Transcript
Josh Clemente (00:02):
Okay. Well, welcome to October 16th 2020. Got a lot of great people on the call today. I’m very excited for this one. We have some special guests. I’m going to kick right into that and start off by welcoming Alex Cunningham. Alex is a good friend and also one of the earliest supporters of Levels. He’s an ambassador, meaning we’ve kept him very tightly in the group. He’s been watching all the Friday Forums. He shares links with us and vice versa, and he’s a super, super successful marketing and sponsorships affiliations aficionado. We’ve learned a lot from him. I’m going to turn it over to him to say a few words, but just excited to have you on the call, and thanks for taking the time.
Alex Cunningham (00:46):
Yeah, rock on. Seriously honored to be on the Friday Forum. Yeah. My background is just business and chemical engineering. Then aged 21 to 23 realized really didn’t like chemical engineering, and I also hit a major health bottom at 23. Drug abuse is a big part of my story. Finally was able to get clean and sober at 23. Then things really changed for me where it was like, all of a sudden, I just wanted to start taking care of myself and my body and stuff like that. The way I learned to own my health was all through influencers and companies. So I’m very grateful to them because where else would people learn it? It’s certainly not from the government or the American Heart Association or anything like that. Of course, like with Dom’s podcast and just read folks’ books and blogs and stuff like that, and that’s how it happened. So now I take care of affiliate wholesale and sponsorships for Perfect Keto and Equip. Honestly, a dream job for me because I feel like I get to be on that influencer/company intersection, and that’s the path that I took too.
Alex Cunningham (02:01):
Current interest is learning about how Bitcoin works. I thought it’d be like a couple of week process, but it’s been years. But it just gets me really stoked because I feel like having a sound monetary system is possibly extremely important towards having a sound food system. You know what I mean? Just creating proper incentives and the ability to save. Then also with healthcare, the ability to issue micro rewards. I think it could be really sweet to help people be more compliant with good health practices, especially something like your blood sugar and stuff like that. But Levels has been huge for me. I’m a massive fan. They used to call me Alex Cunningyam because I used to literally bring sweet potatoes to the office, and that was my go-to source of clean carbs. Levels exposed that to me. It literally rockets me more than anything else, even if I pair it with some fat. So now I’m very low on the sweet potatoes, and if I hadn’t of seen that, I probably would have just been crushing sweet potatoes for 50 years and crushing my blood sugar.
Alex Cunningham (03:12):
I also loved learning that just adding five to 10 grams of fat totally changes a meal for me in a good way. I learned that cassava flour tortillas are A-okay. So I start my day with breakfast tacos now. Then this is my third month getting to use Levels, and I swear, I eat very similarly, and I feel like the difference is just having a lot of sunlight and maybe it being warmer months, able to tolerate my normal routine way better. Also, just like, I’m just thrilled about Levels because I feel like the enthusiasm comes through the product. It feels like the product is alive, and I feel like that comes from everybody sitting on this call today. So, yeah, just grateful to be a small part of it. So, thank you.
Josh Clemente (04:01):
Awesome to have you. Thanks for chiming in and joining us this week. We’ll have to do this more often. You should definitely loop up with David on that Bitcoin stuff. He’s the oracle of Bitcoin in my world.
Alex Cunningham (04:12):
Nice.
David Flinner (04:13):
Yeah, a lot to discuss.
Josh Clemente (04:14):
Yeah. Well, I’m going to introduce Dr. Hull for us.
Dr. Allison Hull (04:18):
Yeah. Hi. Thanks to Dom for connecting me with everyone here at Levels. My passion is prevention. I’m actually dual board certified pediatrician and adult internist. So I get the opportunity to work with all ages. The goal of mine is prevention of disease. Unfortunately, in my 15, 30 minute encounter with patients, despite as much as I try to encourage, inspire and educate, that’s not enough time for people to walk away and truly develop behavior change and, of course, the epidemic of obesity, diabetes and everything that comes along with it. So I developed this program and I’ve been doing it for about two and a half years, and we’ve had tremendous success in improving metabolic health.
Dr. Allison Hull (05:03):
A key component of my passion really is behavior change because that’s the secret sauce that we really need to ignite in people. That’s what I love about the Levels product, and when I’m actually going to get to use it myself here shortly, is another tool to really promote that positive behavior change. That that’s, if we can make that happen, then that’s how we really make progress in helping people live well, live long and just improve their quality of their life and wellbeing. So I’m excited to see how Levels takes my program to the next level, I guess no pun intended there, because what I created has already been very effective, but I think having this device and having that real time immediate feedback is really going to fine-tune the process for individuals. At the end of the day, I don’t care who does it. I just want people to live better. So if I can help you guys be successful, I’m here to make that happen. That’s about it.
Josh Clemente (06:03):
Amazing.
Casey Means (06:05):
We are so excited to have you on the call, Dr. Hull. I feel like I have to share your fun fact because it is so awesome. So Dr. Hull in residency, when she was doing a dual residency of pediatrics and internal medicine, most people just do one of those two, she wanted to run a marathon and told her supervising attending physician. He, of course, thought she was crazy because residency is super, super busy, and told her this would never happen, which totally fired her up. She ended up qualifying that year, ran the Disney Marathon and qualified and then ran the Boston Marathon that year, and thought about her attending at every mile marker. So I just feel like we are so lucky to have you working with us-
Dr. Allison Hull (06:48):
Oh, thank you.
Casey Means (06:49):
… and that type of fire is just really emblematic of the Levels team. So it’s super amazing accomplishment, and I love that. Love that fun fact.
Dr. Allison Hull (06:58):
Thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah. Just tell me I can’t do something and I’ll make it happen.
Josh Clemente (07:04):
Awesome. Yeah. Very exciting progress on the research stuff. I personally can’t wait to see how this program goes and to be a part of it from a Levels perspective. So, looking forward to it. Okay. Jumping into the achievements for the week. Just to highlight right of the bat, we also had Cohort Four of our Weight Loss Challenge go from undersubscribed to oversubscribed in about two hours. For those of you that don’t know the Weight Loss Challenge, this is something that Justin Mares, who, he’s the founder of Perfect Keto, Kettle & Fire, he thought of this idea where we basically get people who are trying to lose weight to use the Levels program, keep their blood sugar within a range, and for every day that they do so they earn back a small portion of a bet that they put up. So basically, there’s a $850 wager, and then you earn back $25 per day if you stay in range.
Josh Clemente (07:58):
So this has been quite successful. We’ve had average weight loss of about 9.8 pounds across the past three cohorts. Last cohort we experimented with a different community where we used Circle community app. Prior to that we had used WhatsApp, which was very vibrant. So this cohort we sent out a note to our current wait list for those people who had indicated an interest in weight loss, and we very quickly, I think, we got about 100 sign ups, which was crazy. So we oversubscribed Cohort Four and spilled into the next month’s cohort.
Josh Clemente (08:32):
Super awesome. It shows a lot of intent from our wait list and also a lot of people who are really keying into the social chatter they’re seeing about these challenges and the successes. So this’ll be a fun one. We’re returning to pure weight loss interest. Previously, we had a few people who were in there just for ketogenic interest. They just wanted to monitor CGM and maybe trim off a few pounds. But this one is going to be for people who otherwise would likely be going to a diet program of some kind. I will also be pulling back the WhatsApp chat, which will be great.
Josh Clemente (09:02):
I want to highlight for ops. So we’ve had, you can see the chart on the right there, the daily active users. That is going up and to the right very quickly. We’ve pushed out, I think, double the orders in the past two weeks that we have in any prior week. Currently, ops is holding the line with amazing happiness scores. So the way that they’re handling tickets and keeping people moving through the process has been amazing. We’ve got a 94% happiness rating. Nobody has rated us poorly. So this is just a really huge accomplishment. Thanks to everyone, Laurie, Mercy, Mike, Braden, Miz, obviously, for just keeping this stuff moving and dealing with the tidal wave. It’s really cool to test our systems. Some things are going to fall through, but this is how we learn.
Josh Clemente (09:46):
We made some changes to the in-app chat process. So we swapped out the old SMS, well, this is internal right now, but the old SMS approach, and now we have an in-app Help Scout integration. So Help Scout is the system we’re using for ops and customer success. So now the FAQ are available and there’s chat integration right in the app. This is also on the Getting Started page, the levelshealth/start. So this’ll be a nice improvement. It should help consolidate communications and remove the additional burden of SMS. So this’ll be another experiment we’re going to be rolling out quickly to the entire user base.
Josh Clemente (10:24):
Internally, we also have released sleep syncing from Apple Health and Google Fit. So previously, we only had heart rate monitor or heart rate syncing. So now we can pull in sleep data, and this is like just a huge step change once again. So as we continue to improve the exercise and activity integrations with the wearables that you might have beyond Levels, like WHOOP or Garmin watches, we can now also pull in sleep stages and also identify things like wake up times and bedtimes, and so identify for people how short nights of sleep versus longer nights of sleep affect their metabolic control or what the dawn effect might be for them and how they might be able to reorganize their schedules accordingly. So really stoked for that.
Josh Clemente (11:04):
We’ve got a Pro Dashboard up and running now with the Detroit Redwings coaching staff. So Lisa McDowell is an NHL and Olympic dietician, and she is setting up a dashboard with a lot of Redwings players. They’re going to basically experiment with a closed cohort where Lisa guides them through improving metabolic control. They’re going to use a WhatsApp chat very similar to the Weight Loss Challenge to just see what kind of chatter we can get and see what the competitive environment is, and just learn from this as a cohort of professional athletes who are also trying to stay super fit and improve their nutrition. So this is going to be an interesting experiment as well.
Josh Clemente (11:46):
Then finally, our first Bulletproof podcast ad went live on Tuesday. So this was a good experiment. I think supposedly the numbers on the conversions were quite good, I’ll let Tom speak to the specifics here, but considering it was our first one, and podcast ads typically are a process of experimentation and trial and error. So we had quite a few conversions there, and I think we have several more queued up to launch sometime soon.
Josh Clemente (12:17):
Lastly, the Wearable Challenge, we also got an offer from Zero, the fasting app, which, they’re going to donate Zero Plus, which is a premium feature including a lot of really cool educational content from Dr. Peter Attia and Rhonda Patrick. So we’ll be able to offer this to all the Wearable Challenge participants as a free bonus to being a part of the Wearable Challenge, and it’s going to be really exciting. There’s obviously a few other really interesting things here. We’ve got people from TechCrunch coming into the program this week, wait list broke 40,000. We’ve got folks from the Mets, New York Mets, MLB joining the program, being extremely stoked about it, and had a Instagram Live yesterday with the American volleyball professionals Kim Hildreth and Sarah Schermerhorn, which was pretty fun. Any questions on recent achievements? Cool.
Josh Clemente (13:17):