Josh Clemente (00:00):
All right, let’s go ahead and jump into it. Welcome to Friday Forum, July 21st, 2023. And straight into the recent achievement slide, got a lot of visuals today, which is great. So on the member experience front, we are currently running a survey on logging and that’s going out to members. I think we have over 200 responses so far, that’s going to really drive the hypothesis around logging V6. So one of our major initiatives coming up is going to be the improvement of the logging feature. It’s a core function that drives data collection and also, then, the ability for us to provide targeted insights to people. As well as many of the scores, many of the core features of Levels, so there’s a big reboot coming to logging and this survey right now is going to drive a lot of that. So it’s good that we’re getting solid engagement there.
(00:50):
Excuse me. We’ve got four weeks above our 90% happiness target on the member success side, member experience side. We’re at 94% this week, which is awesome. Our post-delivery refunds crashed 40%, this is a really good thing. So post-delivery means they’ve already received the kit and then ask for a refund, and that’s a really expensive refund experience for Levels. We have been honoring that, historically, just to give gold standard experience but that dropping 40% is a huge win for us on cost. Opt-out strategy updates, so opt-out refers to the large IRB study that we have running and providing a path that enables people to be able to choose whether or not to engage in that while still being a Levels member is key. And we have some really good strategy coming together around how to provide more streamlined opt-out strategies that can still enable us to scale more rapidly, effectively.
(01:40):
So there’s a lot of chatter going on and comments about that. And then our team logging is way up from eight to 22 people right now, consistent team logging, so please continue to dog food this experience. Again, right now we know that this has to improve, and so it’s key that we are also in the loop, providing feedback on how to make this better for logging V6. We got a big initiative around deduplicating surfaces in the app. So basically we have renderings of very similar data in slightly dissimilar ways, and we’re really consolidating all of that as a fast follow on the single app that we shipped. So everyone is now on a single app, 100% of members, and now we’re deduplicating surfaces in order to make this more simple, more direct, easier to navigate.
(02:22):
And that’ll tee up the whole fixed jank process, which is a funny, large, grab basket of product improvements that we’re planning to make very soon. And then we’re going to be fast following as well a calendar access from the Today page. So through a lot of the conversations we’ve been having with members, we’ve realized that this is actually a very … it’s like a major pain point for people right now, is they don’t know how to navigate to Past Days easily. This was something that was silently happening and we didn’t really recognize this until recently. And so now we have a good plan for shipping a calendar access directly from the Today page, which will be coming together fast. We have a monthly reports, which Kusma is … she’s now I think been in the dog fooding process with two of the Levels team, so testing out new reports for the monthly and annual experience.
(03:05):
And then product engagement updates, so she’s shipping some sort of a reboot of how we measure product engagement and expose that via dashboard. All right, and then finally we shipped a bunch of email template updates. So shout out to Taylor and Karen who really pushed us over the finish line, but we had a lot of outdated information in our email templates and that has now been updated. On the growth side, so we’ve shifted over to our Directly Responsible Individuals program on growth, so that was previously like we focused on product, now growth has caught up as well. So that shift is in work, definitely impacted some of the pace this week, but that’ll really set us up to be able to parallelize things over the next few weeks.
(03:41):
We’ve got a big pricing test coming next week. You can see, it’s kind of hard to see the text, but you can see we’ve split out the Levels membership from the hardware, in a very deliberate way, and broken out the pricing as well. We can now iterate the prices on those two categories. So as everyone on this call knows, when you buy a Levels membership, you then also have to buy the Sensors at whatever rate you’d like and that is not very clear to people who, they don’t know Levels. And so by breaking these apart visually and then iterating on the pricing of each, we can start to find that sweet spot where people very clearly grasp exactly what the structure is like without having to do a ton of long form text, so looking forward to the test results here. We’re testing a referrals notification in app, so pointing people to that feature. An abandoned cart flow or a new campaign around abandoned carts.
(04:26):
And then, on the top level metrics front, our traffic to the home page is back up to April levels. So we had seen this declining, a lot of that was unclear exactly why, but it’s great to see traffic back up to early levels. Spring levels. Part two of Dom’s mental health series, so this has been a great series with the [inaudible 00:04:49] group, digging into mental health and how it correlates with metabolic health. So we will have a third part of that coming out soon on the Whole New Level in all of our channels. And then Calley Means, and Casey, if you have not been following, Casey’s brother is a hardcore evangelist for metabolic health, very similar to Casey, and he has had a huge uptake just across media of all kinds. And Calley and Casey had an episode drop on a Whole New Level this week, which I cannot wait to listen to. Haven’t yet.
(05:16):
We’ve got 70,000 YouTube subscribers, we’re repurposing content on TikTok, we’re testing more email marketing, lots of great stuff happening there on the ads front. So we have new ad sets with Casey live on podcasts, but we’re also repurposing that content for meta ads, which you can see here. So Casey is a natural at this and it’s going to be really exciting to track this. TikTok and YouTube shorts ads went live. We’ve got Sharma ads, so the Sharma agency we’re working with, we’ve got ads and landing pages going live for various personas this next week. And then we’re working on an ad set with Rob’s bloodwork content, so breaking out the long form video we did on bloodwork into a set of shorts that can grab people who are interested in various markers of health or disease. And then showing them how the Levels product can fit into a wellness lifestyle.
(06:00):
Okay, trending to partnership goal. So partnership numbers are moving in the right direction right now. We’ve been wondering how much we’ve tapped out specific audiences, but this week we had Andrew Huberman, his ad read hit a near all time high for conversions, which is awesome. So that’s really showing us that, in many cases this is not … we’re nowhere near probably tapping out, so that’s really good to see. Casey has 10 podcast episodes either live or recording over the next three weeks, so the podcast tour is fully underway. And then Bryan Johnson has been very consistent, even though he hasn’t really been really amplifying the message around Levels, he’s still driving consistent conversions. And that’s really awesome to see, especially as part of the Blueprint program many of us have been following closely.
(06:45):
We’ve got several other new affiliates, including Marcus Philly, Ben Pakulski, Alex Schirm, or Alexa Schirm coming on right now, and all exciting stuff. And then on the engineering front, again, the DRI project, we’re continuing to refine this and make it better. This is a constant process as we really shift over to the Directly Responsible Individuals being the engineer. And simultaneously, we are surface area reduction mode for the backend. We did this on the front end on mobile, now we’re reducing a lot of the backend complexity. Accountability v1 is now in the hypothesis stage. So Maxine is developing her hypothesis that will then go into shaping and execution. And then we’ve got three projects in validation, basically several of those that everyone’s pretty familiar with. And we’ve got two in progress with a retro out on the homepage experiment, which will drive our next steps on the homepage.
(07:33):
Tons of stuff there. You can see we also have a lot on the product front that is ready for eng and hypothesis development and scoping, and then execution, so a lot of backlog stuff coming together for product. So there’s a lot to do. And here are some of the landers that the Sharma team has put together, so those will be for various profiles or personas. And I think that’s most of it. [inaudible 00:07:56] down here. Yeah, great stuff. Okay, with that I want to welcome Jordan Carlisle. So Jordan is a Levels member, entrepreneur, deep in the digital health innovation world. As well as founder, and I think partner in several gyms, but founder of Strengthen Labs in Arkansas. Jordan, I really appreciate you making some time on Friday to come hang out with us and we’d love to hear what you’re excited about in the world of metabolic health and fitness.
Jordan Carlisle (08:23):
Thanks, Josh. I am honored to be here and been a big fan of Levels for, probably since the earliest days. Following y’all as someone working in the space and keeping up with all of the latest innovations in digital health. And I started using Levels right when I decided to start training for an Ironman. And I used it periodically leading up to the actual event, and used it during the events, and found it instrumental in helping me really dial in and think about how to keep myself stable. And if you’ve ever trained for an endurance event like that, it’s really important to be consistent. So every day it’s more important to show up and do the work than going all out or overdoing it in one day. And so being able to look at how my food and my metabolic processes we’re staying stable would help me actually rest and recover more appropriately so that the next day I would be more fresh.
(09:40):
And it was also just fun learning about how certain things that I was unaware of may trigger me or may not. So for example, I actually learned that ice cream didn’t really trigger me as much as I thought it would, but things like cereals did, and really realizing that. And then I think also, I tend to overeat and so overeating was one that I had to really learn and be more conscious about throughout that whole endeavor. But all in all, I mean my passion for metabolic health really stems from my upbringing. I’m from Arkansas, which is one of the most unhealthy states in the US and have a lot of family members who have struggled with metabolic health. And growing up, I always had this burning question around why our health system wasn’t doing more to actually encourage people to practice the things that can help them stay healthy, versus just treating people once they’re sick.
(10:52):
Which is what led me to joining the team at the Whole Health Institute. And what Levels is doing is really right in line with what the Institute is all about. And if you’re not aware or familiar with it, it’s a nonprofit that Alice Walton, from the Walmart family, founded to bring more whole person care to healthcare and really empower individuals to be stewards of their own health. And so I think Levels is a company that is one of the best, if not the best, in terms of thinking about things that are traditionally considered medical interventions or medical tools, but making them accessible to individuals.
(11:41):
And that’s also why I decided to back the company as well in the Wefunder round, because I think we need more companies like Levels who are really willing to do the hard work of figuring out that consumer experience and keeping people engaged. And bringing them along and helping them understand their health, versus just treating them like they’re not able to understand what’s going on with themselves. So I think it’s an honorable challenge, it’s a really hard challenge, but you all seem to be figuring it out along the way. Yeah, so I’m super excited to be here. I’m kind of just meandering through things, is there any specific questions or anything that I should be answering?
Josh Clemente (12:34):
You followed a great thread there, very interested to hear both your personal experience, and then also in a bigger picture, how you’re seeing the importance and trends in metabolic health. And so it’s really fascinating to hear about the Whole Health Institute and how you’re taking that approach right into the heart of America. Which, as you know, Levels right now is an expensive product and it is primarily seeing uptake on the coast. In the expensive places to live, in cities and such. And one of the important elements that we can’t lose sight of is how to make this accessible and not just actionable, that’s the first step, but then accessible to everyone that needs it.
(13:11):
Right now metabolic health is destroying livelihoods at scales of hundreds of millions and close to billions of people. So we’ve got to be able to do the opposite on the same scale, so it’s a great reminder. I’d love to hear, Jordan, from you, besides the price point, which is something that we certainly are working hard on to the extent that we can, what would you like to see Levels do better differently? Or start doing that you haven’t seen before?
Jordan Carlisle (13:38):
Yeah, so just honest feedback. I have found it, not necessarily difficult, but I’ve been less intrinsically motivated to just open the Levels app when I’m not using a CGM. And so I think I am seeing things that y’all are doing that provide more value beyond just the monitoring engagement. And so I think just doing more of that and finding ways to give me a reason to … If I could have a reason to open up Levels twice a day, I think that would be incredible. I mean, as an investor I’d be like, “Hell yeah, that’s going to make magic happen.”
(14:29):
But I do think, just from the person working in healthcare, thinking about what the future is going to look like, I’m really excited about the possibility of the form factor and interface that y’all have created, that can allow for other ways or other modalities for monitoring. So things like cortisol or lactate or other dimensions that, together with glucose, could be really powerful. And I’m assuming y’all are thinking about that, but I think things like that could be really interesting. And yeah, I think the price point is certainly one of the biggest barriers, but my personal approach is doing it a couple times a year, and so I still am motivated to do that and love doing it when I do it.
Josh Clemente (15:22):
Awesome. Yeah, I love all of those. So yeah, great reminder on the accountability element of pulling people into the app to be able to surface the learnings. The important thing is that we are not just running a sensor in the background, but they’re actually tuning behaviors and improving. And I think that bar you set, just twice a day, if we can get people into the app and engaging with their numbers and learning from it, that’s a huge win for them. And also for us. So I really like that. And then on the multiplicative effect or even exponential effect of being able to monitor multiple, simultaneous molecules that correlate with each other.
(15:56):
Or are even orthogonal, perpendicular to each other, but help cover more of the span of health. Something we’re really interested in and look forward to seeing new technologies that can make that happen and being a conduit to it. So, Jordan, thanks a ton for, first of all being a member, but also backing us as an Angel investor in our community round. That’s amazing. And, yeah, your support is awesome. Thanks for taking some time on a Friday. And we have a whole meeting ahead, would love to have you stick around if you’re interested. Feel free, otherwise if you’ve got to jump, on behalf of the team, this is really awesome and thanks for again making the time.
Jordan Carlisle (16:31):
Thanks for having me. It was my pleasure.
Josh Clemente (16:33):
Awesome. All right, Culture and Kudos. So first of all, happy one year to Lynette. Lynette has been in the Levels orbit for much longer than a year as a very engaged Levels member initially, and super excited to just continue to feel the energy from Lynette all the time. She’s doing many things always and it’s really awesome to work with you. Crazy, it’s been a year already. And then just want to shout out the R&D team. So the documentation that’s come together from the R&D Phase 2 memo, and the roadmap that has come out of that, came out super well and the whole team contributed significantly. This was Carrie’s first major strategy doc, so really excited to see him put pen to paper and architect out what we’re doing as we transition from the very first early principles demonstration, into the real execution mode. So love seeing it, love seeing everybody contribute to it.
(17:26):
The team, it’s a lean team right now, but have accomplished a lot. And right now in the transition phase it’s super crucial to be able to keep eyes on the target and keep moving forward, and that’s exactly what’s happening. So yeah, big shout out to Carrie, big shout out to the rest of the R&D team who have been at it for a long time, excited to see the standards of documentation continue. And yeah, a lot more to come on R&D obviously in near term. All right, and then I’ve got another one here. So this one’s a little bit more nuanced but it’s more oriented around how we need to think about this moment in time. So you’re probably not able to read all this text, but you’ll find this thread in comms. It’s basically a comms thread where the topic was, primarily, seasonality. And seasonality is a term that many of us have never experienced before, unless you’ve worked in consumer products.
(18:16):
And it’s where essentially the ebbs and flows of people’s mindset change over the seasons. And when you’re in the summertime, you maybe want to let loose a little bit, care a little bit less about tracking health, want to just be on the beach and drink some beers or whatever. And it’s a very real thing. But the point of this thread, and the reason I’m highlighting it, is that there are a bunch of ways where we can over index on the potential causes of lower or flatter numbers than what we want. So we can be pushing all this work into the system to try to make numbers move in the right direction, and then we’re searching for an explanation. And it’s really easy to index on these that come up on a Google search or that we know have, through experience, exist out there. Like seasonality.
(18:57):
But what’s important is that the mindset that comes through on this thread and the approach of saying, “Yes, seasonality is a thing,” but it’s unhelpful to index on that as the cause of our numbers right now. The point being that we can just choose to recognize that seasonality may be contributing, and yet still work through. Because the only way out is through, and I think Kusma states it as, “Is there a gloomy explanation for why we’re down relative to January?” And the answer is yes, probably. I mean we’ve been working on different directions with the product, our NPS has been declining so referrals aren’t as high as they were, so there are all these things that we invested in other than growth numbers over the past few months. And a lot of this takes some time to turn the ship, so to speak.
(19:44):
And so the reality is that we’re not seeing instantaneous reactions to the effort that we’re putting in. And some of that is to be expected, and we can call it seasonality, we can call it whatever we want, but the reality is that we’re just seeing a delta between the moment that we put effort back into the projects that we now care about and at the point at which we will see the benefits of that effort. Tom sums it up really nicely at the end, basically says, “We know seasonality exists, we’re just not going to use it as an explanation for what we’re seeing going forward. We’re just going to focus on what we can do and what the outcome was.” And then Sam simultaneously saying, “Right now we’ve got a lot on our backlog and we’re working on the right things, let’s just execute on these and let’s not focus on putting labels on the reason that we’re not seeing return on investment, because this stuff compounds.”
(20:34):
So a little bit nuanced, maybe it doesn’t come through super clearly, but I think it’s worth reading that thread and really recognizing that what matters is that we just keep grinding. We’re going to see light at the end of the tunnel sooner than later, and in fact we are seeing some signs of life relative to a few weeks ago, as we really start to see the numbers start turning. So always happy to chat about this stuff and hopefully that helps everybody recognize the mindset right now is keep grinding. All right, on that topic, does this get us to 10% month over month? That that’s the question everyone should ask themselves. This is my background right now. There’s a lot we can do, there’s a lot we are doing, and the point is don’t hold back on making recommendations and diving in, helping out. If you’ve got extra cycles, raise your hand, see if the growth team can leverage you and, yeah, let’s get to 10%. All right, I’m going to hand it over to Tony.
Tony (21:32):
Thanks, Josh. Everyone hear me okay? Cool. So yeah, so today I’m going to go over a quick sneak peek into multimedia as a function within content and growth. I’ll go over a little bit about my day-to-day, how multimedia really works, and overall how I really aim to support a lot of the ongoing content and growth initiatives moving forward. So next slide, Josh. So multimedia really touches a lot of our content surfaces. It could be from our YouTube channels, to all of our podcasts, and even all the video content that you see, that we produce for our social media channels. And a little bit about my day to day for this, I mean my schedule is honestly never monotonous. Every day, every week is completely different. Projects and priorities always shift, so I’m constantly reallocating time differently based on company priorities as well.
(22:40):
However, I think most recently a lot of my efforts have been really assisting Ben on the performance marketing front. So it might even include cutting up video ads for our ads that are running on Meta, and I’ll talk a little bit about TikTok and YouTube as well. And most recently also overseeing some of our YouTube pre-roll ads and our TikTok ads. I think going hand-in-hand, with that with the performance stuff, is on the organic side and the content front with Mike. So a lot of our initiatives for YouTube has been a main focus, especially in the last month of just driving this audience. It’s almost half a million viewers per month, so it’s definitely one of our largest audience. So it’s important that we use this as another key channel for us. Next slide, Josh.
(23:41):
Yeah, so I think it’s also important for me to also show how lot of this works behind the scenes too. I get asked about this a lot, I feel like on donut chats too, it’s just like, how does it really run in the background? So I think this is a good little sneak peek here. So this is my personal dashboard that I look at day to day, and this is honestly key for me. I don’t know what I would do without it, but just as we keep this reminder at the top of our screen, this is the top of my dashboard, our month-over-month goal there. So it’s always a great reminder every day and it gives me a macro view of all multimedia projects, all in one place. And I think in tandem with that, another chunk of my time is also coordinating and leveraging Athena and our contractors to help me scale these initiatives that are happening in the background.
(24:36):
And it definitely allows me to focus on anything that’s higher priority or most urgent right now. So this could be for podcast coordination, video editing, and even podcast editing as well. So again, this dashboard really helps me keep track of all of this and I’m always constantly finding ways to finesse the process. And again, it just really allows me to focus on current priorities and anything that’s urgent. Next slide, Josh. So what are some of the priorities right now with multimedia? On the organic side, multimedia has definitely changed a lot in the past few months. And it’s even changed even more in just the past month alone, since early June, given our growth goals. Previously, our approach was very much what you see here on the left, basically boost viewership on our organic channels by iterating on which content resonates the most for our viewers.
(25:39):
And then most recently, it’s definitely most what you see on the right there as of last month, and some of this has changed so now we’re really trying to use these key channels to lead our viewers to our website. So that’s the main goal right now on the organic front, is just using these massive audiences, especially YouTube, to drive traffic there. Next slide, Josh. And then on the performance marketing front, this is definitely another urgent and important initiative for multimedia. And I know Ben actually chatted a lot about performance marketing last week, so I’m definitely not going to dive into how it all works. I think you got a great one-on-one last week, that was actually awesome. But overall, I think the main takeaway is this is actually something I started taking on as of last week, so this is actually very new initiative with overseeing the YouTube pre-roll ads.
(26:37):
And as of yesterday a new initiative is overseeing our TikTok ads, which we just started. So again, this is another way for really me to just be able to help Ben and the growth team in the coming weeks as we try to hit these growth goals. Next slide, Josh. So in the end, why does all this matter? In the end, it’s really just about supporting our growth goals and achieving our 10% month over month. So I continue to just keep track of the analytics from both our organic channels and now these new paid initiatives. And the more we can effectively just reach these larger audiences, whether it’s from organic or paid, the more it could help support the growth team and hopefully help fuel our growth efforts. So that’s pretty much it, thank you.
Josh Clemente (27:35):
That is a very concise summary of Tony’s day-to-day. Yeah, awesome. I think that that little dashboard is a really nice inspiration. You should turn that into a template, but it’s got a decision framework and the number one thing there at the top. And it’s pretty awesome to see all of the work, all the scale that Tony gets. And I think a great reminder is what Haney said in the comments there, “Tony is probably like … he’s the superstar of delegation at the Levels team.” So if you are feeling like you’re being held back by just you don’t have enough time in the day, it’s worth reaching out to Tony. Or just talking directly to Athena and seeing what processes are they helping him with, that they could potentially take off your plate, or help scale in your process.
(28:18):
So I think that’s one of the major elements of this, we have multiple digital channels that are getting huge, huge uptake and that’s really hard to do. And that is with one guy, Tony, and delegation through our contractor team. So it’s pretty phenomenal and, yeah, super important for everybody to think about ways that they can leverage themselves and add speed. So thank you, Tony. All right, we’re kind of ripping through this one. Hiring updates, so as I mentioned last week we’re going to have some R&D roles opening soon. Those are being shaped right now as we ramp into Phase 2. And then, an announcement that has not been made yet but some of you have probably heard is Braden McCarthy is coming back to Levels. This is really, really exciting. So Braden was an OG on member support and left Levels about a year ago to look for other opportunities to learn and grow and just broaden his horizons.
(29:13):
Nd has decided with all the challenges that we’re facing and the exciting phase that we’re in, there’s a lot that he can sink his teeth into. And I think that and the Levels culture are calling him back, so we’re really excited. I think he’s starting imminently, beginning of next week, so he’ll be able to backfill some of the gap that we’ve had on the ops team with a few members departing, and just going to be a force multiplier for us. So can’t wait to work with Braden again. That’s all I got the hiring slide and that means we are already at Individual Contributions, so we might wrap this meeting early today. But I’m going to stop the share and then go ahead and use the reactions, so you can raise your hand to jump in and share something personal, something professional. Love to hear from you. So, let’s see if I can do this first. All right, I’ll kick us off. So I’m excited to be in game time.
(30:14):
We talk a lot about mindset and we’ve been in growth mode now for a while, but we’ve been really focused on it as our primary objective at the main business for over a month as we’ve turned the ship from the product effort we made in early 2023 towards Levels classic and growing 10% month-over-month. We have not hit 10% month-over-month growth, that’s the reality. It’s not even an elephant in the room, it’s just a fact. And nobody likes that, but at the same time we are seeing an all hands on deck initiative. We’re seeing attention to detail, we’re seeing the scale is increasing so people are scaling themselves. We’re seeing Tony and Ben and Haney and so many others basically hitting speed, getting momentum in this direction.
(31:00):
And that’s the thing that … it’s frustrating, it takes time, but if you watch … There’s this guy, Rob Forrester, that I follow on Instagram. They guy call him Quadzilla, he’s a cyclist and he has these gigantic quads. And he jumps on a bike and he puts it in the top gear and he starts pedaling. And the pedals do not spin. This guy is huge and he’s pushing all of his weight into that and the pedals are moving at crazy slow speed. And then all of a sudden it just kicks into gear and just starts going, and that’s the definition of the flywheel effect. And right now we’re putting the work into the system, we’re pushing hard, we’re not seeing instantaneous results, and there’s certainly stuff that we need to change and adapt to and update.
(31:41):
And I’m seeing that agility, I think we probably have to do more of it. We got to keep our eyes on the prize instead of seasonality and things like this. But I’m feeling confident that we’re going to see that acceleration pick up and we’re going to be moving faster than we expected, much sooner than we thought. So let’s keep at it. That’s what I’m excited for. It covers everything at Levels right now, but just keep pushing, it’s going to start moving. Chris.
Chris Jones (32:07):
That was great, Josh, thank you. A couple things. One, congrats Lynette on your anniversary. Great to have you on the team. Another thing that’s been really exciting the past couple of weeks is, I think we highlighted a little bit last week, we fully got all of autonomy up on Levels and CGMs. And just to watch the aha moment that team has in terms of like, oh, I didn’t know this data … It’s the magic moments that we all experienced as employees that now our contractors and BPOs, so it just is a huge unlock for them and it’s great to follow stories. I’ve never heard so many comments around green bananas versus brown bananas and the subtleties.
(32:46):
Another one is, I want to do a shout out to Zach. I had this in the Woo channel, but maybe I didn’t hit send, is being at a lot of companies where the default is you run away from the legal team and you actually don’t ask them anything because their default answer is, “No, you can’t do that. And let me tell you all the reasons why.” And Zach is just such a breath of fresh air in terms of his approach. And to some degree, in some areas we are more conservative than Zach is. We’re like, “Oh, we can’t do that because of X, Y, and Z.” And he’s Like, “No, actually there are better solutions.” And I’m just like, I have never had a legal counsel on the team that is such a value add. So I just want to say a big huge shout out to Zach.
(33:34):
And even, I think he was responding to things during his think week or off week. So we appreciate you. And then lastly, on a personal note, two things. One is we got a new puppy. So a dog that we’ve been babysitting, and as they’re trying to wrestle each other, some friends had to give them away so we decided to pick them up. So we now have three Labs. And then in about a couple hours I fly back to Iowa for AgBri. So for Mike Haney, this one’s for you. I put down my spurs, picked up my spokes, and I’m ready to ride. A new hat, a new adventure. I will be offline for a week in 100-degree heat, riding through the cornfields, so I might be slow to respond but I’m going to basically break my CGM with every fried food known to man. So, that’s it.
Josh Clemente (34:30):
Absolutely love it. Enjoy. Take a bunch of pictures.
Chris Jones (34:35):
Will do.
Josh Clemente (34:35):
As Rob said, [inaudible 00:34:36]. All right, Justin.
Justin Stanley (34:41):
I’m super excited that the Android app is modernized again and members can start having all the features that we’ve been working on the last three or four or five months, I can’t remember how long back we froze them. And this unlocks the backend to start ripping out a bunch of their old code related to guidance and all that stuff once we force upgrade them. Which, probably next week sounds right as long as there’s no issues that pop up. And then, yeah, the gays are going out in waves tonight for the Barbie premiere. As well as the little girls and boys, maybe. But yeah, so I’m excited. My husband and I are taking our niece and she’s super stoked. I think she’s 10 and, yeah, I had my husband out on a wild goose chase looking for some pink clothes and it’s going to be fun.
Josh Clemente (35:35):
Sounds good. Let me know how it goes. I will be waiting. Ben.
Ben Grynol (35:43):
All right, personally, found PJ Vogt. He was one of the podcasters, early podcasters, at Gimlet. And he went on hiatus and he’s now got this new podcast called Search Engine that’s pretty cool. So if anyone’s into PJ or a fan of that, highly recommend it. Professionally, a bunch of stuff. So welcome Mike, of course. Been pretty stoked digging into this new podcast series that Dom’s doing, it’s very fun to visit that and listen to some of the early episodes before they drop. And then great to see Casey on the pod run again. Another thing super fun is working on that rendering project with Kraker, so some of the things we’ve been doing around the hardware and just seeing that come to life. The eye candy is always exciting, so that is fun.
(36:30):
And then the last thing, I’m going to go off the cuff here, so bear with me. I’m putting out the bat signal here. So if you are agitated, if you’re pissed off, I don’t think any of us like being flat, feeling like we’re fucking losing. That doesn’t feel good. 3512 Montopolis, Monday morning, we’re going to war. Growth war room. If you want to get to town, come here, we’ll get a hacker house going. I don’t care what it is, we’re going to hook up a monitor to a Stripe dashboard. We’re going to watch that revenue roll in. So if you want to get here, 3512 Montopolis, let’s fucking go. Let’s growth hack. We got to get these numbers up. So none of us like losing, let’s get growth moving.
Josh Clemente (37:19):
Quadzilla right there. Haney.
Mike Haney (37:25):
I hate to follow that, but I’ll give it a slightly different perspective from growth, which is building on what we’ve been talking about, that it’s still flat now. I kind of feel like I’ve got a little bit of secret knowledge here, because although we all see the stuff that’s going on, being in the weeds of it and watching all this stuff build. I feel like I’ve seen a couple months in the future. I know where this stuff is going.
(37:48):
And as a point of evidence for that, I talked to a few email marketing firms this week because it’s something we’re looking at bringing on. And all of them were just adamant that there is enormous blue sky for us. They were like, “You guys have an amazing product, you have amazing content, you have an amazing list. Once we activate this, oh my God, just wait to see what we can do.” And I don’t want to over promise for that effort, but I do think it’s just … I think there’s a lot coming. So yeah, it’s a little bit of July doldrums now, but I’m very confident in the second half of the year when all this work just starts to hit the sky.
Josh Clemente (38:26):
Exactly. I think those are two sides of the coin right there. Let’s hit it, continue hitting it, like Ben is saying. I think war room is a great way to it. I think there are moments in time when a sprint and a focused effort is absolutely necessary to bring the energy. And then simultaneously, there’s the age old statement, you overestimate what you can do in a short time and underestimate what you can do in a long time. And that’s basically where we’re at right now. I think we want to see this 10% growth instantly, and I feel like we’re going to be annoyed by that until we do, but then we’re going to outperform. So let’s get there. Thank you, Ben. Thank you, Haney. Anybody else? It doesn’t have to be a hype speech, you can just jump in and share something. Sunny.
Sunny Negless (39:11):
Sure, I’ll go ahead and say … I guess I’ll start with personal. I’m headed, it looks like everyone’s just taking off this weekend. I’m headed to the Pacific Northwest, we’re going to go to the North Cascades and we’re staying in a cabin. The kind of place that’s like, “Hey, y’all, we don’t have wifi here. If you want wifi, you’ve got to go down the street, next to the Wegmans, whatever it’s called.” So going to be offline. And I also do still need that wifi because I’ve got, I hadn’t looked at it, but I think I’m at just under 1200 days on my Duolingo streak. So we’re keeping that going. But outside of that, really excited to spend some time in nature and also just be fully offline, not taking the computer with me.
(39:56):
Because I was going to share with the professional side of it, it’s been really cool to see all of the automations. I shouldn’t say automations, but delegations, things that used to be very, very manual for a support ops side. We’ve now found delegations that Athena can help us out with. We’ve now found things that the engineering team has helped us out with, that now I don’t need to attend to them every single day. So that’s a big shout out to say, feels really good to be able to completely disconnect for a period of time. And also with a small but mighty team, everyone’s got it. So that’s the big call out. And then on a professional note for myself, it’s been really cool to be working on labs.
(40:36):
So labs, I don’t know if Raphael’s on here, but Raphael and Taylor and I were working yesterday, and Raphael’s helping out with a transactional email and he’s like, “There’s this note from Ian that says this shouldn’t be used for production, but I think that ship has sailed.” And we’re like, “Yes, yes. This is in production.” So it was a highlight of, we shipped fast, we worked on it, and now we’re doing some manual work to figure out what needs to get fixed for what we have right now, so that we can make the informed decisions of do we grow what we currently have? Or do we move on to something new? So that feels really, really good to be tying that up today. And I didn’t realize that Braden, when I scheduled this out, that Braden was joining us on Monday to do a lot of work on labs. So I’m so excited. Braden was my mentor coming on with the ops side, so I’m really excited to have him back and have him jump in directly to what we’ve been doing. So y’all have a great weekend, thanks.
Josh Clemente (41:35):
Lot of great stuff. Enjoy the disconnection. It’s going to be awesome. Mike D.
Mike DiDonato (41:40):
Yeah, I’m feeling really, really charged up. Thank you to everybody for this, but I just wanted to connect it to growth and partnerships, especially because Dom is on the call. Some of you may know that trying to think of ways to create this flywheel and engage the amazing partners and network that we have. So recently, not recently, yesterday we reached out to some of our amazing advisory team and just said, “Hey, you may have seen on our investor update, we’re really truly in growth mode. We’re working to move the needle, would you be open to helping, supporting more so?” And less than 12 hours later, I just want to read it verbatim from Dom. “I’d love to help and I’ll add this to IG, Facebook, Twitter, and the next newsletter too.” So I just want to say thank you to Dom, thank you Rob, thank you our entire network. May have been a little bit down, but I am a practical optimist and I know with the energy and the team that we’re definitely going to see some fruits from these labors. So let’s fucking go.
Josh Clemente (42:48):
Nothing to add there. Yeah, awesome. Awesome network. Dom and Rob have been phenomenal. I mean, we’ve gotten too used to seeing their faces on this. This is just our weekly team call and we’ve got Dom DiAgostino and Rob Lustig on it. They’re on our channels, they’re sharing the message, it’s phenomenal. They created the message, they crafted it. Or the conduit. So yeah, it’s amazing. So, feeling lucky. Let’s …