Transcript
Josh Clemente (00:01):
So, first off, I am grateful for another week. I’m also grateful primarily to have Dom D’Agostino on the call. Dom has joined our research team. Dom’s been pretty critical in my own understanding of nutrition as a key vector for holistic whole personal health, and the potential superpowers it can bestow on an individual when they nail it. So, that is what I’m grateful for. I will let Dom as soon as his connection works, you can just jump in and I’ll continue from here.
Josh Clemente (00:34):
Next up, I want to welcome Megha to the team. So, Megha is a legitimate marketing and brand professional. She’s been working at all of the brands that you’ve heard of in this space. Strava, Nike, Peloton, to name a few. Super strong experience. She’s going to help us nail our community and professional and channel distribution strategy. So, Megha, if you want to say a few quick words, that’d be awesome.
Megha Doshi (00:58):
Oh, thank you, I was not expecting this, but thanks. Yeah, super excited to join the team. I’ll be working in a part-time capacity to start on our social strategy and trying to get our prototype or our pilot up on distributing or partnering with either the nutrition sector and/or the gym sector. So, just working on what that’ll look and feel like. I actually met Sam a little over a year ago in New York in Union Square, I think. I rode my bike to go meet him and have been following Levels ever since. And have just been so impressed by the scrappiness and the grit and the hustle I’ve seen from this team over the past few months. So, I’m hoping I’ll be able to keep up. And really, really looking forward to working a little bit more with all of you over the next several months.
Josh Clemente (01:52):
Awesome. Thank you Megha. Sorry to spring that on you. But I appreciate you rolling with it. Everybody reach out, say hi to her, and looking forward to all working together. Dom, it looks like you may have gotten connected.
Dominic D’Agostino (02:05):
Yeah.
Josh Clemente (02:07):
Awesome. Yeah, I was giving a little intro. Really excited to have you, A, on the research team and helping us push metabolic health into the mainstream, and B on this call. So, I appreciate you taking time to meet the team. And we’d love to just hear a few quick words from you.
Dominic D’Agostino (02:23):
Yeah, thanks so much for having me on. I’m really excited to be part of Levels. I’ve been using Levels for about a month now doing CGM experiments on food, on supplements. I have been using the… Right now I’m on vacation in and out of the water and the device has worked fine. I put it through a lot of testing outside and with a lot of different food products that I’m testing. I’m excited to use it also in our sponsored research programs. We have clinical trials with a number of different universities. We do basic science research, and I’m interested in getting something going at University of South Florida.
Dominic D’Agostino (03:09):
And there’s a couple of groups that I met with this morning that I would like to introduce you guys to. In particular, different medical groups that work mostly outside of USF, but have a connection with USF med school. We’re really active in what I’d call operational research, where we partner with NASA and DARPA to do projects with NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations. This year, it got postponed or delayed, but we’re strategizing to start that one up and also the High Seas Program, which would be in Hawaii, which is another space analog. And I would like to get the device in project associated with that. My background is in, I did an undergrad nutrition science and bio, and did my PhD in physiology and neuroscience. So, over the last 10 to 12 years I’ve been studying nutritional ketosis and different applications for it.
Josh Clemente (04:12):
Awesome, thank you. That was a bit of an understatement at the end, but I highly recommend everyone digging into Dom’s background and the research he’s produced. He’s been pioneering some really amazing things for epilepsy, hyperbaric oxygen treatment, and then high performance stuff for divers and astronauts who need to stay healthy in potentially dangerous environments like high pressure oxygen. So, Dom, really appreciate you making time and sharing that. And yeah, does anyone have any quick questions for Dom?
Josh Clemente (04:42):
All right, we’ll I’m sure have a few more of these in the future. And yeah, thank you, and please feel free to stay on the call as long as you’d like but no pressure to continue.
Dominic D’Agostino (04:52):
Okay, thank you.
Josh Clemente (04:54):
All right, Dom. So, moving into the recent achievements. Always tough to catalog everything from the week. But I want to highlight at the top here, David surfaces yesterday. So a year ago yesterday the first Levels kit was delivered. You can see the gorgeous box there in the middle of the frame. That’s the original kit that we provided. It had no Levels branding whatsoever. It was basically a blank cardboard box with a bunch of devices in there. But it marked the beginning of broader access to CGM, and was the proof of concept for the model that we are currently built on. So, that’s exciting. Congrats everyone on 365 days of CGM deliveries basically uninterrupted.
Josh Clemente (05:37):
The new Levels blog launched this week. This is a huge redesign. It makes it much more user friendly, it adds better search and also categorization that makes it much easier to browse and find the articles that we’re cranking out. We’ll screenshot there. But check that out. And also obviously stay up to speed on the blog content. We’re releasing new stuff literally every day. The standby emails. So these are the… It’s basically the campaign that ramped people up into the program from the moment of pre-order purchase. So we have our waitlist, and then we have our standby list, which is people who have already paid and are now waiting for delivery. And so, those emails are going to be automated, they’re going to guide people, provide education, and let them know where they stand on the list. Those are just about ready for launch optimistically today. And so, super exciting.
Andrew (06:25):
Yeah, I can send it whenever. It’s just a button press.
Josh Clemente (06:28):
There you go, boom. On the fly confirmation, so we’re doing that. That’s a big step, honestly, to keep people up to speed and to really provide that elegant experience that we want, and the delight that people feel when they’re kept in the loop and excited. David made some really awesome improvements to design. Xinlu also really weighed in here and basically optimizing the glucose chart such that we can shrink it down and keep it front and center so that the data is primary in the app, but then also open up visual space to fit the new program and education cards, which are part of the insights framework. So optimizing the app and the visuals in order to make that effortless transition over to the cards. I’m going to let David speak more to this. But I’ve been using the new version, and it looks beautiful, I think, and it was really elegant integration. So, that’s exciting.
Josh Clemente (07:21):
We had 190 consults complete on the new EHR system. So this was recently in the past one to two weeks, we’ve just started the new system. And we’re now turning on the spigot, things are moving quickly. Efficiency is going up as the physicians get more familiar with it. An example is a console was turned around in less than five minutes, I think, about two days ago. So really good signals there. And we’re getting very close to also automating the fill request. There’s a few details we have to work out there. But as of right now, we’re just testing EHR systems and things are looking good.
Josh Clemente (07:52):
This was a an absolutely massive week for podcasts. So we had seven actually released this week, and several more that we recorded. Casey recorded six herself this week. So we’re on an absolute tear here. We’ve been getting amazing feedback. There’s some feedback to Casey down in the bottom right corner on her episode of optimal performance. I was able to go on Kevin Rose’s Show, which launched this week, which also had a really great reception. So across the board, I’ve noticed a transition. I think Casey can speak to this as well in a few slides, but I’ve been getting waves of additional interest and new shows in my DMs on Twitter. I’m not able to keep up right now. I think I’ve got three or four invites. So, it’s flipped a switch as we’re getting out there. People are now starting to approach us and it’s no longer going to be as much of a sell on our behalf. So this is really good, and we’re also out there just sharing our thought leadership and education.
Josh Clemente (08:47):
And then want to highlight the Eng Forum that launched. It’s a bi-weekly discussion of engineering topics and work sharing. So this is a great example of just continually improving the ways that we’re maintaining transparency and openness about how quickly we’re working, what we’re working on, and grabbing education from other people on the team. So shout out to the whole Eng team for setting this up and participating in it. Looking forward to seeing similar things across the company.
Josh Clemente (09:15):
I also want to highlight you can see a couple times. About two weeks ago, we were compared repeatedly to Peloton. This week we were compared repeatedly to Apple. So, there was a hardware manufacturer that we spoke with who called us the Apple quality software partner. One of our beta customers says Levels is the Apple of health. We’re seeing these sorts of themes. We’re being were being placed right in the midst of the mainstream hardware software, elegant user experience products that we consider benchmarks, and this is really exciting. So congratulations, great work on basically convincing people that in just basically eight months from zero to where we are today, we’re being included in the same breath as companies that have been doing this for decades.
Josh Clemente (10:03):
A couple great funds that we’ve been speaking to this week. Ongoing discussions for fundraising. Sam will give us an update on that in just a moment. Mike Barwick trains people in the MLB NHL is loving the product, wants to share it with pros. We’ve got a few organic professional basketball and baseball players who have approached us this week. We’ve been called the single most useful health product this individuals has ever used. And we’ve got Olympic runners who are using our product and learning about their own training. So, great week. Overall, we broke 5,000 followers on Instagram, and everything I missed, I apologize. And we’ll make sure we catch it in a future week. All right, any questions on all this?
David Flinner (10:44):
What’s that Rob Wolf icon?
Josh Clemente (10:46):
Oh, we had a conversation with Rob Wolf. This was four days ago. He’s very excited about what we’re doing. Signed up, should be getting his kit here in a few days, and wants to be an affiliate, and contributor to our content. Actually, we will likely cross post on his platform. For those of you that don’t know Rob Wolf, he wrote Wired To Eat. He’s one of the originators of the paleo-diet concept. Owned one of the first CrossFit gyms ever, and is basically just a thought leader in the health and wellness world, and really smart guy, very supportive of what we’re doing.
Thomas Griffin (11:21):
Josh, who’s next to the Accel logo?
Josh Clemente (11:25):
That is Kevin Hart. And we’ve been in touch with his fund. I think Sam might have an update on whether or not he personally is using the product, but-
Sam Corcos (11:38):
His team knows, he’s not yet.
Josh Clemente (11:40):
Yeah, so we’re going to make that happen, though.
Thomas Griffin (11:43):
Cool.
Josh Clemente (11:44):
All right. Oh, yeah, this is the one year anniversary. So, things have moved a bit in the positive direction, as you can see. Very excited to see.
Casey Means (11:54):
The crushed beat up box is actually perfect.
David Flinner (11:58):
[inaudible 00:11:58] one of the sides, I’m going to scribble in sharpie, Levels.
Josh Clemente (12:04):
And to think we were proud of that the first day it showed up, we were ecstatic. All right. So, weekly beta trends. We had another great week. Laurie, obviously, just continuing to turn the wheels and keep this thing moving. You can see she had 94 orders go out this week. We had 101 orders placed. So nice parity right there. And we’re continuing to see quite a few subscriptions going through but a lot of orders, we jumped almost 2X this week over the last, and are continuing to have really high volumes. I think our deliveries are now at the end of October. So, we’re about eight weeks of backlog, which is where we’ll likely stay until we get these automations in place. And our scaling can really ramp up. So thank you to the ops team continuing to keep these things flowing. Sam, financial.
Sam Corcos (12:59):
Yeah, so we’re at about 2.8 million in cash where our fundraising conversations are all going really well. We’re continuing those conversations, pushing for term sheets sometime in the next week, or two weeks. I’ve kind of lost track of time. Here’s our projected monthly revenue, inclusive or exclusive of subscribers. This is the people who have already purchased the product and are just on the standby list awaiting us to ship it to them. So, we’re in good position September and October.
Josh Clemente (13:37):
Nice. Any questions on finance revenue?
Sam Corcos (13:45):
I need to coordinate with Andrew and probably Xinlu about revenue recognition. So, we likely, our likely number for August is 85,000. We’re going to have to change some things because we’re using a consult date. We need to figure out how we want to recognize these from an accounting perspective. But we’re in a really good position on the revenue side. And on the next slide. Weekly had a big jump this week from the Kevin Rochelle. And I expect it’ll probably continue to go up which is great. I think the tale from Anthony Dustin’s Podcast was pretty long, so I’m not looking forward to that.
Josh Clemente (14:34):
Nice. All right. Moving into quick recruiting update. We still have three roles that we’re actively hiring for. We’ve closed out the application process for operations. We have a lot of exceptional candidates there and are approaching a decision as we work through a few of the final technical challenges for some of the candidates, but that was really oversubscribed and we had a phenomenal amount of interest from great candidates there. It’s going to be a tough decision at the end.
Josh Clemente (15:05):
We’re seeing increasing quality of application on the head of marketing and growth. So continuing to be interested in new candidates. If you know someone, if you can recommend someone, please do. We have four right now who are in various stages in the program, and will continue to introduce those to the team. And then head of content, again, we also still need someone here. We only have two potential candidates right now that both are very interesting, but looking forward to potentially having additional options. So, if you know someone who is very scientifically minded and capable of taking these brainy abstract concepts and turning them into approachable content, that’s the person we need. And please recommend them. Any questions on recruiting?
Josh Clemente (15:57):
Cool. So customer engagement, this is an overview of our Twitter action this week. This is just a random selection, but loving seeing Levels being called a game changer. People basically being locked into it within two three days, and “sold” on what they’re seeing. And so, again, a lot of the same things we’ve been seeing, but Twitter has really been, I think, the hotbed for Levels organic interest, which is not… I don’t think it’s very, very common for a product to really resonate on Twitter. I think early on, we were told by the demand curve, which is a course on on growth to completely avoid Twitter because it’s useless. Nobody ever gets their product out there on Twitter. And I think we’ve been seeing the exact opposite.
Josh Clemente (16:45):
So, let’s see, Instagram stuff. A ton going on in Instagram. Check out our stories, we’ve got… I think we’re having something like 30 or 40, user generated stories simultaneously at one point on Sunday of this week, something like that. So people are really making a ton of interesting video content and sharing it through our stories. And this is going to continue to be something that we’re going to build into the product in order to maximize that shareability, and the user friendliness. So really awesome stuff. People are saying great things and sharing with in some cases 400,000 plus followers. We have a lot of people using the program right now who are potential affiliates, current influencers. And this will again continue to be a super high source of traffic for us. All right, Casey, on the podcast?
Casey Means (17:39):
Yeah. So, awesome updates, Josh. That was as always super exciting to listen to. So like you mentioned, lots going on, on the podcast front. This was I think our biggest week for sure to date. We had 13 shows in the pipeline, seven of which, I believe seven or eight if you include a webinar were released this week including the Kevin Rose show, which I think is our biggest show to date. And then, yeah, I recorded six this week. And so, yeah, just lots of good movement on that. And we have many, many more coming up in the coming weeks. So, yeah, if you haven’t listened to the Kevin Rose show with Josh definitely do it. It’s really a stellar show. Yeah, so big thanks, too, Tom and our network for just really getting a lot of these moving. I think that the fire is burning and we’re going to just keep seeing compounding returns on these, so next slide. Can you press play on this one?
Casey Means (18:44):
Yeah, so this is just a little walkthrough of the new blog, amazing work by David and Sam getting this going. So, we’ve got a new search functionality so you can actually search for any term that you’re interested in. Weight, skin, metabolic fitness, it’ll come up. If you can play through one more time, Josh. Some other things to highlight. We now have a new articles and a popular section. People can sign up for the newsletter from the blog, a metabolic fundamental section for people who are just looking for like the basic core content and knowledge and now things are much more obviously labeled with the tag thought leadership. So, for authors who are contributing to the blog, who are thought leaders in their space. People like Dom and Ben Bikman and others we can now highlight those. So super exciting check it out. Next slide.
Casey Means (19:38):
Yeah, just some new content. We have a great awesome new article up by Dr. Vimal Ramjee, a quadruple board certified cardiologist who’s used the program and wrote this really incredible article about heart attacks and glucose and it is one of my favorite articles ever. It’s so impassioned, so well referenced, and I think It’s going to be powerful. So check that out. Hopefully, we’ll be able to convince him to do a few more articles for us. Also, some great user generated content and guest posts happening. We had quite a few backlinks this week from other sites highlighting this post from eight sleeps blog where Sean Rose was talking about the modern health stack and included Levels in that. And just lots of great shout outs to Levels again, comparing us with Apple and a lot of other great brands.
Casey Means (20:31):
We had our newsletter go out on August 30th. And just in the bottom right here, just looking at inbound to our website, our top channels. So that newsletter made our email referrals go from point 0.7% up to about 6.9%. This week. So cool to see that people are clicking through on the newsletter, and that that’s a pretty effective way to get people to the site. And so, and yeah, just some screenshots here of different metrics of our ratings and our organic traffic and keywords. Everything’s going up and up. And yeah, so just keeping pushing the content strategy, and the backlinks, and content partnerships, and excited to be hiring for the new head of content role to keep this moving. So yeah, that’s it for me.
Josh Clemente (21:22):
Nice. Thank you, Casey. Okay, weekly feedback round up, Mike.
Mike Didonato (21:29):
Yeah, so it was another great week of conversations and feedback. Excitement, engagement, continues to remain at all time highs. On the right is just an example of some of the inbound excitement we get from people that want to… Are grateful to learn more and be part of Levels. And then on the left, a lot of these things may be repeats, which is great, because I know that we have some great plan features to roll out. And there’s one thing I want to call out in particular. I’ve been trying to understand what our users want and think of the logging experience, specifically, food logging. And at the top, you can see the quote, I think Josh actually mentioned it at the top of the forum. He said, “We are the Apple of health, and basically keep it simple.”
Mike Didonato (22:28):
I had another interesting conversation with the user yesterday who was struggling. And he was like, “This has been a challenge for me for a while when it comes to his health and nutrition.” And he really wants to do well. And he’s like, “I just feel overwhelmed, and this is an emotional experience for me.” We had a great chat, and it was a reminder of why it’s so important that everything we do is driven based on our user feedback. Not necessarily what’s the next great feature, but what is impactful for them, and to always keep it simple. And definitely kudos to David, Andrew, and Sam for making sure that that was always how we lead things, and that’s really all I have.
Josh Clemente (23:19):
Nice. Thanks, Mike. And thanks for continuing to fill these calls. These have been by far the most impactful source of feedback for us throughout the program. And it’s why we got from zero to 400 plus iterations on the app, and how we know where to focus the roadmap. So, yeah, I know how painful it is to have a day full of calls, but thanks for continuing. All right, David, product and design an eng.
David Flinner (23:46):
All right. Yeah, so as Josh mentioned earlier, the standby list comms are ready to go. In fact, I think Andrew may be launching as we speak. But a nuance here, this is… We had so many customers signed up that oftentimes there’s a delay and right now we’re keeping that somewhere around eight weeks before you actually get your Levels box. And so, the purpose of the standby emails is to on a regular basis, every couple of weeks, keep you updated as to the status of your order, remind you when it’s going to process and give you an opportunity to make any changes, like if you change your address, as well as get you excited about Levels and start to learn a bit more about the product feature set and what to expect once you do get your program started. So, that’s really exciting to see that go live.
David Flinner (24:30):
The small picture down in the middle is the graph improvements. So you can see how the graph is a little bit smaller now. These are subtle changes. The X axis data labels are cleaned up, which was a longtime customer request. And now you can see a lot more of the insight cards down below. So, that’ll be going out with the next release, and it’s currently live internally. And then the big flagship feature that we’ve been working on for several weeks now and highlighting is the insight framework coming to life. And so, it’s almost there. Jhon and Xinlu have been working with me to polish that up this week. Lots of small tweaks to make it better for customers.
David Flinner (25:08):
You can see a few examples there helping you understand how and why to log your first activity, what the zone comparison feature is like, and how to take advantage of it. And then other things like strenuous exercise that may show up if you want to learn more about that. And then push out some code for Dawn Effect detection, which I’m also excited to test out and see go live. We get a lot of customer questions about why they see morning rises. So we’ll be testing that soon. Jeremy is still working on persisting zones. And I think there’s some other complimentary features on the backend for that. A new set of testing processes, test data in a new database, which is going to make, I guess, our data quality and testing much more robust, which is a win for customers.
David Flinner (25:57):
We’re also working on formalizing and codifying what the Levels 28 day program is in code. Hao is working on that right now. And that’s going to be great because right now, for example, if a customer loses their sensor, and we don’t know about it, we don’t know that until they maybe file a support ticket that we’d love to send them a replacement sensor. So now once this is codified, we’ll be able to automatically detect that a user is in a new paused state, get a Slack message about that. And we can reach out proactively or show a card like, “Hey, did your sensor come off?” Things like that. And then Gabriel started thinking about the next big bucket of closing the loop features, which is event detection. So let’s say you have two high glucose events yesterday, but forgot to log, we can send you a reminder of that, show you on the graph, prompt you for what caused this. Was it food exercise, things like that. So, excited to see that come to life as well over the coming weeks.
David Flinner (26:51):
A few things that we’re thinking about, and I’m still trying to define is a automatically labeling strenuous exercise. Working on how do we even further close the loop on how your zones and choices affect your metabolic score. Likely that’s going to be something around the zone cardiometabolic drop in a large way. Maybe instead of having a negative framing of it by showing you all the negative impact of the zone score, maybe we can spin it in a positive ways, showing you other zones you had from the past that were 10s and nines and say, “Hey, next time, maybe try one of these substitutes that you logged within the same two hour window over the last week for dinner or something.” And then in-app daily report will be coming up soon as well. And automating our monthly report, which Hao did a great job automating for me. But the next step is to fully bring it into the code base so we can… The moment you finish the program we’ll deliver your report from that second in the program email. See, I think that’s it. Any questions?
Josh Clemente (28:00):
So, I had a really rough week of sleep and stress last week, and I noticed that my Dawn Effect was crazy high. So it would be like a 30 point automatic jump in the morning. I think this is going to be a really interesting area. So the detections and surfacing of these insights, and then connecting it to other elements of change. So for me, had I not been tracking my sleep very effectively, we could surface the insight and ask those questions. Have you been sleeping well? Have you been more stressed than usual? And can jog the user’s memory and that detection is key to that because in a busy world when you’re rushing place to place, it’s hard to take a moment to think deeply about what happened two, three days ago. So, I think this is going to be really amazing. Thanks, everybody, for all the awesome work. Any questions on product design eng? Awesome.
Josh Clemente (28:52):
Okay. We’re making good time here. I’ve been trying to move this one along a little faster. You may have noticed. We have been running over on the past few meeting. So, I tracked the individual contribution down to a goal of 10 seconds each. And the intention here is just to share something personal is encouraged, but share something that you’re interested in, something you’re excited about, and we’ll keep this one moving along quickly, so we’ve got time for the story of the day. Sam, go ahead and start us off.
Sam Corcos (29:20):
Yeah, I think the thing that I’m most excited about is three months ago, if we had gone on to Kevin Rose Show would have been freaking out. And this time, Josh went on the podcast, got some orders. It’s like, “Okay, what’s the next thing?” It wasn’t even something we thought about. It’s so casual doing these things now. We’ve reached a certain level of comfort, which is just really exciting. So, for those of you who have not listened to the podcast, it’s definitely worth taking a look.
Josh Clemente (29:54):
Yeah, something like that. Hao, onto you.
Hao Li (29:59):
Yeah. Those podcasts are really fun to listen. I just finished the other one. So, I’ll be continuing with the rest of them. And personally, just my team survived another game yesterday, and they will face the game seven tonight. That’s the most exciting thing for me for this weekend.
Josh Clemente (30:22):
I assume you’re talking NHL.
Hao Li (30:25):
Yeah, Vancouver Canucks.
Josh Clemente (30:26):
Very nice. Sports, they’re happening. Somehow the world is returning to normal, sort of, Laurie.
Laurie Morrison (30:35):
Hi, I’m battling an allergy attack. So, I’m going to make it more like five seconds. I’m excited that the orders are coming out a little faster. I’m able to fill those a lot easier with electronic scripts. So that’s great for work and my garden is coming along, and I’m happy about that. But I’m not going to say very many more words. So it’s good to see all of your faces, though. Very nice to be here.
Casey Means (31:06):
Feel better, Laurie.
Laurie Morrison (31:07):
Thanks. I’ll be fine in a couple hours.
Josh Clemente (31:09):
Okay. Tom.
Thomas Griffin (31:14):
I’m going to go with Kevin Rose as well. I’ve been a longtime Kevin Rose fan, and listener. And so, it was really surreal to hear the company that I’m a part of and hear Josh on the show. It was one of those rare moments where you feel like you’re living in history. It was one of those moments for me. And the other thing I just want to say about it is, it’s really easy to start to measure these shows and be like, “Oh, well, how effective was it compared to the natural state?” And reduce it to number of conversions, but having some experience in this space, I just want to tell everyone that we cannot see how valuable and how impactful it was that Josh was on that show. That will be reverberating through circles that are critical for us to get in front of for many months and many years. So, it’s really awesome.
Josh Clemente (32:05):
Nice. Dom, I added you to the slide, if you’d like. I know this is ad hoc. But if you’d like to just share a quick word or two, that’d be awesome.
Dominic D’Agostino (32:16):
I was just checking out the podcast. I was just going to share it to my network. So, the thing that I’m excited about is listening to this podcast with Kevin Rose. I’ve been pretty busy with work at the university. As you know we’re starting up the new semester and everything. But I’ve compiled a lot of data on Levels, and I’m interested in putting that together for a blog on the Keto Nutrition website, my website. So, when I have that ready to go, I’ll talk to you guys about that. And just, I’m just excited to showcase all the different trends and data that I’ve been collecting with the Levels system.
Josh Clemente (32:57):
Fantastic, super exciting. Thank you, Dom. Megha.
Megha Doshi (33:04):
Personally, I’m excited that today is my last day of full-time work, which enables me to dig into Levels and some of the other projects I’m doing more, just immerse myself more. I’ve also just been really excited over the past week, had a lot of great inbounds from partners, and starting to make outbounds. And it’s just amazing to see how easy the conversation is, and how people just get it and are just so excited to work with us. It’s something that I think just makes me really excited because you don’t feel like you’re selling. You feel like you’re actually extending conversations when the value proposition is already so strong and obviously super excited to join the team.
Josh Clemente (33:46):
Awesome. Thank you. Jhon.
Jhon Cruz (33:52):
Personally, I am excited because the CrossFit Box is going to be opened next week. I have been doing CrossFit at home for the last five months. And it was boring, especially because I don’t have all the equipment here. It’s going to be hard to work out using a face mask, but I’m very happy to be going back.
Josh Clemente (34:14):
Nice, get the reps in. He’ll be back in a PR in no time. Gabriel.
Gabriel (34:20):
Yeah, so event detection is really exciting to me. I like help helping the user build those habits more easily. It’s something that I’m really interested in. And personally, we’re going camping again this weekend in Michigan by the lake, so I’m excited about that.
Josh Clemente (34:37):
Nice. All right. I’m excited about two things. Professionally, it was really awesome to chat with Kevin Rose, and the conversation was extremely easy going and organic. It was not forced and he was genuinely interested. And the thing that he left me with that I was really excited about was towards the end he just said, “Yeah, this is undoubtedly the future.” And he’s been using CGM and been immersed in this for much longer than any of us. And has also been as VC, very successful one, he sees all the technology that’s coming up. And so, for him to say that and give us that endorsement was I think straight from the heart honest and truthful. And that stuck with me afterward, super exciting. I’m also excited to introduce my little sister Mercy who’s on the call. She has been taking on customer success stuff for us, managing tickets, and our social media like DM responses. So, that’s always awesome. I’m actually going to hand it over to her to say some stuff.
Mercy Clemente (35:33):
Hey, everyone. I’m excited to finally put names to faces. I’m also excited to be form official, and take on more responsibilities. It’s also personally exciting to work with my brother and also Mike, who is kind of like a brother as well. So, yeah, it’s great to meet you guys.
Josh Clemente (35:53):
Cool. Mike.
Mike Didonato (35:56):
Yeah, so first thing, the podcast thing is just crazy. It’s just, I can’t even keep up with all of them. And definitely, big shout out to Josh and Casey for killing it. And then definitely for Tom making the magic happen behind the scenes, just awesome. I’m going to run over the 10 seconds, by the way, and definitely kudos to Mercy. Thank you for jumping in, and adding value right away, super excited. Personally, I was going to mention that I’m excited over the last month to be back to boxing. But I tweaked my hamstring this morning. So put that on pause. The other thing, I had a couple conversations with Sam in the past about saying no to people. I think Warren Buffett said, really successful people say no to almost everything. And proud the last couple of days said no to some really large obligations that I just did not want to do and wasn’t sure why I was doing, so cool.
Josh Clemente (37:02):
Love it. You’ve become a no man. All right, Casey.
Casey Means (37:07):
Yeah. So, on the Levels front, I am super excited about our new blog redesign. It is so beautiful. I think it’s going to help people access our content so much easier and find what they need. So super pumped about that. Excited to see how that affects SEO stuff. I’m so excited as well that Dom made it to the call. Thank you so much. It’s just so exciting to get to work with you and hear about all the research opportunities. And so, thank you so much for taking the time this morning to be here. And then I think lastly, just the podcast stuff. Obviously, this was such a big week. I feel like from morning until night I was just talking on podcast this week about Levels and I never will ever tire of it.
Casey Means (37:44):
I could talk about metabolic fitness I think all day every day. And just it’s so important, and there are so many angles to it. So being on neuro type podcast, sleep focused podcasts, beauty focused podcasts, biohacking women’s health podcast, and it’s all related to glucose. So, it’s just such a common denominator, as we all know, of so many health things. And so, it’s just really cool to see how many amazing angles and different types of interests that are excited about it. So, personally, this weekend, I realized that Portland Art Museum, which is an amazing art museum, it’s open. It’s reopened during COVID. You just have to stay six feet away. So I’m going to go this weekend. I feel like I’ve been so arts and culture deprived over the last six months because of COVID. So I am super excited to go.
Josh Clemente (38:32):
Nice. Curious, what’s our progress like on the goal of 100 podcasts in the quarter? Do you know off the top of your head?
Casey Means (38:40):
Yeah, Tom put this together this week. I think we’re at 50. Is that right, Tom, between released recorded or scheduled?
Thomas Griffin (38:48):
I think we’re closer to 60 now. I told Sam recently that if by quarter we mean by the end of September we’re probably not going to hit 100. We’ll probably be a little bit shorter of that.
Josh Clemente (39:00):
I mean, that’s an average of five a week. So, that’s pretty solid.
David Flinner (39:07):
If we’re popping 60 that’s pretty extraordinary.
Mike Didonato (39:10):
Zero to 60.
Thomas Griffin (39:11):
It’s more podcasts than anyone else has ever done. And it’s only been a couple of months.
Josh Clemente (39:18):
And we were starting from scratch. I got to highlight that.
Sam Corcos (39:21):
Yeah, actually on the podcast thing. I remember Tom saying at some point, “Yeah, we’ve done more podcasts than WHOOP.” And then somebody said, “Oh, wow, it’s good to hear we’re outpacing WHOOP.” He’s like, “No, no, we’ve done more podcasts than WHOOP has done in their entire history.”
Thomas Griffin (39:38):
They had a concerted podcast push for a while.
Josh Clemente (39:42):
That’s awesome. All right. Great work, everybody. Thank you for sharing all that. We made time, which I’m excited about. So, this will be a benchmark. I guess we can do a quick Q&A. Anyone have any questions on what we’ve covered so far today? Cool, cool.
Megha Doshi (40:00):
I guess one question, this is Megha. Do you feel like the strategy for how we engage podcast host and podcasts has changed? I’m just curious about what do you think the secret sauce is in our strategy?
Josh Clemente (40:19):
Well, early on our approach was basically just generate a gigantic kanban board of all the podcasts that might be interested in us and then look into our network, see who might know them, and try to get a warm intro. And that worked pretty well. And then as we started to grow, I think, I noticed that, personally, I started getting followed by more podcast hosts. And I just would… As soon as I get followed by one, I just message them and say, “Hey, I’d love to come on the show.” I think they’re pretty disarmed by that approach, and they would typically say, “Yes.” I don’t think I’ve been turned down by that strategy yet.
Josh Clemente (40:49):
And then now, I for the first time have been approached by podcasts. I’m sure Casey has seen the same thing. And probably due to the fact that we’re just completely overwhelming the health and wellness space right now with our 60 recent appearances. So people are starting to want to see us. So, I think that we’re going to continue to build leverage as we dominate the space. And we also want to be the first on all health and wellness podcasts. If anyone wants to talk CGM, they’re going to have to do it in the shadow of Levels. Cool. All right. So, on to Tom and his story of the day.
Thomas Griffin (41:29):
All right, so story of the day is lessons learned from a road trip. Bear with me here, it’s extremely unrehearsed. But really, the most recent trip that I did, which is now not so recent was two months through Africa with my best buddy. Most of which was wild camping on our own in a four by four, which we really had no business doing at all given our limited experience. So, we were in South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, a little bit of Zimbabwe. And yeah, I tried to throw just a different structure on this other than sharing some pictures. So what I did is I pulled out a few quotes that came out of the trip that ended up being recurring themes throughout the trip. And even now, we still reference to this day. So let’s dive in. Next slide.
Thomas Griffin (42:21):
Ah, right. Okay, so this one, “Let’s take the slow train, it’ll be a better story.” So, we were going from Johannesburg to Cape Town. And the way that most people do this is they take an hour and a half flight, which costs 50 US dollars. But my buddy who was traveling the world for a few years was on a 20 to $25 a day budget. So he convinced me that we should take the “slow train,” which is a 25 hour train across the entire state of South Africa. And so we did it, he said it was going to be a better story, which ended up being. We did it. The train 10 hours in broke down.
Thomas Griffin (42:57):
We ended up breaking down in a really rough area of Central South Africa. So, the train was actually attacked by some group of nameless bandits or robbers or something like that. At one point, we were told that they had infiltrated the train, which I don’t know if that was actually true or not, or just a rumor. They ended up sending buses out to get us. And then the buses were an additional 22 hours, which I didn’t sleep at all on, and I had three infants who were sleeping on me throughout the 22 hour bus ride. So, at the end of it all, it was a 40 hour trip. And my friend just got off the bus with a huge grin and told me that, he told me that it would be a better story, and that he was glad that we took the slow train. Next slide, Josh.
Thomas Griffin (43:43):
All right, “What else are we looking for?” So we were planning to do a two week road trip along what’s called the Garden Route, which is southeastern coastline of South Africa. And the goal of the trip was to basically find really peaceful serene areas where we could just do a lot of reading and relaxing. And so, we got to the first stop. We had probably 10 stops for two weeks. We got to the first stop, which was a town called Hermanus and within 24 hours I just declared that I wasn’t going to leave. And my friend was like, “What are you talking about? We’ve got all these places to go to?”
Thomas Griffin (44:16):
Apparently, my argument was that I just kept saying to him, “Dan, what else are we looking for? We have everything we need in front of us,” which he thought was hilarious, and I ended up not leaving and I just spent 13 days straight literally on one bench in this super random place. So, anyone who hears about my trip and finds out that I was in this town is like, “Why did you spend that much time and Hermanus?” So, often when Dan and I are now in a situation where we just want to appreciate what we have instead of looking ahead to the next thing. One of us will will say this. Next slide.
Thomas Griffin (44:51):
All right, so one day in Namibia we had a 10 hour drive ahead of us through the desert and I was the navigator, Dan was the driver since I didn’t know stick, and the drive was about 10 hours and there’s one turn. And the turn happened maybe two hours into the 10 hour drive. And we were caught up in conversation, listening to podcasts, etc. So probably about seven hours into the trip, I had to break the news to my buddy who was driving. I said, “Dan, I’ve got got some bad news for you. I think you might want to take a couple breaths.” And I told him, I was like, “You remember that turn that we had?” And he’s like, “Yeah, of course, it was the only turn of the trip.” And I said, “Well, we made a right and we should have made a left.”
Thomas Griffin (45:30):
So, we went four hours in the wrong direction. And really without skipping a beat, he just started laughing. And he said, “Don’t worry, man. We’ve got nowhere else to be, this is the trip.” I just couldn’t believe that in that moment, he’s got a great attitude, but I thought most people would have broken in that moment given that we turned a 10 hour drive into a 15 hour drive. Next slide, Josh.
Thomas Griffin (45:57):
All right, so a quick one here. Just, “There’s always time for dinner.” This is something that we still say whenever we’re rushing through a meal. We noticed we were often rushing through dinner while on the road. We would just end up eating a bunch of peanut butter even though we had this setup in the back of our truck. So, probably like midway through the trip, we resolved to always make time for dinner no matter where we were. So we would often just set up our full setup, and like cook whether it was in the middle of the desert, on the side of the road, or on some random mountain, or in the safari in a random wild area. We would just pretty much always set up the table, cook some food, pour a glass of wine, that’s about it. Next slide.
Thomas Griffin (46:41):
This is the last one. This isn’t really like an adage or advice. It’s just a funny story. So, we were in the middle of Botswana in a really wild area. None of this was national parks. None of it was regulated. And we thought we can make it through this river sort of structure. And we didn’t make it through and we couldn’t get our car out. It was actually like sinking quite fast. And so, we were, I don’t know, 100 miles away from civilization. The first guy who came across our situation, he came across on foot, and he was a local guy from Botswana. He actually grabbed my friend by the collar and he said, “You guys have to leave here, the animals are coming.” He couldn’t speak much other English. And then he didn’t help us. He just left, he ran away, which was a really harrowing thing to hear from someone.
Thomas Griffin (47:30):
I think that what he meant was that this was a common watering hole. And then basically some hippos did end up coming. And we were in a situation where my buddy was underneath the car trying to dig out the water and the mud, which was not a good strategy. And I was watching for hippos and elephants. And ultimately, we had four different… We ended up having to hike seven miles on foot and get into a main road. And then we stopped four cars who came and helped us and we ended up getting our car out. And we took that picture. We gave everyone peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and then we took that picture to celebrate, but we made it out alive. And that’s about it. Happy Friday. There’s a picture from the dunes in Namibia.
Josh Clemente (48:10):
Fantastic.
Sam Corcos (48:11):
Yeah.
Josh Clemente (48:12):
I want to do that trip.
Mike Didonato (48:14):
Plus one.
Thomas Griffin (48:15):
I was scared about half the time, but it was fun.
Josh Clemente (48:20):
I love the trip stories of the day. They’re always good. All right, everybody. Well, great work this week. Have an awesome Friday and a great rest of the weekend. Dom, once again, thank you for dropping in, and we’ll all be in touch. Enjoy yourselves.