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Levels Friday Forums

February 11, 2022

Friday Forum is an All Hands meeting for the Levels team, where they discuss their progress and traction each week.

Josh Clemente (00:00:00):
All right, I’m going to jump into it. Welcome to February 11th, 2022. Very excited to have everyone here. I’m going to jump right into it. This week, we have begun the preparations for Liftoff, which was recently renamed from launch due to the nature of the fact that we’re moving quickly down a runway and rather than launching in one fell swoop, we’re actually going to continue to kind of accelerate and slowly build to general availability. So a lot of preparations across membership, thinking through the messaging there, checkout flows, hardware integrations, and then the analytics wiring, operations, forecasting a lot of stuff to be done. So that’s all well underway and specific dates are going to be, it’s not a single event, but specific dates are going to be developing, and JM’s taking point on that.
We had offers for principal designer and senior finance manager both accepted, so this is exciting. More details to come on those new team editions. We’ve launched the membership pricing experiments. This is part of what Maz is doing with his membership effort, part of which is to understand pricing elasticity and conversion curves versus price. So this is an exciting experiment, some results are coming in already. And then there’s a cool cold outreach test that Jackie did, which I think she’s going to give us some more details on for YouTube, which is an interesting experiment across a different function.
TWA is working on a packaging design refresh. You can see some of the early stuff here in the middle. So this will be kind of also aligned with the Liftoff effort, but our packaging has essentially been the exact same since the first day that we implemented it. Our Now Page Phase 1 is progressing nicely. So we’ve got live in the app for internal testing, we’ve got UX interactions and the 28-day journey. So please go test that out, see how it feels, see how the insights feel and provide feedback. And then we’ve had four consecutive weeks with an app push to our members, which is back on track for the goal that we had set for ourselves. There’s been a little bit of a slowdown since the holidays essentially, but we’re now back on track, which is great.
And then some really awesome milestones on our content with Whole New Level hitting 100,000 downloads and YouTube growth continues to be really impressive. We’ve hit, I think 25,000 hours of watch time and 3,000 subscribers, most of which is in this past month and a half, which is really awesome, 75,000 views. This week and month, we’ve had some records on the member and operations front, so 1,345 orders, which is a 25% week-over-week record, or not week-over-week, it’s an all-time record by 25%. We’re at 73 on our NPS, which is a 29-point jump this week, which is quite interesting. I’ll be looking forward to understanding where that’s coming from.
Email list at 200,000 and then February was 15,000 additions to the wait list and new members are up 87%. So these are all, again, as we talked about last week, we’re not in growth mode per se because we are not optimizing for it, but these are all as a sort of downstream of efforts that we’ve been putting in place to experiment with growth channels. And then our second internal IRB protocol was submitted for review this week, shout out to Taylor for pushing that across the finish line, and the University of South Florida Wellness Study abstract has been submitted for the Experimental Biology Conference in Philadelphia in April, and that was accepted, so there’ll be a presentation about the results there.
Some other interesting stuff. So most podcasts recorded in a week, with six this week and three in a single day happened for a Whole New Level, which is quite exciting. Nothing’s slowing down over there. And then we’ve got some cool design work coming through, several new influencers that we’ll be partnering with. And we’ve got some new ad experiments with Next Level Human and Mind & Matter. And Kevin Jabal pushed out a new video this week. And then blog traffic for January, so this is retrospective on January, hit 213,000, which is a 55% jump from December, which is phenomenal.
All right. With that, I’m going to welcome Dr. Rick son. Many of you, I’m, sure have listened to the episode with Dr. son and Casey most recently on Whole New Level, but also his new book, Nature Wants Us to Be Fat, is setting the record straight about fructose, metabolism and the ways in which we can be tricked by our own physiology. And so Dr. Johnson is one of the thought leaders in metabolic health and the thought leader, I would say, in his new subject matter on fructose. I’m super, super excited to have him in our orbit and really appreciate you taking the time to join us today, Dr. Johnson, love to hear some thoughts.
Dr. Richard Johnson (00:04:29):
Yes, thank you, Josh, and congratulations to your group on the success of Levels, it really is a very important new asset for people to be able to monitor their glucose levels. So I am a physician and scientist and my main interest has been in sugar, and we were able to show that sugar can induce the metabolic syndrome and the metabolic syndrome is one collection of findings that include insulin resistance, and that it’s actually based upon the fructose component. And what we found was that fructose actually induces this entire spectrum, this metabolic syndrome, and that’s actually how animals, a lot of animals use this, eating tons of fruit in the fall as a mechanism to store fat and to become insulin resistant before they hibernate or migrate.
And so, it turns out that this is an actual survival pathway, but we of course, turns out, that we are genetically sensitive to sugar and we also tend to be eating a ton of sugar. And so as a result, what was meant to be a survival pathway is actually driving a lot of our diseases. And so, a lot of our work in the book that I have, Nature Wants Us to Be fat, I don’t know if you can see it here, relates to studies trying to dissect out this pathway. And one of the big discoveries was that high glycemic carbohydrates raise or stimulate fructose production in the body and drive disease through this process. And the glucose monitoring’s very helpful because it’s those peaks in glucose that seem to trigger the transformation of glucose to fructose. And so, the continuous glucose monitor becomes very important in our work that’s trying to show how biology is, and these survival mechanisms have gone awry and are now driving disease. I thought I would end by reading you a poem from my book, actually.
I hope you enjoy this, so here you go. This tells all of you how I think about sugar, and I call it An Ode to Sugar. From crushed cane comes a liquid, sweet and clear, boiled and filtered until it’s pure, yielding a virgin powder soft and white with crystals like snowflakes, like stars in the night. Sugar takes food to heavenly heights, fluffy pies, chocolate cakes, caramel delights, like ferries that dance with frosted wings, sugar brings pleasure, happiness and dreams. But woe to those who desire too much, for they fall into trouble as from Midas’s touch. What was driven by want is now forced by need, what was given from love is now hearted in greed. What once satisfied the heart, now takes from the soul, what once brought love, now leaves the heart cold. With fury, the body fights this dark force, yet little can be done to stave off its cursed course.
The blood floods with sugar that rises to new heights, the heart becomes swollen, the liver creamy white. The teeth once white are rotten and stained, the kidneys are dusky, shriveled, and inflamed. Blood vessels are fatty and may close off or burst, causing weakness, paralysis, dementia, or worse. And Cupid’s honeyed arrow that brought love and romance now pierces the heart with a sugar-tipped lance. Oh, sugar, my love, you must let me go and let me recover my heart and my soul. The sweet pain you gave me can no longer stay, please give me the strength to turn you away. The sweetness of your lips I will forever adore, but to live my life, I need my health once more.
Very good. So I hope that you get a chance to look at my book. The poem is only one small part of the book. It’s really about the science of sugar and fructose and how it interacts to cause a lot of diseases, so that’s my end. I don’t know if we do questions or if this sort of ends.
Josh Clemente (00:09:31):
Well, first of all, I feel like that poem was written for me, I feel it right in the middle of my heart. I’m somebody who has a love for sugar and sweet things and have had to come to grips with the fact that I have to provide myself some limitations. So Dr. Johnson, from here, we actually proceed into the rest of the meeting, and you’re more than welcome to stay with us. I know you’re very busy, so please feel free to stick around, we’d love to have you. Towards the end, we do another sort of personal share, and it’d be great to hear from you there as well.
Dr. Richard Johnson (00:10:01):
Okay, well, I may call back in. So maybe like 30, 45 minutes kind of thing?
Josh Clemente (00:10:07):
Yeah, whenever you’d like, feel free to rejoin and we’d love to hear from you towards the end.
Dr. Richard Johnson (00:10:12):
Thank you all and it was a pleasure being on your show this morning. Take care.
Josh Clemente (00:10:17):
Thank you, Dr. Johnson. Have a nice day. All right, jumping ahead from there, quick Culture and Kudos slide. So first off, I want to highlight Ian and Maxine are new, our two newest additions on the engineering team. They took on basically regenerating the team-specific tasks on the onboarding checklist. So this hasn’t really been built from scratch for engineering in some time, and they were the most recent through it and just took this on directly. And this is a prime example of just the ownership culture that we want to see and we really appreciate from the two of you, so thank you for taking this task on. It’s going to make it that much easier for the next candidates coming through. Really love seeing this type of ownership. And then shout out to JM. So JM is, you’ll see him all across many, many different tasks and projects throughout the company.
He dives in with a really intense focus on getting to the root of questions with quick data and really appreciate the scrappy, but rigorous approach that he takes to questioning assumptions and then putting numbers to them. So I just want to drop a quick shout-out. This was of course a woo thread in Threads, but always appreciate. And this is happening further and further across the company as we get more in business intelligence and more dashboards with the Snowflake database, Chin Lu’s work and all of those efforts coming to fruition. But thank you, JM, for taking advantage of them and sharing.
All right, I’m going to do a quick aside for Scott. Scott is also in the mountains, but unfortunately his Wi-Fi didn’t come through for him. So the first thing is our efforts are focused on showing people how food affects their health. So this is priority one. Everyone should feel that they’re working towards this priority. And of course, if you’re not certain, if you feel like you’re working in maybe a misaligned way towards that priority, just raise that, raise that question, or raise that concern. It’s always good to gut check and make sure that our efforts and resources are aligned towards the key priorities.
Let’s see. Yeah, so we had some great memos coming out this past week exploring membership, exploring Liftoff, which is again, the general availability of the product. And so we’ll start to expect to see more people shifting from P2 over to P1. So education and insights, or sorry, business enablement as we start to take that sort of Liftoff and membership efforts and put them into action. So this is expected, it’s going to be a good thing, it’s going to build some discipline on focusing on the most important work for the company and temporarily alleviating other areas of focus. So there’s a lot more to come on this, and that’s kind of the brief aside there on product, so expect to see some shifting as we make sure that we are focusing our efforts on getting through Liftoff as well as the key experiments inside of the product, such as the Now Page and explorer. All right.
JM (00:13:10):
Hey, everyone. Going to give a quick update since I’m not here live. On blood work, for our second full week, we did 58 orders. The initial splash of launch starting to simmer, this week will be a 20 to 30-order week. I’ve also started, as I mentioned previously, looking into mail order options since about 10% of our members are still unreachable by the mobile phlebotomists. More on that in the coming weeks.
On Liftoff, Scott, Dave, and Maz and I had a wonderful meeting on Thursday afternoon or Friday morning, depending on which side of the international dateline you find yourself. And we broke down the work that sort of summarized in levels.link/liftoff into four different buckets. One is the checkout flows with the IRB. Number two are the new APIs we’ll have access to. Number three are the subscription implications, and fourth is sales and marketing. Things that are going to have to be done. Look for more flushing out of those four things shortly, as well as a deliverable from me that will sort of map out the different phasing of when we’ll do things like go live on an IRB, switch to certain APIs, lift the gate, et cetera. Look for that sometime middle to late next week.
That’s all for me. Have a wonderful weekend.
Josh Clemente (00:14:27):
All right, thank you, JM. All right. Now Page.
David Flinner (00:14:32):
Yeah, so it was a strong week for the Now project. We did a lot of rapid testing on the new UI. So right now, you can download the latest app and tap the Now tab and you’ll be able to play with the overall Now swiping pattern. Justin did a great job implementing that. And the new card UI, which is a full screen experience for immersive simple content where members will see one thing and one thing at a time to focus on. And Steph wired up the initial Instagram-style stories pages where you can see here in the gif, after you tap that card and open it up, you can paste through the simple content.
And then not only that, but we also wired up outside the sandbox the real user feed data. So we have the existing 28-day program piping in through that now, and we need to clean it up. It still looks like the original non-beautiful version of the user feed. So that’s on me to clean it up in this coming next few days, but it’s really cool to see it coming to life. The overall goal right now is we’re building towards an MVP where we can get feedback from our members on how they’re experiencing this page. Do they resonate with us with this pattern?
And we’re setting the stage for an even more delightful experience where we can start to rapidly make progress on all of the things throughout the day, paired in a timely manner, in a personal manner, that actually answers the questions that they have at any given moment. And so to that end, Helena has kicked off an initiative to start shadowing members as they go through their initial levels experience and see firsthand where those problems are cropping up. And then we’ve kicked off a content pipeline, we have about a hundred questions that we know users already ask us that we’re going to be answering with these cards.
And Alan has helped us spin up a UX contract writer to help us with this. Katie’s getting involved to help us write some of these cards. And it’s key that this experience be really simple, visual, communicate the answer with a glance, and I think that’s what we’re set up for. So up next, there’s a whole bunch more to go. We’re just in the early innings of this, but Justin and Steph are working on a whole bunch more of the components besides the basic scaffolding that we already have. This is like the Zone Score Ready, the Realtime page, video components, swaps. And as we get more and more advanced on the personalized insights side, we’ll be creating more of these. So stay tuned, please do try it out and give us your feedback. And that’s it for now for this week.
Josh Clemente (00:16:57):
Awesome, thank you. Got an async from Jhon.
Jhon (00:17:05):
Hey, team. For tagging, we have fixed all the reported issues and we have implemented the provided suggestions during last week. So tagging Phase 1 is ready to be launched to members. It should be available in the app store in the next few days. Regarding Phase 2, it includes food recognition and custom tags or user-specific tags. From the food recognition side, we have not received the green flag yet to proceed with launch, but it’s already implemented and working. And regarding user-specific tags, we will put this feature on hold because it’s not the highest priority right now. We have analytics in place and I will keep reporting how this goes. Thank you.
Josh Clemente (00:18:04):
Thank you, Jhon. Okay, on the hiring front, as I mentioned, we’ve got our product design role filled and our finance role. So at this point, we’re still looking for an associate editor, visual design, corporate council, as well as the perennial software engineering. And Casey and Tom are continuing to take action on the chief staff role. If you have anyone in your network, please refer them to levels.link/careers to take a look at our open roles or to just submit a general talent pool application for us to keep them in mind for future positions.
And then on the new team members side, we’ve got four people starting now at this point, mostly towards the end of February. So Sissy, Paul, Ryley, and Brett will all be joining us. Brett’s taking principal designer and Ryley Walker, senior finance manager. So we’ll have a lot more to come on on those two and their intros coming soon.
Alan McLean (00:18:56):
Okay, yes, I added another gif. So this has been designed for the last year or so, almost a year, and I’ve been feeling like a Millhouse here, but I’m very excited to say that we have hired a really badass designer to join us here at Levels. Next slide, please. We’ve been hunting for quite a while for this role and interviewed a lot of really strong candidates. And then after I met Brett, this is the message that I sent Sam. It was just pretty clear right away that Brett was just going to be a great guy to work with and would be a huge addition to the team, especially as we start focusing more on behavior change in the future. So yep, Brett will be joining us soon. He’ll be starting the 21st, and that should be a super exciting sort of era, I’m going to view it as an era, for the product. Next slide, please.
There we go. Okay, so this was a great time to reflect this week on, we’ve got new team members joining. What is the role of design at the company? And I took some time to think about this a little bit more deeply, and one of our big responsibilities will be to elevate the brand, sort of make us an obvious category leader in the wellness space. Next slide. One of the ways we’re doing that, working with Ben right now on applying the brand refresh to the mailer material. I think there’s a little bit too much green here probably, but we’ll iterate on that and soon we’ll have some new fresh boxes going out to people.
And of course, the other big responsibility for design is making these magic moments for people. And so sometimes those magic moments are in the in-betweens of the primary points of the experience, and one of those is your glucose metabolizing. A lot of people don’t actually know what this means or what’s happening in the background. And so there’s a potential here to create a little bit of a moment around that. And one of the nice things about the Now Page is that we have this giant surface area now. It’s a big full-screen presence, and we can start doing some fun things with that in the background. Next slide.
So part of that is really embracing the point that there’s something happening in your body at this time, and so this is an opportunity for us to potentially start using this big surface area we have to bring up there some dynamic imagery as things are happening. So as your body’s metabolizing food, we’ll have, maybe initially it’ll just be static images, but at some point I’d love it if we have some generative art or background video sort of playing as your food is metabolizing with a little bit more anticipation for the big reveal. Next slide.
We played with a couple, some of these are definitely not a go, like the one on the left, playing around with actually blood cells and fluid and things like that. Next slide. Playing with color too. Can we make this just a little bit more prominent, a little bit more vibrant? Next slide. I think we’re going to settle on the darker theme, and then ultimately we’ll have this Score Reveal, where we can actually start surfacing the score right in the top of the screen. One thing we’ve been exploring in the background here, which you’re not going to see a ton of slides for, is changing the way that we communicate the score to people based on the composition of the meal.
So if we know that there’s an alternative, like a swap, we can surface that. And rather than just saying, “Hey, you scored two, you got a two with your oatmeal,” providing an opportunity here for learning. So next slide. On the right there, you’ve got an example of maybe we do show the score, but we also lead with the insight, which is that oatmeal is perhaps a spiker and we should take an opportunity to try something a little bit different next time. There’s been some great changes on the interactions with the Now Page that Justin and Steph have been working on, really excited to see this big takeover, these nice swipes and you can navigate between screens pretty easily now. Next slide.
Oh yeah, and content refresh. This is a big one. As David compiled all this content, it was increasingly clear that we’re going to need some help to do this. So we’ve brought on, next slide, a really talented UX writer to help us. There’s a lot of content. Kudos to the editorial team for all this amazing stuff. So we’re starting to rewrite that for the app, if you go to the next slide, you’ll see that there’s actually like nine pages of this stuff on the left, and we’re going to be reformatting that for the app so that more people can take advantage of it. We’ve got Jen, she’s a really promising design candidate as well, and so really great to loop her in, super organized, she’s going to do a great job. So I think that’s it for design this week.
Josh Clemente (00:23:35):
Awesome. Love this content effort as well. It is quite a challenge to take all of the content in an article and succinctly boil it down to something that reaches out to people, so love this effort. Thank you, Alan. All right, we have a progress report from the Athena EAs, led by LJ.
LJ (00:23:56):
Hey everyone, I hope you’re having an awesome Friday. I’m LJ one of the Athena EAs, and also the EA who’s directly reporting to Sam. So I’m happy to share with you right here the summary of the weekly progress report of all EAs from the work week of January 31 to February 6th. So as you can see on the table, we have eight active EAs who worked from the past week, 17 Levels team members who successfully delegated tasks to all those eight EAs, and a total number of 158 tasks we were able to accomplish.
To give you more details, these are the total number of tasks delegated per Levels team members. If you want to delegate more tasks or haven’t started yet, please email [email protected], which is the Google group of all Athena EAs, or simply send a task via Athena voice memo app. If you haven’t set up the tool on your phone or your laptop, we’ll be happy to assist you, please just reach out to us. That’s it. Thank you so much.
Josh Clemente (00:24:55):
All right, thank you, Jean, or LJ rather, and then thank you, Jean, for adding a sample delegation. So this week Zac was able to have a time-sensitive email that needed to go out to 80 people from his personal address, he was able to delegate that out to the Athena team to kind of allow himself to take his hands off the wheel and get all that work done exactly as he needed it, but without having to put in all of the reps. And so the Athena EAs, who are exceptional exactly at this sort of task, were able to help him out in a very quick fashion and get that done while he could still parallel other tasks.
So this is exactly why we have this superpower, these force multipliers in our executive assistance through Athena. If anyone is curious about how to delegate more effectively or has a task that you’re curious how it might be delegable, especially if you have sort of ongoing task burden that you need to alleviate, project debt, as we like to call it, just email the Athena group, they’re happy to help out in any way they can with rec recommendations and/or just ask somebody else who has been delegating.
We’ll continue to surface this stuff. This is a real superpower for our team. The more we can delegate, the more we can alleviate project debt, the better we’ll be and more effective we’ll be as a team, and our Athena team members are just phenomenal at this work. All right, over to Chris.
Chris Jones (00:26:15):
Thanks, Josh. So as Josh talked a little bit around the early side, in the theme of the Olympics, just because I love watching the Olympics, as I pulled the data, I was like, “There’s a record, there’s a record, there’s a record,” and I actually got almost like, “The team’s going to get sick of me saying I’ve got a new record either at the monthly clip or weekly.” But given that the Olympics, I just thought kind of the theme was appropriate. Josh kind of highlighted a lot of the things already both on the weekly clip and monthly clip with only just a couple of low lights around conversion, which is expected, and support volume goes up, which is a byproduct of high orders.
Something I’ve mentioned before, our support volume is much more a factor of how many orders we have in a week than it is of how big our member base is, which means we’re much more sensitive to big swings in order volume than how big our MAU is. So it’s just something that we have to think from support of how do we react quickly when volumes, when there’s a big campaign, when there’s a big promotion? Because those ways will come in a hurry. Next slide.
Related to that, when I do forecast model For True pill around making sure we’ve got enough boxes and performance pads and sensors, I look back over the past couple quarters and we were averaging 2.5 week percent growth week over week in terms of our orders. So that was my baseline going into 2022. And then I said, “Well, let me have kind of the upper marker.” So I doubled it and said, “Let’s have 5% growth.” It’s kind of my upper limit. So far this year, we’ve been growing at 10% week over week in January, blowing through every model we have. So it’s great news, but it’s throwing all of my model and forecastings out the window because the team’s doing such a good job. I guess congrats, but it does have some downstream as we think about planning for how many agents we have, how many sensors, and just inventory and people to handle that load. Next slide.
Quick early read on the Day Review. As everyone knows, now that we’re getting into shipping the product more often, a lot of the features are actually showing up in member’s hands, the Day Review, so this was one day’s worth of data in terms of how many members saw it. So because the main call to action is the Check It Out, no real surprise that 98% made it to the first page. But what really surprised me is 88% of the 1330 made it to the second page, because now people could easily click the exit out. So super high engagement with the Day Review, so great work.
So as we get more people on it, we’ll continue to kind of look and see how they use it when they see it more times. Obviously when they see it for the first time, it’s like, “Oh, what’s this?” But will they get in the habit of using it every day as they see it or they dismiss it? So more to come on this. Great work, Alan and team. Next slide. Voice of the member. One of the highlights we’ve mentioned was that NPS was way up to 72, 73. These are just some of the comments from last week, a lot around that accountability, showing me which foods impact my health, which is great. As I looked into, well, what was driving it, was it the David Sinclair audience finally coming through? The answer is it wasn’t. It was across the board, the biggest one was females had an NPS of 80. Our Double Opt promo campaign had an NPSs of 80. It was more of across the board, every age group, every gender, every promotion code, but it is not the David Sinclair promo. That audience group hasn’t shown up yet.
I’ve had no surveys from Sinclair, so we actually might see a little bit of a boost as that audience starts completing their month and starts actually coming into NPS. The one thing that we did get a little bit of lift on was, as I mentioned I think last week, we removed the NPS from the week one, two, and three, which actually gave us about a five-point drag. So about five points of that was because we had CR now back to really only surveying at the end of the 20-day program. So that was about a five-point lift of it just by who we’re surveying because we’re using that for the product market fit survey to kind of go deep on that. Next slide.
Related to voice of the member, there’s a new forum called Voice of the Member where we kind of cherry pick kind of more rich ones, and there was a pretty in-depth conversation, which I really appreciate the team going on this one. But for those of you that aren’t following the thread, I actually wanted to take a second just to read this one because it’s pretty powerful. So this is from a detractor just a couple days ago.
“I liked the thesis, but I found it impossible to self-correct problems. After a while, I found myself mistrusting the idea of low glucose equals better. I ate a massive Chinese meal with shameless amounts of alcohol, salt, grease, carbs and sugar, and was somewhat in a level zone. And when I ate whole wheat, avocado toast with a green salad and vinegarette, it was considered bad. I’m not trying to lose weight, but is it really better for me to eat greasy Chinese food including a mochi dessert instead of fresh vegetables?
I’d love that for it to be true, but I doubt it. I also find the UI confusing. I especially don’t get how to use challenges effectively. I guess it’s a tool to tag each zone, but I think there are better ways to do this in the UX. Sorry, I do want to love the product, but for now I can’t recommend it. My doctor also made the point it could exacerbate eating disorder. For a non-scientist with data low literacy, the product leaves you gasping for air in the deep end of a pool.”
So I know that this already kind of caused this thread around how do we start handling alcohol, but just was… As I read this, it was pretty powerful in terms of what this person’s going through in terms of what they’re getting out of it and not knowing how to interpret the data, getting things that seem counterintuitive to them. So I just wanted to kind of bring this individual one to the forefront. And that’s it for member experience.
Josh Clemente (00:32:26):
Thank you, Chris. The Voice of the Member effort is tremendously important. So definitely, there is a backlog of action that we need to take on alcohol in particular, because we know now more about the actions there, most people do, and that even popular I think metabolic health talks about. So there’s a lot of interaction there, and you have some actions to take in order to clear up some of this confusion, but there’s lots of unpack in this specific message from this member and good goals for our product. Thank you. Ben.
Ben Grymol (00:33:02):
All right. Plus one, thank you, Chris. Love seeing all those member insights. Growth is focused on providing value through membership, lots of work to do. Maz and Jammer digging into everything pertaining to Liftoff and going deep on that. Next slide, please. Weekly recognized revenue $171,000 and monthly we’re at 531. We are having a strong month already, and it’s early on. We’re very much in a controlled growth state, and it’s something that we have to be aware of and it’s something that we’re discussing internally as a team, how it pertains to ops and all of the downstream effects that come with positive and controlled growth. Cash, 16.2, no changes to debt or runway. Next slide please.
So this is a recap. We saw this slide a couple of weeks ago, and it is a breakdown of the digital media stack. So to reiterate what that is, it’s the idea of making sure that we’ve got the different functions, creation, distribution, engagement and membership, and ensuring that we don’t have a number of people working across each one of the verticals. The idea is to lean deeper into specific verticals with specific people so that we can start to scale those efforts.
So Matt’s going to go deeper on engagement strategy, and there’s a memo that he put together, I guess it was two weeks ago. And so, he has been working to scale those efforts and he’s going to talk more about how we’re doing it, why we’re doing it, and what the implications are. So on to Matt, and then Braden’s going to follow up with some email experiments. And that’s it on my end.
Matt Flanagan (00:34:43):
Thank you, Ben. Great. So as Ben mentioned, last week on Monday I shared a memo going over some of the table stakes engagement strategy that we are implementing across our digital platforms. And in the time since then, our digital team has posted 86 times and we’ve received 407 inbounds comments, excuse me, mentions and DMs. So we are hopefully in the next coming months, we’re going to have a better understanding of the relationship between these two things as we start to increase the cadence of our posting. How can we onboard members of the support team to address another queue? And this is important because it’s really about the small micro interactions on these digital platforms that let people know that one, we’re listening, and two, that we care. So this is all part of providing people a home to be healthy with others. Next slide please.
So again, this first month is really about experimenting and getting comfortable with the platform and figuring out what works and what doesn’t work, but continually just thoughtful, personable responses are really what shines in this strategy. So I’ve just been taking sentences from our blog articles and just repurposing them for comments or responses to comments and mentions, and it takes a little bit of work on our end, but it really goes a far way as far as letting somebody know that there’s another person on the other end of these keys. So part of our goal, as I mentioned, is building this playbook and guidelines for our brand voice and figuring out what works and doesn’t.
So if you go to the next slide, so this is again, trying to emphasize that there’s somebody else, this is not just a non-person tweeting at Bernie here. So I decide to come in and again, still experimenting with this, but come in and provide just engagement that is really the Levels team, not just the Levels brand engaging with people. So this is where you can get some, build trust and goodwill with other people. You get things like this.
And then if you go to the next slide, participating in conversations also, you’re going to get, well, actually sometimes, and that’s okay, this is, again, two people interacting with each other on a social platform. And it’s totally fine to come down from the podium, as I guess I’d call it, and engage personally. So that’s just my, as we get more of the support team on board, I just wanted to share this, just so you know it’s okay sometimes to fall on your face on social media, but really trying to just make it a personal experience.
Josh Clemente (00:37:30):
Message made sense though, so your intention came through.
Matt Flanagan (00:37:34):
Yeah.
Josh Clemente (00:37:39):
All right, awesome. Thank you, Matt.
Braden McCarthy (00:37:44):
Yeah, thanks, Matt. So closing the loop on the email experiments that kicked off a couple of weeks ago. So the first one was an outreach to members who were signed up for, or using Levels actively but not signed up for ongoing CGM shipments. Most members don’t sign up for a subscription when they order Levels, so this is most of our members and it’s also a common support driver indicating that there is a lack of awareness of this option or how to sign up if they want to continue.
So the experiment was an outreach to a cohort of 300 members, 50% of them received an email and the other half did not. And it was to see if reaching out to these members would increase awareness and increase subscription sign rates among the cohort. The results were that around 22% of the people we reached out to did sign up for a subscription and 16% did not. So a meaningful uptick on a relative basis. And also worth noting that the unsubscribe rate was zero, there wasn’t anyone who unsubscribed. So we want to make sure this wasn’t a spammy upsell email and it was received as intended. So I think it indicates that there’s still that awareness gap and email is one tool we have to adjust that. Next slide.
And then the second email was two members who have signed up over two months ago, but never gone and started. So this is around 20% of members currently who are in this state. And this was a proactive outreach to see if, “Can we help them get set up, remind them their sensors expire?” And the results of this email were that around 15% of people who we emailed did sign up or got started, and around 10% who we didn’t email got started. So again, on an absolute basis, not a huge number of members did get started in response to the email, but it’s one way we can chip away at this number. And also it’s just one way we can live up to our membership promise of helping members get the most out of their experience and proactively trying to help them get value out of the membership. So I think this is one we’ll look into continuing to do and getting feedback from members who haven’t started yet.
Josh Clemente (00:40:04):
Really awesome. Thank you, Braden and Matt for the update on the experiments and improvements here. All right, over to Jackie for our partnerships highlight update.
Jackie (00:40:18):
Hey team, I have a few updates on partnerships for the week. So first on the left-hand side, just some updates on new podcasts that we’ll be experimenting with, some smaller shows. So there’s Mind and Matter with Nick Jikomes and Next Level Human with Dr. Jade Teta, both of which we just signed deals with this week. We’ll continue to be doing experiments with smaller shows like this. It’s been great, they’re inexpensive to test, great way to gain learning from new audiences. We have really high-touch relationships with the hosts personally and they’ve been really easy to execute.
And then in terms of just results and learnings, those that we see positive ROI with we’ll continue with and I’ll start doing some just quick recaps of what we’re learning from each of these experiments moving forward. And then in terms of partner content and collabs, that went live this week, Kevin Jabal had an awesome video on his secret to medical school hyper productivity featuring Levels that went live. And then Bridget, who is one of our nutritionist in the app, and then also one of our affiliates had an amazing CGM how-to guide, which was inspired by some things that she was hearing from some of her clients in terms of gaps in our onboarding experience. And I think we’re already using this awesome guide for inspiration in the Guided Journey project that the team’s working on, which is great.
And also quickly wanted to touch on this YouTube cold outreach experiment that is underway. I shared a quick update in this notion document on where I’m at with this, but overall what I’ve been doing is reaching out to YouTube creators cold across three different categories, health and wellness, science tech and entrepreneurship. Haven’t done outreach there yet, but that’s coming up. And the goal is just to increase our YouTube content, YouTube content about Levels out there and just partner with awesome creators that are really talented, whether their distribution is high or not, high quality content is the goal. So in terms of results, what we saw so far was that we’ve gained a lot more traction and are getting a much higher response rate among the health and wellness creators. So over half of the health and wellness creators that we reached out to responded.
We have one new partnership with Dr. Lara Hyde, she’s now an affiliate. She is a PhD, creates really awesome educational content about health and nutrition and she’ll be creating some content about Levels starting with her review video. We didn’t gain any traction with the science tech creators. I think we reached out to nine health wellness, 11 in the science tech space, and no one responded. We have a few hypotheses if you’re interested, you can take a look at that document. I think the TLDR is that these creators just don’t prioritize brand partnerships as much. So in terms of next steps, for that science tech category, we’ll will be asking our investors for warm intros in this space. I have a few examples in the doc too if you’re interested in what we mean by science tech creators, but these are more educational channels that might focus on something like the future of biosensor technology or bio-observability and topics like that.
And then in terms of health and wellness category, we’ll be doing more regular cold outreach among this group, cold outreach teams to work really well. I think it’s been a great way to get product feedback as well as create new partnerships and get more content out there. And then I also planned to do an experiment similar with TikTok, to do some cold outreach there to see if we can make connections with creators on that platform. And then lastly, in terms of the next phase of this experiment, we haven’t started reaching out to people in the entrepreneurship category, so these are people that are creating content that might be more culture focused. So I’m going to start that this month and I’m really excited to see what we learn from that. And that’s it. Thanks.
Josh Clemente (00:44:59):
Awesome. Thank you, Jackie. Haney.
Mike Haney (00:45:05):
All right, three pieces up last week. So our kind of big piece last Friday when we tend to do our bigger pieces was to dive into hypoglycemia or otherwise known as a blood sugar crash. It’s another one of these topics we talk about all the time, we sort of reference in passing, but we’ve never really dove into. So this is a nice piece that Revel, our agency, executed for us on why you might see low blood sugar and what does hypoglycemia actually mean and how should you think about it. And I got some really nice outside experts to weigh in on this one. Good Q&A with the researcher of HVMN, and then another research highlight. We’re really kind of leaning into these research highlights and this was written by a new writer who had reached out cold who I hadn’t used before.
It’s really been kind of a focus the last probably eight weeks or so. I’ve been trying just a whole bunch of new writers on different articles and these research highlights are actually kind of a good one to try folks on. So hoping to just build out the team there. Quickly, other stuff going on, the blog redesign is now in development. They’re actually building it, so that’s good. I think we’re probably a couple weeks out from seeing things actually working and close to live, so that’s great. Our Nurture Email Series, which is our education emails, has launched, and I’ll show you some stats in the next slide. Kind of at a next point with our big agency, so our SEO agency, 97th Floor, our contract is up with them. And our contract with Revel, our content agency, is coming up as well. So in chats with both of them and others about what the next year of those relationships look like.
I also wanted to call out, I mentioned this in Threads, so the link is out there as well, but we gave the Athena folks B a task this week to go through all the blog posts, all of Casey’s social posts, our newsletters, and just pull out any recipe that we reference and then just give us the link, give us the original source of it, give the image, and I thought we’d get 30 or 40, and B has found 250. So I think this is going to be just an incredible resource. Now, these are mostly recipes sourced from other places, so we want to think about how we use those and stuff, but just I think for all kinds of things we probably haven’t even thought of yet, this is going to be a really good database and we will continue to update this I think on a monthly basis, now when she gets this initial, she’s going to go through and just do frequent sweeps of that.
So I encourage you to check that out, the Threads out in that content. And then just a peek at some upcoming stories. We got some good everyone on content pieces, we’ve been trying to add some additional writers there, mostly taking docs and other things that we’ve already had from Matt. We took his Whole New Level episode and his Lightning Talk and then a brief interview and turned that into a piece. We’re taking the DRI memo and turning that into a piece. Maz is working on a great onboarding one, so we’ve got those coming.
Some big science deep dives on melatonin, circadian rhythms, both super interesting pieces. We’re finally diving back into COVID, probably a little late. We touched on it early, hadn’t really come back to it, but there’s so much research there that we’re doing kind of a real deep dive on the relationship between COVID and glucose. And then some of our food pieces coming up. We got Best Soups and Stews, like 10 recipes. We got finally our oatmeal alternatives, and kind of our ultimate guide to fruit, which has been suggested for a while. So next slide.
And then just a quick look at January traffic. January was a monster for a whole bunch of reasons and I think actually a part of that, I showed this slide in the middle and on the right there, the whole site stats and traffic source. Direct is up huge and organic search is up huge. My guess on that is that the Sinclair stuff had a lot to do with that. So we’ve talked a lot about Sinclair as a conversion tool, but I think it’s also just a huge awareness tool that big of an audience, and anything that’s going to lead to that many conversions, it’s also just going to lead to a whole bunch of people who hear us, search for us go out to the site even if they never sign up.
And I suspect that’s at least part of this driver, and probably also seasonal things, if there’s an algorithm change on Google that may have driven some of this, but just really kind of a monster month. I don’t know if that’ll be sustained or not. But some recent email stats we’ve seen overall nice trend-up in the open rates. We used to be around 29, 30% was good. Now we are really consistently up around mid 30s, upper 30s, for even our digest, again, this is as the list grows, we’re over 200,000 now. So that’s been good.
And then just some stats in the lower right on the nurture email series. The first one, as of last night had gone up to about 5,500 people just so you get the sample size there, and then less obviously as we go down because these are going out weekly with new cohorts every Wednesday. So I think it’s probably predictable that it’s going to go down over time. Clicks will go down and subscribes will go down just as a function of that. But overall, super happy with these open rates. We’ve got a bunch of different things we’re going to test over the next 12 weeks or so with these nurture emails to see what works best. And I think that’s it for content.
Josh Clemente (00:49:57):
Huge, huge week and month. Thanks, Haney. This is so cool to see. All right, quick week again. We’re going to jump straight in, if Sam is still on to kick us off.
Sam Corcos (00:50:11):
I’m on.
Josh Clemente (00:50:11):
All right.
Sam Corcos (00:50:13):
Well, I’m in New York now. I got an apartment, so that’s the thing. I’m excited to be hosting salon dinners again. That’s actually the main reason why I did it, just to be able to host things again. So excited to kick those off. Doing the first one this coming Tuesday and then probably weekly starting in March, so that’s what’s exciting for me.
Josh Clemente (00:50:38):
Amazing. I don’t know if everyone knows about Sam’s salon dinners, but it’s a historical event each and every one of them, and it’s where people come together and new legislation is formed and society is healed. So seriously, if you have an opportunity, you should go to one of Sam’s salon dinners, you’ll meet some awesome people and the conversation is phenomenal. Cool. Can’t wait to visit. I saw Dom on here momentarily, but I think he had to jump off, so I’m going to go to Helena.
Helena Belloff (00:51:07):
Awesome. So Levels-wise, I just want to say I’m so impressed by how actionable and thoughtful everyone here is. I casually raised a problem a few of us were having with communication on the Now project last week and already by Monday of this week things pivoted, everyone seemed to get unblocked and velocity just increased rapidly. And I’ve never worked for a company where people were so willing to communicate and collaborate, make these changes when something isn’t working. And so just thank you so, so much, everyone. This was an amazing example of how the culture at Levels is just unparalleled. I know it’s not all.
And then one more quick thing. Today is the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. And so I just wanted to give a shout-out to the incredible women on this team. Thank you for being bold and curious and role models and then personalized, my background is actually real. I’m in St. Lucia right now and I’ll be out next week and I’m going to go hit the beach now, so thanks.
Josh Clemente (00:52:10):
Sounds awesome. Enjoy. Taylor.
Taylor Sittler (00:52:13):
Great. I’m just going to do a personal share this week. This is my first COVID-free week, so I’m really excited to have that all behind me and us, and to be able to dive back into things. So really excited to see everything that’s happened. I’ve been sort of peeking up periodically and it’s amazing how fast things move. So it’s really fun to be a part of this. I’ll pass it on.
Josh Clemente (00:52:44):
Awesome. Scott is enjoying the slopes. Jhon’s not with us, not with us. Lauren.
Lauren K-C (00:52:53):
I’ve had a very cool experience professionally Levels-wise because a friend of mine who’s on Levels noticed a really cool link between her glucose and her emotions. She got in a huge fight with her partner and her blood sugar went to 140 and stayed there for three hours and it was just incredible, and she didn’t eat anything. So I thought that was just such an amazing thing in terms of the future, of the types of insights we could build for people, and personally just relaxing this weekend. Excited about it.
Josh Clemente (00:53:18):
Enjoy. Jackie’s out, don’t think Murillo is with us. Mike D.
Mike Didonato (00:53:25):
Yeah, so I’m going to do personal. Some of you may know I’ve had an interesting experience with our medical and hospital system over the last one to two weeks, so I’m just really excited to be on the forum. I just want to give a quick shout-out to both Sam and to David for filling in for me, helping me out, and definitely the whole project team. Yeah, I’m just excited to be back and I’m fully back to work over the next course of the week, so I’ll leave it at that.
Josh Clemente (00:53:57):
Cool. Glad you’re back. Glad you’re feeling better. Hao.
Hao Li (00:54:03):
Super excited about the Liftoff plan. It’s really coming forward and looking pretty good. And personally, I just head back to the mountain and enjoy some spring slash.
Josh Clemente (00:54:21):
I’m right there with you, man. Casey.
Casey Means (00:54:26):
Yes. So in terms of personal share, I am in the same boat as Sam. I signed a lease, so my 14 months of nomadic time is over. I’m going to be, my home base is going to be Bend, Oregon for now, which is just a nature lover’s paradise, and so everyone is welcome to come visit. So I’m going to be traveling a lot for Levels stuff, so it’s definitely more of a home base, but I’m super psyched to get unpacked and get my storage unit unpacked, get my Vitamix out again. It’s going to be great.
Then in terms of Levels stuff, it’s too much to count. The Liftoff plan is incredible. I’ve been just totally so appreciative of Tom for everything he is doing with the Chief of Staff Pipeline and really thankful to Ben and Miz for also stepping in there. We have 120 applications and people have been so helpful with just giving a quick look at resumes or technical exercises and I just could not be more appreciative, so thanks everyone for the input on that process.
Josh Clemente (00:55:34):
Love it. Tom.
Tom Griffin (00:55:37):
Yeah, Levels-wise, we have a number of really solid chief of staff candidates, which is a nice position to be. In terms of other talent, I was checking out Brett Red in more detail earlier and got very excited about him as well. And also shout-out to JM and Maz who did a long synchronous call with me working through a fairly nuanced problem that we needed to solve yesterday. So that was a fun challenge and appreciated their time. And then personally, I have my niece’s four-year-old birthday party tomorrow and she’s psyched, and I am psyched and it’s going to be a great day.
Josh Clemente (00:56:15):
Fun, enjoy. Zac.
Zac Henderson (00:56:19):
Yeah, professional and personal kind of merged for me right now. I am so excited for just about everything that’s going on, and I do mean everything. All corners of this company are making amazing progress towards amazing goals and we have so many goals we’ve already achieved that are somehow already in the rear view mirror. It’s really amazing. I love that I am working at a company that actually lets like the sole attorney take a bit of parental leave. So that’s what I’m going to be busy doing for the next month. I’ll still be semi-plugged in but not on Threads and such, and just handling a couple lingering projects. But so grateful for this culture. So grateful to work with you all.
Josh Clemente (00:57:03):
Love it. Enjoy your time, Zac. Ben.
Ben Grymol (00:57:08):
Levels-wise, super stoked on all the candidates that are in the pipeline as far as people that are coming on board and then even the new candidates coming through. It never ceases to amaze, I think, everyone on our team when we see the caliber of talent and it’s just like, it’s mind boggling. So excited about that. And then personally, one of my favorite authors, Dan Pink, released a new book called The Power of Regret and I recommend it to everyone. Sam and Casey, I know you think about this kind of stuff often and so give it a go.
Josh Clemente (00:57:42):
Cool. Good recommendation. Karen.
Karin Nielsen (00:57:46):
Personally, I’m still unpacking boxes, but there’s one box I’ve been saving, which is my new MacBook Pro. So I’ve been delaying gratification on opening that, so I’m going to find some time this weekend to have a play and unbox that.
Josh Clemente (00:58:02):
Pretty amazing self-control. I could never hold out such an unboxing. Sunny.
Sunny Negless (00:58:07):
On the Levels front, I’m really excited about some of the research that’s happening. I shared with my small community about the Queensland Melbourne WHOOP study about, I actually wrote it down, physiology of wise leadership and impact on performance, which is something that a lot of us have thought about and obviously never put it… We’re not researchers. So really excited to see all of the ways that Levels is being used in the research.
And kind of a hybrid personal and professional, husband and I are using Levels for the first time. So previously I was using a competitor’s product. I know Karin’s looking forward to my update on that. But using Levels for the very first time and having an N equals 2 experience. My husband is a perfect experiment for someone who works in support because he will not read anything, he does not like to watch videos and everything has tripped him up. So I’m really enjoying seeing what this looks like for his or that type.
Josh Clemente (00:59:01):
We got to shadow that whole experience. All right. Alan.
Alan McLean (00:59:08):
Yeah, lots to be excited about this week. Feel like the Now Page is sort of coming together. We’ve got this great designer coming on, it’ll be really fun to work with. And yeah, the sun’s starting to shine in New York. I got a friend from Canada visiting, so good times over here.
Josh Clemente (00:59:26):
Amazing. Maxine.
Maxine Whitely (00:59:30):
On the Levels front, it’s been super fun to get into it and start looking at the LaunchDarkly project, so I’m excited to be focusing on a bigger project now. And on the personal front, it’s gorgeous in New York today and it’s going to be gorgeous this weekend, so lots of time outside.
Josh Clemente (00:59:48):
Awesome. I’m going to circle back. Kunal.
Kunal Shah (00:59:56):
It’s hard to really go for this update but yeah, today’s my last day here so it’s really sad. I can’t believe it, I can’t. Over the course of my time here has been the greatest concentration of learnings I’ve ever had in my professional career, and I am so, so, so, so sad to be leaving but I mean, I’ve just dove into a curiosity that I can’t seem to pull myself out of. So I guess the plan here is, I mean, there is no real plan but it’s pretty much to give it a shot.
I’ve been tinkering with prototypes for electric motorcycles and just got one running last night and it goes about 55 miles an hour and the torque is pretty good but not good enough to be an electric motorcycle yet, but it’s moving in that direction. So hopefully, I’ll have some more announcements soon. But I really hope to stay in touch with all of you. I will definitely be following the chorus of Levels and the public launch as obsessively as I had even before I joined.
I still probably use the Levels app more than anything else on my phone and completely expect it’s going to continue to be that way. And who knows? Maybe if the new concept gets off the ground, I expect to put just as much thought into the culture, the same way, as an aspiration to be kind of like what we have here at Levels. Because I am completely convinced that there is not a company like Levels on the face of the earth, there never has been, and there never will be.
But there’s so much to learn from this and I am so honored and humbled to be able to work with you guys, some of the smartest, most intelligent, caring, kind and thoughtful people I’ve ever met. So thank you all for the opportunity to work together and get to know you and collaborate so deeply. That’s all for me.
Josh Clemente (01:02:10):
Thank you, Kunal, for everything you’ve contributed. I’m very appreciative of both that and your interest in electric motorcycles. I truly mean this when I say you have to pull this off because I need one of your products and excited to hear that the culture stuff will be a part of the new venture. So yeah, looking forward to staying in touch and looking forward to seeing video of the new prototypes on your investor updates and I’m sure you’ll be distributing freely on the internet.
Kunal Shah (01:02:35):
You got it.
Josh Clemente (01:02:36):
All right, man. Over to Matt.
Matt Flanagan (01:02:42):
Yeah, I think Levels side, the updates that Maxine and Ian have made to the just ops little buttons that we have in retool have made a huge world of a difference. It’s akin to building a bridge and the amount of collective hours that you save people over time. It makes that a super impactful project, so really thankful for you guys diving in and doing that. And then personal, everyone else in the Northeast has said it, it’s going to be like 60 degrees this weekend and I’m going to be walking around on the beach.
Josh Clemente (01:03:18):
Love it. I don’t know if Mercy’s on read-only or not, but who’s up?
Mercy Clemente (01:03:24):
I’m here. Levels-wise, professionally, reading the Liftoff document memo was just really crazy to see and very exciting to know that we’re planning to fully launch this year and perhaps in a few months. And then personally, I am almost to Austin. I’ve been driving since yesterday afternoon so I’m very excited to get out of the car and unpack and that’s what I’ll be doing all weekend. Yeah, that’s it for me.
Josh Clemente (01:03:56):
Enjoy. Yeah, I don’t think we have any nomads on the team anymore. Braden, are you a nomad or… You have a lease, that doesn’t count. I think we’re free of nomads now. Kind of crazy.
Maxine Whitely (01:04:07):
I don’t have a lease. I’m the only one, baby.
Josh Clemente (01:04:10):
Maxine is the sole holdout. All right, hold it down for us. Dave.
Dave Ten Haye (01:04:19):
Professionally, just to shout out to Zach, it’s been an absolute pleasure working with you on our conversation over the past couple of weeks. I really appreciate that. Personally, I will be scowling at the lawn. I can literally see the grass grow, literally see the grass grow. It is driving me completely mad, but we’ve had endless rain for the past couple of weeks so I’ve just got to sit there and scowling, so that’ll be my week.
Josh Clemente (01:04:47):
Oh, so you got your hands full. How much lawn, how much acreage do you have if you’d have to cut it, by the way?
Dave Ten Haye (01:04:56):
It’s about half an acre of lawn to mow, so it’s-
Josh Clemente (01:04:59):
Significant. Enjoy. Let’s see, it’s me then. I am really, really excited about the Liftoff plan, the membership experiments to understand our conversion and elasticity and the team, team growth. Really, really stoked for, again, the quality of talent but also the quality of buy-in that we have into the culture and the way that we’re working. And really kind of surreal to see everything sort of merging together towards a Liftoff plan in the next few weeks or months and putting this thing out there for everyone to have access to. It’s going to be awesome. Okay, let’s see, Xinlu I don’t think is with us. Maz.
Mazlar Brumand (01:05:46):
Hey guys. On the professional side. It’s been really fun working with JM and Scott on the Liftoff plan. It’s really, really good to see. And then a woo to Ben for being my personal coach on Notion. I’ve learned a lot from him, so that’s been fun. And on the personal side, going to spend time with my brother this weekend, it’s his birthday, every year he gets older, and I’m getting a year older. And going to do some biking, as well. That’s it for me.
Josh Clemente (01:06:16):
Love it. Chris.
Chris Jones (01:06:18):
On the Levels side, I’m also going to talk a little bit around the culture, which is just so much fun to watch on all fronts. And a couple examples of, it might be things of, as Maz and I talk about how to lower the cost for our product and save money, and hearing his pushback around making sure we’re not doing anything to reduce the member experience, just to save money, just trying to lower costs. So really love how everyone on the team seems to want to always protect the member experience and to not do anything to kind of take away from that.
So on all fronts, that’s always just great to see when we’re trying to figure out the right balance. And also related to that is watching the thread from the quote that I did earlier today when I posted that in Threads, just to see the team rally around alcohol, around what we can do, even to see David doing mock-ups and then doing a loom around, “Hey, here’s what it might look like.” And having three or four different examples, I was just blown away around the team rallying around kind of one comment around like, “Yeah, this is a problem. What can we do?” And with starting to spitball ideas. So it’s really empowering just to see the team on all fronts trying to say, “What can we do to make it a better experience?”
On a personal side, yes, it’s also beautiful and sunny in Montana, which is completely unexpected, but more so, it was yesterday taking the day off for my birthday, going cross-country skiing in beautiful scenery. It was just, I encourage everyone to take your birthday off, be selfish, do what you want to do, all about me time. And it was just so relaxing and great, and refreshed, and it allowed me to continue to beat Matt in the February steps challenge to get out there for a three-hour cross-country ski. So now he’s got to play catch-up.
Josh Clemente (01:08:12):
Amazing. Happy belated.
Chris Jones (01:08:14):
Thanks.
Josh Clemente (01:08:15):
Haney.
Mike Haney (01:08:17):
Yeah, I’ll echo what Chris was saying. They’re diving in this week to the Liftoff plan and the membership memo as well. One of the things that struck me in both, and it’s consistent and has been since I joined the company and even before that, is just to focus on trying to be decent and kind and care about our members and just not be an evil company, and meaning that all the way through and living it in all of our departments is just, it’s really nice. It’s unfortunately not super common.
And so it just makes me happy that even as we grow and even as we look towards growth, even as we start to care about revenue, that those are still front and center. On the personal side, my wife and kid are headed Disneyland this weekend, which means I get a weekend to myself and I’m going to do all of the things, I’m going to mountain bike, and hike, and run, and kayak, and see how many things I can possibly squeeze into 36 hours on my own.
Josh Clemente (01:09:13):
I love it. All right, Steph.
Stephanie Coates (01:09:19):
Levels-wise, I am super excited about the Now Screen and the progress we’ve made with that. To echo what Lauren’s friend had experienced with the mental and emotional effects on metabolism, I love the Dr. Casey’s newsletter for February about all of those mental connections and I can certainly relate to that as well, and so that was awesome to read. Personally, Chris, happy belated birthday, I looked at the photos of that lodge and makes me really want to come up to Montana to do some cross-country skiing. And so maybe I’ll come lend a hand on the farm. And this weekend, it’s also surprisingly warm here in Colorado and so a lot of the snow is melted and I’m hoping to do some hiking this weekend.
Josh Clemente (01:09:59):
Awesome. Enjoy. Britney.
Britney McLeod (01:10:07):
Thanks. On the Levels side, I just wanted to give a shout-out to the content team for all the amazing educational pieces that you guys consistently put out. Not only do I enjoy it, but I just had a really great conversation with my best friend who started using Levels around the time when I started working here, and it’s really changed her life for the better. But she really highlighted just how helpful the educational pieces are that it put out on the blog, and obviously through the app. She really takes those, the lists of suggested items to buy at stores, it’s really changed her life to follow those. So just wanted to give a shout-out there, it was the highlight of my week.
And then personally, very random and unexpected opportunity to go to the Super Bowl on Sunday. So I’ll be going there on Sunday. It’s in LA, which isn’t too far from here, so pretty stoked about that. Thanks.
Josh Clemente (01:11:10):
That’s huge. That’s going to be awesome, enjoy. Well, I didn’t say, I think I skipped my personal share, but I’m excited to be in Vermont. Going to go, I have my ski boots on now, I literally did this in my ski gear after getting a few runs in and I’m going to get back out there, and it was pretty awesome to be, I don’t know, I was talking to my family about the fact that I’m going to have to do this all hands meeting. I got to do some preparation work and I’m just going to wing it and make it work.
And although there was some noise in the beginning, I hope everybody, I hope it wasn’t too bad, but it’s pretty cool to be at a culture where this sort of thing I think is doable, where you can make a weekend out of it and still get the work in. So hopefully it worked, it was an experiment. And I’m stoked to get back out there, so I’m going to leave it here. Thanks for a killer week, the biggest week on record in many ways as Chris shared with us. And hope you all have an awesome weekend. Enjoy the sun.