Transcript
Josh Clemente: That wasn’t too bad. January 8th, it’s been two weeks. Luckily it seems like most people took off some good time over the past two weeks, so we don’t actually have two weeks full of Level’s rate of execution content here, which is a good thing. So, good job, everyone, for taking some time off.
Josh Clemente: I want to welcome Julia Lipton, our special guest for the week. Julia is the founder of Awesome People Ventures and Awesome People Talent. These are early stage funds and a talent supercharger, so I’ll let her jump in and say a few words about what she’s up to. And I just want to say, she’s one of our earliest and most supportive members and backers. I remember working with Mike and Julia when she was first starting and going through the SMS text version of Levels before we even had an app. And so, that’s how far back she goes. So, Julia, welcome.
Julia Lipton: Thanks for having me. So, as Josh mentioned, I am an early stage investor. I invest largely in the future of wellness, in the future of work. I don’t have favorite portfolio companies, but if I did have favorite portfolio companies, you guys would definitely be one of them. I know I’ve said this to the founders a bunch, but it’s very cool to be able to be here and talk to you and share this with you guys as well, because the way you operate as a team has just been extremely impressive to me. The rate of shipping execution, from the time that you go from idea to something live, is just absolutely incredible. And so, the mission is incredible, and just the way that you guys execute is extremely impressive. And given how big of a problem this is facing our country and the world, it’s very, very cool to watch a team as strong as you guys in the market.
Julia Lipton: And especially given this space, shipping is everything, and I’ve been extremely impressed from basically the beginning pre-Levels app until now. So, I just wanted to kind of come say hi, say keep up the good work. There’s a lot of people, whether it’s investors, or customers, or just fans, that are watching and following, and you guys really are the dream team. So, thank you for all the work that you do.
Josh Clemente: Well, thank you, Julia. For the team, I’ll say we appreciate the amazing support and you’re obviously one of our most active, I’ll call it supporters, but you support us in many ways. So, whenever Sam puts out one of his blasts for an immediate need for something or other, Julia is one of the first to respond with an awesome suggestion. So, from the whole team, thank you. And yeah, thank you for joining us on this call, too, and taking some time out.
Julia Lipton: Yeah, of course. Well, thank you guys. You really are the real superheroes, whether it’s to customers, or to hopefully eventually the larger healthcare system. This is really, really good work, so I’m happy to be a supporter.
Josh Clemente: Thank you. Okay. Second intro. Super stoked to introduce Ben Grynol, who has joined us as our head of growth. And Ben’s background is lots of startups, lots of success. He did a startup in class-one medical devices. Most recently, he was one of the earliest employees at Skip the Dishes, I think number six of a company that’s now over 2,500 people. He’s a musician, he’s a podcaster, he’s a car enthusiast like myself, and overall I’ve just really enjoyed getting to know Ben, and I’m excited to work together. So Ben, jump in, say a few words.
Ben Grynol: Perfect. Thanks, Josh. Thanks, everyone, for having me, for being here. I’m just so, so grateful and thrilled to be part of such a high-executing team. What has been done in such a short period of time is… I mean, it’s second to none. It’s really hard to articulate it, but it is truly incredible.
Ben Grynol: To jump in on Josh for a sec. So, I wasn’t number six, I was within the first… We didn’t count numbers because it was not really an important thing, but it was probably somewhere around and 30-ish, 20? I don’t know. I don’t know the number, but it was early enough that it was a wild ride, and we worked on a lot of cardboard boxes.
Ben Grynol: So, background. I’m still working on my user guide. I’ll send that out once it’s completed, but that’ll have a little bit more narrative behind some of the fun things. High-level background is in business and design. So, my first degree was in design. Ended up going back to school as what I thought was an appropriate time period. I was very clearly the older person when I went back and got my MBA about 10 years ago. Co-founded a few different startups, and then as Josh mentioned, I was part of a marketplace that we grew to a pretty meaningful-sized base out of Winnipeg, and it was just another incredible experience to see really, really exponential growth. And see what it looks like to grow 100% in a year when you’re already doing $1.5 billion in GMV is something that’s hard to even understand and think that it’s real.
Ben Grynol: So, a lot of learnings to take away from it, and excited to share them with everyone. So, fun fact. Really, really interested in muscle cars and classic cars. The picture below is… I love Corvette. That’s a C3 Corvette. And there’s a thing that’s called Restomod, so can take an older car, and you can make it so it performs like a new one, but it looks old. And I think that that application of something that has a different aesthetic, but performs differently, is very cool. So, obsessed with those, and that’s it.
Josh Clemente: Awesome. Yeah. We’re going to have to make a car channel soon. Once we get to three people, I think then we can start a dedicated slack channel.
Ben Grynol: Done.
Josh Clemente: Awesome. Well, looking forward to tons of awesome strategy, and moving into our earliest phases of growth with Ben.
Josh Clemente: Okay. Recent achievements, and this is always a fun one to try to pack everything in here. I’m going to try and take this intentionally and touch on all the points. But of course, hired our head of growth, Ben. We’ve been looking for someone in that role for many months. I don’t know how long, but we had a huge number of conversations to zone in or zero in on the ultimate best fit. So, that’s a big one.
Josh Clemente: Lately, over the past few weeks, we’ve had a big push on memos. So, we’re a memo-driven culture. We’ve had a couple great ones that came out that are going to drive strategy through Q1 through 2021. These are still sort of in draft mode, but they’re going to be released in the company like week-ish. So, these are company-level strategy, content, press, clinical product, essentially across the whole organization. So, look forward to those going out and being able to start executing.
Josh Clemente: We launched in-app content styling and persisted zones, so these were both big moves. Very helpful for education also, for just preserving the data and the ability to refer back to it for insights.
Josh Clemente: And then we have internally launched bounded data. So, this is basically trimming the data range from 55 to 200 milligrams per deciliter. This is a very deliberate move which will make the product a better fit for the specific wellness use case. So, we can dig into that a bit more, but this is a kind of a table stakes for a wellness-only CGM platform.
Josh Clemente: We’ve started on the Day Score version two. So, this is one of our core metrics that drives user engagement and education, and we’re building essentially a new model with better explainability. Xinlu’s been doing an amazing job here, and we’re starting to label data for this sort of model exercise now, which eventually make its way into the metrics of scores that our members are seeing every day. So, this is really exciting. This is also going to eventually make its way into our research program.
Josh Clemente: We have had an amazing month for affiliations. Tom will touch on this further, but 311 in December, 102 in November, 155 in October. So, basically at 100% jump. And this is, again, I want to put asterisk on the numbers we’re going to talk about in this meeting. We’re not trying to actively grow today. Ben has joined, he’s going to lay the strategy for growth. We’re still in development mode. We’re still customer-feedback focused. But it is amazing to see this organic, these leaps and bounds happening, essentially without fuel.
Josh Clemente: More of those. We’ve hit 5,000 successful charges. We had 100,000 monthly active website users over a one-month period, and our wait list is now over 72,000.
Josh Clemente: Some other stuff. We had 67% increase in subscriptions in December alone. That’s overall subscriptions. So, not month over month. The total number of subscribers increased by 67%. We’ve had a 35% total growth in followers on Instagram. We’ve had tons of user-generated content. You can see three new videos that were posted over the past two weeks, one of which includes Trevor Bauer, who is the Cy Young award winner from major league baseball. We’ve had Forbes interviews. Dr. Mark Hyman has joined as an affiliate. We’ve got Andre Iguodala, who’s invested.
Josh Clemente: Apollo owners using the program. Rich Roll, who’s a vegan athlete, triathlete, and podcaster, really awesome guy. He’s joining. We released our list of kind of top names in metabolism, and that was a huge hit. Max Lugavere, you can see, who’s very happy to be on that list. You’ve got Dom D’Agostino talking to Zach Bitter, who is basically a world-record holder for running, and a ketogenic athlete. Both of them talking about Levels on their podcast.
Josh Clemente: Just a huge couple weeks. Like to highlight Sam. Sam went on Jason Gay’s podcast, and that was just an awesome conversation. Everyone listen to that. Michael Harrington, you can see he had to shout Sam out for just being a total machine with flawless execution, so I highly recommend everyone tune in, listen to how Sam’s brain works, and try to emulate.
Josh Clemente: And then, I really want to highlight this quote in the middle. So, this was from a beta member this past week, and they sent along blood work results from basically October through December, and they used Levels in November. And they had an absolutely massive improvement in both their understanding of what was driving some metabolic syndrome considerations, and in the blood work that came after. And, of course, this is N of 1, this is an anecdote, but it’s just amazing to see this person, who has a legitimate need to improve some metrics underlying metabolic health, getting that in just 30 days. So, more to come there. Obviously we have a lot of research to do to make this something we can replicate, but it’s awesome.
Josh Clemente: And then, New York Times is working on a story for CGMs and Levels, and this is going to come out, seems like this month. So, that’s huge. I mean, not something we should take lightly. Overall, phenomenal end of 2020, and thank you all for being a part of it.
Josh Clemente: Quick update on the assemblage. So, we were hoping in Q1, early March, to be able to get everyone together in person. Obviously, this is up in the year in terms of COVID, and so we’re going to go ahead and punt this to virtual. We’re going to do everything we can to make it a great experience anyway, but we can’t get across the burden of ensuring that this is something we can do effectively and safely and with everyone’s best interest in mind. So, for those watching this meeting, for those participating in the meeting, please send event concepts. If you have ideas for ways to have a really engaging virtual experience where the team can build bonds, send them our way. I would really appreciate those. And, of course, we’re going to try and do an in-person assemblage once things kind of settle back to normal in the world. Okay. Over to David.
David Flinner: We can start this one with Andrew, I think.
Josh Clemente: Andrew.
Andrew: Yeah. So, I think Josh alluded to… Xinlu’s been working on a new Day Score. And as a part of this, we’re collecting a lot of qualitative data of people that know what they’re talking about with metabolic health.
Andrew: And so, she built a really cool, I’ll call it a game, but a dashboard inside of Retool where you can compare days. What we’re hoping to learn from this is to be able to capture a cross-sectional summary of metabolic health. So, on this one, it’s pretty easy. I think most people would say B.
Andrew: And so, this tool will be used by experts, namely Casey, and people on our medical board, to help us have a relative ranking of glucose data, and that’ll help with the model. Feel free to play with it. It’s in the Retool playground currently. So, if you go there, you can play with it, get some in. But yeah, so I’m really excited about that.
Josh Clemente: Very cool. All right.
Andrew: Thank you.
David Flinner: Real quick, just thank you again to Julia for all the feedback early on. Just as an example, back when Julia was using this, some of the feedback she was giving us was that it was really hard to understand what the data meant. It was just kind of raw glucose data. So, out of that, we developed some of the simple scores, like the 1 to 10 scoring system, the colored glucose lines. Things like that were directly informed in the early days from Julia’s feedback.
David Flinner: So, we’re still doing it. We’re still listening to the customers. And one of the things that customers have been asking for, especially with more subscribers, is searching a longer history for your catalog. And Jeremy launched Persisted Zones just before the end of the year, which is a huge accomplishment for us.
David Flinner: This is a foundational piece of infrastructure for us, and what it means is that we can, in the now, in the short term, we can very quickly retrieve all zones, not just two months’ worth, for all customers. And it’s a much faster experience for zone retrieval and rendering. So, kudos for that, Jeremy.
David Flinner: Next slide. Josh mentioned that we launched in-app content styling. So, now the Learn module looks very polished and is cohesive experience with the rest of the app. This was the foundation for what we can do next, which is helping people understand how to think about their scores, whether they’re good or bad, and what steps they can do instead. Because now we can take this contextually relevant content, and in a style that looks like it makes sense, and embed that in places like the Zone Show, where it would be most helpful.
David Flinner: Next slide. Cool. So, this is the Bounded Data feature that Josh mentioned. And what it’s doing is, it’s helping position ourselves more squarely in the general health and wellness purposes range, where we looked at the data to see what was a typical normal range for the vast majority of our participants, and that is a 55 to 200 glucose level range.
David Flinner: So, we’re going to be restricting the data to be limited to just that range, and if people are curious as to why that is, they can tap on any of the surfaces that show greater than 200, get an explanation of it, things like that.
David Flinner: So, next slide. And one of the most common pieces of feedback we have from people who exercise is, why did they get penalized for having a glucose rise that was caused by exercise? And so, we already have a feature called Strenuous Exercise, but it’s not very discoverable. So, John worked on several features this week to help make that more discoverable. So, now when we import an exercise, and you didn’t market as strenuous, but we see that there was a glucose spike in it, we’ll flag it. We’ll push you a card that says, “Hey, FYI, there’s a Strenuous Exercise feature.”
David Flinner: The copy you see on the screen, that’s a placeholder. That’s not what we’re actually launching with. But to raise awareness of it, we’ll also do automatic Strenuous Exercise. When we have a glucose anomaly on the graph, and you flag it as exercise, it’ll be automatically flagged to Strenuous, and we’ve made it better, more easy to understand, when you do have a Strenuous Exercise, which is not visualized here.
David Flinner: I actually am not sure. This is certainly building off the great work that Gabriel and Xinlu did as well. I can’t remember if there was also contributions to speak from them, but this is a team effort on this one getting this out.
David Flinner: So, next slide. And then, the last week we did a lot of polish on some of the bugs that we heard from members, as they were reporting, and thanks Braden and Mercy and Miz for reporting those and getting them funneled to us quickly. Doing things like fixing duplicate workout imports, the catalog was not working as smoothly as we’d like it to, so we fixed the Compare feature in there, and some UI rendering issues, and general polish across the board. So, strong start to the year.
Josh Clemente: Yeah. Awesome. All right. Mike, over to you.
Mike Didonato: Cool. Thank you, Josh. Lots of great conversations with our members over the last couple weeks. I’m going to include in the weekly writeup tonight some additional common questions that came in. But in the interest of time and being efficient, I wanted to call out one key theme in particular. And we’ve heard this before.
Mike Didonato: It’s about learning. Our members are learning, but what’s next? They love that they’re learning about their current lifestyles, and have this desire to change and improve. As we know, there are some blockers to this. This is all very new to them, understandably so, and they have a limited understanding of alternatives. And then obviously, they have time commitments to this. I know we’re working on some different solutions with product insights and content, but I wanted to make sure that we call this out for sure to the team.
Mike Didonato: One thing in particular is this desire to have suggestions for their lifestyle. So, I thought it was really interesting, especially the last two weeks it’s been louder on calls and our different interactions with members.
Mike Didonato: And then on the right, normally I’ll include a bunch of quotes, and then another quote, but I wanted to share this long form. I’m not going to read the entire thing. Actually, Josh actually touched on it. The long story short is, this person has been struggling with glucose control for a long time, and they had blood work done just before they started Levels. And after two months of Levels, they had additional blood work and saw significant reductions in their fasting glucose, triglycerides, A1C, and they even lost 10 pounds. And I think the quote was, “We have been doing a lot of dancing in the house.” It’s pretty cool, and this is not the only thing, but I love to share the long-form feedback we get. That’s all I have.
Josh Clemente: Awesome. Yeah, somebody I spoke with during the course of… I don’t know. I can’t remember specifically who this is. I’m sorry if you’re watching this. I’ll attribute it to you when I remember. But they mentioned that it sounds like Levels basically has two outcomes of people who need more guidance. It’s the so-whats and the now-whats. The so-whats are people who need to be educated on the benefits of metabolic control. The now-what’s are the main group that come out of Levels, and are asking, “Okay, now how do I improve?”
Josh Clemente: And so, I think this kind of fits that category, that people are increasingly understanding that metabolic fitness is something they need, and we need to just point them in the right direction with the compass. So, we’ve got a few pilots coming with nutritionists in the near term, which may not be something that we’re going to scale, but it’s going to be something that we’re going to test. And just see, does adding some layer of nutritional insight help with the guidance that people need to get the next steps. So, awesome. Thanks, Mike. Miz?
Michael Mizrahi: Great. So, we’ve got a handful of updates on the op side, starting with these eight new help videos. Each are about a minute to two minutes long, some shorter, around common help articles that we see through support, common questions.
Michael Mizrahi: These are being used currently in Help Scout, but we’ll add them to Insight cards where relevant, as well as to the Learn module that David previewed earlier. So, these will be really helpful, contextually aware, and just kind of easily digestible.
Michael Mizrahi: So, [Allie 00:20:36] is featured in all of these. She did a great job on them. They’re all vertically formatted for iPhone. And so, you can check those out now, and you’ll see them around. But these are the eight that launched as of this week.
Michael Mizrahi: Next update, we’ve worked with Truepill over the last few months to bring our turnaround time for orders down. And so, this is the time from when we submit a fill to when it actually leaves their fulfillment center, leaves their building. We were averaging about 54 hours in October. Obviously, that was a huge busy month for us, kind of unexpected over September. That came down to 35 hours in November, and came down to seven hours in December. So, this is massive. This is just a huge improvement.
Michael Mizrahi: There’s a lot of steps to our order fulfillment flow, from the consult processing delay with physicians, to us submitting the fills manually, to Truepill getting them out the door. And so, anything we can do to bring this into kind of our target SLAs is great. And we’re finally there. So, big ups to the Truepill team on the ground, again, both in New York and Hayward, now fulfilling these orders. And we’ll hope to keep that number steady from here on out so that members can get their kits quickly, and we can kind of improve on that delightful experience. So, very happy with this.
Michael Mizrahi: Finally, we had a little performance cover inventory scare, but everything’s under control. But what we’ve done is push out consult dates for about 7 to 10 days. So, we have a little bit of a lull in consult next week, just so we can catch up, get inventory into the right place, and then we’ll continue full steam from there. We should be good for a few months, and hopefully never run into this little hiccup again with our eyes on it now.
Michael Mizrahi: So, what we’ve done is kind of got a bunch of unbranded patches from Skin Grip. We’re screen printing those and just kind of distributing them across those two sites within the next few days. So, that’s in a good spot, but you might see some delays on pushed-out orders there.
Michael Mizrahi: Quick note on that. Customers won’t necessarily know that. These are customers who haven’t yet had their consult date. So, we’re not delaying existing orders that were already in flight. Fulfillment is ongoing for those, and of course, subscriptions and all ongoing orders are continuing to be filled on time. Michael Mizrahi: Great. Next slide here, Josh. A few quick charts. So, we are averaging about 350 kits shipped a week. This includes subscriptions and replacements. Faulty sensors, which are considerable volume, so going to take a look into that.
Michael Mizrahi: As I mentioned, a little decrease expected next week due to our slowed consults, so that’ll have a ripple effect, but it’s all going to come back pretty strongly through the end of January and early Feb.
Michael Mizrahi: Wearable Challenge. The sixth cohort is kicking off this Monday. And so we had a holiday cohort five, which ended right around New Year’s. The next iteration’s kicking off. This is a smaller cohort. I think it’s about 35 to 40 people versus 60 to 65. Continuing to run with that and pull out what learnings we can. There’s really interesting community elements that are coming out of it. And so, we’re going to take a close look pretty soon and see what we can do to improve there, or kind of further develop that.
Michael Mizrahi: And finally, just a December wait list update. We added about 13,000 signups in December. Our total wait list signup is now almost at 70K, which is pretty remarkable. So, that’s continuing to grow, and we’ll see. Can’t wait to capitalize on it, but we’ll hang on for now. Thank you.
David Flinner: Every month they keep going up like that.
Josh Clemente: Yeah. That was the end of December number. We’re actually at 72,000 as of now, and January’s already been pretty stacked. So, this chart’s just already a week out of date, and several thousand signups. Thank you, Miz, for adding those updates, and Sam, financial.
Sam Corcos: Yeah. So, December was quite a month. We have 10.7 in cash, and we’re keeping our revenue goals pretty conservative, just because we really are… As Josh emphasized earlier, we really need to focus on product development and make sure we get this over the finish line.
Sam Corcos: We need to make sure that we focus our product and engineering resources on continuing to iterate learning from our customers, and building something that they really love.
Sam Corcos: We’ll probably be in growth mode sometime in the summer, so just make sure we keep focused on that.
Sam Corcos: Next slide. And we had a big jump the week of December 27th. I think that was the Kelly LeVeque week. Tom can probably touch on that, but strong numbers across the board. So, that’s the revenue update.
Josh Clemente: All righty. Thank you, Sam. Onto Instagram. Mercy.
Mercy Clemente: So, it’s been a pretty crazy past few weeks, just since we hit 10K followers at the end of November, and since then we’ve gained 6,000+. So, it’s like 63% growth in just five weeks on Instagram alone, so that’s pretty crazy.
Mercy Clemente: It’s pretty cool to see different things people are sharing. The one about @elijahnicolas, I thought that was cool that he talked to his physician and now his physician has also signed up for Levels. So, that was neat.
Mercy Clemente: Next slide. Twitter has also been pretty interesting. A little it’s slower over the holidays, but it’s starting to pick up again. I think more people are getting their kits, or have just signed up, and that’s their new year’s resolution. So, we’re at 9.5 thousand followers on Twitter, and still really interesting stuff from different members. This one about the pre-diabetic, and how the cereal she was eating every day has actually been spiking her really crazy, so that was pretty interesting to see. That’s it for me.
Josh Clemente: Thank you. Yeah. It’s always cool to see new features. The Streaks on the top left, the Zone Comparisons to the bottom right, even though it’s not fully filled out, but just all the new features showing up in social almost immediately after their release. Tom.
Thomas Griffin: All right. Podcast update from the last couple of weeks. Just a few to highlight here. Wellness Mama aired right before Christmas. We saw an uptick in conversions from her. More on that in a bit. Katie will be really a long standing partner of ours, so we’ll see that name come up a lot over the next 12 months.
Thomas Griffin: As we mentioned, Sam was on Funded and got a lot of love from a lot of high-profile people on Twitter. So, recommend listening to that one if you want to learn about his fundraising, and life for that matter, philosophy.
Thomas Griffin: Katie is recording Be Well by Kelly, I believe today. This is Kelly LeVeque, as you guys have all heard about. She was responsible for a huge uptick in partner conversions recently. And then we secured two more tier-one shows that will be on in the next probably few weeks, which is really exciting.
Thomas Griffin: Next slide. All right. So, Q1 is definitely going to be by far our biggest podcast push to date. We have six tier-one shows that we’re recording, and will be airing in Q1.
Thomas Griffin: Next up is going to be HVMN this coming Monday, and then Greenfield and Bulletproof will both go live in February. We’re then recording Be Well by Kelly, Pursuing Health, and Pomp all in January. I’m going to try to push those three out to releases in March, just in terms of operations capacity.
Thomas Griffin: We should expect those first four on the list to be generating, I would say, at least 100 to 200 conversions each, and over time, considerably more than that.
Thomas Griffin: And then lastly, it’s not a podcast but I didn’t want to have its own slide for it. So, the Mark Hyman docuseries is going to be airing next Wednesday, and we will be an affiliate partner, and sort of part of the solution stack that Hyman and his team are recommending to sort of improve longevity and long-term health. So, that’s going to be really exciting when that goes live.
Thomas Griffin: Next slide. Our quick affiliate update. As Josh mentioned, December was a big month. We doubled the amount of conversions that we’d seen in either October or November. Again, to reiterate for probably the fifth time on this call, we’re not optimizing for month-over-month growth here. The affiliate strategy is really currently about securing key influencers and laying the foundation for scalable growth later on. But if we see a lot of growth in revenue in the meantime, then so be it.
Thomas Griffin: And yeah, December was due to an uptick really in a handful of our affiliate partners, which we’ll take a look at in the next slide.
Thomas Griffin: So, this is our leader board to date. Mostly familiar names on here. The only kind of surprise was Kelly LeVeque bursting onto the scene with, really, an unprecedented number of conversions from just social posts. We hadn’t really seen anything like that before.
Thomas Griffin: I’ll note that both Dom and Molly, if they’re watching this, they have generated more conversions than this, but this is pulling from our affiliate software, and they had been kind of converting for us prior to being on the affiliate software. So, these numbers look just a little bit low, probably 20 or 30 low, for both of them.
Thomas Griffin: Next slide. All right. And then just to kind of further contextualize the affiliate conversions against some of the other partner codes, the non-affiliate partner codes are in green. So, you’ll see that Broken Brain and Kevin Rose are still our top-performing codes by a long shot.
Thomas Griffin: And this just kind of goes to show you that long-form organic content will continue to be critical for us, and a podcast interview, as an example, will always outperform a podcast advertisement. So, we’ll continue to see kind of a balance between partner codes coming in that are due to paid relationships and affiliate relationships, as well as organic placements.
Josh Clemente: Awesome. Yeah, some of those non-affiliate numbers are amazing from Todd/Rahul and Nat and Lenny. Just super cool. All right. Thank you, Tom. Over to Haney.
Mike Haney: Yeah. So this is… You all got an email this morning about this as well. The content strategy memo is now live, if you want a little bit of insight as to what I’ve been working on, and thinking about, and what sort of guiding what we’re up to over the next probably six months. This will lay it all out. It is broken up into sections, so don’t be intimidated by the length. If you want to just jump in and look at editorial process, you can do that.
Mike Haney: I just highlighted here the vision. I was on a call last night with some SEO consultants who I had shared this doc with, and they sort of called this out as well, and said it’s really great that you have a vision and that it’s very succinctly put there. But this is kind of what’s guiding me as I think about content. Every piece of content we do sort of ticks off one of these points here, and speaks back to this vision. So, that’s out on the [On Notion 00:31:59] now. Next slide. Oh, there you go.
Josh Clemente: Okay. So, here we are on the individual contributions already. That was quick. Casey’s out this week, so we’re going to jump in with Mike D.
Mike Didonato: Well, I’m excited to be back on the Friday forum. And then, two quick things. It was awesome to connect with Ben and have him on the team. We’ve been looking for that role for a while. It’s awesome. And then just excited for this year. I know what last year was for Levels in a crazy time, and we made it a rocket ship, and I’m excited to do much more than that this year with all of you.
Josh Clemente: 100%. Mercy.
Mercy Clemente: I’m excited about being back, honestly. It’s nice to kind of have the forum back again. And then that one email, that really long one from the guy who shared all his glucose results and stuff, I thought that was really crazy. I probably read that email three different times, trying to figure out how to reply to it. So, that was just really nuts.
Josh Clemente: Yeah, that was awesome. Ben.
Ben Grynol: I’m super excited about the Stripe integration that Jeremy is working on. So, everything he’s doing to get that automation for subscriptions is just such a key piece of infrastructure that’s going to have a lot of impact on everyone’s time. So, super excited about that. And then, on the personal side, it’s been warmer than usual in Winnipeg, and I think I’m going to strap on the skates and play a little bit of outdoor hockey this weekend.
Josh Clemente: I love how warmer than usual is going to play an ice sport.
Ben Grynol: Right.
Josh Clemente: Julia.
Julia Lipton: I’m excited about the rate that metabolic fitness is spreading across the healthcare system right now. In the last six months, and even in the last month, I’m starting to see things that I’ve never seen before, and I’m especially excited at the role I think you guys will play in spreading this movement.
Sam Corcos: Well, Josh invented that term, so.
Julia Lipton: Totally. Well, and to be fair, these companies aren’t using that term, I’m just informing them that that is now the space that they are working in.
Josh Clemente: Yeah.
Mike Didonato: Right.
Josh Clemente: Yeah, let them know.
Julia Lipton: Yeah. So, thanks Josh. I’ll start citing you.
Josh Clemente: All right. I did a little year in review myself, both for Levels and for myself, and it was just kind of insane. I’ve been in a time vortex, and I could not figure out whether things happened four years ago or four weeks ago, in general. And being able to see the chronology of it was awesome, and I want to share a little bit of that with the team.
Josh Clemente: But I’m also… I just cannot wait for 2021. It was like we took a baby step in 2020, that’s what that was, and the baby step was pretty significant.
Josh Clemente: And then the other thing is, my girlfriend took her boards for her RN program today, and she passed, and that’s huge. And so, yeah. That was a huge relief. So, thank you. Stacy.
Stacy: All right. Personally, I’m excited that we have wonderful skiing within two hours of our new home, and we got to check that out, a mountain called Breton Woods last weekend, and it was snowing while we were going down the mountain, and it was beautiful.
Stacy: And from a Levels perspective, I’m thrilled that we finally found Ben. We’ve grown a lot recently, through many channels, and I’m excited to add his expertise and fuel to the fire. So, welcome Ben.
Josh Clemente: Yeah. Hao.
Hao Li: Yeah, I’m really excited another Canadian joined the team, and welcome, Ben. And personally, I’m excited to schedule some time for skiing next week or next-next week.
Josh Clemente: Awesome. Yeah, I got to get some of those lift tickets signed up ASAP. I’m at risk of missing the entire season at this point, somehow. Laurie.
Laurie: Well, it’s exciting to be back. And I think Mercy was saying, just the Friday forum is a great anchor for me, and I love hearing all the updates from each one of you.
Laurie: Personally, we were on vacation for two weeks. It was a wonderful time. But I missed Christmas here with two of my children. So, we’re having Christmas next week here. I have still got wrapping to do. I’m not excited about that, but it’ll be good to see more family. So, at a safe distance, since we are in Southern California. So, it’ll be on the driveway, and six or 10 feet away, but it’s still going to be very good. I’m very excited about that. And, oh my gosh, it’s a new year, right?
Josh Clemente: Yeah.
Laurie: It’s going to be wonderful.
Josh Clemente: Thanks Laurie. And Merry Christmas, round three.
Laurie: Thank you. Haney.
Mike Haney: Personally, I’m excited. I just started a program called Trainiac, which is sort of an online personal trainer thing that I’m doing as part of the lifestyle incentive program and will be writing about at some point. So, that’s going to be cool to check out.
Mike Haney: Professionally, I’m just going to plus-one on being excited Ben’s here. I feel like there’s so much expertise there, and he and I are going to work together closely, and I feel like there’s going to be a ton to learn and just sort of accelerate what I’m doing through the great work he’s doing. So, I think it’s going to be awesome.
Josh Clemente: Cool. Sam.
Sam Corcos: Yeah, I was planning to say how excited I am that Ben’s starting, but that was before I read Haney’s content strategy memo, which if you have not looked at it, I have very high confidence that we have the right person in that role. So, it’s an excellent piece of strategy. I highly recommend reading it.
Josh Clemente: Nice. Yeah. I haven’t been able to dig into that yet, but I’ve got that queued up for the weekend. John.
Jhon Cruz: Yeah. I had everyone on support session this week. Kudos the ops team for their great work there. It was good to be involved in this part of the company. I learned a ton. And thanks to Braden for helping me on guiding me there.
Josh Clemente: Nice. Yeah, I did one as well. It was amazing to see the difference between when we were doing things in a CRM, literally ad hoc, and then this amazing process that was built. I was like, wait, I don’t even need the help. Everything’s under control already. Miz.
Michael Mizrahi: Yeah. Tough to put this one into words, but I’m genuinely grateful to have found such a healthy team and work culture. I think it’s awesome, but the talent that we attract, but also the way in which we can integrate the way in which we work, the [async 00:38:44] culture, the reliance on notion. This is a work environment that I’ve dreamed of for the last 10 years, and to have finally found a group of people that want to the same way, and who are willing to try things, and iterate on it, is really cool.
Michael Mizrahi: And it’s particularly cool to see new hires come in. So, I like the excitement to see Ben come in, and Mike recently, on the content strategy side, is awesome. And just integrating into notion, picking, understanding our dock, and just being able to get up to speed quickly and just get working and embrace the culture, is really cool. So, great that our hiring finds that, and great to have people joining who want to continue that culture moving. Yeah. Leaving it there. That’s both personal and professional.
Josh Clemente: Thanks, Miz. Gabriel.
Gabriel: Yeah. So, I’m really excited that Ben joined. I’m also really excited that Jeremy got Persisted Zones out. I know it’s been a huge task, and [inaudible 00:39:37] getting out. I think it’s going to unlock a bunch of stuff.
Gabriel: And then, personally, the UK’s in full lockdown, which is bad, but it means I’m getting a bunch of call requests from people have not spoken to for a while to catch up with them. So, that’s something that I’m excited about.
Josh Clemente: That’s nice. All right. Tom, bring it home.
Thomas Griffin: All right. Personally, I just booked a house in Austin with five friends for next month, so that’s going to be pretty incredible. We got an 80% discount on this enormous house that’s on 70 acres of land on a lake outside of Austin. So, we are beyond excited. If it turns out to be a scam, you probably won’t hear about it. Actually, I won’t mention it to anyone and I’ll probably just still be here in Cape Cod, but we’re really excited about that.
Thomas Griffin: And then, yeah. I’m also just so excited about our team and our new hires. It’s just been so awesome watching Miz and Dan and Haney, and now Ben, join and get up to speed. And yeah, it’s sort of table stakes. I think that, at least for our team and culture, that everyone is super high performing, but I’m just more excited about the fact that everyone is such a kind, humble, low-ego person. It feels really unique. I don’t know if it is, but I’m just thrilled about it. So, kudos to the founding team and kind of the DNA that is attracting such high-quality human beings to Levels.
Josh Clemente: Awesome. Thanks Tom. Plus-one on all that. I’m going to stop the share and jump over. It’s actually my week this week to present something, and this was a little bit ad hoc, is a little bit quick. I threw it together this morning. But I just wanted to share a little bit of the year in review stuff.
Josh Clemente: All right. Can everybody see that? Cool.
Andrew: Nice branding.
Josh Clemente: Thanks. I’m an amateur here. All right. So, just wanted to quickly just walk through. I mean, these are big chunks, and did not by any means cover what we all have gone through over this past week. But just covering the progression of a few key things, and starting with the team, the growth here has been amazing. Just looking at this picture, it’s such high-quality people, so many diverse backgrounds, so many perspectives. Excellence across everyone’s personal sort of focus.
Josh Clemente: And then, we also have an amazing research board coming together that are going to do big things. And the team is pretty wildly spread out already. I mean, this is like one year, and we’ve been connected through 50 Friday forums. I think this is the only format in which we all communicate together. For the most part, we’ve never met, most of us, so the majority of our team has yet to meet in person, which is, I think… I’m not going to put that in the pros category. I’m looking forward to meeting everyone, but it is awesome to just imagine, or to consider the fact, that we’ve covered so much ground despite that, building relationships just through the work that we’re doing, and the collaboration that Miz was touching on.
Josh Clemente: We span all of North and into South America, which is pretty cool. As Andrew starts to relocate into the Colorado region, we’re starting to spread out from the coast. And yeah, this is exciting.
Josh Clemente: Quick stuff, like the packaging developments. Obviously moving from something that showed up in a kicked-in box with pharmacy stuff spilling out of it, over to a kit that we can put our brand on. It was a leap, and it happened in January of 2020.
Josh Clemente: The product. I actually didn’t go all the way back, all the way all the way back, is what you see on the far left. This is what Julia went through. It was basically using the Libre Link software and texting pictures to the Levels SMS thread, and the SMS bot or the David bot-
Sam Corcos: David bot.
Josh Clemente: … would respond, literally respond to every message, and give context. And that was before we had an app. And that was the proof of concept about what an app could be. What was interesting? What should we build?
Josh Clemente: And then we had this version 0.1. And actually version 0.1 is not this one. This actually shows you what you ate. Version 0.1 was, no matter what you logged, it called it pork tacos. And we shipped that. People were using that, and they would log chicken and yams, and it would just tell you, nope, that was pork tacos.
Josh Clemente: And so, going from there to where we are now, where you’ve got, first of all, just a beautiful interface, I think, that gives you intelligent insights into how your body’s responding, you’re able to compare those insights and gather deeper ones, just the brilliant way in which the glucose curve has become intuitive and interactive, and then just the integration of the scores.
Josh Clemente: So, the Day Score and the Zone Score, people are really learning from these daily. The Metabolic Fitness Report, which actually we did architect a long time ago, but it was like David and I would build this manually. We would color these blocks individually and write out the text, and all that stuff, and now it’s auto generated in like 0.3 seconds, and people absolutely love it. We’ve got Apple Health integration, we’ve got sleep integration. So, it’s just really wild to consider that only one year spans this SMS version and where we are today.
Josh Clemente: This is a big one. So, I want to just talk about the data set here. This is hours of glucose data coming into our data set per week. So, a couple fun facts Andrew sent me here. We’re currently bringing in more than 100,000 hours of glucose data per week, which is more than all of the data. So, each week we’re bringing more data than everything we brought in from January to May 11th, 2020. And we recently broke 1.5 million total glucose hours in the data set, and that’s rapidly accelerating.
Josh Clemente: And so, this is really… We take data privacy very, very seriously. This is not a business model. What this is is the potential for the product that will develop ultimate behavior change for people. It’s turning on big data and helping people to fit into sort of an insights framework that is driven by a lot of really sophisticated machine learning. You need to have large data sets there, and we also can, I think, change the trajectory of metabolic health research and therapeutics with the size of this data set. It’s the datum against which we can compare both normative and abnormal, I think, metabolic function.
Josh Clemente: So, I’m super stoked to see this amazing progress. And yeah, there’s a lot that’s going to unlock. What was that supposed to be? That was supposed to be something else. I don’t know what happened there.
Josh Clemente: This is just a smattering of big moments and coverage that we’ve experienced. We went from… Oh, I think with this, this was the amount of public press coverage that we had in January 2020. That’s what this is. And this is 2021. So, yeah. Obviously a… You know what, there was something there, but I… That’s a bummer. Anyway, there was also a picture of Mike and I basically sitting on my living room floor with a hole punch and this medical adhesive, basically slamming out these pieces of tape to stick covers to our arms because we didn’t have a patch process, so we were hand making these things out of sheets of… Maybe I can find this. I can’t. Anyway, so that was a funny picture that I’ll send out afterwards.
Josh Clemente: But then going from there to here, where you have literally the biggest names in athletics, in biohacking, in medicine, are using our product and are standing behind it and are showing off this interesting wearable that no one’s ever seen the form factor of before. And the Levels brand is front and center. That cover, people who don’t buy the Levels product have emailed us and asked, “Can I buy the cover to put over my sensor? Because I just really want that. It’s so cool.” So, that’s just cool.
Josh Clemente: And then we just got tons of coverage. Obviously the raise was phenomenal in raising our signal, and yeah, this was a big month. We had our first live TV appearance with Casey on Cheddar. [Deli 00:47:49] wore this live in an NBA game. So, amazing.
Josh Clemente: And then partnerships development. So, things are coming along. We’re talking to the biggest names in CGM hardware development and really working on trending towards that future where we don’t just have sort of two disparate brands, where one is developing the hardware and one is developing the experience, but we’re unified. And it is taking the sort of sensor, you can think of it as the processor chip inside of the computer with the HP or the Apple, and turning it into sort of a product and a processor.
Josh Clemente: And that’s what we ultimately want to do is give people a unified product experience. And so, this is just kind of a sneak peek into what that future might it look like with one or both of those manufacturers.
Josh Clemente: Our wait list, Miz touched on this, but obviously massive growth. We’re now signing 10 times as many people up every month as we had total in January 2020. A couple fun numbers to go further. So, I want to caveat all of these. We’re not driving revenue growth. This is not something we’re actively focusing on. It’s just fun to look at them and just imagine how far we came.
Josh Clemente: So, January 2020, we had total sales of $45,000. We’re now at about $1.8 million. We reached $1 million in total sales in November of 2020, right? So, we’ve had significant acceleration. The rate of change is not captured on this slide.
Josh Clemente: Monthly revenue. So, December 2020 was 10X our total sales as of January 2020. This is how much we brought in December, how much we brought in January, about $11,000. Pretty significant changes. What’s behind the scenes here is the operational scale that had to be in place in order to even capture that amount of volume.
Josh Clemente: So, this number speaks to a massive change in the organization and the capabilities that we have. We were struggling to move $10,000 worth of orders in January. Trust me. And now it’s just staggering to see how much capability we’ve built.
Josh Clemente: Number of subscribers. So, we didn’t even have a subscription process in January. We currently have a Jot form where people go to use this third-party form provider, which it’s hilarious. It’s like the last relic of the earliest days of Levels with that subscription process.
Sam Corcos: The Jot form era.
Josh Clemente: Yeah. So, the Jot form, originally, was how we signed up people at all. It was the purchase flow. And then we had another one for subscriptions that we stood up in like March. And so, yeah. The Jot form era is about to come to a close now that Jeremy’s focusing on it.
Josh Clemente: But, this is an interesting number here that we just crossed $1 million run rate from subscriptions alone. And again, not something that we’re actively focusing on. This is very much a second-class citizen in the Levels stack of products. We barely give people any intelligence that there is a subscription available until they’re halfway through the program. So, looking forward to actually even focusing on this.
Josh Clemente: And unfortunately, I think that’s all I was able to fit in. But anyway, I’ll send around some more pictures from the process. We’ve had some in-person assemblages, we’ve had a couple of really funny moments. And oh, Mike just sent me this.
Josh Clemente: Anyway, I’ll send those around on Slack, but long story short, it’s been a pretty wild ride, a very quick and yet mind-bendingly long year. And yeah, I’m just super grateful for the experience, and for everyone blowing my mind with how much you can accomplish with a killer team and a good mission. So, anyway, we’re at time here. Thanks everybody. Hope you all have great holidays, and looking forward to doing it again soon. Julia, again, thank you for showing up and spending time with us.