he could be trialed and he made it. He doesn’t have a trach anymore. It’s bonkers to think about. So yeah, super, super stoked. And that’s it.
Josh Clemente:
Awesome.
Tom Griffin:
Wow.
Josh Clemente:
Quick recovery, Theo. Mercy.
Mercy Clemente:
Professionally, the product and design updates look really incredible. I’m excited about that. Also subscriptions so close. And then personally, still helping my sister renovate their house and we’re almost done with that. We’re about 90% done. That’s exciting. Yeah, that’s it for me.
Josh Clemente:
I saw a Peloton ride registered this morning, which I believe was the first from your account.
Mercy Clemente:
Yes, my bike shoes just came in. I forgot to order them before.
Josh Clemente:
Good. Carry on. Hao
Hao Li:
Yes, Alan been great. Had a good talk with him on Monday but I also want to mention adjusting, really catching up really fast with Sara and [inaudible 00:46:44] and stuff. That’s really good to see, I think, how our documentation helps a lot, which is great. And personally, we are looking for a week long raining forecast for next week. So I’m going to do some barbecue before that comes in.
Josh Clemente:
Very nice. Let’s see. We are on JM.
Josh Mohrer:
If there were aliens on earth, they’d probably have started a company. I’m excited about subscriptions and the work being done there. I’m excited about experiments. It’s soda now, maybe blood soon. And on a personal note, I’m so excited that my mother-in-law is coming for a month. She gets here this afternoon. Really excited about it. Have a great weekend.
Josh Clemente:
All right. Well, best of luck. We’ll watch for cortisol related blood sugar increases.
Josh Clemente:
On my end. So I’ll take a slight breath on the content. I think that what’s amazing is for all this volume to be happening, the background process has to be really nailed. And so I’m just blown away by the writers, Casey, doing all the medical, verification and not only that, but queuing up and teeing up the content topics and giving Haney the raw material that he needs to organize this, it’s pretty stunning. And I took today, I was walking to a doctor’s appointment and was just listening to some of the recorded sessions and it’s just crazy. We’re putting out some amazingly high value stuff that I don’t know yet and it’s just helpful and awesome to have.
Josh Clemente:
And then, yeah, another thing I’ve got a couple things I’m just going to go for it. Team bios, I was going through our notion and I saw our team bios page and was just reading through all the getting started guides and just learning about people’s lives again and that is awesome. I love that we have that. For those of you who’s getting started guide is not on the notion page today, please add it. It’s just not even for professional reasons, just for personal reasons. It’s so cool.
Josh Clemente:
Then I do want to shout out Casey for her conversation with Dr. Lustig. I was upset to not, not be able to join that call, but Lustig is a powerhouse. I’ve seen him talk and converse with people at CrossFit conferences before and he’s a force to be reckoned with and Casey was just straight up, changed his mind about Levels on the single call and the notes were awesome and it was very detailed in the weeds. It’s just cool to have that type of talent on the team. Casey, shout out.
Josh Clemente:
Then, personally real quick, my birthday’s at midnight tonight and I’m making this year about mornings. My goal is to make mornings my thing and become good at them. So far, so good. Today was probably the most, today and yesterday were probably most effective days I’ve ever had because I got up really early and just focused there and didn’t really care about the rest of the day. That’s all. Gabriel.
Gabriel:
Wow. Yeah. So to echo what everyone else said, it’s been really exciting working with Alan. It’s also been really exciting having Murillo and now Justin, on the team, the number of mobile engineers has grown so much in quite a short period of time and that’s been super exciting to see. Personally, I got my bike out of winter storage and chinned it up. So I’m going to do some bike rides this weekend which I’m excited about.
Josh Clemente:
Awesome. Enjoy. Tom.
Tom Griffin:
I’m going to stick to my guns and stay on the bandwagon and go with Alan and the design work, just been super excited about it. Also, had an awesome call with Alan, where I had intended to give him an overview of partnerships at Levels and instead, I just asked him about 45 questions on the future of our industry and just learned a ton from him. So that was really fun for me. Then personally, so many things, I think I’ve got 10 podcasts queued up. Unfortunately they’re not Levels podcasts, I got to be honest, for this weekend that I’m really excited about. Even though I’m hearing Sam on my shoulder saying that I’ve got to stop listening to podcasts if I want to read more of books, but I’m really excited about those. And then I started piano lessons. So I’m excited about that as well.
Josh Clemente:
Share the queue. I’ve been doing some real serious work on my podcast queue and I’m getting close to the bottom. So I need more. Miz is out today, so we are, we made it.
Speaker 18:
We got Murillo.
Josh Clemente:
Oh yeah, Murillo.
Speaker 18:
See Murillo is back.
Josh Clemente:
Sorry. Does your audio work?
Murillo:
Yeah, it works now. Right. All right. It’s just my new headphones. I can’t get them to work. But yeah, super excited, one for Alan and just seeing the design work being done. But this week has reminded me of something I even talked to, and I even mentioned in this call was just the quality of work and care that’s being put on everything that’s being done. One of the things that I do consistently now is just check the Levels blog whenever I have a question about glucose monitoring and I got reminded of that again this week when I had my [inaudible 00:51:57] support call with Baden and just seeing how much care he put into the messages that we send to our users, it’s just really humbling to be a part of this team. So I’m really excited about that. Yeah, that’s it for me.
Josh Clemente:
Love it. Great way to wrap up. All right team, fun week, great job everybody. Let’s keep it going. Have a great weekend.
Tom Griffin:
Happy birthday, Josh.
Casey Means:
Bye guys. Happy birthday Josh.
Josh Clemente:
Thank you.