Combating the Unspoken Metabolic Health Crisis with David Flinner, Levels Co-Founder

In this episode of Better Product hosted by Meghan and Christian, Levels co-founder David Flinner shares an overview of Levels’ mission and an inside look at the company’s trajectory and next steps. He discusses why metabolic dysfunction is a nationwide epidemic, the insights that can be gained by using a continuous glucose monitor, and why a focus on member needs guides everything that Levels does.

6:00 – Reversing the metabolic health crisis

This is the hefty goal that Levels is taking on as a company, by bringing insight into metabolic health for individuals.

Only 12% of the U.S. population is currently metabolically healthy. And everyone else is on a spectrum of some non-ideal metabolic health. And Level’s mission is to reverse the metabolic health crisis to solve that. And we do that by helping people understand how the food they’re eating is affecting their health in real-time using this closed-loop feedback system powered by the continuous glucose monitor wearable that we help our members get access to. And we power that through a simple insights layer on top of the raw data, so that you can understand how the foods you’re eating, the activities you’re doing are affecting your metabolism so that you can improve it. We talked a little bit about this as metabolic fitness. In the same way that there’s physical fitness, there’s metabolic fitness. And it’s something that with appropriate understanding, appropriate inputs, you can improve it over time. But it does take work.

7:48 – Understanding the scale

If you’ve ever gained weight but you’re not sure why, it could be due to glucose levels caused by lifestyle choices.

If you step on a scale, you might see that you’ve gained a few pounds, but you’re not really sure what drove that weight gain, or you might not know exactly what drove the weight loss. The really powerful thing about what Levels does with a continuous glucose monitor is that it’s real-time personal feedback. So this is a device that you wear on you and it’s continuously monitoring your body’s blood glucose, which is one of the primary analytes that we look to for metabolism. And what we find is that by measuring in real-time, you get instant feedback on the choices that you make. So when you eat something, your body metabolizes that, turns the food into energy, and it’ll take the food that you eat, turn it into glucose or other products, but primarily glucose. And you’ll see that glucose hit your bloodstream through the continuous glucose monitor.

9:26 – Education comes first

First and foremost, Levels wants to educate individuals. That way, they can take charge of their metabolic journey.

Education is really important to what we’re doing at Levels. One of the interesting opportunities we’re facing is that we’re not just building a product and trying to find product-market fit, figure out what problems we’re solving for members, but we’re simultaneously trying to build a movement and raise awareness about metabolic health at the same time. So it’s a brand new space. No one really knows about it. And so there’s a lot more on the upfront education side to get to a base level of understanding as to what this space means, what can it actually help you with and then how to interpret your results. Our education, and also, it ties back to our mission. So if we want to solve the metabolic health crisis, we want to get the word out as much as possible broadly with educational material, help up-level everyone as to the benefits of looking to metabolic health.

10:37 – Your first month with Levels

The first week is all about getting a baseline reading, then experimenting with diet and lifestyle until you begin to achieve the glucose levels you want.

With the Levels program, what happens is it’s a one-month experience. You get access to a telehealth consultation where you’ll get a health consultation with an in-state licensed physician who will evaluate if you’re appropriate for a continuous glucose monitor. If that goes through, you’ll get shipped a one-month supply of continuous glucose monitors. And there’s a month-long journey that we’ll put you through on the program. And a lot of that is in the first week, it will be focused on education, on understanding what is this new data stream? What does it mean for me and my goals? What is a glucose spike? Why would I want to try to minimize large ones? And then baseline where you’re at, get an understanding of where the… This is the first time you’re shining a light in a dark room and you can see what needs tidying up a little bit. And so that’s what happens in the first week. And then you’ll have a chance to learn a lot of the principles and strategies. This is a more interactive education model we have. We’ve taken some of the foundational principles and built a product experience around what we call challenges. So it’s essentially something in your diet or activity that you might do normally, and then try it with one of the additional strategies that we’ll teach you to improve your metabolic fitness. And that’s what you do in weeks two and three. And then over time, you’ll be armed with a variety of tools that you can use.

12:50 – Putting members in the driver’s seat

Once the Levels team understands what users need, they can start to tweak the product to fulfill those gaps.

The core thing that’s driving us at Levels right now is learning from our members, figuring out what value that they find in this space. And like I said, it’s new for all of us. So there hasn’t historically been anything in the metabolic health space. So we’ve been intentionally trying to limit the audience to something that we can work with intimately with our team. A lot of this is on the product development side and less on the we know what you should learn and we’ll help handhold you through that. Our ultimate goal here is to automate as much of these learnings as we can in the software so it’s simple, intuitive. You don’t need an expert to handhold you through it. But before we get to that stage, we have to uncover what the learnings are in this new industry.

16:58 – Building in public

By being transparent in every way, Levels hopes to earn the trust of their community, and inspire them in the process.

Part of what we’re doing is trying to create a movement around this and a community. And an additional part of this is what we talk about building and building in the open, and all the things that we do, we try to be very transparent. And one of them is radical transparency with our member set. So nothing’s really hidden. We talk about what we’re doing, we share our thoughts. And what we found is that when we share what’s on our mind and draw people in, they can see that we are clearly passionate about the mission, they can see that we’re laying all the cards on the table in a very authentic way. And we get a lot more feedback this way. At least I’ve seen here, when we try to paint a vision for where we’re going, that is inspiring, that people want to be along, they want to participate. And we really scale our expertise.

21:47 – Metabolism is different for everyone

Part of why gaining insight into your metabolism is so valuable is because every body is literally very different when it comes to converting food into energy.

Metabolism is a highly multivariate process and Levels will help you synthesize all the different inputs you’re doing and help you make sense of it so that you can see what the drivers were. But then also, even controlling for all different factors, you take two people, what we’re finding and what the science is showing is that people respond differently to the same foods. There’s no universal one size fits all diet and everyone can potentially have a different response to the same inputs. It’s really hard to know how you can make progress personally without taking a look at your personal metabolic response to foods. Just one quick example, there’s a study where they had several people controlling for all different things. I think they even had twins. They had people eat a banana and a cookie. And what they saw was that many people had equal and opposite responses. So some people would have a blood sugar spike on the banana, but not on the cookie, and some would have a spike on the cookie, but not the banana. So it’s really hard to understand how your body will react until you take a look and actually get the data.

23:40 – The oatmeal example

Oatmeal is heart-healthy, right? Not necessarily. Levels CEO Sam Corcos discovered that it’s the last thing he should be eating for breakfast.

Our CEO, Sam Corcos, talks about this sometimes. So before Levels, he always did what he thought was the healthiest breakfast. If you Google healthiest breakfast options, you’ll see oatmeal is one of them. And so Sam would always start the day off with a bowl of steel cut oats thinking that was the healthy choice. And then around 9:30, 10:00 AM, he’d feel this wave of tiredness. And he said, “Must be time for more coffee. I’m low on caffeine.” And then lo and behold, one day, he puts on a continuous glucose monitor. And what he saw in that moment was the drop in energy, that crash he had was perfectly timed with a giant spike and a crash in his blood glucose. And so it wasn’t necessarily for him the caffeine that was causing that sluggishness, but he could see that it was something that he was eating. And oatmeal doesn’t cause the same response for everyone.

28:05 – The Goldilocks mode of growth

David said that Levels is in a great position right now, as they can explore questions and problems without pressure.

Right now, we’re in this Goldilocks period of the company where we’re pre-growth mode. We have the luxury of more time. We’re not dealing with scaling constraints. And so we’re trying to explore the problem space. We’re dedicating a lot of our time not just refining the core path and the learnings that we’ve already uncovered, but really we’re trying to optimize for more learnings. So we’re trying to explore a breadth of different things so that we can learn the most about what our members value, as well as a depth of things within a problem space that we’ve already uncovered. What are the specific routes within that we want to reach? And in this time box period, we’re trying not to spend too much time polishing the features, doing too much on a comprehensive feature set. We’re trying to do what is necessary to see if there’s potential here. And then once we learn something, we may pause that feature actually and revisit it later, because we’re more interested in learning and exploring right now. And we’ll come back to that at a future stage of our company when we know yes, we’ve already identified there’s value here, we can just allocate resources to it to build something more on this and do it in the polished version.

32:03 – Ready to scale

David and the team can’t wait to start scaling Levels, because it means they’ll be able to help more and more people in the process.

One woman, she’s been a subscriber and using our product for several months. And I think she’s lost somewhere around 95 pounds using Levels. And she told us a story about how she’s been talking to doctors for many years about finding what’s wrong. And it was finally seeing her data herself and finding out what the landmines were she was able to course-correct. So I’m really, really excited that we can bring that experience to more people. We will be scaling up. And yeah, I think at core I’m excited that the product that we’re building seems to be starting to help people and to continue to help it do so.

David Flinner (00:00):

One of the interesting opportunities we’re facing is that we’re not just building a product and trying to find product market fit, figure out what problems we’re solving for members, but we’re simultaneously trying to build a movement and raise awareness about metabolic health at the same time.

Meghan (00:18):

Hey, everyone, it’s Meghan, and you’re listening to a Better Product original series. Today, we’re talking to David Flinner, Co-Founder of Levels. Levels is an app that keeps track of your blood glucose level in real time so you can make better decisions about diet and exercise.

David Flinner (00:34):

Levels is a product that helps people understand how the food they eat affects their health in real time, using closed loop feedback systems powered by a biowearable known as a continuous glucose monitor. Levels is an insights layer on top of this raw data stream from the continuous glucose monitor that contextualizes the data and helps people close the loop on how what they’re eating, what they’re doing throughout the day affects things like their energy levels, weight loss goals, athletic performance, things like that. And it’s all part of a bigger picture, which is metabolic health, which you mentioned. And metabolic health is one of the most foundational things that drives all life.

Meghan (01:11):

There are a lot of products out there promising to make us healthier, but Levels takes a holistic approach to this idea of metabolic health which David says is becoming an unspoken epidemic in America.

David Flinner (01:21):

It is an upstream issue that is underlying a lot of the proximate and chronic issues that people may be facing. And it’s something that is really actually at the heart of an unspoken epidemic across America and the world. We don’t really talk about metabolic health much right now. People don’t really know what it means. But in the next five years, we think that we’ll be talking about the metabolic health crisis in the same way that in the last five years we’ve talked about the opioid crisis. Only 12% of the U.S. population is currently metabolically healthy, and everyone else is on a spectrum of some sort of non-ideal metabolic health.

Meghan (01:56):

Most ways we measure health today are reactive, but Levels is all about giving you real time insight into how your body is working and the education to help you get better over time.

David Flinner (02:05):

I think that the analogy of a weight scale is really appropriate here. If you step on a scale, you might see that you’ve gained a few pounds, but you’re not really sure what drove that weight gain, or you might not know exactly what drove the weight loss. The really powerful thing about what Levels does with the continuous glucose monitor is that it’s real time personal feedback. So this is a device that you wear on you and it’s continuously monitoring your body’s blood glucose, which is one of the primary analytes that we look to for metabolism. And what we find is that by measuring in real time, you get instant feedback on the choices that you make.

Meghan (02:40):

Levels is in an interesting space. They’re attempting to build a business and find product market fit while also educating a market that doesn’t know much about metabolic health as a concept. This informs how they invest in marketing, how they’ve built their onboarding experience for new Levels customers and how they prioritize new product development for Levels overall.

David Flinner (02:59):

In the beginning, of course we had some ideas of what might work. But what we do is we’ll have a hypothesis about something. But instead of trying to build too much or an entire product up front, or often even an entire feature, we’ll try to find the smallest possible thing we could test to prove the hypothesis and let the interaction on that guide whether we proceed forward on it. So of course, we knew we would want to have our own app sometime in the future, or at least that was the hypothesis. But we really didn’t build that until we heard from our members that they would prefer something like that and not to be interacting with us on a text thread. So the way we’ve approached this in terms of the development is what is the single most pressing problem that we’re hearing from our members at the given time? Let’s tackle that and then move on to the next thing. And doing it in a way that is focused on velocity, trying to optimize the rate at which we learn from members.

Meghan (03:47):

Let’s get into the conversation to hear more about how David’s team tackles building a brand new solution in the health tech space.

Christian (03:58):

David, when you say metabolic health, I’m going to reference what I think a lot of people think about metabolism, which is when you grow up and your mom or your dad says, “Oh, your metabolism’s going to slow down as you get older,” to me, that’s all most people know about metabolic health is that your metabolism’s really high when you’re a kid and it slows down when you get older. And all the stuff you used to eat, your body doesn’t handle it as well. But I feel like when you’re talking about metabolic health, it’s more nuanced and rich than that. So I’d love to know a little bit more about what’s really behind metabolic health and what that means.

David Flinner (04:33):

Absolutely. And actually, your understanding of metabolic health was my original understanding of metabolic health too. And that’s what led me in part to start Levels. We all know that it gets slow over time, you start to feel a little sluggish, not really sure what’s going on. And Levels is a tool that helps you unpack that and figure out what actually is happening. At the basic level, metabolism refers to a set of processes that essentially it’s how your body turns the foods you eat into energy to use. And so we put inputs in and then our body takes them and turns them into energy. It stores them as fat, uses some right away. But at the end of the day, it’s the whole chain of mechanisms that are taking place that convert what you’re consuming and all of your activities into energy. And as you reference, it is a complicated system.

David Flinner (05:18):

But it is something that is foundational to all we do and is upstream of a lot of the other things that we’re feeling, whether it’s day to day, our energy levels that might slow down over time, brain fog from productivity, reasons why we might gain weight faster or might have skin health issues. It is an upstream issue that is underlying a lot of the proximate and chronic issues that people may be facing. And it’s something that is really actually at the heart of an unspoken epidemic across America and the world. And we don’t really talk about metabolic health much right now. People don’t really know what it means. But in the next five years, we think that we’ll be talking about the metabolic health crisis in the same way that in the last five years we’ve talked about the opioid crisis.

David Flinner (06:00):

Only 12% of the U.S. population is currently metabolically healthy. And everyone else is on a spectrum of some non-ideal metabolic health. And Level’s mission is to reverse the metabolic health crisis to solve that. And we do that by helping people understand how the food they’re eating is affecting their health in real time using this closed loop feedback system powered by the continuous glucose monitor wearable that we help our members get access to. And we power that through a simple insights layer on top of the raw data, so that you can understand how the foods you’re eating, the activities you’re doing are affecting your metabolism so that you can improve it. We talked a little bit about this as metabolic fitness. In the same way that there’s physical fitness, there’s metabolic fitness. And it’s something that with appropriate understanding, appropriate inputs, you can improve it over time. But it does take work.

Christian (06:51):

That’s fascinating. To me, I started with my ignorance idea of metabolism because I knew it’s more nuanced, but I think it gets at this trend that I’m seeing in fitness today, which is that it’s getting a little bit more inclusive of many other factors. I was an eighties’ child, so grew up in the nineties. And at that time, losing weight was the thing. It still is the metric, but then it’s like fats are bad and then they’re okay. And then sugar’s bad and then it’s okay in some facets. So there’s all these really narrow lens factors in health. But it seems like when you’re talking about metabolism, it’s almost like a richer picture of what health actually looks like. But it seems like it requires different ways of measuring. Tell us about how the wearable part of Levels helps create that richer picture that you can even judge metabolism of.

David Flinner (07:45):

I think that the analogy of a weight scale is really appropriate here. If you step on a scale, you might see that you’ve gained a few pounds, but you’re not really sure what drove that weight gain, or you might not know exactly what drove the weight loss. The really powerful thing about what Levels does with a continuous glucose monitor is that it’s real time personal feedback. So this is a device that you wear on you and it’s continuously monitoring your body’s blood glucose, which is one of the primary analytes that we look to for metabolism. And what we find is that by measuring in real time, you get instant feedback on the choices that you make. So when you eat something, your body metabolizes that, turns the food into energy, and it’ll take the food that you eat, turn it into glucose or other products, but primarily glucose. And you’ll see that glucose hit your bloodstream through the continuous glucose monitor.

David Flinner (08:33):

And when we talk about improving metabolic fitness, improving your glucose response, broadly what you want to look for is minimizing large glucose spikes and lots of glucose variability. These things will register on your continuous glucose monitor and it’s feedback right after you do something that helps you potentially course correct on choices that may be taking you away from your goals.

Christian (08:54):

Yeah. So that was I guess my next question, which is the educational aspect. Even on your site, you have some animation showing different glycemic responses to different foods and how it spikes over time. And I’m curious, and then you have a number that’s circled which it seems branded. So maybe you can tell me about that. But my question really is how does education fit into not just getting people to Levels, but actually as a Levels user, as a consumer, how do you actually handle education through the data that you’re sharing with people?

David Flinner (09:26):

Education is really important to what we’re doing at Levels. One of the interesting opportunities we’re facing is that we’re not just building a product and trying to find product market fit, figure out what problems we’re solving for members, but we’re simultaneously trying to build a movement and raise awareness about metabolic health at the same time. So it’s a brand new space. No one really knows about it. And so there’s a lot more on the upfront education side to get to a base level of understanding as to what this space means, what can it actually help you with and then how to interpret your results. Our education, and also, it ties back to our mission. So if we want to solve the metabolic health crisis, we want to get the word out as much as possible broadly with educational material, help up level everyone as to the benefits of looking to metabolic health. And then specifically when you become a Levels member, helping you appropriately ramp up to the level you need to understand how monitoring your glucose can help you with your health goals that you might have.

David Flinner (10:21):

So broadly for people who are interested, we have a really exceptional blog, Thought Leadership Pieces. We try to put a lot of time into the long-form articles to really get at the drivers of metabolic health. And so if you’re interested in understanding the mechanisms, how it works and what you can do, that blog content is there. And then with the Levels program, what happens is you get a… It’s a one-month experience. You get access to a telehealth consultation where you’ll get a health consultation with an in-state licensed physician who will evaluate if you’re appropriate for a continuous glucose monitor. If that goes through, you’ll get shipped a one-month supply of continuous glucose monitors. And there’s a month-long journey that we’ll put you through on the program. And a lot of that is in the first week, it will be focused on education, on understanding what is this new data stream? What does it mean for me and my goals? What is a glucose spike? Why would I want to try to minimize large ones?

David Flinner (11:10):

And then baseline where you’re at, get an understanding of where the… This is the first time you’re shining a light in a dark room and you can see what needs tidying up a little bit. And so that’s what happens in the first week. And then you’ll have a chance to learn a lot of the principles and strategies. This is a more interactive education model we have. We’ve taken some of the foundational principles and built a product experience around what we call challenges. So it’s essentially something in your diet or activity that you might do normally, and then try it with one of the additional strategies that we’ll teach you to improve your metabolic fitness. And that’s what you do in weeks two and three. And then over time, you’ll be armed with a variety of tools that you can use, you’re empowered to take action if you would so choose to improve your health. And that’s where we’re at in our beta right now. And so yeah, education is broadly speaking one of the big drivers for our mission, and then specifically it’s foundational for the in-app experience as well.

Christian (12:05):

A lot of times with software companies, everybody’s just thinking about scale. How do we grow efficiently? Product like growth, all that stuff. But I made a joke about Superhuman with you before we started and their famous onboarding program is very… You have to talk to a person. And I’m hearing something similar here where you don’t just get left to get educated on your own, you actually take a really strong approach to that and more hands on. Tell me why you think that’s important to Levels’ growth in the early stage.

David Flinner (12:33):

So right now, we are in a closed beta. We’re trying to take on about a thousand new members a month. Our primary goal is to learn what value our members have with different ideas in this early stage where we’re pre-growth. Earlier on, it was even fewer. We tried to take on a hundred per month. But the core thing that’s driving us at Levels right now is learning from our members, figuring out what value that they find in this space. And like I said, it’s new for all of us. So there hasn’t historically been anything in the metabolic health space. So we’ve been intentionally trying to limit the audience to something that we can work with intimately with our team. A lot of this is on the product development side and less on the we know what you should learn and we’ll help handhold you through that. Our ultimate goal here is to automate as much of these learnings as we can in the software so it’s simple, intuitive. You don’t need an expert to handhold you through it.

David Flinner (13:22):

But before we get to that stage, we have to uncover what the learnings are in this new industry. So in the earliest days before we did anything, the very first beta we had was Levels members received continuous glucose monitors and pretty much nothing else. And they were instructed to text us pictures of what you’re seeing in the manufacturer software app, text us pictures of what you’re eating and we’ll engage with any questions you have. And so we’ve very much built the product entirely based on feedback from that experience and all the questions that we’ve built into experiences around have been things that have come up along the journey around people’s goals and the roadblocks they’ve hit along the way.

Christian (13:58):

So you’re saying in the very beginning, you didn’t have a digital product component at all, just a glucose monitor and just say, “Hey, wear this and tell us about your journey through the other apps or other things that you’re using.”

David Flinner (14:10):

Yeah. So we’ve intentionally tried to not take too much of an opinionated stance on where this is going. In the beginning, of course we had some ideas of what might work, but what we do is we’ll have a hypothesis about something. But instead of trying to build too much or an entire product up front, or often even an entire feature, we’ll try to find the smallest possible thing we could test to prove the hypothesis and let the interaction on that guide whether we proceed forward on it. So of course, we knew we would want to have our own app sometime in the future, or at least that was the hypothesis. But we really didn’t build that until we heard from our members that they would prefer something like that and not to be interacting with us on a text thread.

David Flinner (14:47):

So the way we’ve approached this in terms of the development is what is the single most pressing problem that we’re hearing from our members at the given time? Let’s tackle that and then move on to the next thing. And in doing it in a way that is focused on velocity, trying to optimize the rate at which we learn from members. So if there’s a way that we could push out something that is good enough to meet the learning without spending more engineering time on it, we would do that as opposed to waiting for four weeks. In the early days, we were pushing new builds out every couple days. Now, we strive for a weekly build, but it’s still how we’re operating.

Christian (15:19):

So I’m going to just give a little background context, but feel free to share. But your background, you’ve been in product for a while. You’ve been at Google. What you’re describing seems a lot different than I imagine being in product for a very large company and one that’s just all digital for the most part. Was it hard to do what you’re saying to say, “We’re going to go forward without a product?” Was that a challenge for you?

David Flinner (15:46):

It’s certainly quite different from how I operated at Google. Even at Google though, there’s many different teams at a company that size. So I’ve always approached it that there may not be a right single one size fits all product development philosophy. But at our stage and the fact that there wasn’t really anything existing in the space, it’s really been a breath of fresh air to be so connected to customers and to be building in lockstep with them. It’s been quite a nice experience. And actually, we’ve built into something where our members tell us that they feel like they’re part of the product development experience. They’re excited to be part of the beta, that they haven’t seen changes based on their feedback come out so quickly before. So we’ll be connecting one on one with people.

David Flinner (16:25):

In the early days, we would have an onboarding call, like you mentioned for Superhuman, and we’d have a midpoint call and a debrief call. And these would all be video calls, synchronous video calls, where we would really be engaging on the feedback. And we would get themes that would emerge from that. And it was very clear what was the obvious next step, and it was just a very fast-paced environment.

Christian (16:44):

Why is that important to you? Sorry, let me reference, I have my note here. You said customers say they feel like they’re a part of the product development process. Why is that important to what you’re doing at Levels?

David Flinner (16:58):

I think part of what we’re doing is trying to create a movement around this and a community. And an additional part of this is what we talk about building and building in the open, and all the things that we do, we try to be very transparent. And one of them is radical transparency with our member set. So nothing’s really hidden. We talk about what we’re doing, we share our thoughts. And what we found is that when we share what’s on our mind and draw people in, they can see that we are clearly passionate about the mission, they can see that we’re laying all the cards on the table in a very authentic way. And we get a lot more feedback this way. At least I’ve seen here, when we try to paint a vision for where we’re going, that is inspiring, that people want to be along, they want to participate. And we really scale our expertise.

David Flinner (17:39):

It’s not like me relying on my own self, it’s not me relying on my team, but we in effect are able to take all of our advocates and members and turn them all into one team. And bringing people alongside that product development process feels that way.

Christian (17:54):

So building in the open, you mentioned, is this like those pizza places where you can see in the back of the kitchen there making your pizza? Or is it more than that?

David Flinner (18:02):

Partly. Yeah, it’s pretty broad. It’s broadly being authentic and transparent and not being secretive about what we’re doing on some aspects. The key challenge in a startup I think is execution and our strategy really isn’t a secret, and I think anyone else in the space who wants to get involved will converge on our strategy. Being transparent has a whole lot of benefits. I think one of the big ones is helping us get the word out to perspective members. So we’re going to be successful. If we do have a product that helps people succeed in becoming healthier, being transparent about what we’re doing, this creates a lot more content to help prospective members understand what’s going on. A lot of our blog posts come from things that we learn from our members. We’ll write a blog post about it, publish it, product roadmap, we’ll publish that. But it’ll help build this community.

Christian (18:44):

It’s fascinating. And I’m curious, I wouldn’t necessarily call this devil’s advocate, but maybe come at this from a different approach to building product and tell me the contrast, which is okay, so you’re talking about metabolic health. It’s a new space. In my mind, if you say, “Hey, we’re going to go build a product in a new space,” a lot of people say it’s important that we’re perceived as the leaders. And when I hear that, I think that means really enforcing your thought leadership, being a little bit closed off so people know that you’re the experts. But I feel like you’re almost saying the opposite. You’re almost embracing the fact like, “Hey, we’re actually all in this together. We want your input. We don’t have all the answers.” How do you manage that while still trying to become the leader, but still also being very almost vulnerable to the customers that, “Hey, we’re actually learning from you right now?”

David Flinner (19:33):

I think part of this is the difference between what we’re trying to build in the product experience, and we’re trying to learn what are the problems that we can help you solve that you care about using metabolic health? So that’s the area where I think we’re doing a lot more exploration. We don’t have all the answers there. On the other side with the foundational metabolic health science, that is a bit more known. And we’re trying to take a very strong thought leadership position on that. And so there’s a lot that we do know and a lot that we don’t know there. A lot that we do know is enough to get the word out there and start the movement around why metabolic health is important, why it’s so foundational, working on metabolic health is important for improving your chances around chronic conditions, but also important things that we all care about, energy, brain fog, weight management, things like that. That side of things is broadly known.

David Flinner (20:20):

We don’t know all the specifics because this has been something that’s been studied for decades with a focus on Type 1 and Type 2 diabetic populations. And so there really hasn’t been a lot of research specifically on people who aren’t actively managing diabetes and also the personalized aspect of it. There is a huge personalized component to this. Taking what we do know and trying to get the word out with a very strong, comprehensive, accurate, scientific thought leadership pieces is one thing. And then as we dive deeper into the new realms and especially on the product side, there’s many different ways we could take the experience here. We want to know what is most valuable from an applied sense to our members. That’s the area that we’re mostly exploring around is in the applied area. But as we go through that journey, we’re also learning different things too.

Christian (21:05):

So as you’re talking, I’m scrolling through the Levels health site, and I get to this section where you have Levels is changing the way people live their lives and it’s just a series of tweets. They’re all very recent. But what stands out to me is everybody’s saying and talking about different aspects that are very specific to them. Somebody’s talking about their blood sugar spiking after an intense lifting, another person is posting a picture of their food and talking about what they’re learning. It seems like what you’re doing with Levels is highly customized. It’s metabolic at the core, but it’s highly customized to the end user. I’d love to learn a little bit more about how that plays into Level’s strategy as well.

David Flinner (21:44):

Yeah, definitely. So I think there’s two aspects of this. One is that metabolism is a highly multivariate process and Levels will help you synthesize all the different inputs you’re doing and help you make sense of it so that you can see what the drivers were. But then also, even controlling for all different factors, you take two people, what we’re finding and what the science is showing is that people respond differently to the same foods. There’s no universal one size fits all diet and everyone can potentially have a different response to the same inputs. It’s really hard to know how you can make progress personally without taking a look at your personal metabolic response to foods. Just one quick example, there’s a study where they had several people controlling for all different things. I think they even had twins. They had people eat a banana and a cookie. And what they saw was that many people had equal and opposite responses.

David Flinner (22:35):

So some people would have a blood sugar spike on the banana, but not on the cookie, and some would have a spike on the cookie, but not the banana. So it’s really hard to understand how your body will react until you take a look and actually get the data. And once you’re empowered with the data, you can make changes. In those two ways, it’s a really powerful experience for our members.

Christian (22:54):

That’s great. So I’ll share my background. It’s a podcast, nobody can see me, but during the course of the podcast, I’ve lost weight. And that was exciting in and of itself. But I was also getting my blood tested as well. As I get older, I get it done every once in a while and I noticed that my blood sugar was a little bit higher. And I started my own clunky educational journey to even learn all these different things. And what I’ve observed without the Levels product is really just seeing those exact things that, “Wow, if I pay attention to these, I realize I’m…” It’s like they say, the tryptophan in Turkey isn’t necessarily what makes you tired, it’s actually the overeating that you do and all the other stuff you eat. And so I was starting to wake up to that. So there’s almost an awakening to this.

David Flinner (23:40):

I’ll share one story. Our CEO, Sam Corcos, talks about this sometimes. So before Levels, he always did what he thought was the healthiest breakfast. If you Google healthiest breakfast options, you’ll see oatmeal is one of them. And so Sam would always start the day off with a bowl of steel cut oats thinking that was the healthy choice. And then around 9:30, 10:00 AM, he’d feel this wave of tiredness. And he said, “Must be time for more coffee. I’m low on caffeine.” And then lo and behold, one day, he puts on a continuous glucose monitor. And what he saw in that moment was the drop in energy, that crash he had was perfectly timed with a giant spike and a crash in his blood glucose. And so it wasn’t necessarily for him the caffeine that was causing that sluggishness, but he could see that it was something that he was eating. And oatmeal doesn’t cause the same response for everyone.

David Flinner (24:26):

I can handle oatmeal better than Sam does. I won’t have as big as a response as he does. But for him, that was really eye-opening and very easy for him to tweak. He wasn’t passionate about oatmeal. He found substitutes. But he wouldn’t have known that. And in fact, he did go years doing that without knowing what the actual causal driver there was.

Christian (24:42):

And at the core, it’s almost as if there’s no judgment in what you’re trying to do in the product. And even the name of just being Levels. As we started, we were talking about scales and weight loss, and I don’t think weight loss will ever go away as a decent indicator. But we know now so much more even with problems with BMI and all of that that weight is definitely not the only thing. And you can be quite unhealthy and not weigh a lot. But what I love about what you’re doing is you’re also not getting on, “Hey, you need to be like this.” You’re actually just saying, “Expose the levels, give you the insights and then let you figure out.” In that example of your CEO, we’re not saying, “Oatmeal’s bad.” It’s just, “Oh, you shouldn’t eat oatmeal.” That would be the old way of doing it. You’re saying, “Hey, for you, there’s a spike every time you’re eating that.” And then you leave it up to the person to make those changes. That’s pretty fascinating.

David Flinner (25:30):

Yeah. And then what we’ll do then is we help people understand what to do next by arming them with strategies. So you have options, right? You can choose to not eat that. But if you really enjoy it, we can help you work it back in in a way that helps your body process it much better. So a simple strategy you might do is go for a walk after a meal. We’ve shown through some informal tests, actually you can look it up on our blog, the Levels Coke Challenge, but basically, if you eat anything that spikes your blood sugar alone, and then you do it again, go for a brisk walk afterwards. I’m not talking about a run, but just go out for a nice brisk 15, 20 minute stroll. You’ll find that your body is able to blunt that spike and process the glucose much faster. That’s one strategy. Or making the meal a mixed meal. We often talk about don’t have high glycemic carbs. So basically, don’t have processed food alone.

David Flinner (26:18):

If you are going to have something that is higher on the glycemic index that’s going to cause a glucose spike, eat it in a mixed meal. Try having a salad first. Things like this that they’re not rocket science, but they’re easy principles that we help people try out for themselves and work it back in. And you can self-serve optimize your diet. We’re in this awareness and equipping with tools phase with the company. Over time, we do want to build the product so that it does optimize for actual improvement. But it’s a little bit farther on our roadmap. We’re starting with a foundational platform almost that has all the core experiences. And then we envision a suite of a variety of programs on top of this. So there would be some base programs that Levels will help you improve with, but then also perhaps third party marketplace. You can imagine maybe certain health leaders in the industry might have their own program that you could opt into, or you could work with your dietician with a custom plan. Things like that.

Christian (27:10):

That actually gets me. I wanted to get down to the product Levels just a little bit, and you started down that. How do you determine when you’re ready to take the next step with a product like this? And maybe give you some background, so I always joked in design school when I was there people couldn’t figure out they were a user researcher or more of a designer. And I would say, “When you’re doing a project, are you the type that can’t wait to start designing something? Or are you the type that says hold on, I want to wait. Just a little more research before we get to designing?” So I imagine with Levels, you’re sitting there and you’re doing a thousand people a month. And you’re at some point like, “Hey, when is enough? When do we actually start diving into some of these things?” So have you thought about what that looks like when you make that next lead to say, “Hey, we’re going to start to expand this out or go down some specific paths?”

David Flinner (27:57):

Yeah. And I think I can talk about different levels of the abstraction as well. On one dimension to this, the answer to that I think is going to depend at the phase is at the company. And right now, we’re in this Goldilocks period of the company where we’re pre-growth mode. We have the luxury of more time. We’re not dealing with scaling constraints. And so we’re trying to explore the problem space. We’re dedicating a lot of our time not just refining the core path and the learnings that we’ve already uncovered, but really we’re trying to optimize for more learnings. So we’re trying to explore a breadth of different things so that we can learn the most about what our members value, as well as a depth of things within a problem space that we’ve already uncovered. What are the specific routes within that we want to reach? And in this time box period, we’re trying not to spend too much time polishing the features, doing too much on a comprehensive feature set. We’re trying to do what is necessary to see if there’s potential here.

David Flinner (28:51):

And then once we learn something, we may pause that feature actually and revisit it later, because we’re more interested in learning and exploring right now. And we’ll come back to that at a future stage of our company when we know yes, we’ve already identified there’s value here, we can just allocate resources to it to build something more on this and do it in the polished version. The broader question of how much is enough I think is it’s something that we’re talking through at the company right now. What is the right time to launch? What does launch mean? Are we doing a big bang? Are we going to launch without launching and increase the users? Go through the wait list? Yeah, just in transparency, we’re thinking through that now. But there are some table states things, a lot of common things that we know we want to get through. We’re building this core metabolic awareness program first. So there’s a lot that we’re leading people hanging with even right now.

David Flinner (29:35):

So I would say one thing that will tell us that we’re ready to move forward is when we feel like the health seeker audience that we’re targeting has a complete user journey that they feel like they know what they should be doing at every moment throughout the program, they feel like they have a valuable takeaway, we’ve made a lot of progress, but there’s still a lot of open ended things. So one of the big things we saw first was helping people understand what their responses meant. So we think we’ve largely explored that space pretty well. And we are helping people contextualize it and understand the responses. What we’re looking at now is helping people understand what to do next and that optimization and, I don’t know, swapping behavior change route and equipping them with that. So once we get to that point, I think we’ll be at a much better state to say, “This is a more comprehensive experience.” But it’s less about the polish on it and more about, yeah, feeling that it has sufficient complete journey and value along that we can go forward with.

Christian (30:30):

Yeah, that makes sense. It seems like ultimately with product development, you have the business rationale and probably investors like, “Hey, guys, you need to start making money and all that.” But I’m always interested in what role does a product play in that? Because it can be very challenging because you’re trying to build the metrics that even define your success as you go along I imagine.

David Flinner (30:50):

Yeah. To that point, we’re optimizing for NPS. So we talk internally that this is a very long game for us. We’re not focused on short-term growth. We’re not in growth mode. We want to have a, as our head of growth calls, an NPS unicorn. We want to have trust. Growth will come when we have a product that people love and a product that people talk about. We think Levels is a pull product. We’re not going to be out there necessarily advertising so much to people. It’s the kind of thing where if we nail the product experience and really help people change their life for the better, they’re going to be talking about it to their friends and family, and it’s going to spread that way. So we’re focused on the short-term in getting our NPS up as high as possible.

David Flinner (31:28):

It’s a simplified metric. It’s not the only thing we’re looking at. But the intent is to find something that’s truly helping people that they’re passionate about and build a community of people who are aligned with the mission, who are advocates for it, are bought in and are truly helped by it. And we’ll expand out from there.

Christian (31:45):

Yeah. Great. Thank you. And let me ask one more question before we go, what are you most excited about when you look at the next 12 months for Levels?

David Flinner (31:54):

I think I’m excited about what I’m hearing from members right now that are going through our program. There’s a story I heard yesterday, one woman, she’s been a subscriber and using our product for several months. And I think she’s lost somewhere around 95 pounds using Levels. And she told us a story about how she’s been talking to doctors for many years about finding what’s wrong. And it was finally seeing her data herself and finding out what the landmines were she was able to course correct. So I’m really, really excited that we can bring that experience to more people. We will be scaling up. And yeah, I think at core I’m excited that the product that we’re building seems to be starting to help people and to continue to help it do so. Maybe specifically, one of the projects that I’m excited about right now is that along the Levels journey, there are some metrics that help you orient to what your health means. And one of them is something we call the metabolic score.

David Flinner (32:48):

And it’s a composite score that tries to simplify how your day’s going, give you a sense of whether your day represented ideal or room for improvement metabolic responses. And we’re thinking through some really cool changes to it right now that will make it much more of an improvement based metric where it’s very positive and it actually helps you make steps hourly and daily towards improvement. There’s more to come soon on that.

Christian (33:16):

Thanks for joining us. And if you haven’t yet, be sure going the Better Product community. We’ve got all sorts of content and resources for you. And if you want more audio, don’t forget, the Business of Product is our latest show to join the Better Product network. And you can find that and more at betterproduct.community.