Josh Clemente (00:00):
We’ll jump into it. Last Friday Forum of April 2023 somehow. And as a quick reminder of what this meeting’s all about, this is our sync time to see across functions and see what’s going on across the team, celebrate achievements. We are a remote, asynchronous organization so we can oftentimes be in our deep work whole and not really have exposure to what goes on in other functions. And so this is the opportunity to see and hear from each other, members, partners and get on the same page. We have other formats for deeper business analytics and social connection.
(00:36):
So this week the big news is on Beta 2, so that’s been the full court press for the whole team. We have filled the Beta 2 signups, so we’re at 1,040 signups as of now. There’s definitely some learnings for us through the signup process. A reminder that we kicked this off two weeks ago and filled that target in just two weeks, so this is something to celebrate. But also some of the product market fit signal that we can pull from things like conversion rate inside those signups is a little bit less clear. So Ben’s got a retro that he’s putting together to help us understand exactly what analytics we’ve got, the composition of those signups in terms of existing members versus new members. And he’ll be distributing that I believe today. So that’ll be really important for us to check in on. But I do just want to highlight that we did hit the target there, which is awesome.
(01:22):
Then in the onboarding project for Beta 2 is now in work. Sissy’s taking point on that. On the ENG side, the Beta 2 app is at code complete as of right now. I know we’ve got some bugs we’re tracking, but overall ready to go for Monday as of right now. And then there’s just continuous progress going. So we’re working on looping content, the underlying framework for us to be able to enable continuous onboarding into the experience. And then we’ve also got a sensor menu for hybrid experience. So essentially this would allow you to, if you don’t have a sensor, browse, select, purchase and then onboard into a CGM experience in that new hybrid format.
(02:01):
And then we’ve also got some logging UI improvements. The objective with logging is of course to improve the quality and consistency of logging. This is mostly going to be on the front end, so this is not a big rework on the back end. It’s mostly to improve the experience of logging and ideally improve the quality of those logs over time. And we’ve also got the synthetic glucose project ongoing, so we’ll I’m sure do a deep dive on this sometime very soon. But as a reminder, this is community data. So this is showing someone who does not have a CGM on how people in the community of levels users have responded to similar foods and logs. So this will be a very ongoing project, but could be something really exciting.
(02:38):
And then we’ve got a refer a friend update. So we’ve had a referral option in the past. Most people do not know about it, we never boosted it. And we’re now for the first time revisiting that and building on it. On the conversion rate front, so we’ve got on our homepage, I think a first time conversion rate of about 6%. This was our Q1 target, which is really exciting. Definitely some variability in this number we’ve seen week over week, so we don’t want to index too hard. But really the objective now is to stabilize at around this rate. For right now this is really good. This is the culmination of a lot of work on the growth teams part. And it’s really cool to see us calling our shots and hitting them.
(03:23):
And then we’ve also got a smoke test going live. So the smoke test we dove into a little bit last week, but essentially we’re testing monthly pricing and plan positioning. And the way this is going to go is that we will set up a purchase process which will actually convert to a wait list. So the purchases will not finalize, but it’ll allow us to really gauge intent and test some really important assumptions that we’re making right now. And then we’ll also have an opportunity for people to convert from that wait list or really to accelerate their time on that wait list by filling out a survey, which will be really important for us to get good read on the highest intent among the high intent people. So this is the first smoke test of its kind. It’s really beautiful and refined. And I just want to celebrate everyone that is working on this, Karin in particular. And then Farhan is shifting over to support on growth product.
(04:12):
Okay, LA Guide shoot, so we had a bunch more work. As everyone knows, Guides is a huge project that we’ve got ongoing. Everyone was out in LA who’s associated with this project, filming a lot more content. I’m sure that some amazing stuff’s going to come out of that. You can see some stills down in the corner there. Rob and Dom, their Whole New Level episode on YouTube hit 50,000 views in less than a week. This is the first time that’s ever happened for a Levels piece of content or video content. Huge, really awesome, definitely signals that we’re on the right track with that deep metabolic content and surfacing, just the experts that we’ve got in our orbit. So I’m excited about that.
(04:45):
We’ve got SEO project underway, so we’re doing a lot of analysis to understand how to maximize the search engine optimization for the upcoming product. This is a departure. There are different themes involved in the new product, so a lot of work there. Got a new blog header going live soon and some new cohesive Instagram templates. We had a little bit of, we would say brand debt that we were building on IG and on social. And so this is a project to bring us back into alignment with our brand goals. We hit partner conversions for the month. Dr. Becky and Huberman in particular are really crushing it. Dr. Becky has been super consistent for us, so that’s awesome. We’re starting to get deeper on our plan for partnerships, activations for general availability of our new product. So a lot of work going on there. That monthly target is, we still have a couple days left and we hit that I think earlier this week, which is awesome.
(05:34):
And then we’re finding our business model strategy. Everyone I think should know this by now. We’re still working on price point, retention plans, requirements for this new product given our customer acquisition cost, given our lifetime value of a member, a lot of this stuff is predictive. We haven’t yet gotten a large enough sample size to be able to have high confidence on this stuff. But we need to set a target that is comfortable and will support our business. So that work is ongoing, Lauren is leading that. And then we’ve got a bunch of stuff going on on the operation side, QA processes for our fulfillment partner, new processes for reshipments and logging on our side.
(06:07):
And then we’re working on an update to our fraud and disputes strategy. So a lot of work went into this over, honestly over a long period of time, but we’re taking a stand in implementing strike radar to help us with fraud and disputes, which is really important to maintain our credibility, I would say with the payments processors. There’s a lot of fraud out there unfortunately in the world and we need to get ahead of it. And then we’re scaling our member support team with three new autonomy support staff starting May 9th.
(06:35):
Finally, performance reviews. So we know that this is a lot of work and we’re going to extend the deadline to four full weeks to allow everyone to get this done in the midst of all the beta stuff. But please do check coms, get caught up on the performance reviews process. And this will be the first time that we do a performance review cycle all at once, so lots to learn so bear with us on the process and please share feedback. Okay, we also had some great work on the R&D video series, a new Whole New Level episode about pregnancy with Azure and Ben. And some great food content and a new piece with Molly Maloof based on a podcast from previously.
(07:14):
All right, I think we hit all of it here, with that I want to jump ahead and welcome Adam Saks, Adams a Levels member. He’s in SF rights as well as his digital strategy for Google and has a lot of aspirations with metabolic fitness that I definitely can align with in terms of understanding how to optimize energy and how to stay away from the long-term chronic illnesses that we all hear about and hope not to experience. So Adam, I’d love to hear a bit more about your experience with Levels and what you’re excited about in the world of metabolic health.
Adam Saks (07:47):
Yeah, most definitely. First off, thanks everybody for having me. And what I’m most excited about is those updates you just ran through Josh, just remarkable the clip that you and the Levels team continue to execute at. And yeah, just incredibly excited to have the opportunity to speak with you for three, four quick minutes today, especially because I’ve been a long time admirer of the Levels team’s work, your mission and your incredible team, the people that are on this call on this Friday. Each time I tune in or skim the Friday Forum, which is usually the more frequent habit, I’m impressed by just the organization direction and the high clip that you’re executing at. And a lot of those growth tests and just the initiatives you’re working on are truly impressive. But as I mentioned, I’ve enjoyed working or I guess as you mentioned, the slide alludes to, I’ve enjoyed working in health tangential communities and spaces and co-founded Run With Me a coaching platform for first time runners.
(08:43):
And one of the topics that I’ve been increasingly interested in is something that comes up consistently when any of our athletes, we call them our runners, are training for their first 10K half-marathon full marathon, the topic of proper fueling for endurance races. That was something that definitely was a value. And the last time I ran some of the more targeted tests overall increasing awareness of foods relationship to energy levels is something I think Levels and the growth team, the content team has done a remarkable job truly becoming the source of metabolic truth and providing high quality information, but broadly across the internet. And just marvel at how you guys have done that. I think that’s something I’m very interested in as well as I guess tactically adjusting pre-run fueling has been something that’s been of interest. And Mike, I need to close the loop with you because we have an essay and draft phase that simply needs to be sent to you.
(09:45):
But I would just say to wrap up here, I guess during my time at Google, I’ve had the unique opportunity to work with some of the other players in the space. And while I absolutely respect the work of almost all of the consumer health companies and entities mission and ethos behind it, I wholeheartedly believe that Levels is leading the change in transforming metabolic health. And as somebody who’s looked at the forecast and search markets for some of these related queries, the optimist in me sees the growth as knowing that people are continuously more interested in this and need to rely on companies like Levels to be there for them.
(10:30):
So just wanted to wrap up here by saying the way that you operate as a team has left a lasting impression on me in my waking days throughout the different jobs and projects I take on. And just looking forward to following along the team’s progress, the impact you’re going to have on the world. And yeah, with that in mind, just thanks for giving me a couple of minutes here to share a few tidbits about myself and having me in the Friday Forum. Looking forward to hearing what else you guys have going.
Josh Clemente (10:59):
That’s really awesome and genuinely appreciate you first of all paying attention along the way. We put these forums out into the void and it’s not always clear that people are following along. So it’s awesome to hear a longtime subscriber, it sounds like. Glad to have you here. Thanks for taking the time. I personally am really excited about the potential for some of the work we’re doing on the community data side, unleashing what we’ve learned through the data set, the trends specifically for the unique interests. Some people are very interested in pre-run fuel, a lot of people are not. But to be able to tap into those trends, even if you can’t afford a sensor or don’t want to wear one continuously to be able to unlock that, I think is something that we’re working towards I’m very excited for. So looking forward to your feedback on that. On the topic, I’d love to, before we wrap here, just really curious, appreciate all of the kind words and the support. What do you think that Levels needs to focus on or do differently or better in the future?
Adam Saks (11:55):
I don’t know if it’s the recency bias, to that point right there for the communities, for the members that aren’t able to access the full membership, how can you continuously show up for them, add value, create content, and just resonate with them? I don’t know, actually being able to drive behavior changes is one of the toughest end states to achieve. But chipping away at that problem and applying the sharpest minds and to solve for some of those problems is something that comes to mind. But I need to think about it to know if that’s actually the number one thing I’d land on.
Josh Clemente (12:30):
Well, I think it’s one that we have near and dear to our heart, right? We got to hit a billion people if we’re going to change the trends that we’re seeing in metabolic health. So yeah, it’s definitely the right track. We’d love to obviously continue to hear any ideas you’ve got on ways we can improve over time. But just wanted to repeat, thanks a lot for sharing Friday morning with us. And if you want to stick around for the rest of the meeting, we’d love to have you do so. We’re going to dig into some of the functional stuff. And just on behalf of the team, we really, really appreciate hearing directly from you.
(13:05):
All right, thanks Adam. Okay, quick Culture and Kudos aside. So first off, crazy, but we are hitting two years with Jesse. Love having Jesse on the team. Really appreciate all of the hard effort. It’s been awesome to work closely with him on RD recently, but I’ve also worked with him throughout his time here from support through to the research team and now R&D. So big shout out to Jesse. Really appreciate all the work you’re doing and the adaptability. You can see the product team filming on the lower left. I just love these behind the scenes shots of all the content we’re producing. It’s really exciting. We’re genuinely building a media competency that spans all of digital. And it’s really exciting to see, especially the pace that that execution is happening on. Huge, huge shout out to everyone who’s traveling and I know that is difficult to do over a long time period, so not lost.
(13:54):
And then a lot of constant and iterative improvement on checkout flow and there’s a ton of people involved in that across growth and digital member support. There’s just a lot, can’t name all the names, but just really want to highlight that whole team and Karin in particular for helping to lead the charge there. A lot more of this going on, as you know, with smoke tests, et cetera. And then Murillo helped onboard a genius e-mobile engineer, he did this entirely independently. Got us live with a bunch of important bugs, bug fixes and new features and just really handled this entire thing end to end. And I think the team just recognizes and really appreciates that type of autonomous startup mindset. Love seeing that. Thank you Murillo.
(14:37):
And finally, I just want to boost Shawn and Subhi who have really been burning the midnight oil on the R&D team. Just working through some new tedious, frustrating at times challenges. They’re staying agile and just keeping great attitudes and I love seeing it and I really appreciate two of you. Obviously the whole R&D team is working hard, but in particular Shawn and Subhi over the past few days have been tackling some new and difficult challenges. So just appreciate that. All right, this is Karin.
Karin Nielson (15:08):
All right guys, happy Friday. So I was super excited to get to present on this cultural value because I think it’s actually one of the most important things that startups should be thinking about, particularly at our stage. Next slide please. So when I think about experimenting and taking risks and why it matters at this stage in our growth journey, I always think of this picture of David and Goliath. And for those of you who don’t know the story, David is obviously much smaller than Goliath. And he throws a rock with a slingshot at Goliath’s head. And defeats him by cutting off his head when he hits the ground. And what he is doing is using an unconventional strategy to beat a much bigger and seemingly more powerful opponent.
(15:57):
And that’s really what we’re up against, right? We’re up against bigger companies in our space or bigger companies solving similar problems. So our ability to experiment and take risks is actually our foremost competitive edge. Anybody who’s ever worked in a really big company will know that taking risks and experimenting with anything becomes virtually impossible the bigger the company gets. And that’s why it’s something that we should be doing a lot more of in order to move faster and uncover things that our competitors can’t. Next slide please.
(16:33):
So when I… Oh, I think there’s some icons missing. Do you want to tap again? No worries, it doesn’t matter. So one of the things I thought about initially when I was going to talk about this topic was that experimentation at levels predominantly relates to growth and to product, right? I think that’s the first thing people usually think about. But actually, I remembered a very early podcast I heard with Josh and he actually said something along the lines of, “This whole company is an experiment.” And that’s really true. And it got me thinking about some examples of things that we’ve done differently to other startups. So for sure, growth and product are important. So we talk a lot about experimenting with different growth channels and different strategies to get to market. Or different conversion experiences and stuff like that. On the product side, we experiment with new products, with new features and those are all quite obvious. But we also experimented with a lot of stuff as a company that others haven’t done before us.
(17:38):
So things that immediately spring to mind our fundraising strategy. We had a crowdfunding round. We’ve also raised from a lot of angels to grow our network, which allowed us to in turn grow the company much more quickly and to spread the word about our mission. And on the culture side, we’ve built a fully remote and async company. And there really aren’t many examples of that outside of what we’re doing right now. So experimentation isn’t just limited to specific functions, it’s something that we should be embracing across the board in how we think about building our company and culture. Next slide please.
(18:19):
So I think when people talk about experimentation, they often talk about frameworks and processes to actually run experiments. But I think much more important than that is the mindset that we adopt in order to get good experimentation. And I think there are three things that I’ve learned over time that have helped me to get better at this. And I think it’s definitely a work in progress because we’re all afraid of failing, it’s an inherent human trait. So the first is that intuition is really important. So just because you can experiment doesn’t necessarily mean that you should. And running experiments is expensive. It means that you’re spending time planning something, testing it, and potentially failing or breaking something in the process. So having intuition about when to deploy experiments and how to do it is really important.
(19:12):
The second attribute that matters when you’re experimenting is that you have to be low ego. So the more you feel that your own success or failure is invested in your ideas, the less likely you are to question your assumptions and the less likely you therefore are to run experiments. And the third is that you really have to learn to reframe failure. Failing isn’t something that we should aim towards as a business, but it’s also something that’s inevitable if you take big risks and if you try to take big swings at a problem. So it’s not necessarily good to fail, but it’s also not something that we should be ashamed of. So I would argue that if you never fail, you’re actually not pushing hard enough or trying hard enough. So it’s really reframing failure as an opportunity to learn rather than something to be embarrassed about. Next slide please.
(20:16):
So when we think about taking risks, I think this soundbite from Facebook is what people think about mostly, which is moving fast and breaking things. And I’ve actually never really liked that. I don’t think it’s suitable for every type of company either. And as a health tech startup, our risk surface is very different to that of a social media company for example. So one of the things that we need to be mindful of is that we operate in a regulated space and there are some things that would be detrimental to our company if we were to fail at them.
(20:54):
So when we think about how we experiment in growth, for example, we might consider shipping a change to our sign-up flow. And the worst possible outcome there would be that we lose customers for a few hours if something breaks. If we make bad decisions on the privacy front, then we could risk a data breach which would lead to an irreversible loss of confidence in the company. So it’s really about assessing the difference between one-way door and two-way door decisions and making sure that we design experiments appropriately in that context. Next slide please.
(21:35):
So with that in mind, I think about it like this, that taking risks is not the same as being reckless. And I think we should actually think about re-framing our value as taking calculated risks. So we shouldn’t just take risks at all costs, but we should carefully consider the impact of experiments that we run and then design them accordingly to make sure that we minimize the potential downside. And those risks could also involve time. So time for example is our scarcest resource right now. And a big risk for the company could be going down the wrong track for a long time without re-evaluating where we’re at. So I’d like to propose to close this talk that we add calculated risks to this tenet.
Josh Clemente (22:30):
Super well said as always Karin. I like the concept there. I’ve frequently used justifiable risks as another way of saying if you can make the calculation make sense, then it’s a risk worth taking. But I do love the idea of modifying this and setting it apart from just pure recklessness and setting things on fire, because that seems to be the start-up way. I love this. I think the experimentation mindset, it is core to our DNA. We have to embrace it. It’s really hard to do. And as Karin was saying, the entropy direction is against this. The larger you get, actually the more progress and success you see, the more likely you’ll enter scarcity syndrome where your fear is to go back to before that success. And so you start to withdraw, try to build moats and new stop ups leading the past. So love that, especially the low ego one, that’s such a huge point. It’s so hard not to get dogmatic about what we believe here and to actually follow what we’re learning. Thanks a lot, Karin. Yeah, let’s revisit those values.
(23:33):
All right, company objectives. Levels shows you how food affects your health. No change to the main thing. And quick update on the beta numbers to hit. So Beta 1 is still ongoing as you know. We’ve seen a tail off in engagement towards the end here, which I would say is not altogether unexpected. I mean overall we’ve been trending to our engagement target and this week we have seen some decline. But a lot of the features we have not yet built out. And so we’ll be stepping into Beta 2 with an on track number of conversions. So we hit our thousand target with slightly a little bit of margin there, so we’re on track there. We’ll be launching May 1st and then we’ll be tracking that engagement metric again.
(24:11):
We do have some Beta 1 to Beta 2 carry over. I think about a hundred people made that shift over. So lots more to come here on the engagement retention in Beta 2. Definitely the targets will continue to climb. So the concept is that the additional building that we’ve done from Beta 1 to Beta 2, which is substantial, is going to increase those metrics even further. So yeah, great work on the release hitting that deadline and on conversions. Okay, I’m going to hand it over to I think Alan. Ah, Cosima.
Cosima Travis (24:44):
[inaudible 00:24:45]. So on the product side, I wanted to start, you can go to the next slide, by spending a little time as Beta 2 is launching talking through, I think we’ve been talking a lot about the hybrid experience and just zooming out and making sure that everyone’s super clear on what it is. And then I’ll dive into what it entails across the experience. So what we really mean by hybrid is we’ve had this what we’ve been starting to refer to as our Levels classic CGM reliant experience in production. And then we’ve been branching off and building this alpha and beta version of what we were originally calling our software only experience. And we knew that those were the early phases where we were really focusing on guidance and software and the guidance feed and the kitchen and building this experience without a CGM.
(25:33):
And then one of the main goals of Beta 2 predominantly for the software pod was how can we start to elegantly blend these experiences together? And the goal from a member perspective is to say, we know that we can bring members value without wearing a CGM, but how can we have this feel like a seamless experience where they’re supercharging their Levels experience when they put a CGM on. And it doesn’t feel like they’re jumping into some other app, nothing’s aligning nicely. You want it to feel like something that you put on on day seven, you take it off 10 days later and that’s okay. The experience elegantly across. So a couple of little screenshots here, but I’m going to go into more detail in the following slide so you can go to the next one.
(26:21):
So one obviously really critical component of this is an elegant and easy way to boot up a CGM and then boot it down or say stop. We basically now enable members by looking up what the status of their account is, an ability to purchase a CGM. If they’re a member who hasn’t purchased one yet, they might be software only at that point. And then we also allow, once we recognize that they have a CGM account, that they’re able to boot it up and when the time is right, if they want to turn off and go back into software mode, they can manually do that and force it. They can also just wait for enough time to elapse of no CGM data and we’ll auto put them back into non CGM mode. Go to the next slide.
(27:11):
The today page. So the today page had to be adapted so that the stability ring, the glucose graph only appear there when you have a CGM on. And then we had to do merging and I’ll go into more detail of the checklist later. But we had to do merging to make the checklist experience cohesive. And we also merged this concept of the timeline. So it used to be the insights and activities feed, now it’s the timeline with this much more beautiful and compelling tiles that Victor has designed. And so that’s now the same regardless of whether you have a CGM on or not. If you go to the next slide.
(27:52):
So the metabolic checklist. This is something that we had a lot of thinking about the future. We know that the checklist is going to evolve over time. But to come to a place where it feels today really cohesive, straightforward and is not jumping back and forth when you have a CGM on or off, we wanted to bring it back to the core principles of food, sleep and movement. So we simplified it, so that it’s the same whether you’re wearing a CGM or not. We also did a bit of expansion though on the activities side, where now the activities you get rewarded for actually match the Mike D exercise program.
(28:31):
So we’re looking at zone two strength training, HIT training. And the details of these categories are likely going to evolve over time. So what earns you food category, sleep and activity are probably going to adapt and evolve. But keeping these as the three pillars we felt was going to unify things rather than focusing on reaction targets like stability, thinking about input targets and action targets, like what you eat, how much you sleep and the exercise you get. So that was an adaptation to simplify things. If you go to the next.
(29:12):
Meal reviews and zone. So this is where we really dove in. It looks complicated and that’s because it is. So as we know with zones, there’s a lot of complexity and a lot of nuance to what things get grouped together under a zone. In our previous zone experience, there was a lot of digging and hunting. And we were really happy with the new meal review as it had been designed in the new software experience. So we spent quite a lot of time between design, product, engineering, trying to figure out how to blend the best of both experiences. And where we landed is an experience that allows you to have a meal review when you have no CGM, a meal review with glucose data if you just have one log in that zone. And if you’ve got one of those multi-log zones, we allow you to both look at the zone and dive into a single meal. So we really didn’t want to get rid of all of the nice much stickier and vibrant experience of the meal review.
(30:13):
And if you jump to the next slide. I just wanted to shout this out because I think this is one of these behind the scenes meshing together of a lot of pieces of code and experience that can feel seamless and hopefully does feel seamless when you use it. But the amount of work that went in, I mean definitely on the design side, a huge effort to bring all these surfaces together. But then also on engineering, there was code that was three years old that Sam had written. Zones permeates very deeply. And with that said, be gentle, let us know. We’ve been shaking the app and finding stuff, but if you find things that are funky with zones, with scores, bear with us. And yeah, we’re really excited to launch on Monday.
Josh Clemente (30:59):
Huge update. It looks awesome. Thank you Cosima. Thanks team. Definitely it is not lost how much work went into that. Right, I’m going to shift over to Alan to let him share.
Alan McLean (31:14):
Thanks everybody. So I’ve got some updates here related to some work that’s been happening on the product side as it relates to community. I think when we look at some of the user needs in the product and especially related to guidance, we think there’s two primary needs that we’re trying to solve for the direction. So, “What do I do?” We all know about that one. And then accountability, “Help me make sure that I actually do those things.” We’ve heard some really positive feedback on our guidance. We’re seeing engagement in the app go way up. In our beta tests we’ve seen really positive reactions to the guides coming in directly to them. We do think though that for this program there’s opportunities around accountability.
(31:57):
So we’re starting to get these pieces in place in the product. And I think actually what we’re starting to see here are the makings, the foundation is essentially laid for us to start integrating our social experience. We’ve wanted to do this for a really long time. I talked about it in my interview two plus years ago. And so we think that we’re starting to get to a point where we can start testing some of this in a more robust way. So we’re going to introduce community to enable richer guidance and really enhance our learning loop. So some of the questions we might want to explore here or we started exploring was how can we expand the types of guidance that we provide, in a social setting where users provide their own expertise, where people respond to post and response to nudges from a guide, getting you to go do some of these things or respond to their suggestions.
(32:46):
How can we learn a little bit more quickly about what content resonates? We’ve got all this amazing content that we’ve been producing, Sonia, Stacy, everyone on the Guides programs has been working really hard. How can we learn a little bit more quickly on what’s really resonating? And then how do we scale it? How can we boost engagement through this content without being on this treadmill all the time and burning everybody out? Because it takes a while to make video. So we think that a successful community experience is going to require some changes to the current guidance experience, nothing major but some evolutions. And the reason for that is that the immersive video is awesome. I think we’re finding it really engaging and really well produced. But it does hinder some of the quick content navigation. People are wondering where things are, they want to go back, they want to search. This treatment, it’s somewhat limited as it relates to accountability. And I think there are many other aspects of the experience where we can start introducing accountability.
(33:42):
But in the video and the guidance, we think that there’s a really important role to play there, so we want to make sure there’s space for that. There’s actually no social proof for users on what content is really valuable, that people are really responding to. That’s a problem for both users and for Guides. And then the success of the content, right now it’s primarily evaluated through view time, but we think there’s other ways to evaluate that. So what we’re doing is we’re switching out from this immersive full screen view to essentially a feed. And this is going to be a chronological list of the content that we’re producing. And soon we’re going to start introducing other formats into the guidance experience.
(34:24):
We’ll also be starting, some of those pieces, those pieces of content, they’re going to more deeply tap into that really important role for accountability. And so right now, again, just video, but imagine we start introducing references, something like this. Maybe someone can send a text message to the group and is asking them, “Did you do these things? Tell me what you’re struggling with. If you’ve done it, let me know.” It’s a little bit more flexible than just pure video. We can also start introducing to the experience, hey, if you’ve got all these users, there is a sense of a community. Maybe we tell you that a whole bunch of people just did their workout, there’s still time for you to go do it.
(35:01):
So yeah, this is one of my favorite ones. This is a [inaudible 00:35:04] suggestion with a little green check mark. Social proof, so again, right now, that full screen video experience, it can be a little bit challenging to essentially have a visual filter, to scroll through the list and find the stuff that’s really resonating with the community. So we’ll start introducing things like this, reactions, we’ve played with reactions to user provided food logs in the past, they tested well. Although in that particular experience we found the food log content eventually got dry. So thankfully, again, back to having the pieces in place, we’ve got this really compelling Guide content and so we think that these reactions are going to be a little bit more useful.
(35:45):
And comments, obviously that’s the currency in many ways of social experiences. So we’re going to start tapping into the user base. They’ll be responding to Guides content, they’ll be potentially replying to themselves. And hopefully what we can do is we can crowdsource all the expertise that we have in this space and potentially have users interacting with each other. The nice thing about this content too is that essentially it’s going to become more valuable over time, at least we hope it will, if the community engages with it. If you see a recipe and you start responding, maybe you have suggestions, edits and so on, that’s something that someone down the road can take advantage of and it just gets more and more value.
(36:24):
Back to the formats. It doesn’t all have to be a video as I was saying, we can start introducing content that’s either referencing experiences in the app or recipes and so on. No video required, comments, all the good stuff and it’s just text and an image. You can imagine a social scaling that even with Athena who can identify some key things. It doesn’t always have to be a guide directly going in there, cranking a bunch of content. And potentially down the road third-party content. So we know there’s all kinds of great stuff out there. And I think part of our role is actually to curate that and make sure that they’re really high-quality content. So leveraging our expertise we’re bringing into the foreground so people can benefit from it. And we don’t actually necessarily have to produce it, right?
(37:09):
You might be wondering just a little bit about the phasing. There’s a world where we have social content where maybe users provide their own recipes or they provide their own posts into the wild. And that’s definitely something that we’re interested in. But I think first what we need to do is just validate that users want to engage in a social setting in the first place. And so that’s what this is really representing. It’s an evolution of the surface that will open up tons of opportunity. It’ll make our content pipeline a little bit easier for all of us. But it’ll also give us a sense on whether the community will actually provide content to Levels and other users. So based on that, what we’ll do is we’ll move forward and potentially explore other more open-ended user different posts and reply models. I think that’s it. We welcome feedback. We’re going to start… I’ve posted this in the product and design forum. You’re welcome to watch the loom. And yeah, let us know what you think.
Josh Clemente (38:04):
So much exciting stuff there. I love it. Thanks Alan. Let me find my… Here we go. All right, awesome work team. Okay, hiring updates. We don’t have anything new here, so if you or someone is interested in what we’re up to at Levels, check out levels.link/careers. We have a standard application where you can send your info in and get into our orbit. And lots more to come as we grow in the future. And then we are here at Individual Contributions. So I’m going to stop the share here. We got some time. This is a nice packed episode of Friday Forum. Lynette, right off the bat.
Lynette Diaz (38:46):
All right, I think it’s no surprise here. Can everybody hear me? Yeah, how excited I am for Beta 2. It is my favorite version of the app so far and I cannot wait for members to test it. And I’m just filled with so much excitement. And I actually get teary-eyed when Alan’s giving his design, just to see how far we’ve come. Just filled with excitement and gratitude for the team. And just all of the energy that’s coming out right now, it’s awesome, incredible. And I’m so grateful to be a part of it. And so that’s that. And on the personal front, we are considering possibly moving, so we’ll see how that goes. But that’s a pretty big change and we’ll ride that wave as it comes. But just super excited about everything that’s happening here.
Josh Clemente (39:28):
Love that energy. Thanks Lynette. Caitlin.
Caitlin Shure (39:31):
Hey. Professionally, I am pretty tired from going back and forth across time zones, but still just in such a good mood and energized from the LA filming. And just want to say thanks to everybody who is out there. I’m just very, very impressed and energized by all of you. And personally, my baby’s turning one in a couple of days, which is insane. And thank you all for bearing with me as I share copious footage of her. That’s all.
Josh Clemente (40:07):
That was a fast year. Wow, happy birthday. Azure.
Azure Grant (40:15):
Kind of the same on that. I think the LA Week was one of the most fun weeks that I’ve ever had at Levels. And I don’t think I’ve ever had the 14 to 16 hour days, but where you actually get to sleep for the hours that you’re not working, exercise a little bit, eat delicious food because that’s what everyone’s making. And it was just really productive. And even the async things that we were doing with Lynette or the whole Athena team or Alan, David, Mars, everything just felt like it was really working. So I’m very grateful for everybody who was there.
Josh Clemente (40:51):
Amazing. Awesome work team. All right, April.
April (40:59):
So hi everyone. I am April. I’m Zach’s EA and I’m standing in for Nicole and Zach. I’ll be sending the link for the end of month Friday Forum survey. I’m sending it now through the chat box. If you can please fill out the survey at the end of this meeting. Thank you so much.
Josh Clemente (41:18):
Awesome. Thank you, April. Ben.
Ben Grynol (41:20):
All right, I’m going nerd path on this one. So been having some fun conversations with Shawn about filaments and the most granular things related to what’s going on in R&D. But it’s very cool to be so close to it and just to see it all get built and see the milestones that are hit and some of the roadblocks and it’s just really fun, so stoked on that. And then stoked on this, we have gear. This came this morning. So Jesse put up his hand this morning and he’s going to capture footage on a weekly basis of what’s going on in R&D, so more to come on that. But yeah, super stoked professionally on that. And then personally going to play soccer tomorrow. So pretty stoked.
Josh Clemente (42:10):
All right, nobody count on Ben being mobile for the next two weeks after that soccer game. I’m just kidding, Scott.
Scott Klein (42:20):
We’re all getting old. Professionally, we don’t get many weeks like this. It’s just fun to be in the fray. And I felt like yesterday we shipped… I made the joke, there’s some GitHub server somewhere in a data center that’s just emitting smoke right now as all the fixes were pouring in and everybody was swarming on it. So it’s always fun to be able to just hang out on Zoom for about six hours and knock things out as they come up. Personally, we are coming out of our March and April, they are not the kind months in Seattle for weather. We’re usually over it by the end of April, but it’s going to be 76 and 77 I think this weekend, which is going to be super fun. So I’m going to take my laptop into the forest and just work from the trees for this afternoon and long weeks of getting reconnected with some outside times. It’s going to be good.
Josh Clemente (43:06):
Sounds amazing. And yeah, huge plug for all the engineering work. And just saw the updates rolling in late last night. It’s awesome to see that hit code complete. All right, I’ll jump in here. Yeah, I’m feeling a lot of gratitude just watching this forum today and just the quality and really the disposition of everyone on the team, just being optimistic and working super hard and executing with quality and standards staying high. And all the stuff that I continue to see that’s happening behind the scenes that I didn’t even know about. Just a great feeling. So yeah, just really loving it and excited for Beta 2 to kick off. The hybrid effort is beautiful, and there’s a lot of fun stuff going on on the back end with the CGM options.
(43:59):
And I think we’re going to have a really compelling offering bridged by the community data, the synthetic data project that will allow people to really effortlessly weave in and out of sensor use, which providing that base level of value to our members is a huge step improvement in what we can do. And that allows all this flexibility with sensors. And so that’s awesome to see coming together. Anyway, I’ll stop rambling, but all that. And then on the personal side, I had my family in town this past week, my little nephew and niece and two sisters. And it was super fun to hang with them. They’re at the most hilarious point in their, or at least my nephew is right now in their lives, so that was great. And looking forward to moving in a couple of weeks across town. So Sunny.
Sunny Negless (44:45):
Oh man, I had all my thoughts and now they’re gone, that’s how that works. I’ve been really excited to hear at work, even though it’s a lot of hours, it’s a lot of things going on. Getting to do a lot of the work I really enjoy as far as operations. It’s really a smorgasbord of all of the things that are balancing right now, of all the different activities. But I really had a moment reflecting, listening to Karin today and listening to Ben. And these are folks that I all very much admire and I’m reminded from when I first started of the big eyed, “Wow, everyone here is a superstar and I can learn.” I would love to sit down and just learn from every single person here because everyone’s bringing so much value and has so much knowledge that I could have a masterclass with every one of you. So I’m having little peaks of that because I’m involved and we’re all involved so cross-laterally and cross-functionally that I get to learn from Taylor.
(45:38):
I’m doing disputes, but I get to learn from her about like, “Oh, right, there’s a next level on this.” Or listening to Karin talk about experimentation and failure. I’ve read the book, but hearing from someone who is… I mean we’ve all failed, but really has an amazing perspective on this, makes me really proud to be here and energizes me. And I have a little bit of like, I hate to do this, but when we’re past this next hump, then I can get back to adding on those extra learnings and catching myself going, “Well, no, you’re in it now. You’re in it now. It’s just happening so fast you’re not realizing it.”
(46:11):
So enough of speaking of rambling, Josh, that’s what I’m excited about at work. There’s so much happening and there’s so much learning. And then personally, just for some fun, it is starting to be perfect running weather for myself, which means it is 50 degrees or lower. I don’t run outside when it’s hotter than that. So we’re running. And I was graduated to my next level of West Coast swing last night, so I started taking West Coast swing lessons. I am not a dancer and apparently I’m doing well enough that I get to be in the intermediate class now, so yay for me.
Josh Clemente (46:45):
Awesome update. Love it all Sunny. Thank you. All right, anyone else want to jump in here on the contributions? We have a short attendance today. We’ve got a lot of people still cranking in or traveling, I’m sure on Guide stuff. So all right, going once. All right, we’ll call it here. Have an awesome rest of your weekend. Really great work this week. Inspirational meeting. Stoked for Beta 2. Adam, thanks a lot for joining. See you all.