Josh (00:00):
Welcome to Friday Forum, last forum of April, 2022 and jumps right into it. This week after we’re following on the Series A announcement, which went out last week, we conducted a future of series, which was kind of an ask me anything sort of format. And each of Casey Maz and myself got to host one of these sessions. You can kind of see some of the members here. These were open to 50 member investors, and it was kind of an experiment to play around with how we can engage not just our community broadly, but also the more engaged members of our community, those who have decided to join us as investors and sort of diehard fans. It was really great. I appreciated the range of questions that I got in my session. I haven’t been able to catch up on Casey Maz’s yet, but you can also see people holding up their patches from the series A.
(00:57):
It was really fun, and I think this is a nice sandbox for what we’ll be able to do with community in the future. We picked up a lot more coverage. The Series A continues to kind of circulate through the community, which is always exciting, had some good coverage.
(01:12):
This week, we got memos released for company objectives and analytics and attribution for web traffic. In particular, I want to highlight the company objectives because it kind of flows down just like a couple different structures and formats. You’ve got the directly responsible individual matrix, we have the key objectives or key initiatives and then we have the company objectives or prime priorities. All of that is in the memo. We kind of touched on this last week in the draft form. There’s been a round of iterations and feedback, and that memo is now out and I recommend everyone take a look at it.
(01:45):
And then of course, analytics and attribution is quite an important one for us as we try to double down and optimize our web traffic and prepare for international expansion where there are rules and regulations, cookie tracking, GDPR, so lots of stuff that we have to really nail with our web traffic, so also, please take a look.
(02:07):
Quarterly culture survey went out this past week. Well, the results did, and they were shared with the team and with managers, so anyone who is managing team should have kind of a subset of that where you can dive deep on your team and we can continue to make improvements. Generally speaking, these are super valuable. They’re a nice pulse check, especially as the team grows and they’re also an experiment. We’re trying to constantly make these better.
(02:31):
This was the first one that was attributed. Last time, was that it was really the second overall survey we’ve done. The first one was anonymous. This one’s attributed, and I think it’s just much more effective for people to be able to follow up on that feedback that we’ve received. If you have any suggestions for improvement on this process, please share.
(02:51):
On the background numbers side, the email signups are at a seven week high right now. Replacement rate was under 10%, which is great. The Now Dashboard had really high engagement rates, so this is the opt-in, I think 86% opted in, and then only 23% of those opt-ins ended up turning it off, which looked quite promising for what is in an early experiment. On the product work, continuing to focus, and Scott will have an update on this, I believe, but continuing to focus on Liftoff prep with the IRB consent build out, transfer portal, new signup flow, all this stuff is going to be built on following on the API work that was done last week. Yeah, just a lot of background stuff happening there.
(03:30):
And then on the front end, rolled out a 50/50 split test function. The goal here is to compare the Now page versus the homepage and get really good objective, grounded feedback for that experiment. And then, we also collected some good feedback, which I think we’ll have an update on from existing members.
(03:50):
And then, another really exciting one, you can see this down here, the IRB use study website was submitted to the IRB for approval, and we’ve got final advisor feedback rolled into the protocols. Those have been integrated and returned to the IRB for approval. So continuing to really get close on this one. A lot of awesome work happening.
(04:12):
We had some nice podcast released this week from Whole New Level, Esther Dyson, Chris Trulio, Molly Maloof, some really great conversations. Taylor has been making the rounds. I think we had at least three, maybe more podcasts released with Taylor, especially experimenting with new messaging around resilience. And I really look forward to hearing feedback and kind of keeping tabs on the community, how these messages resonate.
(04:37):
One of our studies that’s been ongoing with Grove City College closed out this week, or at least the data collection portion closed out, and that was the effects of a low carb, high fat diet on high intensity exercise. This is an area I’m super interested in. There’s a lot of really unique metabolism happening when you’re exercising at high intensities and looking forward to sending the data over to them and getting some final results here. Manu Ginóbili, basketball legend, didn’t necessarily attribute to Levels, but is having a great time using the product and posted about it this week on Twitter. We had a ton of UGC here, you can see brain fog, fructose, worse types of foods, how Levels CGM optimized health.
(05:20):
It’s really fascinating to see this spectrum of material showing up. This metabolic health just wasn’t really on the radar a year or so ago and continues to be kind of surprising to see the spectrum that’s available for people on YouTube today and just really glad that we can promote it.
(05:35):
And then, I love this one. This is a little example Paul posted about his blood work. Really, really enjoyed the metabolic health panel and had a bunch of engagement on his thread, including some competitive responses around insulin and HDL optimization, which I think is a kind of an early indicator of what’s to come where people are really competing to improve their blood work and compare and get engaged with numbers that used to be super abstract and not readily available.
(06:00):
And then lastly, we had a newsletter go out with Ben Greenfield this week, which I believe has been getting great engagement relative. With that, I want to welcome Edie Hortsman. Edie is a partner of ours, content creator, mom, coach, blogger, and generally integrative nutrition, health coach and promoter of all the concepts that we share here through Levels and through the tools we’re building. Edie, I want to thank you for taking some time on a Friday to come and join us. We love hearing from our partners and our members, and we’d just love to hear what you’re excited about for the future of Metabolic Health.
Edie Hortsman (06:35):
Oh, thanks Josh. Well, gosh, I feel so honored. Gosh, where to start? I know I just have about five minutes, right?
Josh (06:44):
That’s great. I mean, I basically just want to hear some thoughts, so no time limit required.
Edie Hortsman (06:48):
Okay. Okay. Okay. Well, I’ll keep this pretty quick. Long story short, I would say, well, so first of all, my name’s Edie. I live in Denver, Colorado. I’m a mom. I have a two-year-old. My son was born about four days before lockdown, so everything I sort of had anticipated in terms of being a new mom and bringing a baby into this world was completely spun on its head giving birth right before the pandemic. It’s been very, very interesting to navigate being a new mom during this time period.
(07:20):
But, my blood sugar journey started a long time ago. I would say it actually started when I started experimenting with… at the time I thought it was healthy living, but really it was diet culture. I cut out healthy fats. I really limited my protein. I essentially for some reason had come across a blog post at some point about fats and had decided that I needed to cut them out in order to mold my body into a particular shape and this was when I was in college.
(07:53):
I started experimenting with changing my diet and unfortunately, I think that healthy living can be a very slippery slope. And for me, what had started as a curiosity in terms of molding my body into a particular shape turned out to be really unhealthy and really orthorexic.
(08:12):
Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was spiking my blood sugar constantly throughout the day because I wasn’t pairing my carbohydrates with healthy fats and probably without enough protein. I was working out like a crazy person. It was very unhealthy. But at the time, I thought that what I was doing was healthy, which is sort of the irony.
(08:32):
Fast forward to 2017, and I had had an irregular menstrual cycle for most of my adulthood, and then I went on to birth control, so that birth control just essentially masked whatever was happening underneath the surface.
(08:45):
I was diagnosed with PCOS, and I was specifically diagnosed with insulin resistant PCOS, which is not surprising give it my history with not eating enough healthy fats and not eating enough protein with my carbohydrates. And so, simultaneously at this time, I had decided, I was working in tech, I decided to actually go back to school. I’ve always been interested in women’s holistic wellness. At the time, I was starting to get really burned out in my job. I ultimately realized that what I was doing wasn’t aligned with my passion, so I went back to school.
(09:24):
Right around the time that I was diagnosed with PCOS, I was learning a ton through the Institute for Integrative Nutrition about a more holistic way to balance my hormones. Very long story short, I dove into blood sugar regulation, understanding it, it opened my eyes to an entirely new world that I didn’t even know existed.
(09:45):
My doctor did put me on Metformin, and I did end up taking Metformin for about, I would say five or six months. But during the time, I was working on my exercise and my diet and my sleep and my stress management, and I had left a job that I didn’t enjoy doing so my life was changing essentially every day at that point. And so, I think I really sort of accelerated my health in terms of being able to manage my blood sugar on my own without the Metformin.
(10:14):
I stopped taking the Metformin about five or six months later, and I found that through managing my blood sugar and exercise and acupuncture and sleep and all of the things, I was actually able to eventually put my PCOS into remission. That kind of leads me to the here and now. I’m a huge advocate for managing blood sugar. Like I said, I think it’s been probably the number one other than probably sleep, the most important thing in terms of putting my PCOS into remission.
(10:46):
And now, I essentially empower women to take control of their blood sugar, their hormone health. I do have a specialty in the postpartum time period, so I also help moms nourish their bodies and take care of themselves and heal during the postpartum time period. And I help with baby’s nutrition as well. My specialty is actually, I ended up going back to school, and my specialty is in both postpartum and babies’ nutrition. Also teaching moms that you really can never start too early in terms of helping kids manage their blood sugar too. I’m super passionate about all things blood sugar, and I just feel super honored to be here and to be giving my sensor a test.
(11:26):
It’s been really fascinating, just in wearing it for less than a month, I have already gleaned so much. For example, my blood sugar tends to drop really, really low at night, and I should have realized that it was correlated to some poor sleep or vice versa. And so, I started incorporating a carb and fat snack pretty close to bed within about half an hour of going to bed. And that has dramatically improved my sleep and my blood sugar while I’m sleeping. And I wouldn’t know that if I wasn’t wearing Levels.
(12:00):
But the other really cool thing I’ve noticed too is if I start a meal with my protein, some vegetables, non-starchy vegetables and healthy fats before eating more starchy carbohydrates, whether it’s a piece of sourdough toast or some potatoes or whatever it is, I have way less of a spike just in the order in which I eat my food, which I know you guys have written a ton about. Yeah, I just feel like every day I’m learning something new and I’m just so eager to continue sharing this with everyone. Yeah, I think that’s it.
Josh (12:31):
That’s an awesome journey. I appreciate you sharing that with all of us. What’s exciting for me is just to hear from someone who’s been so focused on metabolic health and blood sugar control for now, what five years, you were describing it as to be learning lessons from the real time continuous nature is just inspiring because I think we’re just scratching the surface of where this sort of continuous vector can take us. I’d love to hear just maybe as a closing thought, something that you would like to see us improve upon in the experience for you or for your clients or audience.
Edie Hortsman (13:11):
That’s a great question. Yeah, I, too, feel like I’m just scratching the surface at this point. I’d love all of the articles, just the information that’s available within the app, I think the one point of feedback that I do get from my clients that I’ve introduced them to Levels is just the price point of it. They’re hoping that at some point it’ll be a little bit more reasonable for them on a monthly basis.
(13:42):
But in terms of, otherwise, I don’t know if there’s anything specific yet that I can think of off of the top of my head other than the price has been the one thing that I’ve received some feedback about. Yeah, I’m not sure. Sorry, I wish I had more feedback. At this point, I-
Josh (14:00):
That’s a huge one.
Edie Hortsman (14:02):
Yeah, still kind of getting very much accustomed to it.
Josh (14:06):
Well, we’re looking forward to following along with the journey and always open to that feedback, constructive, specifically, and unit economics and price point is, it’s the main focus internally. It’s something that we… This can’t be a tool or a toy for a certain subset of the population. It has to be readily available to everyone if we’re going to really tackle the metabolic health crisis. It’s always good to hear that reinforcement that it needs to be more accessible financially.
Edie Hortsman (14:34):
Yeah, I think that actually that reminded me of one thing that I have been thinking about too, in terms of people that are either, so people that are using Levels that are either brand new to metabolic health have maybe some understanding of it or are essentially an expert in it. It could be really interesting. And I believe I clicked some prompt when I first opened up the app in terms of how much knowledge I had about blood sugar regulation.
(15:04):
Could be very interesting to create some sort of tier system once people are in the app, so if they are very much beginners, potentially putting them on a different path, giving them really the foundation, a really basic understanding of it as opposed to people that maybe are more advanced, have been using another device to be able to track their blood sugar. Just because I know that with my clients at least there are some that really have no idea what metabolic health is and they’re like, “I don’t even know where to start.” It could be interesting, just something to consider as well.
Josh (15:43):
Excellent feedback. Yeah, we’ve thought quite a bit about guided journeys and goals oriented programs. This has been really awesome feedback. Edie, I appreciate again you taking some time and sharing with us in this forum and we got a packed meeting. Would love to have you stick around for it if you can. I know you’re super busy, so on behalf of the team, thank you for taking the time. We really love hearing from people like you.
Edie Hortsman (16:08):
Thank you.
Josh (16:10):
All right, jumping ahead to a quick Culture and Kudos. First off, I want to shout out to Jesse, very happy one year, Jesse, which he hit on the 26th. Coincidentally, or not coincidentally, we had a really nice shout out for Jesse, which relates to the awesome work he’s doing on the background for the IRB project. This is super complex, detail oriented. There’s a ton of volume of paperwork and just pieces to put in place involving external third party reviews and Jesse’s been doing a tremendous job, obviously in collaboration with the research team and Maz, but just pushing this and across the finish line.
(16:45):
And as Taylor put it, I think herding cats across the flowing river. That video is hilarious. And Jesse, happy one year, thanks for helping us with this massive initiative. It’s been awesome to see.
(16:56):
And then, something else that this is sort of cultural value, but Haney just really exemplifies closing loops. I mean, when six months goes by on a thread and you get an update that says, “Hey, we ship this thing,” it’s kind of shocking when you’re on the other end of that. It’s like, “Holy smokes, this is unbelievably organized.” But I think even more importantly than just an anecdote, we’re in an asynchronous format and nothing is self-evident in async land. Nothing is going to, no loops can be closed unless they’re closed proactively, right?
(17:26):
And so, a lot of times we can get work done and just assume that, oh, it’s discoverable, the loop is closed. But the reality is that unless that surfaced in some way, it’s really difficult for people to know and it leaves open loops that become cognitive burden for other people. This is just a really nice example of the culture we have, which is we are asynchronous and we have to close loops for each other and it just helped us all work more effectively. Thanks Haney for representing this. Over to Miz. Let me make sure my sound is shared. One second.
Miz (18:03):
…RI Database, which we’ve been talking about quite a bit. A few updates this week, a bunch of new fields and also just some new ways to think about this and some consolidation. Starting with the consolidation, we’ve archived and deprecated the experiments table in the Experiments Wiki, the priorities database that existed in Notion, the tasks database that existed in Notion. Those are all done. Everything is now in the DRI database. And to be clear, this isn’t capturing tasks, this isn’t a project manager. It’s a chart of ownership and responsibilities.
(18:34):
And so, you can think of how we’ve each had our own areas of responsibility doc over time, many people have completed that. This is a consolidation of that breaking down line by line each of those things that we’re kind of implicit that now we want to make explicit of who owns what thing.
(18:50):
An example, I’m going to kind of pull up a view accountable to me, a good example to run through this is Spotlight Articles. Mike is the DRI for Spotlight articles. He’s responsible for the success criteria that every new hire has a Spotlight Article written for them in time for their first day. It’s not tracking all the tasks that are required there. There’s a bunch of different steps. It’s just defining that Mike is responsible for this and here’s the criteria that defined that. We added a status field as well to capture if something’s unknown or paused or deprecated if it’s no longer a thing. That’s defined here. That’s in the status field.
(19:24):
Something else to keep in mind is that some of these are going to be kind of obvious and kind of simple, and some of these are more amorphous and those are the ones that we want to better understand. If there’s processes that are broken down, if it’s unclear, who decides what, that’s exactly what we want to capture and the process of having to put a name on it is what’s going to help us define the process and define the ownership. And so, I’ll be looking for those kinds of situations and asking everyone as well to look for those things that might be ambiguous, where you’re not sure if you’re the owner, you’re not sure if someone else owns it. Putting it on paper gives you freedom of mind to know that you do or don’t have to worry about it.
(20:01):
And so, you can play around with these views, start seeing the things that you are DRI for. This will look different across roles. And then, for some of the DRI items in the DRI Database, those wrap up into key initiatives. And so, that’s this view here on the OKR view where you can see specifically which items within a top key initiative have DRIs assigned to them and those might be different. Assigning names on those is what’s going to be really helpful in driving clarity of ownership.
(20:30):
That’s the update here. A lot of other work going on on the fireside conversation topic that we had yesterday. If you didn’t catch that live, definitely recommend the recording, which you can find in threads. That’s it for now. Looking forward to solving some of these problems as we grow. They’re interesting challenges. The company’s larger, the team is bigger, and these are the kinds of things that we got to work through. Appreciate all the input and feedback, keep it coming and please contribute to this when you’ve got a chance and help me out if you see things that could be more obvious that need improvement. Let’s get them in here and clarify. Thanks everyone.
Josh (21:03):
Thank you, Miz. All right. The main thing hasn’t changed. Level shows you how food affects your health. If you feel that you’re not necessarily working on this priority, please raise that and we’ll get that organized. JM.
JM (21:19):
All right, we were slightly up last week on rolling average daily food bloggers. This is driven a lot by subscribers. Our April subscriber shipment number was up about 10% from last month, and that’s all for me for now.
Josh (21:36):
Thank you. Scott.
Scott (21:40):
Hi. I didn’t plan ahead to record ahead, so I got the baby. Hang on one second. We have slides that have largely not changed. I actually went in to go update them this morning and nothing was different, which was actually a feature, not a bug. And so, I keep repeating it this week and it’s really good for us to keep in mind that we are in laser focus mode on Liftoff and on the Now project. And that’s going to be the way that we are for the foreseeable future, likely in through maybe early June-ish, et cetera.
(22:11):
One of the things that did pop up this week was just around project planning and resource allocation, so do know that this is top of mind for us, and I’m going to be working with Andrew and the rest of the leadership team to sort of come up with a little bit better ways that we can allocate engineers for projects coming .up with Liftoff, things are changing week to week. We’re literally planning a weekend ahead based on new information. It’s kind of our reality right now. And so, hopefully we can get to more predictable situation going forward. But, in terms of strategy right now, we’re still resource allocated appropriately. Next slide.
(22:42):
Same thing here. Yeah, the entire web team is on Liftoff. The entire mobile team right now is on Now, we’ve got design and PM split sort of across as necessary. Next slide.
(22:53):
Most recent app update has been today, a flurry of activity I think this week around bug fixes. A lot of stuff on the Now project that David is going to be talking about, that we should be in a much better place in terms of learning and validation and getting updates pushed out to customers quickly based on their experience with the Now project. 50/50 split coming for all of our new customers there. Next slide.
(23:18):
All right, I’m going to be moving this thread into the general forum today. One of the things that has been changed in the last week or so is the consulted field on the memo’s database. One of the characteristics of the consulted field is that if you have a lot of thoughts about these memos and you want to carry it through to completion, not just sort of lobbying them over the wall, but you want to be really part of the discussion, you are open to add your name to the consulted list and we’d be happy to have you in the conversations, but please know that you need to bring it and not just sort of sprinkle into comments here and there. And so, I will be sharing that more widely. Please, please feel free to add your name if you wish to help shape this. Next slide.
(24:02):
PM Hiring is going really well so far. Please keep referrals coming. One of the candidates that I actually really liked came in through a referral, so it’s very possible for this to be the case, very likely. And so, if you have friends at other companies or people that you just feel like we should get in contact with to know, even if we don’t necessarily need to hire them right now, they’re good to have these interview chats while we’re doing them all at once. I think that’s it for me. Cool.
Josh (24:29):
Thanks Scott. David.
David (24:30):
Yeah, how can you follow up on that one? Okay, briefly, for now and for product process in general, just to reiterate that we are focused on validated learnings. That is our goal. We want to celebrate every time we learn something. We’re experimenting. What did we learn? How are we going to take that learning and decide to move it forward? Next slide, please.
(24:53):
The past week, we’ve been focused on existing members, so we also have been continuing to interview. Thanks Mike for setting it up, all of our new members. But the feedback from that has been pretty stable and the learnings are that Now is helping people comprehend and gain awareness of the single thing that we want to put in front of their face, which is good. The daily guide has been landing well. It’s been helpful. This week, we rolled out as an opt-in to a hundred percent of our existing members. We got 50 feedback responses. We summarized that feedback in these two links. You can jump in afterwards and go deep on all the feedback.
(25:23):
And then, we put together a learning and iteration plan based on that, which we’ve been executing on this week and we’ll continue for next week. Next slide.
(25:31):
The one thing I wanted to call out from our existing numbers is that we learned that we’re surfacing a lot of value in the original cards. And this is because we designed Now to focus on a single thing at a time to raise your comprehension and awareness of what you should be focused on now and next slide.
(25:46):
But, our existing members are telling us that the overall value has become distributed across the experience. You can think back to the old home tab, it was glanceable, had glanceable summaries for the entire day. You had all that context at hand. What it didn’t do very well was give you that individual single thing to focus on next and what that focus kind of zoomed in to you. And on the right here, we have all these new experiences that are really rich and help you with understanding your meal score or how to think about the glucose graph.
(26:14):
And all together, they’re really exceptional and people are saying that they enjoy that. But, pulling it back together to that Now homepage, there really isn’t as much of a glanceable nature to it. We’re finding that people are going throughout the app and it’s taking more taps to get to the same old experience. If you wanted to check your score, for example, you have to go into my data, then tap onto the day. It’s extra taps to get there. Next slide.
(26:36):
Okay, a few other learnings from the existing member feedback. Information has been spread out a little bit more across different screens. I guess I already talked about that. But also, the simplified graph that we did include on the default empty state of the Now page isn’t as usable as the new dashboard. And so, Sissy has more feedback on that and more feedback from the community forum later on in this presentation, so next slide.
(27:03):
Okay, so what are we doing based on what we learned? And by the way, I summarized that learning. There’s a lot more in the doc that I referenced, but can’t get into it all right now. We kind of split this up into quick wins and actionable things we can do now based to quickly iterate on the feedback. Some of the things were non-controversial, like bug fixes. And then, some of the quick turnarounds we had are around new hypotheses on how to improve some direct member feedback.
(27:26):
One thing we heard was that people love these story. Even the existing members love the stories, tapping on the little information explainers, but the contrast was really hard. It was hard to read. And so, we have to optimize that experience. Seth this week worked on some readability of the stories which we’re rolling out for feedback and we think that’ll improve the comprehension of those.
(27:44):
And then, we had some really good feedback that if you’re not a new user who doesn’t know how to use Levels, some of the cards aren’t, are less relevant. Every day we push you a card that says, “Learn how food affects your health by adding your first log.” And you can see on the left here, this person was, “It just felt unnecessary. It’s just visual clutter. It’s just a new add log button.” So we’re actually removing that add log card except for the very first day when it’s relevant to you.
(28:10):
The key theme there is relevancy, but we’re taking quick action to fix that and we’ll close the loop on the Facebook community group for that one too. And our next slide.
(28:20):
I think that might be, okay, one back please. I just wanted to call out, no slide for this, but as Scott mentioned, we, Maxine and Justin rolled out Launch Darkly for a split, the ability to support split tests, so we can do 50/50 experimentation for our new members on the new experience and the old experience. And that’s going to be a really nice quantitative way to see how all of our metrics are trending given the two groups. And that’s not the only and end all, be all, but it’ll be a nice compliment to the qualitative feedback we’re getting with the member feedback calls. That is it.
Josh (28:53):
Awesome.
David (28:54):
More from Allen coming up.
Josh (28:56):
Cool. Thanks, David. Andrew.
Andrew (29:01):
Hey, here’s the engineering update. We’ve had a lot of productivity, as Scott was mentioning early in the week, just fantastic. People have been doing a fantastic job sticking to code review SLAs and that sort of stuff, so really excited about that. Hiring pipeline stays healthy, so we’re excited about new people joining soon. Next slide.
(29:24):
I wanted to call out two things. Both Maxine’s and Steven’s work on their new projects. I think this is really cool seeing engineers take deep ownership of things that are meaningful to business outcomes. The one in the background is the new order processing UI and the one in the front ground is the IRB acceptance flow being demoed. Incredibly exciting work coming from all of our team.
Josh (29:58):
Love it. Awesome. Thanks. Eng team. We’re on the 29th now, but…
Alan (30:06):
Hello.
Josh (30:06):
Alan with Design.
Alan (30:09):
Oh, no, I think you might need to refresh a little bit.
Josh (30:10):
Yeah, let me give it a refresh. There we go.
Alan (30:22):
There we go. Okay, Design. Where are we up to? Big focus this week was getting Liftoff together, which is largely, it’s not a huge amount of design in the traditional sense, visual design, more just organizing and figuring out how you get from one point to the other.
(30:39):
Brett’s starting to dive into scoring, which is super exciting. He’s kind of the exact, right guy to do a project like this. We know there’s been some problems with scoring in the past, and so we’re going to dive in there and see what we can do. And then navigation, as David mentioned, there’s a couple considerable issues with navigation. We sort of tried out the easiest, lightest pattern there is, and now we’re going to dive in and see what we can do there. Next slide.
(31:04):
Yes, Liftoff. Our Liftoff. Largely a lot of design like this. We’d spent some time with Scott a couple days here, two days looking at the flow, seeing what we can do and then defining a bit of some of the texts and labels. It’s not super fun to look at, but it’s pretty important. We’ll be sending out, I believe we’ll be sending up comms to users once that’s ready. Next slide.
(31:29):
Metabolic score. As I mentioned, Brett’s going to start looking at this and I’m actually really stoked to see some of this work. We’ve tried scoring in the past and it’s been really tricky. Our members have a really tight relationship with the score because they’re using it to evaluate their choices and make different decisions during the day. And of course, you got someone like me, seeing 55, I’m not that different than some users. I’ve recently started fasting quite a bit more and I started to get higher scores, yes, but we shouldn’t require people to necessarily do that to do well with Levels.
(32:00):
And so, we’re starting to dive in. Maybe it’s some concept like this on the right or sort of related to rewarding the healthy habits in the day, or maybe there’s just some light tweaks that we can make to the way the score works to sort of accomplish a better representation of your day that’s still aligned to sort of healthy outcomes. Even yesterday, we just had a jam with Helena and I thought that was really productive and really promising. Next slide.
(32:25):
And then yes, user testing, so present day and we tried out this little swipeable pattern on the bottom. You’ve got these big full screen cards. We know that people love them in that they’re really helpful when you’re trying to figure out a little bit more around what’s happening. We put them up there, people can dive in or else we can get sort of the TLDR on the screen here, especially on the right, we know people enjoy seeing the metabolizing screen. However, next slide.
(32:50):
You have no… It’s tricky to get back to the area where a lot of people are conditioned to be and there’s less value on that screen and we’ve got to bring it back. We want to be able to both dive in and allow people to see the overall picture of the metabolic health during the course of the day. Next slide.
(33:08):
We’re starting to come up with some sketches on how we might do that. Some of you may remember from quite a while ago playing with this sort of widget module sort of model idea. These are just black and white concept sketches, but can we bring a bit more density and a little bit more value to the dashboard while still allowing these deep, deep, oh, I don’t know what I’m trying to say there. These highly focused screens. Next slide.
(33:33):
Yes, so it’s not totally clear on these screens what is actually happening, but the way we’re thinking about this is that when we have something really important to say, we can use these full screen cards, we can take over the screen. This is an example of someone who had three cards stack up. We know some people don’t know what they’re going to see on the next slide, so we want to start bringing in some iconography, maybe some text labels so you have a little bit more of a predictable experience on what insights are available to you. Next slide.
(34:03):
Here’s an example of what we’re thinking. Does this GIF translate well? I don’t know. When you come back to the experience, you’d have these cards up, if they had generated and while you weren’t using the app, maybe your meal score was ready and you can always come back to them. And so these insights, these things that were generating through the course of the day would come to the dashboard and you’d have a really deep view on what what’s happening and you could dive into them if you really wanted. Slide.
(34:31):
We’ll be testing a variety of things next week. We’ll be looking at a couple different ways to navigate through the experience. We’re looking at sort of how you jump from one to the other, how do we keep it predictable? But, we’re also going to use this as an opportunity to talk about what is on the dashboard and what do people care about.
(34:47):
Is the glucose graph super important to us? We kind of think, so we’re going to get some more information on that. What about when we tell people what to do? What is the response to that? This is one of our most important surfaces and so we’re going to use it as an opportunity to go even deeper on some of these things like metabolic health points. We talked about this sort of additive scoring concept a while ago. And of course, Brett will be diving into that. And so, we want to get a little bit more context, a little more info and get some interesting recorded discussions for you all to see next week. I think that’s it for design. Is that it? I never remember. There you go. Yeah, thanks.
Josh (35:24):
Awesome. Lot of exciting stuff. Always looking forward to the user feedback conversations. Thanks, Alan. Okay, on the hiring side, so we have Hui starting May 23rd, and on the Open Roles side, we have added a support associate role and we have an offer out on corporate council, so looking forward to being able to continue to grow the team. If you know anyone who fits one of these roles or if you, yourself are interested and something doesn’t fit, go ahead and check out levels.link/careers and submit general information to our jobs page. Thanks everybody. Okay, research updates. Believe this is Jesse.
Jesse (36:01):
Yep, want to take this one. We’re just continuing to hammer away at some essential Liftoff centrals for the IRB. All the member facing study related materials have been submitted for review and we’ll use next week to incorporate any comments or feedback on those. And then, we’re continuing to work on the adverse event and complete structure into the support workflow.
(36:23):
Azure has been working on a data set comparing people who have used Levels with blinded CGMs and type 1 diabetes and she’ll post that later for more visibility. And Taylor’s on think week, so expect some cool, more strategy updates. And as always, you can find all these updates in the research team wiki, so quick update from research and that’s it.
Josh (36:46):
Awesome. Thanks, Jesse. Thanks, research team. LJ
LJ (36:54):
Everyone, it’s a new week and we have new additional reports to give you for our Athena Weekly Updates moving forward. But from the past week, we still have 12 active Eas, 24 Levels team members who delegated, 31 non-delegators from that same week and 161 tasks we were able to accomplish. Now, for the new report that I will be giving you, as you can see right here, these are the total number of tasks delegated per Levels team member.
(37:23):
As you can see, we have Sam on top of the list with the most tasks delegated. He had 44 and here we have one each for all of the Levels team members right here from Ben to Dave. Again, if you want to delegate a new task or you haven’t tried delegating just yet and you want to start with your 10 to 10x, feel free to email [email protected] or simply send a task via Athena’s voice memo app and we’ll be happy to assist you with any request that you have.
(37:57):
Now, for our new delegation for the week. This one came from Jackie and something that she did different with here is that she was the one who created the process page for this. As you can see, she said, here, “Please see the new task here,” and she hyperlinked it and this is the page that she created on Notion with all of the instructional videos and all of the other information that the EA needed from her to be able to accomplish this. That’s it for this week. Happy Friday everybody and enjoy your weekends.
Josh (38:36):
Thank you Athena team. As always, congrats Stacy, who delegated for the first time this week, it sounds like. Love seeing it. All right, Chris.
Chris (38:46):
Thanks, Josh. Just a quick update on the SLA Dashboard. All green, no red for the last several, four or five weeks, which is great to see. No, nothing to cover here. Next slide, please.
(38:59):
As David talked about the rollout of the Now page, what I did is I started looking for all the screens of are people dropping off? How many people are actually signing up? Josh covered a little bit by actually re-pulled the data this morning, so on the bottom what you’re seeing is the individual screens people go through as they kind of go through the experience to go to the settings to toggle it on, to toggle it off, toggle it back on. And then, I’m doing a water flow of people going through the steps.
(39:24):
The first thing is you’ll see the drop off from step one to two. I actually don’t know why that is different. It’s the difference of people clicking on the blue button to those people seeing the first page. That’s an area that I have to dive into, so I’m just going to ignore that one. What I’m focused on is once people kind of start the flow, how many people actually eventually go through all the screens to sign up, which is 88%, which is awesome to see. They kind of start going through it, so it’s a huge conversion rate.
(39:50):
Now, I’ve then looked at of the people that opted in, then afterwards how many people opted out, which as of this morning increased a little bit to 28%, which is really strong. But then, the flip side is one more. How many people then turned it back on after turning it off? Which, is another 28%. Netting around 25% of our members who have experienced a new dashboard, go back to the old one.
(40:14):
Even though a lot of the feedback that Sissy might be seeing or David might be seeing or Alan in the feedback is going to be skewing negative, this really gives us a much more balanced approach to rollout features, so I really want to just kind of a huge call-out to the team for taking the effort around how we thought about rolling out this feature versus how we rolled out when we did the update to the day score and we got to all the negative feedback, but we didn’t have that counterbalance to say, “Is this actually net positive?” Because, we didn’t really understand those that actually liked it but didn’t tell us. Next slide.
(40:49):
I’m not going to go into this. This is more of a sneak preview. Matt went deep on Help Scout and did a bunch of analysis that I’m actually going to cover. He did about a 10 or 15 minute loom that’s going to be part of my weekly update later on today. So this just to sneak preview of him looking at top drivers, which ones have the biggest HT, which ones actually drive the best kind of response rate in terms of happiness score. This is just him kind of going deep on the data to a lot more than we can get out of the help Scott natively. I just want to say thanks for Matt for taking the time to go deep on help Scott data, so more to come on this. Next slide.
(41:21):
And then lastly, with the Voice of the Member, there was one quote as opposed to having lots of things, this one jumped out to me and I’m going to read it just for… “Matt and Britney were each very understanding and helpful with their responses to my problem. Just airing my issue and having two listening representatives was a show of exceptional care, whether it solved my problem or not. Sometimes, just by telling of it, knowing you’re heard and that there’s a likely solution eases the issue of my brain by such a huge amount. Thank you.” The reason I bring this up is because as Josh mentioned, we opened up a new role and we’re thinking about are we hiring someone who’s really effective at the queue at just knocking out cases or is it more weight to someone who’s actually going to take the moment and make sure that they listen and care for our users, even if it means it takes an extra minute or two to make sure that they’re heard and understood?
(42:14):
This is a core value of the team that we do, so it’s great when this has kind of resonated back to us. It’s like, “Thank you for taking the time, not by just giving me the right answer, but actually making sure that I was heard even if it didn’t solve my problem.” I just want to say thanks to Matt and Britney on this one, and that’s it.
Josh (42:30):
Awesome. Yeah, it really speaks to the principles. Being willing as a team to experiment with slowing down our support queue in favor of the quality I think is, it’s something that is sort of counterintuitive to some of our modern, rapid, social structure that we’ve built where we expect immediate responses, but they aren’t necessarily high quality. I love that we’re leaning in the other direction. Thanks Matt, Britney, and everyone on the support team. All right. Don’t think that’s in the right spot. Riley.
Riley (43:03):
Okay, really quick update today. Weekly cash receipts have been pretty steady for the last few weeks. And so, now that we’re very close to the end of April, we can see we’ll kind of be down about a $100K month over month and most of that’s coming from new members. By design what we expected, but burn will go up about a $100,000 to $150,000 as a result. Thank you.
Josh (43:33):
Thanks, Riley. All right, I think, Sissy.
Sissy (43:38):
Hi team, two updates from community this week. The first one being our Future of AMA series recap. As Josh mentioned, we hosted three sessions with our Crowdfund investors and had about 70 attendees across three sessions. 10 of the folks were repeat participants who ended up joining for two to three sessions. As a reminder, the purpose of these sessions were twofold.
(44:01):
First, it was to celebrate the Series A close with our crowdfund investors, and then second gauge our community’s interest in meeting our team and other Levels members. From an interest perspective, we decide to cap these sessions at 50 participants, initially. The goal was to keep these events relatively intimate and we’ve had the expectation we’d see around a 20% drop off in registration.
(44:24):
We ended up seeing closer to a 50% drop off rate. A number of the folks who didn’t make it ended up reaching out directly for the recording. It’ll be interesting to see the stats there, but the takeaway here is to account for higher drop off rates in attendance in the future. From an engagement perspective, we received 45 questions total across the three sessions, and two of our sessions went over by 15 minutes.
(44:49):
Takeaway here is that we’re going to continue to explore the AMA format and look to extending future virtual sessions. Doing a more formal debrief doc, and we took the opportunity to pilot a couple new tools like Luma. We have a few key learnings from that as well as learnings from each session, so that’ll come in the debrief doc and all the replays are live on YouTube now. I’ll be posting the links and the debrief doc in threads either later today or early next week.
(45:18):
If you have any feedback or ideas as you tune into the replays, feel free to send it my way. Would love to integrate some of those feedback for our future sessions as we continue to experiment with mostly virtual, but we’re starting to see a couple of in-person events within their community, so would love to use some of the feedback to experiment with new events.
(45:39):
Huge thanks to Josh, Casey and Maz for hosting the sessions and to Braden, Sonya, Mike D, Miz, and Sam for joining and interacting with our investors for the next future. For the future events, we’re going to try and get more team members involved, so more to come here. Next slide.
(46:00):
For our Pulse on the Community this week, the top conversations you can see on the right-hand side were feedback on the Now dashboard, best practices around exercise while healing adrenals and Bulletproof coffee versus regular coffee. As David mentioned, I’m going to talk a bit more about the Now dashboard since the team is focused on gathering member feedback around that right now and highlight the sentiment that value becoming distributed across experience definitely emerges in these comments.
(46:33):
Early on in this thread, Chris asks Liz to share some of her experience around the new dashboard that don’t resonate with her. You can see on this right-hand or on this huge comment box, she shares a great recap which ended up getting 10 member likes. I’ll read a few of her key pieces of feedback starting on the left-hand side, “Distracting that it does not default to my blood sugar graph. Don’t like that only four hours worth of data are shown at a time. While I like the shaded target range, I do not like that labels are gone. I find the recent activity thing extremely distracting in adding to the clutter. When I click on the little “i” next to glucose, it goes to a neat series of screen sharing more info about glucose curve. Super informative and helpful. And, please bring back the day’s metabolic score being right underneath the glucose curve.”
(47:30):
There’s a lot of engagement on this thread and if you want to read more, I’ve linked the post to the top right of this slide. Next slide.
(47:40):
Starting today, Pulse on the Community digests will be shared out on Fridays in the Voice of the Member forum in threads. As a reminder, this is an experiment, so if you have any feedback on content format, anything, let me know. The goal is to try and make these little weekly updates as adjustable as possible, so welcome any feedback to make them better. That is it for our community this week. Thanks.
Josh (48:04):
Jesse, appreciate all this. All right, Jackie or Tom?
Jackie (48:12):
Yep, I’ll take it this week. Two quick slides on podcast updates. Firstly, I don’t know if you guys have gotten a chance to see all the amazing work that Taylor’s been doing talking about resilience on podcast recently. Here’s a few examples of shows that he’s been on and just wanted to give him a huge shout out. He’s been killing it and recording sometimes two podcasts like in 24-hour time periods, just doing amazing. There’s two main goals here with Taylor’s Podcast Tour. First, this high level just Taylor getting reps in so that we have another team member who can help with podcasts and speaking opportunities moving forward, just to take the load off Casey and Josh and Sam.
(48:56):
And then second, is testing out new talking points. And so, a little bit on the right side here, Taylor’s been focused on talking about resilience, which is a new idea that he has defined in a few different memos as our health North Star. We’re defining this as the body’s ability to respond well to physiological challenges. So for example, how responding to a poor night of sleep, getting sick, et cetera. It’s new, so we’re asking you all to take a listen to these podcasts and provide feedback.
(49:32):
You’ll see for every podcast that Taylor’s on, there’ll be a thread posted in the marketing and growth forum. And there’s a Notion Doc linked there every time, you feel free to add any thoughts that you have if you listen to these in the Notion Doc, and we’re compiling, and Joyce on the Athena team has been helping with just making sure that we’re not missing these and she usually posts them in the thread to share those out.
(49:54):
And then overall, our goals here, end goals, will be one, determine if Resilience is resonating with people. And then two, if so, figure out the best way to talk about it moving forward in a way that makes sense to people. That’s it on Taylor.
(50:11):
And then secondly, just wanted to take a quick step back and revisit the why behind doing podcast interviews across the team generally and talk through different reasons that we do podcast tours. There’ll be a memo coming soon on this, but just high level, wanted to share with you here a few of the reasons why we’re pursuing podcast interviews across the team. Many of these are overlapping, some are distinct depending on the guests in the show. And I’ll quickly run through these, just there’s a lot here but that I’ll elaborate on the memo, but high level.
(50:51):
In revenue, in the cases where we’re promoting a link, these are mostly on tier one shows that Casey’s doing, like Hyman or Dave Asprey, Brand Awareness, and SEO, this is for all shows and just in helping getting the word out about Levels. They are always including the show notes to back link to our site, blogs, social channels.
(51:11):
And then education, we view educating, I think we all know the world on metabolic health as an end in itself, even though it’s also a means to our sales and marketing goals. And then, Scaling Casey & Josh is huge. Lately, we’ve had a ton more team members having, getting reps in doing podcasts and this is in part to be able to scale our impact of podcasts and speaking opportunities. And then also, essentially just have more level spokespeople out there.
(51:38):
And then, recruiting, I think all podcasts we’re doing, we might be getting the word out to potential new hires with any given show, but also specifically for those focused on business, engineering or remote culture might be right where our potential recruits are listening. And then, message testing, a good example of this is the Taylor on Resilience, just iterating on those talking points. And then, professional development, this is just part of our everyone on content goals. We want more team members getting an opportunity to share their expertise with the world, their messages out there. That’s really good for Levels, but also good for the team as individuals.
(52:18):
And then lastly, content. Specifically, a specific example of this would be Sam had been getting a lot of questions about fundraising strategy and he recorded a podcast. Rather than answering all those questions individually, he can efficiently point people to the podcast where he answers a ton of questions on fundraising. There are a lot more to come on this. There’ll be a full memo that covers this and a lot more, but kind of just wanted to take a step back as you’re seeing a ton more of our team members on podcasts. It’s really, really exciting to see. And thanks to everyone that’s been helping with that.
Josh (52:56):
Awesome, thank you. Thank you, Jackie, and thanks Taylor for helping us out on the podcast side. I really appreciate the resilience messaging and definitely internally please share feedback if you do listen. Haney.
Haney (53:12):
All right, quick content update, what I want to call out about… Oh, there’s some, sorry, I have the same slide in here twice. There’s more stories than just these two recently, I promise. What I want to call out here is the best and worst fruits for blood sugar. This is another piece where we relied pretty heavily on data on looking at our backend and really ranked kind of best and worst fruits based on Levels, members’ response and were also able to call out some places where adding yogurt to the fruit, for instance. We had enough records that we could call that out and say, “Here’s the difference that makes, so I think this will be a really good piece.”
(53:47):
And then, just on the last slide here, I threw a thing in threads about this as well, but we’re trying this as an experiment to do kind of a monthly recap where we highlight some sort of top stories that we publish, but also research that’s out there elsewhere. Maybe some videos that we’ve come across, maybe some podcasts. Just kind of a monthly roundup in the metabolic health space. Take a look at that post, it’s the top one on the blog today. Give me feedback on how it looks, whether it’s useful, if there’s other things you’d like to see in a kind of roundup and we’ll keep it rating on that. I’ll leave it there for content.
Josh (54:22):
Awesome. Thanks, Haney. Love the monthly roundup too. Okay, so if you haven’t been following on the Friday Forum thread, we are going to be making some changes to the meeting and this is a transitional week. We’re sort of in between formats. We’ve decided that we’re, we’ve been kind of doing two things with the forum format. We’ve been getting updates on project level progress week over week, and those have been really valuable. But, we’re also trying to create a space for culture and social gathering and connection.
(54:52):
A lot of times it just ends up being a lot of volume to fit into one Friday afternoon, especially if we’re doing, for example, a fireside or a cafe afterward. For this week, we’re actually not going to have individual contributions because we’ve hit our 60 minute time cap. That was one of the changes that we’re going to make.
(55:06):
Next week, I promise we’re going to transition to more of the team connection, more of the social bonding sort of element. We’re going to have a different framework for what we’re presenting and when and why. And then, we’ll be doing, we’ll capture all of that other valuable information in a separate asynchronous format so the project level updates will be delivered in a way that we can all digest them and respond to them in an async format.
(55:30):
And then, this Friday Forum will be more about the team and about updating on company objectives and updating on personal, individual contributions and these sorts of things. Bear with us through the change. I really do want feedback, so if you hate this, let me know. If you love this, let me know. We did get some feedback that we were just running kind of long and in general it was difficult for people to be able to absorb everything. We’re going to try this. I appreciate everybody for constantly being open to experimentation culture. I do want to hear from all of you. I’m sorry we don’t have time for the personal shares, but if you want, drop those into threads, we’d love to hear from everyone.
(56:06):
With that, we’re going to call it here. Just want to wish everyone an awesome weekend. Thank you for all the awesome work and yeah, open to feedback. Have a great weekend. Thanks everybody.