Josh (00:00):
All right. Let’s go ahead and kick it off. Welcome to Friday Forum, April 21st 2023. Quick reminder on the purpose of this meeting, I think we’re all up to speed on this now, but the goal is to sync across the various functions in our organization and just understand recent achievements that are happening across the company. As a remote async team we don’t always get to see the wins, and there’s a joy of missing out that we have to abide by during the week, so this is our opportunity to catch up with each other. It’s not the deep business metrics meeting. It’s also not the main social connection conduit.
(00:36):
All right, so this week on Beta 2, so our objective with Beta 2 is to launch in early May, first week of May. We currently are at about 66% of our signup goal with a roughly 20% blended conversion rate. That’s from checkout starts through completions across all of the various channels that people find the signup. We’re trending towards the goal. Again, we’re trying to hit 1,000 for that. And the conversion rate, to benchmark our current product like the CGM product is the conversion rate is roughly 4%. This is not apples to apples. We don’t yet have the same groups making their way. We probably have a higher intent audience who are finding their way to this beta checkout. But the point is the numbers are looking pretty promising. And until we really open the gate, we won’t have a direct comparison.
(01:30):
On the end side for Beta 2, still on track with build, so the guidance pod is working on continuous onboarding. The goal is that you don’t have to all start simultaneously, but instead it will be a kind of revolving door with new people joining and starting a fresh experience with other people who are well on their way with the guidance.
(01:48):
And then the Readiness pod is optimizing the non-CGM to CGM experiences. This is, we’re calling it hybridizing, but there are a lot of surfaces in the product. You can see one here like the zone scores, where whether or not you have glucose data coming in today it’s a fundamentally different experience. And so there’s a lot of great work going on to make that equivalent or at least the experience seamless between those two. So, that’s great. And then Geniusee is also stepping into support on mobile features, so we’re kind of ramping up our involvement with Geniusee as a contract engineering team. And also in the context of this build week where a lot of work is being done we also had record engineering metrics across like cycle times, repeat times, deploy times. So, the team is just humming along as it has been the case for some time now, which is awesome.
(02:38):
A quick update on reviews cycle. You probably saw a few weeks ago, we’ve been talking about this for a little bit, but we’re going to shift to two twice annually performance reviews, the first cycle starts next week. Nicole has been releasing a bunch of info in comms about this, so look out for more on that. We’re going to block off calendar time for people to be able to really make the space to do this review cycle. So, just putting that on the radar. And then Lauren has a new draft business model in pricing strategy that’s in review, so we’ve got some work going on there to set the targets and the context for what this new product … Where it fits inside of the overall market and what our goals should be in terms of pricing and positioning, et cetera.
(03:20):
On the beta app, so we’re currently seeing an average time in the app of about three minutes versus one minute for the classic app. This is just kind of not a finely tuned heuristic, but it is a good heuristic to think about in terms of how much engagement is going on. That’s a three x improvement. A lot of that has to do with the more immersive content. You have video to watch. You have a lot of how-to content that we’re building. There’s just a lot going on there that the classic app did not have, so that’s all a good sign.
(03:49):
We’ve got a synthetic glucose demo, so there’s going to be a lot more on this project coming soon. This is just a very early teaser, but the idea here is using basically community data to provide somebody an experience that would simulate having CGM data. Now, it’s not going to be specific, it’s not going to be predictive of your personal blood sugar levels. It’s going to show you how specific food types and food logs tend to show up in the community data. So very early, we’re definitely going to need the internal team to test this, but really cool and I’m really excited to see us activating our dataset like this.
(04:23):
And then we’ve got multi-part stories, recipes, a ton of how-to content across better lunches, ordering out sugar cravings, all the stuff that our members are carrying about and dealing with daily. So, a lot of stuff going on in the app. We had an article on the content side on epigenetics and aging. This was David Sinclair’s. It was reviewed by David Sinclair, so I think we’re probably one of the only outlets that is able to have the direct from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, on our blog articles, which is great.
(04:48):
And then we’ve got a ton of guides content, so that’s a major focus for the content team. We’re also doing some growth work on content, so improving email and newsletter access. We’ve got new sort of sidebars on the blog to surface sign up content. And potentially even get people into a checkout flow. A lot of work going on there. And then we had a great whole new level episode coming out with Rob and Dom, who’s on the call right now and Rob a very common guest. Can’t wait to listen to this one, I haven’t yet. But this is really awesome. This is the first example I think of two of our supervisors kind of bringing a direct conversation to the whole new Level crowd.
(05:28):
All right, smoke testing. There’s a great memo on smoke testing, what this is, what we’re doing with it, what the intentions are. Our first smoke test, which you can see some visuals here, some beautiful visuals coming together is ready for development. The shaping work is done. The goal here is to test positioning of our first monthly products. Rather than having an annual membership positioning, we’re both testing a landing page that provides monthly orientation and also tests willingness to pay, all the way through to a checkout intention. Meaning we will not have people checking out just yet with the smoke test, but it will test that with a very similar call to action. Someone would click a button that basically says, “Yes, pay this amount.”
(06:10):
It’s about as far as we can go without building the end-to-end experience. And we can rapidly iterate an A-B test with this sort of thing. And the goal, again, it’s to inform people, provide them with a starter kit, with a bundle kit and really learn about the end-to-end intention. We also moved the informed consent for our ongoing IRB to post-purchase, because it’s quite confusing right now, right in the midst of the sign-up.
(06:31):
And then we’re updating all of our email leads with new geo data to understand where they are internationally. And then finally some big partnerships promotions going live this week. We had Dr. Becky released a new video who’s doing quite well. We’ve got an ad going live on Huberman and Hyman’s longevity newsletter, which you can see here. And then we’ve got, let’s see, last stuff. Beta 2 partner conversion tests. Austin is talking about Beta 2 and we’re putting our first partner links out there for the Beta 2 sign up. And so we’re testing this as an activation path for the new product and for beta specifically. That’s really awesome. Did I missed anything here? I think we got most of it. Yeah, we got a shout-out in Men’s Health, but I think that’s the second time for the same list maybe.
(07:17):
Okay, great stuff. With that, I want to welcome a very familiar face here on the Levels Friday Forum, but we haven’t been able to really highlight Dom in a long time. Dom D’Acostino is one of our treasury advisors. He’s the principal investigator on our general population CGM study. He’s been a part of what we’re doing here for going on three years probably, very long time. Kind of from the beginning. And I am not sure how many people have the background, but Dom’s work was the thing that got me thinking about CGM in the very first place. He’s been working on the connection between cognitive health, neuroscience, and metabolic health for a very long time.
(08:01):
And some of his work on central nervous system toxicity and how the ketogenic diet can be protective, or at least ketones in the blood can be protective of certain central nervous system toxicity events was the first study I ever read that made me think twice about diet and about my diet and that led me to testing CGM. I want to personally thank Dom for that work. Just absolutely love having the opportunity to work with you, and I’m excited to get a little update from what’s going on in your world, what you’re excited about with Metabolic Health?
Dom (08:29):
Thank you, Josh. Thanks for the intro. Can you guys hear me okay? Yeah. Okay, great. Well, being a Levels advisor has really been amazing experience from many different angles. Josh, I’m so thankful that you reached out to me. I think we met at a CrossFit event, was that, a while back and yeah, I mean so much has happened since then. I mean, with me of course, but with the company and it’s been amazing to see how such a top tier company can grow and thrive and create a culture for all the people involved. And the team synergy here just, I mean, this Friday Forum for example is just amazing to see this. And I’ve not been part of any kind of business entity that has been able to do this and maintain it for years.
(09:20):
Being able to partner with Levels has been amazing opportunity for me, because it has helped research on many different fronts. We have, I think six peer-reviewed publications coming out. We’ve got about three or four already published, a couple in the pipeline, a couple being reviewed that are CGM-related, Levels Health supported in a variety of different ways. The university really has a high bar for allowing me to be an advisor for different companies, right? And I think they took a look at Levels and they were impressed with it, and especially from the context of they were research focused, they were … The education outreach was top tier, and also the people on your advisory board were such esteemed people that that played a big factor. Every year I have to submit an approval for getting being an advisor and typically most companies do not meet the bar for that.
(10:20):
So, I thank you for being such a top tier business entity that really prioritizes education outreach and it actually fulfills being able to do research with Levels in a variety of different ways. Including, and I’ll get to the IRB study that we have kind of ongoing. Fulfills the education assignment that I have for the medical school. I have at least five to six different medical students and they’re at the top of the class, involved in CGM studies, involved in the Allison Hull study, which led to about a half different abstracts that were published at different conferences, Experimental Biology, American Medical Association, Metabolic Health Summit, which I helped co-host.
(11:13):
There are, I’ve gotten four or five summer fellowships for the students to work on Levels-related CGM projects, which is amazing. I’ve been able to sort of mesh it and dovetail it into my medical education. And it’s also, I think most importantly it’s teaching, I get an opportunity to teach about this in scholarly concentrations at USF Medical School. And it’s teaching them about the value of CGM and Levels and the app and using this in a non-diabetic population, which I think is amazing. And also, I have to mention just the networking and the public outreach that you guys do through the blog and my opportunity to be able to be part of the podcast and to be guest hosting the podcast. And then the podcast that I get on I love the opportunity to be on somebody else’s platform and to talk about Levels and to talk about CGM and the insights there, and just to meet with different people.
(12:11):
Peter Attia’s brother was here a week or two ago, and thank you. Big thanks to Mike DiDonato for setting him up with a CGM. And we both, we’re comparing our CGM data and things, so he’s a huge fan of CGM, of course, trying to get Peter Attia on board, which he is on board with CGMs, his latest book Outlive really talks about that. Yeah, and I think just really what I’m so impressed with is just the team at Levels, and there’s so many people, Josh of course, and then Casey, Ben and Tom and Mike and Stati and Azure has been amazing for setting me up to be able to get the data, the Dexcom data set that is now part of two or three projects or student projects that we are working on. And looking at 24-hour CGM averages, looking at the fasting period, the feeding window, males versus females, age differences, CGM age differences. There’s so many different parameters that we’ll be looking at.
(13:17):
And I’m excited to get my students involved into this research and to really promote the idea of using this in a non-diabetic population primarily for metabolic optimization, health performance, cognitive performance. And I think yesterday I had two or three calls that were people that were connected with me because I think they saw me associated with Levels. And one was an investment group that was investing in different startups related to health tech. You know what I mean? You guys are really casting a very wide net and catching the attention of so many people. Research scientists, investors, and also I had two patients that I talked to yesterday that we’ll probably be using Levels and getting CGMs on them for metabolically managing their disorders. A lot of patients that reach out to me, I’m not a medical doctor, I do not give medical advice, but I steer them in a direction and the direction usually involves using a CGM. Yeah, I mean, thank you so much.
(14:30):
I mean, you guys have really … Partnering with you has changed the direction of my research into the direction that I wanted to go, which is moving the science to human application. And we have a lot of ideas and we’re incorporating CGM into a lot of research proposals we’re writing now for the Department of Defense, for NASA and for other 501(c)(3) foundations and some philanthropy organizations too.
Josh (14:57):
Awesome to hear. Yeah, I mean I would love to go for an hour on each of those subtopics, but it’s just amazing to be able to work together and to advance, do our part to kind of advance the distribution of the work you’ve already been doing for a very long time. And suffice to say, I think your Instagram was one of the first to really catch the attention of people who are thinking about metabolic fitness and your personal tidbits about how you were living a ketogenic lifestyle, but still being jacked and not just being one of those biohackers who’s all about the mental side of it. I think there’s a ton that you’re doing both on the lifestyle side and obviously on the science side to compel people to try this out for themselves and be excited about it, which is quite unique.
(15:44):
I just want to say thanks for being a partner, not just on the work that we’re doing on the research, but also on the distribution and getting onto shows like the Drive with Attia and Joe Rogan’s podcast and the biggest platforms out there. You’re one of the major mouthpieces, which is awesome.
Dom (16:01):
Thank you, Josh. Appreciate it, yeah.
Josh (16:02):
Yeah.
Dom (16:03):
I have a talk coming up in Singapore too in about a month, and one of the things that they want me to talk about is Levels and CGM to a bunch of business people in Singapore. I think that’ll be a great opportunity too to advance the conversation on that front.
Josh (16:20):
Amazing. Well, Dom, where would you … Just briefly, where would you like to see us focus that you don’t see us focusing quite enough yet, whether that’s on the product or on some future vertical or something?
Dom (16:34):
Yeah. Well, I think you guys are already building the app in a way. I’ve seen the app evolve in a way that makes it more engaging. And from my perspective, from the data that you guys have shared with me and also the data from the research that we’re doing. What I see is that people get on using a CGM and then that gives them incredible insight over the first three to six weeks. And then the use starts to taper off. But they’re not engaging with the app as much, probably because they learn so much within that first month or two months that they feel that they don’t need the app all the time, which is super important. The Levels Guided plans, the beta version coming out for the Levels Guided plans is spot on. Because I think some people will want to use a CGM upfront and then be able to use the Levels platform to give them more information.
(17:30):
And then once a year or twice a year or maybe a couple of times a year, they’ll jump back on a CGM to test things. I’m always testing things. Every week I’m testing something, so having a CGM is sort of invaluable for that experience. But I think, I mean I was going to say just making the app, doing what you guys are already doing is making that more engaging to engage the person, create that community. But I think that’s where you’re going really with the Levels guided plans. And then also, CGM becomes incredibly exponentially more insightful when you couple it with other biomarkers. The development of different sensor technologies or just doing, whether it be phlebotomy or blood spot card or saliva or whatever, to take periodic measurements of insulin, HbA1C and other things to give you further insight into what the Levels data, the implications of the Levels data and to make that actionable. Everything I just mentioned there, you guys are already doing in one form or another-
Josh (18:36):
We forget reminders, though.
Dom (18:37):
… data version. Yeah, so I can’t, it’s hard for me to critique what you guys are doing. You’re just on it in so many different directions.
Josh (18:45):
Love it. Well, so as you all just heard, Dom and his team are digging into our IRB data set for the first time, starting to pull together some associations and research questions essentially that we may be able to answer with that data set as we continue to build it, which is really exciting. And then on that topic of adding additional markers, we didn’t talk about this in the recent achievement slide, but we are on track with our metabolic panels. We hit our targets for the … since launch of Labs V two in terms of conversions and number of people. Those were very conservative. We will continue to grow those. And we also want to make sure that the biomarkers that we’re pulling in are the right ones.
(19:25):
We also have piloted the, what do you want to call it, lab visit version, which is quite a bit cheaper. It allows people rather than having a phlebotomist coming to the home, it allows them to go to a lab core location. Lots of stuff. Good reminder that it is really important that we don’t locally optimized just around glucose curves. We also have additional markers, and as we work towards that it’s going to be very exciting to see how it improves people’s ability to understand their data and use it. Dom, thanks so much. I just really appreciate always having you on the call, and really glad we could highlight your work again here and we’ll do many more of these, I’m sure.
Dom (20:03):
Appreciate it. Thank you, Josh.
Josh (20:04):
Thanks, Dom. All right, quick culture aside. So, is Miles on the call? Anyway, I’m going to hit up Viktor and … Sorry, my computer’s glitching here. Okay, Viktor and Azure. Viktor has been crushing it on designs for the new experience. There’s a ton here. We touched on hybridization for example, but there’s a lot of really difficult design problems wrapped into having a non CGM and CGM experience both available through the same app. And to recognize the different surfaces that people are going to be interfacing with and the fact that they can be in one of those two states, or both of them at some period in their experience. That’s really tough.
(20:42):
I don’t have the skill set that Viktor does, let’s just say that, so I couldn’t do the work he’s doing. But shout out to Viktor and shout out to everyone on the design side who’s working on meshing these two experiences really nicely. And then Azure on the content side has been doing a tremendous job. She’s getting tons of shout-outs for the work on scripts and looms to help explain what we’re putting into the app in a very intuitive way, in a very approachable way. And it also seems like she’s taken a really awesome role in delegation and scaling herself through which we always want to highlight that some, it seems like ancillary work to our main work, but if you can scale yourself, that is the main work, right. You’re able to do more yourself personally. Yeah, love to see that. Thanks both of you.
Maziar (21:28):
Maybe, Josh, I can just add a little bit-
Josh (21:30):
Yeah.
Maziar (21:30):
… to both of those. Big shout out to both of Viktor and Azure. I think on Viktor side, he’s not only able to handle really complex work, but he’s doing it in a really short amount of time and he’s converging these two experiences and it’s really, really hard work. Two experiences that seem very different to feel the same. And you interchangeably can go between a CGM and no CGM and make it all be delightful. Big, big shout out. This is really hard work that we just makes them look [inaudible 00:21:59]. And hope that when we launch this everybody can play with it and also give feedback. And I think on Azure’s side, there’s a lot going on here. There is a lot of depth of content. This is also very complex work and being able to deliver things that people will learn from and enjoy and engage with. Again, very complex work and both of them, they’re just making it look [inaudible 00:22:21].
Josh (22:23):
Love it. All right, onward. Over to you Nicole for Team Not Family.
Nicole (22:29):
Thank you. I’m excited to talk about this one. It is an axiom that’s very near and dear to my heart. Because I was very much a proponent of calling our company and ourselves a team, or I’m sorry, a family for a long time. And then I saw the way that evolved and some of the really serious downstream effects that came from that. I wrote a memo, so I’ll share that link here in case you didn’t get a chance to read it. It shares a little bit more. But the takeaway from that experience was that our talent density really suffered, our collective work-life balance really suffered. Which family do you belong to, your actual family or your work family? Departures felt really strange in an act of betrayal. Couldn’t leave a family, why would you do something like that?
(23:21):
And I think behind it all there were really the best of intentions, but even with those good intentions, that mindset created a recipe for manipulation in a way that felt really unhealthy and inadvertently took advantage of teammates and their work. I think that the term family is misleading, an inaccurate way to describe the bonds and engagement we want to have as a company. And I think that we can do better. And so, that is why we lean on the comparison to a sports team and a professional sports team. Josh, if you could jump to the next slide?
(23:59):
This is the classic Netflix slide that talks about this particular axiom, and a team, not family is fundamentally about performance. We’re here to achieve a mission, a really big one, and work toward a very broad goal and purpose. Families don’t usually have that sort of end mission or goal. You don’t usually talk about, “Okay, how was your Thanksgiving dinner?” Or you might, and that’s totally fine too.
(24:25):
But with the Netflix axiom here that we’re borrowing, this is about cultivating a team where everyone is a star in their position. And with that we can work and do amazing things. And this ties into a lot of other values, of course, there’s a lot of intermixing of values. And so treating people like adults, making sure we’re giving quality feedback and expecting a level of maturity and openness and honesty, all of this comes into play. But that doesn’t mean we treat each other in a cold, dispassionate manner. We of course want to treat each other, and from the company’s perspective we want to treat our team and our employees in a very good way. We want to do the right thing and balance that with all of the interests that come with running a company. And sometimes those interests might be competing, and so it’s working through the nuances of that.
(25:20):
But maintaining a high talent density also means that there has to be a match for both sides. The most talented individual might not be the right match for our phase of startup life or startup existence, or they might not be fully aligned with our core values, or they might not find remote async work the right way for them to work. And that’s totally fine and okay, but we have to have the open and honest conversation about that and individuals need to have the introspection to know what’s working for them. And we need to be able to have those conversations too. And when you’re leaning on each other as a family, that can be really difficult and a little bit more complex.
(26:03):
The other piece of this is that Team, Not Family doesn’t remove the idea that there’s strong bonds, professional sports teams, elite special ops teams. Those groups were performance in achieving a common mission where that is the baseline for their association and that the reason they’re together, those people often have the most strong bonds and lifelong friendships.
(26:28):
And so that is what we’re looking for as well. Forging that in the fire, so to speak. We support one another, we cheer each other on, we celebrate individual and collective wins, but at the same time we hold each other to account and we strive for more and we push for more and better. We also take time to surprise and delight and care for each other during hard times. Shout out to the infamous flowers that Lori sends and how that’s a unique and special thing. And at the same time we debate each other and we push each other for the betterment of the company, of our customers, of each other, all within this better framework of healthy limits and boundaries. Acknowledging that work and life can take us in different paths. And so we’re not bound to each other from eternity. And this might only be a small-time that you’re here, because life or career might take you somewhere else.
(27:22):
I think for me this axiom is really about clarity and making sure that we have healthy boundaries or maintaining expectations of each other. Of us as the employer, you as the teammate who’s opted into this relationship. And so, I think removing the notion of us as family doesn’t diminish the power of close bonds, and the fact that we love working here. In fact, I think we should all push ourselves to do better and make this an even stronger bond. We can be closer than family in some respects within that framework of healthy boundaries and pushing toward a really big mission. And we have a lot of work to do and this is a big component of us getting there. Thank you.
Josh (28:05):
Awesome. Thank you, Nicole. Yeah, definitely recommend the memo Nicole has on this as well, which yeah, she goes super deep in and provides some real world experiences she’s had with the other side of the coin. And how this can go sideways if we don’t have this sort of constructive performance like mission oriented philosophy. I’m glad we have this value at the company. Very glad. Right, company objective. Main thing Level shows you how food affects your health. I think we’re all working towards this priority. If you don’t feel you are, definitely raise that and I’ll have Sam take the numbers.
Sam (28:40):
A quick update here. We’re roughly on track to hit our beta conversions goals. There’s definitely an asterisk here, which Ben and Tom have been talking about the composition of these beta conversions. Quite a lot of them are existing members or lapse members. That’s something that we’re thinking about in terms of what that means for us hitting our 1,000 target. The main priority is really getting feedback on the product. We decided to keep it open, but we really need to be honest with ourselves about what that means for conversion. We’re going to have more data on that over the next week or so. Engagement is down to 48%, which is okay for Beta 1. That really is what our target is. And some of our other betas have varying levels of conversion because of misstracking that. So, we’re going to going to know more on all of these soon, but this is the brief update, no action needed.
Josh (29:37):
All right. Yeah, this is real-time data, so fluctuations all happening. We’re doing the best we can to get the cleanest. But Ben and I chatted a little bit about the conversion stuff and just the apples to applesness of the numbers is hard just given the instrumentation we have and we’re working within the bounds that we have, so we’re going to as transparent as we can about the stuff in real time. All right, over to Haney for the content update.
Haney (30:05):
You can just jump to the next slide. You might remember a couple of months ago I, excuse me, did a little thing about all the areas that content works in. And Caitlin’s really living in that middle bucket of product right now and I’m spending a lot of my time on that bucket of growth and that’s what I’m going to talk about today. Next slide. There’s really two big things that I’m thinking about with the overall goal of how can we make sure that content as an organization is helping the company and helping specifically growth hit. The growth targets that we have for the second half of this year. Excuse me. There’s really two ways to do that. One is just to increase the audience, the top of funnel and the other is to sort of move more people down the funnel.
(30:47):
And so high level, those are the two things we’re working on, but it’s not just doing it blindly or really organically, which is what I would say we’ve been doing the past few years, which is just build more content, make it great content, folks will come. What we want to start shifting to this year is just getting much more intentional and specific about the audiences that we’re growing and the things we are trying to get those audiences to do. So those four things listed there are really when we talk about funnel effectiveness or getting people to do things that come in through our content services. Those are really the four things that we’re looking at. Next slide.
(31:22):
So as part of this, I’ve just been setting up some post-hoc dashboards and just trying to get a sort of snapshot of where are we now, what do we know about conversion, growth engagement and all of our different content services. Caveat that these numbers are a little squishy, we’re going to learn more as we go on about how to make these more reliable. And there are some surfaces like the podcast that we really have virtually no visibility into the conversion steps that happen there. And that’s fine, but these are our six that we were able to get pretty decent numbers on. This is checkout starts, and I’ll get to full funnel in a minute, which are the two things we’re measuring. But a couple of things that jumped out at me here were things like the blog has the lowest percentage of conversion, but then I also wanted to look at absolute numbers because if you only look at conversion, you go, “Oh my god, we should just do only YouTube and Instagram and not the blog.”
(32:14):
But in terms of how many dollars is this actually contributing to our world or how many at least folks are restarting down that path, the blog is still huge because it just has the highest audience that’s running through it. And so I think balancing both of these things together of the audiences and the percentage conversion is important to do. So next step, or sorry, next slide.
(32:38):
This is full funnel conversion. How many people get through that checkout? And a lot of this has to do of course with all the great work that Karen and team are doing on making that checkout experience better. But I think in terms of the content, the signal we can take from this is sort of how primed are the people that we’re sending into the funnel at actually making a purchase? Are they just curious? Did we just dump them there without them really knowing what they were getting into? Or did they get in there really excited to actually make that purchase? And one of the things that stuck out here was the product marketing bucket.
(33:08):
So just to define that, that actually just refers to four articles that we’ve put up. Three last winter and one recently. There are specifically about the product. So really in that camp of product marketing, which we haven’t done traditionally where we’re talking either about the app specifically or about say CGM, but in the context of also that’s why Levels is great. And so this is a pretty small data set, but what we see on both full funnel and checkout start conversion is that not surprisingly, this is a very effective lever. If you tell people about your product and why it’s great and why it might be useful for them, they’re more likely to buy. So that I think is helpful and instructive. Next slide.
(33:48):
I mentioned audiences, and this is another kind of analysis I want to do, because we don’t do this very often to look at all of our content surface audiences together. And I mentioned the blog as still I think the biggest in terms of the number of pages views per month. These are all averages, but we not only get a lot of folks coming through there, but we get 100,000 people roughly a month organics. That means people coming in through search who might not have already known about us in any other way, and those folks are sort of closer to the actual join button in the homepage. They’re a little easier to kind of theoretically move through that funnel.
(34:24):
But the main thing I took away from looking at this slide was I think we’re in a really good position. I mean, we have hundreds of thousands of people across a whole bunch of different surfaces that are in our universe in some way or another. And so I have a pretty high confidence level that as we get better at understanding who these people are, talking to them in a language that will resonate with them and moving them down a growth funnel that we can … That there’s some blue sky to be had in terms of the conversion and revenue that content can help contribute. Next slide.
(34:58):
What I took from this first analysis in terms of the biggest opportunities, again, we want to be, when we think about what to do in the second half of the year, we want to be very focused and very intentional with our resources. There’s no sort of 10 x projects happening here. It’s really about let’s just get better and more efficient at the handful of places where we think we can make the biggest movement. And so I think the biggest one is the conversion percentage from the blog. We’ve sort of intentionally and a little bit unintentionally just put up a lot of friction to getting people from the blog out to the product. And I think we want to without again, violating any of our principles or what that metabolic insights is about, we want to make sure that that path is smoother for people who do want it.
(35:36):
And I’ll show a bunch of, we’re doing in a minute. The product marketing I talked about, we just need to make more of it and then get people to it. That sample bucket that for those numbers I was showing there is about 8,000 visitors. So it’s still pretty small. It’s largely been organic. There’s a lot we can do there to make more and get people… Get people’s eyeballs on it.
(35:55):
YouTube and Instagram are two other channels I think we should really look at, because as you saw, they have really good numbers both in terms of checkout starts and in terms of conversion. So right now we don’t yet know what… which YouTube videos convert the best, but that’s some work that we’ll do ongoing. And as we learn more about that, we can kind of lean into that more. And then finally just increasing the number of emails that we get and I’ll show that in a later slide.
(36:20):
Next slide. Just getting into some of the, just quickly go through a handful of things that we’re actually working on here to put this into place. One of the things we want to do is add this top nav bar. This is just kind of my mock up. Adam’s working on this next week on the blog. And the idea of this is just to, A add a little bit of … Well, A, cleanup the UX for the mobile experience, which is the majority of our visitors. And right now it’s pretty bad. It didn’t come out great from the last redesign and we just haven’t put enough attention to making it better. So that’s I think going to be a huge just usability unlock. But from a growth perspective, it’s also just giving people a more direct and obvious path from the blog, from the content services back to either the joint experience or at least the homepage.
(37:02):
We see now pretty good clicking relatively speaking on that Levels logo in the upper left, which is the only way now to get into the experience. But having something like the green get started button, my hope is that that’s going to just help a lot more people get into that experience if they want to. Next slide. The much more obvious one, which we mentioned, the first slide today is these right rail ads. This is pretty common if you look at a lot of other companies and what they do to sort of connect their content services with their product surfaces. It’s some kind of thing like this. And so we just got this ability this week from K-Eight to put these in, and these are article specific, so this is not pervasive thing that would appear on every page. We can choose what articles we put them on and we can basically do any image and any link that we want there.
(37:48):
Ben’s been helping me start to play with creative a little bit here. And really the next step for this is just to do some testing. We just want to see how these work, what kinds of creative are going to make sense on different kinds of articles, the product marketing versus maybe some of our more general stuff, software messages versus more direct messages. Excited to see what these do. Next slide. And then one that we’ve had for a while when we started doing the product marketing stuff last winter, we put up these banner ads just as a kind of test and it’s been sort of interesting. I think there’s a lot more we can do in terms of the creative here, but after I think about four months of having these live, that’s where we’re at. Not a lot of conversions. Only a handful of clicks.
(38:29):
Again, not a huge audience there, but again, I think there’s some blue sky here in terms of experimenting with different kinds of creative and different kinds of messaging in here. And I think these would really only ever live on the inside levels content. I don’t see these probably going into the general educational content, but again, we just want to understand how these various tools can actually convert for us. Next slide. And then the other thing we started doing in the last month or so is testing the Digest newsletter for conversion. So we hadn’t really ever done this before, sort of back in the waitlist days. We’d experimented a couple of times with doing call-outs, but the last two issues we put these ads in, so testing different creative, and this time around we’re going to test that first creative on the left but in a different position.
(39:12):
These have been at the very bottom of the newsletter. We’re going to move it up a little bit to the middle of the newsletter. We’re just going to continue to test here. We just need to again, understand what that Digest audience looks like from a conversion potential perspective. We know it’s a warm audience. We know that they… we’ve got really good engagement numbers, but are they folks that want to buy or do they just want to learn? That’s one of the things we need to find out. So we’ll just keep testing this. Next slide.
(39:39):
And then finally that point about getting more email signups. This is something we just started really talking about the last week or so, good conversation with Paul around this. There’s a number of surfaces where we try to get folks emails besides the actual checkout process. One is that box that’s on the home page of the blog.
(39:54):
We just got the ability this week to edit the text that’s in there. It had been kind of a fixed image. That’ll give us the ability to start testing some new messaging in there. We have the pop-up that appears on the blog that we worked on last summer to sort of create this incentive where if you give us your email, we can download a PDF of our most popular article, but there’s a lot more we can do there in terms of testing, different messaging, different creative, different incentives, et cetera. I’m going to jump in and play with that a little bit more. And then I just threw up a very MVP scrappy version of an interstitial signup box that would appear within blog articles themselves. So kind of halfway down we could ask people to do it. And I think once we nail the creative for that, assuming that it converts at all and we don’t get any signal to annoy people, I think that’s the thing that should be on pretty much every article because it’s just sort of obvious to ask people while they’re reading. I think one more slide.
(40:42):
Yeah, so in terms of how all this is going to come together and what we’re working on next, one of the things we want to take from all of this analysis is just to inform what actual content are we making? What articles are we going to produce for the blog, what videos are we going to make, what podcasts are we’re going to lean into, et cetera? That’s where a lot of this is going to come together. We’ll probably re-examine what we’re doing with member profiles to better match up the new product. When I say product-aligned content, this is something Caitlin’s thinking a lot about is making sure that both from an efficiency standpoint that we’re using any learning, education, whatever that we’re doing for the product back on the blog and vice versa, but also from a messaging standpoint that we’re thinking about having a more aligned message and kinds of education between those two surfaces.
(41:23):
We’re going to dive a little bit more into SEO, which has been just on the back burner and not much happening for the last year, but particularly for the product marketing content. I think there’s a lot we can do there, a lot of blue sky. And then finally we just started thinking about is there anything different we should be doing on the social front when it comes to the new product and how we talk about it and sort of let folks know that it’s there? So yeah, lots more to come in this space. That’s it for me.
Josh (41:47):
Nice. Great update. It feels like a real evolution happening in content as you guys take on even more over and over again. Love seeing it. Thank you Haney and the rest of the content team. All right, quick hiring updates. Nothing new here. You can check out levels.links/careers if you or someone you know are interested, shoot out… Shoot a general application. We’ll have your info on file for the future. And quick meeting today. Let’s do maybe 10 minutes of the individual contributions and then we can call it and get a couple of minutes back. So I’m going to stop the share. Definitely recommend participating here. You just hit the reactions button on your Zoom app and you can raise your hand and jump to the head of the line.
(42:34):
Let’s see, on the professional front. I’m excited about a lot of initiatives on the backend. Definitely the hybridizing of the experience and Beta 2 just generally is turning into a really legit opportunity for us to test this new experience. I mean, Beta 1’s been great. We’re learning a lot about guides. I think beta two is where it really becomes more of a refined experience with a lot more features that are going to be available to people. So that’s great. On the backend, just logistics wise where we are refining a number of processes, whether it’s labs, making it more available, making it more affordable within an in-office option that we’re trialing and also new sensors and new fulfillment options, potentially BYO, bring your own device, that sort of thing is very exciting.
(43:17):
And yeah, I’m looking forward to seeing where those initiatives go in parallel with our Beta learning on. I can’t wait to listen to the whole new level with Rob and Dom. And then on the personal side, let’s see, got some family in town this weekend, so I’m going to be hanging out with my nephew and my sister and it’s going to be great. Ben?
Ben (43:46):
Yes, super stoked on the smoke tests that are coming out very soon. All the product marketing stuff, all the growth-related initiatives that are underway that Haney and Tony, everyone’s contributing. Those are awesome to see. And then, yeah, the lab work was interesting to test yesterday, so very stoked to get the results back. It’s almost addictive where you get it done once and you just always want to game it. Where now I know what I hope to have improved since February when we did it in New York. And so it’s like the unknown and unknown until that comes back, so very excited about that. On the personal front, high likelihood of checking out the racetrack tomorrow, and I’ve never been there, and that will be an ear-to-ear smile on my face. And Pam is wondering if the kids need earmuffs and I assured her that they probably won’t. So anyway, very excited to go check that out.
Josh (44:45):
Yeah, got a Ferrari challenge coming to town. Circling the Americas tomorrow. Tom?
Tom (44:52):
I’ll just do a plus one on the blood tests. I had a similar experience where I was never that keen on doing the metabolic panel very frequently just as a consumer. But then I got my second one done and I started to see the trends being plotted, and it was just this instant insight and unlock into the value of this. And I went from using the Levels app every so often to this feeling of like, “I want my health data in this app forever.” And that was a really cool experience. So I think I shout out Kostum on the team on that feature in the past. But I’ll just do it again now.
(45:29):
And then, yeah, just a quick shout out to Karen, and a lot of other people had been involved, certainly Haney and Lauren, big collaboration on just getting really the V-one of how we might position and price and package this new product. And that was a real sprint. We basically set pretty quick turnaround on getting that landing page done, which the rest of the team will see soon. And there were a lot of late nights pulled and just a ton of hard work, so awesome work to Karen. I don’t think she’s on this call, but I’m pumped about where we landed. And also thanks to Dom for that awesome session earlier, that got me really excited.
Josh (46:09):
The smoke test stuff is super cool and I’m looking forward to just competing with people on blood work stuff. I mean, this is like a new era for health, I think. When people are competing to have the best lipid profile, I think we’re heading in the right direction with individualized health. Nicole?
Nicole (46:27):
I just wanted to thank everyone for all of the patience and good questions and thinking through the new performance review process for next week. I know you all are probably really tired of me saying it over and over, but new processes can come with a lot of cognitive overload, so thank you for putting up with that in this really busy time that we’re into. But I think it’ll be really good in the long run. So, thank you for everyone, especially Maz and Vanessa who’ve all been really, really helpful with ironing this process out.
(47:00):
And then as far as personal updates, similar to Ben, we’re going to a race this weekend, but it’s a rally race here in Washington State. And we’re going to volunteer as a family, so I pack up the kids with all the wet and rain and snow gear essentially and we hang out and we get a front row seat to the race by helping road marshal or some other task, which is really fun. So, we always look forward to that and seeing all the cars go by and swinging gravel. So it should be really fun one, we’re excited about it.
Josh (47:29):
Sounds like a blast. Enjoy. Viktor?
Viktor (47:32):
I haven’t done one of these in a while, but just wanted say I’m pretty excited next week. Sam is coming over, going to try to work through this synthetic glucose together, so excited about that. Personal front, I’m still recouping. I was out a few days over the weekend. I went to Grand Canyon, hiked all the way down to it, and if you haven’t done it, I would recommend it. It’s kind of a bucket list thing, but that trip back up was no joke, so I’m going to have an easy weekend.
Josh (48:05):
It’s pretty unbelievable site. Hope you have a good trip, enjoy. Chris?
Chris (48:12):
On a work standpoint last night and this morning I’ve been OD-ing on the guides content, because I have the Android phone, I’m not able to participate. So Sissy hooked her brother up yesterday getting me on the list of all the content and I’m going through watching it right now. I feel like I’m binging watching Succession or something like that. The content is just so engaging, so fun, so personable and it was great to see Mike D and Lynette and various people from the team come in and help. And this is really cool to watch that come together, I imagine it. But now I’m actually getting to watch it partake, even though I’m on an Android and I can’t play. So that’s fun.
(49:00):
Related to Beta 1 and 2, I really just appreciate the team trying to rally the troops, because as we know when we move fast, things are going to break. We did this and it broke that and we didn’t know it and the team trying to rally and trying to get together to solve it quickly. So, I just really appreciate the patience, the tolerance, the “We are moving fast and that’s intentional and that means some things are going to go bump in the middle of the night.” And the team comes together to fix those as quickly as they can, so I really appreciate the teamwork on it.
(49:32):
And then on a personal side, I’ve been delaying this for a while, but I think I’m going to pull the trigger on it. Today is finally burn my pile of wood. The Woodchopper experience, the woodchipper was fun, but way too slow, and I’ve got way too many piles of timber on the farm and I just need to light the torch. I’m a little bit nervous. I’m going to have lots of buckets of water, tractors around, hose, and hopefully I don’t torch the entire farm, so wish me luck.
Josh (50:01):
I’ll tell my brother in Bozeman to keep an eye out for the smoke signal.
Chris (50:04):
For the smoke, yeah.
Josh (50:07):
Yeah. Speaking of fire, the other personal thing I forgot to mention was the Starship launch yesterday. If you haven’t watched that video, I highly recommend it. That thing is about the size of the Washington Monument and it blew up at the top of the flight, but it was a huge success otherwise, and moved hundreds of metric tons of concrete hundreds of feet into the air, which is pretty wild. Sam?
Sam (50:28):
So yeah, on the work front I’m very excited in using the synthetic glucose V0, which is Sharu, Sean and Galit really sprinted to get that finished pretty quickly. So, it’s definitely super early prototype, but it’s functional and I’ve been using it last night and today, it’s pretty cool. Also excited to spend three days with Viktor in LA next week to do some knowledge transfer on some of the ideas around synthetic glucose to hand that project off.
(51:02):
And on the personal front, today is my one-year wedding anniversary, so we are … Make sure she’s not here so she can’t hear me. We’re going to Hamilton as a surprise, which is, I’m not a huge fan of Broadway shows, but she really wants to go, so I’m going to be going to that, and then we’re going to a French restaurant.
Josh (51:23):
Have a great time. Happy anniversary. Hui?
Hui (51:28):
Yeah, it’s been a busy but really fulfilling week after I came back from vacation. Continue to be really impressed and feeling proud of engineering team of their progress everyone’s making, their hard work everyone is putting in. I’m also very excited to hear their different conversations, different work streams going on for the vendor, the CGM vendor side. We’re talking to different vendors. We are exploring different options to bring in more options for user to explore cheaper and maybe more convenient CGM, so I think that would be another very exciting work stream and product set that we will add a lot of value to our users on. So yeah, personal front this week and definitely would just be relaxing again, just decompress from all the caught up I need to do for this week, yeah.
Josh (52:24):
Awesome. Enjoy. Marz?
Maziar (52:29):
Yeah, on the work front I’m really excited for Beta 2. It’s a lot of work going into unifying our experience between the CGM and software. So that’s going to be, I think a new era for the product. And the team’s really been heads down both on the future side and engineering side and also on the program and conference side. I’m really, really excited to see how that turns out. And also wants to give you a shout-out to [inaudible 00:52:52], I don’t think he’s here, but he did a segment on working for the marathon, not for the sprint. And obviously, given all the push that we’ve had in the last few months to get these datas out, we’ve definitely acquired some organizational debt and that video is really helpful. A good reminder and thanks to Sissy taking initiative and we’re bring some process together to bring down some of those organizational debt that we picked up and pay back, so excited to see how that plays out.
(53:22):
And getting to a little bit more back on some normalcy. I know there’ll be a lot more, but at least pay that down. On the personal front, in one of the blue zones, you guys don’t know what a blue zone is. It’s five areas in the world that has the highest number of centenarians, and so there is personal and part research. See how they do it so we can help our members live more than 100 years. Pretty fun.
Josh (53:53):
Amazing. All right, well, we had a lot to share there. That’s awesome. Anyone, any last takers on the shares here? Okay, well, great week. Have a wonderful weekend. Thanks everybody for crushing it through this Beta press and onto Beta 2 very soon.