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Levels Friday Forums

December 30, 2021

Josh Clemente (00:00):
All right, I’m going to jump in. We’ve got what is likely to be a shorter meeting today. We’re in between holidays here. A lot of people are out enjoying their time away, which is great. So we’ll just jump straight into it. Last one of 2021. I’m sure we’ll do a recap, year in review in the next week or so. This week, or week and a half, two weeks, we completed our financial audit. So this is crucial in order to submit our SEC filing and move ahead with closing out our fundraise. And as most of us know, the fundraise we did was a little out of the ordinary. We had a crowdfunding component. We had multiple operator components under different regulations. And so it’s a little bit complex. It’s been a good learning experience. Really appreciate Miz and Zac for carrying a huge burden here with this audit being added to everything else we’ve got going. So this is a good step. Hopefully, that’ll be closed in the first few weeks of January.
We’ve got two growth candidates in the pipeline, community manager with an offer out right now and then lifecycle marketer. This is a technical challenge stage, sort of an opportunistic higher opportunity, but we’re also going to continue to source folks for those roles as we work towards closing these two out as quickly as possible. Growth, it’s going to become an increasing pressure point in the next few weeks and months. And Ben has put together as well an areas of responsibility and handoffs document to go along with these additional roles, showing where the focus will be and also how he needs to alleviate himself to focus on the growth function itself. Chris took a deep dive on in-app reporting last week. I think he’s got a presentation today as well on this stuff, but beginning a press into better app analytics to help us learn from our experimentation.
Helena did a ton to help us understand, well, help structure a story around what we’ve understood from this gigantic data set that we’ve got. I think she’s also going to be presenting today on some of that, which is quite exciting. We’re ramping up directly responsible individuals for a few new product feature experiments, Now page, Explorer page. We’ve got onboarding V3 queued up, continuing to work on tagging V2 and app reporting. And then just after the holidays when everyone’s back, we’re going to have a larger product update next week. Obviously, we had tried to squeeze that in during the assemblage but needed some extra time on that, so please keep your eyes and ears open for that.
And then also, we just dropped a number of memos and strategy docs this week. So we’ve got Culture documentation 4.0 and 3.0. So we’ve got the Disagree and Commit video dropped. We’ve got Building and Scaling Remote Teams, which I kind of consider a culture conversation between Darren and Sam, which just dropped. And then we have memo docs on the Affiliate Strategy 2.0, Paid Versus Earned Media, Licensing Acquisitions. Some of these are in the draft phase, but a lot of good stuff happening as we spool up for next year. And then on this page here, you can see we got a shout-out in Dr. Gustin’s newsletter.
We got a lot of interest over the past few weeks, I think especially through Sam’s Twitter, on our culture stuff from people who are just really interested in the company building side of what we’re doing here. And it’s a nice segue to get attention from people who maybe are not so focused on metabolic health initially but get there through our business practices. And a cool screenshot here of the tagging V2 work that John has done over the past few days and some of the upcoming podcasts that Casey’s got along with a few VIP folks, Marcus Filly, Jenna Kutcher, and others. Rich Roll we’re continuing to work towards a deal with, and I think we’re getting quite close on that. So some exciting stuff. All right, with that I’m going to hand it over to Ben for introducing our special guest of the day.
Ben Grynol (03:37):
Perfect. Espree Devora is our guest. Espree is a good friend, very connected in the tech ecosystem. She’s founder of an organization called WeAreTechLA, and she’s very much a content creator, a connector. She is an original podcaster, so if you want to say that she was podcasting before it was cool. She is in the likes of Ira Glass and some of the earlier podcasters. So super excited to have Espree here and to share her thoughts on not just her experience as a member, there are some things that were enlightening or insightful when she tested the product, but also the way that we think about community and technology. So Espree, I’ll hand it over to you, but definitely be as honest as possible with your product experience.
Espree Devora (04:27):
Sure thing. Honestly, I’m really honored to be here after talking to you, Ben. I mean, you guys, I didn’t really know anything about Levels other than I trusted Ben, and he’s like, “Here, stick this in yourself.” I’m like, “Okay, I trust you that much.” And I love Levels, but I think I love it for different reasons. It was only after Ben and I chatted after using Levels that then I started to do a deep dive and I was like, “Wow, this company is awesome.” But I didn’t know anything about the company the whole time I was using Levels, and my friends made fun of me for sticking something in my arm.
The thing that I loved most about it is it felt like this accountability buddy. I feel I’m an emotional binge eater and it really bothers me because my body, my genes are meant to be athletic. And so to continually binge eat, going against what I’m naturally made of, really is a frustrating journey for me. And having, one, this device where I felt like it really cared about me, I know that might sound really funny, but I felt like, “This thing really cares about me.” I felt like half robot, like that I could just scan myself and know what’s going on. It just really added to kind of make me feel like I’m not alone in my journey to health and to realize what my body is most capable of achieving. And that’s what I like for myself.
Then when I went through the month and I didn’t have it anymore, I noticed an insane difference. I went from being pretty controlled, even though I didn’t understand what the data was telling me. And that’s why Ben and I jumped on the phone because I was like, “How do I make sense of all this? I know I like it and I know it’s benefiting me for all these psychological reasons, but I’d like to know even more, of course.” But I noticed such a psychological difference when I didn’t have it anymore. I went straight back to binge eating and eating whatever. It was so interesting because typically you hear reports on if you have an accountability buddy, like an actual physical person or habit tracking apps, which never work, for whatever reason. Having this device, and also the blog posts, there’s something about the blog posts, not too much, but the app would trigger, like, “Hey, you may want to read this and that.” And that’s where I found out if I walk right after I eat, that will help a lot too.
Then Ben taught me about insulin, and I found that just wildly interesting. One of the things I shared with Ben is that it’s really important to me to have options for a family later in life, and mental wellness is really important to me. And so those are the two main reasons that motivate me to be fit and to eat well. And he was sharing with me, “Did you know insulin or,” I don’t know the words, “metabolic health is a huge contributor to those outcomes being positive?” I’m not going to speak as eloquently as he did. And I had no idea. It just motivated me that much more to want to understand my own metabolic health. I have the Oura Ring, so I track my sleep. Sleep is something that I started to prioritize more, primarily for mental wellbeing. I’ve been an entrepreneur since I was a teenager, so it was always sacrifice sleep, sacrifice this, sacrifice that. And so it’s something I’ve revisited that maybe that’s not the best thing to sacrifice sleep.
Then I also tried Lumen, that thing where you breathe into it. What I didn’t like about Lumen was I felt like I had to keep remembering to use the Lumen, and I also didn’t really understand how it worked. But I think the term metabolic health is something that I started to at least become open-minded, I don’t know, or aware of. With Lumen, with my girlfriend who is pretty overweight, and she said, “Lumen was the first thing that ever worked for me.” And I was like, “What’s Lumen?” She’s like, “Da, da, da.” I didn’t really understand it, but because it was working for her and she struggled with her weight for so long, I was like, “Well, I’ll give that a try.” And I found that Levels, just the psychological accountability was just tremendous. Ben, I can’t remember what else I had shared with you, but I’m happy to share anything or answer any questions.
Ben Grynol (09:29):
Yeah. I think you covered most of it all. A lot of the things that we had talked about were just understanding the data. You didn’t know if a glucose level of, it doesn’t matter what it is, but let’s say 70 versus 120, is that good or bad? And then interpreting. I think you had thought that your data… When I looked at all of it in aggregate I was like, “Oh, your data’s actually good.” But you were worried. You almost had this anxiety, is what you expressed, where it was you didn’t know if it was good or bad. But your lines were very stable overall. So I said, “You’re doing great.” But you just needed almost some outside reinforcement to say, “You’re doing okay.” And so that was where some of the confusion came from.
Espree Devora (10:19):
And if anything, I leaned toward it being bad at sixties. To me, I was like, “Oh…” I can’t remember what it was, but there were some sixties in there. I’m like, “Oh, that must be bad.” I had no reason for deciding that. That just felt like a low number to me. So I’m like, “Is that bad? What does that mean to me? What kind of action do I take on that?” But yeah, now I still barely understand it only from our phone call, but I feel like I have a little bit more to be like… I feel like with what you shared with me on the phone, now it can become more fun, like, “Oh, now I know how to do something with this. Now I know how to start modifying my food so it’s food that really empowers my body. And now I know how I can eat what I want to eat and what to do about that.”
The favorite thing that you shared with me, I think it was the sushi and how when you ate sushi, you saw it the next day. I can’t remember the exact food. I think you said it was the sushi. I didn’t even know food did that to you, that it could affect you into the next day. And so I’m now curious to discover what affects me and for how long, and how can I select foods that really empower me to be my best self? Yeah. I just think all of it leads to mental stability and hopefully, knock on wood, to being able to have a family later than normal.
Josh Clemente (11:57):
A lot of great stuff in there. A lot of themes that we talk a ton about and really are thinking on. First of all, it sounds like Ben operated in this function that we call the David bot, the Mike bot, the Ben bot. Now there’s another version. It’s just Ben is filling a role that, ultimately, Levels needs to fill, which is explaining in a personalized way relevant to your specific data what you should do, “What action do I take based on this?” So some of the recent conversations we have on the product strategy side are directly focused on this, like, “What do I do now? How do I explore what other people are doing?”
And the work Helena is doing on helping to contextualize all the information and surface it for us and for our members, a lot of great stuff there. And then the accountability piece, I always love hearing that, the feeling personally empowered and accountable and capable of doing something about your daily health habits. That’s what we’re here for. So a lot of great stuff there. I really appreciate the candidness and appreciate your time, Espree, coming on here and helping us. And obviously, we would love to continue to tap your experience and learn more about how we can solve those pain points for you. So thanks for sharing live, and yeah, excited to continue to learn from you.
Espree Devora (13:09):
Yeah. I’m happy to be supportive. I told Ben, “Whenever you guys need anything from me, I’m happy to be supportive.”
Josh Clemente (13:14):
Awesome. Thanks very much. Yeah, we’re looking forward to solving those problems for you without Ben having to get on the phone. We’re async. Remember that, Ben. All right, jumping ahead, quick culture aside. So I want to resurface the Levels Culture Handbook. I know everybody should be aware of this document, but over the past few weeks we’ve been having some conversations and just recognizing that this in particular is not like other memos and other strategy docs. This is really an operational tool. There’s a lot of context in the work we do.
For example, when you read a new strategy document or, let’s say, a new feature set in product or what have you, there’s a ton of different artifacts that are being generated constantly. And the way that we interpret what we’re reading should be in the context of the culture that we have, meaning everyone should be writing strategy that assumes things like there’s a single direct responsible individual. We’re going to take big swings, justifiable risks. All of these things are built into the context of any document that is generated here, but it’s important that the reader is reading it in that same context. Otherwise, we start doing these infinite loops of recovering matter or foundation that we’ve already covered and documented here in our Culture Handbook.
So I guess what I’m trying to say is that I think it’s really important for everybody to read and reread and then share this in a bookmark for yourself and continually revisit it. And if you have questions when you’re reviewing someone else’s work, it should always be grounded. Your interpretation should always be grounded in the overall culture foundation that we have, which is well-documented here. And if there are questions, if there’s gaps that you can continually see opportunities for us to clarify something about how we do work, it should end up here in this Culture Handbook.
We really want this to be the central location and repository of how each of us work and how leadership works with direct reports and vice versa, where feedback comes from and ultimately how we want to run our company. What is the central focus? Incentives matter. Members matter. We’re not competitor focused. These are things that are ingrained in this handbook. So anyway, just highly recommend that everyone read and reread this, save it somewhere close and let us know how we can improve it. Miz, thanks for putting this together. And I’m sure this is a living document. It says it right here in the opening paragraph. So this will continue to evolve, but only with the help of all of us on the team. And, of course, Levels helps you see how food affects your health. The prayer must be repeated.
All right, jumping into products. So active priorities as of the end of the year. Not much change here. Blockers to launch are primarily the scalable data integration, which we have a couple irons in the fire to get there with multiple CGMs. And 2022 should be the year, hopefully very soon, Q1, Q2, we should have some scalable data integrations available. And then completion of membership transition, including the messaging. Maz has stepped into the role of helping us to refine and finalize our membership model and our membership messaging. So we can think of this as maybe V3 or phase three of membership. He’ll be helping us to get that across the finish line, and we’ll be, at that point, ready to launch. All right, we’ve got an async update from Braden here.
Braden McCarthy (16:42):
Hey, team, quick introduction to the [inaudible 00:16:45] amongst our team and to the onboarding experience. It’s easy to lose sight on what it’s like for new members to experience the app after using it for a while, and it’s important that we stay in touch with what it’s like to get onboarded into Levels and started using the app. We’ll be doing regular walkthroughs of the onboarding flow and posting any changes that are made along the way. The second goal of phase one is to ensure that all members who get started with Levels are using the app. It’s a very small percentage, but there are still some members who use the LibreLink app throughout their entire experience and never download Levels. So we want to make sure that it’s impossible to miss this step in the onboarding flow. Part of this will be a refresh of the transactional emails that a member receives after signing up for Levels and throughout their first month. Stay tuned for more updates on this in the next couple of weeks, and have a great weekend.
Josh Clemente (17:41):
Thank you, Braden. The subtext here is Braden is taking on DRI responsibilities for the onboarding V3 project. Oops. All right, data science. Helena.
Helena Belloff (17:53):
Hi. I’m so excited for this update. So, as many of you know, I’ve been working on a project which we’re calling B Levels Data Story. I basically did a deep dive into our very unique and very large corpus data to formally define what metrics we currently keep track of, what’s possible to do or to calculate or to say about our data, and to gain insight into what data we should be collecting that we aren’t currently. As Josh mentioned, Casey will likely be presenting some of these findings in some really exciting podcasts in January. So keep a look out for those. The full findings are in motion, but I thought I’d just share some interesting tidbits as it is the end of the year.
So this year our users have logged over 70 million ingredients with the most logged ingredient being peanut butter. Peanut butter is actually a really interesting example because if you look at this word cloud in the bottom right, you can see that peanut butter was among one of the most commonly logged ingredients in logs that received zone scores of eight and above. So the average zone score received for all logs containing peanut butter in general is actually seven. And the range is anywhere from a zone score of one to a zone score of 10, which just goes to show you that an ingredient might on average score pretty well, but what you pair it with actually matters and can have a huge impact on your glucose stability.
So another thing, on that note, that I looked at was the best and worst meals you can get at restaurants like Chipotle or McDonald’s. And I know we’ve looked into these things before, but I decided to dig a little bit deeper here. So according to our data, the item at Chipotle that will cause the least glucose variability is actually the burrito bowl, although a Chipotle salad is not far behind. And if you are not planning to give up fast food as part of your New Year’s resolution, I would suggest that you stay away from the Big Mac. Among our members-
Automated (20:00):
Recording in progress.
Helena Belloff (20:00):
… it is responsible for the largest glucose variability and is the lowest scoring item on the menu. And even going back to the importance of the combination of ingredients you’re pairing together in your meals, if you plan to eat the McNuggets, which aren’t far behind the Big Mac on the largest variability scale, steer clear of the honey mustard and the sweet and sour sauce as they cause larger spikes when paired together with this menu item than just the McNuggets on their own. And then if you really must eat McDonald’s, breakfast is your best bet to mitigate a potential high spike and subsequent crash. Things like the McGriddle, they still score poorly, but the variability is not as severe as other items.
So this isn’t the complete story here, but one other thing I looked at that I wanted to share was where our members log from. Right now, we only ship within the US, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have members in locations all over the world. Obviously, the US is where most of our logs originate, but Canada and Mexico are next, and even Columbia, India, Brazil and the UK are in the mix. Overall, we have logs originating from at least 65 countries this year. So we are spanning the globe quite literally. So lots of interesting stuff. I’ll post the notion links in the chat so everyone can take a look at the complete story. And then, Josh, if you wouldn’t mind going to the next slide.
So looking to 2022, these are some of the main projects in the pipeline. Migration of tables from the production database to the data warehouse will continue. Shout-out to Xinlu for ramping that up so quickly again. Day score exploration will resume, so that is also in the pipeline. And then guided insights, which from a data science perspective is kind of broken up into content curation, food log suggestions and glycemic response predictions, that will also continue and be ramped up in a very big way. I realize a lot of these categories intersect with some larger engineering projects in the pipeline as well. So I’ll be following up with and reaching out to the responsible individuals to see how data science ties in and how I can best support these initiatives. So yeah, that is all for me for now, and I hope everyone has a happy New Year.
Josh Clemente (22:40):
Super awesome. I noticed on the previous page the dinner versus breakfast and lunch. That’s such an interesting basket of questions for me. It’s like, is it because of the ingredients that we eat for breakfast and lunch, or is it physiological? Are we having circadian insulin responses? So this also, I think, leads to a ton of really fascinating research possibilities, both distributed among our members and also in clinical trials. So it gets me really hyped. This is great. Thank you, Helena.
All right, hiring. So open roles remain as they were. Over the past few weeks we’ve got a few offers out, and then getting into the technical stages on some of the other roles. But realistically, everyone should be tapping their network, constantly thinking, “Who can I refer in?” Even if this isn’t an existing role that you think someone would be a great fit for, especially on the culture side, please start making connections, refer them in. Most of our team growth is going to be happening ahead of us, so we continually need to have rock stars and a constant draft pick list ready to go for even roles that are in the pipeline. So yeah, please share and refer. Thanks.
And then on that note, new team members. We have a few people queued up for a January start. So, Britney will be starting imminently on, I think, Monday of next week. Taylor also starting in, I think, the first week, maybe January 1st is his first day. And Dave ten Have. Yeah, a lot of great folks coming in the next month and more growth coming ahead. Okay. I think, Miz, is this an update from-
Michael Mizrahi (24:19):
Yeah, a quick housekeeping update. So Sam sent out a thread. You’ll find it in the People, Process, Culture forum. We added a team/area field to the memos database so that we can better sort by team or area for related memos. So if you own any memos in that memos database, go ahead in and update those tags. But moving forward, we want to really double down on use of the memos database. Really strong documentation that’s easily accessible is very important for our culture. We’ve spoken about that at length.
And so we want to use that memos database for anything that’s evergreen, that many people will access, that needs public, private, confidential classification, that whole classification system that we have. So try and move those kinds of documents into this memos database and link to them from the respective memos with the back link, or in-app notion, rather. So that’s the best way to move forward here. We’ll do some other notion housekeeping. As the team grows, there’s a lot of redundant docs and a lot of things growing wide, so we’ll do our best to garden. But reminder that it’s everyone’s responsibility. So own your areas, clean up docs if you see bad links. Very helpful to have everyone actively tending to it. That’s it here.
Josh Clemente (25:28):
Great, thank you. All right, over to Chris.
Chris Jones (25:36):
All right. As Josh mentioned, I went deep on in product analysis and tracking how people are using the app. So, PostHog is now my best friend. I hadn’t really been using it before, so that was lots of fun of, “What’s this mean? And what’s this go? And how do I track this?” So it was great to go deep on it and learn a lot. So a little bit of that caveat is as I start producing in-app analytics, I want to lean on everyone to be making sure that whatever I’m saying makes sense. Because I’m looking at data for the first time. I don’t always know exactly what every tag says or means or how to get to it. So if something looks off, feel free to ask or guide me. This is based upon my best understanding looking at the data.
So how I want to read this is there’s a lot going on on this page. So I took a screenshot of the main five tabs or five views of the screen, and in the upper right was the weekly active users at 3,268, which was up 3.6% week over week. And then next to it, the 78 screens per WAU, meaning on average every person views 78 screens in a week, which is a huge amount of engagement. So there’s high engagement of people using it. They see lots of screens, lots of times multiple times.
So then similarly, as you look from the home to my data to logging, of that 3,278, what percentage of them have seen the homepage? What percentage of them have seen My Data page, for example? 60% of our WAU landed on the My Data page, and they viewed it 10.6 times in that week. So it’s a matter of weeklies versus counts. So not only looking at, has someone touched this page, but do they touch it over and over and over again? So it makes understanding when people are logging, they’re using logging a lot, but when they’re going to the Me page, they’re not going there every day, every week because that data’s not changing. So it’s how to read, as I talk about the percents and the numbers in the brackets, is how often members are actually accessing that page.
All right, next page. Now, in my weekly deck I go into more depth. So this is just one example of the next slide down of what I’m doing is for the homepage, what are they clicking on within the homepage? Are they clicking for help, the sensor, manual syncs? Are they clicking on community glucose? So this, again, is as you go into each page of trying to visually go in, okay, how many people are engaging with the metabolic health panel, and how often are they doing it? So in my weekly deck I actually go through each of the five screens to go into more detail, but I wanted to walk you through. And in areas where we find the question marks is either we don’t track that data today or I wasn’t able to find it. But I know, example, Justin, once I asked about the help, he actually added to his PR. So that’s getting added pretty quickly. So yes, you can see how people are linking out for help from the app.
Next page. As I was in going deep on an area in-app challenges, I actually had to go back to retool and actually build a dashboard looking at how many people are even engaging with challenges? How many challenges are they engaging with? Are they actually filling it out, or do they just join and never add any data? So this is a new dashboard that’s currently in retool. I know Helena’s working on moving the challenges table over to Snowflake. So once that’s complete, I’ll rebuild it over there. But just as an example, in late August, the upper right chart is showing the number of people signing up by week for challenges and which challenges they’re signing up for. And you see a significant drop-off of 70 to 80% when we made a change in terms of how people are navigating or are getting to the challenges area.
But right below that, the number of people that actually completing challenges really only dropped by 10 to 20%. So even though we had a major drop-off in people engaging with challenges, the people that really cared about doing challenges and completing that really didn’t move too much. So as you look at it, you can see: which challenges are people doing? How many are they signing up for? Are they partially doing it, or fully? So there’s a lot of information in here, and we’ll continue to blow this out and try and do more with it. So this is an area I also had fun with because I know I was curious of, how many challenges have I signed up for? I didn’t even know that. Yeah.
Next slide. Also, similarly to how JM’s been doing cohort analysis for people that sign up for Levels in a month and then come back the next month or the month after that or in weeks, we can do cohort analysis of people in the app, of people who sign up… do they come back after day one, day two, day three? … to see where they’re falling off. So in the December 14th, I was calling out of, I saw a spike in the cohort. The number of people that actually signed up for or started using the app doubled, but they weren’t very sticky.
And I went back to try to think of, “Okay, is this potentially due to the Matt Frazier Instagram post, or is it due to us launching on the App Store on that day?” So I’m trying to dive more into, just like we have partner codes, of can I actually identify which partner codes are driving this? Just like when I do of what’s driving our conversion rates up or down. So this is more, I’m actually looking more what events are happening, but I don’t necessarily at this moment have to know exactly, “Hey, was it exactly driven by this campaign or this promotion?” So hopefully I can get down to that level.
Next slide. On the promoter comments, just a couple things from this current week in terms of people where they had bad foods that cause spikes but have eaten in moderate or in smaller quantities actually performed pretty well or people that thought healthy food was actually causing bad spikes. A lot of the awareness, the accountability came up a lot. People really liking that we bring in the data, the steps, the heart rate to make it more useful but also want to send the glucose back to Apple HealthKit. So no new trends on the promoter side.
Next slide. On the passive, the thing that jumped out to me is the number of passive comments we’re getting. Right now, the number of passive survey responses in our net promoter score is double the detractors. So it used to be I would have a couple passive comments, and now I’m actually seeing a lot more people in the seven to eight scoring around the, “I like it, but it costs too much.” Or they like some aspects but aren’t fully bought in, they’re kind of on the fence versus people that are really struggling because they don’t know what the data means, they don’t know what to do with it and they don’t know what steps to take, which I know a lot of that Helena’s talking about, which we spoke to earlier.
Next slide. And then lastly, to change directions, you may have saw a note from Sam that I’m going to be the success criteria stakeholder for a lot of the projects, and I just wanted to cover a little bit in my view of what I view my role is and is not. So I’m here to help, to advise, to consult, to basically be there when people need more, like, “Hey, what should I measure? How should I measure? What data do I have? How do I go get that data?” I will be on the hook to, as most as I can, pull in that data, helping to build dashboards, providing that accountability. But in the end, I’m not doing this for you, meaning I don’t want a DRI of a project to say, “Well, Chris’s metrics and success goals were too high. I can never hit them. That’s why I didn’t meet them.” You have to be bought into what we’re doing.
So I will throw things out at you, but, in the end, we have to agree of this is the bar of what’s going to be really good or a baseline, because you have to be bought in as a DRI. It’s too easy if someone’s making up the goalpost for you and you don’t hit it to be like, “Well, I never agreed to that metric.” So you’ll see a lot of me throwing things to get the conversation going, and I’ll put metrics and targets, but I want the DRIs to really make sure that they’re bought in and saying, “Yes, I think this is appropriate for what we’re trying to achieve here.” And that’s it for member experience.
Josh Clemente (34:16):
Great. Love the app dive, obviously. Looking forward to where that’ll lead us. And then on the success criteria stuff, yeah, I definitely encourage everyone to think of the success criteria stakeholder as a resource to help you achieve concrete objectives. This goes very nicely with phase development. So being able to pick your targets, call them in advance, get Chris’s input on exactly what could provide quantitative sort of definition for what a phase could look like for this specific project. And then, obviously, the DRI goes forward and is the primary executor on the project, and make sure that work gets done. So yeah, very much want to reinforce what Chris just said there and use that stakeholdership as a resource. All right, Ben.
Ben Grynol (35:10):
Right. Growth is focused on providing value through membership week over week. There we go. Next slide, please. So weekly recognized revenue, $88,000. Monthly, we’re at 665. Cash, 8.3. No changes to debt or runway. Next slide, please. So even though we are not quite at year end, we’re going to do a little bit of a recap. This was a slide that we shared at the end of July, the journey to $200,000. And where this stemmed from was we had a week right after Casey appeared on Mark Hyman’s podcast where we had our first week of $200,000. And it was one of those mind-exploding moments where we all couldn’t believe it. But we did a recap and said, “Hey, from July 2019 until July 2020, it took 13 months to hit $200,000 in all-time revenue. And we ended up hitting it in a week.”
And since then we’ve had a number of weeks that we’ve had over $200,000 in recognized revenue, which is very cool to see and cool to see this growth. And so it’s good to look at this recap of where we’ve been and where we’ve come and where we’re heading because it’s still very early on, but it’s also important to understand these growth trajectories. So it took us 17 months to hit the first million dollars in all-time revenue, and that was right after the raise was announced last year for the seed round. From there, so from December of ’20 to February of ’21, we generated our next million and a half dollars of revenue. We hit two and a half million of all-time revenue, and that took three months. And then from March of ’21 until July of ’21, we doubled again in revenue. And from August until December, we’re almost double again. So we’re going to end up just over $7 million, around 7.2 of revenue for the year. And last year we ended at 1.6 or just over 1.6. So it’s pretty big growth to see given that we’re still in beta.
Next slide, please. So year over year, you can see 2019, $45,000 of total annual revenue, 1.6 last year. And then this year we’re at 7.1. So 339% year over year growth is pretty significant. And know that it’s still early on. There’s still a lot to a lot of work to do, but this is a path that we’ll continue to see. And we’ll know that, yeah, these numbers are going to be something that are harder to hit as we have growth targets, but that’s the point of having targets is that they give you somewhere directional to go and then you undertake tactics to hit those metrics.
Next slide, please. So modeling, this is the last slide in the recap. Modeling. We all know models, they can tell whatever story you want them to tell and they end up being directional. So that’s the idea is you have forecasts and models and they’re based on inputs and assumptions, and you want to make sure that your assumptions are relatively reasonable and the inputs that are based on those assumptions give you some directional forecast. So we said, “Hey, we think we’ll hit around 175,000 people on the wait list this year,” and our forecast versus actual was almost dead on, which is pretty cool to see. But again, those can change by basis points of a percentage.
As far as revenue forecast, same thing. We’re relatively accurate in that. Those end up being right around 10% month over month growth or, yeah, 10% month over month growth that hit those numbers. Sometimes it’s a little less, sometimes it’s a little more, but directionally we are forecasting things so that they’re relatively accurate. So that’s a recap of growth, where we’ve been, where we’re headed, and lots of exciting work ahead. That’s growth for the week, year, month.
Josh Clemente (39:07):
Love it. It’s amazing to see these numbers. Mind-blowing. Tom.
Jackie Tsontakis (39:15):
I’ll actually take this one. Oh, I’m shocked. I’ve never seen a more accurate forecast in my life. That’s crazy. But this is a quick update on the new affiliate strategy, which will go live at the beginning of the new year. So just as a quick reminder, our affiliates are our partners that receive commission on all the conversions that happen through their link. They’re really valuable to us just because their incentives are pretty much perfectly aligned with ours. So a win for them is a win for us and vice versa. So our first affiliate strategy, which Tom built in July of 2020, aimed to pretty much just lay the groundwork for the affiliate program itself and secure priority partnerships, which it did. We got awesome partners. Our affiliate program to date has 40 affiliates in it, including huge names in the space like Mark Hyman and Kelly LeVeque and Ben Greenfield, who have been so vital to us.
And updated strategy has a couple new developments or a couple new goals. One, just a few new developments, that we’ll aim at standardizing how we engage with our affiliates, just increasing overall engagement and then also adding more structure to the program itself and finding ways to really help our most valuable affiliates and see how we can add value to what they’re doing. And then, two, just growing the program overall and experimenting with new ways to find new affiliates and new partners. And then, three, improving measurement and reporting so that affiliates can see what’s working for them and what is really driving their conversions.
And then this slide just goes into what some of those experiments are that we will be exploring in the new year. So one will be prioritizing YouTube and TikTok as platforms. So we’re working now on some cold outreach experiments with YouTube creators. And then we’ll be doing the same thing with TikTok creators. And then, two, we’re going to be exploring how we might work with smaller creators. So these would be micro influencers that have 10 to 30,000 followers and have really high engagement. We heard from some other folks who run really successful affiliate programs that these creators are really valuable to them. So we’ll do some experimentation there. Today we’ve really prioritized people with huge followings and just the awareness segment, but I think this’ll be really interesting to see what kind of engagement we get with these smaller creators.
And then the third piece is really more about niche communities and Peloton instructors is an example of an experiment that we’ll be testing out in the New Year’s, just researching Peloton instructors and looking at folks like this as influencers and seeing if there’s anyone that would be worth reaching out to or partnering with. And then lastly, we’ll be prioritizing new verticals like weight loss and looking at some creators in this space among different platforms.
Josh Clemente (42:44):
Awesome. Thank you, Jackie. Very excited for all this stuff. I’ve loved seeing the success of the affiliate program. And personally, it’s my preferred way to learn about products. So it’s really cool to see the success here. Thanks for the work. All right.
Tom Griffin (43:00):
Quick podcast tour update here. We’re going to be really coming out with a bang in Q1 2022, which is awesome. Probably the best lineup of shows that we’ve had in our Q maybe ever all at one time. So we’re going to be recording most, if not all of these in early January. Flagging that we’re still in conversation with Bari Weiss and her team over at Honestly, that’s the one in red there, about exactly what the conversation we want to have is. As some of you may know, Bari can be controversial in certain communities. So she pitched us on one idea, but we’re still workshopping it with her. And then some others to flag here, Lewis Howes there on the bottom middle, laughing at Mrs. Hart. He is one of the biggest health podcasts out there, often top 10. He is currently sitting right behind Mark Hyman.
Huge show. He came inbound to us. We’ve been working on that one for a while, but this week he reached out and said he wants to schedule Casey on the show, which is awesome. And then, yeah, Casey’s been putting in a ton of work into preparing for these shows and figuring out just what some of our updated key messaging is going to be throughout 2022. And I think in some of these conversations you’re going to hear a bit more of a global view of the problems that Levels is solving, what’s wrong with our current healthcare system, and how we’re really leading the charge in this new consumer-led decentralized health movement and how bio-observability is going to be a key pillar of that movement. So this relates to other conversations we’ve been having internally here around the product vision and roadmap and our transition to membership and future era hardware. So very excited to see a lot of these conversations come to fruition in 2022. That’s it.
Josh Clemente (44:52):
So awesome. Thanks, everybody. All right. Short-ish week. Let’s jump right in. I don’t think we have too many individual contributions here. Xinlu’s not with us. So, Chris.
Chris Jones (45:06):
On the Levels side, I would think-
Josh Clemente (45:11):
Oops.
Chris Jones (45:13):
… excited about wrapping up the year, the reflective, and things like the growth and what’s in plan for next year. It’s super exciting to take stock of how last year went and what’s the plan for next year. So really looking forward to that, coming in the next couple of weeks. On the personal front, I was really excited to fix my tractor. We got a lot of snow here last week. I was out plowing, and the wheel came off the well and pretty much down to… And I was like, “How do I fix a tire on a tractor?” I’m like, “This is beyond my skills.” So I had call reinforcements to get that one fixed, but that was a fun learning experience.
Josh Clemente (45:51):
Glad it’s taken care of. Let’s see. Next up would be Lauren.
Lauren Kelley-Chew (45:58):
Yeah. Professionally, I mean, it’s just amazing to see these year recaps, and I still can’t believe that I’m part of it now. So really feeling grateful for that. And personally, I just got back from a cross-country flight to Pittsburgh, and our family was together, all of us, for the first time in two years. So it was amazing.
Josh Clemente (46:14):
Wow, that’s fantastic. Glad to hear it. Ben. No, sorry, Tony.
Tony Milio (46:23):
Yeah, plus one on hearing all of these year end recaps and everything, just very exciting news, and also hearing Jackie’s affiliate strategy for the new year. So I’m looking forward to seeing everything that turns out with that. But overall, professionally and personally, just really looking forward to the new year, for sure.
Josh Clemente (46:49):
Ditto. Ben.
Ben Grynol (46:53):
Levels-wise, super stoked on David Sinclair’s podcast. It is coming out next week. There’s been a lot of hype all over on Instagram, on Twitter with Andrew Huberman. Everyone’s pretty pumped on it and it’s already apparently at number 77 on the overall charts and I think number two or something wild in the health and wellness category on Apple Podcasts just from the welcome message that he did. So just sort of seeing that as one of those things where you’re like, “This is going to be very, very cool.” And for anybody who doesn’t know, we’re sponsoring the whole season, all six episodes, which is also very cool. Personally, it’s pretty frosty here. It’s like minus 35 today, and we got a big dump of snow. And it’s just, I don’t know, it’s always cool. It’s a very cool thing to have this wild weather. But yeah, stoked on that.
Josh Clemente (47:43):
Fire up the snow mobile. Espree.
Espree Devora (47:50):
I don’t even know what to say. I’m just absorbing. I mean, I think this is just gratitudes. I’m really grateful to have the opportunity to have been on this with you. I had no idea about anything to do with your actual company, so this is really inspiring. And I’m just really grateful for Ben. I’ve been DMing him in the privates like, “I could feature this. I could do this.” So yeah, just grateful to be experiencing your team culture.
Josh Clemente (48:22):
Thank you. Yeah, thanks for joining and sticking it out the whole meeting long. For me, let’s see, personally, I’ve been able to spend a lot of time with family lately, which has been very nice. My brothers are in town, sisters are in town. So it’s been a good couple weeks. I’m enjoying the holidays and definitely looking forward to next year. I kind of feel like the winter, it’s been an unseasonably warm winter, but even when it’s just gray, I am cool with hanging out inside and thinking and planning, and that’s the mode I’m in. And yeah, I think that’s personally and professional. Matt.
Matt Flanagan (49:00):
Hey, you guys hear me? I think I’ll start with personal. Since everyone’s talking about the weather, it’s a brisk 50 degrees right now in New Jersey. So I took this meeting on the beach with the dogs. Well, that about Levels, and we’re going to have some of my parents over for New Year’s. So excited about that. Levels-wise, it’s been 60 days now since I’ve been working here. I can’t believe it’s already been 60 days, but I also can’t believe it’s only been 60 days. I’m sure most of you felt the same way when you joined.
Josh Clemente (49:31):
Yes, ditto. Love having team walking on the beach while doing the weekly all-hands. It’s so cool. Let’s see who’s up. Helena.
Helena Belloff (49:42):
Yeah. Levels-wise, I know I’m kind of late to this party, but this morning I finally got my blood taken for the blood work pilot that we’re doing. Someone from Scarlet Health came to my house and the whole process was really quick and painless. And yeah, I’m hoping I don’t have high cholesterol. And then on a personal note, I have no plans for New Year’s Eve and I’m really excited about it. So excited to just chill.
Josh Clemente (50:12):
That’s the right way to do it in my opinion. Hao.
Hao Li (50:18):
Levels-wise, I’m really excited about John’s new intuition on the tagging stuff. I can’t wait to get some feedbacks on how you guys think about tag only notes. I personally really like it. And on the personal front, I can’t wait to get back to the slope with the tons of snow we had for the past week.
Josh Clemente (50:45):
Yeah, definitely. I’m checking those weather reports out West every single day. Jackie.
Jackie Tsontakis (50:53):
Personally, I think my mom said it was a very merry Levels Christmas or something like that. Everyone got Levels in my family for Christmas, or I walked them through signing up on Christmas day, I should say. So they all arrived yesterday. So tonight we’re going to set my parents up, and I’m really pumped to be with them. I’m going to be at home for the next week, so I’m excited to just see what they learn and how they like it. I’ll share with you guys. And then professionally, I was looking at, Helena, your notion doc with all the data yesterday and I was just like, “I love seeing all that data and digging into it.” I totally appreciate how much work that is. So that is really exciting, and I’m excited for Casey to share it out on all the podcasts next year.
Josh Clemente (51:42):
Plus one. Awesome to hear about the fam initiation. It’s going to be fun. Jesse.
Jesse Lavine (51:49):
Yeah, I’m excited for the team growth and for Britney and Sunny to start in the new year. I’m also just excited for the new year and for things to ramp up again. It feels like it’s been a little bit slow for the last few weeks. Personally, I was going to go see Khruangbin on New Year’s Eve, but they just canceled because there’s a huge COVID wave, I think everywhere. And it’s also summer in Houston, so I’m thinking about maybe taking an impromptu trip to somewhere colder, but I might just stay on this couch for the next few days.
Josh Clemente (52:21):
Love it. Keep us posted. Tom.
Tom Griffin (52:26):
Yeah, a lot of family time, most of us here, which has been amazing, and just generally love this time of year when everything slows down a bit. Levels, maybe this is personal as well, it’s been really interesting the last week being in New York and dealing with knowing so many people testing positive for COVID and a lot of us also having wearables, combination of either WHOOP or Oura. And it’s been fascinating to see. I mean, super anecdotally, the tech in my community at least or my circle has been pretty reliable in detecting COVID, even when rapid antigen tests are not super reliable. And this has been well-documented at least on social media with people who are testing negative, but then their wearable data is indicating something is going on and then they test positive later on.
So I think watching this unfold as we’re thinking about a lot of the themes and how Levels is going to evolve over the next five years is really interesting, and very much feel like it’s a glimpse into the future just in terms of people being equipped with access to their body’s data. And not to say that we won’t rely on institutions or the healthcare system, but a lot of people in my circle have been saying things like, “I don’t trust the rapid tests at all, but my respiratory rate was through the roof last night.” So really just interesting to watch.
Josh Clemente (53:52):
Yeah, it’s a really cool point. I think Will Ahmed was one of these examples where his respiratory rate was through the roof and he kept popping negative on the tests, and finally got a PCR that was positive. So yeah, it is really cool and I think just the very beginning of individuals being able to self-select for whether or not they’re going to hang out with family members based on more data than just the test. Mercy.
Mercy Clemente (54:17):
Professionally, Levels-wise, the growth stuff is really, really awesome to see. Ben’s update, it’s super crazy. And then personally, just going to say the same thing as Josh, got to spend a lot of time with family in the past week and a half. So that’s been really nice.
Josh Clemente (54:33):
Yeah. Miz, I think you’re closing us out.
Michael Mizrahi (54:39):
Wrapping up. The last two weeks has been a nice exhale. Good to reprioritize projects, clean things up. It feels like a natural end to the year. And there’s a lot on deck for next year, so very much looking forward to that and starting to plan. And other than that, happy New Year’s everyone. Enjoy.
Josh Clemente (54:56):
Absolutely. This is the last all-hands of any kind this year. I don’t think we’re going to do a café after this. Everybody just enjoy the rest of your afternoon and the upcoming weekend, and we will see you in 2022. All right. Thanks, everybody. Talk soon.