Josh Clemente (00:00):
All right, let’s go ahead and jump in, last Friday Forum of August 2022 and get right into it. This week, so we’ve had an increasing focus on demand capture, so… Oops, jumped ahead. Sorry about that. Demand capture and JM has been taking lead on pulling together all of the insights we’ve had historically and what we’re planning to do going forward to improve and continually learn. And so the second part of his two-part memo on demand capture was dropped this week. I highly recommend reading it. There’s a ton of great insight in there. And that is leading into experimentation on this week, primarily email capture, but also purchase flow AB testing. So both of these are AB tests. Our intention is to, since we ended the wait list, our emails are way late in the checkout process and so we don’t always have a way to continue communicating with people who have intention or have intent to either become a Levels member or want to learn more about us long term.
(01:03):
So we’re experimenting with where we can capture emails from people, potential members, and then also how we can optimize the flow of checkout. And so JM ran a few experiments on these two things this week with good results. On support, so in Chris’s words, we’re almost out of the woods there. Just want to again, really shout out the support team. We’re now at about 70% inside of our three-hour SLA on support requests, which is a huge improvement and has taken a lot of effort to get here, especially given the increases in replacement requests and new issues within the IRB and fulfillment challenges. So with our fulfillment partners, we’ve definitely had some difficulties getting SLAs met on order delivery. So really want to shout out the team for continuing to do a great job getting us back on track on SLAs.
(01:54):
On the product side, so Scoring V2 is now launched to members. I believe 10% are testing it now. It was 5% earlier this week, so that’s the stability ring and the associated change in scoring methodology. Labs 2.0, we had some really great user experience research this week. Casima pulled together some awesome insights from that, which we may touch on later in this call. And then Logging v5, so this is the improved logging flow along with suggestions. So we had the logging flow and then now I think some optimizations have happened for recommended food item tags as a function of the logs or images, so that’s now live internally. And lastly, we have work in-flight on the in-app personalities project. If you haven’t seen that, check out the Threads forum or the product forum. There’s a thread on it with a few experiments that we’ve run with Levels affiliates and David.
(02:54):
And then food swaps is next up. On the eng side, so UK e-commerce test order was completed this week. So there’s the first complete end-to-end test order has been run, which is a huge milestone. A ton went into that. Big shout out to the team on getting there. Still on track across the board there. GDPR is on track, I think for an August 31st date. We had the new data science analysis framework, so the objective here is to improve the consistency, repeatability of analysis both for research and also for general product. And so I think this is called Repel is the internal name, but that went live this week. And on the data science side we’ve got a focus on HealthKit, logging, and glucose data. So the intention is to sort of renovate the way that we are managing these three kinds of data such that we can generate insights more effectively, which will then loop back into the product and we can develop not just more specifically informational insights, but also new features as a function.
(03:53):
So a lot of great focus on data science there. And then I just want to shout out eng. So cycle times, pickup times, meaning picking up a pull request for review, and deployment times are all at or near records inside the eng org. And I think the deploy time in particular is at 18 minutes right now, which seems to be by far an all-time record. So ever since the numbers have come out, we’ve just seen consistent improvements on the eng team focusing on hitting these SLAs. So big shout out there. On the partnership side, we’ve recorded and/or scheduled all of the above, so Art of Being Well, Mikkipedia, Balancing Hormones Naturally, Lauren’s on the PCOS Podcast, we are teed up for Mindbodygreen. Taylor recorded Human Performance Outliers and Raise the Line. And then we locked in Mindset and Moonshots, which is Peter Dean Mendes’s new upcoming podcast for November.
(04:48):
We have got good traction on UK, so I think everybody knows by now that we’ve been reaching out to influencers and advisors, potential advisors in the UK for our upcoming expansion. That was a huge benefit when we were rolling out here in the US. And so some really great conversations happening. Poppy Jamie, Tim Gray, very well known over there, along with several others, which there’ll be more details forthcoming but really exciting to see the traction. This is not something we can take for granted and I think our reputation precedes us, which is really helping in these conversations. And then lastly, experimentation. So we did a Coke challenge way back and we’re now developing the successor, which is the vinegar experiment, which will be ready to go to members in September and the research team is already teeing up the next one, which is likely to be fat burn as a function of CGM.
(05:35):
So there’s a lot of really interesting dynamics that occur when the body switches from glucose to fat metabolism and some of this can be approximated from just a CGM trace, it seems. So we’re going to do a bunch of work internally first and then likely roll out another experiment following the vinegar experiment. Let’s see. On here we’ve got the Levels 2021 team patch, which I’m quite excited about. That’s a sneak peek of what’s to come physically. We had a Snapwire shoot with Mike D there in Philadelphia. Mark Hyman’s new book, which is on pre-order, I think we were mentioned six times, something like that in that new book. So quite exciting. We’re teed up to have some additional… Oops, keep doing that. Sorry. So that’s coming out in 2023. We had some great stuff on Twitter this week. I just want to highlight this one in particular.
(06:25):
This individual was asking or was surprised that Oatly had added sugar and there’s just this real validation of the content we put out, that if it’s a metabolic health or nutrition topic, there is always an incredible Levels blog post about it and I think he went on to say he typically just starts his searches with plus Levels Health when he’s looking for something related to health at this point, which is incredible. And then Levels right up there with Athletic Greens as a product that is associated with unlocking relationship with food and exercises as we all love to see. New video from Alice [inaudible 00:06:57], two new videos from the McGuffys. Aaron Deanan was on a whole new level and Lauren had a great video about menstrual cycle and metabolic health, so a lot of great stuff this week. With that, I want to welcome Dave Phillips, who’s been a member of Levels for I believe six months plus at this point.
(07:13):
We had several amazing pieces of content that came out with Dave. Podcast episode, we’ve got a video, a deep interview, and really amazing testimonial video with Dave, which is in post-processing right now and a member story. And Dave, I really want to just appreciate you for being a huge supporter of what we’re building, for patiently working with us to tell your story in so many different ways, and just for I think being one of our strongest supporters thus far, even though we’re still early. And I know I’m sure you’ve dealt with a variety of early company challenges, I just really love hearing your story and I appreciate you taking some time to hang out with us this Friday morning. We’d love to hear some thoughts from you on your journey thus far.
Dave Phillips (07:58):
Good morning health harbingers, and thank you Josh. It’s been a absolute pleasure being involved with Levels.
Josh Clemente (08:07):
Well, we feel the same. It’s been a pleasure to be able to, as a team, get to watch your journey. And I would love to hear from your perspective, and I know that you’ve really given an amazing testimonial about your journey with cancer and how metabolic health has factored into that, and I’d love to hear just from your perspective what you’re excited about in the world of metabolic health related to Levels and what you’re hoping to see in the future of the product in the space.
Dave Phillips (08:34):
Sure. I feel super lucky. About a year ago I was diagnosed with 4 + 3 Gleason 7 prostate cancer. It got worse over COVID. I had always been in pretty good shape, but you guys found me at a time when I needed you and here we are a year later. My PSA has gone from 18 to one. My metabolic health has gone from 59 years of age to 55 years of age. I’m off opiates for the first time in 17 years since my daughter was born after having four spinal surgeries. And I’d like to think my microbiome is in pretty good shape and I’m just grateful. There were a couple friends of mine that recommended me going vegan. Then I had to have a surgery. The story was is I found out that I needed surgery. I called the surgeon who was going to do a very aggressive or risky kind of surgery because I had this thing called BRCA2 and it just felt like the right move for me at 58 years of age.
(09:58):
And I asked my surgeon if I had three months to get into the best shape of my life. He said, “Go for it. It’s a slow growing tumor usually.” And I was able to drop 25 pounds before surgery and then somehow I saw the beta app email on Levels and I had gained 10 pounds right after surgery and I started using Levels, I think 10 months ago in November and I lost another 25 pounds. And it’s really changed my life. I mean, I feel way more energetic. And coming from the background of Hollywood and education, I must have told 300 people that I knew about Levels so far and I’m a guy who’s used to scaling products and celebrities, and so I’m just blown away. I guess part of me wants to figure out how we get this device into the hands of people that can’t afford it, how we get Medicare to cover it, how we get some major talent agencies involved to help you. Anything I can do to help you spread the word.
(11:09):
Coming out of a pandemic, I feel like everybody should be wearing these no matter what kind of health you’re in. And I can only speak for California, but out here first it was a couple of vegan aisles in the grocery store. Then there were a couple Whole Foods, now we have a couple Erewhons. But to me, the roadmap you guys have shown me in the last year, I hate to think that someone has to get cancer to figure this stuff out, but it really took me to a whole new level. I want to think that the tips on your website and the things that I was able to put on my desk to learn about glucose monitor or no glucose monitor, I felt that they were invaluable. I felt that they really just gave me an education on eating, which I never knew. So happy to answer any questions and help any way I can.
Josh Clemente (12:14):
Well firstly, sharing your story and hearing directly from you is about the best support we can get right now. The team really just absorbs this and it’s these first person examples of how the tool is being used ’cause that’s all it is, it is just a tool. And the outcomes, the successes that you’ve had are a function of you absorbing the information and learning from it and making changes in your own way. And so I just want to appreciate you telling the story and really look forward to continuing to be able to capture your story and be able to surface as the product continues to evolve and the product features, not just with CGM but also our labs panels, which we’re developing, just continuing to hear directly from people like yourself about how those are fitting into your life and how they can improve is honestly the best support we can get right now.
(13:08):
So on that topic, I would love to hear, you raised accessibility and price point. That’s one of the core focuses of our business right now, is aligning incentives and ensuring that we can drive down price point and increase accessibility. Beyond that, I’d love to hear what the biggest gap is for you. What do you feel you’re missing in the Levels experience or in your metabolic health tool chest today that maybe Levels can someday manifest?
Dave Phillips (13:40):
Gosh, I think the thing I love the best about it is it’s always every day it’s me versus me. I feel like I’m through my own quest to not just be healthy, but I want it to function right? I’m a single dad with a 17-year-old daughter and what so many people don’t realize, I think there was a study yesterday that came out that said something like 42% of all cancers can be cured in advance with just things like better eating. So you guys, you’re on a path, which is unbelievable, especially coming out of a pandemic. For me, I had a reason to really kind of take the last year to make my number one priority food and intake and working out. Maybe not everybody may have that scare or opportunity, but I don’t know, it just felt like I’ve always grown up being a huge fan of Tom Brady and it felt like Levels gave me the opportunity to have Brady’s team of coaches around me all day long.
(14:59):
I mean, I’m now wearing an Oura ring and an Apollo and CGM, and I will tell you that there’s been just as many people that I’ve spoken to that might not want to spend the 300 bucks a month, but still could learn from all the tips. I’ve been able to sit people down and say the intermittent fasting, not drinking for a couple hours, the walking quickly, the almonds. I mean, there’s such a incredible amount of information to be gained by what you guys teach that just educational wise… I’ve spent 20 years of my life in Hollywood, then I moved to education and I helped start Tim Tebow’s marketing career out of college. Timmy’s somebody who might be somebody great to get involved. There’s so many people in LA that they might go to Whole Foods, but they’ve never realized what wearing the CGM would do, this whole notion of being able to watch it.
(16:06):
And I can wake up in the morning and feel great and then I can challenge myself to work out and make sure I don’t eat until 12:30. And I don’t know if you saw my video, but I do literally duct tape my kitchen after 6:37 at night because it just puts it all together for me. I consider myself a pretty smart guy and yet I never realized anything like not eating two hours before bed. Most people I know, they all eat in bed while they’re watching TV and before sleep. So I don’t know where you guys came up with this scientific information, but it’s invaluable and I guess I’d love to help you spread the metabolic word. There’s a big biohackers conference, I think Dave Asprey’s hosting, that I’m going to be at in a couple of weeks out here in LA and I just feel like it’s one thing to look at the website and look at the articles, but I’ve seen…
(17:13):
I guess my article’s only one of maybe three where someone’s had a health problem and they’ve talked about their participation in Levels, not meaning they weren’t a triathlete, they weren’t somebody really conscious of it, or they want a nerd who’s interested in bettering their metabolic health. So I feel like this whole notion of being open to people who have cancer or illnesses or need to lose weight, in my opinion… I started this a year ago. I hadn’t heard about the Levels. I had to do it from friends of mine that were actors that told me about being vegan. I always thought the vegan videos were pretty lousy. The forks for knives and stuff, it was like, ugh, who wanted to eat that crap? And then because I was a documentary guy and because I spent my life in film with [inaudible 00:18:07] and Facing Ali and so many of these projects, when I saw Game Changers, it blew my mind.
(18:12):
I mean, it was great athletes, great doctors and erections and blood in test tubes and it just spoke to me. And then over the course of the last 10 months, as I was working harder and harder watching my CDM and my scores, I all of a sudden started to see my doctors pay more attention. The blogs started talking more about being vegan, UCLA, the Duke blogs, everything. It kind of coalesced in the last four months where everybody was listening. It got to the point where at the beginning of my appointments, the doctors would spend 10 minutes with you and it was all rushed to get you out of the room and tell you, do we cut? Do we radiate? Or what do we do with you? And for whatever it’s worth, this isn’t putting anybody down, but I learned more from the patient sites than I did from anything.
(19:10):
So for me, the We Spark groups that I was on, the Inspire groups that I was on, I was listening to men who were all ages saying they had taken their prostate out over the last 30 years ’cause what everybody told them to do. And none of them talked about eating well. None of them talked about their microbiome or how they could cure their health. They all talked about how angry they were that 50% of them were either unable to perform or were in diapers. And that’s because the medical science over the last 30 years said, take out your prostate or radiate. And I’m kind of glad that I just was pissed off enough to say, “I don’t care what this BRCA thing is, I don’t care what the rates are. I’m going to first hunker down and do everything I can to help my own self get healthy.”
(20:04):
And so I feel like my cousin, who’s a big executive at Paramount, he refuses to wear the CGM or pay the 300 bucks, but I put him on my own Levels program just based on my knowledge. In the last four months, he’s lost 30 pounds just by intermittent fasting and eating almonds and working out after every meal.
Josh Clemente (20:29):
Secondary fasting.
Dave Phillips (20:30):
So you’re really onto something super special. And I’m grateful for guys like you and I feel like there’s a ton of money out there, be it in Hollywood. It’s easy to just look at influencers and say, how do we get people to pay 300 bucks or influencers to talk to us? But I feel like, again, having been a representative my whole life, if you were to partner up with a major talent agency or management company like some of my friends out here, you would see that you could scale at levels that you probably aren’t at just because the amount of these companies that are representing new income streams is phenomenal. William Morris just bought UFC, they’ve just bought IMG. CAA is outside of just the client representation business. They’re starting to get involved with companies.
(21:38):
I know you’ve raised a lot of money, but I have a buddy who’s been the only person on Shark Tank twice. And I even feel like anything like that that spreads the word’s a good thing because I feel like the partners are going to line up the minute you show people that you can increase their scores and their labs when they go see their doctors. I mean, my labs are extraordinary and I cheat. I don’t always have perfect days, but Levels keeps me within a framework. So if I have a day where I’m at the 60s or 65s, the next day I’m in the 90s. It’s this notion of being able to compete against yourself. There’s no peer pressure when it’s just you against you. So I’m just grateful.
Josh Clemente (22:31):
I mean, there’s so many opportunities there and I really think that we can learn from you on distribution stuff. Obviously right now the biggest thing is, as you’re mentioning here, community being able to surface these insights and share them with other people, increase distribution and maximize the channels we have, which so far have been primarily content through our blog, into our app and then through our digital channels. So honestly Dave, there’s a ton more can learn from you both on your personal story and how you’re using Levels, but also on distribution quite obviously. So we should have those conversations for sure as we are now in general availability. But anyway, from this point I would love to have you stick around for the rest of the meeting if you’re interested. We’ve got a bunch more info coming and I just want to, once again, thank you for taking the time on Friday morning to share your thoughts with the team. It’s priceless and we genuinely appreciate your support so far.
Dave Phillips (23:23):
My pleasure. I’d love to. I’m going to mute myself and listen in if that’s okay.
Josh Clemente (23:27):
Amazing. Thanks a lot, Dave. All right, this is a quick culture aside. There’s going to be a lot more coming here in the next few weeks, but I just want to share an update that we’re making with a formalization of the demand capture versus demand generation along with website handoff. So recently JM and Ben have been working together on the sort of dual sides of the coin of demand, increasing the top of funnel and then closing with conversions. So we’re going to formalize this and JM is formally taking over the demand capture side. Along with that will be website handoff or website properties. And Ben is going to continue to focus on maximizing distribution, maximizing the generation side of this. So more details coming soon, but I just wanted to shout out these two for the awesome work so far on setting us up to be able to have first of all, this sort of handoff occur quite organically and under the right conditions at the right time.
(24:30):
And then also just a big look to the future, there’s a ton more coming on the demand side. We’re going to be not just here in the US, but very soon we’ll be in the UK and JM and Karen’s work on setting ourselves up for demand gen overseas is also going to be bolstered by everything that we’ve learned through Ben and team on demand gen here in the US. So anyway, just want to appreciate everybody who is involved on that side and more to come early September on this transition. All right, main thing, Levels shows you how food affects your health. No updates here, no surprise to anyone. Top objectives, so member retention, member health improvement and new member acquisition. This is what we’re all focusing on right now, whether through building new features or through optimizing our funnel on the demand side. Miz.
Michael Mizrahi (25:20):
Yeah, stepping in for Sam. He released a memo this week with communication examples of Async comms. This is mostly in the umbrella of standups, but there’s a few use cases that we want to lean into and this is important as a reminder, I think a lot of us have joined at different points in time. Before, we were using Loom. As we’ve started using it, people have gone through onboarding and done that intensive week three. The goal here is really to double down and kind of refresh everyone on the use cases and why this is so important for our kind of team where we’re not co-located. It’s sometimes hard to lose context and convey emotion and sentiment and all these kinds of things and so this method is working pretty well with the few examples that Sam showed here.
(26:00):
This isn’t something that we haven’t all done. We’ve all sent looms back and forth. The example here is really around daily Async check-ins with your manager at the end of the day, kind of sharing what you’ve done, or those that you work closely with. So not a mandate but something to experiment with and try. This has been working well on some projects. There’s some examples of Maz and Sam discussing of John, one of our contractors interacting with Sam. There’s examples of some of the teams that have done this and getting the reps in really does change the equation. It starts to feel different. So this is a call to action to lean into this, give it a try, start using more looms with a caveat. Don’t use this to replace the things that should be synced, right? So one-on-one should still be happening on whatever cadence you’ve already committed to. If you sense any misunderstanding or misalignment, jump on a Zoom, schedule something sync, address that head on, don’t let that sit under the surface.
(26:51):
It’s good to address those early and deal with that inflammation versus take it down the line when it might be potentially more painful. So be really mindful and contextually aware of what’s going on. And in general, if you need some high bandwidth, low latency conversation, if you’re throwing around ideas, brainstorming something, trying to get to a decision, of course, use think in those cases. But otherwise there’s a lot to learn from this. There’s a lot of more we can do to use these tools effectively and this is a reminder to everyone to do so. Check out that notion memo with all the examples. It’s really interesting to see how it can be used effectively and I think we all send a lot to learn. So thanks Sam for that memo and this is a good reminder to check that out.
Josh Clemente (27:34):
All right, thank you Miz and yeah, ditto on the memo. It’s really interesting to learn from each other and Sam’s definitely ahead of the curve for many of us in the ways that he can leverage Async and we can all learn quite a bit there. All right, Maz.
Maziar Brumand (27:50):
All right, welcome to the forum, product update for the week. First off, I want to say thank you to Dave. I think the stories that you share or people like you share really energizes us to wake up every day and push the ball forward. So every day matters for us and we are thinking about people like you and so it’s really, really wonderful to see your story and the video that shot was just fantastic and really had a big impact on the team and it just puts everything in focus for us. So first off, I want to say thanks on behalf the company and also on behalf of the product team or product org. Okay, so we’re jumping in. We launched scoring basically stability ring and spike detection last week, which David is actually going to walk through in detail to give you a little bit of the peak of what members are saying about it.
(28:37):
And we’re pretty excited. I think there’s much more to come. This is an area we’re going to continue to invest in, but it is really awesome that it’s live and it is getting feedback from our members. So super excited about that. Logging is coming next, which is going to have huge improvements. Big thanks to Andrew if you really stepped up and stepped in to improve the algorithms or basically the backend to improve how food logging will be done on the suggestion. So big thanks to him, but really excited for that to come out and really reduce the friction for our members to be able to log. As far as visual looking stuff, healthier food choices that we talked about last week is getting ready to be handed off to engineering in skateboard fashion. So that’s going to happen next week.
(29:21):
Really excited for that and Alan and David have really been working on refining some of those concepts and then bringing great content to make that powerful. [inaudible 00:29:31], as Josh mentioned, we did a UXR [inaudible 00:29:34]. It was really fantastic to get feedback and try the new mode and we’re working with our advisors, and big thanks to Rob for helping with that. We’ll got early feedback from him but we continue to work with him. Really excited about that so thank you to our advisors and especially Rob there. We’re excited to step forward. Content continues to move forward. Mike D’s been working really hard to get us event-based insights. We should have about 20 in the app by end of next week. That’s the target and really going from a few to 20 will hopefully make a difference and the team’s obviously done a lot of work on the backend and big thanks to Billy and other folks to make this process a lot more streamlined.
(30:18):
So really excited for that. And on the personality driven insights, I think we’re going to get a final cut for the beta version that we can share with our members through the app and also through community hopefully. So really excited to see what kind of response that gets from our members. We’re also working on everything else down here. Special mention for rewards. We had a design review last week and what we’re going to do is we’re going to refine that and try to test it with logging to see if we can make logging more magical and more fun. So we’ll see the early results of whether rewards or maybe better defined as celebrations will have an impact on how people log and experience our app. With that, I will turn it over. Actually one more slide if you don’t mind. Again, I included this here. This is the representation of the roadmap. Nothing’s really changed here. We continue to still invest in the big things and the things that support the big things. So we’re staying focused. Nothing’s changed here. With that, I’ll turn it over to David.
David Flinner (31:16):
Josh, can you refresh? Great. So yeah, as Maz mentioned, we started rolling out, which is super exciting, so many teams involved, thank you to everyone, to get it to this point. The trusted tester beta ended and I’m going to be recapping the feedback for that in a couple seconds. We are currently rolling out the general availability. We’re at 10% as of last night. Today we’re going up to 20% assuming that we get the go ahead from Dave and I wanted to run you through some of the feedback. So the big theme is that the ring seems to be resonating with helping people quickly understand what the data means in a simple to understand way. People are finding the ring very encouraging, they’re finding it helpful to understand how their day is progressing. They’re finding it moderately helpful in understanding the overall health goal progress, but I think there’s some room we can do to improve that in future versions for this. And they’re also reacting very well to the spike tracking. That’s been one of the strongest things that we’ve seen.
(32:13):
In terms of opportunities, we’re hearing feedback about better explaining the threshold and the overall system. And so based on that, over the last couple of days we’ve been queuing up some work to improve the onboarding experience by having a guided onboarding both for new users and the glucose game as well as something just quick and dirty where we can get out some static card explainers to all of our members. And then pulling on the spikes onto the homepage as well, so right now on your homepage you’re going to see just the stability ring, but we’re going to pair that by bringing in the spike count into the glucose state text as well to give you a better, more balanced understanding of how your day’s going. And then there’s some opportunities for personalization as well. So we’re hearing requests for customization of the stability thresholds, so you have custom goals.
(32:58):
And these are things that we’re really thinking about for future versions and as well as for Levels levels and how can we better encourage and motivate people to change? But encouraging so far. Next slide. Quick run through of some of the things that we’re hearing. You can see that bubbled up into the previous slide. It’s great to see things at a quick glance, seeing where they’re at. It’s been a great motivator. I like the colors, it’s a quick view to see how I’m doing. A lot of this was really done in comparison to just the graph alone. So compared to just having the graph versus this, how are you enjoying the experience? Because the people that we pushed this out to and had the survey they had now V2, which was just the graph interest, the activities list, but now they’re appreciating that it’s much easier and simpler to understand what they’re seeing quicker to interpret the data, motivating them to stay stable.
(33:46):
We also asked what is not working so well with this? And I didn’t include everything here because there was not really a theme to it there. You can dig into the details in the thread that I sent out, but it was very much one-offs on a whole bunch of things. If there was a theme, it was, I would say, based on proactive insights, which we have related to other projects like Mike’s work on event-based insights or healthier food choices. People are saying that, yeah, this is super helpful for me to understand how my day’s going, but how can I improve? And so I think we’re taking baby steps to get there. Now you understand how your day’s going in a way that the metabolic score never really helped you to do because you couldn’t understand how it was being made up. The stability score is tied super well to the spike, so now we know, okay, it was these spikes that are contributing to your stability. And then I think the next step for us is, okay, what can we do about that spike?
(34:30):
And Mike’s work is going to be pairing that with an event-based insight. Alan and my work on healthier food choices is going to be doing that upfront to help people avoid that spike next time. Like hey, it looks like you’re spiking a lot in breakfast. What can we do to have a healthier breakfast choice? I think the last one on here I wanted to call out, which is a theme that came up in internal feedback a lot but didn’t come up too much in member feedback yet, but I think this is something to look at. We see that some people say, “Hey, I got a lot of big ups and downs but I’m still considered stable, so how can I reconcile that?” And I think this is part of the personalization and next steps where we say, okay, for the people who are really healthy bio-optimizers, can we do Levels levels? Can we give different thresholds, personalization tiers so that if you want to consider a spike for yourself to be a tighter range, we can do that and it still works in the same framework? Next slide.
(35:26):
Okay, I’m just going to run through quickly some of these charts, so how would you rate the stability ring in helping you achieve your health goals? Can see four out of five. Next slide. How would you rate the stability ring and the text in encouraging you to keep your glucose stable or recover from a spike? Also four out of five. Next slide. How helpful is the ring in summarizing your day and understanding how you did versus just the glucose graph? Everything is very skewed there to the positive end. Very helpful. Next slide. How helpful do you find the text below the ring? Actually did we just show that one? Anyway, skewed towards right. The theme is pretty much everything, what people were finding is very helpful. Next slide. The one thing that stood out that wasn’t quite helpful yet, and this makes sense to me, was the animations and notification badges for staple time, like the little trophy that comes up.
(36:14):
I think people find it encouraging and they’re saying that they like it and it’s gives them warm fuzzies, but I think we need to tweak the parameters. It’s too much too often. It’s not really actionable in terms of I think the overall thing. So we got a moderate response for this one. Next slide. And then you can see here the strong reaction to spike tracking. Pretty much everyone loved the spike tracking. And next slide. So what’s next? In terms of validation, this is really the whole point of the project. We’re going to finish the rollout to a 100% by Tuesday. And by the way, we were taking a slow approach to this because it’s very computationally expensive on the backend and we needed to go baby steps to make sure that the backend service could support this. So finish the rollout to a 100% of members by Tuesday.
(36:58):
And then we’re going to be looking at, keeping in mind this is a Skateboard v1, it’s not going to solve everyone’s 100% of their health issues from the get go, but directionally the things that we want to measure are qualitative responses to, do you find this intuitive motivating and actionable? Which we’re getting good feedback on. Then we want to look quantitatively, can we actually see spike reduction? So can we reduce the duration of spikes for the top 25% of our most spiking members the first week they start Levels and then the last week of their first month program? And then just doing a before and after app opens and seeing if the ring and spike leads to higher engagement as a proxy metric. So that’s it for Scoring V2.
(37:37):
And huge thanks to everyone by the way. We’ve been getting a lot more shaking of the app through report feedback and that’s invaluable. So everyone, if you see something weird, have a thought, please do shake your app and send a feedback. I’ll see it and then I’ll triage it and that’s it.
Josh Clemente (37:53):
Very cool. Yeah, looking forward to continuing to see experimentation like this, especially with the concrete measurement metrics there, which reminds me, this is not OKRs necessarily, but we are going to start two things. We have updates on functional OKRs coming soon and then also we’re going to have an enhanced view into our member personas and sort of who exactly the user is that we are talking about when we are considering measurements like this. It’s oftentimes we can be, myself included, thinking about, when talking about for example, intuition and motivation and actionability, it’s easy for me to personally think, well, this is or is not intuitive or motivating for myself, but what we actually need to be doing is thinking through the lens of our member personas.
(38:42):
And so Lauren is going to be taking lead starting next week on doing deep dives into our individual member personas that we’ve identified. Really fantastic and this will help I think through this format, all of us when we’re evaluating metrics, also evaluate who the measurer is. So I just wanted to make a note on that, and awesome stuff on product this week. All right, hiring updates. We’ve got Taylor starting in just a few days now, so very excited for that. As we continue to try and make our way out of the woods on the support side, having additional reinforcements is always helpful. So looking forward to having Taylor joining the team. And then on the hiring side, roles are the same with the exception of we have added people operations generalists, so Miz is taking lead on this one. This individual is going to help us continue to scale our team, grow the culture. Miz has been doing an absolutely unbelievable job of handling a whole range of different roles including this one.
(39:43):
And so we’re now going to bring in some support as we’ve hit kind of this recent 50 plus person scale. It’s really important that we get these processes right and have somebody who can focus on them specifically. So if you’re interested in what this role is defined as, go ahead and check out the JD, talk to Miz directly. If you know people who might be an awesome fit for specifically the Levels culture in this sort of role scope, definitely point them in our direction or directly to Miz. And then generally if you’re watching this and you’re interested in working with Levels, checkout levels.link/careers. All right, we bombed through that one. So we will jump into individual contributions this week, straight into it actually. So I’m going to stop the share here. And we’ll do the old-fashioned raise the hand method. So I’ll start off. And this week, professionally I have to say I’m really excited about the product and eng, I think, developments that have occurred over the past few weeks, primarily actually on the structural side, the infrastructure internal side.
(40:50):
It just seems like things are humming and we’ve got so many initiatives underway simultaneously that are all leading towards a range of objectives, whether UK e-comm or stability rings or features in-app personalities. There’s just a lot happening and it’s really cool to see the machine becoming well-oiled, which is awesome. And then on the personal side, I am feeling better. I’ve had a lot of back pain, but doing this rehab program every morning, it’s basically yoga. My brain doesn’t do well with holding poses for long periods of time and it’s been paying off. The pain is significantly reduced and getting active again. So yeah, I guess that stuff works as many times as I’ve heard it. Chris.
Chris Jones (41:35):
On the Levels side, I just felt really energized about the fireside chat yesterday. So huge hat tip to Steph for starting it, sharing your story and I laughed during it, I cried. It reminded me of how special it is to work at Levels on that topic and not only just in terms of something that impacts us all, but as it relates to how we build product and how we think about it. So that was super rewarding. So thank you Steph. On the personal side, to no surprise to most people, I’m looking forward to about 12 hours of weed whacking, spraying for weeds, pulling weeds, #farmlife.
Josh Clemente (42:29):
Love it. Miz.
Michael Mizrahi (42:32):
Nice. Get those hands up guys. I jumped in but now I’m on the spot. I’d say something I really appreciated this week, it was really good to see some of the newer support team, but I guess not new anymore, just really taking a bite out of the queue. So nice to see everyone stepping up. And finally I texted Mercy unassigned was at zero, which is a welcome relief from a few hundred. Even though I’m not in the support queue every day, I still care about it a lot and so I’m happy we’re back in action there. So good work team and really cool to see everyone stepping up. On the personal side, nothing special. Was going to do a weekend trip up to Lake [inaudible 00:43:07]. That’s just for the day, just a small hike, but I’m now a Turo host and someone rented my car before I could block off the calendar, so I’m carless, which is I guess the flip side of that, but I’ll deal with it.
Josh Clemente (43:17):
Well, the good news is there’s a thing called Turo, so you can rent a car to make your escape.
Michael Mizrahi (43:22):
While my car is rented out. I’ll figure out another way out there.
Josh Clemente (43:25):
Enjoy. Steph.
Stephanie Coates (43:28):
That’s so interesting. I’d heard of Turo before but I didn’t know anyone that ever used it and so cool to hear that you’re having maybe a subpar experience with it. But anyway, the highlight for me this week was absolutely the fireside and just a shout out to the culture of Levels of when I brought that up in the thread of just more of the psychological side of health and wellness, I never anticipated to have the… I don’t like the authority to run a fireside and so just for it to be so casual of Miz to be like, “Hey, do you want to facilitate this?” It boosted my own confidence to be like, oh, I can step into roles outside of just being an individual contributing engineer. And so that was so motivating to have the chance to stretch out of my comfort zone.
(44:11):
And God, the feedback was just amazing. It was so scary, but at the same time, just I feel so much more connected to the coworkers and I’m really excited to continue the conversation around having this softer side of pursuing health. And so personally I might go backpacking this weekend and so I’m excited to disconnect.
Josh Clemente (44:30):
Awesome, enjoy. Mercy.
Mercy Clemente (44:35):
Professionally, I would say yeah, the queue has been much more manageable this week, so thank you support team. Everyone is doing a really great job. And then personally started playing pickleball again after taking a little hiatus, so I’m excited to be back and playing that.
Josh Clemente (44:52):
That’s fun. Lynette.
Lynette Diaz (44:56):
All right, so I’m getting over my fear, so four. My fear of speaking in front of all of you at one time. But during the week at Levels this week, awesome week, had a lot of fun crushing the queue, that was awesome that we got to zero several times. It’s like, what are we going to do with all of our time? The second most awesome thing this week was the mock panel that I got to do with Casey, that was a lot of fun. Really excited to contribute and give feedback to that. And absolutely the biggest highlight, I think, this week was the fireside chat. I’m so appreciative for Steph for putting that together that was super brave and the outcome of it I think was super amazing and gives us a lot of insight as to how we need to think about building as we go forward. So really appreciated that. And probably going to just hang out with the family, maybe do a game night. Finally getting over this cold so I can be around people again.
Josh Clemente (45:45):
Feel better.
Lynette Diaz (45:46):
Thank you
Josh Clemente (45:47):
Rebecca.
Rebecca Breske (45:48):
Awesome. So my win, it’s kind of professional and personal. The fireside yesterday was so energizing and it was really nice to connect on that level with everyone and I just felt comfortable sharing and it just was a great reminder of what this team is and how special everyone here really is and how these relationships can grow together. Something else that is kind of a big win for me is just that I’m really happy in this job and it’s fitting into my life very well and I was just thinking how we have to be happy in our personal lives in order to be happy in our work lives and vice versa, and how I really don’t have any complaints about the job and I’m really enjoying what I’m doing. So it’s been really great.
Josh Clemente (46:33):
Love to hear that. Ben.
Ben Grynol (46:39):
Yes, super stoked on the eng SLAs and the product update. Just seeing the velocity and seeing everything super clear, that slide that Maz was going over and then David’s update, it’s so clear to just say, hey, here are some initiatives that are being worked on. And then things like, from an outsider’s perspective, seeing SLAs around PR has come down and all that, it just sort of shows that forward path. So kudos to everybody working on product eng design and that. So stoked on that. Also professionally stoked to have Dave here and always love hearing his story and just his involvement as a Levels member. On the personal front, ducked out this morning to the lake. So we are here for the weekend, hanging out with the family and it’ll be a good time. That’s it.
Josh Clemente (47:22):
Looks like a classic lakeside background you got there, looks awesome. Viktor.
Viktor Engborg (47:30):
Plus one to the fireside chat. It was illuminating and great to be part of. I had so many ideas going through that, so I mostly sat back, but it was just really nice. It’s also been great to work with Casima so far on the labs project. She’s been killing it, so it’s going to make my life a whole lot easier as we get into the design part. Personally, I’m at my desert house, you see the boulders in the background. We’re trying to do a garage conversion, so got to make the garage into another bedroom. So I’m excited about that.
Josh Clemente (48:03):
I definitely did not think those were real boulders, I’m not going to lie. Awesome. Well, anyone else want to share here at the end? Got a couple minutes. All right, well, I’ll say big plus one. I really appreciate the… We do have Maz. Maz, over to you.
Maziar Brumand (48:24):
Just use up the time, right? Personal share, we went camping with nephews, nieces, and my children for a couple of days. Were totally without reception, which was nice and also a little scary, but it worked out just fine and it was so fun just being out there in nature and going for hikes and things like that and spending time with kids just focused on not being distracted with all the other stuff that comes at you when you’re at home. So that was really fun. And on the work front, just really loving working with everybody. It just shows the quality of people that we have. And I’m really excited to actually work more cross-functionally with different organizations like tailor the organization. We’ve had a lot of conversation with data science, which is really fantastic and I’m really excited to start working more with content and also clinical. So looking forward to working with everybody to move this ship forward.
Josh Clemente (49:20):
Love it. Yeah, I just wanted to again, just say it was awesome to see the fireside take kind of a new form yesterday and there was a ton of engagement on that. I appreciate you Steph, for taking a swing. I know that that was probably uncomfortable. There’s a lot we can do to continue to, I think, support complex topics and a lot of communication about them. So that’s great. And then on the labs front, I do want to highlight, I was going to share the video from Casima’s UXR today. I wasn’t sure if we had enough time. We probably did in retrospect, but anyway, you got a couple minutes extra. I highly recommend in the Async watching the project updates for this week where that will surface. Labs 2.0 and the data that we collect through it is going to be an exciting experiment, but it’s also a pathway to massively increasing our members’ awareness of what’s happening in their bodies beyond glucose.
(50:15):
So I’m really looking forward to it. It sounds like we’re really balancing the intuition in a great way. It’s difficult to get people to care about blood work, I think, and this product might be able to do it. So anyway, just want to shout that out. And with that, got some extra time so enjoy your Fridays, enjoy your weekends. Dave, thanks again so much for coming and sharing with the team and for everything you’ve done and sharing your story. Looking forward to continuing to distribute and learn from you as we scale. So here’s to the challenges ahead and have a great weekend, everybody.