Josh Clemente (00:00):
Welcome to Friday Forum, July 8th. I have a little second monitor set up with my iPhone here, which I’m testing out. Hopefully that’ll give me more real estate to work with. It’s kind of hard to do just from the laptop. All right, recent achievements, so the big news. Levels officially reached general availability. So we had our soft launch this week, meaning you can now go to our website and click the Join Levels button and sign up. It’s a huge moment. It’s a soft launch, meaning we aren’t necessarily hyping it up or blowing the trumpets on this.
(00:33):
The goal is to just open the gate and understand how conversion rates are playing out, where we can optimize our funnels, and where the lessons can be learned before we really start amplifying here. But needless to say, it’s a really big moment. We’ve had just a wait list since the inception of the company. So congrats everybody on getting here and very excited for all we’re going to learn. Speaking of learnings, our new PostHog integration on the website, which you can see some tables here. JM posts really informative video on this.
(01:03):
But with the integration into the website, we can now start to really understand the relationship between the informative content that we’re producing and conversion rates and people essentially understanding the value proposition and deciding to become Levels members. So there’s roughly a two to five… Depending on how you want to compare these, there’s like a 2 to 5X, like a 500% conversion rate boost for people who find our content first, especially the ultimate guides. The ultimate guides are… they’re like sort of the flagship content.
(01:34):
They really go as deep as you can go into the theory behind continuous glucose monitoring for people who are interested in wellness and optimizing health and metabolic function. So those ultimate guides, they really give a statistically significant, I think, boost in terms of the understanding that people have and their desire to become members. So it’s pretty unbelievable, excited to do much more of this. I Just want to really give a round of applause for the team, Haney, Casey, and everyone involved in publishing content that goes this deep and on this consistently.
(02:09):
Lots of great work on study support documentation and iteration. So now that the IRB study is live, it is a bit of a departure from our previous approach to bringing in members and supporting requests. So Sadie and Jesse on the research side are doing a great job documenting all specific support topics for the IRB study and training up and improving our FAQs, our support documentation, and other team members so that we can really manage these and continue to scale. So a lot of good work going on behind the scenes there.
(02:44):
Casey’s episode with Dhru Purohit went live this morning. Another awesome podcast. I haven’t listened yet, but I’m excited to. That’s huge. Then Rich Roll’s first Instagram post is live. We’ve been kind of doing a partnership exploration with Rich for a few months now. This is the first live post. They wrote the entire caption and it got… I actually had this shared to me several times. And Rich, I’ve read his book, I love his story, and I really appreciate his perspective on Levels. This is really exciting.
(03:14):
Starting to see a significant increase in cash receipts from Liftoff. So we’ll have better information. We’re only about a week into June here, but we’re in line with expectations for month one of general availability. So this is good news obviously. It’s still early, but plenty to be excited about here. We kicked off the formal process to incorporate a UK subsidiary of Levels Health Inc. This will be necessary for our UK expansion. We’re driving towards a September 1st UK closed beta date. A lot more to come there and highly recommend Karen’s updates on that stuff.
(03:51):
Getting to the Green library of recipes is now live. This goes with this content that we have over here, 78 Recipes Unlikely to Spike Blood Sugar. Just starting to build more opportunity for people to find what to do or what other people do to continue to have really exciting and delicious recipe options that are going to work for them with CGM. CGM is the first time most people have seen under the hood, so to speak, how their body’s operating and responding to food. It can be a confusing experience, and so being able to share recipes that people love and that continue to incorporate the ingredients they love is really helpful. Looking forward to seeing how this helps other people and learn from it.
(04:29):
Yes, YouTube comments integrated into Help Scout. We’re continuing to scale our incorporation of digital channels outside of our main channels into our support system. So we can now respond to YouTube comments from Help Scout, which is our main support system. And DM management is scaling through Sprout. So we’re driving down response times for digital channels. This is really impressive. I think most people don’t expect to have company support coming through YouTube comments, but we can now do this and I think it’s going to continue to provide the happiness and the general perception of an extremely intentional brand across all channels, which is great.
(05:11):
Let’s see. New annotated charts. You can see this picture here. This is internally live, but we’re pushing out the annotated charts which have spike detection. So you can see the coloration and the annotation with the spike information on the main chart. This is going to be part of the new Now Score V… Now Peg V2, which core navigation was released to members. So we broke out the stability score, the sort of ring and stability algorithm from the core navigation, which places the insights and what happened recently at the fold and at the chart.
(05:44):
So I believe we had a slight delay on pushing out the core nav this past week. That’s now live to members. And the annotated chart is live to the team. All of this will come together with the stability score after about another round, it seems like, of algorithm improvements. And then that’ll be live to members as well, which is very exciting. All right, other opportunities here. So the Month in Metabolic Health, this is a roundup that the content team has been doing. A lot of great stuff there on the blog. We had a couple new memos go live this week.
(06:14):
Levels Partnership Strategy update from Tom and Jackie. This is really wide and deep. A lot of our strategy now that we’ve opened the gates and we’re moving into growth mode, a lot of that is going to come down to partnerships and where do we focus? There’re huge opportunities. I think a lot of shiny objects and deciding where to hone our strategy is… it’s really important. Organizational Entropy. This is one that really defines many of the principles that we have at Levels. How do we intentionally build a culture that focuses on the right things, doesn’t necessarily devolve into chaos or just unintentional practices? That is what typically happens inside businesses. We need to be careful to avoid it.
(06:53):
Another one, How to Do a Retro At Levels. We’re going to start to do many more retrospectives. So as we finish up projects, good or bad, the outcomes need to be documented and we need to be able to learn from them and share those learnings in a scalable way. This is an initial stab at defining how that retro process should look. Then we’ve got a memo on Levels, brand personalities and spokespeople strategies. So scaling how many voices we get out into different personas is going to be an important process now that we’ve, again, lifted the gates and have an opportunity to start really building more rapidly.
(07:27):
Okay. Then we had a bunch of great podcast episodes. I think we had Dr. Steven Gundry talking Keto with Casey, Rob Lustig talking about Big Ag, and several of the team talking resilience, some cost, a lot of great stuff there, and a huge amount of YouTube content produced. We got serious keto, Austin, and the continued approach to defining athletic performance. Then really providing some approachable content about a lot of the nutritional jargon that we see out there; free-range, grass-fed, wild. What do all these terms mean? So continuing to produce content that will help people understand what nutrition topics mean.
(08:07):
I think that covers it. I’m going to jump forward and welcome Charlotte. Charlotte is a Levels member. We had a spotlight piece on our blog about Charlotte and her experience with Levels. She’s been extremely gracious with her time and her feedback. As a retired science educator, she found Levels on her own and she has very sort of similar story in that her own personal health journey led her to experimentation and ultimately to finding CGM it seems. Very excited to welcome Charlotte, who’s a tennis player, not a pickleball player, which is an important juxtaposition.
(08:42):
Charlotte, thanks for taking some time on Friday and would love to just hear some of your thoughts about your experience and about what you’re excited for in metabolic health.
Charlette Plinneke (08:51):
Thank you. It’s really a pleasure to be here and to be able to thank you guys in person. I got my business feet wet in the dot-com boom of the ’80s and I know what it’s like to be in the middle of all the chaos in a startup. Sometimes, it’s really hard to see the impact you’re having outside of your little chaotic world. But what you guys are doing at Levels is just huge. I can tell you my story, and I’m sure there are thousands and thousands of other stories out there. But you guys are doing the big work and I really appreciate it.
(09:41):
My journey with Levels started last September. I had retired, sold the big house, bought the tiny house on the beach, and was settling into this life centered around tennis, which is something I’d always wanted to do. I went in to see a new doctor, just regular blood work, and my fasting blood glucose came back the first time at 120, the second time at 106. But what’s interesting about that is the doctor thought both of those numbers were okay. Because I do watch my health and try to be healthy, I knew that I had been trending the last five or seven years higher and higher.
(10:28):
When I mentioned that, his response was, “That’s what happens as you get older. Your levels are going to rise and eventually they’ll get so high we’ll put you on metformin and life is good.” And he really believed that. He was a nice guy. When I said, “Is there anything I can do personally to stop this trend?” He said, “No.” So I left and always thinking scientifically about what was happening in my body. I knew there was something I could do. It was just random that I saw Kelly LeVeque’s Instagram post and she had put on a CGM with her Levels patch.
(11:20):
I immediately got in touch with you guys and literally had the button on my arm in a week. It was so great. I was shocked at what I discovered. I hate to say I’m a Type A personality, but maybe I am. But when I saw the scores in the 50s, F, I was getting an F, I just couldn’t even believe it, the number of spikes that I was having a day. And you hear this number bantered around, this 88% of Americans are metabolically unfit, and it seems so unbelievable. But yet, here I was, 5’9″, thin, playing tennis five days a week, sometimes twice, in great shape. And yet I had this wild insulin resistance happening in my body that I wasn’t even aware of.
(12:17):
So it’s not hard for me to imagine now that that number is correct and you guys are just tip of the iceberg. I feel like you guys are right place, right time, all that sort of thing. So I went into this for health reasons, to balance my blood sugar. What ended up happening is I lost 20 pounds. Who knew I had 20 pounds to lose? Most of it came from around my waistline. I have lost nine inches around my waist. Well, come to find out, when you’re insulin resistant, that’s where you store your body fat. And in that weight, bad body fat, are a lot of toxins.
(13:12):
God bless Brayden and Mercy and all the people that heard from me so many times. But you guys were so incredibly helpful because this was hard information to accept and even harder to get started. But I did get started with your help and it’s been quite a journey because you… I’ve read every book… Every doctor that’s on your board, I love, I’ve read all their books, plus several more, trying to figure out what was happening in my body. Everybody says you’re going to go through this flu-like experience for a week, maybe 10 days.
(13:57):
I sat in that flu-like experience for nine solid weeks as my body tried to figure out how to get rid of these toxins. And there was no doctor that could help me. That’s also the other side of this, is people have to be a little bit brave because you’re really on your own right now while doctors get up to speed on this. So I started doing what I do best. Now, I started my career in Silicon Valley at a startup, but I ended up as a science teacher, which I love science. For over 20 years, I took really difficult science concepts and distilled them down so that teenagers could understand them and get excited about them.
(14:48):
So this segue for me into writing about my experience with Levels and writing about autophagy and mitophagy and these big words you hear that can be a little bit intimidating. I’ve started writing these articles and bringing it down to a level that makes it readable, not intimidating, and hopefully exciting for everybody to get on board to do this. Writing has always been a hobby, but I think now I’m going to make it a career, which is a big statement considering I’ve only been paid for one article. It was Mark Hyman’s group that paid me. So there’s that.
Josh Clemente (15:35):
Wow!
Charlette Plinneke (15:36):
But I’m inspired by this. And you guys really… you’re the tip of the iceberg in all of this because what you’re doing for me and for everybody else is you’re stopping this downhill slide into chronic illnesses that are just so prevalent. And people aren’t even connecting the dots that it’s insulin resistance, that it’s taking a look, a deep look, inside of your blood sugar and being able to accept what’s there and work with it. So it’s been a long process. But the day I got into 60s, seriously, I celebrated getting a D. That was amazing for me.
(16:18):
Now I’m almost always in the 70s, 80s. If I try really hard, I can stay in the 90s all week. But the important part is every other biomarker for inflammation in my body has improved in a way that’s hard to explain. The blood test service that you guys provide, it’s just right on the money. That’s really every marker you want to be looking at. So you can watch your numbers get better, you can watch your sleep get better. My energy is better. Gosh! My flexibility, it’s improved my tennis game, my yoga practice. When you lose nine inches around your waist, it makes a big difference.
(17:11):
And I’m sure I’m probably talking too long. I think you allotted me five minutes. I’ve probably gone much longer. But the point is, none of this happens without you guys because you guys in this room are getting this out there. You’re teaching us what we need to do. I think I read your mission statement, and you can help me here, but it really blew me away because I thought, “Wow! That’s aggressive.” But it was something like you wanted to hit a billion… Was it a billion points, a billion people? I forget exactly how it went.
Josh Clemente (17:48):
We’re going to have to affect a billion people because our mission statement is to reverse metabolic health crisis. So that’s the scale of impact we need to make.
Charlette Plinneke (17:56):
Yes. It really struck me when I first read it. It’s like, “God, that’s really aggressive.” Now sitting here today, I’m making my own mission statements. At first, I had, “I can affect a million people.” Then it’s like, “Wow! If I do the writing and the book thing and speaking, maybe 10 million.” You guys just have started this ball rolling because it is exciting to watch what you can do with your health and your body. I’m 64. As people head into retirement… Which to me I can’t even imagine retiring. I don’t feel even near that age.
(18:40):
But some people head into retirement thinking all their life savings is going to be spent on dealing with these chronic illnesses and you guys are just putting it out there, that it doesn’t have to be that way. You’re really kind of turning our healthcare system on its ear in the nicest way possible because you’re just providing data and people are learning… I had to learn to not focus so much on the daily score, but on the trend of my health. I was trending up. Kudos to the people who are actually putting the app together. Every time they make a change, I initially think, “Oh, I don’t like that. I like the old way.”
(19:31):
And within two days, I love it. It’s like they’re 10 steps ahead of me all the time and I appreciate it so, so much. It makes a hard job easier. So thank you. But really, to everybody in this organization, you are just knocking it out of the park. And I’m excited for you that you had your soft launch and I can’t wait to see where you go.
Josh Clemente (20:01):
Thank you for all that, Charlotte. First of all, your story is really inspiring. I think that we can all see ourselves a little bit in the frustration that you experienced and in finding the edge of just having a feedback loop for the first time. Ultimately, that’s where we are in the journey, is providing accessibility for that feedback loop and then building actionability into it. I really appreciate the perspective and it’s great to hear that you’ve taken advantage not only of the CGM program, but also the Metabolic Health Panel.
(20:33):
There’s tons of work to do to scale both of those, but to broaden the insights beyond just glucose, which is one powerful metric, but it’s not everything. On behalf of the whole team, I mean, we couldn’t be more grateful for you being a supporting member, giving us feedback, testing our ability to answer the complex questions that come up during the experience, and being here to share your philosophy and your experiences so far with the team. Super valuable for all of us. Yeah, want to thank you on behalf of everyone.
Charlette Plinneke (21:04):
Oh, thank you. It was a pleasure.
Josh Clemente (21:06):
Well, feel free to stick around. We got a full meeting. But if you’d like, we do another round of shares towards the end and would love to have you participate throughout.
Charlette Plinneke (21:15):
Great, thank you.
Josh Clemente (21:19):
All right, that was awesome. With that, I want to welcome Cosima Travis. Cosima joined us as a senior product manager. She’s just getting started. Located in Brooklyn, New York. Really excited to continue to expand the product team to focus on exactly the topics that we just touched on. Through Charlotte’s experience and through many others, we’re now going to be finding Levels post general availability. We need to double down on showing people how food affects their health, developing insights and interventions, and ultimately leading people towards where they can go with this information. So Cosima, would love to hear some thoughts.
Cosima Travis (21:52):
Yeah, thanks so much. Really excited to be on the team. It’s been great. I got to actually meet a bunch of people at a dinner at Sam’s maybe about a month ago right before I got an offer. I actually saw on a thread that Helena confirmed that does count towards my Bingo. So I’m very excited to have a headstart on the Bingo board. Then on the product side, really excited about all of the behavioral change direction that we’re taking. Yeah, there’s so much amazing content to read. The onboarding process has been so smooth and everyone’s super friendly. So yeah, I’m really excited. Thanks so much.
Josh Clemente (22:32):
Awesome. Well, as Cosima gets ramped up, everyone please make yourselves available, share best practices. We’re a weird culture and it takes some time to get adapted. So for sure, we’ll need to provide a helping hand along the way. Anyway, very excited to see the team growing and can’t wait to work together, Cosima.
Cosima Travis (22:52):
Yeah, me too.
Josh Clemente (22:54):
All right. Quick culture and kudos. We’ve got two years for Murillo, which is wild. That was a fast two years. We’ve got Sonja and Dana having lunch. Well, Sonya shared a whole update on Dana’s involvement, Dana Alloy. We’ve got Paul and Karin having a blast in London it looks like sharing pints, and a couple shout-outs here. First off, we had a big woo for Riley who is leading… really building out our finance function at the company. And generally across the board, there’s just a ton of appreciation for, as is put here, the level of service that he provides.
(23:30):
Riley really takes… he takes the time to provide deep explanations and fast turnaround all the time. It’s pretty amazing. So Riley, thanks for supporting the whole team across many functions and many demands tirelessly. We got two others here. I want to first highlight Paul and Zach. We had a cookie troll encounter this past week. Both of these guys practiced a number of things. So rapid response and solving the problem first. Then the focus in this thread, which I really appreciated, was both people battling to take ownership of the situation, which I really respected and appreciated.
(24:09):
There was no finger pointing. It was mostly just trying to own the problem and find opportunities to learn. I’m sure there’ll be a ton of valuable opportunity to prevent this from happening again. I just wanted to share that the quality of conversation right here and the cultural alignment that you all demonstrated is really inspiring and exactly what we want to build. Then Mr. Haney over here. I had several of these messages shared with me this week, of just the depth that Haney goes into in threads in a long form, written format.
(24:48):
But just always thinking a few steps ahead, a few problems ahead in a conversation and sharing deep, insightful messages that will help someone move forward without triggering a chain of back and forth. So the quality messages and the detail is just consistently impressive and also helpful. You can see both of the responses from these two folks, Jen and Austin, were appreciative of the thoroughness that Haney shows. So I just want to continue to appreciate the quality of the documentation and pointing people in the right direction, providing full backup, resources. You can see all the links in his messages here.
(25:23):
It’s just really helpful to take that extra moment to give people… point them in the right direction so they can continue moving forward. Really appreciate that. All righty. I don’t know what that was. All right. Yes, the main thing. Levels shows you how food affects your health. So this is unchanged of course. Everyone should be working towards this priority. If you’re not certain, if you’re working on this, just raise the question. We are also adding a new slide on top level objective objectives. These are also unchanged. If you’re familiar with the company objectives, Notion page, that’s the point where this is derived from.
(26:03):
But we have three top priorities right now. This summarizes everything Levels is working on in order to achieve this goal. Right now, those are member retention, member health improvement, and new member acquisition. This last one is new. Essentially, as we’ve moved into Liftoff and general availability, we haven’t necessarily been optimizing for new member acquisition because we were essentially rate limited since the beginning of the company. So this is where we’re focusing. If that’s not enough detail, please go to the page where this is derived from and do a deep dive. If that’s not sufficient, reach out to Maz and he can provide more.
(26:39):
All right, we got a Live JM Show today, so let me go ahead and spotlight Mr. JM.
Josh Mohrer (26:46):
Thank you, sir. Good afternoon and good morning. Live JM Show, the way it used to be. We had a slowish week if you’re outside the US. It was the 246th anniversary of US Liftoff. So as is typically the case on holiday weekends, we see a little less activity. We turned on general availability this week. Sort of insane to forget something like that. But that’s going well so far. People are coming and seeing that button. We’re seeing about 20 or so sales a day from that now that it’s not the holiday weekend anymore.
(27:23):
And that’s great. That’s basically like incremental 600 monthly or so members, which is a lot. As Josh also mentioned, I rolled out a midweek JM Show about the impact of the blog and ultimate guides. It’s really remarkable and I invite you to check it out at the levels.link/contentrules. Finally, as I also mentioned last week, we’re making some changes on the flow based on feedback we’ve gotten through support. Those should roll out probably Monday. Worked a bunch with Jen, Sadie, Maz, and some others. Thank you for all that feedback. Keep it coming.
(28:08):
This will be V1.1 and we’ll probably iterate on this a ton in the coming months. Then finally, circling back on this graph from last week. We’re at about five 50 new signups for the month of July, a quarter way to our goal. Not quite, but as I said, it was a slow holiday weekend. So I expect we will hit this. That is all for me on the Live JM Show. Thank you, everybody.
Josh Clemente (28:37):
Huge amounts to celebrate there. Thank you JM for summarizing all of it. That will step into hiring updates. I don’t think this slide has changed since last week. We’ve got Victor and… Let’s see. Victor is starting on Monday. Then we’ve got Lynette and Rebecca starting the following week and Taylor joining us in October. So team continues to grow, exciting stuff. Open roles, still have software engineering up there. But we also have the general… something else, applications. You can send in a resume if you’re interested. If you know someone who would be interested in Levels and what we’re working on, please check out levels.link/careers.
(29:14):
Okay, truck through there. I will stop my share. Let me do participants here. I’m going to start it at the top, which means me. This week, professionally, very excited about Liftoff, kind of just the JM Show, what we just covered. All that stuff is just amazing. Hearing that we are doing an incremental 600 signups from just flicking a switch, which we did not announce, is huge. I remember when Levels was operating off of a Google spreadsheet and we had roughly 10 orders per month. It was mind-blowing and challenging to keep up with. Now we’re in a different era and it’s just exciting.
(30:02):
Then the continued team growth, love hearing from members like Charlotte. I really appreciate the depth that you share with us. That’s what we’re here to do. Just love all that. Then personally, I’ve had a great week here in Strathmore, New Jersey just jumping in the beach. You’re in the water every day and playing a lot of pickleball and generally trying not to burn myself too badly. Miz?
Michael Mizrahi (30:29):
Yeah, I think my highlight this week… Definitely hearing from Charlotte, I think your story is really interesting and compelling. Hearing the weight loss as a side effect of using Levels is really interesting. There’s just so many lessons to pull out from your experience there. So thanks for sharing. I think it’s really important that we keep those stories top of mind on our end and I appreciate you taking the time. So that was meaningful for me this week.
(30:51):
On the personal side, nothing too special. Weather’s great. There is a pancake breakfast on Mount Tam once a month during the summer. Tam cakes I call it. So riding my bike up there on Sunday morning with some friends and enjoying some pancakes with a great view. That’s it.
Josh Clemente (31:10):
Nice. Charlotte?
Charlette Plinneke (31:13):
Okay. So if I understand, it’s just something meaningful that happened this week. I would say for me it was getting the photo album from my son’s wedding from the Maldives. We went to the Maldives in April in the middle of all the COVID craziness and just had an incredible trip. I actually took my CGM off that week. But what was interesting is I’ve learned so much. I really don’t have to wear it all the time, but I like to wear it when I’m testing things. Now I’m on the stress. What’s exciting for me is now I’m working on the stress. I actually sat here scanning my arm to see how much my blood sugar went up while I was speaking. 30 points.
Josh Clemente (32:09):
Wow!
Charlette Plinneke (32:11):
It’s not just food, there are other things, and you guys are just bringing everything to light. So thank you.
Josh Clemente (32:18):
Love that. You’re a level ahead of us. We’re working on how food affects health and you’re already on stress, so that’s the black belt level. Ben?
Ben Grynol (32:30):
Yeah. Professionally, so hat tip to JM on all the growth stuff we’ve been collabing every week. It just feels so great to have someone with the hand on the wheel where you don’t have to think much about it and it can become very much a collaboration effort between demand gen and demand capture. So all the analytics, all the things like digging into ultimate guys and how we’re seeing conversions from blog content. So it’s just huge, huge hat tip to there to JM for all of the work on that. Then personally, Pam and I had our 10 anniversary yesterday. I played soccer instead of going for dinner. So we’re going for dinner on Saturday, which is going to be really fun. So no kids and that’s the plan for the weekend.
Josh Clemente (33:17):
Congrats. That’s a big one. Britney?
Britney McLeod (33:22):
Thanks. On my end, on the professional front, just excited for team growth and welcoming our new team members this week. We also have some support team members joining us this month as well. So super excited about that. On the personal front, just excited for it to be the weekend. Thanks.
Josh Clemente (33:43):
All righty. Casey?
Casey Means (33:47):
Hello. I am super excited about what’s happening next week in Portland. We’re doing a recipe video shoot. I just shout out to Tony, Stacie, and Sonja for the most incredible organization for this shoot. Tony put together a call sheet, which is this cool thing that I learned about that happens in the video world where it’s like every minute of every day is scheduled from 6:00 AM to 10:00 PM with exact times for what we’re shooting and where. It’s just incredible to see the level of skill and experience and professionalism he has. Same with Stacie with photography and Sonja with the documentation.
(34:30):
It’s just been fun to work closely on that project. Then get to see people in person next week. I wasn’t on forum last week because I was in LA filming some podcasts with Shawn Stevens and Dhru Purohit. That was really special to see some of our partners who are just so excited about Levels. Then personally, I became a godmother yesterday. My best friend in the whole world had a baby, Fiona. She’s doing great and I’m just so excited to spoil this child for the next hopefully 62, 80 years depending on how longevity science ends up working out. So very excited.
Josh Clemente (35:13):
100,000 years, Casey. That’s the current longevity target. Cissy?
Cissy Hu (35:21):
I think professional highlights this week were I getting to work with Stacie for the first time. I’ve been talking to a couple members and trying to get them involved in some of the projects we’re working on and hopping on a call with Stacie and Maureen, one of our members, and just getting to hear all the expertise that Stacie has in the social space. So that was exciting for me to get a behind-the-scenes look into. Personal side, I might crash Mrs. Pancake breakfast thing and go for a hike on Mount Tam. I don’t really have any plans this weekend. My partner’s recovering from COVID. So there was an illness in the house last weekend, so my… Yeah, I’m going to do something fun this weekend.
Josh Clemente (36:06):
Nice. Enjoy the pancake breakfast. Cosima?
Cosima Travis (36:11):
Yeah. So I just actually finished reading this Brain Trust thread. It was such an amazing flex of just the thoroughness of threads and how people are super detailed but also casual jumping in and the kind of using Loom and using writing and using Notion. So it was just a really good exemplar of everything, but also just amazing ideas. So spent a lot of time on that and was pretty wowed. Then on the personal front, going to try to go to the beach, which is not necessarily always a success in New York. But we’ll see how dirty the water is. Fort Tilden is my current goal. But yeah, wish me luck.
Josh Clemente (36:54):
Well, have fun. Hope it works out. Dom?
Dominc D’Agostino (36:57):
Yeah. I got out of jury duty today, so I was excited about that. I’m working on… given the opportunity to work on… I got three white papers. One is for undersea research, one’s for research on land, and one’s for research on space. So I’m excited to work on that. I’m organizing my calendar today to go to LA and San Diego for conferences, but also to do some podcasts, which I’m pretty excited about. I just need to work them into my calendar.
Josh Clemente (37:29):
Awesome. Hui?
Hui Lu (37:33):
Yeah. Work-wise, excited about GA and also really I guess motivated to hear the story that Charlotte told. Also, really interesting to hear that stress actually affect the blood sugar levels so much. I am wondering whether some of my unexpected spikes are also due to that. I should start paying attention to that as well. Yeah. Personal-wise, nothing too much. I actually received a fanfic from one of my readers based on my story a few days ago. So I was really excited about that. So nothing too much over the weekend. Yeah.
Josh Clemente (38:21):
Awesome. Well, enjoy. Ian?
Ian Schumann (38:26):
On the work front, overall, just really encouraged by the last few weeks of progress between Liftoff and e-commerce. I joined people who were already on it maybe two or three months ago. It all blends together. But this project is just… It’s so much scope and so much complexity. And it has felt like as a team we’re trying to wrestle this big, unruly bear to the ground together. And it feels like we’re starting to win. So I’m excited for the next maybe six or so weeks. By the time we get to the UK launch, that will be so much of this new complexity solved. So just really excited about that.
(39:13):
Between now and then, next week, my wife and I are finally taking a long deferred… pandemic-deferred vacation to Italy. So I’ll be there for two weeks. I’m super psyched about that. In addition to linguistics, I studied Italian in college and I’ve never gotten to use it. So time to knock all the rust off and see if it still works. What areas we’ll be in? We’ll be in Rome, we’ll be in Cinque Terre, we’ll be in Florence, and a couple of days in the Dolomites. It’s a little town called Cortina d’Ampezzo.
Josh Clemente (39:47):
Fantastic. That’s awesome. Enjoy. Jenn?
Jenn Palandro (39:51):
So jealous, Ian. Levels-wise, yeah, Charlotte, I hate to be like the 20th person to mention this, but just getting your zoomed out perspective on the effect that Levels is having on the general population is such a great reminder. So thank you again for that and for sharing your story. Liftoff is awesome. Also, a little impromptu work session like sync work session with JM and Sadie yesterday was super cool. Then this weekend just excited for a low-key weekend catching up on some really good reading.
Josh Clemente (40:28):
Very nice. Enjoy. JM?
Josh Mohrer (40:32):
Yeah, really awesome work week. My five-year-old and eight-year-old are out of the house this summer from about 7:30 to 5:30, which is by far the longest we’ve been away from them. It creates this amazing silence all around for many hours, which allows me to run super early like a normal runner and work at the regular hours that I want to. And it’s nice. We’re upstate out in the woods and we’re actually going even further upstate, even deeper into the woods this weekend with some family, friends, and it should be great. Hope you all have a great weekend.
Josh Clemente (41:12):
That sounds awesome. Have fun. Maz?
Maziar Brumand (41:17):
On the work front, I’m really excited actually with the team because I’m obviously adding a ton of bandwidth and horsepower to the product team. Really excited to see how that goes. Also working closely… Can you hear me okay?
Josh Clemente (41:34):
[inaudible 00:41:38].
Maziar Brumand (41:39):
Working closely with David almost on a daily basis to get a lot of these things out. That’s been really fun. Also getting Jason out in the mix and seeing the improvements on the algorithm for spec protection and just seeing the iterations. It’s just been really fantastic. On the personal front, I’ve been working out of the European time zone, our western New York time zone for the past few weeks. It’s been a fun experience. And also been off keto. Obviously, traveling has been a little bit hard. It’s really interesting to see the changes in energy and some of the stuff on the coast monitor. So it’s been fun.
Josh Clemente (42:17):
Awesome. Enjoy. Mercy?
Mercy clemente (42:22):
Professionally, I’m going to have to say Liftoff. I remember the days of manually filling those orders and having to go through the Google sheet. It was a lot of work. It was fun, but it’s happy that it’s done. So that’s just really exciting. Charlotte, it’s also great to see you in person. We’ve talked a lot over email, so it’s great to hear your story more. Then personally, I just got back in town yesterday from spending a week in Montana. So I’m happy to be back in Austin and just get back into my routine for a few days before I fly out again.
Josh Clemente (42:55):
Nice. Mike D.?
Mike Didonato (42:59):
I guess I’ll go ahead and plus one… two things. With the JM Show, was definitely waking up and seeing the general availability on Sunday or Monday. Everyone else, I do remember. I think David mentioned that we used to have to fax things, e-fax things. So the process has become a little bit more streamlined. Then the second part was the analysis that JM did with people going to our blog and the ultimate guides and the conversions.
(43:28):
It was just really cool validating something so early on. I remember in 2019, 2020 Sam and Casey saying, “We’re going to lean really heavily into this long-form content for X reason.” And it’s just really cool to see that loop closure happening. Personally, I got introduced to pickleball. My rackets now arrive today, so I guess I’m a convert. And that’s it.
Josh Clemente (43:58):
Ready to hit the courts later. Haney?
Mike Haney (44:03):
Yeah. Professionally, I’ll echo Mike D. Well, I’ll also say it’s great to hear from Charlotte. Now that I don’t do the interviews for our member stories anymore, I think Charlotte talked to Jessica, a writer. It’s great to put a person to the name when I spend a bunch of time reading the story and putting it up. So thank you for sharing that. Then also, yeah, JM’s analysis, the ultimate guide, is great. It’s definitely not a foregone conclusion that long-form content and deep technical content will work on the internet.
(44:31):
In fact, I think pretty much everybody I’ve talked to has told me it won’t and it doesn’t. So it’s nice to get some validation that it’s serving some purpose, hopefully even beyond education, or at least inspiring folks to sign up. On the personal front, my wife and kid have been out of town this week. So like JM, I’m enjoying the silence and the freedom to go do all the things. So I’m going to get back on a paddle board today, which I did for the first time in 10 years this week and managed not to fall off. So I’m going to see if I can keep that streak going.
Josh Clemente (45:01):
Great time. Let’s see. Ryley?
Ryley Walker (45:05):
All right. I’m going to give a shout-out to Ian. I really enjoyed Ian’s update today. I think I’m just starting my documentation journey with building some stuff out around finance. So looking forward to riffing off of some of those learnings and seeing how it goes with the insight. Then personally, I’ve got a pretty long trail run plan for a 50K run plan for Sunday. So hopefully I’ve done enough to prepare for that and it’s enough fun and I don’t suffer too much.
Josh Clemente (45:39):
Sounds like there’s going to be some suffering involved. Hopefully you can bear it better than I can. Have a great time. Sonja.
Sonja Manning (45:47):
Hey, team. Highlights from this past week, I think, has been really reading and diving into all the new memos, the work, entropy, your portable and accountable brand personalities, partnership strategy, really thoughtful memos and helpful at creating alignment and then being really intentional about actions and next steps. They all also inform a memo I’m working on around Casey’s brand and digital strategy, which I think the highlights from this past week has been just continuing to learn a ton through experimenting a lot with Stacie’s help, so a big help too.
(46:16):
Big kudos to Stacie. With her guidance and help, we’ve been posting five times a week and have grown 15,000 followers in the last six weeks. So I just really appreciate conversations about strategy with partners and friends of the Levels’ community. Casey and I had a great conversation with Kayla Barnes yesterday, which is really energizing and learned a ton through that. Then I think my one other highlight would be Casey’s episode with Dhru. It was the first conversation that I’ve heard about the link between sexual health and metabolic health. So highly recommend a listen.
(46:46):
Then personally, I am dog sitting this weekend. This is my chief of staff down here. She is my chief of staff for the weekend and we’re going to do a big hike in Malibu tomorrow. So looking forward to that.
Josh Clemente (47:01):
Sounds great.
Sonja Manning (47:02):
A Goldendoodle it is.
Josh Clemente (47:03):
Enjoy.
Sonja Manning (47:04):
One of my friend’s dogs.
Josh Clemente (47:07):
Let’s see. All right. Stacie?
Stacie Flinner (47:10):
Levels friends to highlights. First of all, Liftoff is exciting to see. I think the first time we pegged a date for when we thought we’d have a live product to offer to the public, I think it was like summer 2019 when Sam was like, “We’ll launch this fall, probably October.” So took a little bit longer than expected, but obviously we were young and naive at that point and there was so much more complexity. So it’s amazing to see the team grow over those three years and to reach this point.
(47:42):
Then on the other front, I’m really excited to join Tony and Casey and Sonja in Portland to shoot some of her amazing recipes. She’s been in her test kitchen and they’re looking good. On the personal front, my parents are going to swoop in this weekend and look at a house that they’re very interested in. So we’re trying to get them to move to Portland and this one looks promising. Or sorry, to Portsmouth. I don’t want them to move to Portland. Yeah, so that’s exciting.
Josh Clemente (48:13):
Well, good luck with that. Hope it goes well. All right, I think we got through everybody. That was just about right on time. Okay. Well, thanks, everybody, for an awesome week. Huge milestones covered, lots of ground remains ahead. But yeah, thanks for taking the time to hang out. Charlotte, again, thank you for joining us. Really appreciate you and your story. Have a great weekend, everybody.