Ben Grynol (00:00):
Welcome to Friday Forum, August 4th, 2023. So, Friday Forum, as a reminder, is our weekly sync time to celebrate recent achievements, talk about some of the progress that we’ve made week over week, and share things like culture kudos, and hear from different members and partners. We’ve also got our weekly async updates, and then the Monday metrics meetings to dive deeper into some of the metrics and the ongoing patterns that we see. And for social connection, we’ve always got our donor chats. So recent achievements this week, software receipts were up for the week of July 24th, up 19% from the prior week. This gives us a 10%, just over 10% growth rate on a four-week trailing average. So again, this is four week trailing average on receipts that we see for new member revenue. Calendar access is really great product feature I think that many of us have been excited about and something that we started all nodding our heads when we talked about getting back to the basics. The calendar access view to previous days is now shipped and it’s rolled out to a hundred percent of members.
(01:03):
So, Murillo worked to unify the today screen and the data review screen, so that we’ve got a very clear and clean experience there. Support hit the six-hour SLA target for the first time in five months, which was really great. So hat tip to all the support team, can see Sonny cheering there. The team’s also been experimenting with things, so I know Sonny and Lynette both had a couple of calls, but doing very basic support things, and we’ll call them even growth related things, like picking up the phone and how does that impact the member experience, and how does that impact even things like downstream sales. So Lynette had an initiative this week. Chris dives deeper into it in his async update, where when individuals didn’t have their individual consent form filled out, this is something that downstream we would end up having to refund people for not following through on the full funnel experience.
(01:54):
And so, this was a small sample set, but Lynette reached out to 10 people via phone, and this led to half the people going through and completing the form. So that minimizes the turn in all these little activities that we start to do to say how do we do this at scale and what more can we do to support? So hat tip to, I know Sonny had a call that she did as well, and that resulted in N equals one conversion, which is great. Partners are producing. So, we’re seeing conversions strip in from many different partners, and Mike and Jack even ramping up our affiliate strategy to get deeper and get broader across many different categories of influencers that we can work with. And then, the podcast here with Casey is prevalent as ever. So there are four shows being recorded in August, and then two are going live.
(02:40):
Lastly, blog traffic’s up 10% and we’re seeing a lot of this come from the email funnel, which is great. And then, YouTube had a monster growth rate in July, so 17% growth and a record month for short. So we saw 106,000 views, which is roughly 18% of our viewership. So all the metrics on YouTube are very strong as far as top of funnel awareness goes, and we’re continuing to see audience growth and increased watch time, which is really great, because that is consumer attention that helps to build trust in levels. We had, Dom did a podcast, the first of three that he’s doing. That’s a cross section of metabolic health and mental health, and this is in association with Metabolic Mind. So really great listen and excited to see those come through as they start to drip out. We’ve got a number of partners, so five new partners joined this week.
(03:30):
We’ve got Egi Lau, we’ve got Jeremy Teal, Chase Chewning, and then Dr. Nicole Huffman as a handful of, and again, this is across different segments of people who are more interested in health and wellness, more interested in biohacking, more interested in CrossFit. So we’re seeing the breadth of people in our corner that are helping to get our message out. A couple new blog posts live, so are ancient grains healthier than rice? And then, one which is a deep dive into the ultimate guide to exercise and metabolic health. So we all know that there’s lots of information that exists on how to fuel properly, how to make sure that you’re exercising, whether it’s zone two or whether it’s hit that you’re doing. How do you start to think about the way that you fuel and the exercise you get to optimize metabolic health. Top right corner, a couple screenshots.
(04:21):
You can see the day review and the today screen merged, and the calendar, which love to see those streaks. There are a couple new landing pages that Sharma team’s working on. So we’re testing different things, like product-centric landing pages, things that are driven more from derivative content from the blog, like five ways you become healthier with levels. And then, we’ve even got one that’s focused on women’s health. So a cross-section of metabolic health and pregnancy, and how CGM can help to bring insight during that phase of life. I believe that is it for the week. So on to Debbie Marlowe, welcome Debbie. Debbie is a member, retired massage therapist for 30 years, and holistic health coach at Motivate Me Love. So Debbie, would love to hear about your experience with Levels and some of the things that you’re thinking about through areas where we can make improvements, either on the support front, or product front, or anything we’re doing even with things like content. So, I’ll let you take it away.
Debbie Marlowe (05:21):
Well, it’s been my honor, because I have been with Levels and a beta capacity for, I don’t know, probably four or five years now. How old are you guys? I’m trying to think. I know I was one of the early adopters, but it’s been really wonderful to watch the different stages that the company has gone through. I am primarily now a health coach and I’ve worked a lot with elimination diets. And as we all know, elimination diets have a time limit. I mean, you can only do those for so long, or should only do those for so long. So what I love about Levels specifically is, the people that are doing elimination diets, they want to know more, they’re biohacking, they’re just trying to do much more. And I think that Levels is the best next step for them, because they’ve now learned how food affects their body in one parameter.
(06:25):
Now they can see their glucose levels and I’ll just take it for instance, and you guys will probably all get a kick out of this, but I used to put coconut aminos on everything, until the first time I strapped on a CGM and my level shot up to 200, just because I had some, I think it was like a fried rice bowl or something, but it didn’t have… like, cauliflower rice. And so, I think it’ll be amazing. I want to see everybody strap a CGM on, I probably shouldn’t say strap on, right? I want to see everybody put a, see, I had to do it, I’m sorry. I would like to see everybody once in their life put a CGM on, because I think it’s just amazing and I think it’s one of the best things that we can do for ourselves.
Ben Grynol (07:19):
Very cool. Love to hear the insight too, just how things change once you start to see data and once you start to see some of the changes of things, that I think that’s a common theme that we hear where people say, “I’ve been doing this thing my whole life.” And then, you start to see data that closes that loop of what is actually happening in your body, especially at different phases, whether it has to do with exercise and training, or even hormonal changes in men and women throughout their life. And so, are there any areas that you’ve seen opportunities for us to make improvements with the product, or even some of the content that might be missing links based on your interests?
Debbie Marlowe (07:59):
Every time I think, well, Sonny and I are personal friends, so every time I think of something I send it off to Sonny, but it’s just kind of funny, because you all typically come up with something before I know I need it. And this isn’t just a rah, rah, but it’s really true. You all are innovating and I’m so very happy for it. The only thing, well, one of the things that I thought more for people that are just starting was to have that walkthrough, to show them here, let’s do some testing. Let’s test rice and let’s test rice after it’s been a resistant starch, and things like that. And you all just came out with, I think that was was that last, was that January? God, this year’s going so fast, but where you actually had the videos and I can’t remember her name, but all the videos take people through it.
(08:51):
I thought that was really brilliant, because that a lot of people, they might put it on and they might see things, but they don’t really understand what they’re seeing. So I thought adding those videos in, it was a beta test for something in January, and I don’t know the exact name of it so you’ll have to excuse me, but I thought that was really great. And I think any client education you can do on that front is wonderful. Saying things like, okay, now you’ve had your CGM for a week, how about we start doing these kinds of tests, so you can see how things work for you? Perfect example, my coconut aminos that I thought were wonderful, and okay, they’re not soy. I just think that people need to have certain things to try out that they may not have thought of.
Ben Grynol (09:51):
Love it. Yeah, the high-touch support is, I mean it’s something that downstream, the support team is so thoughtful, I think, about making sure that there is that high touch, and the more that we can start there as a foundation and bring that into product, the more helpful it is for all of our members. So appreciate you joining, and you’re welcome to say, we’ve got about an hour long meeting, and so if you’d like to stay around and walk through the updates for the week, you’re very welcome too. If you have to hop off, feel free to head out whenever.
Debbie Marlowe (10:22):
Great. Well, thank you so much for having me and like I said, anytime, anything that I can do for you all, just let me know. I’m happy to help, because you’ve been a very significant part. In fact, my dad just was in the hospital and got out if I can take half a second, and he was diabetic while he was in the hospital. And I told people, I said, give me three days. And he got out and I had an extra CGM laying around, and I slapped that on him, and I’m teaching him how to manage his glucose. And one day he wanted to go out and have biscuits and gravy. I said, okay, let’s go do that. And I showed him what biscuits and gravy do. So now he knows that biscuits and gravy is occasional thing. So, you all are helping my family and me, and so anything I can do to support you, I’m a hundred percent here. So thank you very much.
Ben Grynol (11:15):
Amazing. Appreciate it very much. Thanks for [inaudible 00:11:18]-
Debbie Marlowe (11:18):
Thank you.
Ben Grynol (11:19):
… us today. So, culture and kudos. Here we go. Lynette, to no surprise, contagious infectious energy that gets passed along to the team. This kudos is a shout-out just for how member-centric Lynette always is with every initiative underway. But anytime we’ve got an internal project, anytime she is in the support queue, everything is very much looked through with the lens of empathy. So, she’s always sort of coming at it from a member first perspective. And you can see this is a bottom view of some of the changes that were made to the product. So not only are the screenshots there where it says, “Here’s the old view, here’s the new view,” it’s explaining why did we make this change. So as opposed to just saying, “Here you go, here’s the information that’s changed,” explaining why we made the change and how some of these ongoing changes will take place just over time as we improve the product.
(12:12):
She is always finding bugs and she is always pushing us to be better, and very member focused. So appreciate everything you do Lynette. We always love to see the way that you think about the challenges that we’re solving. Kudos to Murillo. So Murillo, working at lightning speed, this is kudos in regards to the merging of the day review screen and the today screen. When we started talking about nailing the basics and fixing the jank is the two of the big product buckets that we were focused on, getting the calendar view back with something that we all wanted. And so, I think everybody was pretty amazed where Murillo miraculously snapped his fingers and somehow it happened. But there’s so much work that goes on behind the scenes to make this happen and to be very thoughtful about merging two big buckets. And so, Murillo, appreciate the work on that.
(13:04):
Everybody is very stoked that it is rolled out. And then, lastly, today is Karen’s last day. So Karen wasn’t able to join us. She had a travel day planned today, and so she was a bit bummed that she couldn’t be here, but have to give Karen a kudos for everything that she’s contributed to Levels. So from constantly shipping work to making us all push harder to make improvements across the board. I guess a bit of a timeline as far as when Karen came on board. So her main focus was expansion and it was very much a one person team to say, “Let’s do this.” And so, everything around the UK and expansion had to do with building infrastructure and relationships, and partnerships, and it was to none of our surprise to see there’d be sometimes 10 or 20 Levels boxes piled up behind Karen on Zoom calls.
(13:55):
And so, she was running the full stack with that. And when we started to shift efforts into growth products, she took that sack on, and she started again making progress very quickly, doing things like user experience, research calls, relaying that info back to our team, saying, “Here’s what we’re hearing from members and here’s how we can action it.” And then, started working on things like changes to the site, changes to the checkout flow, finding outsourced contractors that we could work with as far as designers. So managing those designers, so that we could scale time without taking additional time away from our team to focus on product. And then, that led to ramping up growth engineering and some of the experimentation that we would be doing week over week. So, hat tip to Karen, appreciate all the work that she’s done to push us forward and to get us to where we are, and best of luck in all the next chapters that she undertakes in this startup game. So thank you to Karen. Hui with data questions and requests. I’ll pass it over to you.
Hui Lu (14:57):
Yeah, thanks. So this is just a quick PSA and reminder that if you have any data related questions or requests, whether it’s about how to use a tool like Posthog or Snowflake, or how to find a certain type of user data in your data warehouse, or how to write a query, how to build a dashboard. If you have questions like that, where should you go to? So first of all, check out documentation linked here, measurement and data warehouse wiki, they have been updated recently and well maintained by the team. They have wealth of data related information that likely can answer most of your questions. If you still need help after you check out those documentations, then post your questions or requests in their data and analytics comms channel, we have a group of data knowledgeable people who will actively monitor their channel and offer you help. Yeah, that’s all. Enjoy your exploration with data.
Ben Grynol (16:08):
Sorry, sticky fingers, could not unmute there. Company priority. So, reminder to us all. When we’re working on things, does this help us to get to 10% month-over-month growth? If this isn’t your screen saver, take a screenshot now or grab it. It is in comms, I’m sure it’s even in notion as well. Growth. So this is a very high level update on the performance marketing front, just some of the evolution that we’ve seen from June to July and how we’re thinking about it moving forward. So recap of June and July. So there’s a new memo, it’s an addendum to the initial strategy, and it’s looking at this past performance and what some of the outcomes were, and then how we’re thinking about it and what that actually means. So June was very much a transition month. We saw 217 conversions, $251 of blended CAC, $55,000 of spend and 2.8 million impressions. July. 395 conversions, $195 of blended CAC, 3.1 million impressions and $77,000 of spend.
(17:14):
And so, the outcome, it’s really easy to come to the conclusion in isolation and say, wow, this is great. Conversions are up 82%, CAC is down, impressions are up, spend is up. And that’s not always the case. And so, when we’re looking at this data, we have to look at it on a platform by platform basis. So this is solely a comparison of what we see in Meta, so that we can look at ad sets, because there’s ad sets in media buying and Meta that you’re constantly tweaking those levers on a daily basis, which is very different from Google Ads, where it is more of a static approach that you’re on strategy and you’re looking at the keywords that you’re bidding against. And there’s not a lot of changes to, Levels CGM doesn’t change from day to day or week to week, but the creative that we choose to run and how we target that changes constantly on Meta.
(18:03):
So the caveat to all of this is, the metrics outlook. Whenever we’re looking at this data and attribution, we know that we have to, July was an improvement month, but we need to dig further into the incrementality of Meta advertising. And the reason being is that the attribution model in Meta and Google, and all these platforms, they’re driven to make sure you’re incentivized to keep putting money into the platform and you’re seeing results. But we need to look at it downstream, what we see in Posthog, and we need to understand how that translates to actually bottom of the funnel conversions. And we need to think about what this looks like from a time horizon. So we know that the purchasing window is quite long for people to actually convert. We hear it quite often where people say it takes two to three years for them to decide on Levels.
(18:48):
In many cases it can be from one to three months, three to six, even six to 12 months for them to make purchasing decisions. And so, when we’re looking at this data, we’re not looking at isolation and say 82% increase in conversion rate downstream equals that in Posthog, because that would be an immediate decision to say that’s 10% growth and we’re not actually seeing that. So Matt and I are starting to think through how can we allocate our capital strategically based on the platform data that we see in isolation, combine that with the insights that we get from Posthog, and then we come to a conclusion on how we can keep making improvements to make sure that we’re always getting our blended CAC, is what we are the most focused on, our blended CAC for all the marketing spend across partnerships and performance market, and all these areas.
(19:34):
What’s the return on ad spend, the ROAS, and then what’s the blended customer acquisition cost based on what we see for numbers? Performance marketing outlook, August to October. So again, this is a shorter timeframe, but how are we going to keep making improvements? So there’s two big buckets. One is improving assets. So this is constantly creating, testing and measuring new assets. And then, the second is improving the media buying. So that’s the actual targeting, the way that you’ve got different demographics, different interest groups, and even different assets that are served up to those interest groups. So good creative and bad media buying, bad performance. Good media buying and bad creative, poor performance again. So we have to make sure that we’re constantly improving those areas, and those are the two big buckets that Matt, Tony and I are digging into, and making sure that we’re making those improvements.
(20:27):
The content, so there’s three main buckets that content will fall within. There’s user-generated content, there’s product-centric content, and then there’s brand content. So within UGC there’s three pillars, we’ll call it. There’s member-focused UGC, so this would be just a person in general who’s giving a testimonial. Then we’ve got our affiliate and partner user generated content, where they might be a little bit more recognizable, and we sometimes take that. This is a hybrid one, where we took a number of different partners and we cut it up, so that they’re fast transitions to make sure that we’re getting the right hook and the right information out. Then we’ve also got, we’ll call it advisor or partner, more thought leader, user generated content that we sometimes will run on our channels, or we’ll choose, in this case this was an ad we ran with Mark and we ran it as a whitelist ad that went out to his audience.
(21:16):
So we’re going to continue to procure that. I’m going to work on a doc next week just on an overall plan, how we can start to get more user generated content from our members that we might want to run as ads, with their acknowledgement of course. And then product centric, this is targeting more like brand marketing or product marketing, where you’re targeting based on headlines. So you’re trying to catch people on certain headlines that might incentivize them based on their interest group, and then pulling out value props based on the product features that they care about. So we’ll continue to test that. And then, brand content or lifestyle driven contents usually very top of funnel, but this will show things like how does Levels fit into people’s lives through things like food, sleep, exercise, all the buckets of metabolic health, but this is more inspirational and aspirational content that can pique people’s interest, especially for prospecting ads, whereas a lot of product marketing and then even user generated content can be driven across prospecting, but works really well for things like retargeting.
(22:18):
So those are three main buckets. And then, within the buckets there are categories. So I know this might sound a little bit nerdy and nuanced, but they’re categories. So you can have user generated content focused on these different segments or these different groups. And this is generalizing into where we see members fall. It’s nothing new. It’s reiterating from what we tend to see, but people focus on increasing longevity and preventing disease generally an older demographic, 45 to 65, people who are interested in optimizing performance and increasing energy tends to be a little bit younger demographic. And again, this is just generalizing, it’s not to say in absolute terms. People who are focused on improving wellness, so this is a broad demographic of people who want to improve their metabolic health, and sometimes they’ve got certain goals like weight loss in mind. And then, the last group is understanding health at different phases of life.
(23:11):
So, we see this specifically with women at different stages, whether it’s in family planning or years of fertility in pregnancy, whether it has to do with things like PCOS or even menopause. And so, we’ve got these different buckets where we can create content, we can nail the media buying and then we can always make sure that we’re testing. So this is something that we will work towards and that is a high level update about performance marketing. So as always, if anyone has questions, put out a thread on comms and happy to chat about it, or we can think about it anytime.
Cosima Travis (23:44):
Cool, and I’ll give a little update on what I’ve been working on and if you go to the next slide, I think it’s certainly true to say that this is very much a work in progress and has changed a lot in the past two months. So I’ll talk a little on this slide about what I’d say I do in theory, and then in the next slide I’ll talk about what that means in practice. So in theory, I think the sort of areas that I’m thinking about a lot are measuring our product, how we prioritize what we work on, shaping what we work on and kind of planning across the team, and then communicating. So on the measurement side, it’s a lot of questions around at the core, is the product getting better? So what are the main KPIs, what drives members actually retaining? On a more qualitative note, do we like the app, do we like the product that we’re building?
(24:37):
And that’s sort of the measurement piece. The prioritization piece is really asking ourselves always, are we working on the most important thing? I think this is probably the hardest area of product, always. I feel like when you work in product for a while you realize that there are a ton of great ideas of things we could build and the ultimate hardest thing is the deciding the 10 good ideas that we’re not going to work on right now, because there’s something more important. So kind of always making sure that the roadmap is aligned to the most important gaps that we have right now, and that we have the right sequencing of things that we’re working on. And I think part of this is also making sure that we are protecting our core competencies and really meeting those at a high bar, but that we’re also experimenting with new ideas and new concepts that might fail.
(25:26):
And having that balance is important kind of in the prioritization. And then, I feel like there’s a shaping and planning piece, which is the looking ahead, what’s next? How can we prepare for those projects? What sort of research can we be doing in advance of actually building those new features? And then, of course communication. So it’s a bit of an octopus role in that you’re trying to make sure that every team has the context it needs, some teams need a lot more deep context, because actually going to be working on and building those features. Other teams need more situational awareness and a general understanding of the product direction. And then, if you go to the next slide, I tried to break down what are all the things that I’m actually doing on a daily basis. So I was thinking of, it’s like there’s small things I do that are regular daily updates in projects for the product team in general, like what’s happening in product, lots of small little ad hoc stuff that’s, probably like 10% of my time is small things.
(26:30):
Then medium-sized stuff, there’s regular medium-sized things that I do. So these are a lot of regular processes and this is probably the ripest area for Athena, and having more kind of scaled out work as this new way of doing product has a little bit more time, and time to get automated. But one of the main things I’m doing every day is triaging product ideas. So we have lots of member calls, we have lots of internal feedback, so it’s like, where does this stuff belong? Most ideas, no offense, are not totally new ideas. They’re usually related to some other idea from the past, so how can we actually call together? And that sort of goes into backlog refinement too, but how can we call together all these ideas, so that when it’s time to actually work on this thing, we’re gathering together the 20 historical thoughts that people have had about this area.
(27:27):
Then there’s also a lot of planning stuff, so product and team planning and resource allocation, providing updates, async for the team every week, product metrics. So I do a high level updates in the Monday metrics meeting and then more detailed metrics, readouts for product stuff on Fridays, and then monthly stuff like churn analysis, investor updates, AMA walkthroughs, and screenshots of how the app looks, and maintaining the Wiki. And then, quarterly stuff like the product newsletter, and member and team surveys. I’ll go later into some of what I see as medium ad hoc work. This is more like the flex points in projects, where I’m more in a supporting role, but I’m there to kind of jump in when we’re validating, jump in when we’re building hypotheses, kind of give my feedback in the designing user story and shaping, and kind of planning next steps for projects.
(28:23):
I’d also say I write specs for smaller pickup projects, where there’s a little bit less of a kind of hypothesis exploration. And then, in terms of larger things that I work on, larger regular stuff is sort of maintaining the product strategy, the product roadmap. And then, in terms of ad hoc stuff, it could be anything from prototyping, future roadmap areas, investigating metrics, user research, competitor research. And if you go on the next slide, just some examples of some of the recent ad hoc larger projects I’ve been working on, like the monthly yearly report dogfooding. Like, we have a project for reports coming up, so that’s a way to dig into what could this thing be, what can we dogfood internally before we actually have end allocation to see what do people find compelling in a report, et cetera. So there’s lots of areas where I’m trying to, I see it as kicking up the dust on a topic that’s coming up soon.
(29:28):
If you go on the next slide. And this is sort of how I see, and this is very much a work in progress and something that will evolve over time. But in the project life cycle, I think in the new engDRI format, where product is probably the most involved, is really where I feel like I’m involved in the discovery phase. And that’s kind of part of what backlog refinement is, figuring out is this problem a new problem? Does it relate to another problem? Should it sort of be grouped together? And I’m heavily involved in prioritizing. So deciding should we work on this problem now? And then the exploration phase is sort of what I was describing before, so what sort of dust can we kick up in advance of actually starting to shape this project? And that exploration can be pretty open-ended, and sort of lead to Wizard of Oz type experiments.
(30:25):
Then the gray sort of represents where I’m more in a supporting role, so the engDRI is building a hypothesis. I’ll be there to support and give feedback. In the shaping phase, I’m probably taking a more active role in terms of between Victor, myself and the engDRI kind of shaping the project on the day-to-day. And then, build test release, validate retro. It used to be much more heavily involved in this. Now it’s a bit more of a supporting role as the engDRI takes more ownership, and I’d say next steps is sort of like the closing the loop prioritization. So no project is ever done, done, done. There’s always more you could do, but the natural instinct might be to do that next cool thing right away, but it’s kind of always coming back to the prioritization. We might want to do this next thing, but is it more important than starting on some totally different initiative now? So that’s sort of the closing loop. This will vary by project for sure, but this is I think sort of how product stretches across the project lifecycle in the new engDRI culture. And that’s it.
Ben Grynol (31:37):
We’re on to individual contributions. Thanks, Cosima, for all the work there and everything you’re doing with product, all the Looms that you put out are always so informative. And actually, we didn’t touch on this, there was so much, so many things and I know you touched on it in the async update, but highlighting that model you’ve created to think through downstream, how does some of the decisions that we make impact long-term retention, whether we make a decision around food logging, or just any of the app interactions, so getting deeper into the cross section or product and growth. It’s so great and if anyone hasn’t watched that Loom, highly encourage it, because it’s a really thoughtful way of thinking through product decisions and how they’re not just near term in the way that we make them, but it’s more the why that we make them in the long term.
(32:22):
So appreciate the work there and going that deep into everything you do. Individual contribution. So professionally, I’m so stoked on the calendar thing, again, it is one of those things, like I missed that feature so deeply. And I would just love going and looking at it, because the way that I personally would use that was the accountability of you’re doing well, and that just looking at those green dots, I don’t know what it is, but I know that it’s something that we all sort of felt that was such a core part of the project experience. And so, I love just seeing that back and it’s something that I missed so much, and it created so much friction before, so very, very stoked to see that back.
(33:01):
Personally, it’s Penelope’s birthday next Tuesday, I think Tuesday or Wednesday, and she’s been asking since we moved to go to the Museum of Ice Cream and we haven’t taken her, but we’re surprising her. On Sunday we’re going to go there and I have no idea what this thing is about, but we’re going to go check it out. So that is the update. Miz, take it away.
Michael Mizrahi (33:26):
I’ll jump in with one. I know she’s not on the call, but going to miss Karen, want to send her off well. And super thankful for just the energy and the focus, discipline and consistency that she brought was certainly very welcome on the team, and I know she touched a lot of us. So, we wish you well, Karen. I didn’t get to see the goodbye video, but I’ll check it out shortly. But yeah, thanks for everything you’ve contributed here. We’ll miss you and see you around.
Ben Grynol (33:51):
Plus one, two to that. Love to check out, it sounds like there’s a video in comms floating around. Hui.
Hui Lu (33:59):
Yeah, so on the professional side, I’m so excited about a few projects. I guess I’m excited about all of them, but just to shout out to a few, first is definitely the calendar access, and I think to me the very unique part of that project is Murillo really felt excited about the project. He wanted to work on the project and he dealt with it so quickly, and made such big improvement to our app. I think that’s a great resemblement of their new culture that we’re trying push to the team now, so I feel so glad and proud of that. On personal front, I’m going to fly to China this afternoon, so I feel so excited about that. It has been four years since I was able to do that last time, basically since pandemic happened. So can’t wait to visit my hometown, see my family and childhood friends, and all that. Yeah, so very excited. Yeah.
Ben Grynol (35:06):
Amazing. Have a wonderful trip. That’s going to be great. And yeah, plus one on all the, just everything regarding the architects and contractors that have managed to maintain the building on the duct tape and Popsicle sticks of the scraper for the past four years that was supposed to be a short window, and has kept us going on, so I don’t think anybody on the backend team is going to miss that at all. Chris.
Chris Jones (35:39):
On also kind of work but personal, being out last week was a lot of fun, but really it was great to see the team where they handled everything, and there was a lot of things going on. A lot of action, things with the hackathon. So, I was super proud of the team to kind of step up and pretty much didn’t need me, and it felt great to be able to disconnect and not turn my phone on, and knowing that the team’s got it. So that was a great feeling. Then personally, two updates. One on hashtag Farm Life. This morning they finally delivered Nicole’s sand for her horse arena. I went back to the email that she forward me and it’s been two years in the making of her finding sand for her horses. It was shipped in from Washington, and essentially they do equestrian and golf courses, so it kind of has this fine sand trap, sand of Pebble Beach ish, and I was like, I had no idea sand was so complicated until I actually felt it.
(36:46):
I’m like, oh, this is not just sand I get from the dirt. So now I know why it took two years. So my wife is very, very happy and excited. Then on my standpoint, because last week was riding across the state of Iowa for training. I’ve got a gravel race this weekend, so I’m putting back on my helmet, so the bears can find me when I’m in the woods. And then, it’s going to be my first race with this Ketone-IQ fully leaded. I’m going to have a water bottle full of it. So I’m going to be drinking the gasoline, because Lance Armstrong says you get 15% extra performance by drinking gasoline. So I’m excited to see how full ketones helps me in the race. So this should be fun. I’ll report back later.
Ben Grynol (37:36):
And there’s the HVM and UGC coming at you. We’ll cut that, Chris, we’re going to sell that as an ad to the study.
Stoddy Carey (37:47):
Hey, so first, professionally, I think there’s sort of two things. There’s one just big shout out to everybody involved in getting that protocol submitted. I think that we can’t understate how long that takes a lot of teams, and Levels in true Levels fashion does it like two to three weeks faster than expectations. So shout out Gui for being really transparent. I think that I had some requests for her and then the transparency of her to basically share her one-on-ones with Hui, sort of led me to talk to Chris and then Chris get involved in helping her with back end things. So it’s like all of these sort of trickle down effects of transparency, kind of building into problem solvers. So just really big kudos to her. She’s a big mover on all things back end engineering, and I really appreciate her sort of taking a leap and being transparent, and sharing what she needs, so that we can help her out and get things fixed.
Ben Grynol (38:58):
Here we go, team, kudos. Thanks, Stoddy. Still got 12 minutes. Chris, you might be getting your wish. Anyone have anything to add? Any last…
Tom Griffin (39:13):
I’ll jump in here. I always have trouble distilling my thoughts. I’ve got about 5,000 every week, but I’ll pick a couple small ones first. Just that I’m excited about the investment in email that Haney has been doing a great job leading and kicking off. We’re seeing some good early results there and it’ll be a much larger investment over the next couple of months. I think simply put to just better nurture the audience that we naturally get at the top of our funnel from blog, YouTube, et cetera, through the actual buying process, which I think makes a lot of intuitive sense and we’re excited to invest a lot more there. On the partnerships front, it was nice to see Sean Stevenson, our latest partner who just started promoting Levels formally performing pretty well, or I would say very well in terms of initial performance. So that was a great win to get and an awesome team effort I would say between Casey, in terms of initially getting that relationship, and Jackie as well.
(40:21):
Definitely want to wish Karen well. Yeah, she’s been a force and among many qualities that we appreciated in her, just her hustle and tenacity was contagious, and set the bar there. So excited to see what she does next. And then personally, I started at comms about listening to a Peter T at Sam Harris podcast, and I think that that is representative of a shift in the last week of starting to listen to podcasts again. I think between travel and work, I was leaving zero time for any reading, music, podcasts or anything like that in my life, which I think I was starting to feel the effects of. So this past week, being back in New York, I was able to invest and expand intellectually a little bit more than I have been over the last couple of months, which I think felt very good.
Ben Grynol (41:20):
Podcast for the win. Anyone else? Final thoughts, or we’re getting 10 minutes back on Friday. All right, we’ll leave it on that note. Well, appreciate everyone’s hard work. Let’s keep pushing. We’ve got to keep getting numbers up, numbers moving, product shipped. Everything that everyone is doing, push hard and when you think you’re pushing hard, to quote Goggins, “You’re only at 40%.”