#125 – Reflecting on a year full of startup milestones | Josh Clemente & Ben Grynol

For startup companies, one year can house a lot of changes. Crucial milestones like team growth, fundraising, and launches happen so fast for new businesses that it can be hard to keep up. But it’s important to remember the steps your business takes along the path to success. In this episode, President and Founder Josh Clemente sat down with Head of Growth Ben Grynol to reflect on the 2021 milestones Levels has achieved and how things have changed in one short year.

09:44 – The power of podcasting

Josh said podcasting is a great way to get an in-depth message out to people, because a long conversation is more nuanced and informative than a tweet.

I think podcasts have been around a long time, but only recently I think has society really appreciated that this is the anti-240 characters. This is like, “Wow, I can get depth here.” So our message, in particular, which is about this abstract nuance concept of metabolic health and nobody really knows what that means and it’s going to be impossible to capture in a tweet, well, podcasts are where we found, I think, our home with the podcast where we did in 2020. So we wanted to have our own place to share what we felt were a large spectrum of concepts, but we didn’t really know how to formulate that into a single recipe for a podcast. What was great is when you came onboard, you looked at the work we had done on podcast concepts previously, and a lot of it was tenuous question marks, lots of resources definitely going to be burned here, and you were like, “Well, why don’t we just record tomorrow and then we’ll go from there? Let’s just record something tomorrow, and then we’ll record something else, and then we’ll see what to do with it.” I was like, “Huh, that’s an interesting way to approach this. Why aren’t we talking about all the potential problems anymore?” So we, I think, you and I sat down and just recorded for an hour and we didn’t spend any time describing the recipe book like, “What is the show going to be? Who’s the host going to be? What are the topics going to be?” Instead, we just went free form and decided to just dig into the background of what we had been working on.

12:35 – Help people live better lives

Josh said Levels wants to provide the best access to raw data that they can to help people live healthier lives.

We’re here to help people take raw data and determine how to live better lives. So part of that commitment is making sure that we’re providing the best access to data that we can, and that means a diverse spectrum of products and devices. Like you said, there are various platforms, there are CGM devices that provide an NFC, near-field communication approach, where you have to scan your phone over it using your payments chip in the phone to pull the data on, and then there’s Bluetooth streaming platforms. So we had expanded from just the NFC strategy, which is quite manual, and in some ways, some people prefer that because it requires them to be engaged and to pay attention at discrete moments, and then we piloted a Bluetooth streaming platform for 250 people and learned a ton. I mean, first of all, it doubles the operational complexity to deliver essentially two different skews of product kit that are very different and to be able to deliver those, and then to keep tabs on different lifespans. So the CGMs last a different amount of time, 14 days, 10 days. So we were really learning a huge amount not only about our operational processes and about our checkout flow and our e-commerce system, but also about member selection, what do people prefer in the tools that they’re using to collect the raw data that then feeds their Levels experience.

19:23 – The importance of remote datasets

Josh said the most important part of the Coke challenge was that Levels gained the ability to create a fully remote dataset.

What I think is actually most important about this project is not that we were able to get everyone to try a “calibrated meal”, which was really important and it shows interpersonal variation, and it wasn’t even that we were able to show people how limited, simple, low-exertion exercise can modify the response because we had people drink a Coke and then we had them be stationary and then drink a Coke on a different day and go for a long walk afterward, but it was actually the fact that this is a very early prototype of a distributed research model that we can build to really push forward the science behind what we’re building. That’s what’s most important here is that we had a fairly large and as a function of the number of people using our product at the time of people participate in a rules set challenge study, they performed three different interventions, and we were able to collect all this data completely remotely, completely DTC without really any significant change in our overhead and learn from it, and show the statistical results on how this affected the individual and also the group. That’s really powerful because that’s the future. That’s where we’re going is large and distributed research with our fully remote dataset, and that’s something that we can do because of the way we built our business.

22:09 – Creating engagement

Ben said the point of giving out patches to people who had accomplished the Coke challenge wasn’t just to give them something cool. It was to help them feel engaged in the community.

You assume, “Hey, people will hopefully appreciate the touchpoint. They’ll hopefully create some UGC out of it,” all of these things, but that’s not the point of doing it. It’s because it creates the engagement. It makes them feel good and intrinsically fulfilled about being part of this thing and, and, and. We did it and we’ve continued to do it because people have been receptive to it, but we have now scaled that to our team. So we have team member patches where the year you joined there are patches for that, and there are other. We’ve done it for investors. So our seed round versus our series A investors and the number of people who are like, “I’ve never received something for being an investor. This is so cool.” It’s just they look at that and it probably, especially for the community investors, they look at it and they’re part of something, and that’s the acknowledgement that they’re part of something, and it’s the reflection back when they have it. If they choose to put it on their desk or somewhere that they might see more often as opposed to a drawer, it’s just knowing, “I’m part of this thing that I believe in.”

25:13 – Getting rid of Slack

Ben said a major organizational change for Levels was getting rid of Slack in favor of the communication platform Threads.

Around August, we had probably one of the biggest organizational changes from a culture perspective. We’ll call it people, process, and culture. It’s something that we were, I don’t want to say vocal about, but we discussed in-depth was this idea of transitioning from Slack to Threads and removing email all together. So Threads, if anyone’s not familiar who is listening, it’s the platform where we currently communicate. The best description is a combination of email meet Slack, but we wanted to stop the Slack dopamine slot machine so that people weren’t feeling this need to always have instant messaging, and we really leaned into the idea of being async, but needed a better way or better tooling than email for managing some of the internal comms. So that was probably the biggest thing was August transitioning to Threads, and it’s still not perfect to this day, but it’s something that was one of the largest changes we’ve made, I think, as a company.

27:23 – Streamline communication

Josh said the reason they moved from Slack to Threads was to make company communication cleaner and easier.

We wanted to move to something that has a completely different approach, which is that if you’re on the hook and you have a list of items for which you are required to do something, and then you have access to the other information through open channels and discoverability but it’s longer form, it’s closer to drafting an email than it is to submitting an instant message, and that’s what we found with Threads. They have this different artifact, which is followups, which are where you’re either required or requested to do something or you choose to mark something for followup. I would say that we’re getting to the point where we’re finding the cracks in the system, for sure, but I can say with full confidence that is an improvement over where we were with Slack and email, and there is room to grow and improve it further, but just remembering those moments of having 200 inbox messages, some of which were from the team, which I probably am blocking on, some of which are from external parties, which it’s unclear whether I’m blocking on something or not to where we are today with Threads, where I know exactly what I’m on the hook for and I can reach out to someone in five seconds and say, “Hey, I can’t get to this right now,” without having to go through 199 other messages to find that.

28:59 – Be willing to make changes

Ben said it’s important for companies to be willing to make changes that will improve their organization, no matter how big or small the company is.

It reinforces the outlook we have on always being willing to make changes no matter what size, no matter how hard something seems because it’s so easy to rationalize the wrong thing like, “Oh, we’re at 10 people. Oh, we’re at 1,000 people. We’re at some number of people, therefore, we can’t do this thing,” and it doesn’t matter whether it’s related to people and process, whether it’s related to actually serving customers for any company, but it’s really easy to fall into the trap of excuses of like why something can’t happen or can’t work. Just knowing that we’re continuing to embed this way of thinking and working, this way of thinking and biasing towards action, I don’t want to say working because that’s going to get confused with what we’re actually talking about on Threads, but biasing towards action to actually say, “Let’s try this and it might not work, and if it doesn’t work, we’re going to go back to the drawing board.” We might even go back to email and Slack, not actually, but it’s knowing that almost everything is a two-way door in some respect no matter what the size and scale and just thinking through those things is important for us to know when we make some of these decisions that seem really hard.

30:40 – Question assumptions

Josh said if someone raises a question or concern, you should be willing to talk through the underlying problem and come up with a solution.

I think the important thing is that we have a team who’s on the same page about questioning assumptions. So when somebody raises a communication problem with Slack, it’s not about, “Oh, well, you should modify your behaviors according to Slack’s systems.” It’s, “Hmm, maybe we should talk about what communication should look like and the principles of effective communication,” because if we don’t solve the underlying problem that is leading to this breakdown for many people, it’s going to get exponentially harder as more people come onboard because these problems with communication scale not linearly with the number of people. So just having a team that it’s difficult to take your attention off and it seems like you’re taking your attention off, it’s actually not. The company is the product. So it is difficult to convince yourself that we have to invest effort in solving communication because it feels the problems that we have to solve are all in the metabolic health products that we’re building. The reality is that both problems have to be solved.

33:09 – Align incentives

Josh said it was important for Levels to move to a membership model because they wanted to be incentivized to do the right thing for their customers.

CGM is a powerful tool and we’ll continue to make it a hallmark of what we’re building, but there’s much more out there that is necessary to know your health status. So thinking about that and like, “Okay. We have to have an expanding portfolio of methods to get better information about your health and turn it into insight and action. How do we build such a portfolio without entering into dark patterns where we are incentivized financially or in other means to extract more consumption from our members, right? Because if you make 80% margin on every product you sell and you want to keep making those numbers go up, we got to get people to buy more stuff.” So thinking about this, and Sam put in some background research to essentially find other ways of aligning incentives and making sure that the goal is the same between us and between our members, and that is better health outcomes. In doing so, how do we structure every incentive along the way to point towards that end?

47:14 – Looking at long-term scale

Ben said the growth of Levels over the last year has been exciting. They’ve doubled their team size, vastly increased anonymous customer data points, and grown their newsletter recipients, too.

So by the end of the year, I think end of December 31st, 2021, we had grown from we’ll call it under 20 team members to 36 full-time team members. So we grew by about 20 people. We almost doubled in size. I guess more than doubled in size. We had grown to 18,000 lifetime members, so people who had been through the program. We had over 100 million total health data points, which was shocking just the scale of that, and 1.6 million food logs thinking through all of this data that we now had. Again, it’s anonymized data, but just knowing that we have a large dataset related to metabolic health and glucose response related to food showing people how food affects their health and think it through like, “There is a lot that we can start to do here to uncover some insights,” because no one in the world has a larger data set of glucose-related data outside of the type one and type two community that has been continuously streamed. So again, it’s the sense of responsibility of we have a lot that we have to do to keep on our mission of educating the world about metabolic health. So that was exciting. Then I think we hit 175,000 newsletter signup or email signups that had grown by 100,000. So again, it was more than double. So just a lot going on.

Josh Clemente (00:06):

Each of these years is really just building. It’s building for the future, and it’s putting pieces in place that we’re going to build on. Those 36 employees that we hit by the end of 2021, each of those was an exceptional force multiplier for our team. The 18,000 lifetime members, I mean, each of those is an individual who has invested in Levels’ mission, who has taken a pass at being part of something that is in very early beta, given us feedback, provided us an opportunity to learn, and then all those health data points and food logs are an anonymized dataset that has unbelievable potential at this early, early stage to be the future of how metabolic science is conducted.

Ben Grynol (00:51):

I’m Ben Grynol, part of the early startup team here at Levels. We’re building tech that helps people to understand their metabolic health, and this is your front row seat to everything we do. This is a whole new level.

Ben Grynol (01:17):

When time passes, it’s pretty easy to rationalize why you don’t do something. Well, that was very much the case for Josh Clemente, co-founder of Levels, and I. Originally, at the end of the year 2021, we thought, “Hey, why don’t we do a year in review, a recap, and we’ll talk through some of the milestones, some of the things that happened over the course of the year?” It’s always exciting to keep track of these things.

Ben Grynol (01:42):

Well, as new team members have come onboard, what started originally as a podcast in April of 2021, we told all these back stories, the history of Levels, how it came about from June of 2019, when Sam Corcos and Josh, the two of them, got together and they decided to start this thing called Levels.

Ben Grynol (02:01):

Well, since then, when we started telling the backstory of Levels, we missed this big period, this 2021 period, where, although we told some of the stories in realtime, we didn’t really do any recap. So Josh and I, we sat down and we thought, “Why don’t we do it now? What’s stopping us?” So easy to say, “Well, it’s already 2022. Why would we do this now?”

Ben Grynol (02:23):

We put those irrationalities behind us. We put those insecurities aside and we said, “Let’s just do it. Let’s talk through some of the milestones.” So we did it. We walked through all these different things that happened in 2021. It’s important to document these things not only for ourself and for our team, but for new team members as they come onboard so they’ve got context on the history of Levels, all these things that happened. You don’t want to forget these things because in startups, it might be cliche, but time does move really fast. Anyway, here’s a conversation with Josh.

Ben Grynol (03:01):

So it’s been a while since we have done one of these. We did. When the podcast first launched, I was going to say 2021, April of last year, so about a year ago almost to the day, we spent a lot of time digging into the history of Maple biometrics, Frontier biometrics, what eventually became Levels, and we told all of this story retrospectively of things that had happened in the past.

Ben Grynol (03:30):

Then in the winter of ’21, December, we thought, “Hey, why don’t we do a December recap?” We ended up just punting it and punting it, and it led to this point where it was like, “Well, we actually don’t need this to line up exactly with a year end. It’s just capturing the story of what happens in a year over time is probably an important thing to do because there’s so much stuff that happens and it’s easy to lose sight of it or to forget about these events. So I thought it’d be good to go through a lot of the things that happened last year and just go sequentially through some of the big projects, some of the timelines associated with the month leading up till the end of the year and jam on it that way.

Josh Clemente (04:11):

Yeah. I’m excited for it. I like these opportunities. I do these on a micro basis every week for the Friday forum. I get a chance to catch up on what we did that week, even if it wasn’t directly in my line of sight, and then doing these year end or quarterly reviews is also just really nice reminder. Time is so weird in the startup vortex.

Ben Grynol (04:32):

It goes so quickly and it’s easy to forget about. So fall of ’20, there’s the fundraise, there’s the podcast tour, there’s a lot happening with tier one press, everything that Haney and Casey were working on with JTPR. So so carrying that through, it happened from the announcement of the raise, November of ’20 in through December, in through January where we had this momentum, and it continued to happen where you shake your head. It felt between we’ll say January and March. You keep shaking your head, you’re like, “New Times, Men’s Health.” Rodney was on the cover of Men’s Health, and there’s just all of these things and you’re trying to put together all of these pieces, and we really had that fuel where it didn’t slow down even though we all thought, “Is this going to stop? Will the wait list flatten out? What’s it going to look like?” We had talked about working towards launch. So during that first quarter of the year, we still had that forward movement, and I think you were still digging into a lot of the podcast appearances.

Josh Clemente (05:33):

Yeah. It was, let’s see, January. The podcast tour went through. For me, I started to pull my attention off podcasts around that time, yeah, January, February 2021, and we really started hitting our stride on ops, so being able to fulfill orders and hit a new scale, although we weren’t scaling. We’re not in growth mode even at this moment. We were testing and experimenting with many different things, press and print articles, podcast tour, obviously. We even started to experiment later in the year with ads and specific partnerships and affiliations. So we were learning a lot and our operational back end was really strong. So Truepill expanded to a second location on the East Coast, and so we were able to start cutting delivery times down and get more scale, and these two and three-week backlogs dropped two days, which was really nice and we were able to get a much better experience out.

Josh Clemente (06:31):

Yeah. That is all momentum that was built in late 2020, seed raise funds being put to use, bringing in new members and such. So beginning of 2021 felt like it was nice because we wrapped up the raise, and also in a couple ways, I relocated into Philadelphia again because I had taken 2020 and been off the map riding COVID out. I think many of us were displaced for that year, and then 2021 was the year we were like, “All right. The world is not actually ending and we were able to button together 2020, which looked real tenuous, into a good outcome with the raise and with just validation of the concept.” Now, 2021 was, “Let’s start executing on this again,” as opposed to … We were on our back foot in the beginning of 2020, then we started charging forward. We tighten the belt, just keep pushing ahead. Then we got the raise done. Then 2021 was just execution time in a sense.

Ben Grynol (07:28):

Yeah, and we’re focused on, I’m trying to think, I think around January we had set a goal. It was a moving target and it continues to be tighter, but this idea of what we were calling launch, air quotes launch, and it was really the idea of what we now refer to as liftoff, but opening up for general availability. So that target was we’re aiming for Q3, Q3 and we didn’t even have a month. We didn’t have a specific month, but we were working towards that, and there were a bunch of things that needed to come into play.

Ben Grynol (08:03):

So part of doing that was continuing to build the team, right? So I think we were, gosh, we were under 20 people at the end of ’20. So moving into ’21, we were still under 20 people, and over the course of the first two quarters, we brought on more team members and we were starting to think about scaling the team and ramping up for this idea of general availability.

Ben Grynol (08:30):

So we were working on all these different initiatives, one of which was a full experiment, which turned into, and this is probably a little bit meta, but it was a full experiment that has now turned into something that we do regularly, and that was in April we launched the podcast. We launched a couple different feeds, but it was when we started recording. It was, “Hey, this is an experiment, and if none of this works out and we ship exactly zero episodes, it’s not going to be a failure.” That was the outcome there. We would’ve had some qualitative and maybe quantitative data that said, “Here’s why we’re not doing it,” but it was an experiment.

Ben Grynol (09:08):

So April, as one of the milestones was, we launched this podcast and we didn’t really know what was going to happen with it. It ended up turning into this. We knew what our model. We want to have this thing that represents our team and a bunch of people are a part of, but we didn’t know that it was going to end up being this like, “Hey, this is a recruiting tool that we’re not trying to use as a recruiting tool.” So a cool experiment to see the outcome and to watch how it’s evolved and grown so much.

Josh Clemente (09:37):

Yeah. That was because we had had such good success, I think, with the podcast tour and the long form conversational format, which I think podcasts been around a long time, but only recently I think has society really appreciated that this is the anti 240 characters. This is like, “Wow, I can get depth here.” So our message, in particular, which is about this abstract nuance concept of metabolic health and nobody really knows what that means and it’s going to be impossible to capture in a tweet, well, podcasts are where we found, I think, our home with the podcast where we did in 2020.

Josh Clemente (10:09):

So we wanted to have our own, a place to share what we felt were a large spectrum of concepts, but we didn’t really know how to formulate that into a single recipe for a podcast. What was great is when you came onboard, you looked at the work we had done on podcast concepts previously, and a lot of it was tenuous question marks, lots of resources definitely going to be burned here, and you were like, “Well, why don’t we just record tomorrow and then we’ll go from there? Let’s just record something tomorrow, and then we’ll record something else, and then we’ll see what to do with it.”

Josh Clemente (10:44):

I was like, “Huh, that’s an interesting way to approach this. Why aren’t we talking about all the potential problems anymore?” So we, I think, you and I sat down and just recorded for an hour and we didn’t spend any time describing the recipe book like, “What is the show going to be? Who’s the host going to be? What are the topics going to be?” Instead, we just went free form and decided to just dig into the background of what we had been working on. I think that was the key is just create and see how it feels and then evolve a little bit.

Josh Clemente (11:13):

Now, I would say that whole new level is anti-formulaic. Rather than being a metabolic health podcast or a business building podcast, it’s a little bit of everything. In a way, I think that’s the best approach because, like you said, it’s turned into this communication tool from us to anyone who’s listening and the people who listen tend to be early believers, potential members, existing members, and potential team members. That’s huge. That’s definitely not what I had thought of when I was thinking about a podcast.

Ben Grynol (11:48):

It’s the restaurant without a menu.

Josh Clemente (11:49):

Yeah. We’ve got ingredients. We can cook something.

Ben Grynol (11:53):

Exactly. So April and May, continued to execute, and then June was another milestone. We ended up doing this small beta test with I think it was 250 members of the community where we said, “Hey, do you want to test some hardware to stream data and see what that experience is like and provide us with feedback?” It was something that we worked on. It just felt like another stepping stone towards getting to this moving target of the idea of general availability.

Josh Clemente (12:26):

Yeah. I mean, our business is actionability and accessibility, data science interpretation, insights, metabolic awareness, right? We’re here to help people take raw data and determine how to live better lives. So part of that commitment is making sure that we’re providing the best access to data that we can, and that means a diverse spectrum of products and devices. Like you said, there are various platforms, there are CGM devices that provide an NFC, near-field communication approach, where you have to scan your phone over it using your payments chip in the phone to pull the data on, and then there’s Bluetooth streaming platforms. So we had expanded from just the NFC strategy, which is quite manual, and in some ways, some people prefer that because it requires them to be engaged and to pay attention at discrete moments, and then we piloted a Bluetooth streaming platform for 250 people and learned a ton.

Josh Clemente (13:23):

I mean, first of all, it doubles the operational complexity to deliver essentially two different skews of product kit that are very different and to be able to deliver those, and then to keep tabs on different lifespans. So the CGMs last a different amount of time, 14 days, 10 days. So we were really learning a huge amount not only about our operational processes and about our checkout flow and our e-commerce system, but also about member selection, what do people prefer in the tools that they’re using to collect the raw data that then feeds their Levels experience. That was a big moment, June of last year. It feels a lot longer than that. I’ll tell you that.

Ben Grynol (14:03):

The funny thing with those is it reinforces the importance of N of one, but in this case, N of 250 was our N of one. So it’s really easy to experiment with things and go, “Ah, that feels small. Why don’t we do 1,000? Why don’t we do 10,000?” but that just increases organizational complexity. So you start to break down all of the individual inputs for testing some of these things.

Ben Grynol (14:29):

So in this case, it was what needs to change operationally from a fulfillment, from a throughput perspective, what needs to change in the tech stack as far as actually being able to have people opt into this experience, what needs to change from a packaging standpoint, what needs to change from a performance cover. You break down all of the little inputs and then you go, “Oh, imagine we messed up and it was 10,000, it just gets so much worse if there’s something really bad or something missing,” where 250 is still a big enough sample set, but you compare it back and you could go, “Could we do it with 10?” and that reinforces this idea with experiments of saying, “Start really small so that you can learn and learn and learn.”

Ben Grynol (15:13):

If you overdesign, going back to what you’re saying with the podcast, if we overdesigned it and we said, “We’re going to make this thing that’s a recruiting tool,” we tried to plan it out, it probably would’ve been exponentially worse because we would’ve been trying to engineer towards something as opposed to saying, “The outcome that has evolved from our learnings is this thing.”

Ben Grynol (15:33):

So it was a very cool test, and I think as a team we learned a lot about collaborating together, about making a huge initiative come together and say, “This involves every person on our team in some way. Here’s what we’re doing about it.”

Josh Clemente (15:49):

Yeah, and it’s feeding a lot of ongoing initiatives inside the company because we do intend to have an array of options for people. What we learned in June is super relevant today, and we’re still building on those lessons, and I would say, in some cases, counterintuitive learnings that we pulled out of that, about what people prefer. So yeah, that very much was, at 250 people, we had a strong signal in several directions and then a weaker signal in some directions. So we’re able to double down on those areas that were very clear learnings.

Ben Grynol (16:25):

That was the first we’ll call it community project, community engagement initiative. So in July, we had this other one that we undertook as a team, but then we moved it towards a community, and that was the idea of the Coke challenge. So that was something that everyone on our team remembers really well because I think it started out as drinking glucose 75, downing one of those and seeing what the metabolic response would be individually to having this and being sedentary versus doing light exercise like going for a walk.

Ben Grynol (17:01):

So we all had these different responses. I think Sam had initially come up with the idea, and I want to say we were going to record a podcast. There was something that we were about to do and he texted and he said, “I’m hitting 300.” I think he crashed so hard after that, but we ended up tweaking the experiment and it became the Coke challenge where we said, “What happens if we change this to a Coke?” but also, we change it to a product that a lot of people do have as, I don’t want to say a staple, they have a lot of exposure to because we’re surrounded by it in society.

Josh Clemente (17:37):

Everyone has had one, right?

Ben Grynol (17:38):

Yeah or continues to have them, right? We ended up doing this community challenge where people participated and we did a lot with the data and content around it after.

Josh Clemente (17:48):

To pull back, the concept started off as mimicking an oral glucose tolerance test, which is that 75 grams of pure glucose in a solution like this syrup. That’s a general approach to understanding how someone’s blood sugar response and insulin sensitivity functions. So JM, I think, was running the project and his goal was to do this community challenge and see how your body responds to 75 grams glucose, and like you said, Sam did it, and his blood sugar exceeded 300 milligrams per deciliter. It was way up there and came crashing back down. I mean, that’s a pretty serious event for someone who doesn’t have diagnosed dysfunction of any kind, right? So to know that that’s the type of thing that can occur, we were like, “Hmm. Maybe we should not be inducing that degree of variation and elevation in our members.”

Josh Clemente (18:42):

So instead, we stepped back and thought, “Yeah. Maybe we should make this something that’s more relevant to our day-to-day. It’s glucose 75. Well, yeah, of course, that’s going to cause a huge elevation, but my Coca-Cola, that’s in a vending machine. Why would that cause a huge problem? That must be safe.” That’s, I think, some of the background thinking that goes into just choosing a beverage that ends up actually having 38 grams roughly of glucose.

Josh Clemente (19:09):

So we went with the full sugar Coke. JM knocked out the operational stuff running that project just as basically getting essentially consistent Coke products into the hands of anyone that wanted to participate. Then what I think is actually most important about this project is not that we were able to get everyone to try a “calibrated meal”, which was really important and it shows interpersonal variation, and it wasn’t even that we were able to show people how limited, simple, low-exertion exercise can modify the response because we had people drink a Coke and then we had them be stationary and then drink a Coke on a different day and go for a long walk afterward, but it was actually the fact that this is a very early prototype of a distributed research model that we can build to really push forward the science behind what we’re building.

Josh Clemente (20:08):

That’s what’s most important here is that we had a fairly large and as a function of the number of people using our product at the time of people participate in a rules set challenge study, they performed three different interventions, and we were able to collect all this data completely remotely, completely DTC without really any significant change in our overhead and learn from it, and show the statistical results on how this affected the individual and also the group.

Josh Clemente (20:40):

That’s really powerful because that’s the future. That’s where we’re going is large and distributed research with our fully remote dataset, and that’s something that we can do because of the way we built our business. We’re a very e-commerce-like experience, but we also have a backend that’s managing huge amounts of data, and with people fully understanding what we intend to do with the data, we can get I think a huge array of these sorts of studies going continuously into the future, and that’s going to set the standard for … My guess is this is going to be the standard for population scale end of one trials going way into the future not just with Levels.

Josh Clemente (21:17):

So I’m very excited about what the Coke challenge was, and it led into this next thing that we did, which was, I think, our first community mission patch to commemorate that. So people that participated got this embroidered Coke challenge patch, which I think is one of the coolest designs we’ve had so far, but the goal is just to, in the same vein as what we did at SpaceX whenever we had big projects that were completed, people who participated would get these embroidered flight patches.

Josh Clemente (21:44):

So we did something similar to commemorate the Coke challenge, which is just an experiment, and I think it got rave reviews and that’s been a program ever since. So the Coke challenge was the root of several really cool learnings, I think, for our team.

Ben Grynol (21:59):

Yeah. You brought that forward in. It was that experiment where we were like, “Let’s test, let’s see what happens,” not knowing. You assume, “Hey, people will hopefully appreciate the touchpoint. They’ll hopefully create some UGC out of it,” all of these things, but that’s not the point of doing it. It’s because it creates the engagement. It makes them feel good and intrinsically fulfilled about being part of this thing and, and, and.

Ben Grynol (22:27):

We did it and we’ve continued to do it because people have been receptive to it, but we have now scaled that to our team. So we have team member patches where the year you joined there are patches for that, and there are other. We’ve done it for investors. So our seed round versus our series A investors and the number of people who are like, “I’ve never received something for being an investor. This is so cool.” It’s just they look at that and it probably, especially for the community investors, they look at it and they’re part of something, and that’s the acknowledgement that they’re part of something, and it’s the reflection back when they have it. If they choose to put it on their desk or somewhere that they might see more often as opposed to a drawer, it’s just knowing, “I’m part of this thing that I believe in,” and it’s the, to Cess’ point, the people like us do things this. You’re part of that little club because that means something to you.

Ben Grynol (23:19):

So it’s been very cool to watch how your inspiration for being part of … We’ve actually never talked about this, but I’m going to make an assumption. You have a falcon patch somewhere.

Josh Clemente (23:29):

I’ve got my favorite one right here.

Ben Grynol (23:33):

Oh, you got one right there.

Josh Clemente (23:33):

So this one went to space on the first cargo dragon mission, and we have this little signed thing with our employee number. It’s signed by Elon, and that patch was in the first dragon capsule I worked on. So I have a bunch of these, but certain of them, this is what I love about the program is that you remember. It’s a chronological mile marker. That is a very simple thing, but when you look at it, you remember the specific details about that time and space. I think we’re going to look back on the Coke challenge badge or mission patch as Levels was pre-launched, we were using cans of Coke and a few hundred people to basically demonstrate something that was very unscalable. Someday, I don’t know what it will be like, but it’ll be very different and we’ll be able to look back and just smile about it.

Josh Clemente (24:19):

When I look at this version of the dragon capsule, this thing was real basic. It was as simple as you could get. Now, it’s much more advanced and it’s doing much cooler stuff, but I’m glad that I had the opportunity to commemorate that moment. It’s an IRL badge. It’s an in real life thing, where most of what we do now is it’s a virtual experience, and so we have virtual tokens. You can get these little badges in the app or something, but I love that we’re creating the physical form of that and it shows up at your doorstep and you can touch it and feel it and it’s like, “Oh, wow! This is a commemoration of a thing that’s only in my head.”

Ben Grynol (24:55):

I was going to say I’ve never seen that version of dragon. It looks it’s got wings on it or something.

Josh Clemente (25:01):

Yeah. It’s hilarious. Yeah.

Ben Grynol (25:02):

Look at that.

Josh Clemente (25:03):

Which one of our investors designed.

Ben Grynol (25:05):

Oh, look at that.

Josh Clemente (25:07):

[inaudible 00:25:07]

Ben Grynol (25:08):

There you go. Yeah. So that was a fun time. We delivered those mission patches in August, and around August, we had probably one of the biggest organizational changes from a culture perspective. We’ll call it people, process, and culture. It’s something that we were, I don’t want to say vocal about, but we discussed in-depth was this idea of transitioning from Slack to Threads and removing email all together. So Threads, if anyone’s not familiar who is listening, it’s the platform where we currently communicate. The best description is a combination of email meet Slack, but we wanted to stop the Slack dopamine slot machine so that people weren’t feeling this need to always have instant messaging, and we really leaned into the idea of being async, but needed a better way or better tooling than email for managing some of the internal comms. So that was probably the biggest thing was August transitioning to Threads, and it’s still not perfect to this day, but it’s something that was one of the largest changes we’ve made, I think, as a company.

Josh Clemente (26:15):

Yeah. I mean, definitely not nailed down, but I would say what it does is it’s a demonstration of our commitment to solving the problems of the way we work. Most companies look at the landscape of technologies available, they sign up for something, and that’s it. You just go with it. We’re looking at Slack and email, which we were using both of these at the time. Email is the endless to-do list that anyone can put an item on, and you have to filter through every single item to know whether or not you are signed up for something. So email is the black box.

Josh Clemente (26:50):

Slack is the internal. So everyone can’t put an item on it, but there is no to-do list. It’s just an ethereal receipt that keeps printing. It’s like the CVS receipt. It just goes and goes and you got to review every line item if you want to find something interesting or more than interesting, find something that you’re on the hook for. So you are either permanently plugged into the Slack machine, which is a lot being worked. You’re not actually able to do work because you’re just trying to look out for if you have to do work on Slack or you’re constantly faced with these huge, huge, emotionally draining episodes of email processing.

Josh Clemente (27:23):

So we wanted to move to something that has a completely different approach, which is that if you’re on the hook you know and you have a list of items for which you are required to do something, and then you have access to the other information through open channels and discoverability but it’s longer form, it’s closer to drafting an email than it is to submitting an instant message, and that’s what we found with Threads. They have this different artifact, which is followups, which are where you’re either required or requested to do something or you choose to mark something for followup.

Josh Clemente (27:54):

I would say that we’re getting to the point where we’re finding the cracks in the system, for sure, but I can say with full confidence that is an improvement over where we were with Slack and email, and there is room to grow and improve it further, but just remembering those moments of having 200 inbox messages, some of which were from the team, which I probably am blocking on, some of which are from external parties, which it’s unclear whether I’m blocking on something or not to where we are today with Threads, where I know exactly what I’m on the hook for and I can reach out to someone in five seconds and say, “Hey, I can’t get to this right now,” without having to go through 199 other messages to find that.

Josh Clemente (28:37):

So yeah, just an investment moment. It was quite disruptive to transition to that communication model, but I’m glad that we’re the team that’s willing to make those choices because, otherwise, you get trapped and there’s all that inertia. As more team join, the inertia builds and you get less likely to make that choice.

Ben Grynol (28:59):

Yeah. It reinforces the outlook we have on always being willing to make changes no matter what size, no matter how hard something seems because it’s so easy to rationalize the wrong thing like, “Oh, we’re at 10 people. Oh, we’re at 1,000 people. We’re at some number of people, therefore, we can’t do this thing,” and it doesn’t matter whether it’s related to people in process, whether it’s related to actually serving customers for any company, but it’s really easy to fall into the trap of excuses of like why something can’t happen or can’t work.

Ben Grynol (29:34):

Just knowing that we’re continuing to embed this way of thinking and working, this of thinking and biasing towards action, I don’t want to say working because that’s going to get confused with what we’re actually talking about on Threads, but biasing towards action to actually say, “Let’s try this and it might not work, and if it doesn’t work, we’re going to go back to the drawing board.” We might even go back to email and Slack, not actually, but it’s knowing that almost everything is a two-way door in some respect no matter what the size and scale and just thinking through those things is important for us to know when we make some of these decisions that seem really hard.

Ben Grynol (30:15):

They’re not easy. I think that’s the thing to highlight is sometimes it might seem like they’re easy when we talk about them publicly. They’re not. We still struggle with managing Threads and communication volume. We’re figuring it out. We don’t have everything figured out. We’re not some like, “Look at Levels. They’re on the pedestal.” We don’t. This is the disclaimer. We don’t have it all figured out, but we’re trying to make changes constantly to figure things out.

Josh Clemente (30:40):

Yeah. I think the important thing is that we have a team who’s on the same page about questioning assumptions. So when somebody raises a communication problem with Slack, it’s not about, “Oh, well, you should modify your behaviors according to Slack’s systems.” It’s, “Hmm, maybe we should talk about what communication should look like and the principles of effective communication,” because if we don’t solve the underlying problem that is leading to this breakdown for many people, it’s going to get exponentially harder as more people come onboard because these problems with communication scale not linearly with the number of people.

Josh Clemente (31:18):

So just having a team that it’s difficult to take your attention off and it seems like you’re taking your attention off, it’s actually not. The company is the product. So it is difficult to convince yourself that we have to invest effort in solving communication because it feels the problems that we have to solve are all in the metabolic health products that we’re building. The reality is that both problems have to be solved and many teams don’t think of it that way.

Josh Clemente (31:43):

Understandably so, it’s a race. Companies are at race against time. So splitting your attention can feel like a bad idea, but we’re here to confirm that splitting our attention is leading to better bandwidth availability for our team because the communication problems are at least not as bad as they once were.

Ben Grynol (32:02):

That’s exactly it. So that was around the end of August that we had that transition and we continue to bring more team members onboard. October rolls around and we ended up transitioning. So that was our biggest we’ll call it people, process, culture transition with the idea of moving to Threads, and our biggest business model transition was moving to a membership model, which a lot of time and effort was spent on really thinking through the implications of that and why we did it and what we wanted to do from an incentive alignment perspective. So let’s dig in to the whole membership model.

Josh Clemente (32:41):

Essentially, towards the end of August, we recognized that what we were building that needed to exist was a platform that allows biological observability, which would be the ability to measure the important parts, the important elements or markers of health, and glucose is really powerful, but it’s insufficient to know your entire health status. So that’s biological observability.

Josh Clemente (33:04):

So as we started to mature this, we recognized that this goes well beyond just CGM, right? I mean, CGMs a powerful tool and we’ll continue to make it a hallmark of what we’re building, but there’s much more out there that is necessary to know your health status. So thinking about that and like, “Okay. We have to have an expanding portfolio of methods to get better information about your health and turn it into insight and action. How do we build such a portfolio without entering into dark patterns where we are incentivized financially or in other means to extract more consumption from our members, right? Because if you make 80% margin on every product you sell and you want to keep making those numbers go up, we got to get people to buy more stuff.”

Josh Clemente (33:50):

So thinking about this, and Sam put in some background research to essentially find other ways of aligning incentives and making sure that the goal is the same between us and between our members, and that is better health outcomes. In doing so, how do we structure every incentive along the way to point towards that end? We found inspiration in Costco, which is they keep their margins on the products they sell through very low, and they have a membership model and their goal, their incentive is to bring in more satisfied members. That’s their goal. In Costco, you’re satisfied if you get quality products for a good price. With Levels, we would have satisfied members if we have people who are learning more about their bodies and able to make informed changes that lead to better health.

Josh Clemente (34:35):

So that has nothing to do with volume of product sold. So it feels a really good starting point. So actually, we came up with a new membership model based on some of what we learned about Costco and other membership platforms. We’re still certainly tuning our messaging and really our own understanding of what this membership platform will look like as we grow, but we’re putting the framework pieces in place now. So we’ve transitioned to a membership since October. The various components have been in work, but we’re fully transitioned now, and everyone who signs up is signing up to be a member of the Levels platform, and we then offer opportunities to get access to a number of different products and services, and that includes CGM. It also includes, for example, the launch of our nutritionist marketplace, which is one of the first new efforts that we rolled up in that October of ’21 timeframe, where we really wanted to respond to all of these folks who were using Levels and wanted more of a human touch. They wanted to get more explicit interpretation of their data that they had collected.

Josh Clemente (35:40):

Of course, the long term vision is Levels continues to improve our ability to have software take much of this burden off the individual so you don’t have to worry about interpreting this yourself or needing an expert, but as we move towards that, having really aligned experts in the loop who can help our members understand what they’re looking at is a really good idea.

Josh Clemente (36:01):

So along with the membership model transition, we started to work on this nutritionist initiative, which points to the future of a marketplace where you have access to just many different levers to pull on to get to your goals. We’ve learned a lot. It’s an ongoing project. We’ve learned a lot about that concept and how nutritionist might integrate with our platform.

Ben Grynol (36:22):

Started small with that, too, right? It wasn’t like, “Okay. Cool.” The heuristic is like, “We’re building a marketplace. We need a nutritionist that focuses on plant-based diet. We need one that focuses on keto, paleo, you name it.” We can go on forever, one that is in … We can start to have taxonomy by geography, and by age, and by gender, and by … You name all these things, and it’s like, “Well, that’s actually a terrible idea because it’s a great idea in when you are at scale. It’s a terrible idea for learning.”

Ben Grynol (36:56):

So we started with, I think we had three or four nutritionists initially and kept it focused to say, “What feedback are we going to get?” as opposed to over-engineering it and trying to be everything to everyone. It’s, “Will this help some people and what feedback will they have for us?”

Ben Grynol (37:12):

So that was part of the idea of moving to a membership model, where the idea was to create value for members through different ancillary products and services, one of which was the metabolic health panel, which you touched on and why the idea of being able to have feedback about more than one molecule. Glucose is not in your words. Glucose is not a panacea. So the goal isn’t to say, “Hey, everyone. Go get a panel because we’re telling you to get a panel,” it is, “The reason a panel is important is because glucose is one marker, and it’s only going to give you a certain amount of insight. You need to understand your insulin levels. You need to understand your triglycerides, and, and, and,” and so providing the foundation of education to say, “This is what we are trying to bring forward,” so that it aligns with our mission of educating the world about metabolic health so people can make different lifestyle choices.

Josh Clemente (38:10):

Yeah. So all of this, I love the October-November timeframe because this is when we started to hit our stride with the biological observability concept leading into membership, leading into the ability to start testing these ancillary services that you’re describing. Previously, we didn’t really have the conceptual framework for how we would get access to or get our members access to the information they need to know about their holistic health.

Josh Clemente (38:36):

Then we hit on these ideas. We started building on them, and it’s hard to overstate how important the metabolic health panel is to the future of Levels. Like you said, glucose is not a panacea, but even more importantly, glucose does not represent, I think, even the pinnacle of the information that you could collect from your body. That is likely something along the lines of a hormone like insulin. Insulin really drives how glucose is utilized by the body. So today, insulin is a gold standard in understanding how your metabolism functions.

Josh Clemente (39:16):

We just recognize that we don’t need to wait to introduce these concepts to our members. We can start by building a panel which enables gold standard access to a number of different markers that are critically important to your overall health and closely correlate with glucose metabolism. Of course, we wanted to find a path to getting this information to our members that isn’t high overhead and frustrating and painful. We experimented with a large number of products and services in the background, everything from at-home testing to going to get lab work.

Josh Clemente (39:50):

Ultimately, we landed on this VIP experience of in-home phlebotomy where you can sign up and within 24 hours you have an appointment on the books and someone shows up at your home, a qualified at-home phlebotomist, a licensed professional. They come in and they take quick few vials through at your own table in the comfort of your own home in just a few minutes, and then a few hours later, you have the results right in your app.

Josh Clemente (40:15):

That experience felt a transformation of what is typically a frustrating battling traffic in the middle of the day to go find some dingy lab and sit in line and eventually get called up and have some cold clinical experience and then have to reverse the process, and then you get a PDF in the email and it doesn’t really help you understand anything about how you’re living your lifestyle.

Josh Clemente (40:37):

So this is the beginning of Levels investing in biological observability, making available the markers that through our research and through our advisors we know are most important to you and your long-term health and getting it built into our membership. It’s just super exciting. I am a customer of the metabolic health panel. I’m a believer in what we’re building there personally and for my family and for my friends. I’m so excited that we were able to make the expansion to our portfolio so quickly,

Ben Grynol (41:06):

Yeah. It’s such a stepping stone with the … There’s a couple reasons it’s a stepping stone. So the first one you highlighted on. It’s the, colloquially, and this is an example that happens. You go to a lab and you get the printout, the photocopy piece paper. It’s like, “Here you go.” That’s one scenario or I’ve had this happen personally, where, “We’ll call you if there’s anything that looks it’s off,” and you’re like, “Great.” So then no one even follows up and calls you, but what is the subjective view of off when you start to think through some of these markers.

Ben Grynol (41:41):

The idea is like, “Well, if you are providing continuous data or streaming data for glucose, why aren’t you doing it for insulin? If insulin is so important, why don’t you just do it?” This is the reason it’s a stepping stone is providing people with the importance and the education about what it is because, commercially, there isn’t any hardware that you can just stream insulin right now. You can’t stream cortisol right now, and these are things that in the future companies will have to work towards, but you can’t just go from zero to not having anything. It’s what can we do now with what we have as a society based on where technology is at. What can we do to provide members with that lens and that foundation of education?

Ben Grynol (42:21):

So it’s very important and it’s something that, I think, our team really likes and really likes to talk about the metabolic health panel whenever there’s an opportunity to because when you see it, you realize how exciting it is to see all of these markers as opposed to just glucose.

Josh Clemente (42:38):

Absolutely. Also, like you said, picking up the tools that are available and building it into an accessible and important experience is going to lead to more attention and eventually more innovation in the space, for sure. I mean, that’s just how these things work is if you can see a functional representation of what insulin tracking looks like through VIP at-home blood work, but you can easily understand how that might map onto a future continuous platform that could give people those insights on an ongoing basis. So I’m just excited to get the message out there that’s important and have people try and recognize, “Wow! There’s huge potential in biomonitoring.”

Ben Grynol (43:14):

That’s exactly it. So November, December, as we pull it into a close here for the year end, we had these two exciting events, one of which, let’s go into December because it was an important one, but something that we discuss less as a team, which was we launched the Levels app in the app store in December, but let’s rewind to November because that seemed to be the pinnacle of the year where a lot of great things happened, but I think as a team, we all took a step back and we said, “You can start to feel the movement,” and that was the crowdfunding, the equity crowdfunding raise through Wefunder, where we opened up our fundraising our series A to the community and we’re like, “Let’s see what happens.”

Josh Clemente (43:59):

The crowdfund, like you said, started in November. This was, again, this was more incentive alignment. So once we had really found our stride with membership and recognized what we were building, it became important to weave that member centricity and that incentive alignment into the DNA of the company and into our cap table. It’s very clear that if our goal is to maintain the same incentives as our members, what better way than to make sure the company is being built with investors who are aligned with our goals and their own health and can merge those two?

Josh Clemente (44:36):

So luckily, we’re at a point in time where the SEC had changed some rules around crowdfunding. It used to be very, very hard to do this, borderline impossible. Now, there was an opportunity to have up to a $5 million allocation available for private, for individuals who weren’t necessarily professional investors.

Josh Clemente (44:57):

We got the opportunity to work with Wefunder on arranging for an allocation. We decided to go with $2.5 million initially. We didn’t really know if this was going to work. It’s a very new thing. SEC just made these rule changes and not many teams have done this before that we were familiar with. So we went out on a limb, decided it’s worth the risk, it’s worth the effort to get this alignment in place. Even if it’s just a few people that respond, it’ll be important.

Josh Clemente (45:24):

I remember we pushed the link live on a Thursday at 11:00 AM, and no prior warning, we didn’t message this at all to our membership, and we pushed the link out, and I think within 77 minutes, that two and a half million dollars was snapped up. I think $600,000 was in, Zach was tracking it, it was within five minutes there was $600,000 or something. Absolutely insane. I might be messing that up, but I remember just sitting on the stairs and tracking the messages and Threads as people are in a Slack vortex of some kind because one of the rare moments when I was just transfixed by what was happening. Totally blew my mind.

Josh Clemente (46:00):

Then we were like, “We hit the cap in 77 minutes. Well, that’s not enough because most people haven’t even been able to open the email yet. So we got to do more.” So we doubled the allocation to the SEC limit of five million. I don’t think we sent even a followup communication. We just doubled it just assuming that more people would open the email and they would try. That’s exactly what happened. We hit the full five million over subscription in less than five hours, I think.

Josh Clemente (46:27):

So truly a moment that I don’t think any of us will forget, and I think a validation that people care about what we’re doing as an organization, as a team, as a mission, and that was just, man, still get chills thinking about it. It was so cool.

Ben Grynol (46:46):

Yeah. It was a very cool experience. So it was a nice way to bring it into the end of the year where we carried that momentum forward. It felt like you could feel the team growing. You could feel things evolving and we all felt the responsibility and the accountability to say, “Now,” not that this wasn’t the case before, but, “we have to execute. We don’t have any excuses. We have a lot of responsibility to see through.”

Ben Grynol (47:14):

So by the end of the year, I think end of December 31st, 2021, we had grown from we’ll call it under 20 team members to 36 full-time team members. So we grew by about 20 people. We almost doubled in size. I guess more than doubled in size. We had grown to 18,000 lifetime members, so people who had been through the program. We had over 100 million total health data points, which was shocking just the scale of that, and 1.6 million food logs thinking through all of this data that we now had. Again, it’s anonymized data, but just knowing that we have a large dataset related to metabolic health and glucose response related to food showing people how food affects their health and think it through like, “There is a lot that we can start to do here to uncover some insights,” because no one in the world has a larger data set of glucose-related data outside of the type one and type two community that has been continuously streamed.

Ben Grynol (48:15):

So again, it’s the sense of responsibility of we have a lot that we have to do to keep on our mission of educating the world about metabolic health. So that was exciting. Then I think we hit 175,000 newsletter signup or email signups that had grown by 100,000. So again, it was more than double. So just a lot going on. all the tier one press. We grew the advisory board with 10 new thought leaders, including Dr. Lustig, Dr. Perlmutter, Sarah Gottfried, Dr. Sinclair, Mark Hyman, Gerald Schulman, Kristen Holmes. It was just a very exciting year.

Josh Clemente (48:53):

It was, and even though it felt like execution year relative to 2020, each of these years is really just building. It’s building for the future and it’s putting pieces in place that we’re going to build on. Those 36 employees that we hit by the end of 2021, each of those was an exceptional force multiplier for our team. The 18,000 lifetime members, I mean, each of those is an individual who has invested in Levels’ mission, who has taken a pass at being part of something that is in very early beta, given us feedback, provided us an opportunity to learn, and then all those health data points and food logs are an anonymized data set that has unbelievable potential at this early, early stage to be the future of how metabolic science is conducted.

Josh Clemente (49:41):

We touched on this with the Coke challenge, but that dataset and as we get to the point where right now in early 2022, we are preparing the IRB, so institutional review board approved studies, to massively improve the publishability of our dataset. So moving towards the opportunity for members to consent, to contributing their data to studies that can be analyzed, published, and eventually make their way into the world’s top journals to show how this dataset is demonstrating how people use these tools and how changes are rolling out over time, how they’re unfolding towards outcomes.

Josh Clemente (50:22):

Could not be more excited about that. Being able to leverage this to push science forward is really of the main goals of our organization. We’re not in the business of selling data. This is about advancing metabolic science. Then yeah, all the press coverage, just more validation. Finally, the advisory team of just amazing top of the industry of many industries of mechanistic science on how physiology works of endocrinology pediatrics end of one studies with Dr. Gottfried, Mark Hyman, having just a massive following to distribute functional medicine information and Kristen Holmes over at Whoop who has just demonstrated how consumer products can change sleep.

Josh Clemente (50:57):

So just a tremendous brain trust that we’ve built that is just going to amplify what we’re working on as we move into late 2022, lift off IRB studies, and on into 2023 and scaling.