Josh Clemente: All right. Are we live with those slides? Can people see those? Mike Didonato: Yep. Josh Clemente: Awesome. All right. Before we jump in, I want to quickly give a team hi to Scott Klein on the call. We don’t have a formal introduction today. Scott’s going to be starting and in a little bit, but he’s joining the forums. He’s going to keep up the speed with what we’re doing, and many of you have spoken with him or heard about him. Big pickup for the team and excited to have him joining us. So with that- Scott Klein: I will. Josh Clemente: … I’m going to cheers straight in. Scott, if you want to say a few quick words, please feel free. We’ll do the full intro whenever you’re ready. Scott Klein: Yeah. We could save the full intro. I mean, I just did an interview… I’m the Guinea pig for this first time, “Hey, somebody new is joining the team, let’s write up a little post about them.” I sort of answered 25 questions. Like, what are your hobbies, and two truths and a lie sort of thing. So I’ll save the time and we can just go to that, but I’m looking forward to meeting everybody here in a couple weeks. Josh Clemente: Awesome. Thanks man. All right. I think my share is still working. Cool. All right. I’m going to jump straight into the achievements for the week. Really awesome week. As usual, we had the first Levels Ambassadors kick off call. Which you can see an image of all those smiling faces there. It’s not all of them, but a good portion, and this was a really engaging 90 minutes. Where several of us on the team were able to chat through long standing questions, recommendations, and just generally connect with this group of kind of die hard members. Who will certainly be the foundation for what we’re building. I came off that call very energized. I wasn’t certain and several times I told Ben, “We need to have a ripcord in case we need to end this thing early. I don’t want it to get awkward.” Josh Clemente: But it was completely packed with content, we went right to the last second. So really awesome, and we will continue to work with those ambassadors as we build our community. This week released Roadmap, Product Development Process, Company Strategy doc for June and an Influencer Strategy memo. Shout out to David, Sam, Tom, and literally everyone who has contributed to the work that goes into these. Lots to read and catch up on and implement, so thanks for that. We had our first PR/FAQ style concept memo. So for those who aren’t familiar, it’s a press release, frequently asked questions format, which it’s most popular in the Amazon world. And for those of you that have read Working Backwards, you’re familiar with it, for those of you that haven’t please feel free to do that. Josh Clemente: We’re going to be leaning into this memo style. It basically works from end goals for the user experience back to the concept. And it’s a really elegant way to solve problems or identify which problems need solving. We started off on some initiation of the Waitlist Conversions, so we’re testing a number of things here. So bringing new members and also understanding stagnation rate. Like how does the waitlist age? We did this a few months ago, we’re doing it again now. We’ve got a lot to learn on this one. So we’ve had a few hiccups, but in general, starting to activate that waitlist is a really good thing, and it’s great that we’ve got resources to do so. And then we launched and expanded the Coke Challenge. I think we have over 70 signups already. Josh Clemente: Several partners and influencers are joining us on this, which I think is going to really amplify the message and reach of what we’re doing here. It might feel a little bit strange at first, to ask people to drink Coca-Cola with us, but the messaging around this has been really artfully developed. So appreciate everyone who’s pushing this project. And then in-home blood work, the first appointment I believe is today. JM’s our Guinea pig here for getting blood drawn in the comfort of his home. Oh, Jeremy seems to have also potentially had blood drawn, so this is awesome. We’re testing a VIP like experience for what would be the gold standard. So getting a vial of blood from the vein is the gold standard for lab work, as opposed to blood spot tests and finger sticks. Josh Clemente: It’s not convenient though, you typically have to go to a lab somewhere and like it’s a huge pain. But with this, we’re going to pilot this white glove VIP experience. And then on top of that, we’ve got some of the at-home blood spot tests results trickling back in. Shout out to Butterfly Labs, and Scarlet. These companies are some of the ones we’re piloting with and appreciate them working with us quickly on this concept. All right, couple of the visuals you see here. So Casey had an IG Live with Daily Dose, the GQ online article for building a better body went live. I just can’t get over how cool the artwork is and how we got to feature in one of the best spreads I’ve ever seen in GQ. Josh Clemente: Metabolical, Rob is on the call again, but we’ve got these crates of boxes showed up, I think at Mike D’s apartment sometime in the past few days. And we’re going to start distributing these to our members to continue to amplify the messaging. Similar to what we do with Ben Bikman’s book, Why We Get Sick. This is just like a fantastic primer for people and it’s written in a very approachable way. So we’re going to continue to spread the message. Tim O’Donnell, Ironman, World Champ, very excited about Levels. Casey did a call slash podcast with Dr. [Promodu 00:05:11] and the head of Viome. We’ve got interviews with Business Insider, and I think Fast Company this week or past week. Working on an Equinox partnership. You’ll see this comment right here in the middle, we’ve gotten some really great feedback on our Building Public approach. So we’ve started to post our old forums and our old investor updates on our website and people love it. Josh Clemente: You can see down here in the corner, another comment that this is so helpful to see how other companies operate. It’s very useful as a GPS system, when you’re trying to figure out how to do this effectively yourself. And then some really great comments from our customers, there are members as well. I loved this one, “This is by far the best experience I’ve ever had as a physician and a person around metabolic health. I’ve learned so much personally, this has been an interest since I first worked with Omada years ago, and your information is so succinct and clean that, it’s always helpful to read again.” So a lot of great stuff wrapped in there. Josh Clemente: And then, “Levels kept me accountable for what I eat. And in fact, I lost about six pounds during the month, after a previous month of stalled weight loss. I wanted to lose 10 pounds was going nowhere.” So that additional insight of just seeing specifically what foods are causing, what issues is awesome. And then lastly, we’ve got some new charts coming for a heart rate and step counts. Shout out Justin and everyone working on that. And Gabriel made some changes to basically the zone buffer. So how long we go in between zones, we can end the zone quickly, get a score in certain cases when exercise may be indefinite or unintentionally indefinite, so great work on that. I think we got everything here. Cool. I will hand this over to Casey to introduce Dhru. Casey Means: Great. Thank you, Josh. So I am so thrilled to introduce Dhru Purohit one of our Levels advisors and investors to our call, and welcome him to our call this morning. So Dhru is a podcast host, he is a serial entrepreneur and he’s an investor in the health and wellness industry. His podcast, which I’m sure many of you have listened to the Dhru Purohit Podcast, which was formally known as Broken Brain is a top 50 global health podcast. It’s had over 30 million unique downloads. Dhru is also the CEO of the Dr. Mark Hyman brand and the UltraWellness Center. Which is a medical clinic based in Lenox, Massachusetts, that was founded by Mark Hyman and specializes in treating chronic disease through personalized medicine. Casey Means: He’s also a contributing author to two New York Times, best sellers, Clean Gut, and Clean Eats. Dhru has been monumentally helpful to Levels and really epitomizes what a wonderful investor and advisor is. He’s had us on his podcast twice, he’s made so many helpful connections. He has devoted his time and brain power to helping us with content strategy and growth strategy, and using Levels regularly and giving feedback. So he’s truly an all around, super inspiring, and amazingly kind person, can’t recommend his podcast enough. And I’m so happy to welcome you Dhru to our forum and turn it over to you. Dhru Purohit: Thanks, Casey. It’s an honor to be here. I’ve been watching, I think I’ve only missed two of these. So I watch them every week when they get sent over. So I really appreciate getting a chance to be a part of it, and hats off to the team for just being super organized and inclusive with these updates. You’ve gotten so many compliments from different people that have been on here, but it’s fantastic to see how integrated the team is. I want to share a little worry about just my background that I think is so linked to Levels. So I was born in Kenya in Nairobi, but my background is South Asian. I’m originally from… Ancestry is from India. And in America, the South Asian community, people from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka. It’s a very unique population set to sort of study from a health perspective. Dhru Purohit: They actually have one of the highest average incomes. Actually the highest average income per capita is the South Asian population here in America specifically. And typically they have access to great healthcare, many of them are doctors. I think 13% of all medical doctors in the United States are South Asian background. And also not to mention, they typically think of themselves, whether they actually are as a different story. They typically think of themselves as healthier or healthier ish. A huge percentage of them, ranges vary, but it could be anywhere from 20 to 30% are vegetarian or try to be vegetarian. And yet when you look at their metabolic health, they actually have the exact opposite outcomes. They have the highest risk of heart disease of any subset of any population here in America, specifically. And on top of that, they’re one of the highest rates of diabetes as well too, and many other chronic diseases. Dhru Purohit: So the question becomes, how is a group that has so much education, multiple often undergraduate degrees, master’s degrees in a household. How does a group that has access to finances, funds, education, great healthcare, how are they having some of the worst metabolic health disorders and metabolic outcomes out of any other groups that are out there? And I think it’s a cautionary tale for a lot of… The conversation on healthcare right now is let’s get more access, right? If we get more access, then everybody’s going to be better off. And I think access is very much part of the equation, I’m not against access at all, I think it’s a fantastic thing. But we actually have to empower people with personalized healthcare. Dhru Purohit: And when I got introduced to Casey and then ended up meeting the full team here at Levels, it just reminded me of just this important mission. That as the world is thinking about… Especially after a year of pandemic, how to get everybody healthier, personalized health has such a responsibility inside this equation. And we have to really raise the awareness and provide more tools, and devices and accessibility to people to actually make a difference in their health. Because if the highest educated, highest income earning group has some of the worst outcomes in these areas, then what’s to say for these other population sets that don’t have as much access to resources and are more disenfranchised that are there. Dhru Purohit: So when Levels came across our desk and our team also got a chance to try it. It was really a light bulb moment. I was like, “This is for sure the future of where everything’s going.” And you can look at credit card transactions. I’ve paid for probably about five friends of mine to do Levels on their own, full price, no discounts. And they’ve all been really enjoying it. One of my friends who just signed up his name is [Mihiya 00:12:01]. Dhru Purohit: He was a college buddy of mine, and it is a perfect example. As I conclude over here, in college, we both got really into like the world of the raw food movement, which was a really big trend back in the day. And Mihiya, my college roommate lost almost about a 100 pounds. We were college roommates. Yeah, he definitely had a hundred pounds to lose at that time. And being together and making recipes together and working together, he was able to keep that weight off, and then he went off into the real world. And even though Mihiya always thought of himself as eating really healthier and trying to incorporate as much as greens as possible. The idea of metabolic health never really clicked for him, he didn’t understand that he was eating sugar in all sorts of different forms and eventually the full weight ended up coming back and a lot more. Dhru Purohit: And so recently I had a conversation Mihiya and he listened to our episode with Ben Bikman and our first episode with Casey. And he got so excited to sign up for Levels and he felt “This is it, I’ve been eating all these things that I thought that were healthy, and yet I have not lost any weight at all.” And more recently his doctor said, “You’re basically just a few blood works away from being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.” So I’m so inspired by what the team is up to and what’s happening. Dhru Purohit: I can tell you that Mark, my business partner, who’s also an advisor and Casey was just on his podcast. We can’t wait till you guys are out of beta and to really hit the pedal to the metal. And to promote to our community all across the globe to get at them excited about trying Levels and to see the changes in their health firsthand. So it’s been absolute pleasure, I’ve mostly worked with Casey and Tom and you guys have been great. I’m excited to meet and connect with the rest of the team, and continue to help spread the mission of what you guys are up to. Josh Clemente: Unbelievable. Dhru, I love hearing the specific background examples. It’s always amazing to anchor to individuals and their sort of disparate journeys. So thank you for taking the time to come on here and speak with us, and then also thank you for continuing to help us amplify what we’re trying to do. Really appreciate yourselves and Mark for being early adopters of what we’re doing. Thanks a lot. Dhru Purohit: I’m super excited to continue to be on the journey. Thank you for having me. Josh Clemente: Cool. Alrighty. Quick culture and kudo slide so, trialing a prayer here. The Levels prayer, we show you how food affects your health. We’re we’re trialing this, it doesn’t entirely cover the spectrum of what Levels does, but it’s succinct and that’s key. It’s we help you find your stuff. So we’re going to try this one, feel free to leave comments in the chat here or in Slack, and we’ll continue to iterate on this. I want to do two quick shout-outs. Firstly to Braden, you can see this really brief example of an email that he sent to Ben in this case. Three bullet points, extremely clear what’s happening, it’s just an update, it’s just an internal communication. The intention is not to create dialogue or anything like that, it’s just to keep people up to speed. And in a remote culture where you’re not going to run into each other at the water cooler. This is really in important, so that everyone’s just constantly aware. Josh Clemente: And then shout out to David who jumped in both feet with the PR/FAQ style. We’ve been talking about incorporating this for a few weeks and he just ripped the bandaid off and did this twice this week. And I found both of them amazingly helpful, just jumping in and having the awareness from the customer’s perspective was awesome. I have never worked in a PR/FAQ culture before, and so it was really cool to see it happen. So I appreciate David for jumping and doing that. It also led to some really awesome discussion, I think because of the way it was framed. So we’ll be doing more of those. All right. David Flinner: Thanks Josh can we get a refresh? And wow Dhru, that was amazing. Thanks for sharing your thoughts there. Okay, let’s kick it off, before we get into things I just wanted to highlight. Actually you can go next slide, Josh. Highlight that the roadmap and Product Development Resource materials are ready for review. This is something that I’ve been working on for the last couple weeks. So thanks for your patience with me. Thanks a lot to Sam for helping out, and Andrew and for everyone who’s giving feedback so far. I’d love to get everyone else’s thoughts as well. Real quick here, you’ll see that there’s a go link here. And many of you might not be familiar with what a go link is, but it’s a shortcut. You can download a browser extension and you can create your own shortcuts, that map onto to documents. David Flinner: So I’m going to start using this and I encourage everyone to get the extension. It’s something that can be a very handy way to quickly navigate to different resources. So next slide. Wanted to just preview a bit about what you can find in the resources at that roadmap overview. There’s essentially three things. There’s high level roadmap views. And then that goes from everything from the bird’s eye views down to more dynamically linked things. That you can go from the top level towards the mid-level, which are eras and epics, and then how those tie into the specific projects that the team is working on. Yeah. So that answers what are we working on now? What’s coming up next? What does the future look like? If you wanted to just have one artifact for just the top level, you can jump into whimsical and see things that are a bit more color coded. And then if you want to get into the specifics, you can jump into notion and see exactly what the team’s working on. David Flinner: Next slide. And then, I’ve been working with Andrew on coming up with an improved Product Development Process. And so this a view that anyone can come in and get an understanding as to what the product and engineering team is working on right now. But growth from the upstream stuff that the product team’s working on, taking raw ideas and turning them into specs that can be worked on. As well as what the engineering team is currently working on. And I think a really nice thing about this is that, hopefully it’ll be a scalable process where we can slide in more people as we grow. But also take advantage of everyone who has great ideas here, you can come in. David Flinner: If you want to have your own Amazon PR/FAQ style idea or anything like that, you can just jump right in. There’s a lot of explanations in this product process overview doc, where you can just read through how can I submit my own idea. Get that vetted by some of the product leads and get shipped out to members, so they can benefit from it. So do take some time to redo those two. And then the third thing is something the same of the charge on. Next slide, Project Management for Tasks. So the tasks are the on the ground, low level things that any project might comprise of. And then this is optional, but if you want to slot in to it, you can very easily add tasks for yourself that anyone else can see as well, and see the status. David Flinner: Next slide. And just to tie this all together. Now, whenever you look at one of my product specs or anyone else who’s working on product specs, the nice thing here with this new system is that you’re going to be able to see the big picture. Everything from our members, the user problems that they solving within the spec, tying that back up dynamically to the larger roadmap picture. And what epic this is related to, what big theme this is related to, and what we’re working on in the product. As well as what the product status is, so is this simply a raw idea that doesn’t have all the details yet. It’s not ready for engineering, is this something that I’m actively working on and we’ll soon hand off to engineering, things like that. David Flinner: And then next slide. And then at the bottom of the specs, Sam found a really nice way to dynamically link in the tasks database. So below what the product spec says, you can actually see all the different tasks linked below, across departments. So you can see here that there’s an operations tasks down there for Josh and then a few engineering tasks. So I’m really eager to hear feedback, this is not yet been proven out with our team. So we can scrap it, we can iterate on it. Let me know what you think, and I think that’s it. David Flinner: Next slide. Sorry, one more thing. And those specs do jump back to the higher level roadmaps. What you’re looking at here is the different eras and the epic. So these are the high level things that the team is focused on right now, which I’ll get into in the next slide. David Flinner: So speaking of roadmap, just adding a new slide here for this week. I wanted to just quickly remind us of our top priorities. So as Josh mentioning at the beginning of the call, our top priority is before we launch, we want to switch to a membership model. And I think this is sort of a new concept for most of us. We’re still flushing out the details, but wanted to put that on everyone’s radar. Is that we think there’s a huge amount of value in switching to a membership model, basically taking it capitalizing on the ability for us to become the trusted partner, with our members via membership model. David Flinner: And then of course, all of the course up we’re doing towards getting that one month metabolic awareness program ready for launch. And then while we’re doing that experimenting, defined value for the future things that we think are coming on the roadmap. If you want to see this, there’s a whole bunch of views in the overview doc that I sent out to the email yesterday. About how you can go to the product database, see the top level priorities, see the dynamic roadmap, jump up the whimsical, see it that way, or drill down onto the specific projects. David Flinner: And next slide, as it relates to the information architecture, part of the priorities that we’re working on right now, the Zone Analysis page is under development. So this is the continued Charts v2 swap out. We’re replacing all our legacy charts, with the new software library. And this new experience here you can see in the middle is a work in progress, but swapping out the components here with a beautiful new heart rate widget, and step widget. And then after this, we’ll be working on the comparisons graphs, as well as the homepage stats graphs. I think Justin just mentioned that go roadmap doesn’t exist. If you haven’t installed the extension then install the extension, and if it truly does not exist, I will update that after the call. Might be my bad on that one. David Flinner: Next slide. The new Add log flow is ready for testing. So you can get the internal build and try that out. The mocks are a little different from this, but we’re excited to see that go live. David Flinner: Next slide. And then Murillo is about to start working on the new information architecture changes to get rid of the hamburger menu, pull all that information into the Learn Module as well as other pages. So you can see more about that in the product documents. Next slide. Then we previewed this yesterday or last week, but Gabriel launched the Long Zones Reduction efforts related to strenuous and non strenuous exercises. So hopefully next week we can pull the numbers again and see how that changed things. But congrats Gabriel on that. That’s pretty helpful. David Flinner: Next slide. And then just some ongoing stuff. I had some good conversations with Casey and Andrew about the future of Meal Insights, and this is still ongoing product thinking. But we’re trying to think through the right way to preserve the flexibility that we offer with a note. Where you can type in something like date night or team dinner, something like that, but also expand upon that to get more structured data like raisins or a salad with Italian dressing, things like that. So how do we preserve those two things? So still thinking through that on the top of my mind as we go forward. David Flinner: Next slide. And Josh already mentioned this, but you can see the go link here for Dr. Casey’s data. That’s the new Amazon press release at FAQ style, so take a look in that. Lots of great commentary as Josh mentioned. From Alan, from others. I view this as an MVP to have access to health leaders data, but it’s very much a small slice of what we want to be doing. We want to be helping users connect with other users of all sorts. Helping each other unpack what’s going on, where they can go instead, and there’s a really broad spectrum of things we can be doing here. Josh Clemente: Awesome. Thank you, David. Thanks team. We recently opened a fourth position called Partnerships Specialist who will be helping Tom out, to build our go to market strategy, working with influencers, affiliates, et cetera. Lots of great thought went into this, and this will be sort of an opportunity. With the recent transition of the PR strategy from Tom over to Haney, we’re going to be able to free up some more resources to start thinking about this as we trend towards launch. So again, all of our positions are linked from Levels.link/careers. To those who are on the call and watching later, please feel free to think through your network and point us in the right direction with these folks. All right, Miz. Michael Mizrahi: Great. Two quick recaps from the month of May. Just wanted to show overall orders shipped and completed medical consults. About half of our volume is subscription, so no news there. But otherwise just keeping an eye on this and I’ll send out the larger metrics deck from the last week, shortly in a bit, and post in Notion. From here on out, making sure that fulfillment is hardened with true pill, that packaging pieces fall into line. And then just revving up the engines so we can hit the ground when it’s good to go. That’s it this week. Josh Clemente: Awesome. Thank you. Sam Corcos: Just want to jump in quickly, Josh. I was watching some of our old forums from about a year ago. And I remember we were discussing how chaotic it was, trying to fulfill 40 orders. Now we’re looking at these numbers and it’s substantially more than that, and we don’t really think about it too much anymore. Josh Clemente: Yeah, it’s pretty surreal. I remember that pain. I’m sure Lori does too, and Mike. Michael Mizrahi: Yeah, it’s easy to see these numbers and just throw them up there. But those are discreet orders, which have issues, things go wrong. And so yeah, there’s work behind it, but yeah, it’s relatively on autopilot. So thanks to the ops team for keeping that moving. Josh Clemente: A 100%. Ben Ben Grynol: Growth. So weekly we’re at $73,000 of recognized revenue, nice to be right on target at 75. And the monthly we’re at 228, so in a good position there on the way to 300, 9.2 in the bank and sitting well. Recap on growth, so we’ve got to a nice point right now where… For a number of months we had we’ll call it demand shock. And so demand shock is when you get people like Dhru, or Mark, or Kelly or some partner has an initiative that gives us a surge in orders, which is really great. The challenge is that it puts a lot of stress on the infrastructure in the pipeline, where we can get a backlog of orders for throughput. And so, because we’re in a controlled growth mode state, there would be orders that were placed months ago and they weren’t getting fulfilled for six weeks. Ben Grynol: And that can be a challenging customer experience to manage, when we start getting tickets into support saying, “Where are my orders at?” So it’s nice to be in a position right now where we’re able to fulfill orders a lot quicker, because the pipeline has minimized, the challenges that we don’t have the thorough pipeline that we did previously. So we’re in a great place as far as order volume goes. And now it’s just a matter of managing the levers to make sure that we’re always sort of flexing back and forth to know where we’re at. Ben Grynol: So next slide please. So update on swag mini-kits. So we have these mini-kits which have water bottles, hats, and books and note cards. And the goal with these is to have small kits where we can ship them to members who either give us feedback, or people that we want to close the loop with. To give them a small gesture of thank you. And also to make sure that we were always testing different swag options, and so we’ve moved to these corrugated boxes as a test for multiple reasons. Ben Grynol: So, one of the reasons is that lead time is very long on the custom boxes for items. Takes 25 to 40 days just to get those boxes produced, which is wild, but that is what happens when working with multiple vendors. As well, we couldn’t actually use those custom branded boxes for the backpacks, which will be coming in the full swag kit. So we wanted to make sure that we had a cohesive experience, where any of these boxes that were going out were somewhat similar to each other. The good news is that they still come with the black shredded paper that Andrew loves, so we’re in a good place there. Ben Grynol: But yeah, we’re going to try to keep these in stock, and Mike D is looking into having these so that we’ve got different swag options moving forward. Next slide please. So growth theme of the week is, the movement. And so Josh alluded to the call that we had on Wednesday night. We had more than 30 people join the call, 10 of which were from our team, which was very cool to see. One of the cool moments was when members started celebrating, there was one member who said, “Hey, I got my first 10 this week.” And everybody started did the finger snap, and there were some chats or some common going in the chat. And it was just really cool to feel like there was a movement going and there was a lot of energy behind that. Ben Grynol: There’s a lot of good discussion around, how challenging it can be to eat at restaurants, some good feedback on Dr. Casey’s data. And a lot of product questions came up in many technical health questions. The benefit of doing this, is that we provide this opportunity for members to connect with our team. But it’s also an opportunity to glean insights, where we’re not asking targeted questions of what do you think of X? It reinforces all the insights at surface, reinforce that, “Hey, we’re moving in the right direction with product or business model decisions.” And so, the takeaways are that we will keep doing these micro initiatives moving forward and testing them out, and eventually we might even have a Levels meet up in-person. So onto Mike D. Mike Didonato: Thanks, Ben. I think I said this before, the main point of our Member Insights initiative and testing tools like Dovetail is to, make sure we’re capturing our feedback, structuring it and making it actionable to the team. Ideally, be able to action insights that provide an opportunity for whether it’s product or content to put together some kind of like scrappy MVP. We don’t want to put anything with too much bandwidth on the team. So with that in mind, we put our first official insight from Dovetail. In our review last week, we saw that a member had requested some kind cheat sheet or getting started guide, would’ve been helpful for them when they started with Levels. I sent an email to Haney and definite hat tip to him, I think it was in under five days, including the weekend Haney put together the scrappy version. We’re still thinking through when and how we’ll surface it. But it was really exciting for that to come together. We’re going to continue to test or pilot this process and try and action at least one insight per week to the team. That’s all I have. Josh Clemente: Awesome. Quick note to remaining presenters, we’re running a little slow. So just try and power through this, got tons of content gross each week. Mercy. Mercy Clemente: Okay. Social, we hit 31,000 followers on Instagram. One of the key insights this week was we shared about the Coke experiment and that was really popular on Instagram and also on Twitter. People were really amazed by that and just really shocked by the fact that just having a short 20 to 30 minute walk could make such an impact in how our bodies respond to it. Some of the post highlights from this week. The first two weeks, everyone knows you’re supposed to just stick with your normal schedule of how you eat and everything, but you can see in this middle photo, people being more attentive now. They’re seeing the come in through their sensor and they’re realize, “Okay, I’m going to be a little bit more cautious on when I eat or what I’m eating.” And those tiny changes are really making a big difference. Twitter, we hit 14,300 followers. Yeah, that’s it for social. Josh Clemente: Thank you, Tom. Tom Griffin: All right. Quick update on our podcast tour efforts. Thought it was just worth a dedicated slide because there’s been some great progress over the last couple of weeks. Casey in particular has been very busy on this front. So on the right there, you’ll see a handful of shows that we’ve either recorded or have been released over the last couple of weeks. And then on the left couple things to just keep an eye on over the next few months. Doctor’s Farmacy with Mark Hyman and Casey will be released sometime this summer, as well as Dhru Purohit podcast part two. Both of those have the potential to be our highest converting sales events ever, so that will be exciting. And then lastly, keep an eye for more interviews with the rest of the founding squads. So Sam has been ramping up, David has entered the fold as well, and then Andrew will also be doing some shows. And these will be focused a little bit more on building Levels’ culture, product engineering, rather than just metabolic health. Tom Griffin: Next slide. All right. So I sent new memo for an updated Influencer Partnership strategy. This is mostly for folks on the team who are focused on marketing, partnerships content, via this. But I think it’s helpful for anyone interested in understanding how we think sort of holistically about this space. So this memo outlines how we think about these partnerships in terms of platforms. So podcast, YouTube, Instagram, as well as the type of partnership from just building organic relationships to affiliate partners and to paid marketing efforts. Tom Griffin: So a couple of just quick takeaways. I mean, I guess one of the reasons why I wrote this is because we want to dedicate more time to this space over the next six months, as we gear up the launch. Which is one of the reasons why we opened up the partnership specialist role. Podcasts are going to remain our top channel, however, we’ll probably have an increasing focus on securing paid advertising relationships versus just the podcast tour effort. And then YouTube is going to be the next kind of frontier for us in terms of focus areas, and we’re going to run probably a similar playbook that we did to podcasts. In terms organic to start and then lightweight affiliate relationships and then paid marketing opportunities as well. Lots more on the dock. Josh Clemente: Thanks Tom. Haney. Mike Haney: So one thing I want to call out this week, some good pieces went up. A piece I just put up last night, just post in Slack is a new kind of article we’re going to start to calling a research highlight. This is kind of hitting more on some timely content, where when we see a new study come through all the channels that we monitor that has a real direct sort of relationship to the kinds of stuff we talk about. We want to comment on it, explain it and get it out pretty quickly. So this is the first one about fitting with the Coke experiment about movement after a meal. Also, working on trying to consolidate some of our brand voice documents, we’ve got a lot of really good stuff, kind of scattered around about what our actual brand voice is. And I’m going to try to synthesize those a bit, and just wanted to call a couple of conversations I had this week, which will make their way into future articles. Mike Haney: We’ve got a really good article’s going to post next week about Dr. Kam somebody that we’ve influenced and fitness person who fasted during Ramadan. And wore Levels throughout it, what his experience was, it’s a really nice personal piece. And I had two really nice conversations this week with doctors. With an ER doctor and a cardiothoracic surgeon who are really interested in metabolic health and what it can do. Mike Haney: Next slide, just one thing quick. I just want to call it the newsletter for this week. This was a test that we did on subject lines. And this were by far our best results we’ve ever had, the click through rate over 9% is really unheard of. And also the most significant change or difference among the sort of things that we’re testing. So shout out to Ben for the Levels grocery shopping list idea, which you could see performed extremely well. And the middle one was the one I thought would do the best and did the worst. So, awesome that we continue to learn. That’s it for me. Josh Clemente: Very interesting results. I’m also surprised by these. Very cool. All right. Onto the individual contributions. Thought we had one more section here, but apparently we do not great work everyone. Haney you’re back on the spot. Mike Haney: A leaf blower going outside my house. I will be quick. My personal and professional highlight this week was meeting the four of Levels founding team. My first in-person Levels meet here in San Diego, it was really great to put faces to the Zoom pictures. Josh Clemente: Nice one, Tom. Tom Griffin: I’m going to go with the Dr. Casey’s data concept. I’m really excited about that. A fundamental shift in how public educators and influencers communicate with the world. And personally, going to New Jersey this weekend is see my niece and nephew. So very excited about that. Josh Clemente: Nice. Close by, Dom. Dominic D’Agostino: We had a great week of data collection for the CGM study with Levels. And personally just finished up two podcasts, Fast Keto podcast with Vanessa, and another with Louisa Nicola. I think it was recommendations through you guys and we’re doing some pretty cool things with the Tampa Bay Lightning today on the metabolic front. So I think there’s some opportunities there too. Josh Clemente: Very cool JM. Josh Mohrer: I’m excited about a lot of things, but most recently was the in-home phlebotomy test that I had done here this morning. The person was in and out and about minutes, it hurt and it wasn’t particularly expensive, and so I’m excited about that. And the weekend ahead, the weather is not as oppressive as it’s been, so that should be nice. Hope everyone has a great weekend. Josh Clemente: Love it. JM, what labs are we getting with that first draw? Josh Mohrer: We’re getting insulin, glucose, lipids, HSCRP, and I might be missing one more. You can see it in my Notion that will have a go link very, very soon. Josh Clemente: Nice looking forward to it. Casey. Casey Means: Awesome. Highlight of the week was spending time with some of the Levels team in San Diego this past week, and more specifically running with Josh yesterday first thing in the morning, took a good run. And then straight from the run, jumped straight into the Pacific ocean fully clothed in my running outfit, but it felt amazing. I wish I could do that every morning after my runs. Also, just the community call, that was incredible, really inspired me this week. And I don’t think it’s ever going to get old seeing people in the wild using our product and getting benefit from it. That was amazing. Josh Clemente: I know, I enjoyed it as well. Justin. Justin Stanley: Levels wise, I’m excited for the new logging to get out to member, especially because of a community call, and we were talking about making that smoother and easier. And then personally we’re opening up as of Saturday, a little bit here in [Mantle 00:39:46]. So I can go visit my mom in her backyard for the birthday, which was on Tuesdays. Josh Clemente: Nice. Mike D. Mike Didonato: Yeah. So just grateful to be part of our company and the culture we have. I had calls with two teams, very well known in the health and wellness space. One’s a very large wearable company, and they were asking us about what we were doing. And it was just funny, especially something as simple as documentation. I think their quotes were things just moved too fast here, and we did not embrace documentation. So kudos to Sam and Josh in particular for setting that standard, it’s just a given now. And then personally, the mask mandate has been lifted here in Philadelphia, I am pretty excited. I may go to a bar and watch the Sixers game, maybe have a drink. My whoop data will be very low, maybe. So don’t judge me. Josh Clemente: Judgment is a definite I guarantee you that. Alan is not with us today, it seems if you are please jump in Alan. Otherwise, Murillo. Murillo Nicacio: Yeah. First of all, welcome Scott. And I’m really excited on the Levels front for the process document drops that just happened this week. Been going through them really and excited to try those out. Personally, I started small container garden in my apartment. So excited to just… My first crop and just eating the plant. So that’s exciting. Josh Clemente: Nice, ready too. Mercy. Mercy Clemente: Personally, we’re having a surprise party for my oldest sister. So I’m going to be able to see a couple of my siblings. So, that will be nice. Josh Clemente: Yes, Gabriel. Gabriel: Yeah. I’m also excited about that, which is good. Levels wise, I’m really excited about the new roadmap process that David’s been working on, I think it’s really cool. Josh Clemente: Awesome. Laurie. Laurie Morrison: I had fun actually putting together those Coke boxes. So the little things to send out. It’s good to see the members come together like that, it’ll be interesting to see all the data. Personally, one of my best friends and oldest friend passed away last year and of course everything was shut down. So we’re having a really beautiful memorial service tomorrow and it’ll be good to see so many friends and family. And the grieving process takes a while, but you can celebrate forever. So I’m very much looking forward to that tomorrow. Josh Clemente: Love that, Scott. Scott Klein: Man, professionally, it’s just going to be great to be back on a team. Last couple years for me, I’ve been consulting, contracting, advising a little investing. But I’ve always been a build cool things with cool people kind of person, so I’m excited for that. Personally, we’re going to outlet malls today, I haven’t bought clothes in two years. So kind of like an early Father’s Day thing. My wife was like, “Let’s just go get you some new stuff.” So I’m excited for that. Josh Clemente: We’re a remote team. You don’t need clothes, put filter on. Scott Klein: Still wear this one shirt every single day. Josh Clemente: Yeah. That’s Sam’s approach, Ben. Ben Grynol: Welcome Scott, this is awesome. That’s super fun. Having Dhru was super cool. Two hat tips this week. So, David, the PR/FAQ was so cool, I thought that was a great discussion. And the scrappiness and velocity on Haney’s execution on that insight from Dovetail was so cool. That kind of stuff gets me so energized to see, and yeah, I just loved it. Personally. John Mayer’s got a new record that dropped, I guess, was like a few days ago and it’s really good. So pumped on that. Josh Clemente: Nice, Sam. Sam Corcos: Yeah, I’m pretty excited about all the product roadmap work. I love the visibility that we have into it now. It feels like it’s much more cohesive, just all the different approaches we’ve taken to add some visibility into that’s been really encouraging. Personally, I’m in Oakland right now, and Oakland is a lot nicer than I remember growing up. Growing up in Sacramento, Oakland was not somewhere that you wanted to be. But it’s quite nice, if you haven’t visited it might be worth a shot. Josh Clemente: For me professionally I’m really excited about the team growth, excited to have Scott on the call. And just generally, I think Andrew sent a note that we’re closing exceptional candidates at an unheard of rate, I think in his career experience. And it’s just very cool to be on a team on a mission that has that sort of gravitational pull for people who want to do big things, so that’s awesome. It was great to hang out with a couple others on the team this week in San Diego. Haney awesome to meet in person. And personally I’m going to see some family this weekend, my sister’s surprise party, which is always fun. Hao. Hao Li: Yeah. Level wise, I’m pretty excited about the new project management process. Thanks. Sam, David and Andrew to come up with that. And also the community call on Thursday or Wednesday were pretty interesting to have firsthand information from the members. Josh Clemente: Definitely. Also I got my coffee this morning for the assemblage and I was blown away, it was delicious. So thank you for putting that together. Looking forward to the cupping. It looks like Rob may have left his chair. So Rob, if you’re on audio, please jump in. Otherwise, we will jump to Jesse. Jesse Lavine: Cool. I mean, I’ll pass one to Mike and also really just to be really grateful to be part of this team and culture. This week I’m in Atlanta and seeing some old friends and have been telling them about the company and what we’re doing. And it just fits into a need in their life of like, “I’m confused of what to eat.” And it’s really cool to see the conversation go from, “Hey, there’s this thing on my arm.” And now you can also get one and sign up for the beta. So that’s been really cool. Josh Clemente: Amazing. Stacy. Stacie Flinner: Levels wise, have been digging into Tom’s influencer doc. It’s awesome, I’m really excited about leaning into that more. There’s such incredible advocates for us. And personally New Hampshire is finally in bloom, so it’s just beautiful to walk town now because every house has a pink or purple bush next to it. And so looking forward to a weekend of just strolling around. Josh Clemente: Very nice, Jhon. Jhon Cruz: I’m excited to be back and have met David in person in New York. Josh Clemente: Miz. Michael Mizrahi: Yeah. Just seems like a really big product week on all fronts. Community calls, the task management piece, the product roadmap. I have my blood test in two hours, and so kind of cool to see us running all these different things that are relatively heavy lifts, but we have a pretty well suited team to handle it. So really happy to see that. On the personal side, going to Mammoth for a few days, starting tomorrow. So excited to get outdoors a little bit. Josh Clemente: One of my favorite places. All right, we have made it. I don’t think I missed anyone, which is always good. So quickly, this week is my week for the story. We’re going to probably mix up the story of the week, segment, as we continue to grow. It’s really important that we maintain the section that we just had individual contributions. And so we’ll probably bump the story of the week into a different format that is likely going to be something driven by votes inside the team. Like somebody knows something really cool, and so we want to hear about it and we’ll just kind of like work through it that way. Also a note, we’ve kind of reformatted the Levels Cafe. We’re going to do a segment right after this call I believe, rather than the previous ones we have on Tuesday, Thursday. Josh Clemente: So a couple changes coming, please give you feedback. And with that, I will jump into my story of the week. I might just show this video because it’s probably the easiest thing. But this is a past project of mine that is still ongoing actually. And so this is about ARES, the Articulating Rapid Entry system, and I’m sorry to say it’s an acronym, the government loves those more than anything, they hate having descriptive titles. So this is a project that I was VP of engineering on and, well, I’ll give some quick background actually first. Oh no, I don’t want to start there. Why can’t I stop that? There we go. Okay. So my dad is a former law enforcement officer. He worked in the FBI and he was on a tactical team… A rescue hostage rescue team specifically. Josh Clemente: And there were a number of situations that cropped up during his tenure. Where teams were trying to rescue hostages in scenarios like here in Waco, Texas. And they had to use extension ladders. And he lost several of his friends unnecessarily because they were not able to defend themselves as they were climbing these ladders hand over foot. And there’s a need, you have all these really beefed up armored vehicles that can get to these same locations, but they can’t get you into an elevated point at the location. That’s where most of the issues arise. And so this is a project, a design that is intended to allow someone to get into an elevated point of interest, get somebody out quickly, but can also be mounted to an armored vehicle, which has almost no excess capacity. Josh Clemente: Because these things weigh so much, the suspension is already taxed beyond where it should be. So you can’t put something really heavy onto an armored vehicle, it’s got to be very lightweight. And so it ended up being a design problem, it is much closer to aerospace where everything has to be extremely weight optimized than it is your traditional people moving. Sort of like a genie boom, if you think about it that way. So I will let the video do the talking, let me know if you can hear this or not. Tim Clemente: In then when I was an FBI SWAT team leader in 1997, we were working on training for aircraft hijacking scenarios. So we were at Dallas Airport, it was kind of misty and rainy, it was cold, November night. We were out there, and we were using what was at that time, the greatest and latest technology, which was German assault ladders. Basically just a glorified homeowner’s aluminum extension ladder. Slipping and sliding on the aluminum rungs, I realized as a SWAT operator that there’s got to be a better way. My name’s Tim Clemente. I’m the president of MIT, Mission Integrated Technologies. Our new system is called the ARES, the Articulating Rapid Entry System. It’s a stairway that articulates hydraulically into the air. Josh Clemente: Anyone familiar with elevated tactic systems knows that the status quo today is a ramp. We introduce the four bar parallel stairway system. This allows us to be maintain flat wide stable stairways at any height all the way up to nine meters. We’re executing a very mass optimized design here by aggressively limiting overall weight and transitioning critical lifting components to the rear of the system. We’ve managed to tune the center of gravity to really minimize our impact on the handling dynamics of the host vehicle. The ARES is the first product on the market that can reach directly to nine meters while mounted to an armored vehicle. It does it without attachments, it does it without ladders and it does it in a package that can be driven confidently into any scenario known or unknown. We’ve got the only stabilization system on the market, this truck armored with the ARES mounted and front rear stabilization is rock solid. Ken Fournier: It’s extremely stable, much more than what I’ve seen of any other unit out there. So your ability to rapidly put a team in, or extract a team out of a building or an aircraft, it’s going to just be that much more enhanced. Josh Clemente: We’ve got the modular breaching platform, which is a direct extension to nine meters from eight meters. It’s very modular system. So side assault entries, repel assaults, all of this stuff is possible with the new ARES. At any target height below eight meters, you can have a stable full six man team on a platform able to achieve breaching or entry. Ken Fournier: It’s very precarious when you’re trying to help somebody get out of a building, but you don’t have enough width for yourself to get out of it. You try and carry somebody out on a litter or anything like that with this system. It’s wide enough, where two people can actually carry a litter and carry somebody else, that’s non ambulatory. Tim Clemente: We have a rule in MIT and it’s known as our three deep rule. We want three guys shoulder to shoulder, but we have a tagline. Somebody has to go in first, but nobody should have to go in alone. So what we do is allow three men side by side to move to that apex point, move to that fatal funnel, move to that doorway window or whatever it is, that you’re having to enter. And allow you to go. One, two, three immediately side by side. Speaker 25: One of the most important things, a law enforcement and military sniper needs is a position of tactical advantage. The ARES large level breaching platform can be transformed into a sniper observer perch with level 3A ballistic protection underneath them, in front of them, and on both sides. The ARES ballistically protected sniper observer perch is the most advantageous position a sniper can be in, at an altitude no other system can reach. Up to eight meters. Josh Clemente: Additionally, we’ve got the integrated wireless electronics package. Touch sensitive through gloves, we can equip multiple operators with this capability. So if you have team lead on the ground, team lead at the top of the stairway he’s able to wirelessly control the system in real time. There’s no necessity for pendance wired hardware harnessing, it’s up to the specific agency or operator, how they want to leverage this to the best of their abilities. Ken Fournier: Nobody wants a fair fight out there. You know what I mean? We want to go there as much as we can overwhelming force, shut them down right away and save the most amount of people you can. And you do that by having the tactical advantage and ARES gives you that. Josh Clemente: Operators are going to see this, and they’re going to know, they’re going to light up and realize this is the product I’ve been waiting for, this is the product that will allow us to take our own safety and the safety of those that we’re trying to rescue in these situations to the next level. Tim Clemente: We’re all here for the same mission and that’s to integrate technology to other people’s missions, because we’re not out there doing it every day anymore. The people that are out there, we want to try and help them. Josh Clemente: All right. So that is my prior. And I have a little bit of the engineering stuff for over time here. But I guess we do have like a little of that cafe blocked off. So I’ll into some of why this is novel. This is the way this system deploys. It’s sort of a flat system that’s sit on top of a vehicle, and then it deploys in several steps. So it flips out this end sort of breaching platform, and then that stays parallel to the ground as the system rises. And it maintains staircases, so you could like walk upstairs at every angle and that’s what’s key. And then you’ll notice that there’s nothing underneath the stairway. So you can reach out over wings or go over fences, you don’t have anything that could be cut or knocked out from underneath. Josh Clemente: And that’s the novelty of the system, basically is the lifting mechanism. So I worked on this for about a year. This is when I was in peak CGM, personal obsession mode. I was doing a lot of personal engineering on myself, and this was my project day to day. So yeah, I mean, I don’t want to spend too much time on it, but if anyone’s interested, I can answer questions in the cafe or what have you. But very different, obviously two different worlds, CGM and tactical equipment. But it was a great project, and it’s actually still in contracts, pending mode in about a 100 countries right now. No, I’m sorry, a 100 contracts in various countries right now. So, with that, I will stop.
June 11, 2021
Friday Forum is an All Hands meeting for the Levels team, where they discuss their progress and traction each week.