Josh (00:01):
First Friday forum of December 2022. Let’s jump into it. Top line item this week, just really want to shout out the whole team, especially the demand capture team, put together a very fast and very effective Black Friday promo. Reacting to an awareness that this is something that really high profile and very brand conscious brands do.
(00:23):
This is really the only time that these brands provide a promotion and that’s the category that we fit into. It was a huge success. Tom’s going to do a much deeper dive on this, but we hit over 800 orders. We had two of the five days this promotion ran were all time record days for new orders, drove 25% month-over-month conversion or member growth rather.
(00:46):
Really was just a huge success, especially considering the timeline that this was delivered on. There was a ton that went into this shaping it, setting up the visuals, landing page, engineering, awesome work. So, just the first obviously of many demand capture efforts that are underway, but we’re off to a good start there. We were a few weeks ago able to convert from the prescription pathway for our IRB study into an over-the-counter pathway, meaning no prescription required given that the IRB approves based on exclusion criteria.
(01:16):
So if people opt in, they consent and they meet the exclusion criteria or the inclusion criteria, we’re able to fulfill the study devices through that mechanism. So we finally were able to turn this on through all the different background systems necessary, and this was a huge win. So it led to an increase in completion rate, could be called conversion rate, but just going through the complete checkout execution and sign up for the IRB study of 11% increase there.
(01:43):
We were also able to hit records on the order fulfillment, timing. We had really great success on just the amount of support volume associated with this. Our content leverage was at 17x this past week. Just a ton of great numbers here. This is again, a really big win for the team. A lot of cross-functional work necessary to make this happen and to fit the criteria of the IRB headset for us, and congrats to the team. This is just making everything better for our members and our participants in this study.
(02:11):
On the social side, on the digital side, we had a 42% increase in engagement rate this month. This was largely due to just the amount of work that the support team has put in on making social a top priority for communicating with our members. So we’re now at about 2.6%. We obviously want to continue to trend up towards that high watermark of 5% that really exceptional social channels can hit. But this was a huge increase from the previous months and awesome to see.
(02:38):
Then Levels Kitchen, the really high quality series that we shot with Casey, we hit 2000 watch hours. Retention is really high. For the 40 minute episode, we had an average watch time of 10 minutes or something, which is substantially higher than what I would expect to be honest. We hit a thousand new YouTube subscribers, which is more than, for example, our top viewed video with Dr. Perlmutter I think has half, or sorry, double the views, and we’ve hit 2x the subscribers in half the views or that’s the rate that we’re moving at. So really, really awesome to see.
(03:13):
We’ve got a new memo out on channel strategy, so how we’re going to distribute content across all of our digital channels. Shout out to Sonia for that. And then on the Whole New Level side, so we hit 30,000 Whole New Level plays in November. We’re close to, I think, we’re right at like 500,000 all time or very close to it, and you can see our year-end review here.
(03:31):
Our podcast was in the top 1% most shared globally across 80 countries. We’ve got really great retention numbers. There’s a core audience where Whole New Level is in their top 10% of listened to content. They listen to every episode.
(03:45):
Then we’re making a change here based on some data that Tony dove into and we’re going to split the feed into Inside the Company and Whole New Level. He’s going to have a bigger update on this, but this is just to double down on the content that’s resonating the most on the Whole New Level side and to still have the inside the company stuff for how we’re building, how we’re growing, the intentionality that we’re bringing into the company building stuff.
(04:07):
Let’s see. So we’ve got two big programs coming soon, membership renewal season starting soon. Sissy’s leading the charge towards a 12/5, December 5th, launch date for membership renewal process. Got a Try It program, which I think many of you have heard about where we’re going to do a $100 Try It single sensor program. We’re going to see how that works. December 8th is the launch date for that.
(04:27):
We’ve launched our first experiments for performance and search ads. These are internally produced. Tony whipped up some great stuff internally and we’re just really getting a feel for how this works, what sorts of numbers we’re getting and so on. And then sign up 3.0, so a nice tweak to our sign up and checkout experience is prepping for a 12/9 launch date.
(04:47):
We started an internal pilot experiments primarily through the content team to really take a swing at traditional product marketing. So, this is something we have not done. Our editorial project and program is really entirely focused on educational content, and we don’t intend to convert it into product marketing, but we do have amazing writers and amazing thinkers on our content team.
(05:11):
We’re seeing what we can do by applying that towards some traditional product marketing, and TBD, where exactly this surfaces. We’re going to make sure that we don’t cross wires with our traditional editorial content, but definitely excited about this project.
(05:26):
On the app side inside, so we’re working on a faster app launch, start onboarding V3 is in work, personalization and ingredients, spike attribution, all projects that are in flight right now. The over the counter replacements, that process of being able to replace sensors that were fulfilled through the new IRB over the counter study is now live. Shout out to Hal for that.
(05:46):
Order items, so there’s a ton of work that had to go into back filling the old system, the old checkout flow, to the new commerce 2.0 system and making sure that the data matches well with the old and the new. So tons of work from the backend team on getting there. Then the product team got the stability score launched to I think the email went out this morning. A 100% of new members or of members have the new stability score and Levels Levels is live to 1%. So big launches there, awesome work.
(06:16):
Then let’s see, the last things content team plus JTPR working on a launch plan for February 2023. Lots more to come on that, but that’s in flight. We launched the Ask the Expert series on the blog. This is like an advisor QA, Ben Bickman did the first one. See up here. It’s a new series, pretty sweet.
(06:34):
Then there’s a big APOB piece as well. So obviously we’re taking a stand on what we consider to be important metrics for heart health, cardiovascular health, and APOB seems to be and is becoming increasingly accepted as a much more important marker than total cholesterol. So that piece went up to explain that.
(06:53):
Then lastly, Lauren was on Be Well by Kelly. this is a tier one show, TikTok partners are lined up. So we’re going to start experimenting with TikTok, more on that in the strategy from Sonia, multiple gift guides and promos as we approach the end of the year and the holidays. And you can see a ton of exciting stuff here. Again, huge lift in our conversion rate. Our new members, due to the Black Friday promo, got some great new episodes on A Whole New Level.
(07:16):
Alexei is joining us as an advisor on the demand capture and growth stuff. And what else? Tons of great content. Kevin Jubbal, Dave Asprey, a lot of good stuff. All right, that I want to welcome Steven. Steven’s a partner to us here at Levels, content creator, entrepreneur in multiple ways, investor, fellow Texan, now that I’m down here.
(07:42):
Steven, I really appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear a few thoughts from you on health, wellness and your perspective as a creator in the space. Hey Steven, I think you’re muted right now.
Steven (07:54):
There we go, so my journey with Levels actually started eight years ago before Levels was even made, and I was diagnosed with pre-diabetes two weeks after completing my first marathon. So I was like, what on earth is going on here? Long story short, I just shotgun approach, cut out all sugar, carbs for the most part, but really didn’t know what I was doing.
(08:19):
Was then introduced to Levels from, I think my little brother just took a screenshot of some Instagram ad and texted it to me. That was like two years ago. I’ve worn a CGM for over two years now. My whole family has worn one for at least two months, and I come from a family of eight, so there’s a lot of us, and really enjoy Levels, really enjoy what you guys are doing.
(08:48):
My background, I worked in finance, I was in venture capital and special situations investing, left because I realized that I could make 10 times the money running an Instagram account for my wife and my mom. And that was three years ago now. So now I invest in consult and incubate both influencers and brands, and I have a lot of fun doing it.
(09:13):
Levels, I think, is a fantastic social media brand, because it’s so visual and it allows you to take something that typically is non-tangible and put it into a tangible chart, something that people can look at and understand. That’s one of the keys to brands that succeed on Instagram particularly, and TikTok as well.
(09:41):
I’m super passionate about this. In fact, I am going to be doing, I don’t know if giveaway is the right word, but on my account where I essentially pay people to try this out of my own pocket, because I’m just so grateful that I figured this out before I got full-fledged diabetes and had to deal with the problems that come with it. And so anyway, I don’t know where you want me to take that.
Josh (10:09):
No, I think first of all, awesome insights from your perspective. Obviously the angle of seasoned creators and entrepreneurs like yourself building this digital audience, it’s key to our grassroots growth is getting people who can communicate directly with audiences to help them understand exactly what we’re building and why it might be relevant to them, so that’s huge.
(10:31):
And hearing the hype in advance of the Try It Program is exciting, because I agree. It’s a more gentle on-ramp into the technology platform for the long term. So thank you for sharing that. I know our team is devouring those insights. I’d love to hear a little bit more about your experience with the program, with the CGM experience and then transitioning into the Levels ecosystem.
(10:59):
Then I’d love to hear at the end, what’s one thing that you would like to see Levels do that we’re not doing yet, whether it’s a new product or service or a change to the existing platform?
Steven (11:10):
So, three questions in there. It was my experience coming into Levels, ecosystem, what I like about it and what I would like to see changed, is that right? So experience coming in. So I’ve tried four or five different of your competitors as well, and I think Levels is the best. The other ones have parts that are great about them, but for a number of reasons, I think Levels is better and that’s why I’ve come back to Levels.
(11:45):
What I like most about Levels is actually a feature that I don’t use anymore, but was pivotal when I first joined. When I first joined, I logged all of my foods, I did the comparison stuff and I got my scores, and I had this massive list of all of these different things and how they scored. And eventually you do that enough and it builds an intuition.
(12:11):
I don’t really log my foods any more so much, because I already know what the scores are going to be because I’ve done it for so long. What I love about Levels now is that I can’t cheat it. I can’t lie to it. If I go eat a doughnut, it’s going to show up in my blood sugar. In this weird way, I just really like the Levels helps hold me accountable, and that’s to be quite frank, my favorite part about it Now after having used it for so long.
(12:48):
Favorite feature, again, going to the second question, favorite feature is definitely the ability to compare and log foods and get scores. Again, I don’t use it a ton now, but it’s still my favorite feature even though I don’t use it as much.
(13:03):
Anything I could change, two things. One was going to be you guys need to come up with a one-sensor Triad system because I did a poll on my Instagram two weeks ago and 15,000 people were like, and I put, “What price would it have to be for you to try it?” No price, 99, 1.99, 2.99, and 15,000 people said 99 dollars, and they would try it. So I don’t know what percentage of the 15,000 would convert. I would imagine it’s a lot more than 150. So, that was the first change I wanted.
(13:41):
The second change I wanted, which is probably more to your question, I would love to understand, and I don’t know if technology is there, but understanding insulin and how that moves with glucose. I’m sure Bickman’s talked to you guys about that as well, but to the extent that’s possible, that’s the next thing I’d be interested in.
Josh (13:59):
Awesome insights. Well, firstly, the accountability part is great to hear. I resonate strongly with that. Can’t cheat it, but in terms of the Triad sounds like we’re heading in the right direction there. And lastly, our core mission here is really express and educate people on the entirety of their metabolic health, their cellular function, mitochondrial health. And that requires us to have a lot more insight than just glucose.
(14:25):
So, with our in-home blood work and with our expert advisors like Rob on this call right now, we’re helping people focus on the fact that glucose is really a symptom more so than a driver. And it’s upstream insular resistance that is super consequential. Whether we’ll get to that continuously anytime in the near future is TBD, but we’ll definitely get it discreetly through our blood work and through our educational stuff.
(14:47):
So continuing to elevate that and having people like you help explain that to audiences is just huge. We won’t be able to translate it through every sort of subgroup, and so just really appreciate you having that perspective and helping us to continue translating that.
Steven (15:02):
I think in five years, everyone on the planet Earth is going to have worn one of these for at least two weeks, because you’d just be crazy not to. So excited about what you guys are doing.
Josh (15:12):
Amazing. Well, Steven, thanks so much for taking time to hang out with us today. The team, really, we can’t get these insights anywhere else, so thank you for joining us. Thanks for sharing that and looking forward to continue to partner with you.
Steven (15:24):
Awesome. Thanks so much. Appreciate it.
Josh (15:26):
All right. Feel free to stick around for the rest of the meeting. We’ve got a bunch more here, but no pressure. I know you’ve got a lot going on.
Steven (15:31):
Awesome. Thank you.
Josh (15:32):
All right, thanks, Steven. Quick culture and kudos aside, I want to shout out Maz, you hit one year with us here at Levels. Again, I’m in a time warp. It always feels like either much shorter than that or five times longer, and in this case it feels like he’s been here five times longer. So, shout out to Maz for taking on a ton and helping us forge ahead. Then I’m going to hand this one over to Alan.
Alan (15:59):
Hey, so I wanted to call out Sissy and Victor this week. So what was the problem here? Well, I was too busy, and I couldn’t deliver. I didn’t have the time to deliver on this really essential experience, which is prompting users to renew their membership. They’re approaching the end, and in a very brief amount of time, both Sissy and Victor were able to turn around some designs and a point of view on how we’ll do that.
(16:30):
So to me, this was this really amazing teamwork and combination of, well, there was a PRD that was incredibly detailed and specific that made it really easy to execute against. Then Victor, another victory for Victor in that he just sat down, got some beautiful and thoughtful designs, and they’re essentially ready to go. He did this with a Friday deadline. He started on Wednesday, so really impressive collaboration.
Josh (16:57):
Love it. Thank you, Alan. Thank you Sissy and Victor. This is the type of stuff that makes us take faster and more effectively.
(17:06):
All right, do a quick culture shout out as well on a recent conversation that Sam and I had on Whole New Level, this sort of stuff will soon be on the Inside the Company Track that Tony just launched. But the objective here is to continue to pull the thread on confidence, trust, especially in a remote environment when communication drives so much of the awareness and context that we all have.
(17:31):
So continuing to assume positive intent in people’s communications, seeking better information when you don’t have it, and being responsive to those requests with positive intent and recognizing that in others is huge. I really appreciate everyone working towards this constantly. Remote, it’s a new frontier and we’re doing a lot here with a high speed growth stage company. We all need to continue to practice this, myself included.
(17:58):
We really appreciate everyone listening to this, sharing thoughts on it, how we can continue to shape this and do better at it as a team, as leadership and so on. So, just wanted to pull that one out, and then I’m going to hand it off to Hui for the don’t suffer in silence value.
Hui (18:17):
Hello everyone. So, this is something that I learned and started doing during the transition from being an individual contributor to your HR manager. And I find it particularly helpful with their transition, but also with my professional life and personal life things. That’s why I wanted to share this here with you all.
(18:42):
So basically when we say “don’t suffer in silence,” it means whenever you’re suffering, you should raise your voice and get attention from relevant people. And in a workplace, that usually mean your manager, your mentor, your team member, or just whoever you trust, and you do that instead of suffering silence. In the end, bring yourself out, which would cause more harm to yourself and also people around you.
(19:12):
That plus [inaudible 00:19:14] is my personal learning on top of that, basically on how you should raise your voice to avoid sounding like a negative person that complains all the time. I will talk more about that later. But first I want to emphasize why raising a voice is important, especially in an environment like ours.
(19:34):
So first and foremost, no one else can understand you better than yourself do. Maybe your mom can when you a small kid, but definitely not your coworkers. If you don’t raise your voice, people might not know that you’re suffering at all. People would think everything works great, that you are doing well, which would let the situation end up being with surprises, distrust, wrong decisions being made, and sometimes even worse.
(20:04):
In addition to that, an environment that experiment is very important and emphasized. Feedback is greatly appreciated. Like ours here at Levels, everyone’s voice is also very essential to make those experiments happen in the first place and improvements to continue to happen. The cultural surveys and policy changes resulting from those are great examples.
(20:33):
But you might wonder if I raise my voice too much, especially or about negative things, would I be perceived as a grumpy, childish person, immature person, or would I be perceived as someone who is always being negative or being pessimistic about things? And to be honest, that’s not impossible, and that’s the how part comes into play.
(21:01):
Basically when you raise your voice or just about your sufferings or concerns, try not to only vent, rant or complaint, but rather approach the issues from a problem-solving perspective. You can start with something like, “I’m really bothered by X or that we’re doing X. Can I understand the reasons why and find a way to achieve the same goals but make it better for me?” Or “I’m not happy that we don’t have X, that we are not doing X. Can I propose something to address the issue of that cost?”
(21:36):
Even if you don’t have any feasible way to solve the problem, you can simply go as straight as, “I’m suffering, I want to get advice on X, Y, Z to make me feel better.” The key point here is to make it clear that you are raising your concerns with the intent to solve it, improve it, or just understand and then disagree and commit, which is totally fine in a workplace. When we all want to assume positive intent of the other people.
(22:04):
We can also do our part to make sure the positive intent is obvious from our side. So people don’t even need to make the assumptions. So in my scenarios, I have usually find a way out when I do this, when I talk to people with this mindset. And now that I’m a manager, I also love to hear from people the less bright things on their mind and work with them together to improve. And together we can make things better or just less bad. I think that’s all I have for today. Thanks everyone.
Josh (22:41):
Awesome. Thank you, Hui. I think that was a perfect articulation of this one. So nothing to add there. Thank you very much. All right, one last thing, just a little house cleaning touch point here. It’s really just about on Notion, making sure that we’re all using the public pages and the public databases that exist. So primarily memos, meeting notes and or a document wiki space.
(23:07):
The goal here is to keep categorizations, like these bulk categorizations basically cover 99% of what we’re generating in Notion, and it’s really important for discoverability. If you need to limit the audience, you can do that through sharing permissions, but let’s keep everything in its right place as opposed to in private spaces.
(23:22):
Then on comms, obviously the transition to comms is going to continue to be a work in progress. Please continue to provide feedback in the sort of comms channel, meta channel, and then turn on SMS notifications. So the triple app mentions the P0 category. We have an SMS notifications feature. These are rarely used. This is the super urgent need to get someone’s attention, so turn on SMS for that.
(23:47):
It’s the best way to be able to know that those are in your box. And then confirm your channel subscription settings. So we have a couple general that we really want everyone to be able to see when there’s a post in general. So make sure that your subscription settings are set up, and then at the highest level is a great curated pin post channel. So continuing to improve here, but these are some great tips to make sure that we’re using the tool as effectively as possible.
(24:12):
Company objectives, Level shows you how food affects your health. No change here. Number one priority. Member retention, new member acquisition, member health improvement, obviously with the recent initiatives, especially on demand capture, we’re really pushing here. And then product side, continuing to focus on improving member health. That’s how we’re going to be able to retain people because we’re providing that value.
(24:32):
Product top priority in Q4. Demand capture of course is increasing. Here are the functional group tagline, just ripping through this, no major changes here. And now onto product update.
(24:43):
I believe this is Maz.
Maz (24:54):
Hey guys, sorry, just trying to find the unmute button. Welcome to the update for December 2nd. There’s lots and lots going on in product engineering and design land. We’re actually doing two things. One is [inaudible 00:25:09] their beginning. We’re really focusing on getting a lot of the basics that maybe we’ve been putting on the backlog right now.
(25:16):
A lot of work on making the app a lot faster, a lot on growth projects as you saw earlier with Try Its, with sign up and many, many more. And then also focusing on some of the pinpoints that we’ve heard from our members around support, creating a portal for members where they can adjust things themselves. So there’s a lots and lots of work going on to really making our app, now that we are past beta mode, something that people would find delightful to use.
(25:43):
In addition to all the feature work that we have been doing, and we’re also taking on a lot of the bugs to make the app a lot more usable by a more mainstream audience. So lots and lots of work going on here, and then continuing to really building the features. As Josh mentioned, Levels Levels has gone live through GA at 1%, and I think this is going to be a big step function in how people use the Levels app.
(26:12):
In addition to that, there was a big effort on the vision of the product for 2023. This is a work that Alan, myself, David are doing, which is related to the product strategy memo that we wrote, but it’s going to be actually what visual walkthrough of what our app could look like, what the user journey could look like and how it can add a whole new dimension to our app, which is emotional feedback, which we will tell you a lot more in a week or two.
(26:41):
Our goal here is to have an update for you, a much more in-depth update or view of this vision before everybody goes out for break or the holidays. So expect that in the next couple of weeks, and we’re running some prototypes that we’re talking internally to test out some of the ideas within this product vision. Then the last one is trends that we’re working on, which is really showing people their data to show them a sense of progress and the biological feedback. Really excited about the SCUM, so stay tuned.
Josh (27:11):
Awesome, thank you, Maz. All right, demand gen, this one is Tony.
Tony (27:18):
Thanks, Josh. So I touched on some of this actually in some recent memos, but I felt that it would be really good to go over some of the changes this past year with demand gen and how we’ve been switching gears. So for YouTube, our initial goal was to 10x digital content. We anchored on producing different types of content and shipping them as fast as possible.
(27:46):
Now, that we’ve already tested a variety of concepts and a variety of types of content, we’ve already seen what our viewers are looking for. So our next step now is really to just double down on what actually works to grow our subscribers in a way that personalizes it for them. So with that, we’re going to be focusing on quality topics mostly related to metabolic health and health and wellness.
(28:13):
Next slide, Josh. Thanks. So what types of metabolic health content have resonated the most with everyone? We already saw the huge success we had with Casey and Dr. Perlmutter’s episode from a few months back. That one, as of today, I think generated a little over a million and a half views already. And then the episode that Casey recorded with Rob about the cholesterol panels, that one’s now our number one podcast episode.
(28:45):
But as you’ll notice here, aside from those, these are our top 10 to 15 videos and podcasts that we produce over the last year. And you’ll notice any of the episodes that featured a thought leader in our space was the key driver for the increase in subscribers that we’ve witnessed over the past few months and as well as the play rates and watch time that have increased. So this same effect that we had on our YouTube channel was the same effect we had on our podcast channel. So moving forward, we’re going to be doubling down on really just coordinating these thought leader types of episodes.
(29:23):
Next slide. Thanks. So I recently started digging into our YouTube metrics and seeing which thought leaders are the ones that we should be connecting with. From there, I started to really anchor on two key factors. The first one was really just pursuing special guests that had a massive reach already on other podcasts. Then the second one was really connecting these guests with topics that are already high ranking search terms on YouTube and search terms that our viewers are already looking for day-to-day.
(29:58):
So you’ll notice here on the slide already, the good news is many of these thought leaders are advisors, which is awesome, and we’ve actually recorded episodes in the past with many of them. So, we’re definitely going to be bringing them back on the show, but there’s definitely plenty of other speakers that I found that we haven’t interviewed yet. Over the coming months, I will be reaching out to them. Next slide.
(30:25):
So on top of bringing on more thought leaders, we also felt it was important to make some other changes to our podcast, especially if we’re going to be doubling down on strictly health content. It doesn’t mean that we’re not going to be creating more startup culture related content because we will continue to do that, but we’ll be doing that on a separate channel.
(30:47):
You probably already noticed that a few months ago we split our YouTube channels, so this really helped personalize the experience for our subscribers because now they’re really seeing the health content that resonates with them more so than the culture content. So this was the same effect we’ve been seeing over the last few months with our podcasts with a lot of the retention per episode. Next slide.
(31:15):
As Josh mentioned earlier on the call, so starting later this month, we’re actually going to be distributing our podcast episodes across two different channels. So the Whole New Level will still be a podcast for us, but it’ll be a health-focused podcast, and it’s going to lean mostly into health and wellness topics. And then for anything startup business or culture related topics, we’re going to be releasing those on our new podcast now called Inside the Company.
(31:44):
Overall, doing this is really just going to allow us to spread awareness while retaining all of our listeners in actually two different categories on the podcast side. So definitely stay tuned over the next few weeks for this new channel. I’m really excited about it, and that’s pretty much all I have for the demand gen recap.
Josh (32:06):
Super, super cool. Thank you, Tony. Thanks for continuing to evolve the systems and adapt. I’m very excited for the direction for A Whole New Level. I think our members are too, and also continuing to share what we’re doing here Inside the Company. Okay, Chris Jones.
Chris (32:23):
Thanks, Josh. So I’m here today to give everybody an update on the OTC for the IRB, which enables the non-RX path for the G6. And everyone’s probably going, what in the heck did he just talk about? So it’s a term that I know we tend to say we don’t like to use acronyms here, and it feels like this particular topic we have over-indexed on it. So I’m going to break down a little bit around what this actually means for us, our members and support to just make sure everyone understands the impact on all fronts.
(32:53):
Next slide. So first off, when we sign the IRB, this allowed us to get devices to our members without an RX and without SteadyMD. So for those of you that have gone through our signup flow recently, for those of you who maybe haven’t, you kind of forget, is this one page or two pages from our cart? It’s actually closer to 10 to 12 pages of the flow that users are going through.
(33:20):
So, the first four slides on the medical consult, they have to agree to a telehealth consult, they have to agree to a safety consent, they have to fill out 12 questions and three open ends to give medical history, and then later on, they have to have to do ID verification, which is go find your wallet, pull out your ID, take a photo of the front, take a photo of the back, take a selfie, and there’s just so much friction in that process. So getting up and running with the over-the-counter allows us to remove all of these screens that all these questions from the current IRB flow.
(33:56):
Next slide. Great. So what does that mean? What’s the net net of removing all of that? In this chart, what I’m looking at is I’m looking at people going through the flow. So these are new orders that see the IRB consent in the flow, meaning they’re definitely coming through that path and looking at that ratio over time is that proxy of two markers.
(34:18):
Before the OTC went live, which is the part of the chart on the left, we were averaging from those two points about 32% conversion rate of people that see the IRB consent form and then eventually show up with an order on the other end. After we went live with the OTC, that jumped to 36.2%, which is an 11% improvement over our current data.
(34:42):
Now, some of the data on the right, I had say wanted to make sure I excluded things like Thanksgiving or Black Friday because that would definitely skew any numbers. So I wanted to try to isolate what’s a normal week and to put it in different ways, if OTC was a partner code, it would be our third-largest partner in a month behind David Sinclair and Mark Hyman.
(35:05):
So that gives you a sense of scale around this type of reducing friction can have just as big if not can sometimes bigger impact on orders, and then some of our largest partners, next slide. But there’s more than just reducing friction, which is really kind of the first bucket of removing a lot of information and having the completion rate. There’s a huge reduction in support volume and support things we have to handle.
(35:31):
You can imagine every time someone runs into that friction along it, they reach out to support or they forget to fill out a consult or they forget to do an ID verification or their RX gets rejected or they run out of refills or they have a military ID that doesn’t have a back of a thing they can take care of.
(35:48):
Also with the OTC, we are shipping orders twice as fast. So this is a huge reduction from a support thing in terms of just helping people through that flow. My quick estimate is just over Black Friday weekend alone, it saved us over a hundred cases that have been eliminated because of this reduced friction and people forgetting to do these steps.
(36:07):
Then lastly on the cost side, which I know Riley cares probably the most about, is we no longer have to spend $12 for that RX for that new member and we’ve reduced our dispensing fee from $12 to $6 in order. So again, looking at only the four-day weekend of Black Friday, we saved $20,000 from having this live, in addition to likely doing about 80 to a hundred more orders because of the reduced friction in the cart.
(36:37):
So, it’s been just a huge unlock. I really just appreciate everyone that’s helped on this. I know it’s been the project that almost seemed to never end, but we finally got there and I just want to say a huge thank you to everyone and that’s it.
Josh (36:52):
So awesome. I love the framing there, that we think a lot about promotions and about partners and things, but we have so much that we can take off the table in terms of reducing friction, just making it easier for people that are interested and want what we’re building to get there. So this is an amazing example.
(37:09):
Thank you to the whole team on the back end, on the engineering side, front end, support. First of all for getting through all the friction that used to exist and then now this big unlock, so very excited to see more of this. Thank you.
(37:25):
All right, hiring updates. We don’t have any new hires pending, so I don’t think there’s much there, but we do have open roles still just sort of our general roles here on software engineering and R&D engineering. And then we have our general talent pool.
(37:37):
So head to levels.link/careers if you’re interested in what we’re doing here, shoot a note, send in your information, and if you or someone thinks that this culture and this product is a fit, definitely stay in the loop. We’ll get you in your orbit, share more on what we’re up to.
(37:53):
And I believe we onto individual contributions, so we’re well ahead of schedule here. We have probably a high watermark for live participants on the call right now, which is great. We’d love to get a ton of some collaboration here on the individual contributions. We typically go about these by raising our hand, which I got to stop the share here. You can raise your hand like this and we’d love to just hear from some people on what you’re excited about professionally, personally.
(38:23):
I’m going to kick it off. I’m going to probably have a bit of a ramble here, but firstly, extremely excited about what we just touched on from Chris. The improvements, these sorts of operational improvements are just driving them to completion. There are so many moving parts.
(38:36):
There’s a lot of frankly regulatory considerations around something like this. We are being very careful working with an institutional review board on a first of its kind large-scale study. People are consenting to this. It’s very complex. We have a lot of educational material to distribute.
(38:50):
We also have a lot of awareness that we have to provide to the IRB to make sure that we’re meeting the intention. So to see something like this work out and have a massive boost in completion rate is awesome. Just reiterating myself here, but that’s huge. The Black Friday promo, seeing the team just come together so fast and crank that out and the huge win that it showed us, it was awesome to see improvements on the Whole New Level. Just a ton of stuff I’m super stoked about.
(39:19):
And then I really want to just thank the research team. I sent a note out yesterday if you didn’t see that in the general channel, we’ve been working through the transition with Taylor, departing Levels. I know he’s on the call today. He sent out an async update this morning, if you didn’t see that, definitely recommend checking that out.
(39:39):
But just want to thank Taylor for what he is done here, getting us to the point that the IRB is a real thing, built the research team. Research team is transitioning into various regions of the company to continue doing research work but also to support the functions that are closest to product market fit. And just want to thank them for working with us through this transition.
(39:56):
So personally, I’ve been on a roll with my daily workouts and I’m feeling good. So energy levels are good, back is in good shape, so I’m feeling happy about that. And with that, I’m going to hand it to Chris.
Chris (40:10):
Thanks. Plus one note everything Josh said. It was super fun watching the Black Friday promotion. I think I sat there with a Retool dashboard hitting refresh about every five minutes of like, all right, where are we at now? Where are we at now? Where are we at now? That was just so much fun to watch.
(40:28):
And related to that, I just want to do a huge shout-out to the support team, because it’s an area that I had let the team know that they were free to spend time with family and really take the holidays off to prepare for a big January and February. Well before we did decide to do a promo, and I wanted to make sure that I held to that and didn’t pull them away from spending that time and recharging.
(40:51):
So we were going into what essentially is our biggest ever order peak, and we were half staffed the whole time, so we knew a ton of volume was becoming the door and we were basically treating it like a weekend. So it was really encouraging and fun to watch the team self-support each other.
(41:13):
Some of the team members that were on call absolutely had it go away for emergencies and everyone just started jumping in, “Can I take this? Can I help out here?” So just the team collaboration around having each other’s back was just incredible to watch. So a huge thanks to the support team for helping each other out in a very tough spot.
(41:34):
Then personally, we finally started getting a lot of snow. So two days ago was the first time I actually had to pull out the tractor to actually do some plowing. So that was fun, me being back on the tractor for the winter and excited about winter sports.
Josh (41:49):
Love it, same. Ian.
Ian (41:56):
So I’ve given individual updates several times over the last couple months about commerce just in review and broad strokes. The start of this month, a big milestone was getting the thing launched and getting a bunch of traffic that we had on the old rail, shifted over to the new thing, making sure that it held up under the load.
(42:13):
The next test, which is newer news, is I was out of the office for about 10 days around Thanksgiving and didn’t have to jump on to put out any fires or anything. And now having gotten back at the beginning of this week, one new thing was already built on top of the new system, which is the no RX path that we were just talking about. Then GoLead is about to ship the Try It path in a few days.
(42:42):
So, seeing that the new thing is working and it’s holding up even as we’re…
Justin (42:45):
[inaudible 00:42:46]
Ian (42:48):
Justin’s dealing with his dog. Seeing that it’s able to grow its own legs and other people are able to contribute to it and we’re able to build new order types on it. This is a huge proof of concept and just super gratified to see that it’s working.
(43:05):
On the personal front while I was out, it was a reminder of all the things I enjoy and I’m interested in outside of work. So I cleaned out my garage and installed a power rack and, speaking of Josh mentioned workouts. I’ve just been enjoying working at home since I got that installed and built some custom shelving in there and just had it had a DIY explosion while I was not thinking about work over the break. That was a lot of fun.
Josh (43:33):
Power rack, I’ll see you there. Nice work. All right, here’s a prompt for more. Anyone else? Got plenty of time here. Love to hear from some of you. Maz.
Maz (43:49):
On the work front, it’s been really fantastic working with cross-functional teams, whether it’s starting to work more with [inaudible 00:43:57], whether it’s Karen or Tom, and also really starting to work more with Casey, which has been really fantastic. She’s the heart of our scientific knowledge of the company, so really taking that and using it to make products. Really excited for that, excited for Azure to join the product team. Also become more research-based.
(44:14):
So this is all really exciting cross-functional integration that’s finally happening. Super excited about that. On the personal side, we were up in Joshua Tree for Thanksgiving and they had a unheated pool and so no sane person in the right mind would use an unheated pool, but thanks to Casey and her inspiration of cold plunges, we used it as a cold plunge.
(44:37):
So we did a bit of swimming. I think I started with 30 seconds. One of our friends that does cold plunges was there, and she started with 10 minutes. So it made me feel terrible and I think I got to over a minute by the end of it, and she got to 20 minutes. So anyways, it seems like there is some adaptation there, but it was fun. It was fun to try something to new. I’ve always hated cold water, so this was fun. Thanks, Casey.
Josh (45:02):
I’m with you on that. I did an 11-minute cold plunge with Wim Hof breathing associated the other day. Mercy’s boyfriend has one. It’s a converted chest freezer and it works pretty well. It’s like 46 degrees. It’s crazy. Zach.
Zach (45:17):
Amazing. Y’all, 10 minutes is just swimming, you’re just in the water. That’s not a plunge. You’re just swimming at that point. On the professional front, one of the best things about doing legal at a company like this is I get to drop in and work with for just a couple minutes or a couple days or a couple weeks, a lot of different teams.
(45:37):
And that’s been the case for me this past three or four weeks. I’ve gotten to do a little bit of work with Karen, which is always a blast, working with Maz on agreement. Same thing with Miz and Cosima, chatted with Azure and Stoddy, and I will just say I really love working with everybody at this company.
(45:57):
It’s so cool to see everybody have on the one hand different approaches but tackle everything with the same degree of zeal and professionalism. So that’s just been really great. On a personal/professional note, next week is my first think week, so I’m super stoked about that and excited to just slow down a little bit and just do some brain work.
Josh (46:21):
I’m excited to see the output of a Zach Henderson think week. I think it’s going to be impressive. Keep us posted. Taylor.
Taylor (46:29):
Hey, thanks for the shout-out, Josh, and just wanted to say thank you everybody. You can potentially skip watching my async update. Just wanted to say bye and thank you very much for a great year.
(46:42):
I’ll echo what Zach was saying. I think professionally, I’ve really enjoyed all the interactions I’ve had with all of you and wherever we’ve met, whether it’s been Glacier or picked a phone in New York or dinners in San Francisco, I’ve really enjoyed and learned a lot from all of you.
(46:59):
So excited to see all the progress and keep up the good work with OTC and Black Friday. I hope that line continues to go up and you all have my coordinates, you know where I am, so take care.
Josh (47:15):
Awesome. Thanks, Taylor. It’s mutual. All right, anyone else? Any closers here? All right, well, we got 10 extra minutes, so go ahead and earn those back. Have a great weekend. Thanks everybody for crushing it and excited to round out the rest of December well into the holidays. So have a great one, we’ll see you next week.