Early Stage Product Development with Levels Co-Founder David Flinner

In this episode of Build hosted by Maggie Crowley, Levels co-founder and Head of Product David Flinner provides insight into the trajectory of Levels as a company. He explains how putting users first allowed them to change the roadmap on the fly and create resources and tech that truly serve the needs of users—and work to solve metabolic health.

Metabolism lets our body function

Our everyday energy levels are governed by our metabolism, and how well it’s working.

Metabolism is a set of cellular processes that take the foods we eat and turn it into energy for us to use. And so, it’s really critical. It’s a foundational part of how our bodies function and if things are not working as they should at the metabolic level, then it’s going to manifest in many different ways that are very near and dear to things that we care about. So, whether that’s from finding peak productivity during your work, so this might manifest in all of a sudden you’re feeling lower energy mid morning or mid afternoon, and you’re not sure why. You’ve been kind of haunted by feelings of low energy and don’t quite know where that’s coming from, or maybe you’ve been trying to lose weight and counting calories and don’t know why some of the pounds aren’t dropping off.

Helping customers access CGMs

The first problem the Levels team tacked was getting their initial customer base access to CGMs, which are typically only available with a doctor’s prescription.

The very first presenting problem we had was, we knew we had this small set of people who wanted access to continuous glucose monitors but they couldn’t get them. So the first thing we solved was helping people get access to the continuous glucose monitors through a telehealth consultation system. And so, in the very beginning we had nothing besides a regulatory approves, up board telehealth medical practice that could facilitate people who wanted to consult with a physician about getting continuous glucose monitors and just make that connection with them. The very next thing was, they would get the continuous glucose monitor devices, but they would get nothing else from us. We had no app. They came in a cardboard box and in order to understand what they wanted next, we just said, “Text us screenshots about what you’re seeing in the app and any questions that you have.” And, that was how we started getting feedback.

The birth of the Levels app

The Levels team let users pave the way for whether or not an app would be built, and what it would look like.

We tried to make no assumptions. So, at the very beginning we didn’t have an app. We weren’t sure if people wanted an app, although you might assume that’s very obvious. We didn’t take it for granted. And so, pretty shortly soon after that people started asking, saying, “Hey, there’s a lot of deficiencies in this manufacturer’s app. I’d love to be able to do X, Y, and Z.” And so, that was the first feature set that we had in forming our own app when we decided to build it. And then, that was the way we approached it was, solve that one problem and then figure out the smallest thing that we could do to do that. Because I was often very surprised and I have been continued to be surprised at how I haven’t had to overthink certain things that would solve the problem. So, I would put something out there to test it, thinking that there’s no way this will work. And then all of the questions we got about it would just disappear. And so, it’s enabled us very quickly and try to get to the meatier things that we want to get to down the line.

Is your diet good or bad?

In essence, answering this question and educating users is the goal of Levels and its tech.

We had our very first app, I think, in January 2020. So, all it did was let you log food logs. It had no glucose, no connection to the actual bio-wearable. You log food and do nothing else, and so it was very, very basic. We have been, basically throughout this time, we’ve been building what we’re calling a metabolic awareness program. So we’ve been trying to iterate towards what we think is the core value that will help people understand. Understand whether their dietary choices are good or bad for them based on their goals, where their health is at, and then the steps they can take to improve that. It’s more about the awareness and the future of Levels is about the improvement. And then, a big other kind of foundational layer to this is the educational piece.

There’s no one size fits all diet

It’s becoming more and more clear thanks to scientific research that dietary needs vary greatly from person to person.

One of the biggest things that we’ve seen in the science is that everyone responds differently to the foods we eat. So, there’s no such thing as a one-size fits all diet. And the data is showing that people respond differently to the same exact thing. So, I don’t know if you’ve heard of the study where they have, there’s a study from the Weizmann Institute in Israel a few years back where they had people eat both a banana and a cookie. And, some people would get a blood sugar spike from the banana, but not the cookie. And then other people would get the exact opposite response. They’d have a spike for the cookie and not the banana. There are a lot of contributing factors to this, got microbiome, stress levels, other things about your genetics. And it’s something where, if you think you know what you’re doing, like you mentioned just following advice online, you can’t really know for sure until you check.

Seeking member feedback

Levels has a broad plan in mind, but the specifics of that path are determined by user needs.

In terms of figuring out what we want to build. There is an aspect to this, where it is coming from us. We do heavily use the product ourselves. We use continuous glucose monitors. So we kind of have a directional sense of what might resonate with our members. But then really listening to the feedback that we’re getting and trying to build based on only the things that are causing pain points from our members that we’re hearing in real time. We’re trying to carve out roughly half of our time towards refining the main path that we see towards that metabolic awareness program. And then another 50% of the time towards exploration. So, we’re still pre-launch, we’re not in growth mode. And, I think a lot of the focus right now is around exploring different values.

What’s next for Levels

Right now, Levels provides broad insight into the link between diet and glucose. Going forward, they hope to make the educational component more and more specific.

The roadmap is pretty clear right now. And so we’re kind of executing on that, but the new value is not certain. And then there’s also a lot of exploration even within the core program area. Education is an ongoing process, helping people understand it more deeply. Right now, we help people see how their body responds to foods at a certain level, but we want to go more deeply. So right now we could say, “Hey, something in the meal you ate caused you to have a glucose spike.” What we want to get to is say “Specifically it was the dressing on your salad. The kale was excellent, the other components were fine, but it was the dressing. You should try swapping it out with this.”

Promote a positive experience

Levels isn’t meant to judge or guilt-trip users. Life happens. Levels is all about providing an unbiased source of truth.

There’ll be cycles where you’re charging ahead and going forward with your health goals and then periods where you fall off the bandwagon. Life happens. Something comes up that’s really important and you have to put things aside for a while. What we want to do, on top of the depth and the goal-base improvement and the community aspects, is kind of weave everything together into a sense where Levels is always positive and encouraging and a place where we’ll meet you where you’re at. And whether you’re using CGM currently and marching forward to hit some goals and we can help you get there, or you’re taking a break and not using active monitoring, we want it to be a positive experience. And so we’ll be thinking through spaces within that.

Prioritize problems worth solving

When you keep the customer center stage, identifying the next big pain point becomes easier.

Reflecting on my experience in early-stage startup, the biggest things for me have been like really making sure that I don’t lose sight of talking to customers. I think some of this advice probably will be pretty foundational like across the board. No huge surprises here. But the other thing was prioritizing and picking the problem worth solving at hand and not thinking too far out in the future because things will change and they do change. So we were focusing on just the main blocking problem, maybe over a two week period or a one month period, and then moving on to the next one. And then finding ways to not bottleneck everyone else on yourself. So coming up with some system that allows people to see the vision, understand how you want things to be run and being able to slot in to participate.

Put members first

Levels isn’t out to price gouge users. They’re looking to provide as many complimentary or at-cost resources as they can.

We want to move the company towards a membership model where you join Levels and you would have a Levels annual membership fee but then we would provide at cost access to continuous glucose monitors, at cost access to at home blood panels, things, anything that we think would be beneficial to you. The reason we’re thinking about this is because we want our incentives to be aligned exceptionally well to our members. We don’t want to be incentivized purely to get you to buy something because we’ll make money off of it. We want to align our incentives where it’s all based on trust. If we can be your advocate and say, “No, we’re not recommending this blood test because we’ll make money from it, we’re actually recommending it because we think that this is something that will help you truly.” That would be a powerful win for our users.

Maggie Crowley: All right. Welcome to Build, this is Maggie. Today, I am so excited to have David Flinner, the Co-Founder and Head of Product for Levels here with me today. So, David, welcome.

David Flinner: Thanks Maggie. It’s really nice to be here. Thanks for having me on the show.

Maggie Crowley: So, we’re going to get into building a product that solves a problem that most users maybe don’t know that they have or know much about. But where I want to start is, if you could give us a rundown of Levels, of what metabolic health actually is, and kind of why you guys decided to start the company, I think that’ll be a good starting point.

David Flinner: Yeah, sure. Levels helps people understand how the food they eat affects their health. And we do so in real time, using a continuous loop feedback system powered by a bio-wearable, which is the continuous glucose monitor. That is a little patch that you wear on your body and it’s continuously monitoring your body’s metabolism. One of the main units of energy in that, which is glucose. And then as you eat, Levels will then show you how your food choices are being processed by your body and how that’s affecting the wellness goals that you might have from energy to weight loss, things like that in a closer fashion. And Levels is primarily a software layer on top of the actual continuous glucose monitoring device. We have a consumer version. So, these devices have been around for decades and have been used by people to help manage diabetes. And, we are the company who’s taking that and building the consumer application version on top of it, the insights layer that translates it into everyday general health and wellness.

Maggie Crowley: Full disclosure, I’ve used or participated in the beta and used the product. And I thought that was really interesting. I didn’t realize until I got the box, that it was the actual CGM that you would get as from the doctor and then this other thing on top of it, which was Levels.

David Flinner: Yeah, that was actually one of the challenging things that we had to just briefly solve for at the very start of the company was getting access to these devices. In the United States, it is a prescription only product. Elsewhere around the world these are over the counter. The first thing we had to look for was setting up a telehealth medical process whereby someone could go through, have a consultation with a physician, if appropriate get access to these devices. Our expertise is not on the hardware side, it’s definitely on the software side.

Maggie Crowley: Another thing that was interesting is that, metabolic health is something that I didn’t know about until sort of signing up and getting access. So, I thought it was interesting when I first started using it, that when I would look at the numbers, I had no idea what good looked like and kind of what to do with the information. And so, I’m curious as someone on the product side, how did you approach solving a problem that I guess your users maybe didn’t even know that they had, or like even how to interpret?

David Flinner: Yeah, sure. Maybe just to start off, because I’m not sure if even your audience knows exactly what metabolic health is or how that’s important. So it’s essentially, metabolism is a set of cellular processes that take the foods we eat and turn it into energy for us to use. And so, it’s really critical. It’s a foundational part of how our bodies function and if things are not working as they should at the metabolic level, then it’s going to manifest in many different ways that are very near and dear to things that we care about. So, whether that’s from finding peak productivity during your work, so this might manifest in all of a sudden you’re feeling lower energy mid morning or mid afternoon, and you’re not sure why. You’ve been kind of haunted by feelings of low energy and don’t quite know where that’s coming from, or maybe you’ve been trying to lose weight and counting calories and don’t know why some of the pounds aren’t dropping off.

David Flinner: It’s associated with things like skin health. Pretty much all of the things that we, well, many of the things that we think about every day are kind of rooted in metabolic processes and as well as things that are much longer term. So, poor metabolic health is associated with longer term risk of chronic illness, diabetes, things like that down the line. If you can understand how your metabolism is functioning now, you can see where it’s at and take preventative action to course correct in your life. That is going to help you have, potentially, more energy now, lose weight faster, things like that.

David Flinner: So, what Levels does is it helps you kind of take a look into where things are at, gives you metabolic awareness, and then helps you associate your current feelings and your goals with how your body’s responding to the food choices you make. I can give a quick example, my co-founder Sam, he used to eat what he thought was one of the healthiest breakfasts of all time, just steel cut oats. If you were to google healthy breakfast, you’ll see I think on the first page, oatmeal is one of the top things. And so, he was doing the right thing eating oatmeal. And then around 10:00 AM, he would consistently have this feeling of tiredness and think, “It’s time for my next coffee. I haven’t had enough yet.” And then, when he finally got access to a continuous glucose monitor and took a look at the data, what he saw was that the feeling of tiredness was correlated very directly with a giant glucose spike and corresponding crash. You might have heard the term like a blood sugar crash.

Maggie Crowley: Yep.

David Flinner: So that’s exactly what Levels helps you see is that spike in a crash and then associate very tightly, because you’ll log you had that oatmeal, you can see that it was the oatmeal that drove your blood sugar up and had a corresponding crash. And then, we helped you gain that awareness of how you feel so that you’re more empowered to make decisions in the future on what you want to do. It’s still your choice, but now you know.

Maggie Crowley: Yeah, but I think even to get there, that’s sort of like the end state that you’re trying to get your users to. But you have to sign up, you have to go through the doctor flow to get the actual glucose monitor, you have to get it, put it on. And like there’s all this like workflow that the user has to go through, for this thing that they don’t even maybe know that that’s what they’re going to get out of it.

David Flinner: I think there’s a couple of things here. One is, and this sort of goes towards the different user types that we’re kind of encountering, when we were starting out we didn’t quite know what we would encounter with relevant data from the glucose curve and what would be meaningful towards people. So we were at the same time trying to try this out ourselves, see how it related to our life and then look towards the market and see who was looking to get access to this as well. And we started out with, there was a subset of user out there who did actually know they wanted this and they were begging for it, but they couldn’t get access to it.

Maggie Crowley: Got it.

David Flinner: So we started out with that crowd, and that’s more of a biohacker crowd. People who just want access to their own data. And having the data, they can inform themselves and course correct, and know what to do with it. So we started out there. There’s a lot I can go into in that, and how we kind of incrementally built up for that audience and laid the foundation. Right now, we’ve been doing this for a bit over a year in our closed beta. And we’re extending out and we’re seeing a lot more of a mainstream audience who is much more what we’re calling the health seeker. People who try to take healthy actions, maybe try to buy organic but don’t really know why it’s good, go to the gym when they can. And I think for that audience, we encountered that there was a much greater need for education in the metabolic health space. And so, I think that is sort of the backdrop. And maybe from where you’re coming in with your question on how do you take people to understand what they’re going to get out of this.

Maggie Crowley: I think the question, maybe it’s like sort of a multipart question. It’s like, what was the first slice of the problem that you peeled off for that early adopter crowd? Because that’s really interesting that it sounds like you started by saying, “Okay, there’s these people like bleeding edge, they already know they want this thing, so let’s get them in and let’s learn from them.” And then there’s also that trap that we all know about, which is, okay, you’re building for early adopters, but early adopters aren’t the same as those of us who like maybe, and I’m probably like right in the middle. I use a lot of like health tracking stuff. So I think that space is really interesting, but I don’t know all that much about it. So how did you then, how did you think about going from like early adopter to person who doesn’t know about the space at all?

David Flinner: Sure, yeah. So, what we saw in the beginning was that there was a clear market kind of need for these biohacker types that just wanted to get access to it. And we didn’t quite know what they wanted, but they wanted access. And so, the way we approached this was not trying to solve everything up all at once, but try to find the most pressing presenting problem and solve just that. Try to minimize the amount of time you take to spend that and just get it out there and see what they say, and bias towards velocity and getting as much customer feedback as we could. Our approach throughout this whole thing has been to focus on customer feedback and to focus on shipping one thing at a time, but very, very quickly. Like one time a week solving the next presenting problem.

David Flinner: So, the very first presenting problem we had was, we knew we had this small set of people who wanted access to continuous glucose monitors but they couldn’t get them. So the first thing we solved was helping people get access to the continuous glucose monitors through a telehealth consultation system. And so, in the very beginning we had nothing besides a regulatory approves, up board telehealth medical practice that could facilitate people who wanted to consult with a physician about getting continuous glucose monitors and just make that connection with them. The very next thing was, they would get the continuous glucose monitor devices, but they would get nothing else from us. We had no app. They came in a cardboard box and in order to understand what they wanted next, we just said, “Text us screenshots about what you’re seeing in the app and any questions that you have.” And, that was how we started getting feedback.

Maggie Crowley: I just love that, because I think there’s this narrative, especially from product people who haven’t worked in the startup, or who’ve been at bigger companies that the first, like if you’re going to build a startup, it has to be perfect. You need to like have this perfect product that you’re launching. But I love it, they just texted you like. That’s the scrappiest thing.

David Flinner: I would spend countless hours every day texting with hundreds of people about what they were saying with their continuous glucose monitors. So, yeah, it was crazy. I came from Google where it was much more, take a long time, write a detailed spec. And then, it’s different in every team, but it was a bit more waterfall-y. And this was totally the other opposite direction where I had no idea what to expect. Gather as much feedback as we could. Beyond the hours of daily interaction we had with users on text, we would also do a pre-sign up call where we took people off of our wait list. So, we called them and did market research basically to figure out who they were and what they were interested in on that call. And then we had an onboarding call, a midpoint call, and a debrief call to unpack everything that they were doing.

David Flinner: So it was very much deeply ingrained with our members and understanding what they were seeing, where the pain points were and what they wanted next. We tried to make no assumptions. So, at the very beginning we didn’t have an app. We weren’t sure if people wanted an app, although you might assume that’s very obvious. We didn’t take it for granted. And so, pretty shortly soon after that people started asking, saying, “Hey, there’s a lot of deficiencies in this manufacturer’s app. I’d love to be able to do X, Y, and Z.” And so, that was the first feature set that we had in forming our own app when we decided to build it.

David Flinner: And then, that was the way we approached it was, solve that one problem and then figure out the smallest thing that we could do to do that. Because I was often very surprised and I have been continued to be surprised at how I haven’t had to overthink certain things that would solve the problem. So, I would put something out there to test it, thinking that there’s no way this will work. And then all of the questions we got about it would just disappear. And so, it’s enabled us very quickly and try to get to the meatier things that we want to get to down the line.

Maggie Crowley: Yeah, I think sometimes having worked at bigger companies and at startups, the thing that people don’t like to admit is that sometimes you just sort of know what the thing is to do. And you’re just like, if you just shift the idea that you kind of all have in your head, sometimes a lot of the times it just works. And you don’t have to like overthink it and like over-research it and you can kind of just build what makes sense. Especially in those early days when you’re getting all that feedback.

David Flinner: Yeah, and I think what we tried to do is not do too much of a comprehensive feature set approach for that launch, because then I don’t think we would’ve known exactly what was resonating as much with our members. So we tried to do it one thing at a time and see if that stuck and we could kind of gauge where the value was being trapped there.

Maggie Crowley: So you went from this super scrappy texting to now you have an app. How has the app evolved over the past however many months it’s been in existence? I had no idea it’d only been around for a year.

David Flinner: Yeah.

Maggie Crowley: So, it looked like it’d been around for a little bit longer than that when I was using it.

David Flinner: We had our very first app, I think, in January 2020. So, all it did was let you log food logs. It had no glucose, no connection to the actual bio-wearable. You log food and do nothing else, and so it was very, very basic. We have been, basically throughout this time, we’ve been building what we’re calling a metabolic awareness program. So we’ve been trying to iterate towards what we think is the core value that will help people understand. Understand whether their dietary choices are good or bad for them based on their goals, where their health is at, and then the steps they can take to improve that. It’s more about the awareness and the future of Levels is about the improvement. And then, a big other kind of foundational layer to this is the educational piece, which you have mentioned before, because no one knows about this.

David Flinner: It’s been something that we’ve had to ramp people up on using many different tacks, and it’s something that is still not done at this point. In fact, education has been one of the biggest things that we’ve invested in, in the app. It’s been a big value proposition that our members have requested, and we try to weave it in throughout the getting started experience, through a learn module in the app where you can explore at your leisure. The most powerful thing we’ve had though, has been context relevant education. So, I think to your point earlier about how do you actually ramp people up on this. One of the most powerful ways we’ve discovered is through event driven education. So basically, magical moments that when something happens to you that you’re not sure about, Levels will attempt to give you education to help you understand what that is in that moment, but not before. And that has been in our data, the thing that people liked the most.

Maggie Crowley: Yeah, I’m trying to think. I think that there were a couple of moments when I was using it, where there were helpful, like this thing just happened. Did you do this? Or like, did you do this kind of thing, which I thought was pretty interesting. And another thing on the education front that I thought was interesting is, especially before I started using the products, having been a little bit in the space of, “Okay, what are the health apps out there?” Because I am interested in that space.

Maggie Crowley: I had this assumption like continuous glucose monitor that it would be about sugar, which meant that all it was just going to tell me was that I shouldn’t eat desserts. And like, I shouldn’t drink alcohol and anything that has lots of sugar would be bad for me. And so I was kind of like, “Whatever, I don’t need this app to tell me that because I already know.” And what I thought was interesting is that, that was the wrong perspective. And then I learned that, eating a bag of M&M’S for example, for me was fine, but eating like a bowl of grapes wasn’t fine. And so, even I had the wrong perspective on this space before I was able to actually see like what it was for me.

David Flinner: Sure, yeah. I think one of the biggest things that we’ve seen in the science is that everyone responds differently to the foods we eat. So, there’s no such thing as a one-size fits all diet. And the data is showing that people respond differently to the same exact thing. So, I don’t know if you’ve heard of the study where they have, there’s a study from the Weizmann Institute in Israel a few years back where they had people eat both a banana and a cookie. And, some people would get a blood sugar spike from the banana, but not the cookie. And then other people would get the exact opposite response. They’d have a spike for the cookie and not the banana.

David Flinner: There are a lot of contributing factors to this, got microbiome, stress levels, other things about your genetics. And it’s something where, if you think you know what you’re doing, like you mentioned just following advice online, you can’t really know for sure until you check. And it’s also important to point out that glucose is only one measure of a proper nutrition. It’s not going to tell you everything. So, I know M&M’S are still a candy and they’re probably best enjoyed in moderation. In terms of a glucose response and effect on metabolism, then, yeah. That’s all I can tell you there.

Maggie Crowley: Yeah, I mean I know that we’ve kind of talked about this offline, but my scores were really good. So I was sitting there being like, “I guess this road trip I went on where I ate McDonald’s for like 10 days straight, because there was nothing else, is fine and I’m healthy and like, who cares?” Which obviously is not the right answer, but at the time I was feeling pretty good about myself. I guess, from a product perspective what I’m curious about is, there’s so many, like even in this discussion, there’s so many different things that I, as a user would want to know or want to be aware of and like all the science and all these behavior changes, or at least tracking whatever. How do you think about prioritizing those things and structuring your team and structuring how you build stuff? I know you mentioned you want to shift something every week, but like, how are you prioritizing that when there’s just like infinity things you could be doing?

David Flinner: From a process standpoint, we’ve been trying to come up with a scalable process where, despite the fact that only I have been the single dedicated person on the product side, we want to make sure that the entire team can slot in and contribute ideas and help keep the ball rolling. We’ve decided to be pretty leveraged from engineering to product management. So, we’re keeping the product team very small and trying to hire and buy us towards engineers. But we’ve come up with a system that hopefully facilitates more of a strict interface that helps anyone on the team, as long as you’re willing to read through how it works, contribute ideas, flesh out product specs, things like that, and contribute to the product process. And I think that has been really helpful leveraging the ideas across the rest of our team to do that. So from a process standpoint, we’ve been focused on doing it that way.

Maggie Crowley: I think one of the things, again, you having worked at Google, like big company, what are we building is so different than the stage that you’re in, which is like so early, there’s so many things you need to do. Velocity is so important, but again, especially when the users aren’t as familiar, it’s not like you’re building in a space where there’s like 500 million competitors and you kind of know, like there’s some user expectations around the thing that you’re building. And you’re sort of starting from scratch in a lot of ways, that I think is not as common in product. And so, just curious how you’re organizing and then how you’re thinking about like what you guys do.

David Flinner: Yeah. There’s a couple directions we take from this. One is, from in terms of figuring out what we want to build. There is an aspect to this, where it is coming from us. We do heavily use the product ourselves. We use continuous glucose monitors. So we kind of have a directional sense of what might resonate with our members. But then really listening to the feedback that we’re getting and trying to build based on only the things that are causing pain points from our members that we’re hearing in real time. We’re trying to carve out roughly half of our time towards refining the main path that we see towards that metabolic awareness program. And then another 50% of the time towards exploration. So, we’re still pre-launch, we’re not in growth mode. And, I think a lot of the focus right now is around exploring different values.

David Flinner: So if you think of like, that’s like a video game example, but there’s like an unexplored map of the world out there. And a lot of it unexplored and uncharted, and we don’t know where the value is yet. And so we’re trying to do experiments in different areas as well, like different hypotheses around community. We’ve heard feedback around the community, but we don’t really have a core community product right now. But how could we gain more clarity on that? So 50% of our time is spent on doing like micro experiments or small things that we can ship quickly still that are intended to gauge. Is there a giant mountain of value over here? Or is it more of just like a little hill. And probing, because it’ll get a lot harder to do that after we do launch.

David Flinner: The more and more we experiment, and early on that’s all it was, was just experimenting, listening. We got a lot of signal on what the core product was through that. And that is kind of defined what our core product is and that metabolic awareness program. And so, there’s still a lot to do on that and the roadmap is pretty clear right now. And so we’re kind of executing on that, but the new value is not certain. And then there’s also a lot of exploration even within the core program area. Education is an ongoing process, helping people understand it more deeply. Right now, we help people see how their body responds to foods at a certain level, but we want to go more deeply. So right now we could say, “Hey, something in the meal you ate caused you to have a glucose spike.” What we want to get to is say “Specifically it was the dressing on your salad. The kale was excellent, the other components were fine, but it was the dressing. You should try swapping it out with this.” Something like that.

Maggie Crowley: Yeah, that’s interesting. And I think that’s sort of where I wanted to go next was, so having used it, I thought what was interesting about it was, there was sort of like a defined period of time where I was wearing the glucose monitor and getting this information and then I got kind of a wrap up. And then that was sort of the end of my experience. My experience kind of ended. And so I was curious to hear from you, what is the future look like and what’s the ongoing experience? Or was that, if you can share, or was it really like a one time thing?

David Flinner: No, it’s going to be an ongoing thing. So right now, if we’re focused on the metabolic awareness program right now, in the future it’ll be more about improving and getting towards metabolic fitness, deeper metabolic awareness and support on the path towards metabolic fitness. And this means better understanding your true health and then helping you succeed in attaining your health goals. And I think this is going to split out into a few different areas. One of them is going deeper on understanding your true metabolic health. Glucose alone isn’t enough to be entirely comprehensive. Glucose, it is the main metabolite for metabolism, but in order to have a deeper understanding we have to go beyond that. So we’re going to continually get better, deeper insights down that path. A second one is a huge amount about this and about behavior change related to community and identity.

David Flinner: And so, we want to have a really deep and broad community layer on Levels. And then, a third one is goal-based journey. So specifically like tailoring your experience with Levels towards your, like if you want to lose weight or gain in fitness goals, things like that. So, in the broad brush strokes of things, that’s kind of the three different paths that it would be taking. In terms of the ongoing experience, I think it is about improving, and a lot of that is about helping people succeed over the long run. And it’s less about habit formation in the health and wellness sense here, and more about being there through the cycles of commitment that people will be on. And a lot of these, just in life in general, in a health and wellness sense. And I can relate to this and I think it is common.

David Flinner: There’ll be cycles where you’re charging ahead and going forward with your health goals and then periods where you fall off the bandwagon. Life happens. Something comes up that’s really important and you have to put things aside for a while. What we want to do, on top of the depth and the goal-base improvement and the community aspects, is kind of weave everything together into a sense where Levels is always positive and encouraging and a place where we’ll meet you where you’re at. And whether you’re using CGM currently and marching forward to hit some goals and we can help you get there, or you’re taking a break and not using active monitoring, we want it to be a positive experience. And so we’ll be thinking through spaces within that.

Maggie Crowley: I love that. And I love the sort of principles behind what you’re building and where you’re headed. I think stepping back even a little bit further, I’m curious, now that you’ve been doing this for a couple of years, what are the big sort of lessons that you’ve learned? And, what’s your advice to someone who, I think again another common path is, I’ve been working as in product for a while and I want to go and do my own thing, and I want to be able to start something on my own. So like, what are those big lessons that you took away and any advice that you would give to other people who are in the same situation?

David Flinner: Yeah. Well, it’s kind of hard because I feel like this is going to be so different with any different team. Even myself on teams I’ve been on, I feel like there hasn’t been one size fits all towards any of the ways we’ve been a approaching product. It’s more like what is going to make the team work together the best in that given unit. But I would say, reflecting on my experience in early stage startup, the biggest things for me have been like really making sure that I don’t lose sight of talking to customers.

David Flinner: I think some of this advice probably will be pretty foundational like across the board. No huge surprises here. But the other thing was prioritizing and picking the problem worth solving at hand and not thinking too far out in the future because things will change and they do change. So we were focusing on just the main blocking problem, maybe over a two week period or a one month period, and then moving on to the next one. And then finding ways to not bottleneck everyone else on yourself. So coming up with some system that allows people to see the vision, understand how you want things to be run and being able to slot in to participate. Those three things have been really, really helpful offhand.

Maggie Crowley: Awesome. What’s your hope a year from now? What are you hope Levels is like?

David Flinner: Oh, it’s great. So a year from now, Levels is launched. It is helping people understand very intuitively how their food choices are affecting them. People are engaging with each other through the Levels platform. They can see how any given meal relates how it affects them. And they can see how people with similar dietary philosophies, how it also affects how that person responds. There is a people directory where you can go in and you can find different health leaders who are… You’re a vegan, you can go in and tap on Dr. Casey means who’s whole foods plant-based vegan and see what are the things that she’s found success in. Find things like that. Basically, there’s going to be like a very large community later that’s going to, if you choose to opt in, you can donate your meals or engage with other people on them, compare to each other a public meal database where you can come in and see what are more proven glycemically friendly things that you could be eating.

David Flinner: Taking a step back actually, we’ll be moving away from strictly the one month program and more towards an ongoing membership model. And, we’re thinking about, this is kind of like live thinking here because it’s very much in discussion right now, but we want to move the company towards a membership model where you join Levels and you would have a Levels annual membership fee but then we would provide at cost access to continuous glucose monitors, at cost access to at home blood panels, things, anything that we think would be beneficial to you. The reason we’re thinking about this is because we want our incentives to be aligned exceptionally well to our members. We don’t want to be incentivized purely to get you to buy something because we’ll make money off of it.

David Flinner: We want to align our incentives where it’s all based on trust. If we can be your advocate and say, “No, we’re not recommending this blood test because we’ll make money from it, we’re actually recommending it because we think that this is something that will help you truly.” That would be a powerful win for our users. And so by switching to that membership model, empowering people to go deep on their health, and giving them recommendations through deeper understanding of CGM, additional analytes, additional 360 degree health measurements like at-home blood tests, layering on that community layer to help people go deeper and help each other, Levels will be helping people through automation, automated insights. But it’s very possible that the best insight and the one that will lead to lasting behavior change won’t be one that Levels gives directly to a member, but one that they find through each other or through a friend and family we can facilitate through sharing.

Maggie Crowley: I think that’s so interesting. And it’s also interesting that that’s another way to say, “Okay, you could presumably try to through, like you said, through AI or automation, like automate all of that and try to be the person or the tool that’s giving all that out. Or there’s all these other people and that’s another way to solve the same problem rather than having to do it. And I think, I love that idea of the community aspect, I think when I was using it, I had a little bit of skepticism on like, okay, are the other people in this program of the same type as me? And does that mean, is my number good or bad? And then you sort of, I think via email were like, well, the number itself doesn’t matter as much but it’s like the variability and that kind of thing that I think would be interesting solving through community versus solving through just building more features.

David Flinner: Yeah. There is so much more to go, even on helping people understand what their scores mean at the immediate level. The way I’ve been structuring the product is, I kind of break out the jobs to be done. And we have a set of high level problems that we’re helping solve for members, for people. I’ve been calling them levers that we can pull to help across all those different jobs. The different levers are automated insights. And that helps us with our mission, because we want to be very accessible. So we want to get the cost down and get this to as many people as possible. So we do that through automated insights. The second lever is through community. We can have people help each other. Can we design an experience around that where they teach each other some of the same things or beyond the same things that we do with the automated insights? And then the third lever is, once we have a platform, can we facilitate connections between our members and experts?

David Flinner: So whether that’s plugging in a professional trainer for athletes, a nutritionist for a professional review of your information, or maybe a physician export. Those are the three levers that I’ve been thinking of implementing. Our users have the same core problems. I think ultimately, Levels help people succeed in achieving their health goals. And we do that by helping them determine, first of all, tracking their health information, then helping them determine if their choices are good or bad and then seeing where their health is and how far away they are from where they want to go and pointing the path to get there and then helping them keep at it. So that accountability, motivation layer, and then finally building an identity that supports that foundationally.

Maggie Crowley: Yeah. And it’s interesting, I think. It’s not often that you get to hear the sort of guiding principles or the thinking behind the product choices people are making. So it’s cool to hear these are your principles and this is sort of where you want to go. And then, when the people who are using their product can see like different ways that that’s showing up. And I think it’s interesting just to hear like what that looks like in such an early stage product.

David Flinner: Yeah, and we’re keeping an open mind. I think that’s sort of the wrap up of what we’ve heard from feedback so far. But it’s going to be interesting trying to go into the mainstream audience. I think, especially in the community side, that’ll be a whole set of new challenges around scaling and thinking through just different sort of network effects through people. It’s going to be a very different product problem to solve when we have that than the sort of health and wellness kind of awareness use cases.

Maggie Crowley: Yeah, and I think it’s also interesting. I’m assuming intentionally, the closed beta also creates a little bit of FOMO and people wanting to get access, and so that’s definitely, I would assume part of your current user acquisition model.

David Flinner: Yeah. I mean, it definitely does do that. We have the closed beta primarily because we’re not in growth mode right now. And by having the closed beta, it helps us. We’re only taking on, I think right now we’re taking on about a thousand people per month. We are still doing lots of feedback. We’re not interviewing everyone three times right now.

Maggie Crowley: Yeah. I’m thinking, you’re thinking like, “Well, I didn’t get interviewed.”

David Flinner: Yeah, yeah. Right now, it’s, so up until I think we were doing it for up until we had like about 200 people per month. And it was just, it was too much for our team and we decided to run like a sampling method. So now, we’ll do sort of random and we’ll also try to pick a representative selection based on just different member profile characteristics as well as NPS scores. So we’re biasing towards, actually I think this one’s sort of interesting, there’s been different thoughts out there on who you should be paying attention to, I think. Like [inaudible 00:30:15] advocates for, don’t listen to your detractors as much, look for your super promoters and build for them.

Maggie Crowley: So are you running that product market fit score?

David Flinner: We are not doing that one in particular. We actually tried to do it early on with surveys. We had survey adherence problems. So, that was a very hard challenge just to solve. We’re doubling down on the people who are passionate about helping us build a movement because they care about this, they want to see the metabolic health crisis solved. So I think the extent we’re building for promoters, it’s towards people who really are aligned and have a passion for reversing the metabolic health crisis, which is only 10%. About 10% of the US population is metabolically healthy, everyone else is on a spectrum of non-health.

Maggie Crowley: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

David Flinner: We’re trying to find people like that. We’re also, right now, because we’re kind of biasing beyond the biohacker early adopter crowd, which we think we’ve built a fairly good product for them at this point. I think we have around, well for everyone, our NPS right now is 69. But we’re coming up with this new audience who has more mainstream and they don’t have as much context and we’re getting a lot of detractors from that. And so, we’re interviewing them heavily. And we’re definitely biasing towards that because we think that this is just an untapped market that has huge potential. And this is how we’ll actually get the scale. We have to build a product that meets the needs of the mainstream audience to have the biggest impact. So, we’re interviewing them much more carefully because we want to hear where the differences are, what makes them tick at this point.

Maggie Crowley: Yeah, I think it’s interesting. The different philosophies around, do you double down on your super users or do you not? And who you build for. And I think I’ve definitely seen different ways. And I think back when I worked at TripAdvisor, which is such a… Everyone is the user. It was so different getting feedback than working at a much more targeted or small or specific user group. And the way that you’d get feedback was way different. So, I totally get that.

David Flinner: Yeah.

Maggie Crowley: All right, David. Well, I mean, I could talk about this all day because I’m such a nerd about health stuff. But any last sort of parting words of wisdom to product people who are making the jump from big company to startup?

David Flinner: Categorically, it’s been fantastic to make the jump. I would encourage people to do it if you have an idea. And especially if you have a team that you want to do it with.

Maggie Crowley: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

David Flinner: It has been nonstop excitement. It’s some ups and downs, but I think worth it.

Maggie Crowley: Yeah.

David Flinner: I think especially if you have some people that you know you want to do this with. I think that has been the biggest thing for me, is joining a team of people that I just had a great amount of faith in and together. I think it’s been great.

Maggie Crowley: Awesome. Well, David, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it.

David Flinner: Thanks Maggie.