Transcript

Josh Clemete: Everybody see that?

Tom Griffin: Yep. Good.

Josh Clemete: Sweet. Okay. Second meeting of 2021. And yeah, excited to jump in. So recent achievements. This week we had a couple milestone numbers that hit us. And of course, I got a big asterisk on these. I’m actually going to do the asterisks first. These are passive metrics, meaning we’re not actively managing these. We’re not actively trying to increase them, but they are increasing as a function of us expanding volume and testing our systems during development. But $2 million in total sales. This is big because we just hit a million dollars in total sales in November of 2020, so rate of change, high. 500 subscribers, which is 20% week over week growth, wait list is over 75,000. So big numbers. Congrats on getting here. And let’s continue to focus on feedback and improvement.

Josh Clemete: The Q1 and 2021 strategy docs are largely published now, so everyone on the team has been working on these. Thank you for all the effort. And everyone who was not developing them, please read up in Notion, add comments. And then if you have any share links or anything like that, definitely update those and distribute to people who need them. I want to shout out right off the top, the new day score labeling tool that, that Xinlu put together. I’ve been using this to help us, or several of us are going to be labeling data to help build the next Day Score iteration. And this tool is just awesome. I mean, for an internal piece of tooling, it’s super easy to use. It’s intuitive. It’s actually fun in many ways. And I think it’s also going to lead to a really great end product where we’re starting to converge on a score that’s explainable as opposed to the current one, which is kind of like a black box. So thank you Xinlu for the great work there.

Josh Clemete: And then the in-app tutorial work that Murillo’s doing. I also want to shout that out. There’s a picture down in the bottom right. By the way Xinlu’s work is in the middle here. Murillo’s work down in the corner. So working on that to guide people through a tutorial, to identify features that may not be entirely intuitive. So this is a really big step towards usability. Este Haim and her sisters are joining as investors. And they’re basically getting on board because Este herself is not only a rockstar, but also an outspoken type one advocate. And so that’s really key, basically bridging these communities is going to be huge to moving innovation ahead across the entire metabolic spectrum. So not just cool, but also really going to be a major value proposition for us.

Josh Clemete: And then we had an awesome call with Adidas yesterday, the head of performance who, Paul Francis, who is really stoked about what we’re doing, wants to move ahead a 100 person pilot using athletes and collaborators from the Adidas network to test Levels and start building metabolic fitness into their sort of concepts and offerings. And as you can imagine, big lifestyle companies are always thinking about these things. A couple other cool things. Joe Rogan has been texted directly about Levels. Nothing really has come of this yet, but it’s cool. I mean, that’s the biggest podcast in the world by far. A couple other big ones, we got Joe Holder who is GQ’s wellness and fitness correspondent and writer. He’s demonstrating or testing the product right now.

Josh Clemete: Kelly LeVeque who’s by far the MVP of the week. I mean, she’s just, she did a 30 minute dedicated IG Live without us asking her at all and it was awesome. I mean, I got a ton of text messages from people who apparently follow Kelly and had no idea she was representing us, and they just absolutely loved hearing about the product directly from her. Marc Andreessen shouted us out on a Clubhouse about the future tech stack of, of health, which was huge. The Hustle wrote a good article with 1.5 million viewers that launched yesterday. Ben Greenfield podcast was recorded yesterday. He did an IG Live. And then just overall, obviously a ton of coverage and a ton of progress behind the scenes. So really solid week. We’re also in touch with the NFL’s Players Association, which that’s key to getting … You don’t work with the leagues and the teams. You work with the Players Association, if you want to get products adopted. So huge week. And thanks all.

Sam Corcos: Did you get your GQ profile? What was that one?

Josh Clemete: Oh, yeah. So Joe Holder is our sort of correspondent over there, so we’ll see how that goes. Nothing’s published yet obviously. Quick announcement. We’re going to be trying something new starting next week and we’re calling it Fourth Friday’s Fireside. The alliteration has nothing to do of course, with that name, but this is going to be an open format to discuss company topics, do a Q&A and we’re going to just try and experiment and iterate towards something that is really helpful and helps us all in a more open format than the Friday forums. Just chat about what’s to come, what’s happening and why. So we’re going to send out more details. We’re going to have a submission form for that Q&A. All that will come very soon. And yeah, excited to give it a shot. Okay. Andrew or David?

David Flinner: Yeah. So Hao launched a feature flag manager. We talked about this before, but this will allow us to turn on and off features remotely, which is really exciting. It will also allow us to do better internal testing before we launch apps. Right now, our users are special, and so they get treated differently and this will make it easy to un-specialize any user you’re using to test with. And so it’s exciting and will definitely speed up our velocity for being able to iterate on features.

David Flinner: And Xinlu pushed out a nice export your data feature for all of our members. So now, to date, people could reach in, reach out to support and we would help them export a CSD of their data manually. But now everyone can go directly to their profile on the web, on the Level’s website and find your data link and export that. So this is a really exciting feature. We talked about it for a while, and this is fundamentally, we believe very strongly that our members own their data and can do with it as they want. So this is a really good first step in that direction to let them take it out. And over time, we want this to be built out into the app and other sorts of integrations and just really encouraging first step.

David Flinner: Next slide. And Josh mentioned it, but Murillo helped incorporate into our app a sort of wizard, tutorial wizard that we can surface in moments that matter for helping people understand the journey, or when we get common feedback in the support channel, we might want to use this as well. So for example, one of the things that people will always say is like, “Wow, I didn’t know that you could import a photo and it would automatically set my log to the time the photo was taken.” And they often learn about that after they’re done with Levels.

David Flinner: So now what will happen is after you’ve logged three logs, the fourth time you go to add a log, if you’ve never tried the photo button, we’ll just have a little overlay that tells you, “Hey, did you know, you can import a photo?” And we’ll use a time. The mocks you see here are not the fully finished styling state. These are internal screenshots, but just a lightweight way to raise awareness. And another one is the first time you add a log will quickly annotate the notes field and tell you, “Hey, just give it a short name. What you put in here will be used for your reports.” Just a helpful hint that you don’t wait till the end of the month, get your report and realize it’s all blank and wish you’d added more detail upfront.

Sam Corcos: That’s great.

David Flinner: So yeah, there’re other things we can use this for. It’s a great tool to have and excited to see where we take it. Next slide. Awesome. And then also behind the scenes, there’s a bunch of work this week. A few things that we pushed out and more to come next week, but Gabriel’s been working on some really cool stuff for both anomaly, like improving the anomaly detection and getting smarter about when we actually present anomalies based on sleep and other factors. So the quality of our suggestions for users is increasing a bunch. I think we’ll have more on this next week. And then we’ve been doing some bug fixes this week based on feedback coming into the support channel that there’s duplicate logs on Apple Health. We had one member reach out, helping us make an important clarification on the metabolic score, contributing factors, units were wrong. So some product quality improvements this week, other than the other things I mentioned.

Josh Clemete: Cool, thank you, David and Andrew. So quick hiring update, we have launched a new page called work at Levels, which it’s a Notion page that brings together all of the common themes across our positions. Generally what is working at Levels like, and how do we conduct business, build our culture. So that page, thanks to everyone that worked on that specifically. Miz and Ben, and everyone else who contributed. We also have on the bottom of that page, the open recs. So right now it’s lead designer, software engineers, general counsel. Generally, we also have an open submission. So if you know someone who would be a really good fit, and by the way, I’m speaking both to the internal team and to anyone of our supporters who might be watching this. If you know someone that would be a great fit, please direct them to one of these links or to our work at Levels page and ask them to send us a note and we’ll reach out, get in touch and find a way to keep them in the loop, if we don’t have something right now.

Josh Clemete: Let’s see, we have a hiring update at least on two positions, the lead designer and chief legal council. So had a bunch of applications for lead designer this week. Thanks to Braden for keeping the Notion page updated and keeping us sort of on top of this. We’re going to be running a process for these. Spoke with one legal council candidate this week. We’ll likely be building a roster sort of, of candidates and then working through portfolios and doing a batch process to get into the technical work. So for those of you that are helping us with intros and initial conversations, thank you for dedicating the time. And we’ll try to improve the value of this slide and add more positions to it in the next week. Mike.

Mike Didonato: Cool. Thanks Josh. Good week for conversations with our members. At the end of the week, we’ll have fielded eight calls with members. And as everyone on the team knows when our members receive their final report, we ask them a question, how likely are they re how likely are they to refer a friend to Levels, and it’s a score of zero to 10. So one of the areas of focus this week, although we don’t have many people who score us lower than seven, I think Deloitte, it labels them detractors, it was an area to connect with. And a few things that were interesting, every one of those conversations included quotes like, “I love Levels, and I love what you all are doing.” I think after reading the call notes, Sam said that we have the best detractors, and I definitely agree.

Mike Didonato: We were able to learn some good things and get some great feedback. Definitely the metabolic score came up and it’s really helpful for long term trends, but there does seem to be some confusion or a need for more explaining. And I know that we’re going to hopefully start tackling that with V2 of the days work, but I definitely wanted to call that out for the team. And then again, another great week for excitement, and in the coming weeks, in addition to connecting with our normal feedback calls, we’re going to also start reaching out to more of our subscription members. I think it was on the main slide, but we just passed 500 active subscribers, which is pretty awesome. And we want to learn more from them and find out what it is that Level’s doing right and doing wrong. That’s all.

Josh Clemete: Nice. Thank you. Cool. Let’s see. Jumping ahead to Ops, Miz.

Michael Mizrahi: Great. So quick update, we posted a draft privacy memo, not quite near where it needs be, but a lot of helpful information there. I think David hit on a few of the important points on our principles. We believe our members own their data, and there’s a lot of things we can do to make that actually walk that walk. So Your Data Export is a huge first step. We had a ton of customers reaching out, a ton of questions about how to access it, how we handle things. So that’s one big step that we were able to take. And one of my favorite things is just how quickly we can get these things out the door from concept to our members. It’s nice being small and being able to move fast, and this is a great example of that. So thanks for all the work there, Xinlu and everyone.

Michael Mizrahi: Other small things, we can do, changes that we can make to not collect data that we don’t need, this generally, this privacy area, isn’t just about health data, but also just about user data and member information, as it relates to how they interact with Levels. So we’ve turned off things that we don’t use. So in Instabug, we were collecting location of everyone who files a bug, where they are when they submit it, that doesn’t help us debug. We’re not an international or localized product, so that’s a feature we can turn off. We had a Help Scout open tracking on for every email that we sent. That’s also a feature that can be switched off.

Michael Mizrahi: So looking for all these little things where we can make improvements, but also the big picture health information, how we treat photo IDs, member names. Where we put this information internally in Slack, how we redact information from Looms. There’s a lot of surface areas where we have member data exposed and it will do us well to get this right. So more to come there in terms of process changes and updates, but really happy that we’re moving the ball forward here.

Michael Mizrahi: We fully migrated to the new form of the medical consult form. This was necessary for the Truepill network. It asks a lot more questions up front to reduce the back and forth with members. So, if they’re on a medication, we ask why. If they have previous conditions, we ask for details and basically just screen out for all the conditions that are relevant to us being a health and wellness product. As of this week, we’ve officially sent our first consult to the Truepill network. So now we’ve got both provider networks up and running, which is a big milestone. We did a lot of work towards the end of last year to get this ready and it’s officially in action. So thanks Andrew for the help there and excited for what this unlocks for us.

Michael Mizrahi: As Josh mentioned, new careers page at Levels.links/join-us. You can take a peek there. And finally, we had a performance cover shortage over the last two to three weeks. We didn’t interrupt any existing orders. We did push out and delay some standby orders, but that’s fully resolved. And we’re in the clear for a while and everything we can to get ahead of that. So that’s it for that. One more slide, Josh. Some quick numbers, we passed 500 subscribing members just this week, which is a huge milestone. Can’t thank Laurie and Braden, Mercy, but Laurie’s really the power behind this, keeping the lights on and keeping these subscriptions rolling. It’s not a small amount of work. It’s extremely manual. There’s a lot of things to keep together and in one place. So hats off Laurie, thanks for keeping this running. It means a lot to our members and it also is pretty essential to keep our business moving on a daily basis. So huge milestone, and obviously we can’t wait for some of the product work coming, but we’ll keep it running until then.

Michael Mizrahi: Finally, some stats, some quick numbers. On the right hand side, you have our trailing NPS for the last few weeks. So this is that survey that Mike mentioned, that David implemented before the final report. So we had a little bit of a dip a few weeks ago in December. We had a trend of detractors we’ve done what we can to reach out to them, do those interviews, and Mike has been posting those interviews with detractors apprentices in the user feedback channel, so you can read up there. Some really helpful insights, but otherwise generally steady around that the 60s. High 60s.

Michael Mizrahi: Our CSAT score is 99% over the last week. This is really unheard of. We had one not good, which was a privacy complaint out the medical consult form. But the level of support that we’re able to give with an increasing number of conversations is really, really exceptional. I’ve seen a lot of support over a lot of years and really, really proud of the team for what we’re doing here, and our members recognize it as well. So hats off to everyone there. This has become a core feature, essentially. So it’s great that we’re managing that well. Finally-

Sam Corcos: The question is on, the NPS thing has been really confusing to me reading through Mike’s notes, because we had … I remember the first one of that random series of five detractors in a row. Mike interviewed one of the people and said that he gave us a five out of 10 on would you recommend it, but in the call, he said that he has actually recommended Levels to many people. So is that maybe a different … should we be looking at different metrics as well? Or is this the best we can do?

Michael Mizrahi: … I think the best we can do is drive up volume on responses and there’s going to be some noise and some variants. We’re not going to change those responses. It’s just part of surveying and sampling. And so it’s worth mentioning the end on the NPS responses is, I should look at our response rate, but we’re talking like 20 to 30, sometimes even in the low teens per week. So the absolute numbers are somewhat low. And so, one detractor makes a big difference in terms of percentage. Did a lot of the groundwork this week on just setting up metrics and dashboards and I’ll share that in time, pretty soon, where you can actually see the number of respondents in a Notion dashboard that’s pretty slick. So good call out. Yeah. This is a small sample of our overall user base and within that those notes and the actual qualitative feedback from those calls sends a very different message. Yeah.

Josh Clemete: Yeah.

Michael Mizrahi: We have work to do … Yeah, go for it, Josh.

Josh Clemete: No, no, I was just going to say it would be interesting to try and supplement with a follow-on question for detractors. I know that, that right now is a single submission, but is there some way that we can add a secondary question that asks whether they specifically disliked the product? Because there seems to be this interesting theme where they’re projecting internal feelings like, “Oh, it’s too expensive for anyone I know. So I wouldn’t recommend it, but it was the greatest thing I’ve ever done.”

Sam Corcos: Right. Right.

Josh Clemete: So it’s not the same as whether they like it.

Michael Mizrahi: The beauty of NPS is the simplicity of it and how standardized it is across companies. We can get more specific. We can do user Medallia surveys with breakdowns of each product area. After you go to a hotel and you fill out a 20 page survey. So we can do those things that will be very insightful, but the value of NPS is that it’s standardized in this exact way.

Josh Clemete: Totally. Yeah. And those feedback calls from Mike are really helpful to clear the air, so to speak.

Michael Mizrahi: Exactly.

Josh Clemete: And yeah, just that CSAT score is blowing my mind. So thank you. Thank you, Epstein for just crushing this. This is so cool.

Michael Mizrahi: And whishing-

Josh Clemete: And all things are going up until the right and this is as well.

Michael Mizrahi: And the qualitative comments in the CSAT survey also blow my mind on a weekly basis. So it’s not just people hitting the great button they’re writing out full form comments. So on that note, next slide. Want to send a little congratulations over to Mercy and Braden for officially joining the team. They’ve been with us for a few months in contractor status, but coming on full-time. And just some select quotes from CSAT, “Mercy’s been fantastic at communicating and addressing needs that have come up over the last month.” So there’s a continued relationship here. “Superb customer service makes me even more excited to be part of this community.” Amazing buzzwords and really great highlights.

Michael Mizrahi: “Braden has been a huge reason why I’ve been so happy with my Levels experience. He’s responded amazingly promptly, even late at night on a Sunday afternoon.” Make sure you’re taking some rest time Braden. “And he has given me thorough and useful information every time. He’s been incredibly patient with my annoying questions. Thank you so much for the amazing service.” These aren’t one off. There’re hundreds of these comments on a monthly basis. And so welcome guys. Congrats on the exceptional job. Worth noting support, but then there’s all ops processes that we’re running, subscription fills, social media, candidate tracking in Notions. There’s a whole much bunch more that that fits in here too. But yeah, just wanted to say kudos and official welcome.

Josh Clemete: Woo hoo, that’s awesome. Congrats and thank you.

Braden: Thanks guys. Excited to be joining the team full-time.

Mercy Clemente: Thank you, also excited.

Tom Griffin: Congrats, Braden and Mercy.

Josh Clemete: Awesome. This is fun. All right. Well, that’s a great update and onto financial stuff, Sam.

Sam Corcos: Yeah. So just quick update on this still 10.7 million in cash. We’re on track to hit a, a revenue goal for the month. And the next slide. Weekly revenue, Kelly LeVeque has been a big driver for the last few weeks and we’re doing pretty well on the revenue side, especially given that we’re not really focused on this. So we’re continuing to see a lot of … if you’re following in the order Slack channel, the diversity in codes is particularly interesting to me. How we seem to have a really good long tail of conversions.

Josh Clemete: All right. Onto Instagram, Mercy.

Mercy Clemente: Instagram, we’re up past 17,000 followers this week, which is exciting. Kelly LeVeque did a 30 minute live solely about her level CGM, which was as far as I know it wasn’t planned. So it was very unexpected. We got a lot of incoming DMS about it and followers after that live, which is pretty cool. Ben Greenfield posted I think, four stories about Levels, so that was cool. A lot of people sharing the challenges I thought was really nice. It was interesting to see how she was like, this one person on the far left Christie just shared strictly about the challenges and how interesting it is because you can apply it personally to what you eat regularly. Yeah. Next slide. Twitter, a lot of interesting tweets this week as well. The one in the center from Chris Bell about the Chinese food with or without the rice, that was crazy to me, because I loved Chinese food and I never really realized what an impact the rice alone would make. We reached 9,600 followers on Twitter and continue to grow. Yeah, that’s all from social.

Josh Clemete: Awesome. Thank you. All right, Tom.

Tom Griffin: All right. Podcast update. As mentioned last week, podcasts are still a priority, but we’re going to be doing relatively fewer of them in the coming few weeks and few months, I guess I would say. Mostly because we’re being a bit more selective and we’re not doing the very small shows given that Casey and Josh feel really good about where they’re at in terms of practicing and reps. Notable updates this week H.V.M.N. Podcast was released. I definitely recommend listening to this one. Geoff Woo the host of H.V.M.N. is a supporter and investor, and it’s a very sophisticated and nuanced conversation. So, especially to our team members, if you haven’t listened to one in a while, I’d recommend it. Josh recorded Ben Greenfield Fitness, which is huge. That’s going to be released on February 6th. Josh, not put you on the spot, but how did that go? I haven’t talked to you yet.

Josh Clemete: It was good. It was really good actually. I mean, he didn’t want to talk much about the mechanisms, he wanted to get right into the tactics of using CGM. So it was a lot of feature conversations and he didn’t know about strenuous exercise stuff, and it was blowing his mind that we had that integration already in the app. So it was pretty good, I think. Very organic.

Tom Griffin: Awesome. And then you’ll see on the right there, just key upcoming shows most notably Bulletproof. We’re recording that within the next couple of weeks, and it’ll be released also in February, late February. Next slide. Excuse me. We wrote a brief memo about our press strategy for the next six months or so that I’ll send around to the full team later this afternoon. A few high level notes our PR goals really mirror our broader marketing goals at this time. That is your press is not a growth strategy, but rather we’re focused on education and awareness, content marketing, brand building, and continuing to secure the right influencers and content creators.

Tom Griffin: In terms of channel allocation, we hired a PR firm mostly to focus on the traditional media outlets i.e. The New York Times and TechCrunch and Men’s Health, et cetera, but they also will be helping quite a bit with podcasts, YouTube and other content creators, listen awards and events. And then in terms of key storylines, these will evolve based on company updates, but high level, the top two that we’re driving is just the problem that we’re solving, the metabolic health epidemic. And then the fact that bio wearables are going mainstream and Levels is the category defining brand and company that is leading the charge. So thoughts and feedback on that doc are very much welcome. Next slide.

Josh Clemete: Cool. Can you guys hear me still?

Tom Griffin: Yep. Next slide.

Josh Clemete: Sorry.

Tom Griffin: All good. All right. Most of this is redundant. I never know what Josh is going to cover on that first slide, but Mark Hyman docusseries is live. They have not sent out the first Level’s promo yet, but just found out like 20 minutes ago, they’re going to do a whole dedicated email on Levels. They’re estimating 500 to a thousand conversions from this over the next few weeks, which seems really high, but we’ll see, exciting nevertheless. Hustle newsletter, this is huge. I had three friends, a couple that I haven’t been in touch with a while text me about the Q&A that was featured, 1.5 million readers.

Tom Griffin: We signed a few lightweight sponsorship packages with Wellness Mama, Bulletproof, and Ben Greenfield for podcast ads, newsletters, and some other activations throughout 2021, which is great to just lock in those partners for the next year. And then Lifetime Fitness, their leadership is testing, which is cool. And excited to share our first draft of the Barwis video in the coming probably one to two weeks. That is really going to highlight our work with pro athletes and how CGM is, is relative to sports performance. So that’s going to be exciting. That’s it.

Josh Clemete: Awesome. Cool update. Thank you, Tom. Any questions on anything we’ve covered so far? All right. Haney.

Mike Haney: So we’ve had three articles up since I think we last spoke. One came, I think last Friday, The 11 Common Questions. And then we had two sort of thought leadership contributor pieces that went up this week. So after a lot of our service pieces lately, getting back to some of our deep dives into stuff. These are both really good. The insulin resistance one is interesting. I’d take a look at that even if you sort of feel like you know a lot about insulin resistance, because I think what Ben does really well there is dive a little bit deeper into what’s actually happening inside your body that can cause insulin resistance beyond just too much insulin. And the joints one is super interesting as well. This is an orthopedic surgeon who I mentioned Slack writes a lot about. He has a cool style and he writes a lot about this kind of stuff and agreed to do this piece for us. So, yeah. Check these out. Next slide.

Mike Haney: And then this is something we talked about doing. I’ll figure out if maybe this is the best thing to do, but just to report a little bit of statistics each week from what’s happening on the blog, these are the top articles. And the really notable thing here, if you haven’t seen this already, is that there’s one article that makes up about 30% of our total traffic consistently. It’s the Ultimate Guide to Healthy Blood Sugar Ranges. And that happens primarily because of organic search. There seems to be two theories around that from all the SEO folks I’ve talked to. One, is that because it has Levels in the title, it sort of helps piggyback on our domain, but also it has a bunch of numbers. So if you look at the things people search that drive them to this article, it’s things like blood sugar 74, blood sugar 102, glucose, 105.

Mike Haney: It seems to be that people go get a test and then get a number back and then Google the number and this comes up. So we haven’t yet figured out how to operationalize this and do more things that capture this, because the drop off rate’s really high. It’s not necessarily people converting or even reading more articles, but that’s always the behemoth in there. And then below that there’s about 10 articles that fall in the same realm. What’s good to see, that’s a little bit different from even a couple months ago, is that some of the new articles we’re putting up are joining some of these top ones before the body temperature, ultimate guide, secret master plan always appear in the top, but now we’re getting some good circulation on some of these new ones, either driven by social or by newsletter. So we’ll continue to share some of these stats every week, just to give you a sense of what’s happening. That’s it for me.

Josh Clemete: Awesome. Yeah. Looking forward to just across the board having … I’d love to make the metrics that we show in the forum, across everything we’re doing, sort of connecting them to the member experience. So whether they’re conversions or some sort of actualization of the metrics. So this is a helpful step in that direction. Thanks, Haney. Okay. We’re on time here. So individual contribution section. Gabriel, you’re on the spot to kick us off.

Gabriel: Yeah. So I’m most excited about probably the event detection improvements. They’ve been better than I thought they were going to be. So hopefully get those launched soon, and then on a personal level, it’s my birthday this weekend and me and Kate are going to go hiking in the woods and stay in a cabin, so I’m excited about that.

Josh Clemete: Sounds like an awesome weekend. Happy birthday. Tom.

Tom Griffin: All right. It may have been a call I had yesterday with the founder and CEO of a company called Ladder. Some of you may have heard of them, they’re one of those fitness train apps. And the founder is actually a close friend of my older brother, a college roommate of his, and we got on a call and I was starting to explain what Levels was and what we’re up to. And he was like, “Tom, I obviously know about Levels.” And I was like, “Really? Levels continuous glucose monitoring?” He was like, “Yeah, every knows about Levels. Even people that aren’t in the health and fitness. Of course.” I was like, “Wait, how? How do you know about them?” And he’s like, “What do you mean? Everyone on social media is talking about you. You have partnered with every top influencer. Andreessen’s backed to you. No one doesn’t know about Levels.” And so it just blows my mind and is fascinating to watch this shift happen. We’ve long talked about changing the cultural zeitgeist and I think it’s just happening right in front of our eyes. So it’s really cool.

Josh Clemete: That’s awesome. Hao.

Hao Li: Yeah, I’m really excited. I can see everything about Levels around all the social networks. So I’ve putting lags on my LinkedIn accounts with all the Levels’ articles. That’s really nice.

Josh Clemete: Very cool. Miz.

Michael Mizrahi: Yeah. Somewhat broad, but just the progress on all fronts. I think even when there’s no one highlight, I think seeing all these teams start to come together and seeing all the different functions work is exciting. And just the way we work. I mentioned something to Ben yesterday of just about email hygiene and just communication style and that part of the experience continues to be great. So happy that we’re running with that.

Josh Clemete: Definitely. Laurie.

Laurie: Laurie, I love how the pharmacy is coming together. Things are happening faster. Orders are being delivered beautifully and that’s a change from a few months ago. So, that’s an ongoing thing I’m really happy about. I work for another client and out of the blue, he said, “Oh my gosh, congratulations on your seed growth a few weeks ago.” And it’s like, “How did you know about that?” “Oh, I play games with Sam and Patrick.” It’s like, “Oh my gosh. How do you know these people?” And the interconnective element here is pretty cool. But I’m excited about a new year. I’m looking forward to hopefully a lot of wonderful changes this year, so including with our company.

Josh Clemete: Awesome. Thanks Laurie. Haney.

Mike Haney: I guess on a sort of personal and professional note, I’m having two calls today I’m excited about, I think are going to be super interesting. I’m talking to Este Haim in about an hour. Who’s interested in contributing something for the blog. So either hopefully kind of a personal essay is what I’d love to have her do, or maybe a Q&A. And then later I’m talking to a different kind of rockstar, Esther Dyson, who’s super smart and super interesting, and just getting her thoughts on this space and how we sort of spread the mission of metabolic fitness. So I think those are going to be super fun.

Josh Clemete: Definitely. Yeah. Esther’s so cool, and Este for that matter, but Esther being related to Freeman Dyson and all that stuff, it’s a cool legacy in that family. Mercy.

Michael Mizrahi: Professionally, I’m excited to have a full-time offer. So that’s really to be an official-official member of the team. And also I’m excited about the data export tool and now that the members can personally do it, that’s pretty cool and it’s a nice little feature to have. It takes off some of the incoming tickets from ops. Personally, I guess also the full-time offer. Yeah. That’s it for me.

Josh Clemete: Nice. Sam.

Sam Corcos: Yeah. I often come in expecting to stay one thing and then watch the forum and end up getting distracted by something else. I think I’m going to have to go with the customer satisfaction on our support. Those are pretty unheard of numbers and they’re pretty consistent. We’re not talking about low volumes here. So it’s pretty extraordinary, especially hearing from other people who have run customer support teams, how incredibly hard it is to get those kinds of numbers. So, that’s really exciting.

Josh Clemete: Definitely. Ben.

Ben Grynol: Yeah. From a Levels standpoint, everything that happens in a week is incredible at most companies in a year. And I think that’s just a byproduct of such an incredible team. I mean, it’s just week over week you’re like, “Is that really what happened?” To drill down, the Kelly LeVeque thing was incredible. I think we got, as of yesterday it was 237 conversions. So that’s 100 grand in paying members in about 24 hours. That, and then the 500 subscribers. That’s a big milestone. We’re still hitting about 10% on our current members as far as conversion goes. So really exciting micro milestones and it’s been really fun to see it come together. Personally, sounds counterintuitive, but we got a nice blanket of snow last night and everything looks really pretty when it’s all white and clean. And so it’s nice to be nice to be outside on the weekend with stuff like that.

Josh Clemete: Nice. For me, it’s been a pretty great week. I have to say that personally, having Mercy joining full-time is exciting. It’s always great to work with family and it’s just cool to have that happening and have her excited to join and be a part of this. And then professionally, a couple things. Recorded Ben Greenfield this week, which was pretty surreal. I mean, Ben is a good guy generally, and I’ve been following him for a long time, but just, I remember about two years ago talking to Mike Denato and some other friends in Philly, just about who would be ideal to use this imaginary product and Ben Greenfield, was like, “Man, you just got to get on that show. If you could do that, this would be huge.”

Josh Clemete: So that was a surreal moment, and then two conversations this week. One was, did an interview and someone was like, “I know all about Levels. I was riding mountain bikes and Moab in the middle of nowhere and there was this group of investors that we ran into and all of them had Levels and they were stopping and checking them at the top of this mountain.” And I was like, “What are you talking about?” And the next one was the NFL Players Association. We got this connection from Kelvin Beachum to NFL PA, and I sent them a bunch of background info on us and they responded with, “We’re very familiar with Levels, congrats on some incredible momentum.” So it’s like the players associations already know about us of course. So that’s just wild. Anyway,

Stacy. Stacy: So many things to be excited about. I think maybe at the top of the list is adding Braden and Mercy full-time. Mercy, I see a lot of her communication within the social media apps and it’s so winsome and so timely, and I’m just very excited for you and you’ve been doing such great work. And personally we have a 1950s kitchen that’s not so cute and I’m going to give it a $50 makeover this weekend. So I’m excited about that because it’s turquoise and it won’t be turquoise when I’m done, so.

Josh Clemete: Nice. Post pictures. Jhon.

David Flinner: I think Jhon’s on mute.

Jhon Cruz: Yeah. Excited to have this new tutorials features on the app. I am pretty sure this will help our members to better understand some parts of it. Actually I am using it to clarify some new features that we recently released. So pretty useful. And personally I will be participating in my second tennis tournament from this weekend, so let’s see how it goes.

Josh Clemete: Nice, good luck. All right. Mike. Mike D, wrap us up.

Mike Didonato: Man, I guess to close out, I’ll finish similar to what Sam said. I think on a weekly basis, I’m just blown away with the progress that we make. I’m just grateful to be a part of the team. I mean, Josh mentioned it, but thinking about whether it’s, I think Dave Asbury, last year around this time had posted on Instagram, something about CGM. And I think Josh and I were at WeWork were like, “Whoa, would just be awesome if we could just get Levels on his podcast.” And I’m pretty sure Josh is recording his podcast next week. And then the Ben Greenfield one. I think we got connected with Ben less than a year ago and was unclear, but kudos Tom and everyone making this happen. It’s just pretty amazing. That’s really it.

Josh Clemete: Yeah. Plus one. All right. Thanks everybody. These contributions are definitely my favorite part of the meeting every week. So appreciate everyone jumping in every time Sam, tell us how good we are at our jobs.

Sam Corcos: Yeah. So I pinged the group on what things people wanted to hear about these. This was the full list. And I decided this week, I would talk about email, which is really my core competency. So thought I would give a deep dive into how I process email. So the Tl;dr is everybody should be an inbox, zero person. And I’ll explain what that means a little bit later. Use hot keys. You see, I got this message from Rahul that I’m ranked number three and superhuman, because I use a lot of hot keys and snippets. And block off time for email and automation is a big part of it. And automation is more than just use of time. It’s also use of cognitive resources and closing the loop on things.

Sam Corcos: So let’s go to the next one. So inbox zero is, it’s the idea that at the end of every day, roughly, I’m able to do it a couple times a week usually, your inbox should be empty and you should have everything processed. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to respond to every email, but it does mean that you should have at least looked at it and decided what to do with it. So in the event of say, there’s an email that you really don’t need to get back to until tomorrow or next week, you can just schedule it for later, and it allows you … For me, this is a huge source of anxiety reduction, where when I have this ambiguous mountain of stuff that needs to be done, and I don’t know if I’m dropping the ball on anything, just knowing that my inbox is empty and that I’m not blocking other people is really helpful.

Sam Corcos: I guess this has largely been in a leadership role, your main responsibility is to unblock other people. And email is often the way that people communicate. And so knowing that your inbox is empty and that there’s nothing that is pressing and blocking of other people, it’s really helpful, not just for yourself, but for everyone on the team. It also helps with better relative prioritization. This is why we’re so focused on asynchronous first as a tool set. The problem with using things like text messages or Slack, is that you just have this fire hose of information that can’t be triaged. And so when everything is maximally escalated in priority, it means that nothing is prioritized and you can’t really get anything done effectively. And you always drop balls.

Sam Corcos: I have right now, 43 unread text messages. And I may or may not ever get to them, because I know that as soon as I look at it, if I cannot take the action that is necessary in that exact moment, I’m just going to forget immediately. Whereas email allows you to close the loop and to triage and decide, oh, this is not an urgent thing. I can check this next week or I can check this tomorrow. And it allows you to make sure that you always close the loop. So using tools that allow for triage is really important to close the loop and make sure tasks get completed.

Sam Corcos: Superhuman is a really great tool for this. I definitely would recommend everyone at the company use it, if you’re not already. They have a pretty good tutorial that they force everyone to go through that teaches you about hot keys and how to be inbox zero. Inbox zero can be as simple as at the end of the day, you have 100 emails and you just go through them one at a time and you just schedule them for tomorrow. But you’re at least consciously making that choice, as opposed to unknowingly deprioritizing things that may actually be really urgent.

Sam Corcos: Next slide is use hot keys. So I use my mouse very rarely when I’m doing email, which allows me to do it very quickly. These are the hot keys they have in Superhuman. Gmail also has hot keys. If you’re not familiar with them, you should look it up. Hot keys allows you to do things way faster. Typing the letter C instead of moving your cursor over and clicking and create email it’s massively faster, especially if you start compounding these hot keys onto each other. If you’re a programmer and you use VIM or something like that, it’s very similar. Programmers are very used to using hot. I think Superhuman is translating a lot of those best practices into just processing email. Next slide.

Sam Corcos: So this was something that I thought was very common, but I found through a conversation with a friend that it’s not. I use a lot of snippets. I create multiple snippets per day. If I’m writing the same email to three people, instead of doing copy paste, I’ll create a snippet. And I use that snippet in drafting the email. I know that the support teams use things like text expander and snippets are a core part of what is probably how Braden and Mercy are able to manage so many inbound. But I write a lot of snippets, and some of these snippets are very simple. I actually am going to go through some more in a minute here. But I often emails will often just be effectively Lego blocks of snippets that I’ve created. There’s a rule of thumb in programming to write three times before you generalize, which is that you can type it out a few times, but once you realize that you’re typing out the same thing more than once, just create a snippet and use that snippet and things go much faster.

Sam Corcos: So next slide. This is an example of an email that I got in two days ago, and this is how I processed it. Next slide. So first thing, command, shift, I, this is a hot key. The person who made the intro automatically went to BCC and then it jumps me here. Next slide. Then I typed myself, “Good to meet you, James,” with the smiley face. Next slide. I created a snippet. I write, “Are you free for a call sometime in the next few weeks,” sufficiently often that I just created a snippet for it. Next slide. So now it looks like this. Next slide. I wanted to forward him, our investor update and the forum. So he has some more context before our call. Next slide. So that’s what it looks like now, next slide.

Sam Corcos: And then I command, return, which is the hot key to send it. And then I mark it as done. Because if he doesn’t follow up on it, I don’t really care. So it’s up to him. But sometimes you want to schedule it to check in later or you want to schedule an automated check-in. So next slide. If you want, say, after I sent it, I can press H and I can say check-in, in a week. And then it’ll surface in my inbox as a task that I need to do. Next slide. The other option is doing an automated check-in. So next slide. I created a snippet for gently following up. Next. This is what it looks like. And command, shift, L automatically schedules this to go out in a week. So if he has not responded in a week, this will go out. If he does respond, the email will get canceled and it’ll surface in my inbox and it won’t automatically send.

Sam Corcos: So that’s a way I found for when I was doing these lead calls, for example, I think 20 or 30% would respond to the initial email. And when I did the follow-up, that was automatically scheduled for two days later, the conversion went up to 80%. So sometimes those nudges really substantially increased conversion. So I timed myself for that. The entire time to process took about four seconds for that email. I did then have to manually forward the investor update in the forum, which used my cursor and I had to do it. There’s no way to do that automatically, but for most emails, it only takes me a few seconds to process because for a lot of these things, it’s procedural with snippets.

Josh Clemete: I actually make snippets for the investor updates and forums as well. And then I just fire off a C and then use a snippet for that too.

Sam Corcos: Totally. So this is what a relatively busy email processing week is for me. I put in a lot of email processing time. I think one of the biggest things is just to make sure that email is often something that is not prioritized for people. They see it as the thing to do in filler time. But the reality is for most people, email is your primary responsibility, making sure that you are communicating with people and that you are unblocking others is a really important part of your job. So I personally know that I have to spend about four hours a day processing email or I fall behind. Let’s just go to next slide. So I block off a lot of time. So I blocked off this time in advance, so things can get scheduled over email processing time. And if you’re curious on other things related to time management, I did a forum share on how I manage my calendar and stuff a few months ago and that’s the link to it. Next slide. Is there anything else? I don’t remember.

Josh Clemete: That’s it.

Sam Corcos: That’s it. Cool. There you go.

Josh Clemete: Sam, I’m curious, as a follower or I believe you are … Let’s not say follower, but as a Tim Ferriss listener, you like The 4-Hour Workweek, how do you feel about Tim’s position on email being something that you should immediately get rid of and out of your life forever and never use?

Sam Corcos: I think that be a challenging thing to do.

Josh Clemete: Yeah. Is that where Tim has gone wrong in his-

Sam Corcos: I don’t know. I think there are ways that you can manage email better. My friend, Jonathan Swanson, he started Thumbtack and he similarly does not schedule anything. That’s not strictly true, but he generally speaking will not do email and he will not put time on a calendar. For him everything is sort of ad hoc and whatever is convenient for him, which is to say, he says, “Yeah, I’m relatively free this Saturday, send me a WhatsApp and if I’m open, we’ll do a call.” And so Tim is probably in a similar boat, where he’s very much optimizing for his own time. I think when you’re working with a team and your actions are blocking other people, I don’t think that is a process that works very effectively. So that would be my assumption around it, is that if you’re in leadership and you’re responsible for other people, I think you have to do email or some method of triaging requests.

Josh Clemete: Yeah. I was always curious about that. Because you quote The 4-Hour Workweek and I listened to that one and I was like, “Huh, this guy hates email.” So anti Sam.

Sam Corcos: Yeah, definitely.

Josh Clemete: Cool. Well, we are at time here at gang. So thanks everybody for we’re another great week. Thanks Sam for a great share. And yeah, we’ll be in touch through our Slack channels and have a great weekend.