Josh Clemente (00:00):
Welcome to the first meeting of September 2021. Let’s jump right in. The formatting always changes on this slide when I present it, it’s so strange. Okay, first off, great specs coming together on some of the core projects from the responsible individuals. So we’ve got table stakes design, progress, membership model, nutritionist marketplace. The main journey, a lot of great progress on the spec side of things. And those, of course, will get translated into execution in the coming weeks.
Josh Clemente (00:31):
Xinlu successfully divided the back end into two separate services. So this is the first big step towards scaling, which will allow us to support more traffic, more load in general, and our designs on future growth. We’ve got explorations like additive scoring underway, which have been super insightful towards understanding how the field changes when you’ve got a different metric that’s tracking. So hours and range versus the day score. It’s a very different dynamic, and it’s been quite useful, for me, and I think for others on the team to actually experience these things as opposed to just thinking about them.
Josh Clemente (01:07):
Stripe Auto ID is live, so huge shout out to the team for getting this across the finish line. The validation verification of ID stuff is a really huge ops burden, but it’s far less of a burden, or it has historically been far less of a burden than sending un-validated orders into the physician network. So with Auto ID, it alleviates that even further. So this is just a really big win for the team and appreciate everyone continuing to make iterative progress on our back end and ops stuff. We got progress on social, the emoji reactions, you can now delay your subscription from the profile, wake log filtering, food log analysis and scoring iterations all happening this week and/or shipped this week.
Josh Clemente (01:50):
Big progress on product stuff. And then on the content side, we had a couple highlights. Casey’s Everyone on content piece went live, which was just awesome. Super tactical, the things that Casey learned along the way launching an editorial operation at a startup, which was not in her wheelhouse when she started. So it’s just a really great read. And then Tom’s is right behind it about the podcast strategy and generally the tactical side of getting anything, press, PR, tour related we’re going to use these same steps on the YouTube effort that we’re pushing forward. So another really tactical piece, I think these are so great for generating goodwill in our community and in the wider community people are reading. It doesn’t necessarily have to map 100% onto their experience, but just knowing that it is possible to achieve these things. And these are the steps we took, I think is just huge.
Josh Clemente (02:43):
And then Casey recorded a whole new level episode with Dr. Sarah Gottfried, which is going to be great. So that hasn’t dropped yet, but it is recorded. And then we had the Whoop slash Levels case study where we had team from both Whoop and from Levels each wore each other’s products. And we did some analysis on the final data. It shows that there are associations with an increased levels day score and total and restorative sleep, sleep consistency, lower resting heart rate, and an increased WHOOP recovery score. So this is all also very preliminary. It’s not something that we can take to the bank necessarily, but it is really important that we can see these sorts of associations, talk about them and line up maybe future research and get the broader community thinking about this. Let’s see, what else do we want to highlight here? We’ve got contact with Bari Weiss.
Josh Clemente (03:31):
JM had a really awesome recorded conversation with Greg Greeley who was the originator of Amazon Prime. And so that’s all going to be quite instructive for our membership model and how we think about the package and opportunities that we provide to people in terms of free versus paid product. So really great conversation, highly recommend listening to it. We had a lot of very supportive tweets this week, people putting us on the list of uncomfortably bullish startups, which is always good to see. A lot of great testimonials from people who are starting and saying the setup experience has been just fantastic, sleek, absolutely incredible videos. These are the sorts of things that we really need to hear because this is a complex process, of course. Another one that I really want to highlight is this person here saying, “Nothing else on the planet would get me to want to put a needle anywhere near my body. ”
Josh Clemente (04:22):
Now, of course the needle is not staying in the arm, but the fact that this person wants to apply it is a really, it’s a paradigm shift. And then some awesome user generated content this week. This customer goes, “Versus my metabolism video is super high production quality and these are the sorts of things that this like a grassroots movement taking shape.” We got the Pompano brothers getting started in the program. We were shouted out by Rich Role on his podcast or actually discussed several times with this episode with Sergey Young who’s leading a longevity fund. And we’ve been in touch with SilverLake and a couple other big firms just kind of chomping at the bit to hear about our growth plans. And Ally dropped another video about [inaudible 00:05:03]. So I think we touched on everything, be well by Kelly episode. I think Casey was invited onto Max Lugavere’s podcast, The Genius Life, and we ran our first ad with Pod of Jake.
Josh Clemente (05:14):
Yeah, some great screenshots here of program design that Alan threw together, which I think he’ll touch on. Okay, jumping ahead, I want to introduce Othman Laraki. Please let me know if I mispronounced your last name there, but Othman is co-founder of Color and Mixer Labs. He was previously at Twitter, previously at Google, investor and advisor, huge supporter. Really appreciate you taking the time, Othman, to join us here on this call and would love to hear from you.
Othman Laraki (05:43):
Hey, good morning. That’s good to see everyone and also really impressive to see all the updates. Feels like the productivity of the team at this scale is pretty incredible. So it’s always impressive and I’ve been also really impress as an investor, I mean started a few companies myself just to see the way in which the Levels team has been, I think really effective at really participating in the dialogue around the definition of the whole new category. And I think one of the interesting thing that’s happening now is the technology’s been around for a little while, but I think a big part of what you’re doing is changing people’s perception of where it can be used in the scope of the market. And so I think that’s really exciting and huge opportunity. So I’ve been just really, really excited to be a bit on the sidelines.
Othman Laraki (06:36):
I used the CGM, what was it? Maybe about seven or six years ago and was so amazed by how the value of that information and how effective it could be to change people’s daily habits. And so one of the things I used to do before Color was I was one of the VPs of Products at Twitter and ran about half of the product org. One of the things that I worked on was the growth team, and it was all about how do you build habits and change people’s behavior at scale. And interacting with the basic CGM was like, “Wow, this is actually a building block to really change one of our fundamental aspects of our lives in terms of what we choose to eat and how we live our lives.” And so I was really excited to see when this team got started, I think finally, I think going after basically that kind of concept.
Othman Laraki (07:31):
And so yeah, congrats for all the kind of progress and an impact, and I don’t know what would be most valuable to the team today, but happy to… People have specific topics or questions but we’ve been, last eight years been working on a company called Color. So we’ve been scaling kind of large distributed healthcare services over the last year. It’s been a really big year for us because our platforms has turned into this piece of infrastructure that’s been used for some of the biggest public health services in the country. We’ve served, I think over 10 million people by now just in the last year and just seeing that really come to its own. And so I think it’s a very exciting time in healthcare in general. It’s I think finally at the point where technology companies like yours, like ours can make a really big difference. And so I think you’re well timed and so very excited to see the progress.
Josh Clemente (08:38):
Well, thanks very much Othman. And it’s awesome to see the growth and progress with Color and the genomic efforts as well. It’s super huge for pathfinding and quite exciting to see technology hitting it stride in these various areas. I think it bodes super well. So yeah, really appreciate you being a strong supporter and again, making the time to come in and share with us. Team really appreciates this.
Othman Laraki (09:04):
No, no, absolutely. And please, as always, feel free to reach out to me as a resource. And I think one of the thing that it keeps coming up again, again in healthcare is the biggest challenge is accessing the market and figuring out people can build great software and technology and products and figuring out the mechanism in which you can really scale it to large population, I think oftentimes tend to be one of the biggest hurdles. But I think when you’re in a time when the market is very dynamic as it is right now, I think that’s one of my internal sayings that I say inside Color a lot is that embrace the entropy. It’s like when there’s a lot of entropy in the world that I think that’s when startups ours actually have a very big opportunity to make a difference. But yeah, please feel free to reach out with anything I can help with.
Josh Clemente (09:57):
Absolutely. Thank you. Yeah, I reference entropy frequently myself, so…
Othman Laraki (10:01):
All right.
Josh Clemente (10:03):
On the same page there. All right. Thanks a lot. Jumping ahead. Quick touch on company priorities. So right now we’re focused on membership model, migrating to subscriptions and additional product offerings. We’ve got social experiments underway and guided journey. So these are the big three buckets. Of course, we’ve got this in Notion, so if you’d more detail jump in there, we’ll continue to update these as we knock them off the list. We’re also planning to support 10,000 members. This is the Scaling Project, Table Stakes design. These are the sort of big responsible owner projects we’ve got underway. Supplemental testing, nutritionist marketplace. And Quick Culture and Kudos slide. I’m going to hand this one off to Alan.
Alan Mclean (10:45):
Yeah, I wanted to call out John because he’s incredibly good at finding ways to scope our projects in a really positive and productive way. Sometimes I come up with some crazy design or some screen and I send it to him and we talk about it a little bit and he finds a way to push back where it doesn’t make sense. Sometimes I’m a little over eager on throwing gradients around and just sometimes both subtle and larger ways. And I think the magic there is that he’s able to give feedback that sort of change, not just like to get it out the door quicker, but he actually makes the design better. I think Justin’s really good at this too, but I think lately I’ve been really experiencing [inaudible 00:11:28], just want to call him out and tell him I appreciate him. [inaudible 00:11:32].
Josh Clemente (11:33):
Love that. Thanks both of you and thank you John for raising the necessary questions to scope projects and move them faster. That’s exactly what we need at this stage. And thank you, Alan, for being receptive to the feedback and being willing to throw the kudos out there. Okay, Miz.
Michael Mizrahi (11:52):
Yeah, and we somehow missed mentioning this last week, but this is last week’s news. I assume most folks have seen these culture videos by now. Almost all of us participated in these interviews with Campbell. Really, really nice finished products. So major props to Ben and Campbell for running with this. levels.links/culture is publicly available. It’s a Notion page which links to these five cultural principles that we talk about and each of the kind of five or six minute videos on each of those. So feel free to share this around. If you haven’t watched these, definitely try to get one or two in a day. They definitely pump you up in a nice way. And it’s really interesting to hear the team’s perspective on each of these principles.
Michael Mizrahi (12:32):
Sam tweeted this out earlier this week, or I think that was… Yeah, that was on Monday. And we’re also sharing this across LinkedIn and in some of our recruiting materials to really share what it’s like to work at Uber and kind of put forward our cultural principles. So this was the third version of this project. We’ll continue to iterate on this and capture it as things change over time. Did I really say that Justin? Wow. Sorry. Levels really need to unprogram that and yeah, that’s it for here.
Josh Clemente (13:02):
David.
David (13:04):
Yeah, so most of this is going to be with the responsible individuals, but I just wanted to quickly shout out great progress on getting all of the specs kicked off. We’ll hand it off to you, JM, to start.
JM (13:14):
Okay. Membership model transition. I shipped a scoping doc for the first phase of that, put that up last night after a really great call with Sam and Andrew. Miz spun up the app store review effort as a responsible individual, which is he did a fantastic job on that and I’m excited as we move forward. Membership home on Notion is at level.links/membership. And I’ll do one more on the next slide.
JM (13:46):
Metabolic Health Kit / Blood Testing Phase Two, we’re inching along there. The advisor document that sort of talks about the best ranges for all the things we’re going to test has been finalized. It’s fantastic. Thank you Dr. Casey. And Alan put together a really nice mock of the results page that I suspect he’ll be sharing again later. And I really love it and I am now preparing the phase one scope for that, which should come through this weekend. And you can learn more at levels.Link/blood. Thank you very much.
Josh Clemente (14:24):
Great URL, even better project. I’m very excited for this one. Thank you, JM. Murillo.
Murillo Nicacio de Maraes (14:31):
All right, so on the Additive Scoring project. So the reason behind this project we’re addressing some user feedback. It’s been consistent that some of our users have been having trouble with our current metabolic score. So to address those, we need to answer what a good scoring system is supposed to be and we’re trying to have a scoring system that’s accurate and fair of where the users are at, highlights points of improvement and encourage positive action to improve that score. As a bonus, it’s a great opportunity to create entry points to the guided journey that we’re… That’s one of our priorities right now.
Murillo Nicacio de Maraes (15:19):
So next slide please. So I divided the project in three phases. Experimentation, implementation, and validation. Right now we’re in an experimental phase, so you’re seeing a bunch of experiments just roll out. We even pushed one out to everyone so you could try it. Next slide please. Yeah, so you’ve learned a lot so far. So one of the reasons one of our initial experiments failed was that it didn’t feel fresh enough every time you opened the app, it felt stale, felt like the data was still the same. So it didn’t provide users that sense of I should open the app more so to have updates.
Murillo Nicacio de Maraes (16:07):
Another learning we had is that the metrics that we’re providing is actually are helpers to understand the glucose data. So it shouldn’t overtake, it shouldn’t be the star of the show. The glucose data, the real time glucose data is the real star of the show. So our metrics should really only help you make sense of that and improve that.
Murillo Nicacio de Maraes (16:29):
And yeah, just be careful with information overload. Our charts already have a lot of information in them and we don’t want to just provide too much information at once the user so they don’t know where to start. We still have some open questions that we want to explore< we want to explore different metrics. This sites ours in range and a few different time scales, so it may be interesting to measure individual spikes and how good or bad those were and to provide user feedback regarding that. But we don’t know until you try. So that’s it for additive scoring for now.
Kunal Shah (17:17):
Sweet. So we have some pretty short updates on social this week. We shipped the, of course, the first version of the community view, thanks to John and [inaudible 00:17:31], and also thanks to Alan and David for all the work here. And there is a product [inaudible 00:17:38] coming together as for all of our learnings here and a proposition for how we move forward on this front. What does social in the Levels app actually feel like and could go right and what could go wrong. So it’ll be shared shortly and we are very much open to feedback from everyone who has strong opinions about social. So please don’t hesitate to ping me. Thanks. That’s all for social.
Josh Clemente (18:06):
Thank you. Justin.
Justin Stanley (18:12):
Okay, sorry, my track [inaudible 00:18:15] froze. So this new project is Table Stakes Design Experience and it’s focused on… We’ve scoped to focus on making the app feel cohesive and consistent and it’s design so that we can launch and feel not embarrassed by the app. We did, the initial scoping for the project, which was done is about 18 or so in scope tasks that we’ve identified. And each task was kind of put into whether it was a high priority, medium, low based on some criteria. And we’re going to go forward with all of the high priority tasks in phase one, which I put a target of Friday, October 8th to get finished.
Justin Stanley (18:58):
And we have another phase that we might get to items that are in it, but we might delayed further depending on how phase one goes or how strongly we feel about what’s going on around that time. And one thing that was updated is all of the legacy grays in the app, I just kind of changed some hexes, so now they’re black and they kind of match the rest of the app. It feels a bit more cohesive, just that simple change and it has Levels link there you can check out.
Justin Stanley (19:28):
Next. So an update on my data, not as much happened just because I was working on the other project this week, but got the score trends chart going there and then as well 24 hour chart time formatting. So in the past, it was just showing always AM, PM, whereas the rest of the elements on screen would show 24 hour time. So now the chart supports that and part of that was just because I was hitting some issues where the scale, now that we’re crossing over days, the scale had really, really bad overlapping of labels. So I had to go forward and make custom date format and nothing I could do about that. But that’s done now. So next up is adding scrolling back in history on the charts so you can see even more data. That’s it.
Josh Clemente (20:20):
Awesome. Yeah, really looking forward to that. The long views of score trends.
Scott Klein (20:28):
All right, let’s talk about Guided Experience. So we are about to kick off a good bit of work to get the guided experience of the first month really up-leveled to the next sort of phase. So go to the next slide, there’s a sort a couple goals for this. So just to go through them. Number one is we need to calibrate this to your own personal journey. Looking through a lot of the NPS feedback or just customer sort of results, we get a lot of things in the vein of A, what do I do now? You give me all this data, but B, it just doesn’t seem like this is maybe fit for me. It seems like it’s a little too strict. I don’t really know what to do, how do I replace my diet? And so we’re going to start to come up with a way that we can baseline people through the first week maybe and then continually baseline them with support data and some quality of life type of surveys.
Scott Klein (21:18):
So the experience that you get is going to be level set to sort where you’re at. Second thing is it’s going to be progressive in its education. So what I mean by that is right now we dump you into this spark line of your glucose and you can see all the sort of minute to minute perturbations basically, which can be sort of shame inducing to people in a way if they don’t know how to fix it. And so we want to start, I think by rolling out these concepts of metabolic health, things like glucose excursions, things like time and target. We can do this over a period of days or weeks as opposed to just dumping you into the raw data. Third thing is going to be just making sure that it’s actionable. So if you’re food logging something that we think is going to be a pretty high glycemic load, we can recommend right away before you’re done eating that you go take a walk afterward.
Scott Klein (22:04):
If you want to start replacing some of your normal things, maybe you’re big into cereal, we could recommend something like magic spoon. There are things that we just want to be able to make sure that people are not asking the question, “What now?” when they get to the end of the first couple weeks. So I think that there’s going to be things in the vein of physical activity, things in the vein of meal competitions, so making sure you’re eating protein and fat with carbs, et cetera.
Scott Klein (22:27):
And then this is maybe kind of my own pet project, but I really am interested in how we can do some zero friction diet experiments. So the challenges that we have right now still require people to go out and purchase and cook their own food, but there’s a lot of interesting new prepackaged foods, sort of the processed health of them not withstanding, but I think we’re just trying to get people to notice a little bit more when they use cauliflower rice instead of normal rice or if they use a keto ice cream bar versus a normal ice cream bar. We want to start to build in these feedback loops and I’m hoping that there’s ways for us to, as part of the first month, just send them stuff on behalf of Levels to say, “Hey, it looks like your diet maybe falls into this category. Here’s a couple things that we would just like you to try because we want you to notice what the difference is in terms of how it affects your blood sugar.”
Scott Klein (23:12):
So these are roughly the categories that we’re going to go after on the guided experience for the first month. So next slide. Alan, do you want to talk about your initial design work on the day review?
Alan Mclean (23:26):
Yeah, yeah. So I think there’s a loom and some slides you can walk through and it already shared in the product design thread. But I think the gist of it is I think users expect a really personalized experience from us. We’re sticking something in their arm and if we can’t deliver a personalized experience, we [inaudible 00:23:45]. So next slide. And so I think in general what we’re going to need to do, deliver a more personalized experience for users is we probably definitely need more data around you, more context, more interactions, a better understanding of what you’re capable of. We need to know your objective, why did you use Levels? Why are you using Levels? What are you trying to achieve? Number three, how are you moving against that goal? What is our understanding of progress against it? Are there objective ways of measuring it? And then finally some kind of pulse check on the state of mind and how you’re doing.
Alan Mclean (24:23):
We want to be very sensitive to that and we’ve got interventions and programs that can help keep you on your journey too. Next slide. So we did a quick jam on what potentially a cadence for a daily check-in might look like. And so I think there’s… The slides are go into more detail on this, but in essence this is kind of a check in on where you are in the first screen, where you are in the program, how many days are you on, what have your scores been? We identify opportunities in the day to see how you’re doing and is there something that we may have contributed to your score being low or high? Can we address it? Why does it matter? And then providing something, essentially a task or something to think about during that day. Something to focus on. So perhaps if you’re not sleeping well, we can call out how to make time your meals for the day so that you get a little bit better sleep.
Alan Mclean (25:20):
You don’t have a big crash in the middle of the night or maybe you’re spiking personally in the morning and not sabotaging your whole day. So here’s some tips on breakfast. Maybe you show a little video and we explain why. So I think there’s going to be a whole gamut of these things. We can create little templates for what a day review might be. And our hope is that if we have a sort of cadence for checking in on a regular basis, we can develop a better understanding of where you’re at, give you some actionable guidance every day and keep you engaged in the Levels experience. That’s it for guided programs. Yeah.
Scott Klein (25:54):
It’s good to call out too. I think a couple people have mentioned just high level concepts around this. Peter Tia did a sort of a CGM AMA. Recently and he talked about how at the beginning of people’s journeys, it’s really a 90% exploration and understanding and maybe 10% accountability. And then as time goes on and you build in these feedback loops, it’s shifting. So our product is eventually going to encompass both that we’re just sort of focusing our efforts here on the front half of that. I have a big ask for everybody, which is we need to talk to people that have tried Levels and just didn’t like it or they were just confused about what to do. So this could be friends, family members. I have a friend here in Seattle who basically said, “I put the first sensor on it, confirmed that I eat like crap. I threw the next sensor away.”
Scott Klein (26:37):
That’s the kind of person that we want to talk to because these are the people that we were trying to reach, but they didn’t get the, “How do I change things to make this better?” I think everybody has an intent on being healthier than they are right now, but it could be a mix of goals, it could be a mix of understanding, could be a mix of just time management. We need to find this out. So if there’s anybody that you know would be willing to talk to me specifically, I’m going to be doing a bunch of customer calls coming up here in the next couple weeks and would love to talk to those people. So…
Josh Clemente (27:08):
Awesome. David.
David (27:12):
Yeah, thanks everyone. Just want to call out that even our newest hires are pushing things out, so congrats Steph on getting some of those changes out there. Helena, really cool word… I think what you call it, word cluster. I was really [inaudible 00:27:29] of our food logs and Kunal on the delayed prescription. So great to see the fast and strong week overall.
Josh Clemente (27:41):
Awesome, thanks team. Rapid hiring update. You’ll note that we have dropped the head of clinical product off this list as in keeping with last week’s update and we are still looking for software engineers and our growth generalist position is open. Believe that is it on this one. Over to Chris.
Chris Jones (28:03):
Couple updates on the Member Experience. First, I created a new Notion document on NPS specifically around trying to get better coverage of our members, those that don’t complete the beta. Talking to kind of Scott’s point around the people that are filling out our surveys today are the kind of ones going all the way through and probably really engage. We actually need to find out where they drop off. So coverage better and also insights. Related to that is the screenshots on the right. I’m taking a number of our NPS comments that we have today and running them through a number of text analytics tools. So these are just a couple of screenshots from some tools where they can do things like top trends over time, when your score drops, from month to month where the drivers in the waterfall analysis and really digging in of, “Hey, our NPS went up or down five points month or month. Why?”
Chris Jones (28:51):
This kind of helps you dive into the areas that are kind of moving or changing. Is it because of price? Is it because of new analytics? Is it because we change something on our end? So a lot more coming on that is purely exploratory and investigation now as they kind of understand what the players can do. But I know I’m super excited about that space. So I’m bringing some people along in the journey. On the support standpoint, a new monthly operations deck that I released earlier this week. It is now complete with a loom overview. Thank you Casey for your feedback on that. And the FAQ feedback links that we added last week, we’re starting to get data, but the engagement on it is pretty low, which absolutely is typical, but it just means it’s going to take us a little bit longer to kind of get good reads on which content people view and find helpful versus not.
Chris Jones (29:41):
So a little lower and expected but not any alarm. And then lastly on support, we set a new record, the team on 89% of the responses were within under an hour, which is just incredible for a team. It’s typical email response is 24 hours is the expectation and the fact that almost 90% of people we get back to within an hour with as such a small team is just, it’s beyond me. So I just want to say huge shout out to the team for continue acceleration on that one and hitting milestones. And then the only update on TruePill is we’re going to be moving some fulfillment from four states to Hayward for shorter times. Originally, these were filled out in New York and we’re just doing some basic site optimizations, trying to reduce and streamline both cost and quicker fulfillment. And that’s it.
Josh Clemente (30:31):
Awesome. You shout out to the team, that’s an amazing statistic. Right, we got Ben’s remote update for the week.
Ben (30:46):
[inaudible 00:30:46]. Weekly recap for financials. I’ve been off the grid for most of this week here, so we’re going to run through these pretty quick. We’re not going to do a weekly recap because there’s only a short period of performance a couple days and there hasn’t been any change to our cash position or our burns. So very strong month. It’s our strongest month to date. $836,000 in recognized revenue. Quite a significant jump from last month. So 34% month over month growth given that we had 649 in recognized revenue in July. 821 in cash generated. So you can see there’s a pretty significant bump in our traction. Yearly, so we had [inaudible 00:31:33] $81,000 of recognized revenue in August of 20. You can see 836. So that is a 937% increase year over year. And then from a subscription standpoint, we had $13,000 of subscription revenue in August of 20 and 202K in subscription revenue this year.
Ben (31:52):
So 1437% increase, pretty significant bump from year over year and even month over month in subscription revenue. Highlights are… Oops, highlights are so $278,000. It’s 33% of our recognized revenue. This month was driven from HYMAN, it was 698 conversions. So that podcast that Casey and Mark did led to some pretty significant, not just awareness for Levels and for metabolic health, but conversions as far as us getting members into the beta program and through the pipeline.
Ben (32:29):
Strongest week to date so in the history of Levels $286,000 in recognized revenue generated in one week, and that was shortly after the HYMAN podcast drop. 836K in monthly revenue and that’s again our strongest month we’ve had in the history of Levels. And then we hit 6 million in all time revenue in August about midway through the month. Pretty significant given that we hit 5 million in all time revenue in July. So that is growth for the month. Nice recap. [inaudible 00:33:02] are, thank you. Professionally, thanks so much to Tom and Sam and Miz for covering me while I was away.
Ben (33:08):
Ended up having very limited access to cell service, which was unplanned, but have made it work. So I’m back on the mainland right now, came into record this loom and get these slides done. Personally, it’s been a really nice time with the family. We’ve seen lots of bears, we’ve seen baby turtles hatch, we’ve seen lots of eagles, lots of wildlife and spending time fishing, doing fun things like that. So excited to get back and jamming with the team, but it’s been really nice with the family for the week. So that is growth and that is everything going on here. So that’s it.
Josh Clemente (33:45):
Thank you, Ben. Coming to us from the Safeway parking lot in Kenora, Ontario, according to the other Canadians we’ve got on the call. All right, jump into… I believe that’s… Yep, Tom?
Tom Griffin (33:57):
Yep. All right, good to be back after being out last week. There are no major surprises here, but just wanted to close the loop on August. Again, HYMAN with a record setting performance by far in terms of revenue generated. The rest of our kind of tried and true partners, KELLY, DAVE, BEN, DHRU, all performed similarly to the way they normally do on a standard month when there’s in a major promo. And then we had a couple new codes jump into the top 10 list here, PERLMUTTER from a newsletter and KEVINJUBBAL from his YouTube video. And then over there on the right you’ll see all codes. So these are all promo codes, which includes DOUBLEOPT, so I think HYMAN and DOUBLEOPT accounted for about 50% of revenue in August. Next slide.
Tom Griffin (34:43):
Some quick highlights from the week. So we’ve got two new ad experiments that went live. Again, goal here to generate a bunch of revenue, but it’s really helpful for us to just learn. So Kelly of course is an audience and a platform that we validated, but we started doing podcast advertising with her relatively cheap this week, so it’ll be cool to see how these play and what type of money we want to invest in the future. And then that obscure blue dot below is Pod of Jake. And this is an interesting experiment. This is kind of an up and coming show of a young kid. He works directly with [inaudible 00:35:19], who many of, and he somehow had many top guests across the industry on his podcast and it’s a growing show and we’ve got kind of a title sponsor for the next season alongside Aura for very cheap.
Tom Griffin (35:33):
So it’d be interesting to see how that plays out. Some new UGC there in the middle. Austin McGuffy, aka Metabolism Mentor. Austin is really interesting guy and I’ve been chatting with him a bit, even just today, he’s going to be creating a number of more videos for us and he’s just very missioned aligned. He’s had a lot of chronic illness run in his family and he’s specifically focused on educating communities that are underrepresented and diverse, especially in the health and tech community. So excited to see where that goes. And then on the right there, just calling out again some new conversations. Genius Life, Max Lugavere, he’s been on our top targets for basically since we started Levels. And so it’s really awesome that Casey’s going to be on the show.
Tom Griffin (36:12):
He came inbound to Casey. Casey’s just becoming a health and wellness celebrity, which is really convenient for my job. And then similarly with Bari Weiss and Honestly came inbound, had already been in touch with the producer who’s been a huge power user. Megan Phelps Roper, who I know many of you know. And we’re talking about advertising on the show and then we’ll have Casey on. So go Casey. And yeah, super exciting stuff. That’s it.
Josh Clemente (36:37):
Awesome update. Thank you, Tom. All right, Mercy.
Mercy Clemente (36:44):
Okay, I’m at a coffee shop so there’s some background noise, I apologize for that. So this is August recap interview. So Josh, if you can play the video on the August top post for Instagram. Our top posts on Instagram got over 1100 likes, actually over 1300 likes. This post alone got 27,000 impressions, which means that the more likes and shares it got, the more times people saw it, even people that didn’t follow us. So that is really awesome. Sorry, just some quick month review type, interesting things that happened. Sam tweeted a post about how he handles his time and people were amazed by that. That was really popular. Casey on Mark Hyman’s podcast, we got a ton of positive feedback. Everyone loved that episode. It was shared many, many times in stories and we kept getting tagged. We did a post on Instagram about kids and sugar and I’d also received a ton of positive feedback.
Mercy Clemente (37:45):
People were both fascinated and horrified by the amount of sugar that they were seeing in that post and the data in it. Posted about our Coke challenge, also got a lot of feedback and got some inbound responses on people asking how they can do it now and can they still get a patch or anything from that. So some regret for people that missed out, but it was still awesome. And then we shared our culture videos on Twitter and we’re slowly staring sharing those on LinkedIn as well this week. Next slide please. And then this is just a recap of some user generated content on Instagram and Twitter. I’m not going to go through each of them, but just some cool points that people shared about us saying, “This is the coolest biometric feedback ever invented” and the oat milk latte was eye opening for them to discover how horrible they reacted to it. Yeah, that is social for the month.
Josh Clemente (38:46):
I’d like to highlight [inaudible 00:38:48] comment that success of Levels is a moral duty for humanity. I feel the same. Thank you. Mercy. Henry.
Mike Haney (38:58):
Yeah, so content update, three posts, actually two from this week and one from the end of last week. The first one was another excerpt from Ben’s book. I’ll note one of those posts that did really well on the previous page. The one with the lovely picture of Miz looking out at San Francisco was also an excerpt from Ben’s book. And the kids and sugar post that’s done well and I’ll get to the article on the next slide was the excerpt from Dr. Lustig’s book. So it’s really great to see that these excerpts were able to do thanks to our advisors are performing so well. The second piece in here is really nice sort of accidental one got connected with a guy named Ed Wu, who’s a co-founder, Recora Health, which is a cardiac recovery health tech company and just had a really nice conversation about the intersection of metabolic health and heart health.
Mike Haney (39:43):
And then the cholesterol piece that we just put up, This was spurred by Sam emailing a while ago saying, “What’s the deal with cholesterol?” I feel like we see lots of different kinds of advice on this. And so we did an experiment here where we assembled this piece largely using excerpts from our advisor’s books. Casey and I talked about how we talk about this and realize that between all of our advisors or several of them, they’ve kind of said it everything that we would want to say. So again, big shout out to the advisors for allowing us to do that and I think it was a really successful experiment. So next slide.
Mike Haney (40:19):
I just want to briefly show the monthly stat review. Huge month. I was surprised when I jumped in and looked at this to do the investor update this month, record blog traffic by a mile. So the 110,000 that we had in June and July were previous records. We jumped to 163 this month and the bulk of that really, we got rises across the board. We had about a 10% rise in organic, which was great. That continues to grow. But we had huge jumps in both email and social. So we moved to the new email format. We’ve actually had some not great stats on the emails I think because of the August slump, but because that list has gotten so big, it’s driving even with low engagement, it’s driving good traffic. And back to Mercy slide, those social posts are just driving traffic they never have before as well.
Mike Haney (41:06):
So just love that sort of group effort there of Stacy, of course, all her great work and a guy named Chris Urban who’s helping us write those. We’re creating these really useful social posts and they are driving engagement. And then I just put the top 10 stories of August on here and that extra from Dr. Lustig’s book was the second. And that number’s enormous. You see that 3000, 2000 is kind of normal for everything below what should my Levels be, which is always kind of in the 30,000 range. That’s always our lead by far. But that process food and kid story is so high, just really shows the engagement with that. So super fun month. That’s all for content.
Josh Clemente (41:44):
Huge. Thank you [inaudible 00:41:47], for speaking the truth through our platforms. It’s so huge and thanks team for crushing it this month. That’s amazing.
Mike Haney (41:55):
And you can skip this one, this slide from last week.
Josh Clemente (41:58):
Alrighty,
Mike Haney (42:00):
Cool.
Michael Mizrahi (42:01):
All right, quick last slide to sum it up. So quick check in on our internal comms, two big things on our mind. The first one is information abundance, a little bit of overload. We’ve broken down all these silos, which means now everyone has access to everything, a lot of calories to intake. And so we need to meter this in some way. Making a suggestion to create a project updates forum to allow specific messages or comments to get forwarded to their for team input for communication, for progress updates, et cetera. So kind of like a weekly recurring standup thread that we have daily. So keep an eye open for some communications around that. We’re going to keep all the other forms open, they’re not private, you still have access to drop into any team and see what’s going on. But just want to create some space for teams to focus on the work without too much input and 30 opinions on each thing.
Michael Mizrahi (42:52):
And so really leaning into responsible individuals and just some boundaries for teams to do their work. A lot of improvements from thread seems like they’re moving quickly every single day, every single refresh, there’s some new features. The latest one is that when you join a forum, it prompts you to choose your notification preferences, which I quite like and obviously I think we’ve all seen some of the integrations and emoji changes and highlighted comments and all these kinds of things. So nice to see some really good progress from their product team. On the Slack side, I think we’ve effectively done it, which is really impressive. Over the course of really a week, we’ve totally changed the way the company communicates and I think this would be pretty crazy to most companies today to even suggest doing this, but it seems like we pulled it off. So major major props to everyone here.
Michael Mizrahi (43:39):
There’s a few channels remaining that are in use, these are shared channels with TruePill, Stripe, Reaktiv, Wearable Challenge. And so we’ll figure out the use cases for those but right now we’ve got communications with those companies in there. Otherwise you can see a massive drop in our activity. Slack doesn’t do a great job of summing it up on a weekly basis, but it’s down. The remaining messages are just kind of the bots that didn’t realize that they’re alone. So they’re just continuing to fire in a bunch of different channels. And so try and speak that to see if we can really suss out what communication is happening there because there is still a few messages. We want to make sure those have a home.
Michael Mizrahi (44:18):
Finally, it looks like about 28 of us are in Discord, so we’re all in there. But feel free to drop in there when you feel the time and place to be social. It’s not a thing to keep open all day, but there are some conversations there that are social in nature. We’re keeping work out of there, but that’s absolutely available as an outlet. That’s it on this. We’ll keep posted on upcoming changes and we’ll continue to keep an eye on this.
Josh Clemente (44:45):
Another feature I want to highlight that just dropped in threads is the ability to schedule follow up, which is a big one. So excited for that. Thank you Miz and thanks team for making these switches happen. Right. Here at the end. Tom, hot seat.
Tom Griffin (45:01):
God, it’s been great to be back. I was out for a number of days. We had our growth generalist verbally accept this morning, so I’m pretty excited about that. More to come. And personal, had a great time at brother’s wedding. It was one of the best weekends of my life. Casey did make tell me that I should tell the team this so after all the jokes about Levels somehow making it into the wedding. It in fact did play a prominent role in the wedding. So at the end of my oldest brother’s Best Man speech, right before I spoke, he said something to the effect of, “Now I’m going to pass the mic to my younger brother who’s going to talk for 45 minutes about the relationship between glucose, insulin…” And read off a bunch of other stuff that I think he grabbed from Google, which got a big laugh from everyone there because everyone could relate that that’s half of what I talked about. So…
Josh Clemente (45:54):
I can see any conversions come in from the Griffin wedding, what’s up with that?
Tom Griffin (45:58):
They need some more touch points and then they’ll [inaudible 00:46:01].
Josh Clemente (46:00):
Kunal.
Kunal Shah (46:04):
Yeah, a good week here on my end. I did join the Brooklyn Track Club for a workout and met a whole bunch of people who are super interested in what we were doing at Levels. So I sent them over my invite link so I think we’ll get some conversions there. So it was really nice to be able to geek out some more super like-minded people and yeah, that’s all for my end.
Josh Clemente (46:31):
Sweet. Steph.
Stephanie Coaters (46:37):
Cool. Professionally, it feels so good to start shipping. Thank you Justin and Gabriel and John for the pairing and the PR reviews. Yeah, it’s really cool to start going from the birds eye-view to actually getting in the weeds with coding and so I’m really excited about that. And personally, I mentioned last week that I was headed to Tahoe, which that plan got totally scrapped because of the fires, which is really, really sad. But yeah, I’m just crashing with family in California at the moment and so looking forward to doing some hiking this weekend.
Josh Clemente (47:07):
That was unfortunate news, but enjoy the hiking. Jesse.
Jesse Lavine (47:16):
Yeah, I’m excited about the new guided future or the new guided journey and also for Kunal’ Delay future, that’s going to be huge, huge time saver for us. So thank you.
Mercy Clemente (47:29):
Professionally, I’m excited for also Kunal’s feature that is massive. I didn’t even know that was in the works, so that was a nice surprise. And also I really enjoyed Ben’s update even though it was remote. I thought that was… I like that a lot. Personally, I spent this week pretty much only working in coffee shops and it’s been super nice change environment and the weather is finally not raining, so I’m going to be outside this weekend.
Justin Stanley (47:55):
Professionally, I’m looking forward to the guided journey stuff taking shape and I feel like that’s one of the missing core pieces of our app. Even my husband who’s just saw thing go up and down, didn’t really know what to next. And then out to my brother’s cabin again this weekend. Last weekend was a success for the dog and he loved it. So going out there again and have him some fun.
Josh Clemente (48:20):
Nice. Miz.
Michael Mizrahi (48:23):
Yeah, I enjoyed on the work side. [inaudible 00:48:25] into the Apple App store guidelines was a lot of fun. Just kind of break them down one by one and enjoy the discussion that follows as a result of that. And looking forward to kind of the membership model, the free product, I think those are very, very meaningful unlocks for us. So excited on that front. And then on the personal end, flying to New York on Sunday for the week just to see some family, Jewish holidays and I haven’t been back there in a while, so looking forward. I’ll see you, JM.
Josh Clemente (48:51):
Awesome. Rob.
Robert Lustig (48:53):
So [inaudible 00:48:54] everybody. It’s that time. Got a lot to atone for this year. So I just to let you all know, the metabolic health is going to have its moment in the sun at the UN Food System Summit. The food industry has been dragged, kicking and screaming, but they basically couldn’t stop the juggernaut and so it will have an airing. What they will say about it is still open to question. They had put up a very, very, shall we say, vigorous defense. I’m not sure how strong it was. Just vigorous and pressure made them cave and so it will be discussed. So I’m excited about that. From a personal standpoint, I’m all alone with my dog cause my wife and daughters went to a wedding in Pittsburgh. So if anybody wants to have a drink here in the San Francisco area, let me know.
Josh Clemente (50:03):
Always love Rob’s updates. Mik D.
Mike DiDonato (50:06):
First-
Robert Lustig (50:09):
Sorry. And by the way, everybody, make sure you spend… Reserve the hour for the Metabolical book club next week. Sorry. Apologize.
Mike DiDonato (50:23):
No worries. I’m excited to be back. I was out the last two Fridays, my second and third time’s ever missing a forum, so very excited to be back. And then definitely the major projects said a few times the guided journey, it’s definitely been something we’ve talked about for a while. And then the at home blood testing, I think it’s another missing part of the journey to add that additional context to our members. And then personally been on the go quite a bit the last few weeks. Excited for more of a low-key weekend.
Josh Clemente (50:59):
Awesome. Hao.
Hao Li (51:01):
Yeah, level wise, super excited about the food tagging project. I feel like it will definitely benefit users and make the app more interesting. And personally, I’m super excited. This will be my final week with puppies, so yeah…
Josh Clemente (51:20):
Enjoy the rest. I don’t think Othman was able to stick with us. Sam.
Sam Corcos (51:28):
I’m here. I’m in my natural habitat at the airport and I’m really excited by… I read Haney’s, the piece that we put out on cholesterol and I really enjoyed it. I’ve been had a lot of questions about that for a super long time and it’s just really encouraging to see how much incredibly high quality content we put out every week. So very excited for that.
Josh Clemente (51:53):
Yeah, it’s awesome. Zac.
Zac Henderson (51:56):
Yeah, excited about my sister and mom are visiting this weekend, so excited to see them later tonight.
Josh Clemente (52:04):
Enjoy. Casey.
Casey Means (52:07):
So very exciting about all the guided journey work. Thrilled to hear updates on that today, Scott, that was awesome. I am super excited. I have Richard Johnson’s new book. Nature Wants Us to Be Fat, that I’m reading this weekend, the pre-print and writing an endorsement for, and then Philip Ovadia’s Stay Off My Operating Table. So going to get through those and write some blurbs, which I’m really excited about. And personally, we’re going up to the Napa area for my dad’s 75th birthday this weekend and I’m really excited to celebrate.
Josh Clemente (52:44):
Awesome. Enjoy that. And happy birthday too. Scott.
Scott Klein (52:48):
All right. Work wise, I am thrilled that we have a lot of new dev and data people make big waves early. It’s really fun when we can get people in front of other pieces of the company being able to do stuff to help ops out. So congrats to you all for shipping. And professionally, I’m also excited about you all sending me introductions to people that dropped out of the program so we can get started talking to them. Personally, I am going to go jump on a boat here in a couple hours and I’m so excited about that. So we can take taking the three year old tubing, hopefully, it won’t be as much of a disaster as last time. Just got to get the reps in. So…
Josh Clemente (53:23):
Fun, Dom.
Dominic D’Agostino (53:26):
It was a great week in the lab, in the clinic with patients and also in the High C’s mission that we’re running in Hawaii, Space simulation mission. I have a friend from NASA, the astronaut strength and conditioning coach. Him and his wife are coming to our house this weekend and I think he has Levels too. I think he’s signed up, so looking forward to meeting with him and talking.
Josh Clemente (53:53):
Awesome. Love to hear that. Elena.
Elena Beloff (53:57):
Yeah, Levels wise, I’m really excited about a bunch of data science projects that I’ve been outlining. And I just have to say, I’ve really appreciated getting feedback from a bunch of you about just project focus and areas where we need more data analytics. I just have to call out Andrew, Xinlu, Scott and Chris this week. You guys have provided me with amazing feedback and I really appreciate it. And then I guess on a personal note, this weekend I’ll just be trying to enjoy the weather. We’ve had a lot of rain and flooding here on the east coast and I’m just happy to be able to be outside.
Josh Clemente (54:40):
Yep, I hear you. I don’t think Laurie’s with us today. Chris.
Chris Jones (54:46):
On the Levels side, just super excited about the continuous love that we’re getting from the engineering side to help out on operations with the pausing of subscriptions and Stripe ID. Those are going to go a long way as we start scaling up. I mean, their our biggest call drivers, so solving those things now is just going to save us tons of headache in the future. So I just want to thanks engineering for all that help. On the personal side, I got to say I’m excited to go [inaudible 00:55:19], the easiness of farm life and the subtleties of doing minor tasks that brings so much joy. So yeah, get me out there on the tractor and just don’t bug me for three hours.
Josh Clemente (55:35):
The farming life chose you. Ben is off the grid. JM.
JM (55:42):
I am very excited that it is now September. I find the last four months of the year are the most fun for a bunch of reasons. At work, at home, the weather, school starts, people buy more stuff online and I’m excited about that. Have a great weekend.
Josh Clemente (56:00):
I’m a little bit more sensitive to the rapid changing of time, so I can’t necessarily say I’m happy it’s already September. But professionally, I’m really excited about… I got particularly excited about the Stripe ID updates that were shipped. The automatic validation there ,just was reflecting back on the crazy way in which we used to have to manage these sorts of things when we were using Google sheets for an EMR. We’ve come a very long way and that’s awesome. Guided journey stuff is great. The WHOOP study results, just seeing early correlations with metabolic score and recovery score is huge. I think it’s going to bode really well for future opportunity, both on content and social and movement stuff, but also just the research. And then personally, the weather is gorgeous this morning, I’ve been… Oops. I’ve been sticking with my training with the marathon and it’s pretty interesting with a 10 degree drop in temperature, my heart rate is 15% lower and runs are much easier at the same pace. So it’s quite interesting to see these sorts of things. And looking forward to just hanging out this weekend. And Murillo.
Murillo Nicacio de Maraes (57:10):
Yeah, professionally, excited about all the projects. Just all the progress there, especially the guided journey. I think that’s one of the things that we’ve been missing in the app for so long. Just really excited to see the progress there. Personally, the wedding’s still taking most of my time, but I feel like it’s sort of calmed down now. Most of the things are settled and decided. So just excited to have a little bit of that space back.
Josh Clemente (57:46):
Nice. Well, I was watching a documentary series on HBO about Nazare, the big wave area in Portugal. It’s pretty wild. Highly recommended to anyone.
Murillo Nicacio de Maraes (57:56):
Yep.
Josh Clemente (57:58):
John.
Murillo Nicacio de Maraes (57:58):
Me too.
Jhon Cruz (58:00):
Yeah. My son is going to have his first EMX Real competition this weekend, and as parents, we are feeling more anxiety than him. He’s going to be the youngest participant, so excited to see how that goes.
Josh Clemente (58:18):
Awesome. Good luck. Alan.
Alan Mclean (58:23):
Yeah, on the work side, I’m just really thrilled. There’s so many things going at once. I’m just really struck by the velocity of the team. I think we hit a bit of a junk pile up at some point and then now it feels like there’s just so many arrows in flight. Murillo’s doing additive scoring. John’s working on social and everyone’s getting going on new projects. So I’ve found that really exciting. And then the personal side, there’s some incremental progress to our New York City transition. I’m hearing thinking about joining New York Road Runners again, Brooklyn Track Club. Very excited about exercising in the winter where there’s actual cold weather again. So…
Josh Clemente (59:06):
Awesome. And Haney.
Mike Haney (59:09):
I’ll say professionally, I really love the new forum thing we’re doing where each of the engineers are responsible owners is talking about their project. I think between that and all the activity on threads, it just feels like exponential growth and the amount of brain power and ideas that are being brought to the company, it feels like a totally different company than even six months ago, and it’s just really fun to watch all that happen. Good for me.
Josh Clemente (59:37):
Well, that’s a great one to end it on. Thanks everybody for another killer week, and enjoy this first week of September, this first weekend of September.