April 22, 2022

Josh Clemente (00:00:00):

April 22nd, 2022. This week, big news, we officially closed and announced our Series A. There were a couple tranches to this raise, it’s been ongoing for some time. We learned a ton. It was a bit experimental, since we were taking advantage of recently developed SEC rules for crowdfunding. Just want to reiterate for everyone, this was a huge, huge success for the team. We’ve learned a tremendous amount, which we’re going to continue to use to keep our membership base involved and really active supporters of what we’re building so that our incentives are consistently aligned. So I just want to thank everybody who helped us challenge convention on this and who pushed us over the finish line, in particular, Zach and Miz just did a tremendous amount of behind the scenes work. We had audits, we had 1,400 new crowdfund investors, we had a huge cap table of non-institutional investors who participated, operators and founders.

(00:00:59):

This really is a massive, it’s an advantage, it’s a force multiplier for us to have this active group, but it’s a lot of work. We’re one of the few teams, I think, that leans in on this sort of thing. So we got a lot of pickup on the signal, we had a couple learning experiences with the primary exclusive article being behind a paywall, so it didn’t get as much traction as it might have otherwise, but the community and the grassroots response was really awesome and we’re going to start to amplify that today by kicking off our community investor initiatives with the crowdfund team. So just want to say congrats. This really is, it’s a landing on the staircase. We are in a great cash position. We have revenue, we have runway. It really is an important moment, so just take a few minutes to maybe celebrate that.

(00:01:49):

All right, the new blog site went live. So improved layout, improved categorization, improved discoverability, so all great stuff. I love the new design integration and the new colorways. So everybody check that out and provide feedback. I think Haney’s going to have a few more updates on that later.

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Actually this week, besides the raise, some of the biggest forward progress I would say was on strategic memos and starting to focus on some of the initiatives that we talked about last week and in the weeks prior. We’re starting to hit a few increments towards output there. So some of these are product design process memo. So Scott took a think week and put this together. This draft memo was released this week, it’s going to essentially create the foundation upon which we will be able to develop velocity on the product side. So there will be discussion, there will be implementation, but it’s really awesome to have traction in this direction. If you’re on the stakeholder list for that memo, please push that across the finish line by reviewing and providing your feedback.

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Another big one, Maz pushed us out yesterday, so draft company objectives and key initiatives memo. This is part of a larger company priorities project that we’ve kicked off in the last few days and weeks, but the goal here is to set the highest level of company objectives and link those to key initiatives that we can track similar to OKRs. From there we will continually evolve as we check off milestones along the way, but this framework is going to help us prioritize and resource projects. So as we’ve gotten to a certain scale, we just need more structure so that we all know what we’re working towards and we can row in the same direction without disagreement or ambiguity on resources.

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Another big one was, well actually we’ll take a quick aside here on product, so more memos coming. We are rolling out the Now Daily Guide and the Now Page Core Interaction Model. So through member feedback, we’ve gotten a ton of positive validation and both of these are going to 100% of new members as of Saturday and then 100% of existing members will have the option to opt in. So for those that haven’t caught the update, we’re doing this opt-in approach because it can be jarring to have your experience disrupted by a new forced interaction model, if that makes sense. So what we want is to instead draw people in by offering them the opportunity to do this on their own terms. That feels much more like being behind the scenes and being an early access member, as opposed to being frustrated that your app looks totally different and functions totally differently out of nowhere. So more progress on user research and member feedback, which is all great, and so we’re pushing ahead there.

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Chris put together a great member demographics review memo. If you haven’t seen this, I highly recommend it, it’s going to really help us guide focus on a number of company priorities. I just want to highlight two things here. Our base is 52%, 48% split female to male. In 2020, this was 20/80, so we were dramatically more asymmetric towards men and younger. Our age group has actually shifted into the 40s as our core age group, so really interesting to see how our demographics have evolved and where we’re finding resonance. This will definitely inform a lot of our primary member focus and key initiatives.

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Let’s see. We had a draft memo on experimentation, infrastructure, and process go out. So Ben and JM have been doing some great work here. This is a key initiative to support company objectives, we’re going to use the experimentation framework across essentially everything we do at this company. We are an early stage, experimentation heavy group and we need structure to help us do that effectively.

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Then finally, a really great memo from the research team, Taylor, Azure, Staddi, on research strategy and charting a path towards broader health service. So there’s a lot in this, a lot of significant decisions to be made as part of the material here. This is definitely a key initiative. We need to demonstrate how we’re making people healthier along the way, and so this will be making the rounds over the next few weeks as well. Excuse me, sorry, one second. I inhaled something.

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Okay, had some great Whole New Level episodes recorded this week, especially discussing membership. Let’s see. We have a pulse on the community development, which I think Cissy is going to dive into, so essentially how we’re setting up the key forums on social and elsewhere for our community to grow and foster new engagement. We had some really cool derivative content development work this week from Mercy and Irwin, who were able to develop I think 20 assets for TikTok, which we haven’t done much on yet, but just essentially using existing content and reformatting it for that platform, which is really great. More awesome YouTube work. I think Casey’s video from her recent podcast episode hit YouTube and has like 50,000 views already. It’s getting just rave reviews as well. So a lot of great stuff going on our platforms and then some images here from the recent app updates on the Now Page, so the daily guide and opt-in approach. Then also just tons and tons of coverage from our Series A and from members reaching out and/or posting publicly about why they got involved and what they’re excited for.

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All right, I think Matt Laye has me… There he is. Want to welcome Matt, who has been a really significant partner and benefactor to the content that we’re producing, and to in particular the research strategy and how we communicate complex topics to our membership base. So Matt’s an Assistant Professor of Physiology at the Idaho College of Osteopathic Medicine, he’s a coach for ultra running and generally an extremely, extremely competent knowledge resource for how human performance and metabolism mash together. He’s done the sort of 5/5/5 format for breaking down research topics, complex publications, to make them very approachable, very understandable, which I think is a critical miss today in our literature, is that they’re written for other experts. They’re not written for people who need the information. So with that, I want to hand it over to Matt, just to hear a few words on any topic of interest. We’d love to just hear your thoughts on what we’re building here and appreciate you joining us today.

Dr. Matt Laye (00:08:42):

Yeah, thanks Josh. I think I’ve been watching these since maybe last spring or early summer, somewhere in that time, so it’s kind of cool to be a part of one and also being a part of the Series A. I’m one of those 1,400 who ponied up a little money to get involved and really believe in the mission that you guys are out to solve, the metabolic health crisis. So a little bit about myself, during my PhD I was in a lab that was convinced that if we found the molecular marker of inactivity, we could sort of do what happened to smoking. We could have this massive public health shift and create policies that encourage people to be active. In the, I don’t know, 10 years of doing research, we have plenty of evidence that physical activity is great for us, no real smoking gun, and I really think that that’s not the right approach now and that you have to take this approach of giving people the tools individually, rather than relying on maybe public policy to shift the way people change their sort of lifestyle.

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I think it’s unlikely that government really is the solution and I really believe that getting people to think like a scientist is really important, and that’s part of what I do in sort of communicating the scientific research, is trying to get people to think like a scientist and discover the nuanced limitations that different studies have inherently and how just a single study is just a single study and not necessarily more than we sometimes make them out to be. What I really love about Levels is actually the idea that by wearing the continuous glucose monitor, you’re not just thinking a scientist, people get to act like a scientist. They get to test their own hypotheses and sort of figure out what works for them.

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When we look at these massive studies that are extremely important to the way medicine is practiced or how some of these public health policies are put in place, they’re done on huge groups of people and we look at the mean, we look at the effect sizes over that entire group. What we see inherently in all of these studies is just a ton of individual variation. So even knowing the studies, and being able to look at the studies and read the studies and understand the studies, isn’t enough to actually apply it to yourself. You have to actually then act like a scientist yourself and figure out how things are affecting your health, or as you like to say, how food affects your health. I think that that’s really where Levels is really special and that’s the advantage of the continuous glucose monitor, is it gives that continuous, immediate feedback that allows people to not only act like a scientist, but then get that sort of scientific result very quickly and act upon it.

(00:11:44):

So that’s what I’m really excited about and sort of seeing the direction that their research team is taking. I hope to be a continued part of it in whatever role. I’ve just started my role here at the Idaho College of Osteopathic Medicine, but one of the things that really excited me about being at a medical school is actually trying to talk to future doctors about what healthcare looks like in this sort of wearable, preventative, let’s not make it sick care, let’s make it healthcare. That is actually sort of the philosophy of DOs and osteopathic medicine, so I think it’s a good fit and I’m looking forward to working with the doctors here and probably sneaking in a few Levels bumps and get them involved and interested. I’ve already got my department chair on board, who’s a diabetic, she’s ready to take the leap. Yeah, thanks for having me and keep up the great work.

Josh Clemente (00:12:47):

Amazing. The communication of this complex and occasionally abstract science is, as you know through our content platform, one of our core initiatives, one of our core priorities. So almost independent of the product, if we can better communicate the science, we’re doing, I think, good. With that, just want to thank for set aside time. I would love to, we can get you into Threads. There’s a lot of people running on this team and a lot of people either already ultra runners or ultra running adjacent, so I’m sure you have some gems that you could share with the team. So we got to make sure we have Dr. Laye in our fitness chats. All right, well, thank you again for joining us on Friday. I know everybody loves reading your work and really appreciate you partnering with us and joining us today.

Dr. Matt Laye (00:13:35):

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Josh Clemente (00:13:37):

All right, jumping ahead to welcome our newest team member, Jenn Palandro. She’s from an area I just left right outside Philadelphia and is joining us as our… She’s just going to be taking on all of our copy, which I’m just going to describe it as that. There’s a ton of written work that we do, and in particular filtering this down, creating the succinct version of very complex topics, and delivering that at moments that are most critical to our members, it’s an art form. So Jenn is going to be helping us level up here. Really excited to have you, Jenn. We’d love to hear a few words.

Jenn Palando (00:14:14):

Yeah, I’m really excited. It’s really hard to encapsulate the excitement, but I’m going to do my very best. So I discovered CGM and Levels through my own personal health journey, which honestly started as a pretty vain journey and then ended up being kind of an obsession with optimizing both my skin health and also my mental health. I’m just so pumped to be here full-time, especially after knocking on the door for a few months and contracting with you all. Just the opportunity to help change the way that people manage their health through personal health data, it just means so much to me personally and the way of working and everything is just so deeply rooted in my values. So thank you for the warm welcome, it’s been Amazing to talk to everybody so far. Just so happy to be here.

Josh Clemente (00:15:08):

Yes, we’re all stoked to have you. Jenn has fully embraced our way of work and has been able to, I should have mentioned this, she’s been a huge part of our work for months now as a contractor and a consultant helping us develop the Now Page and the [inaudible 00:15:25] interaction frameworks that we have already in place. So she’s already fully up to speed and cranking on doing work for us. All right, for those of you that haven’t, please reach out to Jenn, make yourselves available, help her out through the onboarding process and through the stages of getting onboarded full-time into the other communication tools we use. Jenn, stoked to work together. Oh, we’ve got an unmuted mic.

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All right, jumping to culture. Want to highlight Mercy. So Mercy, she’s one of our earliest full-time member support team and has just hit a pretty significant milestone with 10,000 Help Scout, or I guess we could call them tickets because I think we transitioned to Help Scout while she was with us. 10,000 members she’s helped with a 95 happiness score, which is pretty Amazing, over 200 members with a 100 happiness score, which I also want to highlight, and was recently handling all social media DMs, lifetime average handle time of one minute, 12 seconds. I don’t even know how that’s possible. But just want to shout out Mercy and all the others who are constantly providing our members with an incredible experience, it’s so important and looking forward to many more leaderboard highlights like this.

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Okay, onto Riley. So Riley raised this after our most recent investor update went out. He put a note in it about connecting with other finance leaders and just sent us a note that it was tremendous, the response. He got very valuable responses. I just want to basically use this as an example to reinforce that we have an incredible investor network, it just more than doubled, or I think it tripled, and we’ll be using that investor network in as many ways as possible. We want to keep people engaged. We really mean it when we say that we have an active investor base. So if you have a need to connect with people, if you have a need to get insight or advice, we probably have someone on our cap table who is aligned, wants to see us succeed, and is willing to help out. So just want to reinforce, let’s leverage the investor network, they’re always happy to do so and they’re pretty incredible at it.

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I also wanted to highlight an example that I saw in Threads that just really I think was value additive to the recent projects we’ve been focusing on and how to essentially create constructive solutions oriented discussion upstream of disagree and commit. So Ben and JM are taking on the experimentation framework and there’s a thread about the V2 for how to approach experimentation. Ben put out some great thoughts and initial document. JM followed up with his thoughts, which just in some ways diverge from Ben’s, and used some highlights, including examples of his own work that fell short, for example, which I think is just a really nice way of creating constructive solutions oriented discussion about why something could or could not work out. Using one’s own work as the fell short example I think is just a really great example of culture just being very objective and feedback oriented.

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So yeah, just really appreciated the exchange that happened there between Ben and JM. The point of our culture is not disagree and commit on day one. It’s create solutions oriented discussion, make sure all the facts are out there, everyone can iterate towards a good solution, and then we disagree and commit. So if there’s any remaining ambiguity, the DRI makes the choice and we all move forward, but we’ve got to first get all the facts out there, all the perspectives. So thanks to the two of you for representing this. Okay, we’ve got Miz with a culture update.

Miz (00:19:12):

Hey everyone, three culture and process updates for you this morning. The first one is to keep an eye open for the culture survey results in your Threads inbox soon. In here you’ll find the full summary of the survey that we all took back in the first week in April for Q1. Each of the sections are broken out as well, so you can find all the raw results with all the numbers according to each question laid out, and then by team and tenure. Then all the raw verbatim comments as well are included here. I did my best to capture any themes and any call outs, you can find those in the boxes here. This is always really interesting and engaging to read through to see where people’s perspectives are, to see where we’re aligned, to see where there’s gaps, and to see if there’s any surprises, which there weren’t this time around, which is encouraging that we’re thinking and focusing in the right things already.

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So go ahead and take the time to read through this and would very much appreciate some thoughts down here. Last thing, there’s a Loom here, about 24 minutes to get through, which walks you through the results section by section. So I recommend that route because there’s a lot of commentary that I add that I think is somewhat helpful.

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Second thing is this proposed memo on memo process and decision making, a little bit meta. Our memo process has somewhat broken down in the final stages. So it’s really good for the ideation, for the writing, for the strategy and the thought, and then we need a good process to get those over the finish line. So this memo has some suggestions on how we can change that and specifically add steps and states between draft and active into the proposal state where there’s explicit decision meetings that have to happen to plan out the next steps and bring this over a finish line.

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So that’s broken out very specifically here in a lot of detail and I recommend everyone taking a look at this. This has been open for comment, got some positive feedback, but not a lot of active discussion or disagreement. So if you disagree with this process, you’ve got a little bit more time to speak up. Otherwise, we’ll start using this process moving forward with new memos next week. So I’ll release this to the company pretty soon and kind of make the changes to the memos fields so that we are following the steps that are outlined. So that’s the memos process.

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Then the last update we’ve got here is the DRI database, which we’ve showed before. Maz has got an update coming on OKRs and company priorities. The DRI database is going to dovetail right into that in a really cool way. So more to come on that, but for now, keep adding discreet items to this by team, by area, by function. These are also going to roll up, some of them that are relevant, into OKR views, which will be interesting. So more to come there, I’ll be working with each of the team leads to continue filling this out. Some have already started, there’s room on others, but this is going to be very valuable for having clear understanding of who’s responsible for what in the operation sense. So the same way that we use memos for the nerve center of our strategy, this DRI database should really become the nerve center of our operations to understand what’s going on and who’s doing it. That’s the intent here. That’s it for me, have a great day.

Josh Clemente (00:22:16):

Awesome update. Yeah, I want to definitely double click on the memo process and decision framework, that’s super critical to how we do work. I’m sure all of us have experience to some extent a memo that has been in some ambiguous state for some period of time, not clear if you have full buy-in or not and how to move it forward. So please, please go review that and provide your feedback based on your own real experiences. It’s really important to anchor this in experience and that will help us all kind of drive towards the best solution here. All right, can we skip ahead? All right, main thing, Levels shows you how food affects your health. No changes there. Over to JM. Yeah, over to JM.

JM (00:23:02):

Hello. On the North Star Metric, we saw daily average food loggers dip a bit this week, which was not surprising given the lower new account volume we’ve allowed in over the last four or five weeks as illustrated in the bottom left. That’s it for me, thank you.

Josh Clemente (00:23:19):

Thank you, JM. Okay, product.

Scott Klein (00:23:23):

Good morning, everybody. Missed you all last week. All right, this slide is not changing, as intended, which is great. You’ll notice in the top left we have almost all of our web developers, which is the vast majority of what the liftoff project is entailing, heading full steam into liftoff enablement. Things are going well. You’re likely going to see in the next week or two a lot of things start to emerge and almost appear like they came out of nowhere. I think this is just a window into we’re laying a ton of the plumbing right now. So every week we sort of get in and we’re sort of wiring up different parts of the site, and then we’re going to build the actual things that the customers are going to interact with on top of that.

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So in product land, we see a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes, I could probably do a better job of painting that picture for you all, but I think in the next couple weeks you’re actually going to start to see the sort of clickable, interactable pieces of the migration assistant or the new signup flow. All of that’s going to really start to emerge and it should feel really exciting and almost like it happened overnight, but everybody’s been working hard in the interim to get that done. On the right, we have the entirety of our mobile and data teams working on education insights, which is to say the Now Project. Next slide.

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I think I just covered that exact information here. Okay, new app release as of today, which is fantastic. The most previous one I think was one day ago, which is nice. So Apple’s actually getting into a really good cadence of approving our updates, which is good for us. I hope that on the back end they have some sort of trust barometer that we are consistently doing quality releases. There may be relaxing a little bit on the amount that they’re reviewing, I would hope that they have the smarts to do that. Again, thanks to David and the mobile team for being diligent here. Next slide.

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All right, new memo is out. If you want to read through it, please do. I personally need to go through Miz’s meta memo situation. But just a quick reminder, we come out with these memos not for them to be the tabernacles that we come down the mountain with, they’re supposed to be… My think week last week was intended to give me space in order to do some deep thinking and writing. We’ve talked about a lot of these concepts maybe in fragment or in pieces, but the point I think of the memo process is really to get some connective fabric or a narrative arc around the disconnected thoughts that we’ve had in various Threads. So it’s good to see it all sometimes strung together in a way that makes sense and is believable in taking us maybe a generational leap forward in the way that we’re doing something.

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So this is not meant to be gospel at first look, this is why we have draft set up at the top of it, it’s meant to foster discussion. So for anyone in the product organization or that’s interested in the product building process, if you would like to read through this memo, please do so and would love some feedback on it. I’ve already had some pretty good, substantive discussions with Sam and Alan and I hope to do some more in the next week or so. Next slide.

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All right, quick update on recruiting. I’ll do it just this one week because it was the first week that we actually started to have interviews. We have some incredibly promising candidates in our orbit. It’s just been so fun. I think I did eight intro calls this week. Really, really confident that we’re going to land on a good hire for this role. If you do have intros that you would like to make, please keep them coming because this won’t be the only PM that we hire this year and so I would love to at least get a relationship established with other people. If it’s not a good fit right now, that’s fine, it may be a good fit in the future. In a couple of the calls this week, they weren’t even looking to make a jump necessarily right away, but we had a great intro call and it was fun to do, so please keep those coming. Next slide. Oh, that’s it for me, yep, okay.

Josh Clemente (00:26:58):

Awesome. Thank you, Scott. Maz?

Maz (00:27:05):

Hi everyone. As last week we talked about, and Sam highlighted, we took on a project called Org Priorities and Design. This project has four components. Component number one is the OKR process, basically how do we set company objectives, key initiatives, and how do we roll up all the projects that we’re working on into that framework? That’s something we’ll talk about. The other three components that are going to be priorities for following weeks are going to be who are we going to build for and what are we going to build them as a component of this larger project? What are the org R and Rs and DRI process, updated DRI process? Then the last one is experimentation framework.

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So today we’ll focus on the OKRs or company objectives. So we’ve been working on this project with Miz, JM, and Lauren and published this memo for the leadership team to get alignment. So effectively what this memo does is it helps us clarify what are the actual company objectives and how do we measure success? What are the key initiatives, which are effectively a combination of many projects such as Liftoff, that support these company objectives and its key results? Then what are all the other projects that we’re working on and does it roll into a key initiative or does it standalone?

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So we set out a frameworks to how do we think about all this, which is we define the goals and anti goals in the process, and ultimately what we need to agree on is the top level company objectives, the key initiatives, and then all the projects that will roll into either the key initiatives, for example, these are some of the projects that support Liftoff, these are some of the projects that support the work priorities and design you just mentioned, and so on and so forth. Then there’s a host of other projects that have DRI that may not be part of the key initiatives, but that’s totally okay. Those are still supporting the company objectives and help us achieve the key results. So anyways, we shipped this memo to leadership and we’ll get feedback. Once we have a little bit of an alignment, to reduce churn for the rest of the team, we will publish to the broader team for feedback.

Josh Clemente (00:29:34):

Thanks, Maz. If anyone has any questions on that, you know to talk to DRI Maz. There we go. I think this is-

David Flinner (00:29:39):

Quick reminder that for conceptual projects, like Now, we’re focused on validated learnings and the number of those that we can achieve within our limited time period. So hypotheses, the learnings and then closing the loop and iterating where needed. Next slide.

(00:29:55):

So to that end, I wanted to celebrate that we have a couple of early validations from some of our experiments. As Josh mentioned, Steph’s Daily Guide V1 has been out there and we’re getting some positive feedback from members who are interacting with it. They’re aware of it, they’re using it. Then we’ve been iterating for the last several weeks on the Core Interaction model for now. At the beginning we had a lot of rough edges, a lot of complaints. In my recent interviews, those have mostly gone away and people are understanding the swiping, understanding the dismissing of the cards and the activity list. So it’s still early, but the positive signs are tilting towards these being validated experiments. We’re going to, I’ll talk about this in a bit, but going to proceed with some of the rollouts. Next slide.

(00:30:37):

Really quickly on the Daily Guide, just some highlights from member feedback. So what you’re seeing on the right is what’s launched. People are seeing the guide, they’re using it each day. They appreciate that it’s curated and not exhaustive. However, one thing to be mindful of is that for our more advanced members, the simple content may not be as relevant for them. So we should look to personalization in the future and try something out with that, with either no content or more advanced content. Next slide.

(00:31:04):

Then as a quick reminder on the Core Interaction, the meta theme for Now is that a single focused action will increase awareness of what to do next. We’ve been iterating on that for the last couple months. Next slide. This one, yeah, we’ve been iterating on it for a few months. Different features here, the swipe to dismiss, the recent activity widget. Next slide. Now we’re getting mostly positive feedback. So here’s a quote from one of our members. Oh man, it’s not working, huh? Can you refresh the video? No, that’s a bummer. Okay, that’s unfortunate, I added that over an hour and a half ago. This member kind of verbatim told me that, “Levels tells me something immediately actionable, what I need to do right now,” when she was describing how she uses Levels and was talking about the Now screen.

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So that’s just one member, but the common theme, if you go to the next slide, is that it’s mostly positive right now. People are aware of. Now they’re understanding how to use it. People are loving the Instagram style simple education versus the long form articles. Let’s see, what else is a highlight here? Finding it easy to swipe between cards. People are preferring to view the meal cards on the Now page, that full screen experience, versus going into the legacy experience. With that in mind, if you go to the next slide, we are looking to roll this out based on the early validations. There’s still more to learn, obviously we haven’t talked to our entire membership, but we’re going to be enabling Now for 100% of new members starting this Saturday. That’s why we have a zero-day app release, because I pushed the build yesterday to Apple that has this feature enabled.

(00:32:43):

As part of that, our existing members who are very used to the old app, they’re going to get a prompt, as you’re looking at this demo gif, here to try out the new screen. They’re going to see on their dashboard, this nice little card right below the graph, the call to action to try it out and then a little bit of an explanation about what to expect, and then how to give us feedback and how to enable it. So hopefully we’ll get some good feedback through that. I’m expecting that we’ll have some change aversion, but hopefully this will be a nice, easy way to ease into it. Huge congrats to everyone to get to this point. We’re still focused on learning, but this is a major step forward. Next slide.

(00:33:19):

So that’s the core part of Now, and Now is made up of several projects, that’s the core platform that we’re shipping. We have some other features, some other projects that are in flight and have been shipped and awaiting validation. So the first one is, based on early feedback we had actually from Sam and I think a member or two, they wanted more context on the meal card. So previously your meal card didn’t have the glucose graph or the in progress cards didn’t have the glucose graph, so Steven jumped in and added that back. So this is actually super cool, you should all try it. Now whenever you log food, you’ll see the constant pinned in progress graph throughout that entire two hour experience, and then as well with your score. It’s really nice. So we’ll see how that lands with numbers this week. Next slide.

(00:33:57):

After working through some of the final bugs, we finally got the in-app onboarding rolled out, which is super helpful. We’re hoping that this guided experience will… It didn’t play the whole video there. But we’re hoping that that will help more people successfully connect. You can actually go ahead, Josh, real quick. There you go, yeah, see it doesn’t keep playing, but go through all the connection setups here and then in the end you’re going to get to the final awaiting data screen. So kudos to Gabriel for getting that up. Next slide.

(00:34:37):

Two other things I wanted to mention, other projects in flight. So in development, John has been working on, well he was out this week, but he pushed out just before he left the metabolic report demo. If you click that, you can see just a quick explainer for it. John is going to pick this back up when he comes back next week, but the purpose of this is actually to help people understand a purpose with Levels. As opposed to the core of Now, which is about comprehension and awareness and what to do next, this is to instill a purpose. A hypothesis is that a takeaway like this will increase logging and then people will understand more what they should be doing at a high level with Levels. Next slide.

(00:35:14):

Unfortunately, I couldn’t capture a gif for this one, but the gif would’ve been so much better. Marillo has been working on this Interactive Glucose Education game to help you understand how sweets and non-sweets and activities affect your glucose line before you unlock the graph. Definitely try it out. Right now I would say it’s an internal validation, we’re tweaking it internally, and then I think it’ll be in a spot where we can release for member validation next week.

Josh Clemente (00:35:40):

Awesome, thank you, David. Huge stuff there. I think we’re over to Brett here.

Brett (00:35:48):

Hello friends. Happy Friday on behalf of the Design team, hope you have a blast. Alan’s out of town, so I’m going to really quickly go through three things that were pretty awesome in design this week. So first off, we got sign off, final approval on some copy, not the final images, but some copy on a project called What is Glucose? So we’re really good at long form copy, so we have 15 page blog posts and all kinds of fun stuff, but trying to get people to just really quickly understand it has been a challenge. So we took a 10-minute video, reduced it to one minute. You can follow this, I’ll link this file, but you can follow along and see as a team, we really came together, Lauren and Alan, and especially Casey at the end, to really get the copy honed in.

(00:36:37):

We have these silly images of explaining the high level of glucose and our take on it and the scientific take on it, but we do it in fun, pretty lighthearted way. So this is really great animation, which leads me to another animation. This one’s from maybe two weeks back. Sam came to me and wanted to have some fun with a week in review, kind of like Spotify does except for way cooler. So we used an API to blender, so you see this is all built as a 3D scene, even though it looks 2D. A firework flies in, it explodes. We go through that and it’s like, “Your week went like this,” and you kind of go up and down and we show the hills and valleys you rode. There’s some crazy copy in there, I’m sure somebody will replace it soon. Then we got these great celebrating even bigger wins, “This was the best day of your week,” and really just a fireworks of good times and smiles.

(00:37:44):

Yeah, and on the note of animations, in the map file we’ve started mapping out celebration moments, places we’re going to make little pops and magic. So even though this is kind of a small thing, we’ll look at, so here, a couple pop animations. Whoop, let me move this guy. These aren’t necessarily pops, they’re kind of more pushes, but do we want them really fine and kind of keep it super classy or are we thinking maybe a little bigger and noisier, fun? So I’ve got other ones going too that pop out this way, but the whole point, the reason that they’re in this, is because they’re already converted to Lottie, which is JSON, so we can drop them in and give them a test and feel it on the phone and see how it goes. On the pop note animations thing, we’ve got this fun little moment.

Speaker 10 (00:38:41):

Yep, namaste, great. Did that save somewhere? Did that record something somewhere?

Brett (00:38:49):

So this is UX interviews. Awesome Logging is what this file is named, this notion file is named. That was a moment where we got somebody to laugh and smile, which is a double whammy of goals for us. So I feel really great about all the interviews, we’ve learned a ton. The images up top don’t really reflect the current state of it, so forgive me for that. I’ve got to do the interviews and keep the updates going and keep the prototype updated, so I’m just a little bit behind on documentation. But there’s videos for each of the interviews and there’s a little thumbs up moment here to, if you want to skip all of the small talk and how they load the file. But if you scroll through, there’s also too long, didn’t watch. So if there’s anything you just want to get the notes on, feel free to scroll here, give comments. Really looking forward to this pipeline.

(00:39:41):

I worked with Mike, who’s been super helpful in getting us people. So the way it’s kind of working, hopefully going to be working, is in a fairly automated way. We’ll be doing UX interviews every week, just a few here and there, testing little moments and ideas. So really happy about that, I think that that’s going to be helpful for the company in the long run and just validating things while we go. Anyhow, yeah, thanks a lot for all the help this week. Everybody gave a ton of great feedback, lots of great conversations happened both over Zoom and Loom, and appreciate all your time. Have a wonderful weekend.

Josh Clemente (00:40:23):

Lots of awesome stuff there, particularly love that week in review, which I think ties back into what David was talking about on the metabolic report of showing people why they should log. Then this is a second touchpoint showing them the effect of that logging, so now you can see the benefits along the way and all the steps that you took to get either to a high point or why you might see a low point. Super cool.

(00:40:47):

All right, Hiring updates. New team member Hui Lu is joining as a software engineer. Super excited about this. I had a tremendous discussion with Hui during the interview process. Very excited that she’s joining the team, I think I speak for everyone when I say that. She’ll be joining on May 23rd, so a bit more time.

(00:41:06):

Then on the open roles, proceeding pretty quickly on, I believe, corporate council. Then we still are looking for software engineers constantly. Visual designer role is still open. The senior project manager, as Scott touched on, we’ve got some great talent coming in. So if you know someone, please refer them. If you are someone who’s interested in Levels broadly, visit Levels.link/careers. All right, research updates?

Jesse Lavine (00:41:33):

Okay, I’m going to take this one. So Taylor has been out this week, but myself, Staddi, and Azure have been making some good progress. Staddi drafted an Adverse Events memo this week, which is really great and it’s really important for letting the framework of how research and support are going to be working together. The website copy is going to be submitted to Advarra today, and thank you all for your feedback on that. That was really helpful. This was also a big week for IRB member facing materials, so I want to give a shout out to Braden for taking on the recruitment email for new and existing members. Also, this is seemingly small, but we had both of our protocols with different coordinators through Advarra and we were able to consolidate them, so that’s much easier for feedback processes.

(00:42:30):

Azure has been making some great progress on the Enabling Research memo, I encourage you all to check that out. Next week she’s also going to be doing a community call with Cissy to better understand our female users’ needs and perspectives on basically what it means to enable participatory research. We also had, on the note of participatory research, the IRB is basically just this big umbrella study and there are a lot of sub-studies that will come out of that. So we had a great call with Proof Pilot today, which is a contra contract research organization, and are considering working with them to handle all of the operations for all the sub-studies, which will help a lot and relieve the burden from our team with that. Just a reminder that all these updates and more are in the Research Wiki under the Research Team Updates. All the memos listed here are there as well, so if you want to check them out, I encourage you to do that. That’s it for research this week, thanks.

Josh Clemente (00:43:42):

Super awesome. Yeah, this is unlocking a massive future vector for our company of being able to conduct human research consistently, effectively, ethically. Just a ton of learning is happening here and really appreciate the team continuing to ratchet us forward on this. LJ with Athena’s update?

LJ (00:44:06):

Hey everyone, another week of updates. So from the past week, we have 12 active EAs, 22 Levels team members who delegated, and 162 tasks we were able to accomplish. Now moving forward to our new delegation for the week, which came from Paul, this is his first time delegating to the EAs and he also mentioned right here, “I’m not sure if I should include anything in the Notion Doc or if your team will be able to take care of it.” To answer this question, yes, the EAs will be able to create a process page for you to save your time. So how this works, whether it’s a non-recurring task or a recurring task, we create a process page just like this one wherein all of your preferences and the step-by-step instructions for the process is included in this page.

(00:44:51):

So right here, as an example, this is the title of the task, who we do it for, the gist of what the task is all about, the status, if it’s ongoing, deprecated, completed, the cadence, how often do we do it, whether it’s weekly, monthly, or any specific day of the month, and the partner EA or the EA who is responsible in accomplishing this task for you. Now, when you scroll down, we also put right here the original instruction, whether it’s from your Loom recording, a voice memo that you sent us, or maybe just an email. So we snip it and we paste it right here so we’ll have access to the original instruction you gave. Then under the process, this is the text step-by-step process of all your requests. Then for the process videos of the EAs, these are just videos of us bouncing back the instruction to you, just to confirm that we understand it completely and if ever that we do have questions or clarifications to raise.

(00:45:53):

So going back right here in Paul’s request, as you can see, the gist of his request right here is to research the definitions of these terms and write out a paragraph for each question. He listed down all the questions that he has and he also provided some resources that will be helpful for the EA to read about and research about. From there, he will be able to draft the paragraph as an answer to each of these questions. So that’s it for this week’s update. Before I end, I would just like to congratulate Sam and we wish you the best in your marriage. So thank you so much everybody and have a great weekend.

Josh Clemente (00:46:40):

Awesome update, a little tidbit at the end there. Yeah, the Athena team is extremely rigorous with documentation. So not only do they set up those process pages, but they also keep them updated with the recordings as they execute those. So you can always revisit, if there is a deviation between what you expected and what the output is, you can go watch the recordings, learn from it, and improve the process going forward. So it’s a super effective process, highly encourage everyone to work with Athena on delegations. All right, Chris?

Chris Jones (00:47:14):

Thanks, Josh. On the SLA Dashboard, all greens, no major changes, so nothing to really cover here. Next slide. As everyone’s aware with the series A announcement, we had all hands kind of on deck because we didn’t know the volume that would be coming in. So it was a bit of fairly quiet on support. We had one support case, which was the question of, “Can you tell me more about your [inaudible 00:47:46]?” So it actually took us by surprise that we didn’t get more volume, but that was a pleasant surprise.

(00:47:51):

On the social side, Matt pulled these slides for me this morning, so thanks Matt for the last minute, there was quite a bit of activity, specifically on Twitter. So you can see the green spiked to almost about 140,000 tweets on the day that we announced. The graph on the right is comparing the direct messages coming in, comparing the green as recent, as we did the announce a couple days ago, and then comparing that against Mark Hyman’s free giveaway from February. So kind of comparing two different type of events that were offset by about a day where Hyman actually drove more direct messages, so it was fairly quiet from a DM, but much more activity in terms of people tweeting about it. But from a support standpoint, for us it was a non-event, which is a great thing to see. Next slide.

(00:48:40):

As Josh mentioned earlier, there’s a new Snowflake Dashboard and a new memo, specifically around member demographics that feed upon each other. The memo is really just kind of trying to pull that together for the highlights. Specifically, this was originally built for Sam as he was getting a lot of questions from VCs, investors, asking around, “Who are you building this product for and how’s that changed over time?” So wanted to make sure that he had someplace, as well as all of us, to go get that quick snapshot. So as you go through it, let me know if there’s things that are missing, things you would like to see, additional kind of slices on, either on both the dashboard or the memo. Next slide.

(00:49:21):

The last one from Member Experience this week is earlier this week we had a member that emailed into support, not with a question, with just a link of a video of herself saying thank you to Levels. So it was a really powerful one that, as I watched it, I then reached out to the member to ask, “One, I would love to share this in a Friday Forum and is it okay?” She was over the moon of like, “Absolutely, feel free to share it.” So this is a really kind of great story in terms of people talking about their experience with Levels. Josh, if you want to hit play, and then everyone just kind of sit back, relax, and take it all in.

Charlotte Plinky (00:50:01):

I’m Charlotte Plinky, I’m 64 years old, and I have had an incredible journey with Levels. Being able to take that inside look at your body and pinpoint where your blood sugar spikes are and what’s causing them, whether it’s food, stress, sleep, and being able to fix them is life changing. So today I sit here out of the pre-diabetes range, my inflammation scores are down, my sleep is outstanding, and I lost a whopping eight inches around my waistline, which was a huge surprise. So I feel like I’m on the road to metabolic fitness, it feels so good to feel good, and I thank you, Levels. I am a forever fan.

Chris Jones (00:50:57):

That’s it for member experience.

Josh Clemente (00:51:01):

Chills. Awesome, thank you. I think it was Charlotte. Thank you, Charlotte, for sharing with us. Ryley?

Ryley Walker (00:51:14):

Really quick finance update this week. So week over week, our new memberships were down a little bit, which means we’re bringing in a little less cash, and so expect our Burn to be a little bit higher for April. On the right-hand side of this, you’ll notice we don’t update Burn weekly. That kind of comes out of our monthly accounting compilation and monthly financials, so you won’t see this move until May when we update our financials. Just a quick update that we’re kind of moving along track, it’s what we expected, and we’ll update the Burn and Runway in May.

Josh Clemente (00:51:58):

Awesome, thank you, Ryley. Growth, I think Tony?

Tony Milio (00:52:04):

Thanks, Josh. So quick update regarding our 10x’ing Digital Content. I brought this up a few times in previous forums. Just for some quick context, the goal from the 10x’ing Digital Content memo that Ben released a few weeks ago was to create 10 different types of content by the end of April, see what kind of metrics we get, and then double down on those types of videos for next month and moving forward. So I’m happy to update that out of the 10 pieces of content, we successfully completed five of them. The other three are actually being rescheduled for next month, just due to some scheduling conflicts. The member story with Abby is actually being shot this weekend in Virginia, so we’ll have a Snapwire videographer filming that as well. We did punt one of the projects that you can see there with the line through it, the Sugar Industry Audio Series, but everything else is either complete or currently in pre-production. Next slide, please.

(00:53:22):

However, not everything was completely successful. So out of all the types of content that we created, one of the experiments we tried was to do custom visuals for the block. What we did with this experiment was we provided a Snapwire photographer with very little direction, honestly. We just provided her with an article that’s coming out, I think next month, regarding sandwich alternatives, glucose-friendly sandwich alternatives. So just through an async Loom and just the written form of the blog, we provided that with her and we just wanted to see what kind of assets we got. Unfortunately, the assets that we received weren’t up to par with what we were thinking for these custom visuals. I think we learned some great takeaways from this for the future and why this one failed in particular. So the main number one reason is lifestyle photography versus food photography, there is a huge difference here. It is a lot easier to hire a photographer, a lifestyle photographer, in an async way compared to a food photographer.

(00:54:38):

The other element here is that just because there’s food photographers out there that are very talented, and this specific photographer was very talented, I have to say, but you also have to be a food stylist, and that wasn’t the case in this scenario. So I think if we ever proceed with photo shoots like this in the future, we’re just going to be looking into food photographers that also have a food styling background, because that’s going to be the key way.

(00:55:07):

Then the last takeaway is overall this experiment was a perfect example of why we do experiments with a small sample size of just one, of an N equals one, because if we were to do this, if we executed this with 10 across the country and received deliverables like this one, I don’t think it would’ve been great experiences. So I think this was overall definitely a failed experiment, but a lot of great takeaways for the future and a perfect example of why we always do a small sample size of just one. So that’s my update, thanks so much.

Josh Clemente (00:55:50):

Super cool, thank you Tony for running the experiment and for the update. Okay, Ben?

Cissy Hu (00:55:58):

This is me. Two updates from community this week. So on Wednesday, we emailed our crowdfund investors with two things. The first was to invite them to the Future Of AMA series with Josh, Casey, and Maz. The second was to survey them on whether they’d be interested in getting more involved with Levels beyond their investment. Engagement with the email has been positive. We sent the email to nearly 1,400 members and the open rate was 72%. We kept the event at 50 members per event, with the goal to keep them relatively intimate and to make sure the event’s not super chaotic. He sessions filled within the first day and a number of folks reached out asking to be added to the wait list. Of those 1,400 folks we reached out to, 12% of those members filled out a brief freeform interest form on getting involved with Levels.

(00:57:00):

The first event today kicks off with Josh at 11:00 AM Pacific, and Casey and Maz are hosting their events next week on Tuesday and Wednesday. The sessions are going to be recorded and distributed on social, but we’d love to have three or four folks from the team join. So if you’re interested in joining us live, reach out to me on Threads and I’ll add you to the calendar invite. With the intention of keeping these groups relatively intimate, I’ll add the first three or four folks who reach out, so feel free to send me a DM on Threads.

(00:57:29):

On the right-hand side, there is a breakout of the survey results. One of the questions was, “What community initiatives are you interested in?” I intentionally left this freeform with the hope that we get some really interesting ideas from the community and hear the quick trends that surfaced. The majority of our members are interested in helping us beta test new features, and as well as raise awareness and educate around metabolic health. [inaudible 00:57:55] of folks listed promoting levels, doing health challenges, more AMAs, book clubs, helping others cook, doing community shares, meetups, and participating in trials. Once I finish synthesizing all this data, I’ll post a more detailed recap to Threads and reach out to each of the respective teams to try and find ways to get some of these experiments off the ground. Next slide.

(00:58:22):

The second update is an introduction to the Pulse of the Community, as inspired by Chris’s Voice of the Member overviews. So the Levels community, as you all know, convenes all across the internet right now. The goal is to really get a pulse on where the activity in our community is happening each week. So right now the largest virtual homes to our community are the Levels Facebook group, Twitter, there’s a subreddit for us, and then a Apex Optimizer Precision Health Discord. The ultimate deliverable of this will be a doc every week that I’ll share out on Threads and preview a bit during forum, but if you go to the next slide, I will do a quick preview of what you’ll expect to see.

(00:59:08):

Chris covered a lot of the activity on Twitter from the Series A announcement this week. Outside of Twitter, on Facebook there was a ton of engagement with three threads with over 20 comments. There is a meetup convening in Seattle with Natalie, who is one of our most active members, organizing that. In the middle there is a discussion about whether or not it’s worth sacrificing a high daily metabolic health score for the sake of experimenting with a new food item. The results are mixed. Some people feel like it was not worth it to sacrifice your score and other people were all for it. Then the last thread is a conversation on glucose reaction to ProLon, a fasting program, and members suggesting alternatives to that fasting program. That is it for community this week, thanks.

Josh Clemente (01:00:01):

Amazing update. So excited about the engagement on the first survey and then seeing members meeting up in person, that’s kind of surreal, as well as these two themes here on the food stuff, recognizing unexpected, counterintuitive results and kind of gamifying based on our scores. That’s huge, thank you, Cissy. All right, Paul, async.

Paul (01:00:27):

Hey, everyone, got two quick updates today from my end. So the first is we took care of an issue we had with discovering our Facebook page in Facebook search. If you didn’t know, we had two pages and the old page that was created prior to the current one was being ranked and this one wasn’t ranked at all. So what we did is we unpublished the old one and changed the URL of this one to Facebook.com/LevelsHealth, and so that took care of the issue. So every time anyone would search for Levels Health in Facebook search, this page would show up. The second thing we did is we got rid of all the irrelevant tabs and also updated settings to make everything current for our brand and business right now.

(01:01:10):

The second update I have with you is we put together a sort of process and structure to our UTM parameters. So moving forward, we’ll ensure to the best we can that all external links pointing to our red properties will have UTM parameters attached to them. Doing so will help us to better track our attribution and also better segment our data in our analytics platforms. This is the first of many steps that we’re doing to kind of improve the way that we measure success and growth, and basically our growth efforts that we’re doing as a team. That’s pretty much it for me, thanks.

Josh Clemente (01:01:51):

Really cool. Love that we have the resources now to focus on these sorts of things, they’re going to pay off major dividends in the future. All right, Haney?

Mike Haney (01:02:02):

All right, this week I’m going to do something a little different. Instead of going through the articles, I just wanted to highlight a few things in the new blog design for folks who weren’t around last year when this effort kind of kicked off and maybe didn’t see the original memo of why did we do this and what were we trying to accomplish. So I would say there are two really high level goals we wanted to accomplish with this site redesign. One was to better represent visually and aesthetically the thrust of what this blog is, which is to say this is not a company blog where we sort of dump press releases or put the occasional clickbaity article.

(01:02:37):

This is really a news site. It’s a metabolic health news site that we’ve created, and so we wanted the design of it to reflect that. We want this to look much more like a Healthline or Very Well Health or even The New York Times, which was a lot of the inspiration for this, to look like something that publishes regularly, that has a lot of new content and a lot of existing content, as opposed to something that could look kind of stale. So that was a big part of what informed this design, why there’s a lot of density here, is to communicate that point that there’s a lot of content here and then within that try to create some organization.

(01:03:13):

The second big point that we wanted to get was to increase engagement. Because we have so much content, I think we’re at 261 articles now, we want to make sure that people are finding that. We’ve got so much good stuff out here and the only way it really gets surfaced is when it first comes up, in the old blog it was a small rail of new articles, or when we surface it in the newsletter and it sort of comes up that way, or maybe if it pops up in search results. What we want to do is make sure that when people land on the blog, from whatever channel they come from, and they read something that’s interesting to them, that we give them lots of opportunities to see all of the other content that we think would also be interesting or useful to them. I’ll go through that.

(01:03:54):

So I just have some arrows here pointing out some of the specific things. First of all, we named the blog. I think we’ll still probably colloquially call this the Levels blog, but what we did call it Metabolic Insights. Really that name is because that’s what we had come up with, with the podcast feed we have for all the audio article versions of this. I’ll say this was not the result of… We didn’t pay a branding firm tens of thousands of dollars to come up with this. This was a little bit ad hoc, it’s kind of an experiment. I think it’s definitely a two-way door. We can decide in the future how important a name is and if it should be something else as we expand. But I think it’s useful, if this is a publication, I think it’s useful for the publication to have a name.

(01:04:33):

Much more front and center newsletter sign up. So this is something, as the wait list goes away, which is really our primary email capture now, we want to make sure that we are giving folks lots of opportunities to sign up to get our newsletters. Our newsletters are really good, Dr. Casey and the Digest one we’re getting great engagement, so there’s a lot more places around the blog and right here on the front page to get signups. I think we’re already seeing some decent signups through this.

(01:04:59):

You see this place where it says Metabolic Health 101, so this is a rail that we’ve built in to really surface that kind of… This is the beginning of what we call the curriculum, the ability to surface, “Hey, if you don’t know anything about this space, if you came here to research granolas and then you’re kind of wondering what the hell we’re talking about with all this metabolic health stuff, here’s some places to start. Here’s some really simple first articles to read.”

(01:05:22):

Similarly, we have another right rail where it says Top Ultimate Guides. We can use that for whatever. It could be most popular, it could be start here. But because ultimate guides are kind of a hallmark of what we do, we create these deep dives, we’re trying to surface a few there. Also, the homepage then is divided into categories and we can control which categories appear on the homepage and in what order they appear. Then within each category, it’s a chronological listing of everything that has just been published there. So again, I hope this helps communicate, A, that we publish in a lot of different categories. We talk about nutrition, but we also talk about sleep, and we also talk about weight loss, and we also talk about women’s health, and you can see that with a quick scroll down the blog and hopefully find something that is interesting to you. Next slide.

(01:06:06):

Then on the article pages, some really nice updates here. So just starting on the left side, some really small things. We have the ability now to say when an article is updated, this is useful for SEO. It’s also really useful for people coming to the site to realize that a lot of this is pretty current. We will be probably later this year going back and updating all of our articles with new research and making sure everything’s up-to-date, so that’s really useful. We got rid of the old, placeholdery audio version. It was kind of a quick fix at the time when we started doing audio articles to embed an audio player. The web firm came up with a really smart solution, which was like, “Hey, you guys already have a Spotify feed of this stuff. Let’s just put the Spotify player.” A huge shout-out to Bea and the Athena team, which went through all 260 articles this week and did the change necessary in the backend to highlight these Spotify players and get rid of the old kind of janky audio player. Much better share tools.

(01:07:05):

Then the thing I spent the week doing is, on the side of almost every article now you’ll see related articles. Here it says More Metabolic Menus. This is a manual process. We decided not to do this in an automated way. You could set it up by tag or by category, but we really wanted to be thoughtful about it, and at the cadence we publish I think we can, so that when you land on a particular article, we’re really trying to surface what are three or four or five other articles that you might really like. I think that’s a really key part of helping to increase engagement, to recirculate people more.

(01:07:39):

Then finally, within the articles themselves, we’ve also had kind of a placeholder way of doing related articles, which is that I typed “Related article,” colon, and then paste in a link. What the web team came up with here is two great new interstitial formats for surfacing related articles. So it looks designed, it looks nice, it looks like the kind of stuff you’d normally see for ads, but we’re going to use it to promote other articles, podcasts, etc, newsletters, things like that here. So that’s a remaining task, is to go through and start adding these in, in a thoughtful way, throughout all of our back articles. We’ll definitely lean on Athena to help with that as well. But I think these are going to be really big unlocks for getting people to just spend more time on the site, which is really one of our primary goals with this.

(01:08:22):

The last thing I’ll say is this is very much a work in progress. So please, as you dive in, we’ve gotten some great feedback from Sam, from Alan, from others this week, please feel free to shoot me any notes about things that are broken or things that could be done better. We’re working through the punch list now and we’ll just kind of keep iterating on this. So that’s it for content.

Josh Clemente (01:08:44):

Looks amazing. Thanks Haney, and really love hearing about all those background optimizations. That’s awesome. Okay, we’ve got about 18 minutes here. I don’t think we’re going to get through everyone and we’re going to have to do a hard stop because I do have to prep for the community event after this. So what we’ll do is we’ll just work our way through the participant list and then, however far we get, we’ll say our goodbyes and we will pick up where we left off on next week, or we’ll try to.

(01:09:12):

So I think I kick off. I’m super excited about the Series A, having all that locked in and particularly unlocking this massive new tranche of invested members and believers is tremendous. Then on top of that, I think the work that we’re putting into the company level objectives and priorities and decision making, I’m very excited about it, and mostly for getting across those hurdles and moving forward. Personally, I would say I am not excited about having a totally thrown out back right now and looking for some PT recommendations. If anyone in Austin has anyone to point me to, please do so. All right, Ben?

Ben Grynol (01:09:59):

Stoked that Jenn is here and super stoked on getting the blog and website and all that shipped. That’s just such a cool thing because it’s been a long process. Personally, the Acquired crew, hat tip to them, they sent a nice little swag package of love and it was really nice surprise to get that yesterday.

Josh Clemente (01:10:19):

Awesome. Azure?

Azure Grant (01:10:25):

Sorry for the delay. I think my personal and professional one are kind of the same. I’ve been having a ton of fun with the Levels dataset and comparing it to a couple old data sets of people with Type 1 and some online open data sets of non-users without diabetes with CGMs. It’s really cool starting to see a little bit of how people stabilize their glucose just by using Levels, maybe without doing anything else, seems to be a small but real effect, and seeing some other cool stuff that I’ll share next week, so really excited about that.

Josh Clemente (01:10:58):

Excited for that as well. By the way, if you want to follow along and not be surprised by where you are on the list, you can just click the participants button at the bottom of the Zoom call and it’ll pop up the list according to what I’m reading. So Caitlin, you’re up.

Caitlin Shure (01:11:13):

Hey, so Levels-wise, really excited to have Jenn here as another word person. I know how hard it is to make this type of stuff brief, so I’m sure I’ll be continually impressed by what you’re doing. Personally, I’m just thrilled to have a home chore weekend ahead of me, which I haven’t had time for in a while. We have a new radiator cover to assemble, big stuff like that. So yeah, that’s what’s going on over here. Also, the weather is finally nice again, so great.

Josh Clemente (01:11:52):

Love to hear it. Good luck with the radiator cover. Chris?

Chris Jones (01:11:59):

On the Levels front, just the incredible progress on all fronts. I know we talk about it’s hard to keep up with what’s going on across all of Levels, and I’m even having a hard time keeping up with what’s going on with just the app. The number of changes coming at it is just incredible to see, so big hat tip to David and the team for all the work on the Now page, it’s incredible and excited for things coming. On the personal side, this weekend they are starting to take down our big trees that are hanging over our house, so they’re bringing in a hundred-foot crane. So I’m excited to basically sit and watch in awe of please don’t come crashing through my house, please don’t crash through my house. So that should be fun.

Josh Clemente (01:12:45):

Cranes are the coolest. Galit?

Galit Lukin (01:12:51):

I’m a levels front, excited to continue ramping up on everything going on, although everything’s changing, so it’s a really cool time to be getting into things. Personal front, it’s the last weekend in Asheville, so we’ll be spending it outside hiking, golfing, good weather.

Josh Clemente (01:13:15):

Awesome, enjoy it. Hao?

Hao Li (01:13:15):

Ooh, that was fast. Yeah, so Levels-wise, really excited. It’s really interesting to see the demographic update and really interesting to learn about the insight of our members’ group base, like age group, different stuff. Yeah, it’s really nice. Personal-wise, just getting ready for the camping season, I’m going on my first one next week.

Josh Clemente (01:13:42):

Very cool, enjoy. Jenn?

Jenn Palando (01:13:47):

Yeah, just really excited to be here and just trying to be a sponge and soaking up all the information. Personally, there’s a kid’s birthday party this weekend, which means there will be a bouncy house. So that’s how I’ll be getting my workout in this week, during the one-hour adult bounce.

Josh Clemente (01:14:08):

Love it, enjoy. Jesse?

Jesse Lavine (01:14:12):

On the Levels front, I’m super excited to be working closely with the research team. I feel like I’ve said this to a bunch of people, but I’m learning way more about public health working at Levels than I am in my Master’s of Public Health degree, so it’s nice to have a closer proximity to the research. On the personal front, I am finishing up a bunch of final projects and exams for my semester this week, so I’m really excited for that to be over.

Josh Clemente (01:14:42):

Congrats, at the finish line here. Matt?

Matt Flanagan (01:14:48):

Yeah, Levels-wise, the Series A was awesome to see the response on Twitter. You could feel the power of the operator round and it was really cool to see and be on the other side of that. Personally, really nice day down here by the shore. I’m walking with my dog, sorry if I came off mute a little earlier in the meeting, but going to enjoy the warm weather down here.

Josh Clemente (01:15:15):

Awesome. Matt Laye, if you’re still with us, feel free to jump in.

Dr. Matt Laye (01:15:21):

Sure. I wanted to say, I think the blog is looking fantastic and the work that Haney does is something that always excites me with Levels and it’s been an absolute pleasure working with him on some of the content side. I’m excited I get to do my first lectures next week, talking about the respiratory system.

Josh Clemente (01:15:39):

Nice, congratulations. Maxine?

Maxine Whitely (01:15:44):

Yeah, my levels and personal are blended. I’m loving to hear the voice of the members, that video is amazing. Also, my dad just ordered his first Levels CGM, so he’s my little user study at home, which has been really fun.

Josh Clemente (01:15:59):

Love that. Many of us have done UX research with our parents so far, they’re like my target demographic in my brain. Maz?

Maz Brumand (01:16:11):

Levels-wise, so much to be excited about. There is great work on product focus broadly, just can’t name one, so all of it is fantastic. On the personal front, going to do kids camping with my three-year-old daughter’s preschool, so we’re going to be up there tonight and tomorrow, so should be fun.

Josh Clemente (01:16:33):

That’s awesome. Mercy?

Mercy Clemente (01:16:38):

Professionally, the Series A was just super exciting, just really awesome. Personally, I am hoping that it gets sunny in Austin so I can spend more time outside this weekend. That’s really it.

Josh Clemente (01:16:54):

[inaudible 01:16:54]. Mike D?

Mike Didonato (01:16:56):

Am I last?

Josh Clemente (01:16:56):

No.

Mike Didonato (01:16:59):

No, okay. Yeah, I guess plus one everything. Then with the Series A, it’s super cool. But I think just zooming out and thinking about all the things we achieved last year, it just makes me really excited with all the team growth, the things we’ll achieve this coming year, and the value that we’ll deliver to members. Super grateful.

Josh Clemente (01:17:26):

Nicely said. Mike Haney?

Mike Haney (01:17:30):

On the Levels side, I would call out both the Series A and the blog designer, obviously huge projects and highlights for me in the week, but I just want to call out all the other folks who contributed to that. The Series A went through an awful lot of hands, Zach, one, with a really careful read, Maz and JM with super careful reads of that press release. It’s very short, but a lot of effort goes into making sure that is phrased and worded correctly at this stage of our company, and so that was great. On the blog redesign, Ben and Alan were huge helps in just doing really rapid iteration and it is just infinitely better for their input on that, so that was super exciting.

Josh Clemente (01:18:07):

Yeah, definitely. Sonya?

Sonja Manning (01:18:13):

Professionally, just loving the onboarding process, so impressed by the thoughtfulness of this entire team, learning a ton. So thank you all for one-on-ones, for short pings, for everything you’re doing. Also, for Mike D, making my Levels hat dreams come true. I’ve been trying to get this Levels hat for I don’t even know how long, so thank you Mike for making my hat dreams come true. Personally, I’m heading to Ann Arbor next week for my partner’s graduations, so it’ll be nice to be back in Ann Arbor for a weekend.

Josh Clemente (01:18:43):

Very nice, enjoy. I love Ann Arbor. Steph?

Steph Coates (01:18:48):

I was about to say I, Mike, I’m waiting for, I’m still waiting for my Levels hat. Sonja, you’ve got to fill me in on how you did that. This week was exciting mostly for the member feedback for the Now screen, and I’m super excited that we’re going to be rolling that out to 100% of new members going forward. Personally, I set up a standing desk outside, so now I feel like I have the best of both worlds of my back’s not being killed, but I’m really enjoying the warm weather here. I’m going to be out next Friday as the start of my Q1 week, but I’m going on my first backpacking trip for the year and I am so, so excited, and so I’ll be sure to post pictures once that’s done.

Josh Clemente (01:19:25):

Definitely. Standing desk looks great, I’m hopeful for some sun so I can do the same. Tom?

Tim Griffin (01:19:34):

Yeah, I’m going to go with the Series A. I think sometimes, to me, fundraising announcements can feel superficial in terms of being a big company milestone, but it’s a really fun opportunity for me to get an updated read on our relationship with the world and how people perceive us. I was astounded at the number of texts and LinkedIn messages I got from, certainly a lot of people I don’t know, but a lot of people within my network who were saying things like, “Wait, you work at Levels? I didn’t realize that.” Almost like we’re, I don’t even know, like we’re some huge company. I got a number of messages from people saying, “Great progress. I’m seeing Levels on people’s triceps all over the place.” So hearing that regularly, my response is always like, “You did? You have?” I just can’t believe it. Then personally, I’m in Scottsdale with my parents and my brother getting in some warm sun and family time.

Josh Clemente (01:20:32):

Super cool. Yeah, I love that they’re associating with tricep positioning, that’s a nice aspirational branding move there. Tony? We got through everybody.

Tony Milio (01:20:43):

Wow, that’s awesome. I don’t know where to start. This was a pretty amazing week. Plus one to the Series A announcement, seeing the blog redesign, seeing that update earlier about the UTM parameters for tracking attribution. I’m super into that stuff, so it was really awesome hearing that as well. Then obviously welcome, Jenn. I had a spotlight interview with Jenn this morning, so I’ll be releasing that shortly after this call.

Josh Clemente (01:21:22):

Awesome, can’t wait to read it. Okay, well, so in the few minutes we’ve got left, actually we do have a post cafe on the schedule, but I think we’re going to make some changes. Yeah, Mike’s saying-

Mike Didonato (01:21:37):

Yeah, Josh-

Josh Clemente (01:21:37):

No cafe.

Mike Didonato (01:21:37):

Cafe should be deleted, no cafe.

Josh Clemente (01:21:41):

So no cafe. We’re going to make some changes probably to the Friday schedule for a few reasons, one of which is we’re going to have an increasing number of team members in the UK and other time zones, so we’re going to try and find a more compatible time zone. Secondly, the timeframe is a little bit long, I think. We’re at 90 minutes now, we’re kind of consistently filling out, so we’re going to have some updates coming down the pike. So just want to get that out there for awareness. We’ll definitely make sure that we’re optimizing for two things, being able to catch up on what’s been happening, the buzz in the company outside of your own function, making sure that that’s succinct and helpful. Then also making sure there’s, either separately or integrated, touchpoints with the team. This sort of live personal interaction I think is super critical for so many people.

(01:22:24):

So just wanted to drop that in there. Look out for some updates this next week and we’ll experiment. If you have thoughts, please send them to myself and/or Miz and Mike, we’ll really appreciate that. Then otherwise, congrats on the A week. Congrats to Jenn, thanks for joining us. We’re super stoked. Yeah, onward. Looking forward to doing the community call shortly. Have a great weekend.