May 7, 2021

Josh Clemente:
All right. All right, team. Let’s go ahead and kick off. We’re going to jump straight to our special guest today. Dr. Gerald Schulman. Dr. Schulman is… I’m going to let him speak for himself, but he’s one of our advisors and he is pushing the science of insulin resistance specifically, but cellular and molecular physiology at Yale. And I have learned an impossible amount from just a few of his pieces, specifically this podcast with Dr. [inaudible 00:00:31] most recently about his work. And I’m just so excited to be able to work with him, to have him on this call with us and to push forward the research potentially in collaboration with him through a sponsored research grant that we’re working towards. So, I just want to quickly introduce him to the team. He’s got to jump to a new meeting or another meeting just after this, but we’d love to hear just a few words from you, Dr. Schulman.
Dr. Gerald Schulman:
Sure. Thank you, Josh. Well, listen, I’m delighted to be part of the Levels scientific advisory board. I really like the mission that you have. Insulin resistance is a major factor in so many diseases. Of course, diabetes is always thought to be the number one association with insulin resistance, but it clearly is driving cardiometabolic disease, cardiovascular disease. It’s probably the driving force for obesity, associated cancers, and we see insulin resistance in our young, healthy, even normal weight undergraduates that we study at Yale. And so, whatever we can do to catch their insulin resistance early on, reverse it, I think will lead to metabolic health and healthier lives. So, really look forward to the mission that Levels has, joining you and seeing if we can come up with additional indicators of metabolic health that we can address and improve in people.
Josh Clemente:
Gets me super excited. Dr. Schulman, short and sweet. Please go take on your other meeting, but just from… On behalf of the team, really appreciate the work you do. We’ve all learned from you, and we’re looking forward to continuing to work together.
Dr. Gerald Schulman:
Terrific, Josh. Thanks so much. Take care.
Josh Clemente:
All right. We’ll talk soon. Thank you, sir. Okay. All right. First off, this is a recent development. Shout out Casey, but Dr. Robert Lustig, who is another of the biggest names in metabolic medicine has agreed to join Levels as an advisor. This is really huge validation. I think Dr. Lustig, one of the first deeply contemplative videos I’ve ever seen was by Dr. Lustig talking about fructose and its effect on children. He works with pediatric medicine and pediatric diabetes at the University of California, San Francisco. And it’s pretty amazing what he’s been able to uncover almost single handedly through his books, through his constant and unyielding approach to just surfacing the facts despite the kind of mainstream narrative. And I can’t believe that we are already this far along in the conversation. Casey, I’m sure you’re going to say a few words about this, but we’d love to hear from you right now, just on your conversation with Dr. Lustig.
Casey Means:
Yeah. So, we’re just absolutely thrilled. I think this is huge validation for our team and just how we’re presenting our mission. We just kind of wrapped this up last night, and I think there’s just going to be really exciting opportunities for collaboration here. He just actually released this book called Metabolical on Tuesday, which I have not finished yet, but I think will become a new… Another one of our core manifestos for the company, it’s called, I think, The Lures and the Lies of the Processed Food. I can’t read the full caption there, but it’s all about metabolic health. So, yeah. Dr. Lustig has been really focused on the systems issues that lead to sort of where we’re at with the metabolic crisis right now, really uncovering a lot of the factors at play, from food policy to farm bills, to marketing and processed food influence, big food.
Casey Means:
He’s been just a really vocal sort of trailblazer and trying to really uncover what the root cause of this crisis are. And then on the flip side, so, he’s talked a lot about the systems issues, but then has also done some of the key basic science research in understanding the actual metabolic mechanisms in the development of insulin resistance. So, he’s kind of an incredible, both basic science researcher, but also met communicator. Has been very vocal about [inaudible 00:04:41] both those areas. So, really wonderful. He’s going to be focusing a lot on sort of… Similar to a number of our advisors. So, on content and amplification of our message, on really thought leadership pieces with us, on network connections and sort of brand representation, strategic advice, and sort of product guidance, and then potentially down the road, some research opportunities with him. So, really, really excited and congratulations to the whole team for just continuing to attract this type of incredible talent and thought leadership to to our team.
Josh Clemente:
Thank you for taking lead on it, Casey. I’m stoked about it. We’re pushing forward with piloting additional analytics with an at home metabolic test kit, JM published a memo on kind of next steps in the balls in flight that we can and cannot use depending on how deeply we want to integrate this in the near term versus the long term. So, we have a little concept artwork here that Alan has put together. And overall, this is pointing towards our goals, which are to be able to understand the holistic metabolic health of an individual, as opposed to just the glucose patterns. So, having more analytes will help us to better phenotype and better understand the individual. The getting started cohort. So, many of you have heard of this project. It’s one of our pilot programs, but cohort A, which is… It’s kind of based upon the wearable challenge platform that we’ve been working with Aaron and team on, this will be, I believe we have 55 signups, something in that neighborhood.
Josh Clemente:
So, all of these beta members will be starting simultaneously together on Monday, and we are going to see how this goes. This is kind of a big community effort. We’re going to learn a lot. It’s fairly scrappy, appreciate Aaron for jumping in and taking this one, and Ben, and Miz, and all the others who have helped for getting it to this point. We completed our first Levels content survey. So, I found on this really insightful, we had a lot of really great responses from our audience. Many of whom are not actually members, which a shocking percentage, I think it was 20% where are not beta users just yet. So, we got a really nice insight into how our content is a platform. It’s a product in and of itself. And so, we learned a lot about what is working and where we can offer more value, which was great.
Josh Clemente:
We got some powerful feedback this week. I want to highlight, our members are always sending us great feedback, but two in particular, Chris Jones and David Fisch both sent literally pages of detailed experiential feedback, including screenshots and personal anecdotes. And it’s just awesome to see the depth of effort that goes into this. And I just want to shout you both out for all of that work. We know it’s not free and it takes time and effort and care and concern. So, thank you. And then Levels received three honorable mentions in fast companies, world changing ideas, which is another just big line item for the week. In addition to our Wall Street Journal piece, which Casey had some amazing quotes in. And I think overall came out as one of the… I think one of the best pieces we’ve had this year.
Josh Clemente:
Really, really powerful to see… Yeah, pieces like this surfacing in publications like that. It’s kind of crazy and continues to shock me every time it happens. Rhonda Patrick from FoundMyFitness, who’s one of my favorites in the metabolic health space has agreed to pilot Levels. So, that’s exciting. We’re in touch with Tiffany Haddish, Sammy Schultz, who’s an Olympian heading to the 2021 Tokyo games. We have had some great conversations with CVS Health, talking about potential nutrition integrations. They’re building a pretty large effort in that space. And so, really good early conversations, nothing major yet, but again, another potential pilot for us to break new ground. And then lastly, we had a couple great anecdotes that I highlighted in here. This member feedback in our Slack channel is just consistently blowing my mind. People are really calling it the best health education they’ve ever received. And this is primarily the beta experience on its own. So, it’s not… This is not a guided program, and it’s just cool to see that people are learning so much.
Josh Clemente:
All right, great week. Over to culture and kudos. I want to make sure Laurie is on this call. She is. Hi, Laurie. We just want to give you a huge shout out. This is a small smattering of the impact that Laurie makes constantly in her work, but in particular, this flowers effort, which I think it’s the brainchild of Sam, but the effort and the execution of consistently making our members and our supporters and our team just super happy and appreciated is Laurie. And that, in addition to keeping subscriptions moving and all the other moving parts that Laurie works with, this is my brother, Rodney, here holding his framed copy of our Men’s Health feature, that he has a little picture of himself in, and you can see his mind is completely blown, and that’s a… It’s a little thing, but it’s a really meaningful gift. And, Laurie, we couldn’t do it without you. So, thank you for continuing to do these. As you can see, I think this is a podcast host who said Levels her better than any man. So, I think we want to continue to have that reputation as a brand. So, thank you, Laurie.
Laurie Morrison:
You’re welcome. I enjoy it so much.
Josh Clemente:
Awesome.
Laurie Morrison:
Thank you.
Josh Clemente:
Just one piece in our mission to solve the metabolic health crisis. All right, Alan, are you going to be able to jump in on these? If not, I can.
Alan McLean:
Yeah. Yeah. I’m happy to feel in for David as best I can here. And Andrew, or anyone from [inaudible 00:10:20] feel free to chime in, if I miss anything. It’s a long list on the left here. I see 19 things shipped, and I want to call out that a lot of the items here are actually at least small behind the scene things, behind the scene changes that actually make the experience… Able to achieve that sort of feeling of magic. So, just improving the performance, for optimizing logging, I think that all our users are doing better speech recognition, permission, rationales. Some of these calendar performance improvements, you’re not going to actually necessarily notice these changes unless you’re really frustrated. And so, I think that’s kind of a nice… I mean, as a user experience designer, I’m really happy to see some of those invisible changes go out. We’ve also got a bunch of iterations on social export, which you know is super important to our users as well.
Alan McLean:
In the works, we’ve got zone analysis pages again, sort of just trying to bring it closer to spec, great work by Jhon there. Also beautiful charts explorations. I think I’ve got a slide for this coming up. We can just go to the next slide. Wait one more down. So, I want to call this one out, especially because we been looking at the visualizations we’re using in the app, and I’m wondering, can we do something to improve maybe the smoothness of the line, the gradients, the representation? And I kicked out a little quick web prototype last week. And in a couple days, Justin and Jhon put together a couple variations in the app and they’ve already started to show some great progress there. So, super impressive, quick work. Back previous slide.
Alan McLean:
On the design side, we’re looking at logging and how we can potentially improve that experience for our members. Make it a little bit quicker, a little bit less layout thrash. And so, we’ve got a prototype together here, you can check out on the design channel. We’re pretty excited about where this is going. It’s got some nice improvements to adding photos, auto completing text and some explorations around adding macros. Next slide. Working on the information architecture. We’ve got some good progress there. We’ve got a couple variations of some sort of medium fidelity designs. We’re going to start exploring that next week with some tappable prototypes. We’re going to probably stem those around some of you out here. Looking at just how we figure out where things go and make it predictable for our members.
Alan McLean:
Next slide. Just a fun jam, I got to work with Josh this week, taking out some potential cover art for these metabolic test kits. They’re really pretty, I’m looking forward to seeing if the printers are able to pull it off. But yeah, it’s also a good chance to play with math again, which I haven’t done nearly enough. So, go back… If you can go back real quickly to the summary slide product. So, I think there’s also some other interesting things here just to call out Jeremy, [inaudible 00:13:22] can sign up. This is really important and sort of in the works behind the scenes, again, one of these flows that is going to be sort of critical to our members, continuing to benefit from the Levels experience. So, I want to call that as well, and then how working on standby emails. So, good work by everybody.
Josh Clemente:
Awesome. Thanks, team. It’s crazy to see this slide trending towards being insufficient to fit all of the weeks’ efforts on… Kind of crazy [crosstalk 00:13:51]. Yeah, exactly. It’s going to be unreadable. All right. And also animations and visuals here. Quick hiring update, nothing major here. We are probably modifying the general council role to more of an inside council role. So, more tactical individual contributor style. So, for anyone watching this who has been holding off because general council is such a large sort of scope, please feel free to recommend people who may be a great fit for inside council. Continuing to move folks through workable and please, everyone, keep your candidates updated if you can. Thank you. All right, Miz.
Michael Mizrahi:
Okay. So, a bunch of updates here for mostly in April recap. Right in the center, I know it’s kind of small, it’s just our orders filled chart. As you can see, April was a little bit of a down month, we’ve… A little bit of an exhale. We’ve had some of those promos paused. And so, that we’re… Had some time to breathe. That’s largely going to change as some of those ramp back up through May. For the next few weeks, we have about 1100 orders scheduled. We’re now able to break out subscriptions from new consults pretty easily. So, thanks Xinlu and Josh for some of the work there in Retool. So, of our 1100 upcoming orders over the next few weeks, 700 are subscriptions. So, just calling out, this is a meaningful number of our weekly bills. It’s no longer just new starts, subscriptions are sizable, which is great.
Michael Mizrahi:
Excited for the community court coming up as was mentioned. So, won’t touch too much on that. Back up to the top, the small improvements that we’re making, for example, the change to the copy in the sign up flow didn’t require much engineering work. It’s changing a quick string, but has massive implications in terms of the member experience, and then the support experience and support workload that we have. So, all of these kinds of little improvements that we can make now, before we have significant growth, incremental step change growth, changes are going to have a big impact. And so, constantly keeping our eyes open for those kinds of process improvements. Finally, some things that are on deck and coming up, the subscription form is due to be pushed any day now. Hopefully, with Jeremy and engineering’s help. So, that will let us email members that have… That were single month members and engage them to sign up for subscriptions.
Michael Mizrahi:
It’ll also enable us to allow folks to change their subscription cadence from monthly to bimonthly or quarterly. Some other process improvements around prescription renewals for those who are out of refills after the one year mark, and then all the manual tasks that we’re still doing in Retool, we can make improvements there. So, sorry, in Truepill. So, we still log into Truepill to manually fill replacements, to manually fill performance, cover updates. And every time we log into Truepill, we’re dealing with member data, there’s room for error, it’s working across a few different tools. And so, as much of that as we can automate in Retool, the better. So, we’ve already got the standard order flow done. We’ve got the subscription order flow done, which are the two big [inaudible 00:16:54] after that comes things like replacements and exceptions. And so, those are hopefully on deck.
Michael Mizrahi:
And then finally, whenever I head into Help Scout to view our monthly report and look at the feedback comments, this is all I see. I’m not cherry picking. I’m not filtering for great comments. These are the raw comments that come out just listed straight away. Here’s some of the highlights from April, “Quick response straight to the point.”, “Laurie is the best.”, “Mercy is awesome with logistical supports, quick responses.”, “Amazingly quick and efficient.”, “OMG, I got a resolution and a reply in three minutes.”, “You make me feel like I have an accessible coach.”, “Support is excellent.”, “Crazy fast.”, “So helpful.”, “Solved the problem with just one email.”, “Unbelievably quick and helpful.” Really, really setting the tone. So, hats off to the team. Good job on this, and really excited to have [Jesse 00:17:49] in the mix. Quick ops update on our end is that we’ve laid out a little bit of a support schedule for the next few weeks.
Michael Mizrahi:
As Jesse gets on board, our team’s growing, we can finally offer some relief on the weekends for Braden and Mercy who have been absolutely killing it, but also absolutely need some relief. And so, Jesse’s going to cover us on some of the schedule. We heat mapped out our volume and we’re taking a pretty good approach to this. So, excited for everything that’s coming up, and thanks to the team for keeping this moving and for really, really meaningfully improving the member experience. It’s not an auxiliary piece. It’s pretty core at this point, which is awesome to see.
Josh Clemente:
Amazing update. I don’t think I’ve ever written unbelievable quick and helpful about a company’s customer support before in my life. So, just wild. Thank you, team, especially with this volume. All right. JM.
Josh Mohrer:
All right. On a lighter note, let’s talk about the Coke experiment. As a refresher, we did an experiment where about a dozen of us drank a soda and then did nothing. And then a few days later drank another soda and went on a walk or did some light activity. Here are the results. So, the big graph is actually every data point of every person who did both versions of this. Depending on which sensor you use, there might be fewer points, and they’re all kind of leveled to your initial. But as you can see, sort of intuitively from this, the orange, which are the trials with activity are compressed. If you look at the raw data, the median delta was about 30% lower with the activity, and the spike was about 19% lower.
Josh Mohrer:
That’s interesting. It’s what we thought was going to happen, but it’s cool to see it for real. And I got to imagine tests like this, even with a group as small as ours, probably haven’t been done too many times before. And so, this is sort of a peak into the kind of things we can do with our members and the Levels folks all over the world. Special thanks to everyone who participated and did both trials. And this was great. This was a lot of fun.
Josh Clemente:
I’m interested in the area under the curve delta.
Josh Mohrer:
Say that again, Josh.
Josh Clemente:
I’m interested in the area under the curve delta.
Josh Mohrer:
Yeah, definitely. I think we got to put a professional on this. I don’t know Xinlu is on, but I don’t want to bother her with this. I took my own stab at it. I’m sure she could make it five times better. I will point out, there’s one person who had sort of odd results. That person was me. We’ll have to dig into that another time, but thanks again.
Josh Clemente:
Yeah. Thanks everybody. It’s cool to have a calibrated product that we can do this with. Unfortunately it’s Coca-Cola but-
Sam Corcos:
I still have PTSD from the 75 gram glucose test.
Josh Clemente:
Yeah. You really put yourself out there, Sam, I think Dom has done a couple Coke experiments as well. So, we’ll have to add his data to the mix.
Josh Mohrer:
Definitely.
Josh Clemente:
Yeah. All right, Ben.
Ben Grynol:
Great growth. Weekly recognized revenue, we’re at 92. So, surpassed our goal of 75. Monthly, we’re already at 119,000, on our way to our goal of 300. So, to reiterate, we’re very much in controlled growth mode. And the idea is to not surpass the $300,000 goal and blow it out of the water. We really want to maintain a level of… We’ll call homeostasis so that we’re not putting too much stress on our engineering and our ops and infrastructure. As far as cash on hand, we are at 94. So, that is down $800,000 from last week. Reason being is we had a bill with Truepill, $750,000 that we allocated and paid this week. And that’s from December through to February. So, that is not a month of performance, but that’s where the cash allocation is. Next slide please. So, we’re going to talk about growth theme of the week. Mike will fill us in on member insights work that we’re doing.
Ben Grynol:
We’re going to talk about derivative assets. So, the what, the why, and the how. Right now, we’re undertaking a project to create transcripts, show notes and audiograms for the entire suite of podcasts that Josh, Casey and Sam have been on. And so, the idea behind this is that, why would we do this? Well, one, accessibility, right? I think it’s something that often gets overlooked, where some people have different forms of… Or different ways of needing to consume content. And so, from an accessibility standpoint, it immediately makes all of our content much wider to a broader audience. Helps immensely with indexing, which is great for driving traffic, organic traffic to the site. And then derivative content. It gives us content that we don’t really have to do anything else as far as lift goes, and we can distribute this content through social platforms.
Ben Grynol:
So, that’s things like the audiograms, very easy to share across any social platform, and they’re immediately downloadable. We’re working with an agency called [inaudible 00:23:05] that is creating all of this for us. So, pretty cool to have. The how is the neat part. So, we’re having everything managed in Notion. And in Notion, you can have the toggle switch to published web, which everyone knows, but there’s also a toggle for indexing to be available. So, we can take this content that’s coming from [inaudible 00:23:27]. We don’t have to do anything else as far as taking all that content and then copying and pasting and updating the web. We can just control it immediately from Notion.
Ben Grynol:
[Inaudible 00:23:39] is going to build this right into our website so that it’s all there. And then it gives us a lot of control if we want to ever update anything in those documents pretty easily or search in our own database that we manage in Notion. So, we’re getting a lot of 90, 10 out of it, where 90% of the… 90% of the benefit with 10% of the effort. So, low lift, really high return, and really cool to see it come together. So, it’s going to take probably another three to four weeks to finish all the 100 plus podcasts, but we’re well on our way, and it’s looking great. So, on to Mike, and that’s growth.
Josh Clemente:
Thank you.
Mike Didonato:
Thanks, Ben. So, the update on the member insight side this week is, so, I think we all know that we’ve captured and continue to capture a lot of great qualitative feedback, but not a lot of diligence, and at times, it’s been a challenge to properly make that qualitative feedback more quantitative, and provide insight and a way to basically provide visibility to everybody and then also properly track what’s coming in and what can and or should be a priority. So, with that in mind, we’re exploring a new platform called Dovetail. I’ll practice everything. What I’m about to say is that we’re still exploring the platform and all the data you’re about to see is hypothetical, but a few interesting things. So, we’ve started to record our calls with members when they give us permission, and Dovetail allows us to upload that video and then it transcribes the entire interview.
Mike Didonato:
And then it allows us to go ahead and tag different themes in groups, which then we can go ahead and then on the image on the right kind of quantify that information to the rest of the team. And then Josh, if you can go to the next slide, and then here, there’s a way to basically track. And it’s not only just the different features or problems, able to have it in context. So, we can add NPS, and then also this allows us to provide visibility in context to the entire team, but then also when applicable, we’ll be able to close the loop with our members in an efficient way. Again, we’re still exploring the platform, and we’ll provide some more updates, but that is it for now. And we’re pretty excited about it.
Josh Clemente:
Awesome. This is looking really good, excited for it. Mercy.
Mercy Clemente:
Okay. Social presence. So, this is our April analytics review. So, Instagram, we had 27,000 followers or just over, which is roughly up by about 9% since March, end of March. We’ve reached a total of 27,000 accounts or 27,600 accounts over the month. We shared 210 stories to our page, which does not include all stories that we’re mentioned in. I think we were mentioned, there are many people that tagged us multiple times. We would share maybe one or two of those stories that they tagged us in. So, I would say well over 300 stories we were tagged in. Our April top post was announcing a whole new Level podcast. People were really, really excited about that, and kind of very surprised that we were launching it. Some people were like, “When is this going to happen? I’m so happy it’s finally launched.” So, this post got over 300 likes. We reached over 8,600 different people. So, that was super cool.
Mercy Clemente:
Twitter. We are at 13,700 followers, which is up by about 700 followers since the end of March. Our total monthly impressions on Twitter was 1.85 million, which is seven times our previous month’s impressions. So, our average daily impression was 65,000 impressions daily, whereas previously, I believe March, was 8,200 impressions daily. So, this is a massive increase. So, this just kind of means that our tweets are being seen by a lot more people. They’re being shared a lot more, liked, commented, all that stuff. So, that’s really exciting.
Mercy Clemente:
Our top tweet was sharing about the Boss Babe podcast, that really hit a chord with our followers and our members. People really, really loved that podcast. We got a lot of positive feedback, both via DM and also just people tweeting at us or commenting on photos and tweets saying how much they enjoyed that podcast. So, that was really awesome. The impressions on that tweet alone was 230,000. So, it reached 230,000 people. That’s how much it was enjoyed just on Twitter. Our April top follower is mark Benioff. He has over 1 million followers. So, shout out to Mark for following us. And that’s our social recap for April.
Josh Clemente:
Very cool. Thank you. I’m still confused about the 700% increase, but we’ll have to do some digging there.
Ben Grynol:
Maybe Mark is in the pilot under a pseudonym.
Josh Clemente:
Could be. All righty, Tom.
Tom Griffin:
All right. A few quick updates from the week here. I’ll touch on Tiffany Haddish in the next slide, but she’s a very well known actress and comedian with the huge platform. And I’m connected with her team via A16Z, and she’s really interested, which is great. She also mentioned had a good call with CVS this week and specifically got connected to the folks who are leading their nutritional programming as a next step, which is exciting. And then a couple more pro athletes. So, I just call out that I’m working to get product in the hands of more Olympians who are going to Tokyo this year, fingers crossed that, that happens. And the main value of these relationships is possible content opportunities as well as press opportunities. So, it’s only once every couple of years where all eyes and media outlets are on the Olympics.
Tom Griffin:
So, if we can take advantage of that and generate some authentic storylines around how Olympians are diving in nutrition, using Levels, that would be awesome. Next slide. All right. So, theme or spotlight of the week is celebrity VIP. So, some of you may have seen some chatter on Slack about Will Smith on Instagram this week, posting this picture bottom left on the screen, and announcing that, one, he’s in the worst shape of his life, and two, he’s about to embark on a physical transformation to get into the best shape of his life for a movie that’s coming up. We’re actually in touch with Will’s nutritionist right now, not explicitly in the context of Will yet. And, but I guess between that, and then a couple of other celebrities and celebrity trainers that have entered the fold over the last couple of weeks, I thought it’d be helpful to just quickly touch on why these opportunities are valuable, as self-evident as that might seem.
Tom Griffin:
So, on the left side of the screen, just in short, this is really about building our brand and maybe can be contrasted with some other influencer types that we work with, like Ben Greenfield or Dave Asprey, which is largely focused on revenue generation. And also these celebrity VIPs are helpful in helping us achieve our mission to destigmatize CGM in a mainstream way. So, again, Ben Greenfield is great for capturing the biohacker audience, but Will Smith, beyond having large reach, makes something like CGM cool and normal, accessible in a way that very few other individuals or brands can do, and can do as quickly as someone like Will can. And then, more practically, they’re exceptionally valuable for press opportunities.
Tom Griffin:
So, in a world where Will invested in Levels or is a spokesperson, it would be… We’d instantly generate a bunch of press opportunities in top tier outlets. And then lastly, I would just say that our approach generally is to get product in the hands of as many influential people as possible, and then really just see where the powerful, authentic storylines and endorsements emerge. And that’s kind of how we decide who we’re going to move forward with in actual… A formal relationship.
Josh Clemente:
Awesome. Thank you, sir. Casey.
Casey Means:
Awesome. Yeah. So, we’ve had some really exciting press in the last couple weeks, which has just been really great to see. Just highlighting a few of the bigger ones here. So, we had a nice feature in Crunchbase about sort of an exploration of the mission of the company and what I’ve learned as an entrepreneur, which was really nice. We had a great feature that I was actually really excited about in Business Insider. This was about the 25 fastest growing direct to consumer brands, according to monthly traffic. And it highlighted that we’ve had 219.6% quarter over quarter web traffic growth. And I thought this was really awesome because we’ve been seeing this sort of SEO, a lot of organic growth since the beginning, virtually zero… Very little ad spend. A lot of this is organic, and about 40% of the traffic to our site comes through organic search, which is incredible and blows a lot of people away.
Casey Means:
And about a third of the traffic to our site comes through our blog. A lot of it comes through partner codes as well. And so, it just really highlights some of these efforts that we’ve made and in content and partnerships, the newsletter, number of things, and that people are searching about Levels and just finding us. And it’s just really, really exciting to see. So, this one just really felt like a nice validation for a lot of the efforts we’ve been making with growth from really the beginning. So, congrats, everyone, on that, and definitely shout outs to our partners as well. And then we had our Wall Street Journal piece this week, which was awesome. This article focused particularly on sort of the exclusivity and celebrity interest in CGM and kind of the personalized diet and biohacker focus. A little bit less about the wider landscape of prevention and accessibility, but we actually talked about this, the editor and I, extensively in our call and in our follow ups.
Casey Means:
And she actually wrote, right after putting up the article, saying she was very interested in writing more about that broader landscape of metabolic health and prevention and accessibility. And so, hopefully there will be more opportunities for that, but I think it was a really, really great piece that I think made Levels seem very exciting and novel and it was awesome, but excited to hopefully see more in the future, kind of about that broader landscape of what we’re doing in our bigger picture mission. Next slide. This was really exciting, Fast Company, we were recognized in three different areas about being a world changing idea on the rise, AI and data and wellness. So, congratulations to the team, this was really a big win. Our PR company was really thrilled about this. And so, congrats to everyone. And then later today, we’ve got New York Times interview with [inaudible 00:34:38]. So, everyone send good vibes for that. Well give you an update afterwards.
Josh Clemente:
I love the ominousness there. It’s going to be great. Thank you, Casey. Haney.
Mike Haney:
It’s kind of a big content update this week. I’ll move through this one quickly. Just want to call out of the pieces that we’ve published this week. The Drew Manning one is really great. I went into that one a little bit of a skeptic. Then I watched the show, the TV show that has come out of his experiment, and it’s pretty moving. And his interview was really great. I have to say he had some really… The learning that he got from going through this and the empathy that he developed and that just kind of insight that he got into the emotional aspects of food, and he communicated it really well in this piece, I think is a great read for everybody. And we’ve got some fun pieces coming up as well about more foods we love and a good piece on caffeine.
Mike Haney:
So, next slide. Just a quick update on everyone in content. We’ve come back to this again. This is the effort where we’d love to have everybody in the company contributing a piece of content that can take lots of different forms. The goal is to have everybody do one every quarter. So, we’re kind of ramping up to get to that cadence, but if you have ideas or if you… If we haven’t talked yet, and you need help getting ideas for some kind of time topic, feel free to reach out to me any time, I’ll continue to reach out to folks. But just some examples which might help spur some other folks in terms of thinking of pieces that are well in the works. So, Sam has been working on this piece, analyzing how he spent basically every minute of his time over the first two years of Levels, which is super interesting, and able to buy his time tracking.
Mike Haney:
Had a great conversation with Jhon this week, working on a piece that we’re going to do in both English and Spanish, with the hopes of maybe getting some good recruiting efforts for Central and South America. Some more Spanish speaking recruitment is what it’s like to work for a Silicon Valley startup from a different country. Xinlu working on a really interesting piece about managing health data. Tom is working on a piece about our podcast appearances. Mike is working on a piece about this sort of unprecedented level of customer interaction that he’s done. I feel like he’s got this super unique perspective of having talked to so many people. And then Ben and I are going to do actually a podcast episode this week as a kind way into doing a piece with him around this notion of an NPS unicorn. So, that was just an example of like, “Hey, if we’re going to write this, and I’m going to interview you anyway, let’s do it as a podcast episode.” So, definitely want to keep this.
Mike Haney:
I’m really excited about this. The conversation with Jhon this week was just reminding me, there’s so many great stories within this company and so much expertise. I think the more we get it out, the better for everybody, for us and the company. Next slide really quick. Just to start going back to doing kind of our monthly SEO updates that kind of fallen off this last couple months, but Casey touched on this as well. The traffic, we kind of had a real steady incline up until about January. We’d been on just a really consistent incline on traffic. Gotten to a very high level and then we’ve had some kind of mostly plateauing, a little bit of a dip here and there. Now we’ve got the great benefit of working with this really good SEO firm, 97th Floor is helping us get some insights into this. They’re able to tell us, for instance, when we see some of these dips, sometimes that’s tied to just changes in Google’s algorithm, which for the most part, they don’t really publish or talk about. We kind of have to reverse engineer when we think that might have happened.
Mike Haney:
And now that we’ve gotten to these kind of traffic levels, we’re going to start to see coming up more of that impact, but given the work that we’re doing with that firm, we’re going to start to see this kind of climb back up again, I think, over the next six months. We’re kind of in the engine revving phase right now. So, putting a lot of pieces in place that I think are really going to start to show up. I won’t go through each one of these, but to kind of support that notion of what’s happening, that number down in the lower right, this is the number of words that have climbed from lower rankings. So, maybe they’re 30th or 40th or 50th up into the top 10.
Mike Haney:
And really until you’re in the top 10, it kind of doesn’t matter because nobody ever really clicks through to a second page or search results. But once you get up into that top 10, it’s much easier to do some optimization and start climbing up the rankings. And we added 400 keywords just in the last month to that top 10 ranking. So, a lot of the pieces we’ve been working on in the last few months are starting to climb up those rankings and that’ll start to show up in the traffic. It’ll start to show up in a lot of these other features featured snippets and back links and stuff over time. That’s it for content.
Josh Clemente:
Awesome. Thank you. Okay. We’re a little bit short on time. I want to make sure that we get to the final share from Alan this week. So, let’s try and keep these to about 10 seconds each on something we’re excited about, personal encouraged. Justin, go ahead and kick us off.
Justin Stanley:
I’m just excited about the momentum that we have. It just seems to be building up and up constantly. And personally, my bike [inaudible 00:39:35] is being delivered on Tuesday. So, I’m excited to get going on that and experience that.
Josh Clemente:
Awesome. Ben.
Ben Grynol:
Professionally, hat tip to Braden, he’s been doing a ton of work outside of ops, everything from community to partnerships, he’s really been helping out. So, appreciate all of that work. Personally, had our first league soccer game of the night. It was 37 degrees and it was perfect. So, that was fun.
Josh Clemente:
Yeah. Sounds perfect. Nice. Sam.
Sam Corcos:
I’m excited that Dr. Lustig is joining. That’s pretty exciting.
Josh Clemente:
Yeah, that’s huge. JM.
Josh Mohrer:
Sorry. Work wise, it’s really nice to see some stuff that I’m working on start to develop into things that I can show off. On personal note, it was really nice seeing some folks in New York this week, there’s a minimum effective dose of [inaudible 00:40:32] that we clearly hit. And it was really good to see everybody.
Josh Clemente:
100 percent. Jhon.
Jhon Cruz:
I’m excited about the experiments we are running to have better and smoother charts. Nice focus there. And I’m also excited to have work with Haney on the content piece. Looking forward to seeing that coming into reality.
Josh Clemente:
Very cool. I love that Dr. Lustig is joining. I’m excited about Dr. Schulman joining us this morning. And it was awesome to meet not only Braden, Tom, JM and Mike up in New York for dinner, but then Gabe here in Philly. So, I got a lot of in person time this week, which was awesome. Miz.
Michael Mizrahi:
I’ll jump on the doctor Lustig train, watched his YouTube video of one of his talks a few years ago and just connected the dots this morning that, that’s who he is. So, awesome to see that come through.
Josh Clemente:
Very cool
Michael Mizrahi:
On the personal side.
Josh Clemente:
Oh, sorry. Sorry, please.
Michael Mizrahi:
No, I forgot. It feels like COVID is starting to end, which is great. Now that folks are vaccinated, life is coming back.
Josh Clemente:
Totally. Mercy.
Mercy Clemente:
Professional side, I’m really excited about the content. Those new pieces that are coming are going to be really cool. And then personally, what Miz said, seems like COVID is starting to end. I’m going to see some friends this weekend in DC and we’re all going to go out to brunch and walk around. So, I’m excited for that.
Josh Clemente:
That’s fun. Murillo.
Murillo:
Excited about our recruiting process and just seeing the quality and the excitement on the candidates has been pretty great. Personally, I got a month with a running coach for my birthday. So, I’m pretty excited about that.
Josh Clemente:
Oh, very cool. Dr. Schulman had to jump. Tom.
Tom Griffin:
Yeah. The dinner and hang session with a bunch of Levels employees was a real highlight. I don’t know what that noise is. It was weird, but awesome. So, I encourage whenever anyone can get together, do it. And then professionally, I’ll go with press. It’s just crazy what we’re getting prior to launch. Wall Street Journal multiple times, New York Times. It’s just wild to me.
Josh Clemente:
Totally. Dom.
Dominic D’Agostino:
I am finishing grading my exams for MedPhys, excited to be done with spring semester. And then the next call is with Allison, and we are strategizing for finishing the recruitment for the study. So, which hopefully by this time next week, I think we’ll have all the participants.
Josh Clemente:
Very cool. It’s going to be fun. Laurie.
Laurie Morrison:
Sorry. I’m having a sneezing fit, but it’s on mute. The press updates are amazing. The stats with Twitter are amazing. It’s so excited… I’m so excited every week to just see the changes. Okay. Sorry. I’m excited about Mother’s Day. I get to have video calls with three of my kids on Sunday and I’m pretty happy about that. Call your moms.
Josh Clemente:
Well, happy Mother’s Day.
Laurie Morrison:
Thank you.
Josh Clemente:
Hao.
Hao Li:
Yeah. Laurie’s flower channel is pretty and awesome. Pretty awesome. Yes. Plus one.
Josh Clemente:
Casey.
Casey Means:
Oh my gosh. Plus one to everything, especially the flower channel. Thank you, Laurie. Something I’m inspired by this week is that we seem to be this connecting force amongst all these different, really interesting people in metabolic health. So, for instance, there’s all these people interested in cancer and CGM or microbiome and CGM, and they don’t really know each other because they’re just starting to think about this, and yet we’re connected with many of them. So, we’re becoming this sort of centralizing sort of magnet for really interesting thinkers in different spaces, and just seeing that emerge and how we can potentially connect those people and create really interesting relationships around these emerging trends, I think, and have a really positive impact on moving that forward just really excites me.
Josh Clemente:
Definitely. Haney.
Mike Haney:
On the company side, the support comments, I know we’ve seen this before, but seeing them again, just… I find that so inspiring. I’ve done that job before in my previous companies and I know how anxiety inducing and difficult it is so that it is so consistently good, and that Mercy and Braden are all so positive about it. It’s just incredibly inspiring.
Josh Clemente:
True. Gabriel.
Gabriel:
Yes. So, on the Levels side, I’m super excited about the new charts experiments that Alan, Jhon and Justin have been working on, they look great. On the personal side, had a very minor e-scooter accident. I’m totally fine, but it was scary enough that I… Yeah, I’m glad that I’m fine and didn’t break a rib. Always wear your helmet, everyone.
Josh Clemente:
Feel better. Mike D.
Mike Didonato:
I used to think going first was the challenging part, but going at the end… Because you hear everything and it’s like, “Oh no.” You forget what you’re going to say. So, I definitely have to go with the advisory board. It’s pretty amazing. And to have Dr. Schulman on the call was super awesome. If you haven’t listened to [inaudible 00:45:53] podcast, I definitely recommend that everybody does. Press, for sure. The Wall Street Journal, especially coming from finance, and literally every office I was in, there was at least one copy of the journal. And then getting to meet JM, Tom and Braden was pretty awesome. It was strange, but awesome. And also being up in New York kind of felt like the normal world was coming back, compared to last time I was there. So, it’s pretty exciting.
Josh Clemente:
Nice, Jesse.
Jesse Lavine:
It’s been really awesome getting to work with the ops team to get up to speed and help scout. And yeah, it’s been really great meeting all of you. On the personal side, I’ve got a [inaudible 00:46:38] friend who I’ve only known virtually who’s coming into town tonight. So, we’re going to go hit up a national wine bar. It’s going to be awesome to meet him.
Josh Clemente:
Very cool. My brain is failing me. Alan, did I skip you?
Alan McLean:
That’s okay. I was going to sneak it into the story at the end. Yeah. On the work side, just super thrilled, ecstatic to see data [inaudible 00:47:00] work, explorations, even if it doesn’t come to be, it’s just exciting for me to see it happens so quickly. Personal side, I’m going to clean my bike today, which doesn’t sound like a super exciting thing necessarily, but I find it really satisfying to pick it apart and strip it down and clean it up. So, I’m looking forward to that.
Josh Clemente:
Love it. Bike maintenance is fun. All right, cool. I think we’re on track here. So, Alan is going to roll right into the story of the week.
Alan McLean:
Okay. Well, so, I didn’t know exactly what these… How these were formatted. And so, I was trying to rack my brain, what would I talk about? What would the story be? And what I wanted to cover, after this chart exploration this week was how I sort of got into generative art, which is sort of a passion of mine. Something I do when I have spare time, and try to find sneaky ways to put it into my work, like the cover of the metabolic test kit. And so, some here… Some examples here of some really beautiful work that [inaudible 00:48:05]. Generative of art is essentially computationally generated art. It’s things that you could maybe draw, but would be incredibly difficult to. They’re so complex that typically it requires some math and some coding to generate. Oh, excellent.
Alan McLean:
So, I think where… The begin with this story is probably from the very beginning of my early childhood was the first actually cool movie I ever saw, stuck in my brain. Tron came out in the early eighties. I don’t know how old I was exactly when I saw it. But I remember watching this movie and thinking, “Oh my God. This is so cool. How did they do this?” This whole world was created. And next slide, please. And what’s not to like about this movie? Especially as a kid, you’ve got these amazing motorcycles flying around. You’re in a video game, a human inside a video game. They’re throwing these crazy discs that are causing other players to explode and fall apart. So, as a kid, this was a really influential movie for me.
Alan McLean:
And I think, for me, later on, I started to discover actually there was a lot of overlap in the early days with my current work and my current areas of interest. Next slide, please. When I was growing up, like a lot of kids with who had maybe a parent as an engineer or something, I would sneak on the computer and try to find software that I could use to make things. And so, I remember my early teens at home going on [inaudible 00:49:43] servers and downloading things like Photoshop and 3D Studio Max, and not really knowing how to do them, how to use them, but just playing and experimenting and creating. Essentially drawing with computers. I don’t know exactly which version of Photoshop I use first, but version four, I think, is kind of what came to mind [inaudible 00:50:00] looking out there. Next slide.
Alan McLean:
And so, one of the fun things I discovered when I was playing with Photoshop was custom filters, which, if you have a little bit of linear algebra in your background, Xinlu, maybe for you, you can do some really amazing things just by putting in some random numbers and essentially walking through an image and manipulating the brightness and the offset and the scale of the filter that you’re applying. And so, for me, this was the kind of thing where I hated math at school, but I loved this because I could see math manifest visually right in front of me.
Alan McLean:
And so, early high school or end of high school, I was like, “Okay, I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to go become an animator.” I saw the matrix and I was like, “I could do this for the rest of my life. I want to make this kind of stuff. I want to make visual effects. I want to do animation. This will be my life.” Next slide. Of course, to be an animator requires a lot of drawing. It’s actually, to be a really good animator, you have to be an amazing illustrator and be able to render things like this hundreds of times, very quickly. And I actually found this exceptionally difficult. And so, I noticed at school, I was leaning away from all these classes that were gravitating towards visual effects and animation, but I was spending a lot of time creating little hacky things on my computer, generative art, graphic design, spending time in Photoshop and illustrator and things like that.
Alan McLean:
So, the next slide. That was a shorthand way of saying I’m a terrible drawer. I can’t illustrate. It’s really hard. So, these are the kinds of things that I was doing. I didn’t make this particular image, but this was visualizing exchange attractors. And so, what I thought was really wonderful about this was it’s actually bringing form to math and you’re actually able to see these really interesting formulas manifest right on your screen. Back in the day, you’d have to leave them for a while and let them run. And eventually you’d have something like this, but it was still pretty exciting. And especially because what you could do was you could just take some predetermined formula to generate these things. You start tweaking a couple constants then you have a completely new image and it represents both you… Both your input and some preexisting work, next image. So, other permutations of strange attractors. I’ve always found these to be really beautiful. Next slide.
Alan McLean:
And so, speaking to that, sort of just play with the formula and start messing around with it. This was kind of what was amazing to me, was that there’s this math out in the world and it can generate these images. And I can add a little flavor of myself into this. And I would start playing around with the formula, adding little offsets and constants to it, and then just generating entirely new images. Next slide. So, that was a roundabout way to talking about what I really love, which is some of the generative artists that are out there these days. This is Tyler Hobbs. He does a lot of work with shapes and lines, and taking noise and generating some of these sort of structures, like the one in the left, particularly sort of falling apart circle. Next slide.
Alan McLean:
This is Anders Hoff, also known as inconvergent online. This is a pattern, an algorithm called a Sand Spline, which is essentially… You’re using noise to offset and displace millions and millions of pixels over some time. It takes quite a while to generate it, but the ultimate effect can be really beautiful. Next slide. This is Zach Lieberman. He’s based in New York. He does some amazing work. And again, a lot of his stuff is… I think this is also part of the community that I really appreciate. A lot of this stuff is open source. It’s available. You can look at it, Zach even reaches out into the community and helps people figure out how to do this kind of stuff. And he created a school called The Society for Poetic Computation, where he teaches art students, maybe what I would’ve gone to back in the day, how to basically do math, and use math in an interesting and beautiful way. Next slide.
Alan McLean:
And this is a representation of a Perlin Noise field. So, basically, you’re drawing these lines, and it’s using… Oh man, I’m not even going to try to explain it. I can look it up through code how Perlin Noise field works, but it’s basically offsetting based on the coordinates, and it’s a version of random noise. I kind of call it informed random noise because it’s based on the value adjacent to it. Next slide. And so, just to close a loop on this story, Perlin Noise, which I use in a lot of my art and a lot of my work lately is actually something that was created by Ken Perlin for the movie Tron, to generate some of these [inaudible 00:54:46] landscapes. And so, I didn’t know that until a couple of years ago, I was like, “Wow.” All kind of coming full circle here. So, yeah, that’s my story around generative art.
Josh Clemente:
Fascinating. That’s crazy that… The closed loop there. Time is a flat circle. Very cool. Well, I love seeing these Perlin Noise fields making their way onto our metabolic health kit concepts. Looking forward to your Tron inspiration being part of Levels going forward. All right, team. Great timing this week. Sorry to cut everyone short on their shares, but I think it gave us a nice opportunity to get up to speed on Alan’s art side projects and interests. So, thank you all for contributing. This was a killer week as usual, and these are starting to become hard to one up, week after week, but we’re doing it somehow. Thank you all. Have a great weekend.