#162 – Influencer marketing: Beneficial partnership endorsements, relationship management, & organic growth | Tom Griffin, Jackie Tsontakis, & Steph Coates

Navigating the world of influencer marketing isn’t easy. When is it beneficial to welcome influencers into your marketing plan? How do you choose which content creators to partner with? What can you do to maintain authenticity while partnering with influencers? Here are the details on how Levels thinks about influencer marketing, partnership endorsements, relationship management, and organic growth.

02:56 – What does partnership mean?

Tom said that while the term partnership can mean many different things, it’s becoming a more and more common term with direct to consumer companies.

Partnerships is an inherently vague term and it absolutely can mean a million different things depending on the type of company that you are. And as a result, the customers that you have and how you might go about acquiring those customers. I would say there is a relatively recent phenomenon, call it in the last maybe 10 years in particular, where partnerships became a term that was more commonly used in direct to consumer companies, including now Levels. And while it does usually encompass a pretty wide range of type of work, which we can talk about, the main focus to get right to it tends to be relationships with thought leaders, or content creators, or influencers. These are really all terms for the same thing these days.

07:15 – The influence of content creators

Jackie said influencers and content creators have a powerful relationship with their audiences compared to traditional marketing.

It’s so cool to think about the relationship that influencers and content creators have with their audiences and how powerful that is, versus some of the more traditional types of marketing like billboards, or TV ads. And the way I like to think about it is, if a friend of mine or a family member recommended a product to me and said, hey, I saw a huge results drinking this special water or something. And I think you should try it too. That would have so much more of an impact on me than if I saw special water on a billboard. I would not really know what to do with that information. Or if I was kind of interested, I might look it up or forget to look it up. But if I did look it up, maybe I’d just kind of take it in, think about it. But if a friend is telling me about it, that I’m much more likely to take action like, oh, wow, let me try this out. This person has my best interest in mind. And I think the influencer creator relationship with their audience is maybe one step removed from a friend or a family member telling you, but it’s pretty close just from what we’ve seen. People really trust people online and influencers that have really great relationships with their audiences that shows. And you can see that in their engagement, comments and we’ve seen it too. And we’ve tried to prioritize relationships with people that have really great relationships with their audiences just because it really is impactful. It feels like you’re getting a recommendation from a friend, especially when our partners are telling people, hey, I’m using Levels and these are the results I’m seeing personally. We found that to be really impactful.

15:01 – Why we’re focusing on a specific audience

Jackie said that while Levels hopes to branch out into a bigger audience sphere eventually, right now they’re focused on a smaller audience that already understands the basics behind CGMs.

Right now we’re focused on the audience that we’re focused on, that is more into biohacking, kind of knows what metabolic health, is maybe a little bit familiar with glucose or at least willing to learn and more about their health and is actually really interested in learning about their health, because as Tom mentioned there’s so much education required. And right now we’re just scratching the surface of raising awareness and driving awareness around metabolic health and why you should care about your glucose. I think eventually we will kind of exhaust that audience and we’ll feel comfortable that okay, we have a good level of general awareness around metabolic health. And at that point, I think we’ll be able to reach a larger audience once we have a good level of awareness. But I think we need to hit that market now for a few reasons. One, I think people that are interested in biohacking and kind of already have a general awareness, are willing to learn more and are really valuable in giving us feedback which will help us as we optimize the product for a more education.

17:28 – Offer access to the people who need it most

Tom said the people who need Levels tech the most probably aren’t even aware of it, which is why he hopes Levels will eventually partner with insurance agencies.

To be blunt, the people that need this technology the most many of them don’t even have internet access. So on one hand I would say you can diversify the marketing channels. You can diversify the podcasts. You can go from Tim Ferris, Andrew Huberman biohacker land to more mainstream shows. But the reality is we probably would have a wholesale shift in our sales marketing and distribution channels in order to reach over time the people that really need it. And that won’t be simply a shift in marketing strategies. What we really need there is for insurance companies to cover Levels, and or other ways for us to bring the price radically down. And at that point where insurance is covering it or the price has been dramatically reduced, I think then we would probably pause and take stock of our current strategies and it might look entirely different. For example, we might be spending way more time with grassroots health organizations and word of mouth marketing, rather than the podcast channel or the content creator influencer channel.

20:13 – How partnership can pressure food companies into having higher standards

Tom said enforcing standards for a specific program, like Whole30, pressures food companies to comply with those standards to reach a specific audience.

There are a lot of ways to apply pressure to the food and healthcare system broadly speaking. And one way is simply to sell products to consumers at scale so they can better understand how food affects their health in the way that we’re doing. But there are also other avenues. Something coming to mind and this would also fall under partnership sort of longer term at Levels is Whole30, who we’ve spoken to a number of times has a Whole30 approved program. And this is basically their way of working with consumer packaged goods, food and bev companies to certify their products as essentially having the Whole30 stamp of approval that they’re healthy according to Whole30. And what’s really interesting is that there were unexpected positive externalities of this program, where food companies were coming to them and actually reformulating their products. So like taking out ingredients that shouldn’t be in there that are not healthy according to Whole30, so that Whole30 could then approve them. And another example would just be, then they have a partnership with Whole Foods and their products are selling really well. And then Whole Foods is making them way more visible in the stores. And then more products are coming to Whole30 reformulating. And so then on average food is getting healthier.

28:08 – The Ferriss Effect

Tom said when people trust an influencer or content creator, they will automatically trust anything that influencer recommends.

When you think about just how you spend your time online, whether that’s listening to podcast or browsing Instagram or the internet more broadly, you are sometimes following individuals or channels for say entertainment. You just want to laugh or they just post crazy videos that you mindlessly scroll through before bed. And then there are individuals who you follow because you trust them with your life, and you want to know exactly how they live their life, because you want to do whatever that they tell you to do. And there aren’t that many people out there, Tim Ferriss was the first one that popularized this phenomenon. It was actually dubbed the Tim Ferriss effect because in the early days of podcast advertising, there were consumer companies that Tim had recommended even organically. And it single handedly blew the entire company up. For months and months they were out of stock and the company basically overnight became a long term success, just because Tim had recommended them. And that is an example of Tim having built this ridiculously high trust relationship with his audience. And at my last company, we used to refer to this as the host disciple factor that very few content creators actually possessed. But if you do possess it unsurprisingly, it’s just an incredible channel for a brand because if they stand by a brand, then their audience just immediately either goes to learn more or purchases.

33:33 – Finding the right partnerships

Jackie said in order to cultivate authentic partnerships, Levels only likes to partner with people who already have or are willing to try a CGM.

If someone reaches out and asks about partnership, I’ll first confirm that they’ve tried out Levels before. You’d be surprised how many people reach out and want to partner with us, they like the idea of Levels but they haven’t tried the product yet, so that’s so important to us. And so kind of number one is authenticity. Are they willing to try the product that they haven’t, or before that have they tried it, or are they speaking from experience when they reach out to us and are looking for an opportunity to partner with us. And then in terms of when we’re looking at a partner’s channel to see if they might be a good fit. So authenticity is always number one, just passion for what we’re doing and our mission.

41:30 – How async has shaped Levels

Tom said the asynchronous work environment of Levels has influenced how they communicate with people both inside and outside the company.

In terms of just being asynchronous first, meaning that we don’t get on many synchronous calls, that’s been interesting because it absolutely has bled over from just internal norms to how we communicate externally as well, which I think is perhaps controversial. When you think about relationship building and partnerships, you would think that, “human connection via synchronous time, ideally in person but if not in person on the phone would be absolutely essential.” And I think that Levels and the broader remote world has pushed around my intuitions on that. Obviously phone calls and building human relationships ideally in person is very important. But for me personally, I think I’ve learned that there is way more room for scaling your work and your impact by probably decreasing a bit of that synchronous time, and increasing some of the time focused on scaling systems and processes, including something like email communication.

50:12 – The challenges of scaling

Jackie said that because Levels doesn’t go through an agency for communication between themselves and their partners, it takes a lot more work on their end.

Another thing that makes it hard to scale is that all communication is coming from us. So this actually ties into what Tom was saying about agencies, that we’re not going through an agency right now because we want the communication to be us to the partner. And similarly, we don’t want the communication to be automated or not come from a human because the human connection is really important in our partnerships. So I think that also makes it tough to scale, but really exciting to scale because when you find a great connection with a new partner it becomes personal too. So it’s an exciting thing personally and for Levels. So I think that’s part of what makes it so exciting too, it’s tough to scale. But I think as we grow and potentially hire more people, we will be able to scale and want to prioritize keeping that human connection with our partners.

Steph Coates (00:06):

Our priority is experimenting and learning across all these platforms, collect a bunch of data over the next six-ish months. And then after that kind of have more defined levers to pull so that we can kind of project better results of each campaign that we run, because right now it’s all experimentation. We’ve done two years of work with specific partners and we’re still learning from them. As we continue to experiment, we’ll learn a bunch. Our strategy will always iterate from there. And that’s not to say we won’t be experimenting, but I think now since we just launched, I think these results will really show us what levers that we’ll want to pull moving forward.

Ben Grynol (00:52):

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. In all companies whether remote or in person, it’s easy to understand why people don’t necessarily have a lens on what other teams work on. Well, when it comes to functional areas that have pretty strong distinctions in the scope of work, if you work in engineering, you might not know what happens in operations. If you work in growth, you might not know what happens in design and the list goes on. And so we started this functional series where we have people from different functions sit down and they discuss what exactly do you work on day to day?

(01:47):

What are some of the concepts? And so Steph Coates, one of the engineers at Levels, Tom Griffin, head of partnerships and Jackie Tsontakis, also one of the growth team members, the three of them sat down and they discussed this idea of partnerships. What exactly does the functional partnerships do? How does it pertain to growth and everything that we do as it relates to members? How do we spread awareness about Levels and educate people about the mission we’re on? And so they sat down and had an open conversation about what exactly partnerships works on a day to day basis, where are things now and where things headed. And so here’s, Steph.

Steph Coates (02:29):

To kick this off, I think what would be valuable for me and the general audience is when I think about partnerships, I imagine the term itself means a lot of different things to a lot of different businesses and companies. And so in the context of levels and specifically the problems that we are trying to solve, what does partnerships mean specifically at our company?

Tom Griffin (02:53):

I’ll take a brief step back. And first I’ll say yes, partnerships is an inherently vague term and it absolutely can mean a million different things depending on the type of company that you are. And as a result, the customers that you have and how you might go about acquiring those customers. I would say there is a relatively recent phenomenon, call it in the last maybe 10 years in particular, where partnerships became a term that was more commonly used in direct to consumer companies, including now Levels. And while it does usually encompass a pretty wide range of type of work, which we can talk about, the main focus to get right to it tends to be relationships with thought leaders, or content creators, or influencers. These are really all terms for the same thing these days. Two forms that are kind of common that people might be familiar with would be… These are just examples but podcast advertising, you’ve all heard podcast ads.

(04:00):

And then someone promoting something on a social platform like Instagram. And so really this is a form of paid media or paid marketing or digital marketing, these are all common terms. But rather than buying advertisements with a platform, whether that’s Facebook, where you might be scrolling through Instagram or Facebook and see an ad coming from a company or even something just more traditional like a newspaper. You’re buying an ad with an actual individual and their platform who is authentically endorsing the product and educating their audience on that product. And so I sometimes refer to partnerships as perhaps more simply like relationship based marketing channels, because in some ways it’s sort of traditional paid media marketing. But it’s unique in that human relationship lies at the center of it.

(05:02):

And I would just say lastly, our work does encompass kind of other opportunities. So these are all theoretical but everything from like if we were to do a brand partnership with an organization like the NBA, or we were to talk to CrossFit about promoting or distributing Levels through their CrossFit gyms, or even enterprise sales like selling Levels in bulk to an organization, these all technically would fall under partnerships. But the center of the bullseye here for us in the early days and arguably at a lot of direct to consumer companies, are these content creator influencer partnerships. I’ll pause there.

Steph Coates (05:42):

Yeah. Quick thought on that, just my own experience. It’s interesting to see the shift from, before we had these huge social media platforms where now we’re leveraging that a lot to be able to do partnerships and do marketing. I think back to what advertising looked like in the past of just visibility through things like billboards. Or I could be totally wrong about this, but things like just getting mail and seeing pamphlets and that’s how you learned about companies. And so I’m curious from either of your perspectives, the current way that we get the word out about Levels and sort of acquire… I don’t even know if this is the right way to say it, but acquire customers and build brand trust through things like partnerships and the way that we go about growth of the company. I wonder, do you think that the current platforms we use now are more valuable in terms of just building individual trust with people rather than saying here’s what we have.

(06:41):

Here’s a giant billboard with Levels on it and just through visibility, we’re going to get you to our product. I guess what I’m asking is how much of success with building a brand has to come with the individual trust that gets fostered through I think these more personal ways of marketing?

Jackie Tsontakis (07:00):

Yeah. I can jump in on that one. I think it is so cool to think about the power of the type of marketing that we’re doing now. So influencer based marketing for lack of a better term. But it’s so cool to think about the relationship that influencers and content creators have with their audiences and how powerful that is, versus some of the more traditional types of marketing like billboards, or TV ads. And the way I like to think about it is, if a friend of mine or a family member recommended a product to me and said, hey, I saw a huge results drinking this special water or something. And I think you should try it too.

(07:47):

That would have so much more of an impact on me than if I saw special water on a billboard. I would not really know what to do with that information. Or if I was kind of interested, I might look it up or forget to look it up. But if I did look it up, maybe I’d just kind of take it in, think about it. But if a friend is telling me about it, that I’m much more likely to take action like, oh, wow, let me try this out. This person has my best interest in mind. And I think the influencer creator relationship with their audience is maybe one step removed from a friend or a family member telling you, but it’s pretty close just from what we’ve seen. People really trust people online and influencers that have really great relationships with their audiences that shows. And you can see that in their engagement, comments and we’ve seen it too.

(08:37):

And we’ve tried to prioritize relationships with people that have really great relationships with their audiences just because it really is impactful. It feels like you’re getting a recommendation from a friend, especially when our partners are telling people, hey, I’m using Levels and these are the results I’m seeing personally. We found that to be really impactful.

Steph Coates (08:58):

Yeah, you just summarized so much more eloquently what I was trying to get at around how much more powerful word of mouth marketing can be, and leveraging the trust of relationships between people. Even if it’s an influencer in someone that they don’t directly know, but how much more successful that can be versus just being fed this giant. Or I guess just casting this really wide net and trying to draw attention from people that don’t necessarily have any sort of specific connection. How we go about this with partnerships, do you think that there’s a advantage in terms of what we are trying to… Our specific product of Levels, the benefits of paid partnership marketing, versus things like performance marketing or versus just more general types of acquiring customers in the context of Levels as a company?

Tom Griffin (09:44):

Yeah. I’ll jump in here. And this relates to the last question as well in terms of platforms of the old days and platforms that we are using today. I would argue Levels might not be able to exist period, 30 years ago before these platforms existed. Essentially, we would probably need doctors to sell the product to patients and that would be our distribution channel, because when you’re trying to create a new product category entirely from scratch which involves a semi-invasive biosensor that is reading blood glucose on your arm. One, you’ve never used anything invasive like this before. Two, you don’t know what glucose is really. Three, you don’t know what metabolic health is or why you should care about this. Four, the price point is extremely high so you’re not going to be willing to just try it out really quickly without a high degree of education.

(10:50):

And so when you think about even a platform like podcasts, it’s entirely novel in all of human history that we might be able to hang out, so to speak, for two and a half hours with someone who runs a Stanford neuroscience lab. I’m thinking of Dr. Andrew Huberman, now who we all follow and just get his candid summary and take on a particular area of health science and what his recommendations are. That’s pretty incredible and unsurprisingly, many of us out there are now getting their health advice from these individuals. And so that is often the first question that you ask is, where are your target customers? Where do you find them? Because you need to go meet them where they are and talk to them in some capacity. And our target customers undoubtedly were on these platforms or are listening to these influencers, these content creators. Again, and these are not influencers just slinging protein bars on Instagram. They’re often people running labs at Harvard and Stanford and so they’re highly trusted.

(12:02):

And we found this out both through intuition and then also through interviewing thousands of people on our wait list. And we just simply asked them directly, where did you hear about glucose monitoring or metabolic health or Levels or anything? And the vast majority of them said probably five to 10 podcasts where they were getting their information. So it was very obvious for us that we needed to go and speak to our customers there. And I would just close by saying to answer your question, really everything that I said before like the education hurdle required in order to get someone to make a purchase for a new product category, often for a problem that they didn’t even know that they had at a high price point, is very high that education hurdle.

(12:50):

And so it is particularly important for companies like Levels and there are many others in this space, I would argue that it’d be slightly less important if we were a five dollar commodity product. It would be good to just blast the podcast space as an example with awareness, but it wouldn’t be absolutely existential to the business in the first year or two in the way that it is for Levels.

Steph Coates (13:14):

Yeah, those are fantastic points. And I think back to just my own experience with learning about certain health trends such as CGM, or I think that almost every behavior that I do nowadays whether it’s a fitness routine or wearing a CGM, a lot of the stuff I found out about through podcasts or through platforms like Instagram. And so I am that exact example of someone that puts more trust into these avenues that I choose to subscribe to rather than just blatantly being fed things through billboards or TV advertisements. And so that’s interesting. And actually, I don’t know about YouTube, but I found out about Levels through a podcast and that’s what prompted me to apply at the company. And so just the power of this thing that didn’t even exist a decade ago is pretty incredible. All right. So one final question on this broad realm, and then I want to dig into the specific partnerships priorities that we have.

(14:07):

But something that you said, Tom, was how we are marketing to people that are already in this domain around caring about metabolic health, being interested in things such as biohacking or just immersed in the general wellness space they’re likely to be aware and find out about things like CGM. I’m curious of something that we talk about at the company often is the fact that, the people that need it the most aren’t necessarily aware that they need it. And so I’m curious in terms of from a partnerships perspective… Maybe I’ll give this one to you, Jackie, what do you think about how do we reach those types of people, the ones that aren’t necessarily subscribed to scientists such as Dr. Andrew Huberman? Or they’re not following wellness influencers on Instagram, so they might not have access to this information but in terms of our goal of reversing the metabolic health crisis, how do we reach people like that?

Jackie Tsontakis (14:59):

Yeah, definitely. I think right now we’re focused on the audience that we’re focused on, that is more into biohacking, kind of knows what metabolic health, is maybe a little bit familiar with glucose or at least willing to learn and more about their health and is actually really interested in learning about their health, because as Tom mentioned there’s so much education required. And right now we’re just scratching the surface of raising awareness and driving awareness around metabolic health and why you should care about your glucose. I think eventually we will kind of exhaust that audience and we’ll feel comfortable that okay, we have a good level of general awareness around metabolic health. And at that point, I think we’ll be able to reach a larger audience once we have a good level of awareness. But I think we need to hit that market now for a few reasons. One, I think people that are interested in biohacking and kind of already have a general awareness, are willing to learn more and are really valuable in giving us feedback which will help us as we optimize the product for a more education.

(16:19):

So for example, we have a bunch of blog articles within the app now to help drive education. So more of that I think will be kind of what helps us have a product that’s ready for general population. Someone that might really need it and might really be a beginner when it comes to metabolic health. But I think right now it’s important to focus on kind of the crowd that we’re focusing on now until we get there. And Tom, feel free to jump in on anything too, if you have anything to add.

Tom Griffin (16:53):

Yeah, you got the hard question thrown right at you. I think that this speaks to the range of what partnerships can mean. I think right now the only reason that partnerships is so laser focused on these content creator relationships is because that is where our target customer base currently is. And I’d argue that’s not only the early adopter, but probably whatever the next term is on that curve, early majority, the-

Steph Coates (17:23):

Majority.

Tom Griffin (17:24):

Yeah. But to be blunt, the people that need this technology the most many of them don’t even have internet access. So on one hand I would say you can diversify the marketing channels. You can diversify the podcasts. You can go from Tim Ferris, Andrew Huberman biohacker land to more mainstream shows. But the reality is we probably would have a wholesale shift in our sales marketing and distribution channels in order to reach over time the people that really need it. And that won’t be simply a shift in marketing strategies. What we really need there is for insurance companies to cover Levels, and or other ways for us to bring the price radically down. And at that point where insurance is covering it or the price has been dramatically reduced, I think then we would probably pause and take stock of our current strategies and it might look entirely different. For example, we might be spending way more time with grassroots health organizations and word of mouth marketing, rather than the podcast channel or the content creator influencer channel.

Steph Coates (18:40):

Thank you both for that. That’s a great explanation. And it makes me think about, I think it was Sam that wrote this Level secret master plan and how there are these necessary steps in the process in order to become a more, I guess product for the general population. And one of those steps in the process is specifically catering to those that are really interested in metabolic health and are willing to be those Guinea pigs and those early adopters of the process. And correct me if I’m wrong about this but it makes me think about a personal experience of, I became a vegetarian it was like late 2000s, early 2010s. And it was still a very taboo thing. And there was nothing in the grocery store marketed to vegetarians or vegans. And you look at the grocery store now, and even the most conventional fast food restaurants have a veggie burger.

(19:33):

And so it’s really interesting to see that shift that’s happened just over a decade or two around a product B or A. A lifestyle or a product being very niche and only catering to people that we’re specifically seeking it out, to now everyone knows what a vegan is. Everyone knows what a vegetarian is. And so I’m eager to see if that same shift happens with maybe the metabolic health terminology or wearing CGMs in general. Where right now it’s still kind of under the radar, but it’s becoming more popular. The term metabolic health is becoming more popular on podcasts and I think in general conversation as well. And so it’s exciting to see that shift starting to happen.

Tom Griffin (20:10):

Yeah, and I would just jump in there. I think there are a lot of ways to apply pressure to the food and healthcare system broadly speaking. And one way is simply to sell products to consumers at scale so they can better understand how food affects their health in the way that we’re doing. But there are also other avenues. Something coming to mind and this would also fall under partnership sort of longer term at Levels is Whole30, who we’ve spoken to a number of times has a Whole30 approved program. And this is basically their way of working with consumer packaged goods, food and bev companies to certify their products as essentially having the Whole30 stamp of approval that they’re healthy according to Whole30. And what’s really interesting is that there were unexpected positive externalities of this program, where food companies were coming to them and actually reformulating their products.

(21:09):

So like taking out ingredients that shouldn’t be in there that are not healthy according to Whole30, so that Whole30 could then approve them. And another example would just be, then they have a partnership with Whole Foods and their products are selling really well. And then Whole Foods is making them way more visible in the stores. And then more products are coming to Whole30 reformulating. And so then on average food is getting healthier. Now, this is a very premium slice of the population we’re talking about with Whole30 and Whole Foods. But I think it’s just worth noting that this is how these shifts start to happen long term

Jackie Tsontakis (21:52):

On a micro scale we’ve kind of talked to some content creators about that who have a bunch of recipes out there, for example. And they’ve tested out their recipes with Levels and have expressed interest in creating glucose friendly versions of their recipes. So if that could happen on a grocery level scale that’s another story. But I think there’s a little bit of that happening right now just among our community, which is really exciting.

Steph Coates (22:20):

Yeah. I love that. And who knows, maybe one day glucose will be just as universally known of a term as calories one day or as macronutrients one day. And so that’s exciting to see that. Okay, so next thing I want to jump into is partnerships specifically in the context of what we’re prioritizing at Levels. And so, Jackie, I know that we had talked about this a little bit before recording this, but can you expand a little bit on the current partnership priorities that we have at Levels and how you think this will shift as we continue to grow and scale as a company?

Jackie Tsontakis (22:56):

Yeah, definitely. So right now we’re focused on that community that we kind of just talked about, people that kind of have a baseline understanding of metabolic health or at least they’re really interested in learning more. We’re focusing on a few channels, so podcasts. Tom put together our initial podcast I think back in 2020, is that right, Tom, when we started?

Tom Griffin (23:21):

That sounds right.

Jackie Tsontakis (23:22):

And we’re still continuing with podcast where we’re still doing interviews, which is I’d say longest form of content that we’re putting out there just around educating people about metabolic health. And then on top of that with podcasts, we’ve been working with podcast host on podcast ads. So shorter form, usually around 60 seconds. And usually we try to do that among an audience that kind of has the baseline understanding of what CGM is, what metabolic health is. And then a few other channels outside of podcast that we’ve been prioritizing recently, YouTube gives another opportunity for longer form content.

(24:03):

So we work with a bunch of creators on product reviews and then also explaining different benefits of CGM productivity focus and talking about Levels and modern your glucose from different angles. And then a few other channels that we’ve been experimenting with that we want to experiment with more are newsletters, blog posts, which is another great long form content. And then Instagram is an area that we need to explore with a lot more too. We’ve doubled in Instagram. So we’ve done a few Instagram lives with partners that have done really well for us, Instagram stories and Instagram bead. But that’s an area where we’re actually working on identifying influencers and potential new partners now just because we haven’t done enough there. And I think that’s a really powerful platform along with TikTok that we’re starting to experiment with more now. And I think right now overall, all that being said, our priority is experimenting and learning across all these platforms so that we can… Our goal is to collect a bunch of data over the next six-ish months.

(25:13):

And then after that kind of have more defined levers to pull so that we can kind of project better the results of each campaign that we run, because right now it’s all experimentation. We’ve done two years of work with specific partners and then we’re still learning from them. So I think as we continue to experiment, we’ll learn a bunch and then we’ll kind of have… Our strategy will always iterate from there. And that’s not to say that we won’t be experimenting in six months, but I think now since we just launched, I think these results will really show us what levers that we want to pull moving forward.

Steph Coates (25:59):

That’s fantastic. As you were saying that I drew a ton of parallels between the experiment process, experimentation process that you guys seem to be pursuing in the partnerships realm and the experimentation process that we lean on heavily within engineering and within the product org in general of… We’re in the same boat of we don’t necessarily know what works yet or what doesn’t. And a lot of this process of just refining to figure out what patterns are good templates to go off of in terms of figuring out what will land, what will not. And as I’m sure a lot of startups can relate to, a lot of it at the beginning is just throwing spaghetti at the wall and figuring out this stuck, this didn’t stick. We learned this from this experiment. We knew not to pursue things like this in the future. And it’s interesting to know that this isn’t a specific thing to just engineering or just a product. But every functional area within a startup kind of has to go through experimentation to figure out what works for our specific product and our specific company.

(26:57):

Something to dig into this a little bit more, I’ll give this one to you, Tom, what have been… You can give specific partners if you’d like to, I’m not sure if that’s appropriate for this podcast or not, but who or what types of partners have been the most successful so far? And then what factors do you think led to that being a successful partnership? And then on the contrary, what sort of partnerships or experiments have not gone well and what have we learned from that?

Tom Griffin (27:28):

Yeah, there’s so much to say, I’ll try to keep this relatively concise. Probably, the two biggest factors that immediately come to mind in terms of the success of a partnership would be, frankly number one is the relationship that the content creator has with their audience. I was going to say number one would be authenticity of our relationship in terms of how much they love Levels, which is neck and neck. But I would argue that the number one factor would be the relationship that that individual has with their audience. And when you think about just how you spend your time online, whether that’s listening to podcast or browsing Instagram or the internet more broadly, you are sometimes following individuals or channels for say entertainment. You just want to laugh or they just post crazy videos that you mindlessly scroll through before bed. And then there are individuals who you follow because you trust them with your life, and you want to know exactly how they live their life, because you want to do whatever that they tell you to do.

(28:43):

And there aren’t that many people out there, Tim Ferriss was the first one that popularized this phenomenon. It was actually dubbed the Tim Ferriss effect because in the early days of podcast advertising, there were consumer companies that Tim had recommended even organically. And it single handedly blew the entire company up. For months and months they were out of stock and the company basically overnight became a long term success, just because Tim had recommended them. And that is an example of Tim having built this ridiculously high trust relationship with his audience. And at my last company, we used to refer to this as the host disciple factor that very few content creators actually possessed. But if you do possess it unsurprisingly, it’s just an incredible channel for a brand because if they stand by a brand, then their audience just immediately either goes to learn more or purchases.

(29:42):

So we have come across a number of those super high trust individuals. I’ll shout out a few of our partners because they’re great. But Dr. Mark Hyman is an example of one. Kelly Leveck is an example of one, Dr. Davidson. Claire is an example. There are many, but that’s probably the number one factor. And then the other one would be that authenticity. So just ensuring that the individual really uses the product, understands our mission, is deeply aligned with our mission long term, our team, our culture, that’s all exceptionally important to us. We’ve absolutely turned down dozens of partners, who it becomes clear through our building the relationship with them that they’re not a fit, or even just they haven’t really used the product extensively which is critical for us.

Steph Coates (30:32):

I’m curious, this is a bit of a tangent, but what do you think the recipe is for a content creator to be able to build that Tim Ferris effect or creating a platform in which… I know you mentioned authenticity, but where does that differentiation happen between someone that creates a really engaged platform where if they do go to market something, then it’s going to be successful, versus someone that maybe has a lot of followers and has a successful platform, but there isn’t a lot of engagement and there isn’t a lot of trust between the creator and the consumers? I guess as a two part question, have you noticed patterns in being able to identify sort of why certain people become successful at that? And then what is your process for filtering out those that you think will be successful in terms of establishing a levels partnership with them, versus let’s say… And it is an example, someone comes to Levels and says I want to set up a partnership and a red flag goes off in your head to say this wouldn’t be a good fit.

Tom Griffin (31:34):

In terms of specifically that host disciple factor, it’s pretty difficult to identify. There are little hacks I remember at my last company, we went through every podcast out there and prioritized those where the host actually had their name in the podcast and their face on the podcast cover art, which is sounds silly. But the distinction there would be between a show that is focused on a theme, or a concept, or a brand, or an idea versus a show that the entire ethos of the show is that individual. Like people are tuning in because they’re obsessed with that person and they want to know what that person thinks. And so within those shows though, there’s still a huge range. We’re surprised and I’ve in previous jobs been surprised all the time that there are some individuals where this effect becomes immediately apparent, and other times the audience is not responsive at all.

(32:43):

So at the end of the day, and we’ve heard this from plenty of other brands who are further ahead in the space, you really do just need to experiment crazy in order to find this out. But it really comes down to the type of content that individual creates. And as a result of both who that person is, their background, their credentials and the type of content that they create, why people come to their platform to tune in. And then the second question you asked was around when we might identify that someone is not a fit?

Steph Coates (33:19):

Yeah, kind of just the inverse of that question.

Tom Griffin (33:22):

Got it. Jackie, I’ll let you take that one and then I can jump in if there’s anything to add.

Jackie Tsontakis (33:27):

Yeah. I think as Tom mentioned, the number one thing if someone reaches out and asks about partnership, I’ll first confirm that they’ve tried out Levels before. You’d be surprised how many people reach out and want to partner with us, they like the idea of Levels but they haven’t tried the product yet, so that’s so important to us. And so kind of number one is authenticity. Are they willing to try the product that they haven’t, or before that have they tried it, or are they speaking from experience when they reach out to us and are looking for an opportunity to partner with us. And then in terms of when we’re looking at a partner’s channel to see if they might be a good fit. So authenticity is always number one, just passion for what we’re doing and our mission. And then also we’ll look at some ways that you can take a look at what the relationship looks like between the host and their audience, or I’ll say creator and their audience because this goes for any platform not just podcast, is engagement rate.

(34:37):

So that’s something that you can take a look at when across channels is just a formula, it’s comments plus likes over total followers. So there’s benchmarks that we look at, but just kind take a look at how many people are engaging with their content. And then also how many… I often try to take a look at what types of products outside of their content just generally, content focus and quality of content. What kind of products they’re promoting and how many products they’re promoting. Some people are promoting a ton of products and there’s no way they’re using all of those products. So you can kind of get a hint that they might not be authentically promoting those products. And then what those promotions look like? Are they authentic? Are they speaking from experience, because then we can get an idea of how they might talk about Levels if they were to partner with us?

Steph Coates (35:29):

The thing that immediately comes to mind with authenticity, I remember seeing on Instagram the detox teas or the hair gummies, and it seemed like everybody was marketing those. And so I can appreciate that of filtering for the types of people that you know are really a good fit with the product versus just taking any partnership possible.

Tom Griffin (35:52):

And I would just quickly add, you had asked earlier and I think, I guess ignored it or side stepped it. But you had asked about the difference between partnerships marketing versus traditional performance marketing. And by performance marketing we mean, imagine scrolling through Instagram and you get an ad like a sponsored post in your feed from Levels the brand. That’s typically the most common way you do that. There a lot of risks and downsides to performance marketing in that way, which we can talk about. But on the note of authenticity, even if people know that a creator is getting paid to promote a product, many of the creators do only work with products that they actually use. And that is always going to be a more effective conversion tactic than seeing even that same ad or that same value proposition coming from the company itself. We tend to tune out these days commercials or promotional ads from a company because you’re expecting of course, the company to tell you that their product is amazing.

(37:02):

But if it’s coming from another individual who’s recommending it, especially one who’s built up trust then it’s going to be way more effective, which is of course intuitive. But I think it’s worth stressing that because it’s one reason why consumer companies, especially in the health space that requires trust are more and more quickly turning their attention away from some of those traditional marketing channels to partnerships.

Steph Coates (37:25):

Okay, this next question kind of flows into what you were just talking about of zooming out to the higher level, something that you mentioned, Tom, prior to this recording was partnerships as part of something called the growth flywheel. Can you dig into that a little bit?

Tom Griffin (37:42):

Yeah. So a lot of companies look for a growth flywheel, which really just refers to a self reinforcing mechanism that can sustain and fuel growth sort of on its own is one way to think about it. So what wouldn’t be a flywheel would be just dumping millions of dollars every month into Facebook and Instagram ads and then converting customers. You would convert customers but that would sort of be the end of the road there. A flywheel wouldn’t get created. But an example of a flywheel… And I think our flywheel is members content, community partners. Does that sound right, Jackie? I haven’t looked at it in a while but I believe that’s right. And the general idea without walking through it in absolute depth, is that a partner becomes a member so they’re authentically using the product. Oftentimes, they’re purchasing the product which is great. They’re using it and then they’re creating content, so that’s that content piece.

(38:55):

So they’re educating their audience or even just our members even if they’re not influencers, are educating the world because the product has this inherent virality where people want to talk about it and educate other people about it. So they’re posting online, they’re creating content and content is this foundational pillar of our educating the market as well as just word of mouth marketing. They’re also then building community online. So that gets also to the root of why partnerships are so important for us and a difference between partnerships and paid performance marketing, is that we’re actually authentically building community with these individuals and with their audiences. And of course, then that community is purchasing Levels and then creating more content. And so it’s this really organic flywheel system that kind of continues to build on itself over time as more and more members purchase the product, great content, partners come on board, more community is built, if that makes any sense.

Steph Coates (39:55):

Yeah, that does. Jackie, do you have anything you want to add to that?

Jackie Tsontakis (39:58):

No, that was a perfect explanation. I think Tom mentioned this, but I’ll also say that a lot of our partners come from existing partners. So we’ll get people reach out and say like, oh, I saw Kelly has been posting a lot about Levels. Or Kelly will introduce us to her friend who then becomes a partner. So that’s a big piece of the flywheel in terms of sourcing new partners too, is that new partners will come from existing partners and their content and their communities.

Steph Coates (40:30):

Yeah, that totally makes sense. I feel even just in what have we been doing? 40 minutes of this, I feel so much more knowledgeable about partnerships and I’m ready to leave the engineering team and join the partnerships team. Something else I want to time talk about, I guess how are the opportunities at Levels and different than partnerships at previous companies. And I just want to talk a little bit more about the cultural side of working here rather than just the objective partnership stuff. But in terms of I guess, how partnerships looks different at a fully remote acing company. And then in addition to that, how you see your own I think, career trajectory forming at Levels where we do have a lot of autonomy to say, here’s what I want to work on. Here’s something that I don’t necessarily want to work on and I want to delegate out to someone else. I would love to hear each of your perspectives on that at large.

Tom Griffin (41:23):

Yeah, I’ll start. There are a few themes swimming around in my head that I think are pretty related to one another. So in terms of just being asynchronous first, meaning that we don’t get on many synchronous calls, that’s been interesting because it absolutely has bled over from just internal norms to how we communicate externally as well, which I think is perhaps controversial. When you think about relationship building and partnerships, you would think that, “human connection via synchronous time, ideally in person but if not in person on the phone would be absolutely essential.” And I think that Levels and the broader remote world has pushed around my intuitions on that. Obviously phone calls and building human relationships ideally in person is very important. But for me personally, I think I’ve learned that there is way more room for scaling your work and your impact by probably decreasing a bit of that synchronous time, and increasing some of the time focused on scaling systems and processes, including something like email communication.

(42:40):

My previous job, I would often have days where most of my day was phone calls. And I have stretches where I go multiple days in a row without having a single call internal or external. And some of my friends joke when they see my calendar, because they’re like, aren’t you head of partnerships? Don’t you need to be talking to someone. And I think that also speaks to why Levels is a unique place to work, because part of this is not just Levels but it’s also my own personal career trajectory, which is that I loved being on the phone all day and building relationships and going to conferences. And earlier in my career that’s where I wanted to focus my time.

(43:21):

And I think having spent so much time doing that, a natural progression was to shift some of my work towards doing something a bit new. And so at Levels that’s been more maybe focused on writing and long form strategy in setting up systems and processes, or even digging into data analytics reporting. And fortunately for Levels, because of these processes that you mentioned around evaluating your work very closely and identifying what you like spending your time on and where you want to invest more, I’ve been able to make that transition effectively to focus on sort of new professional areas.

Jackie Tsontakis (43:58):

I’ll echo Tom too. When I first came to Levels, I was confused actually at how we could have so little meetings. And I have been completely convinced that more asynchronous time is more productive, at least for me. And it is… As Tom said, it is important to have human connection in partnerships but a lot of that can happen asynchronously. And then sometimes a phone call is just easier or a text I think I can kind of consider that asynchronous communication too. Sometimes that’s easier too and that’s fine. But I think in my previous job was just like Tom, in meetings most days for more than five hours a day and all communication was synchronous in chat or something. There was an expectation that the response would happen in a few minutes. So I’ve definitely been convinced that it’s way more productive to be asynchronous.

(45:09):

And I think partnerships is maybe the hardest to do asynchronous. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but either marketing may me harder or the hardest function to do asynchronous in some cases. But I think once you can figure it out… Or at least I thought it was going to be really hard, but I think once it’s figured out and you can kind of just get more comfortable with defaulting no to synchronous communication, it’s way more productive for sure. I don’t know if that answered your question stuff. I’m kind of forgetting what your question was [inaudible 00:45:48].

Steph Coates (45:49):

I didn’t do a very good job of framing it but no, that was the perfect response. And what I’m taking away from this and this is something I admire so much about the Levels culture is that, especially in the context of partnerships like you had said, there’s probably so many business leaders that would say remote will never work for partnerships. Asynchronous will never work. The domain is human relationships, it is communication. And so how the heck are we going to do this in an asynchronous matter where most of the communication is not done through voice or through video calls. And something that I’ve seen as a common theme in Levels is always challenging the norms to say, well, let’s try it and we’ll see what the outcome is. And I’ve seen that in support. I’ve seen that in partnerships. I’ve seen that in engineering and always being willing to kind of challenge the default way things are being done and seeing if there’s a better path. It’s cool to see that that same outcome has happened for partnerships as well.

(46:42):

And being able to prioritize deep work, I’ve always valued that as something that’s very important in engineering. But like you had said, even in partnerships the ability to zoom out and write strategy documentation, or just have more time to think rather than be bogged down with these sort of… I don’t know, being in meetings all day or being on the phone all day, it’s wonderful to hear that same benefit is happening to partnerships as it is in engineering. Okay, final question and then we can wrap this up. I would love to hear as we’ve done rapid growth at Levels over the past year or two, or I guess since the company has started. And so as we continue to grow as a company, how do you see partnerships growing and scaling and making that sustainable?

Tom Griffin (47:37):

Yeah, I’ll start. I think this is the difficulty of partnerships as a marketing channel and as a growth lever, compared to what we spoke about earlier a little bit with just throwing money into the Facebook system, as people like to say. Because if you told me tomorrow that we needed to 100 x our customers or the number of people coming to our website, we in theory could do that. It wouldn’t be sustainable. But in theory we could do that overnight via Facebook ads because all it is it’s a literal button. Like our bank accounts already connected, we literally just click a button and say we want to spend $10 million a day. And enough people are going to see Levels that they’re going to go to the website and enough people are going to buy. So it’d probably work out for some number of months. But when you’re dealing with human relationships and securing partnerships with thought leaders, scientists, content creators, securing those relationships, managing those product trials, signing those marketing campaigns takes months and months.

(48:47):

And so it can be more difficult to scale. Having said that, the short answer is we need to scale these relationships. So we need to just build 100 X the relationships. And there’s typically… So short answer is build way more relationships and diversify across platforms. We’ve been focused a little bit more on podcast to date. So we’re going to test podcast, Instagram, other social channels, TikTok, newsletter, blogs, et cetera. So those are the two things that we need to do. And then in terms of how you do that, there are really two paths. One is hire more relationship managers in-house, and the other is hiring an agency to build and manage those relationships for you. As of now, Levels is focused on the former for a variety of reasons. Most of which relate back to needing to trust that you’re building an authentic relationship and own that relationship rather than sort of outsourcing it, which creates a lot of risk in terms of the actual relationship and then the content that that individual posts.

Jackie Tsontakis (49:54):

And I’ll also add that, I don’t know that a lot of companies do this, actually I shouldn’t say that. But another way to do partnerships is to kind of automate communication, I imagine. And another thing that makes it hard to scale is that all communication is coming from us. So this actually ties into what Tom was saying about agencies, that we’re not going through an agency right now because we want the communication to be us to the partner. And similarly, we don’t want the communication to be automated or not come from a human because the human connection is really important in our partnerships. So I think that also makes it tough to scale, but really exciting to scale because when you find a great connection with a new partner it becomes personal too. So it’s an exciting thing personally and for Levels. So I think that’s part of what makes it so exciting too, it’s tough to scale. But I think as we grow and potentially hire more people, we will be able to scale and want to prioritize keeping that human connection with our partners.