How Levels CEO Sam Corcos Did 1000s Of Customer Development Calls To Create A Killer Community (And Why Health Optimization Is The Next Big Thing)
Episode introduction
Who will use our product? It’s a common question founders and CEOs have at the start of their company, but for Levels CEO and co-founder Sam Corcos, the question is never fully answered. Levels is a health and wellness company whose continuous glucose monitor (GCM) technology attaches to the user’s arm to measure real-time blood glucose data. The company continually seeks user feedback to ensure it’s keeping up with the variety of people who use their product. On Leveling Up with Eric Siu, Corcos talks about the importance of reaching out to Levels users, creating high-quality shareable content, and how our misconceptions about diet could be holding us back from making the right health choices.
Show Notes
Show Links
- Check out Levels
- Follow Levels on LinkedIn or Twitter
- Connect with Sam Corcos on LinkedIn or Twitter
- Listen to the full interview
- Check out Leveling Up with Eric Siu
- Connect with Eric Siu on LinkedIn or Twitter
Key Takeaways
Key Takeaways
1:56 — Customer development is key to defining your user base
Because the Levels Health market is so wide-ranging — with many different kinds of people using the tool in different ways — Corcos said that it continually helps to conduct customer development.
“You can start with a list of goals and concepts beforehand. In our case, what we’ve found is most helpful is the classic jobs to be done: What is it that we’re solving for people? Also understanding of the willingness to pay and what people are mentally anchoring on and how different demographics and different personas respond to it. We ended up with something around 12 major personas with very different jobs to be done and ways that they approach this. One of the others that was most helpful for us also is understanding where people get their information from. I had a conversation with somebody yesterday about this. Our content and SEO strategy has been very effective for us. And they were saying, ‘How do I do it?’ And my response was, ‘Maybe you shouldn’t.’ We found that this would be effective because in interviewing all of our customers, people would say, ‘Well, I listened to these podcasts. I google these things. These are the things that I google search.’ And we ended up asking a pretty consistent question, which is ‘What is a headline of a blog post that if it showed up in your newsfeed, you would definitely click on it and read?’ And everybody had multiple concepts that they wanted to look up. So we knew for our particular situation that content and SEO would be very effective, but it might not be for everybody. So just understanding every aspect of your customer and refining the questions that you’re asking them is really important.”
06:39 — Diet vs. common dietary wisdom
Do we really know what’s in our food? Or the best practices behind diet, sleep, and exercise? Corcos recalled a friend who thought he was eating healthy, only to realize he was unintentionally eating too much sugar.
“I’m reminded of a friend of mine who’s obsessed with longevity. He probably spends $100,000 a year on bespoke doctors, different supplements. He’s convinced he’s never going to die. And he sent me a picture a couple of days into the program saying, ‘I think your sensor’s broken because I ate this meal. There’s no sugar in it. I had a big glucose spike.’ And I’m looking at the picture and I say, Well, It looks like you had about a quarter cup of ketchup with that meal. You know, that ketchup is basically just sugar, right?’ And he had no idea. He thought it was just tomato. So there are a lot of landmines in what we think of as diet and the common dietary wisdom. That’s actually a huge problem for a lot of people.”
08:16 — Adapting to the user, whatever their interests might be
During customer interviews that ultimately helped shape customer personas, it quickly emerged that Peloton users and intermittent fasters were likely to use Levels. To get to that level of granularity, Corcos described it as a continuous process.
“A lot of these people own Pelotons. That’s interesting. And then we would just start asking them more directly, like, ‘Do you own a Peloton?’ And we found that a large percentage of people did, or at least a measurable percentage. I wouldn’t necessarily say a large percentage of people, but we just started seeing these patterns, and the intermittent fasting one came up a lot: ‘Who do you follow in the space? What is a blog post that you’d want to see?’ And their answer would be, ‘I’d love to know how this interacts with intermittent fasting, or I follow Kevin Rose and Peter Attia. I read a lot about intermittent fasting.’ So these things sort of emerge organically. And this is why in the process — I wouldn’t say a framer for customer development, I really do think of it as a process — you have to adapt your process as you learn from your customers and try to get to an end state where you can take something actionable from it.”
10:34 — Using Levels for daily and long-term health
Levels’ benefits are twofold: you can begin to understand your day-to-day health, like why you’re feeling less energetic on any given day, as well as reduce your chance for long-term health conditions like diabetes. Corcos recalled how Levels changed his own diet dramatically.
“We wrote a blog post on this, The Levels Theory of Behavior Change, that lays out the case for why closed-loop systems are fundamentally different than open-loop systems and why this leads to lasting behavior change. So for a lot of people, for me in particular, the lifestyle aspect of just having mental clarity throughout the day and not feeling tired. The second aspect is long-term health. We published The Secret Levels Master Plan on our blog as well, which makes the case for why metabolic dysfunction is probably the single largest health crisis in the world. And it’s something that people aren’t talking about. My prediction to you is that within the next five years, we’ll be talking about metabolic health in the same way that we currently talk about the opioid crisis. This will be something that is in the zeitgeist. It is the underlying condition of so many problems in our society. We currently treat diabetes and obesity and polycystic ovarian syndrome. All of these conditions we think of them now as separate, whereas in reality, the underlying condition is metabolic dysfunction and it’s, for most people, caused by diet and lifestyle. And this is a tool that really for the first time allows you to quantify the effect of your diet on your metabolic health and allows you to improve it.”
15:58 — Lowering cost to increase access
Though insurance typically covers Levels for people with diabetes, Corcos hopes to bring down the cost of the product in the next few years in order to be more accessible to everyone.
“Typically you have to be a diabetic in order to get access to these and depends on the manufacturer. They range quite a lot in price. They range anywhere from, on the order of a couple hundred to $600 or $700 a month for the hardware, but they’re largely covered by insurance if you’re a diabetic. So you don’t really see that cost. Our goal is to get this under $100 a month. Within two years, one of our core objectives as a company is to make this accessible to as many people as possible. The people that are most at risk of metabolic dysfunction are the people who can least afford a $400 product. Right? So our goal is to get the cost down as quickly as possible.”
17:44 — The importance of content strategy
Levels blog articles feature multiple doctors, including Levels co-founder Dr. Casey Means. This leads to higher-quality content that users trust. In the past three months, Corcos estimates that Levels went from roughly 0% of their traffic coming from organic to 20%.
“We started seeing results almost immediately. Within two months, Casey has been putting together really long form deep thought leadership pieces with 30 to 40 scientific references. We probably put $5,000 to $10,000 into each of these posts. And we started getting featured as the answer in Google snippets. If you search for skin and glucose, you’re going to get Levels as the featured answer. We are the featured answer for many, many questions that we care about. We took the time to put together content. That is really the best that exists though. Our blog is becoming widely recognized from real thought leaders in metabolic health as the source of truth for this type of information.”
21:18 — Higher-quality content = more shareability
A benefit that Corcos and his team didn’t predict was that the content Levels would share would be shared across social media platforms. People love sharing useful content about health.
“We don’t have any marketing people on our team. Our whole team is technical. I think for a lot of this, you just have to roll with the punches. One of the things that we found early on is that people love sharing this information, and we didn’t know that coming in. We don’t push people to post stuff on social. Twitter’s very active. Instagram is twice as active as Twitter. People love sharing this data. And so when we started seeing that, we just leaned in harder to, ‘How do we make the app more shareable?’ Instead of trying to force people to do it, we just saw what behavior was and we just leaned into different aspects of it. So in some ways, we’re lucky in that this information is shareable, but also we started leaning into what is shareable about it and making that easier and better for people. So we haven’t done a lot of marketing. We’ve been very lucky. A lot of this is organic.”
22:30 — You have to learn from your customers to create the best product-market fit
Every Friday, a member of Levels’ customer success team compiles dozens of customer interviews to showcase to the team what Levels is learning from its customers. This helps ensure Levels is always iterating with its user front of mind.
“To get to product market fit, you have to learn from your customers. We interview almost every customer at the midpoint when they’re halfway through the program and we interview them at the end of the program to get product feedback. We had 500, 600 diversion releases since January. We’re iterating constantly, and you get to product market fit by learning from your customers and building in that feedback. You don’t get the product market fit by scaling operations and by investing engineering time into ops scalability. So we’ve knowingly and intentionally under-invested in ops scalability. It’s not that we don’t want to take on more customers. We really just can’t. We don’t have the ops capacity to onboard as many people as want to sign up. So we’re gating this so that we can make sure that we’re still handholding and we’re learning from customers as much as we can. Once we aren’t seeing as much value from that process, then we’re going to start investing a lot more in operational scalability.”
26:15 — A barometer of the business
Levels is very focused on hiring really great talent off the bat to ensure they’re able to keep up with its quick pace of growth and tackle any challenges that come up.
“We’re growing pretty quickly. I think the focus really has been on building the team. I’ve been through this phase change of complexity before. So I’ve been really trying to set the expectation for the team that the next 12 months is going to be a lot harder. It’s one thing when you have a small team of 10 people and you’re all individual contributors and everyone is focused and has very specific domains getting to the point where you’re scaling the team and you hit that first phase change where internal comms becomes suddenly a lot harder. That’s really what we’ve been focused on is making sure. It is essential that the first 30 to 50 people, you hire a really high talent.”
Episode Transcript
Intro [00:00] You’re listening to Leveling Up, where we’ll show you how to win at the game of life and business. It’s time to power up your skills through life gamification with your host, Eric Siu.
Eric Siu [00:16] All right, everybody. Today, we’ve got the co-founder and CEO, Sam Corcos of Levels, which is a real-time dashboard for your body’s metabolism, giving you personalized insights into how different foods affect your body and your health. So this is, by the way, this is the first real time dashboard. And the first that, I heard of this was actually through Tech Twitter. So everyone’s talking about it, sharing their dashboard. And so what happened was I had FOMO and I was like, “Dude, I need this.” I don’t even know what it was, right? I just saw the dashboard. I was just like, “I need this.” So I started looking into it more and more. And then I submitted my application. And then Sam, who’s the CEO, actually reached out to me, which I found really surprising. I was like, “Oh my God, you must be doing a ton of these customer development calls.” Asked me a ton of questions. And then we got to talking. And I actually have my Levels coming today. So I’m super excited about that. I think there’s a lot to talk about. I think this is fairly new and this is the thing I think a lot of people should be aware of. So Sam, first and foremost, how’s it going?
Sam Corcos [01:08] It’s going well. I think people really underestimate how important it is to understand your customers. We do a lot of outreach.
Eric Siu [01:14] Let’s start with that first, because when we first talked, I was like, because it seemed like you were pretty refined and you’ve done quite a few of these conversations.
Sam Corcos [01:20] Yeah.
Eric Siu [01:21] So customer development for people that don’t know it, you should definitely Google it, but it’s just a process of understanding what your customer’s pain points are, asking good questions. Not trying to lead them with questions. And Sam actually wasn’t leading me. He was getting me to respond to kind of continue to refine their product. So at the time, you had done 600 calls or so, and then you said you had a goal of getting to what?
Sam Corcos [01:40] We’ve done thousands at this point. It’s mostly me and Mike DiDonato on our team. We do a lot of user research both before, during, and after the program.
Eric Siu [01:49] Some people would say after like, you know, 50 or a hundred calls, you know, “We’re good to go.” But you’ve done thousands, right? So talk to us about that and what you’re trying to accomplish with it.
Sam Corcos [01:57] With a big piece of it, you have to refine the process as you go. You can start with a list of goals and concepts beforehand. In our case, what we’ve found is most helpful is the classic jobs to be done. What is it that we’re solving for people? Also understanding of willingness to pay and what people are mentally anchoring on, and how different demographics and different personas respond to it. We ended up with something around 12 major personas with very different jobs to be done and ways that they approach this. One of the others that was most helpful for us also is the, is understanding where people get their information from. I had a conversation with somebody yesterday about this. Our content and SEO strategy has been very effective for us. And they were saying, “How do I do it?” And my response was, “Maybe you shouldn’t.” We found that this would be effective because in interviewing all of our customers, people would say, “Well, I listened to these podcasts. I Google these things. These are the things that I Google search.” And we ended up asking a pretty consistent question, which is, “What is a headline of a blog post that if it showed up in your newsfeed, you would definitely click on it and read?” And everybody had multiple concepts that they wanted to look up. So we knew for our particular situation that content and SEO would be very effective, but it might not be for everybody. So just understanding every aspect of your customer and refining the questions that you’re asking them is really important.
Eric Siu [03:25] Yep. And so when you say, just to clarify for everyone, what do you mean by jobs to be done? And are there any frameworks or books that you recommend people read to understand customer development? Because it’s not easy to just go out the gate.
Sam Corcos [03:37] No. Yeah, that’s a good question. I don’t know of any books off the top of my head. The jobs to be done is the framework of understanding what problem you’re solving. So it’s interesting in our case because the market is so large, many people have totally different ways they want to use this tool. For some of them we’re solving a knowledge problem, which is they have what they think is a very healthy diet. Maybe you do a green juice every morning and they don’t realize that is actually just like 50 grams of liquified sugar. And it’s actually the source of a lot of their lifestyle problems. And for other people we’re solving a discipline problem where, this is a tool we’re measuring molecules in your body in real time. So, whereas if you have a nutritionist and you’re supposed to text them pictures of what you eat, and you just don’t text them that you ate a donut, they’re never going to know. This removes that layer of plausible deniability, and it keeps you accountable to your own goals. So different people. Of these 12 or so different major personas we have, each of them really does have a distinct job that they want this product to solve for them. So just understanding that is important.
Eric Siu [04:45] Got it. So what would be your question around understanding jobs to be done? Is it just, actually, I’m not going to leave you with the question. You go.
Sam Corcos [04:51] Yeah. This is something that also just in project management is a good strategy of just success criteria. At the end of the month, when the program ends, what would it look like for this to be successful for you? And so they would say, “Well, I would really like to just baseline what I’m doing. Are my current habits actually as good as I think they are?” One of the core demographics we found are keto people who are interested in just, they have all these keto products and they want to know, are they actually keto? And a huge percentage of them discover, “No, they’re really not.” They might be labeled as keto, but they’re really not. And they have these huge glucose responses from products that they are supposed to be keto friendly and they really aren’t. So being able to close that loop and baselining. So understanding success criteria is the biggest entry point that we found that gets us the best results in our particular case.
Eric Siu [05:45] Cool. And yeah. And a book I really like around customer development, it’s called The Mom Test. Fairly easy. You can listen to it as well. And just teaches you not to ask leading questions. I guess here’s a question before we, I guess this goes into the product. How do you, because you have a lot of high performers listening to this podcast, motivated people, whether they’re executives or founders themselves, what does that persona look like? What are they hoping to accomplish with this thing?
Sam Corcos [06:09] From a lot of these interviews, as I mentioned we’ve done thousands of them, so far we found that if you own a Peloton and you practice intermittent fasting, there’s a near 100% certainty you will convert into a Levels customer. Those two, the willingness to pay plus the paying attention to diet and nutrition. Intermittent fasting is not even a word people knew two years ago. So if you’re practicing it, it means you’re really paying attention. So for us, the job to be done for that demographic is we’re solving that knowledge problem. We’re focused on a one month program for them where they discover as much as they can about their diet and their metabolism. And maybe this is a once or twice a year program. This is not necessarily something you need to use all the time. This is something where you learn, almost everybody learns something. I’m reminded of a friend of mine who’s obsessed with longevity. He probably spends a hundred thousand dollars a year on bespoke doctors, different supplements. He’s convinced he’s never going to die. And he sent me a picture a couple of days into the program saying, “I think your sensor’s broken because I ate this meal. There’s no sugar in it. I had a big glucose spike.” And I’m looking at the picture and I say, “Well, it looks like you had about a quarter cup of ketchup with that meal. You know that ketchup is basically just sugar, right?” And he had no idea. He thought it was just tomato. So there are a lot of landmines in what we think of as diet and the common dietary wisdom. That’s actually a huge problem for a lot of people.
Eric Siu [07:41] So that’s why I felt like, “Just take my money,” when I was talking to you because you know, intermittent fasting, it’s a word like, “I’m just lazy. I don’t like eating in the morning.” And so it becomes this word. Now I do the intermittent fasting, and I got the bike in the back. So that’s super interesting. How did you find out that it had to do with the Peloton bike and intermittent fasting? Like how did you settle on those two points?
Sam Corcos [08:03] Well, we didn’t settle on it. It just sort of organically emerged.
Eric Siu [08:08] You’re just kind of seeing the signal?
Sam Corcos [08:09] Yeah, we kept seeing the signal. So the Peloton came up a lot in a willingness to pay discussion. “What was something like this be worth to you?” And people would say $50 or they’d say $2,000. And we would then dig into, “What is your anchor point?” And one that we heard all the time was, “Well, you know, I spent this amount on my Peloton. It’s going to be a lot like that.” Like, “Oh, okay. A lot of these people own Pelotons. That’s interesting.” And then we would just start asking them more directly, like, “Do you own a Peloton?” And we found that a large percentage of people did, or at least a measurable percentage. I wouldn’t necessarily say a large percentage of people. [crosstalk 00:08:46] But we just started seeing these patterns. And the intermittent fasting one came up a lot in the, “Who do you follow in the space? What is a blog post that you’d want to see?” They said, “Well, I’d love to know how this interacts with intermittent fasting.” Or “I follow Kevin Rose and Peter Attia. And I read a lot about intermittent fasting.” So these things sort of emerge organically. And this is why in the process, I wouldn’t say a framer for customer development. I really do think of it as a process. You have to adapt your process as you learn from your customers and try to get to an end state where you can take something actionable from it.
Eric Siu [09:19] I feel like there’s a book in play there. You know, you’ve done thousands of interviews, right?
Sam Corcos [09:23] Yeah.
Eric Siu [09:24] I think beyond, from what I typically hear, but those are good questions. “So who do you follow in the space? What blog posts would you like to see?” Because that informs content ideas for you. “What’s your price anchor point?” I think that’s an amazing question. What annoys me with our SEO and content marketing software is when people compare it to the cheapest one and I’m just, “Goddammit!” But anyway, so that’s a totally separate thing. So what is a CGM continuous glucose monitor? Why do people even need to think about that right now?
Sam Corcos [09:47] Yeah. So it’s hardware that has been used for years by diabetics and it measures real time glucose. So it takes a reading on regular intervals and it syncs with your phone and it tells you what your glucose numbers are in real time. The reason why you care is that when you have these big spikes and crashes in glucose, it affects your lifestyle. That’s one of the aspects. I started using one of these as a novelty. And I had my normal healthy breakfast, which for me has always been steel cut oats. And I noticed a couple of hours later of that, my hands were shaky and I was tired and I couldn’t focus. And I checked my levels and I had spiked and crashed really high, and crashed into hypoglycemia. And the challenge for me was that in my head, I was thinking the whole time, like, “Man, I really had way too much coffee today.” Or, “Man, I didn’t sleep very well.” It never occurred to me to connect the dots between diets and how I was feeling, because I had always believed that this is the healthiest possible breakfast. So it couldn’t be that. It has to be something else. When you see it in the data and you close that loop for the first time. We wrote a blog post on this, The Levels Theory of Behavior Change,” that lays out the case for why closed loop systems are fundamentally different than open loop systems, and why this leads to lasting behavior change. So for a lot of people, for me, in particular, the lifestyle aspect of just having mental clarity throughout the day and not feeling tired. The second aspect is long-term health. We published The Secret Levels Master Plan on our blog as well, which makes the case for why metabolic dysfunction is probably the single largest health crisis in the world. And it’s something that people aren’t talking about. My prediction to you is that within the next five years, we’ll be talking about metabolic health in the same way that we currently talk about the opioid crisis. This will be something that is in the zeitgeists. It is the underlying condition of so many problems in our society. We currently treat diabetes and obesity and polycystic ovarian syndrome. All of these conditions, we think of them now as separate, whereas in reality, the underlying condition is metabolic dysfunction. And it’s for most people caused by diet and lifestyle. And this is a tool that really for the first time allows you to quantify the effect of your diet on your metabolic health and allows you to improve it.
Eric Siu [12:13] And I think it comes at the perfect time too, because I wear my Oura ring to sleep. You know, there’s sleep optimization now, there’s, this is basically health optimization to simplify things. And so if I’m thinking about the product, when I first saw it, I was like, “Okay, why do I care about glucose monitoring?” Right? I’m like, “I’m not diabetic.” But it’s like, “Oh to.“ And you just tell me if I’m wrong here, but to see, broccoli might be good for you, but maybe it might not be good for you, right? And so you might spike when you eat it. And so you are just basically optimizing what you should and shouldn’t be eating based on when you spike. Right? Is there anything else beyond that that I’m missing?
Sam Corcos [12:46] Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of personalization to this. There’s some interesting twin studies that have been done on this, which are identical twin can have completely different reactions to the exact same foods. The best evidence to date shows that it’s largely microbiome related. I think we’ll know a lot more in the next few years, a lot of these studies are actively being done, but lifestyle plays a huge role in this. We did a post in collaboration with Eight Sleep that we published on their blog on the effect of sleep on metabolic health. If you get poor sleep, it will dramatically and rapidly compromise your metabolic health. Similarly, activity is a really big one as well. Going on a walk after a meal actually makes a huge difference in the way you metabolize. And if you’re sedentary, your metabolic response and your insulin response will be substantially worse than somebody who’s active. So these things are all highly interrelated. Glucose is just one of the aspects that you need to pay attention to in order to affect your long-term health.
Eric Siu [13:45] Got it. So people might be asking, “Okay, what’s the difference between Levels versus like a typical,” what’s it called? “CGM?”
Sam Corcos [13:49] Yep. Mhm. Yeah, so the CGMs, as they exist, are built for diabetics to (? bolus 00:13:56) insulin. That is the use case that they’re built for. We are building the software that contextualizes the data. For you, 160 milligrams per deciliter doesn’t mean anything to you, unless it’s contextualized. You could read a dozen books on this. You can read a hundred scientific papers, and then you’ll intuitively understand this stuff. Or you can use a piece of software, like Levels, that contextualizes the information that automatically detects when certain things happen and prompts you to show you what it means for your health and how you can improve. So you can think of Levels as the contextualization layer that makes this information easy to consume and understand. So you can improve your health.
Eric Siu [14:34] Got it. And how does it work? So when I get mine today, do I just like stick it on me? Is there like a little, like is there like a prick, like pinprick? Or what does that, what does it look like, exactly?
Sam Corcos [14:44] The hardware itself.
Eric Siu [14:46] You know it’s funny I asked this question. I bought it without like.
Sam Corcos [14:48] Yeah, sure. Yeah, there. So there’s a small filament, it’s an interstitial probe that goes under the skin. You don’t feel it. There’s a needle that applies it, but the needle doesn’t stay in your body. It’s a small filament. It’s almost like fishing wire. That goes under the skin and it’s taking measurements and what’s called interstitial fluid. That’s how it works. So you don’t feel it at all. I have one on right now and I’m touching it. I don’t feel it at all. I’ve probably installed 30 of these on me. I’ve only maybe ever felt it at all once or twice. It’s totally painless, with the current technology on it.
Eric Siu [15:19] Got it. And so how often do you need to refresh?
Sam Corcos [15:21] It depends on the manufacturer, the ones that we’re using now, they last for 14 days. You replace them every 14 days.
Eric Siu [15:28] Every 14 days, I should just refresh. Is that what I get in the introductory package?
Sam Corcos [15:32] We sent two patches for the month.
Eric Siu [15:34] Got it, got it. Got it. Okay. Let’s talk about how you make money then. How’s this been?
Sam Corcos [15:39] Yeah. We send two continuous glucose monitors, the hardware, and we pair that with the software and the contextualization layer on top of it. So we make money by educating people on the effect of their diet on their health.
Eric Siu [15:52] Got it. And so how much would a typical CGM cost and what’s the cost of yours for a month?
Sam Corcos [15:57] Typically you have to be a diabetic in order to get access to these. It depends on the manufacturer, they range quite a lot in price. They range anywhere from, on the order of a couple hundred to six or $700 a month for the hardware, but they’re largely covered by insurance if you’re a diabetic so you don’t really see that cost. Our goal is to get this under a hundred dollars a month within two years. One of our core objectives as a company is to make this accessible to as many people as possible. The people that are most at risk of metabolic dysfunction are the people who can least afford a $400 product. So our goal is to get the cost down as quickly as possible.
Eric Siu [16:37] Got it. Yeah, I think what’s, I mean, even if you get a couple of people that listen to this to convert at the $400 price point, I still think it’s- You know, you’re listening to this, you’re probably a motivated successful person. It makes sense. Right? If you’re looking at optimizing, if you spend money on Peloton or if you spend money on Oura, like just 400 bucks to kind of just focus and optimize your health, I think it’s a no-brainer, still $100 is amazing. So that’s good. And so how are you guys? I guess I want to talk about the SEO strategy, because it sounds like you’ve been on top of it. You’re the co-founder and CEO. You’ve been doing the customer development, but you’re also handling the SEO side of things too. What’s going on there? I mean, it sounds like it’s been working pretty well, in addition to Twitter.
Sam Corcos [17:13] Yeah. So my co-founder, Dr. Casey Means, she’s a functional medicine doctor from Stanford. She’s been taking the lead on most of our SEO strategy and writing a lot of the content. One of the books that I wouldn’t necessarily recommend for everybody, but if this is a similar use case, the book They Ask, You Answer is really a great book on SEO strategy. If the people that you’re targeting are asking questions like ours. They ask questions like, “What is a normal glucose level?” We’ve only been actively pursuing a content strategy for a few months. We started seeing results almost immediately, within two months. Casey has been putting together really long form deep thought leadership pieces with 30 to 40 scientific references. We probably put five to $10,000 into each of these posts. And we started getting featured as the answer in Google snippets. If you search for skin and glucose, you’re going to get Levels as, our blog, as the featured answer. We are the featured answer for many, many questions that we care about. We took the time to put together content that is really the best that exists, though. Our blog is becoming widely recognized from real thought leaders in metabolic health, as the source of truth for this type of information.
Eric Siu [18:29] Got it. So it’s, just to be clear, it sounds like maybe you are funneling the questions that you’re getting on these customer development calls to your co-founder and she’s writing everything. So you don’t necessarily have a content team right now. It’s just her.
Sam Corcos [18:41] Yeah, that’s right. She is the content team. We do work with a number of doctors. One of the things that we found, just from some people that we’ve spoken to who have done this very successfully, is that having doctors writing these pieces, especially when it’s medical and having a set of doctors that review them, really does increase Google’s willingness to feature your articles as quality. So that’s been really helpful. We have often multiple doctors review every post and almost all of them are written by doctors. So the core piece of our content strategy has been really high quality information. We’ve tried outsourcing this to a number of firms, but it hasn’t really worked. You need to have the thought leaders actually writing the pieces and just, there’s no shortcut to it. You really have to just invest in it.
Eric Siu [19:27] Yeah. I mean, you can’t outsource caring, so.
Sam Corcos [19:29] Yeah. Right.
Eric Siu [19:30] And I can speak firsthand. This is why I hate agencies. Ironically, I have an agency as one of the businesses, but like everything. So I’m just looking at your site right now. For those of you that want to nerd out from an SEO standpoint, you can use Ubersuggest, which is Neil’s Tool, or you can use HRS, which is what I’m looking at, but their content is, if you look at January, basically four back links from four referring domains, now you have about 250. So it’s going up into the right. And it’s exponential right now. So they’re just going to continue to gain more and more traffic, which I think is amazing. So she’s your co-founder. I’m assuming she’s busy doing other stuff. How much content is she cranking out per week? Just so people can get a sense.
Sam Corcos [20:04] Our target is something like three per week. And so one of them will be like a major thought leadership piece. I think our goal now is three pieces of thought leadership per month, and then two pieces of like customer testimonials and interviews and some other, maybe shorter form or easily digested specific piece of content.
Eric Siu [20:25] When you say you spend five to 10 grand, maybe I heard that incorrectly, what are you spending on exactly for each post?
Sam Corcos [20:31] Those are for the thought leadership pieces. So that’s just like the cost of time in terms of Casey’s time writing the post, getting the doctors who are reviewing it, quantifying their time, any of the research that goes into it beforehand. It was a risk that we took and it’s been paying off. As I mentioned, it’s sort of paying off very quickly. I think within two months we were starting to see, we went from roughly 0% of our traffic coming from organic to 20% within probably three months. Just from making the real investment.
Eric Siu [21:02] Cool. So there’s the SEO strategy, but also I heard about you from Twitter. So maybe you can talk about that and also talk about the launch strategy too, because right now people have to sign up for an application. So I’m just interested. What else are you doing that’s been working from a growth/marketing standpoint.
Sam Corcos [21:18] We don’t have any marketing people on our team. Our whole team is technical. I think for a lot of this, you just have to roll with the punches. One of the things that we found early on is that people love sharing this information, and we didn’t know that coming in. We don’t push people to post stuff on social. Twitter’s very active. Instagram is twice as active as Twitter. People love sharing this data. And so when we started seeing that, we just leaned in harder to, “How do we make the app more shareable?” Instead of trying to force people to do it, we just saw what behavior was and we just leaned into different aspects of it. So in some ways, we’re lucky in that this information is shareable, but also we started leaning into what is shareable about it and making that easier and better for people. So we haven’t done a lot on marketing. We’ve been very lucky. A lot of this is organic.
Eric Siu [22:06] Got it. And so the amazing thing is the people that are sharing it are super smart people. These are VCs, these are founders. And so what happens is everyone else wants to look like that too. They want to look smart. They want to look like they’re ahead. They want to look hip. So then you got people like me trying to, you know, look hip too. So I come in and try to pick it up, right? So there’s a formal aspect there, but there’s a double formal aspect. When you have, you can’t just go and get it. You have to apply. So what was the thinking behind that?
Sam Corcos [22:31] That was a necessity. I’m a big believer that to get to product market fit, you have to learn from your customers. We interview almost every customer at the midpoint, when they’re halfway through the program and we interview them at the end of the program to get product feedback. We’ve had five, 600 diversion releases since January. We’re iterating constantly, and you get to product market fit by learning from your customers and building in that feedback. You don’t get the product market fit by scaling operations and by investing engineering time into ops scalability. So we’ve knowingly and intentionally under-invested in ops scalability. It’s not that we don’t want to take on more customers. We really just can’t. We don’t have the ops capacity to onboard as many people as want to sign up. So we’re gating this so that we can make sure that we’re still handholding and we’re learning from customers as much as we can. Once we aren’t seeing as much value from that process, then we’re going to start investing a lot more in operational scalability.
Eric Siu [23:30] Got it. So it’s more of a, instead of like an objective, you know, KPI. It’s more so like a feeling that you’re getting, right? Like this is actually starting to see-
Sam Corcos [23:37] Yeah.
Eric Siu [23:37] Diminishing returns. Let’s start to move to scaling.
Sam Corcos [23:40] I would say when we start when all of the answers we get are the same as answers we’ve already heard. We’re still getting a lot of new information. Mike, on our team, who’s running customer success for us. He does, I don’t know, dozens of customer interviews every week. And he puts together a compilation. We do a Friday Forum. It’s a company all hands. And he compiles and synthesizes all of the customer feedback and gives us the top five points of what we’re learning from customers, what areas need to be improved, and what we should be focusing on. Just to really keep a finger on the pulse of your customers, to understand how they’re feeling. So we’re still getting a lot of really good feedback and information from it. We did bring on a head of ops within the last few weeks, which has allowed us to scale up a little bit faster, but it’s still, very few of our engineering resources are going into ops scalability right now. So that’s just, it’s not a FOMO strategy so much as it is an operational constraint situation.
Eric Siu [24:37] I love that. So earlier we talked about some key questions that you asked, so, you know, “Who do you follow? What content would you like to see? What’s your price, anchor point?” What are some other key questions that you have in your customer development stack?
Sam Corcos [24:48] Yeah. So one is just learning about their background. So like, “Tell me about yourself and what got you interested in health.” “What was your path to getting to where you’re interested in a continuous glucose monitor? It is something that most people have never even heard about. So how did you get here?” And hearing the stories about people who have gone through these really traumatic health crises or seeing their family history and not wanting that for themselves, just learning as much about them as we can, and understanding how they got here is a really important one. I would say, probably the most important one for us in terms of just how it’s developed our marketing strategy is the understanding, “Who are the people you follow and where do you get your information flows from?” We have a template. We use Notion to keep track of all these. And we have a meeting notes database, and every one of these interviews, we take notes and it goes into the database and we have this repository of all of our history of these customer interviews that has been really helpful. Because it also allows you, when new people come onboard, they can go through the history and they can learn about every person you’ve interviewed and their experience with the app. And they can see the entire history of the company through these interviews.
Eric Siu [25:58] Got it. I love it. It’s so methodical. And I think not enough people do. I seriously think there’s a book behind this. You should definitely-
Sam Corcos [26:04] Nah.
Eric Siu [26:05] But okay. So the business itself, whatever you’re okay with revealing, you know, how much money, how many of you raised, how many employees do you have, revenues, if you even want to talk about it, but whatever you can reveal. How’s the company doing today?
Sam Corcos [26:16] Yeah, we’re doing well. We’ve raised about 4 million, mostly from other founders. I really wanted to make sure that we optimize our early cap table for smaller checks from other founders, especially people who are really interested in the space. The revenues were, I think in September we’re going to show something like a hundred thousand, 120,000 in revenue for the month. We’re growing pretty quickly. I think the focus really has been on building the team. I’ve been through this phase change of complexity before. So I’ve been really trying to set the expectation for the team that the next 12 months is going to be a lot harder. It’s one thing when you have a small team of 10 people and you’re all individual contributors and everyone is focused and has very specific domains. Getting to the point where you’re scaling the team and you hit that first phase change where internal comms becomes suddenly a lot harder. That’s really what we’ve been focused on, is making sure it is existential that the first 30 to 50 people you hire are really high talent. I was just reading Reed Hastings’ book on Netflix culture, and he talks a lot about talent density. And that’s something that I think is incredibly important and often undervalued, is making sure that every person you bring on is really, really exceptional and brings up for the bar of talent for the team.
Eric Siu [27:35] Bar raisers. Actually talking about books real quick, do you still read two books a week right now?
Sam Corcos [27:40] I do. Yeah.
Eric Siu [27:41] So you’ve been doing that since how long?
Sam Corcos [27:43] Probably since about 2013.
Eric Siu [27:45] Okay. Yeah. So I’m curious because that’s amazing. Because I try to set aside, you know, at least 30 minutes to an hour to read a physical book every day and then there’s like the online stuff too. I guess, what are you doing exactly to get through two books a week?
Sam Corcos [27:58] The biggest hack that I discovered for myself is audio books. I do most of these as audio books and I’ll block off time or I’ll just go on a walk, an hour long walk, and I’ll just listen to an audio book while I’m going on a walk.
Eric Siu [28:13] 1.5, 2X?
Sam Corcos [28:15] Well, so I’ve been doing it so long. I started out at one and a half, and once I get comfortable with a particular speed, I’ll bump it up to 0.25. So up to two. I’m at three and a half at this point.
Eric Siu [28:27] Wow.
Sam Corcos [28:28] Yeah, which to other people sounds like chipmunks, but I have full retention from that, it feels totally normal at this point.
Eric Siu [28:34] That’s crazy because before, when I was in my twenties, I could do 2X and now I can only do 1.5X.
Sam Corcos [28:41] Oh, yeah?
Eric Siu [28:41] You got even faster. So did you do anything to train that? Like.
Sam Corcos [28:46] I found that I need to be doing something active. It’s really just understanding what your own limitations are. I’m very easily distracted. I’m having a very hard time, even on this call, not checking Slack. And so I have a website blockers to make sure that everything is, these variable rewards pathways, any of these things that lead to addictive tendencies. I have to put my phone on airplane mode. I put on an audio book. I go for a walk. I make it very difficult for myself to get distracted. For example, I can’t listen to an audiobook while I’m on an airplane where I’m just sitting in place. I can’t do it. It’s impossible. So I have to go for a walk or have to be doing dishes or something where I’m distracted in a different way, where I’m physically doing something. And then I’m able to focus a lot better on what I’m listening to.
Eric Siu [29:33] Wow. So working towards wrapping up here, what is in yours? So you got Levels, but what else is in your health stack?
Sam Corcos [29:39] Let’s see, I’ve tried a lot of different things. I don’t use Oura now. I’ve used it in the past. I’ve also used Whoop. Eight Sleep is a really great one for improving sleep quality. Zero Fasting is a really great way of keeping track of fasting. I go on walks a lot. I think just sleep quality is probably the thing that I’ve discovered is most important for a lot of these. I’ve run some experiments on myself. I have some of the worst metabolic fitness at the company because I run these horrible experiments on myself where I’ll intentionally sleep deprive myself for a couple of days. And then I’ll run experiments on how these different choices affect me. And not surprisingly, they’re often quite bad. I’ll sleep deprive myself, or I’ll get two hours of sleep and then I’ll eat fast food and see what it does. And the responses are really dramatic.
Eric Siu [30:28] You have that on the blog?
Sam Corcos [30:30] Yeah, I don’t think we have it on the blog yet, but I can post some of it. [crosstalk 00:30:31] Yeah, for sure.
Eric Siu [30:35] Wow. Okay. That’s cool. Alright. And then we’ve talked about a couple of books already, which we’ll drop in the show notes, but what would you say is your favorite business book?
Sam Corcos [30:43] I mean The Lean Startup, sort of a classic. I probably reread it every couple of years. The High Growth Handbook is another really great one. I think the biggest thing I got from that was thinking a lot more seriously about pricing. That was probably the biggest takeaway for me and from that book. This is not, I’m not sure if this is technically a business book, but the Four Hour Work Week really helped reorient the way I think about work broadly of whether or not there were things I should even be doing. When you think about how you triage your time. That was a really helpful way of thinking about it.
Eric Siu [31:19] Cool. What would you say is the most compelling thing that you’ve read or consumed recently?
Sam Corcos [31:23] Hmm. I recently read Lenny Rachitsky’s post on product market fit that I found really interesting. So product market fit is sort of this ambiguous stage in a company. That was a really helpful one that was on his newsletter. Just hearing these stories from a lot of other founders on how they knew when they had found it. And what was that stage? I think a lot of people, I’ve been guilty of this myself, prematurely put the stake in the ground of product market fit. We have it. And then you don’t have all of the variables and things don’t quite work out the way you expected them to.
Eric Siu [31:59] Love it. Yeah, you guys can just Google Lenny’s subs stack or check the show notes. But this has been great, Sam. What’s the best way for people to find you online?
Sam Corcos [32:07] I’m on Twitter @samcorcos. That’s the easiest way to get a hold of me.
Eric Siu [32:11] Cool, easy enough, everyone go check out Levels. I’m excited to stick one on me today and see what happens. But that is it for today. We will see you all next one.
Eric Siu [32:20] You may have completed this level, but many more bosses await. If you’re looking to level up in marketing or business, just go to singlegrain.com/leveling-up to get access to our individual and team training programs. That’s singlegrain.com/leveling-up.
Eric Siu [32:46] Hey, before you go have a special offer for you from Click Flow. This is the free content decay tool that we have that will basically point out traffic that you are losing, SEO traffic that you’re losing from your top web pages or blog posts. And then from there, you can decide if you want to go and make any changes or not to that specific page. All right. So all you have to do is go to clickflow.com/content-dk, or just Google Click Flow Content Decay, and you will be able to get access to it. All right. And that is it for today’s episode. Hope you enjoyed it.
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