Mainstream media vs creator economy (Ben Grynol, Mike Haney, Tom Griffin)

Today’s media landscape is incredibly different from what it was a decade ago. There is a major shift happening where traditional mainstream media has been joined by the creator economy. In some areas, these media realms intersect and overlap. On certain occasions, it makes sense to target one avenue over another. In this episode, Levels team members Mike Haney (Head of Content), Tom Griffin (Head of Partnerships) and Ben Grynol (Head of Growth) discuss the benefits of various channels and which would be best to announce a future Series A funding round for Levels.

Traditional media confers legitimacy

Mike believes that traditional media still holds sway for promoting legitimacy and informing what type of news that creator outlets choose to cover.

There’s so much money out there right now that traditional media outlets like a Bloomberg or a CNBC, or even at Times or a journal, won’t even cover raises unless we can talk about valuation, who the lead is, what the story is behind it. Just that there was an A is not even – and even for something like TechCrunch or Crunchbase, which covers this all the time, is not enough for them to cover it. So, the point of going to a traditional media, I think, is it confers a legitimacy on the business, it signals to other people who watch that community that something has happened. More people even in the creator economy are looking at those new sources to figure out what they’re going to write about than vice versa. And so, you just get a lot more spread and a lot more legitimacy much more quickly. What I think the creator economy gives you, or the idea of going on a podcast, say, to talk about this, is there you can get deeper into the stories.

Use first principles to make decisions

Tom said that it’s an interesting thought experiment to think of any media promotion decision from the business mindset of first principles.

It’s a really interesting conversation because you can really dig into first principles around this stuff. We’re already assuming that getting coverage from a credible organization about our fundraise is what we want, and I think that, channeling Sam here, do we want that? Is that our goal? And why is that our goal? I think you can make an argument that if we already have that, if we already have the blue check mark, if we already have the logo marks on our website of New York Times and Wall Street Journal, we’re not actually after that. And is it possible that the answer might be no, but is it possible that going after a traditional media outlet like a YouTube channel or a podcast in an exclusive fashion allows us to secure one of those outlets when we otherwise couldn’t? And I don’t know the answer to that, but I think that that’s an interesting question.

Consider reach over time

Mike said that when taking reach into account, don’t forget that creator media tends to accumulate more views over time.

One of the things I think about with these, especially when we talk about scale and reach with these two outlets, is the timeframe that’s involved. It’s like, right, Baby Shark has a billion views, but that’s a billion views acquired over, what, 10, 11 years. And we think about like a podcast over time, a podcast that’s really popular, when Marin drops on a Thursday, I’m sure he gets a lot of listens on a Thursday, but I bet if you check back three months later it’s multiple times that because people aren’t listening right away. The value of the exclusivity to the outlet is news. It’s we’re going to get to break news on this day, it gives us something to draw readers in to say, “Hey, we’ve got a story nobody else does. If you want to read it, you got to read it here.” But it’s very time boxed because as soon as you… Typically you have an embargo, so you say, “Times, you can have this for six hours or eight hours,” rarely more than that, before everybody else can pick it up and will actually send the release out on The Wire. So, your exclusivity doesn’t last very long, so I don’t know how valuable that is to somebody like a podcast or a YouTube channel where I suspect they’re less concerned about the views they’re going to get.

Different channels have different audiences

Mike said that creator content channels typically have niche audiences, which necessitates a unique format for your message.

The audience that’s going to consume news about a raise is business community, the VC community, the tech community. Right? Those are the people who are interested. And the places they’re looking for that info is CrunchBase, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, CNBC. So, whatever you do there, that’s who you’re talking to, and if you don’t do it, you’re basically saying, “We have no interest in talking to those people.” I don’t know if there’s any reason to not talk to those people. I mean, I’d be interested to hear maybe, you guys or Sam, would have a perspective on not wanting to necessarily put an announcement out there. Whereas any given content creator, whether it’s a YouTube channel about science or a Rogan or a health tech channel or Dr. Hyman, is going to have their own unique audience, which might be huge, but it’s going to be interested in a particular thing. Which just comes back to the both/and. Right? It’s like every audience has its own unique need and its own unique format.

The allure of an exclusive story

Mike believes that an exclusive story would be appropriate for a more in-depth, reporting-style article, such as a magazine piece.

The scenario I had in mind when we talked about an exclusive a while ago was, and I was thinking in magazine terms because that’s my old stomping ground, but if you went to a Wired reporter or a New Yorker reporter and you said, “Hey, we’re going to upend the notion of bio-observability with this project that we’re going to work on for the next couple of years, and we’re going to give you exclusive access to follow us along as we do this work so that when it comes out, or when it’s about to come out, you write the 3,000-word cover story with a picture of Josh on the cover and the new whatever saying this is the company that’s remaking health tech,” that’s the kind of exclusive that I think has value as opposed to a fundraise announcement.

The value of eyes on a headline

Tom said that there is value in getting general awareness of your company out there.

If X number of thousands or millions of people read the story or see the headline, like there is value in that. I think it’s just about being clear on what exactly you’re getting. For example, in one of our conversations in Threads, someone had said, “What we’re really after is people joining Levels, ie, purchasing our product,” and they said that, “Our goal should be that we see a similar number of conversions after this Series A announcement that we did when a particular podcast dropped in the past, which was our largest sales event to date.” Now, personally, I don’t think that that’s possible, and I don’t think that we’re going to see that and I don’t think that that even should be the goal. But I do think that there is a lot of value in general awareness, but it’s just knowing that that’s the only value that you might get. So, where I’m landing personally on this is like, there’s not a good reason not to do it. We should definitely do it. I think the only reason we wouldn’t do it is if we could get more value going a different direction. To Sam’s initial point, which I think ultimately was, if we offer the exclusive to someone else, could that give us more value? And I think the answer might end up being no, not for this Series A announcement.

Use coverage to attract talent

Ben said that publicizing a Series A can also serve as a call to action to attract new talent who find a Series A company less risky than a seed startup.

To get into the question from another angle, any time a piece comes out where a company says, “Hey, we’ve raised N number of dollars,” and it’s done through a tier-one media source, that is an opportunity to attract talent. Right? So, raises, naturally, raises de-risk companies for people, and everybody has a different risk tolerance. So, you might have great people but they’re only interested in joining companies that are at a Series A or a Series B stage. And so, when that comes out, whether it’s through the Times or Crunch, it doesn’t really matter where it comes out, but they see that and that goes, “Hmm, I’ve had my eye on this Levels company and they just raised another round, they’re now de-risk. This might be my time to go and look.

More awareness is always better

Mike said that not too many people are familiar with metabolic health. He will embrace any tactic that serves to bring it to light for the masses.

The way I think about what I’m trying to do every day in content is like, let the world know that metabolic health is a real term and that it exists and that it’s a thing, and I feel like 99.99% of the world still has no idea that metabolic health is a thing, much less that Levels is a company that exists. And so, when I think like, “Oh, we’ve checked that box, we’re good. We have the credibility,” it’s like, “Well, maybe. Within a very, very small circle of people we’ve got some credibility.” And even if we don’t necessarily equate awareness with credibility, because maybe those are two slightly different things, the value of continuing coverage like our Good Morning America story, I think that’s, to some degree, credibility but it’s more awareness. That’s more just like, Look, you’re getting this message out, the name of the product, the notion of people without diabetes monitoring their blood sugar for health reasons, that concept just went out to tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who would not have seen it otherwise.

Mainstream attention has compound effects

Mike said that when you get coverage in mainstream sources, coverage typically compounds further naturally.

Mainstream also compounds on mainstream. This was a point that Ross was making about the release, and I think this is what we’ve seen in the last year. Right? The Times covers us because the Journal covered us. Good Morning America covers us because the Times and the Journal have covered us. Good Morning America’s not going to cover something that has only ever been covered on health blogs. And so, the more of that kind of social – it’s like mainstream media, social signaling credibility kind of thing, it just builds on itself and you keep getting more and more outlets because they see that, well, if the Times has done this, it must be legit. If Men’s Health has written about this, then Women’s Health will write about it. Et cetera.

Content is a long game

Mike said that all content is based on long-term thinking, since it’s typically impossible to link conversions back to content.

It’s a long game. It’s like, yeah, the point of the Good Morning America thing is not to drive conversions. To your point, Ben, there wasn’t even a way for that to be done. Right? There was no way for people to even sign up if they wanted to. That’s the long game. And I think I’m more comfortable with that notion because it’s basically what we’re doing with content. Any given piece of content I do doesn’t really drive conversions, but the point is over time, the consistent messaging, the consistent… If one out of every 10 newsletters reaches somebody and they read a story and they hear about metabolic health and then six months later they read another one and they go, “Right, metabolic… the blood sugar thing, I should think about that.” And then six months later, they’re in a grocery store and they’re looking at two things and they go, “Oh, right, that one’s got too much sugar in it. I think there was something about like sugar’s bad. I shouldn’t do that one.” That’s the game we’re are playing, and it’s just a totally… It’s equally important to the real tactical sort of conversion driving stuff, but they’re two just totally different games.

Transcript

Mike Haney: Mainstream also compounds on mainstream. This is a point that Ross was making about the release, and I think this is what we’ve seen in the last year. right? The Times covers us because the Journal covered us. Good Morning America covers us because the Times and the Journal have covered us Good Morning America’s not going to cover something that has only ever been covered on health blogs. And so, the more of that kind of social… It’s like mainstream media social signaling credibility kind of thing, it just builds on itself and you keep getting more and more outlets because they see that, well, if the Times has done this, it must be legit. If Men’s health is written about this, then Women’s Health will write about this. Et cetera.

Ben Grynol: So, the question for you, is there some underlying John Nash game theory going on here between traditional media sources? Well, I know the New York Times, I know that Bloomberg’s going to report on us, and Bloomberg knows that we know that they’re going to report on us. And you get to a level that is so deep that either everyone reports or no one reports and you eventually get to some Nash equilibrium.

Mike Haney: I was told there would be no math.

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

Ben Grynol: There’s a major shift that’s been happening with traditional media and the creator economy, or basically those who create content across different platforms, those being things like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, podcasts, you name it. But there are many people in the world that now have more reach than institutions like Bloomberg or the New York Times, a lot of these traditional media sources that people tend to get their news from. And what’s happened is that, let’s use someone like Mr. Beast for example, a YouTuber who has 71 million subscribers and more than 12 billion views on his videos, well, he has an incredible amount of reach. And so, when starting to think about how can one, how can a company communicate to their audience, how can they engage people in the audiences that they want to reach? Well, working with content creators, influencers, people in the creator economy instead of traditional media sources seems to be a rational decision.

Ben Grynol: But what ends up happening is that there’s still very much this long tail world of the creator world and the traditional media world. There is some overlap in a Venn diagram if you were to plot it out, but what you end up finding is that it really becomes this exercise of yes-and. It’s using both. It’s working with both to spread messages of metabolic health, spread messages of this epidemic and this crisis that the world is facing, and to do it through all these different channels. Although they might seem unrelated at times, there’s actually more overlap in certain senses when you work with both of them.

Ben Grynol: And so, Mike Haney, head of content and our editorial director, and Tom Griffin, head of partnerships, well, the three of us sat down and we discussed the merits or the benefits of working with traditional media versus the creator economy to spread news, to spread awareness of Levels. And if we go down the path of raising Series A, which very realistic in the next few quarters – that’s what startups do, they grow, they raise capital, they scale, they raise capital, and they keep going. Well, that is the path that we are on with Levels being a venture-backed company, and it’s something that will help us to achieve our overarching mission: to change and impact the world as far as the metabolic health crisis goes. And so, we discussed the merit of working with different creator sources, different media sources, to spread awareness for something like a Series A raise. And so, we sat down, we had a few laughs, we even dove into Cocomelon. Why not? A great kids channel. Here’s where we kicked things off.

Ben Grynol: Okay, well, we got to dig into this idea of traditional media versus creator media, and where this stemmed from was Sam has started thinking about if we go to raise a Series A, when we do, which is sometime in the near future, what’s the best way that we can announce a raise? Should we do it through traditional media sources or through the creator economy? And Haney, you’ve got tons of experience in that world, the traditional media world, and I’m sure lots of thoughts about it. And Tom’s been investing 99.9% of his time in the economy. So bringing a full circle is a good place to have somewhat of a debate and hear some positions on it. So, when we start to think about this, I know, Haney, you jammed with Jack Taylor PR, which is the agency we work with for all our PR. What were some of the thoughts you had going into it and then thoughts you have now about the way we might want to approach it?

Mike Haney: I suspect where we’ll all probably end up is that it’s not either/or it’s both/and, because they do different things. And Jack Taylor sort of echoed this. What traditional media gives you, and the reason we employ Jack Taylor and still have this effort to go out and get press in the “traditional media,” is it just confers legitimacy. I talked to Ross over there specifically about the idea of doing releases around raises and he said it’s basically the press release is, A, helps you control the story a little bit. Working with an outlet on exclusive also helps you dictate the story a little bit. And it also just gives you a verified reference for people in the future to come look at and say, “Oh, Bloomberg covered that raise, that must have been a real big deal.”

Mike Haney: One of the things he mentioned that I thought was interesting that was different from even a year ago when we did our seed, is that there’s so much money out there right now that traditional media outlets like a Bloomberg or a CNBC, or even at Times or a journal, won’t even cover raises unless we can talk about valuation, who the lead is, what the story is behind it. Just that there was an A is not even – and even for something like TechCrunch or Crunchbase, which covers this all the time, is not enough for them to cover it. So, the point of going to a traditional media, I think, is it confers a legitimacy on the business, it signals to other people who watch that community that something has happened. More people even in the creator economy are looking at those new sources to figure out what they’re going to write about than vice versa. And so, you just get a lot more spread and a lot more legitimacy much more quickly.

Mike Haney: What I think the creator economy gives you, or the idea of going on a podcast, say, to talk about this, is there you can get deeper into the stories. One of the points Ross made, I said, “Well should we look at something like a health media or a fitness media, a Men’s Health kind of thing?” and he said, “Well, look, they don’t cover raises. They don’t care about finance. That’s not what they’re about. If you have a story about the future of the company, the raise might be a hook, but they’re not going to cover your raise announcement.” Whereas a podcast might be the place to do that. The message about the raise itself is probably best done through business traditional media, whereas the story about what the raise is for and what it means for the future of health tech or the future of bio-observability is probably best told through a podcast or a YouTuber or some other kind of creator media.

Ben Grynol: Yeah, it’s wild. There’s this massive shift that’s happening in, we’ll call it, in reach. Right? So, if you look at things just from an objective standpoint where it’s like, “Okay, well, who gets more reach?” if we look at media platforms, that could be Mr. Beast is media platform… I mean, Cocomelon is a media platform, like that kid’s YouTube channel is one of the biggest in the world, and it’s become that way for many reasons. But when you talk about a channel like Cocomelon, I looked into it, obviously watch it a little too much, but 119 million subs, 110 billion views. Right? So, if you’re like, “Okay, wait, that’s a communication channel,” now let’s extrapolate backwards and go into avenues like Rogan or like Mr. Beast and start to look into some of these avenues. Assume that a company could work with any of these content creators, or we’ll call them distribution channels, to spread a message. Well, objectively, that’s just a lot bigger reach than…

Ben Grynol: The Times in May of this year said, “Hey, we’ve got 7.8 million subs and growth is starting to slow. We’ve got 15 million people that read our newsletter once a week.” Whether or not they read the part about a raise or whatever it is you go, “Hmm, there’s actually a lot of value in working with the creator economy to spread a message. Now, if you go one layer deeper, which is like, “Okay, well who actually…” Rogan and Mr. Beast aren’t going to be announcing a Series A. That’s just not what they do. But who actually does? Well, The Verge.

Ben Grynol: So, The Verge is one of the biggest YouTube channels that would deal with tech. Mostly it’s product reviews, it’s things like that, little techy gadget reviews, but they’ve started to do some news. And there was one piece they did on that Frances Haugen, or Haugen, I guess, the Facebook whistleblower from a week or two ago, and so they did the story on that, and you look at it and one week later it’s got 136,000 views. And you’re like, “That’s not that much.” That’s actually not a great outlet. So, I think it’s exactly what you’re saying, Haney, where it’s like new it’s like you need the signaling and the social proof of the New York Times snap, there’s your blue check mark, but then you need all the creators that will actually care about this news to help to lift it and then to actually tell that story and spread the message wide.

Tom Griffin: It’s a really interesting conversation because you can really dig into first principles around this stuff. We’re already assuming that getting coverage from a credible organization about our fundraise is what we want, and I think that, channeling Sam here, do we want that? Is that our goal? And why is that our goal? I think you can make an argument that if we already have that, if we already have the blue check mark, if we already have the logo marks on our website of New York Times and Wall Street Journal, we’re not actually after that. And is it possible that the answer might be no, but is it possible that going after a traditional media outlet like a YouTube channel or a podcast in an exclusive fashion allows us to secure one of those outlets when we otherwise couldn’t? And I don’t know the answer to that, but I think that that’s an interesting question because I think…

Tom Griffin: What is the value of an exclusive to the outlet? Haney would probably know better than I would, but I think one of the values is that you basically promise a lot of eyeballs because you drive a ton of traffic towards their platform because they’re the only ones covering it. So, I think there is a world where you could find a channel or a platform or creator and say, “We’re going to drive a ton of eyeballs towards your channel if you cover the story about our company.” And so, then, you get into like what is that story and aligning incentives where the creator is creating something that their audience would want to consume? But yeah, I’ll pause there if you guys have

Mike Haney: What’s interesting about that, one of the things I think about with these, especially when we talk about scale and reach with these two outlets, is the timeframe that’s involved. It’s like, right, Baby Shark has a billion views, but that’s a billion views acquired over, what, 10, 11 years. And we think about like a podcast over time, a podcast that’s really popular, when Marin drops on a Thursday, I’m sure he gets a lot of listens on a Thursday, but I bet if you check back three months later it’s multiple times that because people aren’t listening right away. The value of the exclusivity to the outlet is news. It’s we’re going to get to break news on this day, it gives us something to draw readers in to say, “Hey, we’ve got a story nobody else does. If you want to read it, you got to read it here.”

Mike Haney: But it’s very time boxed because as soon as you… Typically you have an embargo, so you say, “Times, you can have this for six hours or eight hours,” rarely more than that, before everybody else can pick it up and will actually send the release out on The Wire. So, your exclusivity doesn’t last very long, so I don’t know how valuable that is to somebody like a podcast or a YouTube channel where I suspect they’re less concerned about the views they’re going to get. The fact that they’re going to have an exclusive at 10:00 AM on a Thursday for people to tune into, by the time people are listening to that podcast, the news is probably already out everywhere else.

Tom Griffin: Yeah. And also, who cares about a time sensitive fundraise announcement? Not that no one cares, but who are the people who care about that? And are they going to consume information about it on a YouTube channel?

Mike Haney: Right. It leads back to the both/and. Right?

Tom Griffin: Exactly. And so, let’s say I would’ve promised some YouTube creator, “Hey, we’re going to announce our fundraise through you, and our promise to you is because it’s an exclusive, we’re going to direct the internet to your YouTube video about the fund raise,” I’m not sure we could do that effectively. Whereas if the New York Times has an eight hour lead time on releasing a story, it’s going to get a lot of extra eyeballs within the circuit of tech and VC news that are going to go to the New York Times. But I don’t think we could drive all of those eyeballs to that YouTube channel. So, yeah, I’m thinking a lot about like ensuring that everyone in the chain gets their value. I’m like, “What do we want from this? And then what does the creator want? And then what does the end consumer want?”

Tom Griffin: We were talking about some science, just to drive home this point, we were talking about some science channels that get like tens of millions of views about interesting science and health concepts. To your point earlier, Haney, they would not cover a fundraise because their audience is not consuming their content for that purpose. They want to learn about science or they want to learn about how to improve their lives. They don’t want to learn about a fundraise announcement. So, we would have to find alternative creators that specifically are covering those types of announcements, and then we get back to value to us in terms of just the sheer number of eyeballs. I’m doubtful that we could find an alternative platform, like a YouTube channel that covers this type of news where we would get more eyeballs than the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.

Mike Haney: Yeah, I think that’s probably right. It also raises that question of audience, which I think you were hinting at there, that the audience that’s going to consume news about a raise is business community, the VC community, the tech community. Right? Those are the people who are interested. And the places they’re looking for that info is CrunchBase, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, CNBC. So, whatever you do there, that’s who you’re talking to, and if you don’t do it, you’re basically saying, “We have no interest in talking to those people.” I don’t know if there’s any reason to not talk to those people. I mean, I’d be interested to hear maybe, you guys or Sam, would have a perspective on not wanting to necessarily put an announcement out there.

Mike Haney: Whereas any given content creator, whether it’s a YouTube channel about science or a Rogan or a health tech channel or Dr. Hyman, is going to have their own unique audience, which might be huge, but it’s going to be interested in a particular thing. Which just comes back to the both/and. Right? It’s like every audience has its own unique need and its own unique format, and it seems weird… As I think about this, it doesn’t really make sense to pit them against each other because they’re looking for different things and talking to different people for different reasons.

Ben Grynol: I totally agree about that, and that’s one of the things I thought about initially where it’s like, assume Mark Hyman announces through all his channels, like every platform where he has a presence, he says, “Hey, Levels has raised to Series A,” it’s like that much of his audience will care. Right? Very small, minute percent. And understand what it means, understand what the implications are, because that’s not the world that they are living in and that’s not why they choose to follow him, his presence, his content. It’s really catered to tech Twitter. That is the audience. It’s like this very, very small percentage of the world.

Ben Grynol: Now, what I started to wonder was does it become… When does information become media? When is it important or something that news sources would care about? Well, if Joe Rogan got the exclusive to announce who the president of the United States was, that’s news. That’s probably news. For whatever, Rogan was chosen as the outlet to actually distribute this information to the world. That’s something that news would report on that news, so you’re like, “Okay, we’re double-dipping. This is cool.” But strategically, if we rewind, we’re like, “Let’s be objective about this,” we raise some amount of money, that’s not that exciting to the rest of the world because they’re like, “This happens multiple times a day every day. Levels is just another company that raised money. Hoo-ha. No one cares.” Right? That’s not that important from a piece of news to say and even if it was Joe Rogan and Joe Rogan got the exclusive on it. Maybe it would be news if it was Cocomelon, but not Rogan. Right?

Ben Grynol: So, I think it’s important that we distinguish what would cause news sources if they didn’t have the exclusive, if it was a mutually exclusive thing, as opposed to like a yes/and, what would cause them to actually be excited about it? And it’s probably as hyperbolic as Levels forms partnership with Cocomelon to announce Series A raise, so I’m anchoring on that one. I think that’s the decision right there.

Tom Griffin: I guess a question I’m asking myself is in what world would it definitely make sense to do an exclusive with a YouTuber? And I can imagine that world. Right? If we found a YouTuber who does tech news and tech reviews, and they get on average 100 million views per video, and we couldn’t otherwise create content with them, which I think is an important point… We’re throwing around names like Mark Hyman and Yes/And. Let’s get something going on Hyman in addition to a Forbes article, which I think is great and we should, but we can get Hyman no matter what.

Tom Griffin: So, if there was a creator out there on an alternative platform who we couldn’t otherwise get but we’re telling them, “Hey, listen, ahead of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and all these other outlets, we want you to cover our story,” I think that’s reasonable, and I think maybe that is what someone like Sam initially had in mind. Might we be able to go to one of them rather than the traditional outlets and secure the news when we otherwise couldn’t because it’s an exclusive and because it’s a new piece of news, it’s a fundraise?

Ben Grynol: Yeah. Like Marques Brownlee, I think he’s got 14 million subs now, wide reach. Go one level deeper, if, and this isn’t really possible, but assume it is, if Mr. Beast was like, “Hey, I’m into doing this,” it would just be insane for us to not do it because 71 million ups within… It depends on the video that he does, and he does so many different types, but even for that hamburger thing that he did back in, it was probably a year ago but it could have been a month ago because time flies in this world we live in. But when he did that and he promoted it only through his channels that blew up so quickly, and that was very much an exclusive that the media ended up writing on. So, assume Mr. Beast was like, “Hey, I’m aligned with Levels. Here’s what we’re going to do,” he just gets so much reach in his content, and then other people create content about his content, that that would be one of those things where it would probably make more sense.

Ben Grynol: But up until that point, you’re just talking about such a different scale. Right? We’re talking about a 10X scale on the Times. He’s just got more reach than they do. And then if you go to which audiences do each reach, well, the Times is reaching a very, very wide audience that is in interested in a number of topics. Whereas Beast is definitely reaching a catered audience. They are interested in what Mr. Beast reports on. They’re not coming there because they’re expecting him to talk about garden hoses and whatever else. Right? They know Mr. Beast is here for Mr. Beast.

Mike Haney: Yeah. I think the example you raised, Tom of, if giving somebody an exclusive story about the raise got us an audience and a sizeable audience we couldn’t otherwise get, then I think that would make sense. And essentially, if we play out that thought experiment, what do you lose in return? Well, you’d lose the opportunity to offer the exclusive to a traditional media outlet. Right? So, one of the things Ross said is he wants to go after Bloomberg or CNBC because we haven’t gotten coverage there before, and this would be an opportunity to go to them and… It’s a way for him to talk to his contacts there and say, “Hey, here’s an announcement we have, we can give you guys the exclusive.”

Mike Haney: To your point, I would argue I think there still an enormous amount of value in us continuing to get those blue checks and coverage in mainstream outlets like Good Morning America, the New York Times or Bloomberg, but in terms of the Series A release news, if we just play out the consequences of that sort of thought experiment, I don’t think we lose that much by not having Bloomberg cover it as an exclusive. Right? We’d still send out a press release, we’d just do it the next day. Outlets like Crunchbase or whomever were going to pick it up would pick it up anyway. They just wouldn’t pick it up first. We would lose some opportunity to tell the story we want to tell through those outlets. Right? Because if they’re just picking up the press release, that’s different than a Bloomberg reporter getting on the phone and talking to Sam for a half an hour to get the story about what this raises for and what the future of bio-observability is. But presumably that’s the story you could be telling through the YouTuber.

Mike Haney: Without knowing what that YouTuber is or that particular podcast and what story they would want, I still suspect it’s going to be a both thing. Right? The scenario I had in mind when we talked about an exclusive a while ago was, and I was thinking in magazine terms because that’s my old stomping ground, but if you went to a Wired reporter or a New Yorker reporter and you said, “Hey, we’re going to upend the notion of bio-observability with this project that we’re going to work on for the next couple of years, and we’re going to give you exclusive access to follow us along as we do this work so that when it comes out, or when it’s about to come out, you write the 3,000 word cover story with a picture of Josh on the cover and the new whatever saying this is the company that’s remaking health tech,” that’s the kind of exclusive that I think has value as opposed to a fundraise announcement.

Mike Haney: And I wonder in that YouTube world if there’s an equivalent. Right? If it’s somebody who like… What they want is the exclusive, bigger story, they want the chance to interview Josh about whatever it is, or they want the opportunity to follow us along and see what we’re doing, or just create more of a kind of video, as opposed to… I’m having a hard time picturing the YouTuber who jumps on their camera and goes like, “Hey everybody, we got news today. Levels has raised a Series A of X million dollars. Isn’t that cool? Go to Levels and check it out.” I don’t know. You know this world better than I do. I’m just not sure that that’s the exclusive anybody’s looking for.

Ben Grynol: I think that’s Tommy’s vlog channel. I think that’s exactly what that is.

Tom Griffin: I’ll start that channel. No, I think you’re totally right, and it’s an interesting question. How can we leverage the general tactics that are used around an exclusive potentially in the future around other company news, even like a product launch announcement? And can we do that even at a smaller scale with the podcast channel or the YouTube channel? And I haven’t really thought through this, but yeah, in real-time, it’s like imagine we have a new research result that we haven’t talked about, could we go to Mark Hyman or Joe Rogan or… Maybe Joe’s not the best example. But Ben Greenfield, one of them and say, “We want to do a three part podcast that’s going to get in total more views than any other podcast we’ve ever done,” releasing this news to the world, I’m asking myself is the value there for them in terms of the exclusive?

Tom Griffin: I’m wondering, we’d have to set up new terms. We’d be like, “We’re not going to talk about this on any other health podcast for one month if you do this with us.” And then people are going to be talking about your episode. And unlike most health experts out there when they do podcast tours and they talk about the same thing on 100 podcasts, yours is going to be the only one available for one month. And I don’t know, I think it’s an interesting thought experiment we should probably think more about.

Mike Haney: Right. Because that comes back to if I’m the podcaster in that I’m thinking to myself, “Well, is that topic in my podcast feed going to draw in enough listeners for that to be interesting and useful to me? That seems like the assumption there. Right? This news is so interesting that they’re like, “Oh my God, that’s going to get tons of views.” Maybe it does. I don’t know. It comes back to that discussion we were having internally today about messaging and the value of repeating messaging in lots of different places because you don’t know how much audience overlap there is. I’m curious. How do you think about that, Tom, from the podcast tour and the way you think about hitting these different media outlets, how much do you assume a Venn diagram overlap, and how much do you assume… and purposely try to spread it out over lots of different folks? And how much do you not really think about that and just go like, “Ben Asbury has this audience, Ben Greenfield has… or Mark Asbury, sorry.

Ben Grynol: Dave Asbury.

Mike Haney: Dave Asbury. Getting my people confused. Has this audience, Ben Greenfield has this audience, Mark Hyman has this audience. Probably there’s some Venn diagram, but we don’t really think about the overlap or just interested in new one.

Tom Griffin: Yeah. I think, long story short, I think it’s safer to assume that there is not significant overlap, even though no doubt there is overlap. But I think you get into dangerous territory, and I’ve experienced this firsthand when working with founders of companies in this space, where to give you an extreme example, on their second ever podcast recording, the founder thinks that they need to change up the messaging and the narrative because surely if someone heard me on Ben Greenfield last week, they probably also are going to be listening to Mark Hyman. And I think you can probably find examples in certain niche areas of health, where it might be a good assumption to assume that if someone’s listened to one episode they’ve listened to another, but I think, in large part, you shouldn’t assume that. And there’s so many different health podcasts out there, and you’re better off assuming that you should hit similar messaging as long as it’s the most effective messaging. Because then what happens is you feel this compulsion to tweak your messaging, the stories that you tell, and you actually are less effective overall.

Ben Grynol: The challenge though, too, is like, there are only so many top tier podcasts. So, let’s use a tour, Matt McConaughey’s classic. Right? So, Matthew McConaughey goes for his Green… I think the book was called Green Lights. At least-

Tom Griffin: You know Matt personally? I’ve never heard anyone use his nickname.

Ben Grynol: Yeah. Matt and I, we’re homies. Anyways. So, Matt, he goes on his podcast tour for that new book that he did, Green Lights, or whatever it was called, and he was on like Marin, I think he did Rogan, he definitely did Ferris. There were a couple others that came into my overwhelming podcast feed of too many podcasts that get listened to monthly. But the point was, I think I listened to two of them and I was like, “These are pretty much the same.” And the third one was such derivative content that I was like, “This is boring.” What you want is you want Marin to be Marin with him and you want… It’s almost like Marin was trying to be Marin and then he was just giving him back Green Lights with the Matthew McConaughey charm. Right?

Ben Grynol: But the same thing was on Rogan, the same thing was on Ferris, where it’s like, there almost felt like there was this agenda and that wasn’t as exciting. So, one thing, and I think it’s interesting because this came up in Threads today in a conversation where it was… I think Sam had brought it up about creating differentiated topics to be very targeted and pointed at the podcaster you are working with and the message that you want to get out. And where it’s interesting is like you can have the same message when you’re on very different podcasts that don’t necessarily have as much overlap in the Venn diagram of audience. Right? Like Mark Asbury, we’ll use Mark, good old Mark. No, so Dave, so Dave Asbury is going to have a very different audience than Wellness Mama, probably. Right? There might be some overlap in the Venn diagram. There’s not going to be like completely different audiences. There might be some overlap.

Ben Grynol: When you start to get into things like Dave Asbury versus Reply All, a Gimlet podcast, there might be listeners, but it’s pretty unlikely that you’re going to get a ton of people who listen to both. And so, that’s the opportunity to say… Let’s say Reply All, we had an important message about tech that we wanted to get out, Haney jams with Gimlet, we get Sam in there, he puts out the message about remote teams and building tech companies, whatever it is. And then Josh or Casey has something super important that they want to talk about from a research standpoint and it’s done on Mark Hyman’s podcast. Those are just going to be different messages, different platforms, different audiences, and that’s really cool and strategic, but I think it always depends on which podcast you’re going after to feel like you, you are getting mileage out of messages and then also impact. Right? There’s not a right answer. It’s always honing the dials on the board to make sure that you’re pushing things in the right direction.

Mike Haney: Yeah. I think it comes back a bit, I think, to loop this back to this Series A announcement, the question you asked, Tom, and I asked Ross at JTPR about this, as well, is like what’s the point of the announcement? What are we hoping to get out of it? We’re getting the money. That’s the important part of the raise. Right? Sam talks a lot about the notion of signaling often being overvalued, and it feels like a lot of the point of raise announcements is signaling and signaling to the community. It’s not so much probably signaling to the general public except in so far as if you get a mention in something like the Times, maybe some people see your company name that wouldn’t have otherwise seen it and just goes in the back of their head. But I’m curious what… It feels like with the seed, which happened right around the time I started, that notion of signaling legitimacy was very important, I’m curious what… I mean, Tom, just from your perspective, what’s the point of an announcement? What if somebody came and said, “We’re just not doing an announcement” what do we lose?

Tom Griffin: Yeah. I mean, I think you certainly lose basic awareness. Right? Like if X number of thousands or millions of people read the story or see the headline, like there is value in that. I think it’s just about being clear on what exactly you’re getting. For example, in one of our conversations in Threads, someone had said, “What we’re really after is people joining Levels, ie, purchasing our product,” and they said that, “Our goal should be that we see a similar number of conversions after this Series A announcement that we did when a particular podcast dropped in the past, which was our largest sales event to date.” Now, personally, I don’t think that that’s possible, and I don’t think that we’re going to see that and I don’t think that that even should be the goal. But I do think that there is a lot of value in general awareness, but it’s just knowing that that’s the only value that you might get.

Tom Griffin: So, where I’m landing personally on this is like, there’s not a good reason not to do it. We should definitely do it. I think the only reason we wouldn’t do it is if we could get more value going a different direction. To Sam’s initial point, which I think ultimately was, if we offer the exclusive to someone else, could that give us more value? And I think the answer might end up being no, not for this Series A announcement, but I don’t think we would ever be in a position where we would then say, “Okay, if not, we’re still not interested in the extra eyeballs on the company because we already have the signaling and we’ve already had the eyeballs from similar outlets.”

Ben Grynol: I think one thing, to get into the question from another angle, any time a piece comes out where a company says, “Hey, we’ve raised N number of dollars,” and it’s done through a tier one media source, that is an opportunity to attract talent. Right? So, raises, naturally, raises de-risk companies for people, and everybody has a different risk tolerance. So, you might have great people but they’re only interested in joining companies that are at a Series A or a Series B stage. And so, when that comes out, whether it’s through the Times or Crunch, it doesn’t really matter where it comes out, but they see that and that goes, “Hmm, I’ve had my eye on this Levels company and they just raised another round, they’re now de-risk. This might be my time to go and look. I’m an engineer, I’ve been thinking about leaving,” whatever job, maybe it’s with… like a very secure job with a FANG, one of the FANG companies. Right? “I think I’ll reach out about it.”

Ben Grynol: And so, that becomes their catalyst as say, “Yeah, I’m open to this.” Maybe if it came out through Patrick O’Shaughnessy Invest Like the Best, or it came out through our pals at Acquired, that might not give them the social proof of the signaling that the Times or TechCrunch would. Hard to say, but I think that’s like, to your question Haney, of like what’s the value of even doing an announce? It’s like, well, that’s what you hope for, is that it brings more awareness to prospective talent. The goal is not to attract more investors. The goal is, sure, you might bring some awareness to the company or to prospective members, people who want to join, but the real goal is to say like, “Cool, we are a real company. We’re doing real things. Come join if this is some mission that you want to be a part of.”

Tom Griffin: I agree with that, for sure. And I’m writing down some of the possible goals for an announcement like this, and I wrote down consumer brand, so like consumer-facing brand, company brand, which is what you were just talking about. I don’t know if that’s the best term, but credibility where we’d be attracting talent. Revenue or conversions, which I don’t really think… I think if we’re a different type of company and we weren’t a $400 biosensor product, that might be the case. SEO, which I think is a real value to an announcement like this. Education and awareness and then relationships or partnerships, which brings us back to possibly securing something with a content creator that we otherwise couldn’t.

Tom Griffin: And I guess a question that I have is like, often internally we’ll say, “Well, we already have credibility, so we’ve already checked that box.” Do we need more of it? And I think Haney, sometimes it seems like you’re on the position of, “We think we have that, but we could always use a lot more of it.” So, we should not assume that just because we’ve gotten the one piece in the Wall Street Journal that we don’t need to pursue company or brand credibility anymore.

Mike Haney: Yeah. I think that’s right. I always chuckle at that notion because I think… I mean, the way I think about what I’m trying to do every day in content is like, let the world know that metabolic health is a real term and that it exists and that it’s a thing, and I feel like 99.99% of the world still has no idea that metabolic health is a thing, much less that Levels is a company that exists. And so, when I think like, “Oh, we’ve checked that box, we’re good. We have the credibility,” it’s like, “Well, maybe. Within a very, very small circle of people we’ve got some credibility.”

Mike Haney: And even if we don’t necessarily equate awareness with credibility, because maybe those are two slightly different things, the value of continuing coverage like our Good Morning America story, I think that’s, to some degree, credibility but it’s more awareness. That’s more just like, “Look, you’re getting this message out, the name of the product, the notion of people without diabetes monitoring their blood sugar for health reasons,” that concept just went out to tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who would not have seen it otherwise. Right? Because most of those people we assume are not biohackers, they’re not deep in the health tech space, they don’t know about this.

Mike Haney: So, I think that’s the value that traditional media continues to give us, is an awareness in a much broader audience. That’s not consuming the other kinds of media that we’re doing and isn’t going to just find us on their own. And I don’t see an end to the utility of that until we are literally a household name and everybody knows what this stuff is. I didn’t know what Whoop or Oura was before I started this company, and I know that we look at those companies and we think, “Well, they’re huge. They’ve achieved this. Everybody knows Whoop and Oura.” I’m like, “I pay attention to my health. I wear Apple watch. I work out. I read health publications,” I had never heard of Whoop or Oura. So, I think if they’re that far ahead and I haven’t heard of them, it’s just a gut check for me to go like, “Right, most people don’t know who we are, so another mention in the Times, another journal story, another Men’s Health story, another Good Morning America is just not going to hurt us. And I take the point that there’s a time trade off we should always think about, but I think the value of that awareness and, to some degree, credibility is worth the time that it takes to get those kinds of things.

Ben Grynol: What you’re saying around bringing the idea of metabolic health, this term, to the forefront, it is ongoing, it’s Sisyphean, and it’s going to take a lot of effort and a lot of pieces of content to really get it out there. But where we will start to see meaningful gains as a world, because that’s our… Our goal is to educate the world about exactly what you said, metabolic health is a thing, it’s real, it matters. Here’s why you should pay attention to it. Here’s to what we’re doing about it. When you hear like Rogan just did that episode with Dr. Sanjay Gupta on… Gosh, it was last week sometime. But when he said the word metabolic health twice, instances of it… Two or three years ago, the word metabolic health was not commonly used. It just was not.

Ben Grynol: So, again, totally biased lens. When I hear Rogan talk about it, I go, “Oh, he’s paying attention.” Not to Levels, not necessarily to Levels, but he’s paying attention that there’s this movement that’s happening because you don’t just throw those two words out there together and do it twice in the same podcast episode saying, “Hey, the real problem here is this.” And so, that is thing that you go, “Okay, the more that we can elevate and bring levity to this term, to this epidemic, to this crisis, the more that other people through their channels can help to bring awareness to it as well, the better off we are.”

Ben Grynol: So, to Haney’s point, 100%. Every time we get any mention in an outlet where we might not reach that audience, like we can put raise announcements out all day on tech Twitter, and it’s only going to grow the pie in a very minute amount. But if we’re in long tail areas of the world, all these long tail communities, or large media sources that reach a ton of people which creates a long tail, then you go, “Okay, now our roots are getting wider and deeper the more we go. Yeah, you’re right, it doesn’t hurt by any means.

Mike Haney: Mainstream also compounds on mainstream. This was a point that Ross was making about the release, and I think this is what we’ve seen in the last year. Right? The Times covers us because the Journal covered us. Good Morning America covers us because the Times and the Journal have covered us. Good Morning America’s not going to cover something that has only ever been covered on health blogs. And so, the more of that kind of social – it’s like mainstream media, social signaling credibility kind of thing, it just builds on itself and you keep getting more and more outlets because they see that, well, if the Times has done this, it must be legit. If Men’s Health has written about this, then Women’s Health will write about it. Et cetera.

Ben Grynol: So, is there, the question for you, is there some underlying John Nash game theory going on here between traditional media sources? Do they have some game theory… Well, I know New York Times, I know that Bloomberg’s going to report on us, and Bloomberg knows that we know that they’re going to report on us. And you get to a level that is so deep that either everyone reports or no one reports, and you eventually get to some Nash equilibrium.

Mike Haney: I was told there would be no math.

Tom Griffin: I have a question. Do we know if Good Morning America drove a sign amount of anything quantifiable, either website traffic or wait list signups?

Mike Haney: That’s a good question. I don’t know, off the top of my head. I don’t know if it drove any traffic.

Ben Grynol: I was going to say, we definitely can’t look at conversions because it’s just… When things don’t have links, there isn’t attribution, and even then attribution is an interesting thing to go into a very, very deep conversation about. But yeah, strictly from an awareness and an eyeball standpoint, I don’t know what the spike was as far as website traffic or wait list signups.

Tom Griffin: My point of asking is I think I assume that there wasn’t much of a spike in anything quantifiable, and I would say that I’m comfortable saying that I still think it was very valuable that we were on Good Morning America and my parents saw it and two people texted me about it, even if we can’t measure the effect. And I think that sometimes in the marketing world, we of course obsess over attribution. Ben, you and I have talked about this, but I personally, I think I’m getting more comfortable after I… At one point I was one of those people and now I’m getting more comfortable just seeing the value in things that are not quantifiable. And I think that PR, at times, can be one of those things, and I think sometimes you just need to step back and admit that like, “Hey, there might not be a way that we’re are going to measure the effectiveness of mainstream media, but we’re all comfortable saying to ourselves that we still think there’s quite a bit of value there.”

Mike Haney: Yeah. I talked to Ross a little bit about this when I asked him what the metrics of success are around, say, a release for instance. Right? And he was saying the traditional metrics you’d use there is reach. You’d look at, okay, so-and-so picked it up, they’ve got an audience. So-and-so picked it up, they’ve got an audience. Right? And you do this aggregate reach number that this event we did reach this many people. And then earned media is the other sort of thing where you equate the coverage that you get to how much it would cost you if you were to go and try to get that through advertising? And Ross is saying, “Look, increasingly, we don’t even really talk about that because it’s a nonsense number anymore. It’s too hard to do those sort of equivalencies.”

Mike Haney: And so, it really is what you were just saying. It’s a long game. It’s like, yeah, the point of the Good Morning America thing is not to drive conversions. To your point, Ben, there wasn’t even a way for that to be done. Right? There was no way for people to even sign up if they wanted to. That’s the long game. And I think I’m more comfortable with that notion because it’s basically what we’re doing with content. Any given piece of content I do doesn’t really drive conversions, but the point is over time, the consistent messaging, the consistent… If one out of every 10 newsletters reaches somebody and they read a story and they hear about metabolic health and then six months later they read another one and they go, “Right, metabolic… the blood sugar thing, I should think about that.” And then six months later, they’re in a grocery store and they’re looking at two things and they go, “Oh, right, that one’s got too much sugar in it. I think there was something about like sugar’s bad. I shouldn’t do that one.” That’s the game we’re are playing, and it’s just a totally… It’s equally important to the real tactical sort of conversion driving stuff, but they’re two just totally different games.

Ben Grynol: Yeah. 100%. And to the point of what’s the point of all the awareness? Well, even regardless of whether or not somebody has a conversion link that can have attribution, it’s like, if the intent isn’t having some call to action, like Good Morning America wasn’t like, “Make sure you go check out levelshealth.com. That’s levelshealth.com/…” Right? That’s just not the way it’s happening. And so, what do we expect? Do we expect that everybody’s going to go sign up for the wait list? No. It is exactly what he’s thing, where it is a very long game of education where our… We haven’t accomplished our mission until people look at packages side by side and they go, “Oh yeah, that one is going to do this thing that I think I read like two or three pieces about. I should probably avoid that thing.”

Ben Grynol: And then they end up going back to, assume that they do know the blog at this point, they knew where the source came from, “I think I remember it was Levels.” They go back to the blog and then they start doing more of their own self-driven research and education, and that’s where they get to this point of having meaningful behavior change. But it’s such a long game to get to that point. So, we don’t always need there to be some measurable outcome from every single event to be like, “Raise equals exactly this… Here is the exact KPI, and if this is not the… I mean, if it doesn’t measure the way we are hoping, it’s a failure.” It’s like, no, we’re all ignoring arbitrary signals in the short-term knowing that the game is a really, really long-term game.

Tom Griffin: Totally agree.

Mike Haney: And I think where I come down back to this, just to close the loop on the raise exclusive, I still feel like it is both/and with the caveat that you brought up, Tom, of like, and this is really I think ultimately a question for you with the folks you’re talking to, is like if there’s some other channel that allows us to get coverage that we would otherwise get, I’m perfectly comfortable working with JTPR to go like, “Look, we’re not going to get Bloomberg the exclusive because we have this opportunity at the other thing, but we’re just going to put out the release on the 16th instead of the 15th and hope other folks pick it up from there.” I think that’s a legit route to go.

Mike Haney: Absent that, I think the route to me feels like, let JTPR do their thing, try to build the relationship, get the coverage in something like a Bloomberg, CNBC, whatever it is, get all of the benefits that come from that kind of thing, while then also pursuing the longer form storytelling that podcasting or YouTubing allows us where we can go back on Mark Hyman to tell a very specific story about what’s coming with this next raise and what we’re going to do. And then we just get the benefits of both.

Tom Griffin: Yeah. I totally agree with you. That’s where I land, as well. And I think I can probably do an hour of research in terms of some of these alternative platforms and find out if one of these people exists where we would say, “Okay, yeah, we’re not going to go after tier one traditional media outlets, and instead we’re going to go that direction.” And I could probably have a couple of conversations with those types of folks, as well. But I have a feeling that individual doesn’t in fact exist right now for this particular Series A announcement and we should probably go for the both/and approach.

Mike Haney: Ben’s going to get us onto a Baby Shark video.

Ben Grynol: Yeah. I’ll send you Matt McConaughey’s email. He’s hooked up with Cocomelon. There you go.

Tom Griffin: Beautiful.