Transcript
[00:00:00] Josh Clemente: Okay, July 10th, here we are, everybody on and we’re recording in two places. So Hao, warm welcome. Thank you for putting together a little information about yourself and about what you’ll be working on. And I’m going to let you go ahead and take this slide and just give us a few of your thoughts.
[00:00:19] Hao: Sure. Thanks. Really glad to join the team finally. And yeah, it’s been a pretty fun past couple of days, talked to people and got to know the code base. And yeah, as my list here, I was from Beijing, China, moved to Canada about 13 years ago and living in Victoria since, ever since. And also, probably some of you may know, I’m doing keto or low carbs for the past 2 years to help my metabolic health. And I found a job on Hacker News, it’s really cool. And technically, I love JavaScript and also technically, I’m a Sheba owner, so I have to walk dogs a lot. And yeah, I’ve been a ski instructor since 2016, but with zero experience on teaching.
[00:01:10] Josh Clemente: Similar with CrossFit stuff. I have the credential, I just don’t teach people, right?
[00:01:17] Hao: Yeah. That’s about me. Yeah. Really excited to continue to talk with everybody.
[00:01:22] Josh Clemente: Awesome. Yeah, everyone should get some time to chat with Hao and welcome him to the team. And how do you like Canada? How’s that adjustment moving there and how do you like it overall?
[00:01:35] Hao: Yeah, I enjoy it very much. Because I find that Beijing is too crowded for me. It’s like a humans everywhere and less nature place to go. So yeah, I really like Canada, especially Vancouver and Victoria. It really fit in my activities and living styles.
[00:01:59] Josh Clemente: Awesome.
[00:02:02] Hao: I encourage everyone to come to visit Victoria.
[00:02:05] Josh Clemente: [00:02:05] It’s on the list. Yeah, Hao got himself setup to…
[00:02:08] Speaker 1: I heard that Victoria has no COVID cases.
[00:02:10] Hao: We haven’t have any new cases for the past couple of months, I think. And we only have 130-ish cases inland. So yeah, it’s probably no active cases right now.
[00:02:31] Josh Clemente: That’s wild. Hao, you’re officially linked into the Levels app through some day 1 engineering trickery. So great work on that. And yeah, exciting. So everybody. Again, have some time to chat and get to know Hao and welcome him on the team.
So recent achievements – this is always a challenge to bring everything together and I’ve certainly missed things, like the weeks are flying by but at the same time, there’s so much volume that I just need to do a better job notating as it goes by, because I forget, “When did that thing happen? That feels like it was 2 months ago, but it was actually yesterday.” I just want to highlight a few big things here, our waitlist surged past 19,000 sign-ups. That averages to 240 per day. But actually, just in the past 24 hours, we’ve had 650. So there’s this organic wave of Twitter traction, and I’m going to plot this stuff out eventually, by the day, so that we can see when an ambassador or a supporter tweets about us, we see these massive surges. And this also led, so in the bottom right you’ll see Todd Goldberg, who is one of our investors, but he posted a really amazing quote calling Levels one of the coolest consumer health products he’s ever seen. And that quote led to 52 signups in the past 17 hours, which is a temporary run rate of about $10 million.
So I want to just go ahead and highlight that we have hit our milestones and we can all go ahead and cash it in. But no, seriously, it’s amazing the turnaround and there’s not a whole lot of information in that tweet. But he posted a link to skip the wait list and sign up now and the response was just amazing. And then also Nev, up in the top, another of our investors, posted this really interesting quote saying, he sent out the shrug VIP text offering the same thing, and he’s never seen so many instant responses. And we’re getting a ton of sign-ups from him as well. So this whole affiliation and just information sharing and organic traction, it’s just amazing. I say it every week, but this is not normal, to get this sort of natural growth without really putting any effort into the advertising channels and such. So really cool. I think that also led to this Mark Cuban anecdote we’ve got here. His team just wants to learn more, there’s not a whole lot of information there either, but people are seeing this who are not necessarily engaging in Twitter or in the thread, for example, but this is making a huge buzz factor that’s just rippling throughout the world of sports. Mark Cuban, if you don’t know, he owns one of the largest NBA teams, the Mavericks. And so he’s just very embedded in the world of sports and athletics and performance. And so this type of thing catches the attention of giants like that.
Speaking of which we now have all of the leadership of TB12 using the product. So John Burns signed up last week, he’s CEO. Alex Guerrero, who is supposedly Tom Brady’s literal right-hand man when it comes to training is now joining. He’s the co-founder of TB12 and suffice it to say, that whole team is extremely enthusiastic about us. And I’m very excited, I really believe in what they do and I think they have a very similar audience. And the opportunity here with Tom starting a new team, as frankly, one of the older quarterbacks in the league, this is an opportunity to potentially be a part of his new phase of his career potentially. And I’m not entirely sure what will come of this, but I just want to say that to be able to impress that group is a really good sign. Also we’ve got new interest from the Cavaliers and the Detroit Redwings. We’ve spoken with players from both of those teams and I think we’re going to have sign-ups this week as a result. We’ve been in contact with Poosh, anyone who’s been following Courtney Kardashian may have seen that she’s been pricking her finger to check glucose Levels during ketosis. And we’re reaching through our channels to try to get her interested in trying something continuous that will remove that painful and messy process and give her continuous better metrics.
And then, yeah, the Wearable Challenge finished up this week. This was a really huge win, I think overall, the weight loss metrics, interestingly, were quite a bit down from cohort #1. And we chatted with the Wearable Challenge team about that and it seems like we may have tapped a different audience because we went through Justin Merez, his email chain this time. And that, his email group is very much keto and fitness focused and less so on weight loss. So we had a bunch of people who were actually fairly athletic and they really just wanted to try and shave off a few pounds and they had already been in ketosis for a while. And so this is like the hard losers group versus the cohort one so I think that kind of explains a good deal of it. But the net promoter score across the board was really high. And in general, what it did is, it showed us that this is weight loss audience, this keto diet optimization audience is very much aligned with our beachhead audience, which we did not know. We didn’t know whether this weight loss group would convert to subscriptions, for example, as straightforward. We have somebody who we would call our bio-hackers and we had again, many subscriptions from this. And so we’ll be pushing into cohort 3, probably August 3rd is the current target. And so we’ll do, potentially 75, maybe 100 people in the next cohort. And of course there’s some planning to do, a few changes we’re gonna make, but overall huge success.
I want to highlight the awesome work on Retool. We’re making some breakthroughs in terms of order processing reports insight into our data. Thank you to Sam and everyone else who’s worked on the backend there. It’s been a bit painful for sure, but I hope that we’ll only have to do this once and it will be smooth sailing from here. And then let’s see, last thing, oh yeah, go watch Allie’s video if you have not yet. So she released a wild, basically a 7 minute advertisement for Levels. But you can tell that she’s very transparently sharing her real feelings about the product. And so I don’t think we would have been able to produce a video that is as good at explaining what we do. So definitely check that out, it’s part 1 of 3, so we have plenty more coming from her. Any questions on all this?
[00:08:20] Sam Corcos: Yeah, I would note that 5 1/2 pounds of weight loss in a month, with pretty minimal restrictions is still extremely good. So yeah.
[00:08:29] Josh Clemente: Yeah, that’s a good point. And that doesn’t quite capture the overall positivity and benefit of the challenge. There’s some documentation and notion that people can check out to, if you want to dig into the chat transcript, people were just overwhelmingly excited about the product throughout. Like, this challenge cohort versus the previous one was just night and day different in terms of how people engage with the product and how they felt about Levels specifically. And that really speaks to how the product has improved in just 8 weeks between cohort 1 and cohort 2. And this time around everyone was sharing images of the Levels app. Everyone was talking about magic moments. They wanted to get it for their mom, their sister, they were subscribing it. It was just like a frenzy about the product more so than about the weight loss and the wearable challenge side, which I thought was really fascinating. In some sense, we stole the show from the Justin Mares Wearable Challenge team, which, I feel a little bit bad about not really. So anyway, overall really great. And those numbers don’t necessarily speak to the success of what went on there. And as you can see, actually on the right side, there’s a quote about the challenge – “I think this has the potential to change the world.” This person also called it “life changing magic” and subscribed. So there’s, that’s the vibe that you should be thinking about when you’re thinking about the Wearable Challenge. So any questions?
[00:09:40] Dr. Casey Means: Maybe the new Levels tagline – “The magic”, or what was the quote?
[00:09:45] Josh Clemente: “This is life-changing …”
[00:09:45] Dr. Casey Means: “magic.” There we go. I’ll also mention the waitlist numbers, I am finding to be like one of the most compelling things I’ve shared with anyone who podcasts people or journalists. Like, I was talking to InStyle and People Contributor, I was interviewed on Wednesday and she’s pitching a story about Levels. And the whole thing was great, but when I mentioned we had 17,000 people on our waitlist, she like, scribbled it down super fast and was like, “Oh, this is gonna be big. This is huge.” So it’s really interesting how that number is resonating, I think, with people.
[00:10:17] Sam Corcos: It’s interesting how quickly it becomes out of date, because it’s now 19,000.
[00:10:22] Josh Clemente: Yeah, exactly. That 650 signups in 24 hours shocked me. I thought there was something broken in the compiler. So I didn’t post the curve here, but if you just imagine a hockey stick thing, that’s what it looks like. All right. Just quick note on the virtual assemblage. So for those of you that don’t know, actually, I might have to resend this Hao, I’m not sure if you received this one, but we’re going to do a virtual assembly on Thursday and Friday of this week. And the goal here is just to do a little team building and spend some time together and not necessarily really orient ourselves around work, we just share some fun stuff, maybe game night. And I’ll be sending out the agenda for that early this week. But if you can block off these, I sent the calendar hold, Hao, I’ll send it out again or add you to it. And yeah, no major update there but just still on.
[00:11:07] Speaker 2: To clarify, it’s this coming week? Not yesterday and tonight.
[00:11:09] Josh Clemente: Correct. Yeah, you didn’t miss anything. Okay. I’m beating these drums forever, we should get to pre-orders. We’re in a pre-order mode right now where when people sign up, like the folks that just signed up in the last 24 hours, they’re getting a product delivery date of about 7 to 10 weeks from today. And that is essentially a pre-order, they’re paying upfront and they’re not getting it until, 2 months from now potentially. So we need to just, I think, formalize this process and get, with the new website launched and where the resonance we’re seeing with our customers, I think it’s time for us to push out the pre-order opportunity and start bringing in reservations, essentially. And then this will lead to our full launch later on this year.
And again, we’re seeing some really amazing results with the app feature set and experience design. Let’s keep that going and that will lead to the leverage we need to lock down our next generation hardware partnership. So Hao, this is like how we see the sort of big milestones, those will show up on this slide repeatedly, but the next gen hardware partnership is the one where we have a holistic integration with the device. There’s no two absolution, it’s likely going to be direct over the counter, no prescription in the loop. Again, the thing that we’re managing, which is building the market and bringing the data into an accessible and actionable space so that people can understand it and make lifestyle improvements, that’s our core competency. We just need to partner with the hardware provider that we feel is most competent and producing the best device. And then, in order to do that, we should just show that we are the dominant force in the space. Which we are currently doing and just need to continue that. Any questions on any of this? Cool. So Sam has implemented some cool reporting systems in Retool. Our data is getting better and we’re getting closer and closer to, I think, optimal source of truthness.
And this week’s starting column is a little bit shifted from how we report, this week. So our forums are on the third or was on the third of this month and the 10th of this month, so I just kinda threw down here, like the bulk numbers since last meeting. So, since the last Friday forum we had 148 new purchases and 109 shipments went out. And that’s a lot of volume, that was one week. So things are heating up, that’s more than 10 orders per day, obviously. And a lot of that was that boost from the Twitter post from Todd. But we’re definitely hitting milestones we did not anticipate hitting for many months from now.
[00:13:34] Speaker 3: The thing that’s fun in that dashboard real quick, is if you scroll back to page 5 and go forward you can see the trends went from 1 per week, 2 per week, like all the way up to double digit orders per week. Yeah, pretty cool.
[00:13:43] Josh Clemente: Yeah, exactly. All right, Sam.
[00:13:50] Sam Corcos: Yeah. So we’ve raised some additional capital for some pretty excellent founders and angels. So we have about 1 1/2 in cash. This was a big week for revenue and we’ve started implementing some reports in Retool. So if you don’t have access to Retool, make sure you connect with me or somebody on the team and we can get you access. And you want to check within the ops dashboard, the reports page, and that has a lot of our reporting charts. So we’ll be adding more and more of those over the course of the next few weeks. We can go to the next slide. I actually have slides for this. So this is “Weekly Revenue”, so this is “Unrecognized Revenue”. It’s worth noting that this is a bookkeeping term, but “recognized” versus “unrecognized”, this week we took in a lot of revenue, but it is cash that is not necessarily going on our books until we fulfill the orders. So “recognized revenue” is when these people start the program, that’s when actually starts. So technically, on a bookkeeping term, this is a balance sheet liability until we can debit it when they start the program. This is just like a rough number of how many people are paying for it. Hopefully by next week I’ll have the query for what our recognized revenue looking and we can keep better track of the stuff.But very big week for revenues that’s for sure.
[00:15:09] Speaker 3: And this one’s substantially out of date since this morning as well.
[00:15:10] Sam Corcos: Yeah. Right!
[00:15:12] Josh Clemente: Yeah, I want to, actually I did not highlight this in the first page, but we are now charging customers at the point of purchase, which is a departure from where we were last week, where we would only charge customers once their order shipped out. And so that’s, again, that is why we are now in pre-order mode, right? People are putting their credit card up, they’re paying, and they’re accepting that the delivery will be in the future. And that’s a really good, I think that’s a mindset shift as well for the customer. And just to give a little background on Retool, just for everyone’s context, we have historically been using third-party tools to manage our ordering processes. These were like form providers, like JotForm, and we had our data in all sort of disparate locations. And since we switched to our internal purchase app, which Andrew and the engineering team built out, that allowed us to consolidate our data in a single location that we own vertically. And Retool is this really cool tool that allows you to build dashboards on top of your database. And so Retool is, basically we’re building out the workflows and views that we need from the operational side to see into our database and use that information effectively without trying to hand it off to these external CRMs and other tools, that we were previously doing. It was all very clunky and disjointed. So we’re getting closer and closer to using our own database and Retool as the window into it, which is exciting. And that’s why we keep bringing that term up. Yeah. Okay, Casey.
[00:16:35] Dr. Casey Means: Awesome. So a little bit on content and SEO highlights from the week – continuing to move up and up in the world. So again, on the left, we’ve got about 7 or 8 weeks here, just showing the trends. You’ll see every single number in the blue, purple, and orange going up from May 14th to now. I think the most exciting thing is that our average search position is continuing to move up. So we’re now at 13.4 this week for search rankings. Also interesting, our impressions took a huge jump this week, 61,000 to 102,000.
[00:17:11] Sam Corcos: Holy cow.
[00:17:12] Dr. Casey Means: So I don’t know if that’s mostly from Allie but it is pretty exciting. This is huge numbers of people. On the right here, this is just a fun screenshot from incognito searching for the word “levels”, we are now officially right below the Levels, a VICI song, which I’m very excited about. Last week we were at the very bottom of the page, now we are, basically at the top of it. So ranking super highly for “levels”, which is great. Next slide.
[00:17:41] Josh Clemente: So to be clear, we went from 61,000 to 100,000 in one week?
[00:17:45] Dr. Casey Means: Yeah, this top row is 7 days. So these are each seven day chunks. Moving back from May 14th to now.
[00:17:51] Speaker 4: This is the content strategy paying off. I don’t think this is just strictly driven from Allie. I think that our rankings are going up, so we’re organically getting more randos viewing us.
[00:18:05] Josh Clemente: Yeah, the word levels is.
[00:18:07] David: I hate to point this out, but that’s actually just the trend, right? 45 to 60, that’s like a 50-ish percent increase. 60 to 102 that’s a little north of a 50% increase. Like, we’re growing at a rapid rate but this isn’t like some magic thing. This is just been what we’ve been doing it looks like.
[00:18:24] Dr. Casey Means: It’s compounding basically. But I’m like almost now getting nervous, I’m like, “How much more?”, it can’t keep going up like this. Especially the search position, eventually we’re going to hopefully be in the top 10 and it’s just very exciting.
[00:18:38] David: We’re just going to end up above the search bar. It’s just going to be “levels” and then it’s going to ask you what you are looking for.
[Too much overlap]
[00:18:46] Dr. Casey Means: Also, I didn’t include this on here but we are actually starting to become the Google chosen answer for a few questions. That, yeah, so for like “glucose” and “skin”, I forgot exactly what the search question I did, but it’s coming up in the box as “This is the top question answer.” Goal would be to get that for, basically all of the glucose related terms. Okay, so just some other fun trends here on the far left, this is our “glucose” trends. So prior week we were ranking 18.9, this week on average we’re 16.7, and today we’re 13.5. This below, this graph is just showing the “glucose”, we’re on the first page for “glucose” now. So you can see at the very top of this screenshot, “What should your glucose levels be?”, is now on the first page and then, not even the bottom of it, which is pretty cool. We’re beating out a lot of CGM companies and certainly all of our software competitors. Active users, actually, the slope of this line is starting to go up. And interestingly, the light blue trend here in the middle, that one day, that 2,000 for one day is quite high for us, so we’ve been averaging more like 800 to 1000. And so, active users is that very bottom line, which shows, like the least growth is actually moving in the right direction and then contributes to this steeper 30 day number.
On the top right, page drill down, this is just showing when we had 4,000 unique page views on the blog this week. The time on particular pages continues to be high 5 1/2 minutes. And actually, our average time for the pages, this was around 1.4 minutes last week and it’s up to 2.4 minutes this week, for average across the entire blog. Yeah, so pretty cool stuff. And the “Ultimate Guide to Healthy Glucose Levels” is our top performing blog post this week. Next slide.
[00:20:27] Josh Clemente: Seeing both the page views going up and the average time going up, at the same time, it’s counterintuitive as well, by the way. You should see those things moving in opposition. Yeah, cool.
[00:20:40] Dr. Casey Means: And the one driving that is definitely Ultimate Guide and Weight Loss. Those are the only two pages that people spend over 5, 4 to 5 minutes on.