Josh Clemente (00:00):
Welcome to Friday Forum, January 27th, 2023, the last one of this month. Quick reminder on Friday Forum, this is a weekly sync time. We’re here to celebrate recent achievements, to hear about progress across the various functions, hear directly from our members and partners, share our culture, etc. So again, not that deep business analytics meeting. This isn’t where we get all the details on what’s going on across the functions. It’s mostly about surfacing the wins and looking to the future.
(00:31):
All right, recent achievements, so the big step this week, I mean huge progress on getting to this point. We have a 2023 product vision and strategy, which has just been a massive undertaking from a whole bunch of people and this is defining how we’re going to evolve Levels to significantly enhance accessibility and value, whether or not you were a CGM. So there’s a ton of material in that deliverable.
(00:58):
I highly recommend everybody check out the communications thread and go to the Vision homepage and share your feedback directly there, but lots of stuff here. I mean there’s some visuals. You can see kind of the concepts around guides, the various ways that they could interact and show and represent how metabolic health can make its way into every corner of someone’s life. You can see how community data from this huge dataset that we’ve built can be used to help people understand blood sugar concepts, whether or not they’re wearing a sensor.
(01:25):
So a ton of great stuff that obviously is going to continue to evolve from here, but just want to obviously highlight that as a big win this week. We’ve got some new creative and a contractor ready to go for a performance marketing test. So we’re going to continue pushing on the performance marketing stuff that we’re learning a ton about. The UGC tests from Levels actually outperformed. So the user generated content tests actually outperformed some of the white labeled ads from some of our well-known advisors and influencers, which is really cool.
(01:54):
Very close to our target CAC, customer acquisition cost, which is great. So we’re going to continue doing that and bring in a contractor to help alleviate just the overhead there. We’ve got in-app ratings notification launching. We’ve got a Try it Retro, so seeing how the Try it $99 program is going to cascade into conversions is the next wave. So that’ll be the kind of final stage of that retro, and then we’ve got Signup 3.2, a lot of work done on the Signup stuff, which I have a little further down in this as well.
(02:22):
But Signup 3.2 prepping for an A/B test against our Signup 3.1. So basically we’re going to learn a lot about transparency on pricing and messaging and how significantly the impact is changing our conversion rates. We’re also working on decoupling signup from user creation. So this has all been packaged for the entire history of Levels, but we’re now obviously going to be heading in the direction of potentially having an app only user being the main user.
(02:49):
So we need to decouple those two things, so you can have a user account separate from purchasing a CGM for example. We’re going to have manual sleep logging. The Levels has been driving a lot of increases across logging. It seems that people really are responding to the scoring, so people want to, even if they don’t have a wearable to track sleep, they want to be able to add that manually. So we’re going to be adding that. Upgrades to the my data page are coming. We’re fixing some super logs.
(03:16):
Also, I think this is kind of coming out of our learnings around Levels so super logs are huge logs which we boost people for, but they want to get recognition from each ingredient in certain cases. Then also going to fix the background time zone change recognition, which a lot of people have been struggling with. All right, another big one, so Dr. Rangan Chatterjee I think most of us have now heard, but he’s joining Levels as our first medical advisor internationally representing us over in the UK.
(03:44):
He’s a superstar and this is certainly one of the biggest names in our space. This is awesome. We welcomed Dr. Chatterjee in with an onboarding process, which his team loved and so we’ll be doing a lot together, which is very exciting. You’ll see him right up here and then we’ve got a UK wait list dashboard in the works. We’re going to start to get better details and analytics on the UK process, the wait list building that we’re doing.
(04:09):
I got a chance to record the Coffee, Pods & Wods UK podcast this week, which was a live recording, one of the few I’ve done of that, and then we’ve got some influencers like Chelsea here talking about Levels, sharing their experience and it’s really cool to kind of hear how the narrative is building in this entirely new market where some of the very early talking points are now relevant again, which is kind of interesting.
(04:30):
January numbers were super strong, so even adjusted for renewals, we had this huge spike from December to January. A lot of that was driven by the renewals for our membership, but even controlled for that good numbers relative to just the baseline, which is nice. We’ve launched fast payments. You can see here some of these Signup 3.1 improvements that we’ve been pushing. Karen’s been doing an awesome job on this. You can see now for mobile, we’ve got Apple Pay, Google Pay, as well as credit card options so people can just checkout much quicker, and we have geodetection to prevent people from getting all the way through the checkout process only to find out we’re not live in your location. So these are really nice tweaks and then they’ll be contrasted against what we’re calling crystal clear pricing, which is the Signup 3.2 spec, which has also shipped, which just shows for the first time in a single location an easy to understand pricing representation.
(05:20):
It’s like we have membership and we have CGM and these two things are separate. So we’ll be able to A/B test that against the Signup 3.1 and really understand. Tom’s editing me, so solid number is not super strong, that’s fair, but we’ll be able to see how these crystal clear pricing messaging changes again will improve our funnel. On the editorial front, we’ve got big priorities 2023, which you can read in Notion, it’s still in work, but thinking a lot about Levels related contents, not just product marketing but also all the adjacent things members support.
(05:58):
I’m not going to think of all these off the top of my head. This is what the editorial team is handling, but point being thinking a lot about now, adding more content that’s not just about metabolic health and the abstract, but also about Levels, and then we had a nice huge ultimate guide, can’t wait to read this one on autoimmunity and metabolic health.
(06:14):
And on the support front, ever since Member Portal has released or I think the self-serve options have become front and center, we’ve seen a really significant decline in member contact rate, which is great. So the volumes are much below forecast, even with the autonomy pilot, which we brought on to sort of brace for a huge spike, it seems like we don’t really have much for the autonomy team to take care of.
(06:37):
So support has been able to stay on top of the volume and do a lot of sort of bug fixing and working on training and such, which is awesome and still hit the best SLA in three months. So huge shout out there, awesome work. Okay, with that, I want to welcome Beth Bollinger. Beth is a partner at Levels. If you’ve been following any of our social stuff, you’ve been seeing Beth’s work all over the place.
(07:04):
She is a content creator, food photographer, integrative health practitioner. She founded Nest Wellness and is just deep into the world, metabolic health and has also been just helping us to express options for people to live and eat in a healthy way that are very beautiful and also very simple. So lowering the barrier of entry for people who are just getting started here. So Beth, thank you for joining us on the Friday Forum. Everyone loves to hear directly from our members and partners and yeah, I’d love to just hear a few words from you about what you’re excited about in the world of metabolic health and maybe a bit about your journey with Levels so far.
Beth Bollinger (07:42):
Thank you. I’m super excited to be involved with Levels. I love what you’re doing. I think it’s really important. I’ve learned so much and I continue to learn using Levels and I’m just really grateful to be able to create content for you.
Josh Clemente (08:05):
Well, we sincerely appreciate it. The content, it’s critical to us being able to tell our story in a way that people care about. It has to be beautiful, it has to be engaging and so you do an amazing job at that. You have a long history in this space, obviously as a health practitioner, you’re not just a food photographer, you are a food photographer of food that helps people get healthier and I think that that’s a really unique thing and so I’d love to hear a little bit about how you see Levels being able to bridge the gap for people who want to eat something that’s delicious and exciting to look at, but can also improve their health. Any just specific thoughts on your experience so far and how this tool might fit into people’s lives?
Beth Bollinger (08:48):
I think a big piece of making people want to eat healthy to me was making it look beautiful and so that’s sort of all three of my passions come together, cooking, photography and wellness. So I think getting people excited about eating healthy is something that I’m passionate about and a big part of that is making it look appetizing, making it look beautiful. So I’m excited that I can do that through Levels and that I can reach more people through Levels.
Josh Clemente (09:33):
Well, we’re excited to work together on that process and of course the sort of next iteration coming down the pike with the 2023 product vision is going to double down here with pantry items and sort of a Levels kitchen concept to continue to surface, food through there. This is going to be front and center in the journey towards getting people comfortable with eating in a healthy way and excited for it, and I guess from your experience at Levels so far, really the main thing we like to focus on is where we can improve most and so if you have any recommendations from your use of Levels so far or just how you’re seeing the community engage with what we’re building, what would you recommend we focus on or build that we haven’t yet started on?
Beth Bollinger (10:17):
That you haven’t yet started on? I know people are loving the access to the recipes in the app. I know that I’ve gotten a lot of feedback about that. People love the addition of that content in app. The only thing that has come up recently a couple of times, people especially I think it’s a certain personality type who want to get that perfect score and I know you’ve done a lot with the algorithm and the scoring in the past six months, but I still get feedback from people who want that perfect score, and so they’re eating low-carb all the time and so they’re becoming a little bit more metabolically inflexible because they are eating low-carb all the time. So that’s the piece that I see and I know for me, I use Lumen so that it helps me to understand when my body’s ready for carbs, but for people, is there something that we could add, something for those people wanting that perfect score to know that they don’t have to eat totally low-carb all the time? I guess that’s something that comes up a lot in my DMs.
Josh Clemente (11:50):
Yeah, it’s really good question. I actually love the way you framed it about becoming metabolically and flexible in the other direction, really almost we’re only focusing on metabolizing fat and maybe protein but not able to handle carbs as well. Yeah, we kind of see that, right? Where if you’re completely carbon tolerant, you become sort of insulin resistant in the other direction and it’s adaptive in some ways, but it’s difficult to really nail with the scoring, but I think one of the big steps that we’ve been taking is having this spike detection as the approach of trying to consume foods that don’t necessarily drive a huge spike, but rather than having the metabolic score where it’s kind of decreasing throughout the day and triggers this competitive nature in us to maybe just not eat at all or to massively cut back on carbs as opposed to higher fiber carbs and that sort of thing.
(12:40):
So definitely appreciate that recommendation and I think it’s dead on. We want to find a way for people to eat mixed meals, high nutrient foods in delightful ways. So plenty more we can do there and I think to make it full circle, the best ways are to show people exactly what meals have good high quality carb content in sort of a mixed macronutrient environment that will work for them. So that’s a big piece of it. Yeah, we’ve got so much more we could dive into here and Beth, I just want to say thank you again for sharing with us. If you’d like to stick around, I know you have a ton on your plate, but if you’d like to stick around, we have a full meeting and I know that everyone on the team really appreciates you coming on and sharing directly and we’d love to do this again sometime, especially once we make some progress on scoring algorithms and more kitchen and pantry stuff right in the Levels app.
Beth Bollinger (13:33):
All right, well thank you so much for having me.
Josh Clemente (13:36):
Thank you Beth. All right, quick culture and kudos. So I’m going to first give a huge shout out again to the product and design team. This is not everyone who’s involved in the work that was done getting across the 2023 product vision sprint because that’s what it was. A lot of people have been just pushing at near max effort or above maximum effort for weeks now and more than that thinking about these topics. So just want to highlight everybody on this page, Cosima, David, Maz, Stacy, Casey, Alan, Azure, Sissy, Victor, Sonya, just huge amount of work here and obviously everyone else behind the scenes who has been working on this, thank you for getting us to this point. Now it’s time to execute, but first we got to get the vision aligned and the team aligned.
(14:22):
And I also want to shout out how. So how is in the confidence earned memo, how is representing kind of a ton of these details right now as he takes on the lab’s work and Dave gave a really nice shout out to me, wanted to make sure that I recognized the way that how has stepped in actively moving that labs project forward and communicating proactively about every step along the way, which is a huge confidence builder and you kind of see that in this interaction with Dave seeing and having super high confidence in the way how’s taken over and is executing iteratively day after day. So Hal, thanks for representing those cultural values and I’m super excited for the next labs iteration. All right, I’m hand it over for the Q4 Culture Survey.
Nicole Miller (15:11):
Thank you. I just wanted to do a quick reminder that we just shared the Q4 Culture Survey results last night and I’ll share that link here too and thank you everyone for participating these results and these surveys are very useful and we can see we have a full year with the Q4 2022 survey of happiness index scores and so you can see the trends and we also had really great participation this last quarter, which was wonderful. So thank you and as a reminder, these surveys impact our focus and our initiatives going forward. You can see the action items on the bottom and I highlight at the beginning too of the things that we’ve changed since the last culture survey. So your feedback really matters and it really does impact the strategies and the priorities and the communications we have as a company overall. So be sure to check that out. Feel free to leave some discussion notes if you want to or questions and we’ll also have an AMA fireside chat next week next Thursday at 9:00 AM Pacific. So feel free to check that out and join us.
Josh Clemente (16:25):
All right, thank you Nicole and thanks to everybody who stepped in and provided answers here. This is I think by far the highest participation we’ve had, which is huge to really understand whether this is representative sample. So I think we can very confidently say it is this time around. All right.
Cosima Travis (16:42):
So we obviously don’t run a lot of meetings at Levels, but I think that’s even more of a reason to kind of try to double click and think about what the things are that can make a meeting effective. So I don’t think there are some sort of surefire golden rules, but I tried to break down some more philosophical and then some more practical takeaways of things I’ve sort of learned in my lives of running lots of meetings. So if you go to the next slide. So from a kind of philosophical perspective, I think that it’s helpful to think about certain key roles in a meeting and often these roles actually can be played by the same person, but thinking about the role of a director in a producer, kind of like on a film set, I think can be a helpful method to break down what is most important to conduct a meeting effectively.
(17:33):
And so in this case, the director is sort of the guide, the person who’s thinking about what are the goals of the meeting, what are we trying to get out of the meeting? Is this topic that we’re talking about right now important or is it a rabbit hole? Is it a side conversation? Who actually needs to be in the room for this meeting to be effective? Who’s going to make the final call versus who just might have input or be a stakeholder. So the director is kind of really invested in the outcome of that meeting and is the person who has a takeaway that they’re trying to get from it. So they’re really in that way, the guide and the vision for the meeting, and the producer is really the one who’s making it happen. They’re the bookkeeper, the timekeeper, the person who’s aware of the agenda, the person who’s making sure that the right people actually did RSVP that if there’s prep required, those people know about it, that if we need more time, let’s get that time set up, what are the next steps?
(18:30):
And often these are woven together, but I think it’s important to think in these two terms when you’re running a meeting, whether you do it with someone else or do it as a single person. And then if you go to the next slide, some of the practical things that I think come out of thinking about these two roles, so in the kind of before of a meeting, communicating the goals. So this kind of can’t be overstated. There’s few topics that there aren’t lots of other interesting side topics about, but to really state again and again, both at the start of a meeting but also before the meeting happens, what you’re trying to get out of the meeting is really important. Also, defining clear roles for who’s coming and part of this also is about limiting the guest list. So ideally meetings shouldn’t really be more than four people.
(19:20):
I think if it’s more of a communication broadcast out type of meeting that’s more than four people we know, we use Lumen for that. So generally if you’re trying to get to a consensus with a group of people, the fewer the better and this doesn’t mean you can’t kind of broadcast and share the next steps and still get buy-in after the fact from others involved, but four or fewer I think is a general good rule of thumb. Also in advance, sharing an agenda is always helpful, it kind of frames up for people what they need to do to kind of prepare and understand what we’re trying to get out of the meeting, and then during the meeting, again, starting it off in that kind of repetitive nature, what’s the goal of what we’re trying to do? Another thing I found useful is as you’re going, try to gather next steps versus just at the end of the meeting being like what are we trying to do next as you’re going pin things that should get added to the next steps at the end and then ruthlessly parking lot-ing.
(20:18):
So I think this has to be done tactfully because there’s nobody ever, even the most organized people who don’t get excited about a subtopic and start to kind of get into it and then multiple people start to get into it. So it’s a natural thing that happens and I think it’s just a matter of all of us collectively when it happens, let the person finish their thought, but then just all of us try to guide ourselves back to the main purpose of the meeting, and I think part of this though too, the sort of flip side is adapting as needed. So sometimes you’ll enter a meeting and as you start going you realize there was this whole unknown that really changes the course of the thing you were discussing and so you’re not going to get to that final goal in the meeting. So maybe this meeting needs to be postponed, maybe the right people are not in the room, maybe people weren’t prepared, they didn’t read the deck in advance.
(21:09):
So it would be better for everyone’s time to not just all sit here and kind of mull over the same thing. So I think it’s also good to be ruthless in that way and say, “If we need to adapt, if we need another hour next week, let’s do that.” And don’t be shy to kind of jump out of the meeting if it’s not the right time, and saving time at the end. Always good, five to 10 minutes recapping decisions next step so it’s clear and then after the meeting, following up action items, usually just a post in communications, ideally the meeting notes to a notion goes a super long way in terms of just everyone feeling clear on what they’re doing after and those are just some tidbits. I’m sure there’s many more.
Josh Clemente (21:54):
Super well said. Thank you Cosima. I love the philosophical intro there. That’s something I had not thought of as director and producer roles, but makes a ton of sense. Great stuff here. We should have a 101 guide that we surface somewhere because I know many of us get kind of stuck in the memos world and forget how to run the meetings. Thank you Cosima. All right, couple objectives, Levels shows you how food affects your health, this is still the main thing. Everyone’s working towards this, I’m quite confident of that right now and products are top priority in Q1. With that, I’m going to hand it over I think to Maz, maybe onto Alan.
Maz (22:31):
Yeah, I’ll start and then I’ll hand it off to Alan. Welcome to product update January 27th. I can’t believe January is almost over in 2023. I think I still signed my dates as 2022 for some reason, hard to believe we’re in 2023. Well, I’m really excited that we got to share the product memo with everybody and really looking forward to AMA next week. So I encourage all of you, I know it’s long, but to read that and engage and really understand the why. I think every single person at the company is going to be impacted by this. So it’s important that every single person, even if you are not immediately obvious why you need to read the memo, you should read it. I think it would be really helpful for all of us to understand the why, so we can make the last mile decisions on a day-to-day basis that may or may not be clear if you don’t understand the why. So really encourage that.
(23:23):
All right, so what are we building? Just to iterate a few key points as a teaser for next week’s AMA, we’re focused on building a software first product that leverages community data for CGMs to really solve a pain point for Maureen. Maureen is our focused persona demographic that we’re going to cross the chasm with. So we’re excited to learn more about Maureen, to work with Maureen to create this product and really enable the guidance, action, accountability loop to help her improve her metabolic health. Next slide please. The focus of our product and service, just like our prayer is to show how food affects your health and why is food such an important vector to improve metabolic health? I think first and foremost, people really care about food.
(24:13):
It is a central part of their day to day rituals. It is cause for many of their things that affect them and impact them, whether it’s emotional, whether it’s just staying alive. So food is something that people deeply care about and also deeply uncertain about, and the reason people are so uncertain about food is because there’s just a lot of information out there and it’s hard to know and usually people seek out help when something’s really important, really uncertain, and this is why there’s such a focus on food, and food is an unfair advantage for us to help people improve their metabolic health. So really excited to double down on food and work in that area and as Beth talked about earlier, there’s a lot of things we’ve got to get right to get food right. For example, making it beautiful, making it delicious, and obviously making it healthy.
(25:07):
Next slide. Okay, what’s different that we do at Levels that Instagram doesn’t do or social doesn’t do? It’s really adding the objective layer, really using data to drive why is food that we recommend healthy and why does it help improve metabolic health? And there’s a lot of investment that we’re doing there to really use the objective data from community to drive that, and the second piece, it has to be personal, telling people to eat things. An abstract just doesn’t work and so really we’re combining the ability to make it personal and to make it objective, to be able to help people reduce that uncertainty that we saw in the previous slide to help prove people’s metabolic health. So these are some of the principles that we’re doubling down on 2023. Just wanted to highlight them and with that, I’ll hand it off to Alan for a walkthrough.
Alan McLean (26:04):
So you probably saw some of this material last week, these memos, these looms, there’s all this stuff might’ve felt a little bit like me and I worked on it, so this is the super short and sweet one. This is blast through it, not as much of a narrative. I’m going to talk over it a little bit. So I think what are we here to do? Levels is here to make metabolic health accessible, rewarding, and sustainable and that’s a big part of what we’ve focused on for this version of the product. When I say accessible, what I mean is that in a variety of different dimensions, accessible as in you can download it first as Maz said, software first, but you’ve also got material guidance and so on in the app that’s going to be more accessible to more users. We had a big hit with the recipe test and now you’re going to see a big presence for that in the app.
(26:54):
We know it needs to be rewarding and it’s going to be rewarding not just in the daily choices you’re making, although I think we can do that in really novel ways. Here’s an example of weekly wins from Casey, but also rewarding in terms of your overall objective. The construct of the program is going to help get you moving forward towards your objective and really validate that and keep you motivated during the middle of the experience with things like you see here on the left with Casey, and it’s sustainable too. We need to know where you’re coming from and we’re going to adapt the kind of guidance you do, see the kind of content that you see based on where you’re at and what you’re doing so that you can have a sustainable long-term relationship with your metabolic health and with Levels.
(27:33):
See that on the left here? We’re customizing the experience based on where you’re at and that content potentially will reflect that on the right. So you’re going to hear me talk a lot about loops and probably now and in the future, what do I mean in these daily, weekly, monthly loops? Well, these are basically laying the foundation for like I said, a sustainable relationship with the product, and so the role of these different loops at different times of your journey are essentially the daily loops. These are the things that we want to do to keep you motivated. We want to reward you. We may also refer to that as the action layer. We want to keep you going on a daily basis. The weekly loop, here’s a point for reflection to look at wins and maybe opportunities, and then the monthly loop, we’re showing progress. We’re seeing where you’re showing where you’re at and where you’re going and giving you that feeling of building that sort of investment in experience and that feeling that you’re moving closer towards your goals.
(28:29):
So Maz refers to this and we all refer to this our product team as sort of these different layers. These called the guidance, action, accountability and like I said before, guidance, simple version of guidance is recipes. Action, the feedback you get right away from doing something sort of rewarding and then accountability, again, plotting progress and what you’re essentially seeing in those loops is some similarities between the purpose of each and these tags or layers. So to be actually successful in that daily loop, we’re going to need to know why you’re here and what you can do, and so as you might expect, we’re going to onboard you. We’re going to ask you where you’re at. Here’s an example of Maureen selecting a starter food plan or food program. We’re still figuring out the verbiage here, but ultimately giving a chance for her to indicate how ready she is and the kind of changes she wants to make.
(29:22):
And to do that, we’re going to need to know what we’re going to ask you some questions of your general metabolic health comprehension. If you’re tracking weight, that’s your objective. We’re going to need to understand where you’re at, where you want to go to and that will result in these daily objectives or these components of the daily loop that we can use to reward you around to motivate you and also to shape some of the content that you’re going to get. So an example of the guides that we’ll be bringing in, I wasn’t able to put this in the other presentation, but I think it’s really important to understand this whole component of the daily experience that really taps into the emotional feel of the product. So this is an example of Casey welcoming people into an experiment that we’re running. Hopefully the audio works.
Casey (30:08):
And a happy Monday and a happy New Year. I am so excited that you decided to join this group this week. This is a small group of individuals who are all connected by an interest in improving health and metabolic optimization. This week in this close friends chat, I’m going to be sharing how I aim to live out the metabolic health principles that we know are so important and also how I use my continuous glucose monitor to both give me insights on how I’m eating and living and also how it helps keep me accountable. I’ll share some ask me anything boxes, I’ll share some prompts and some challenges. So get engaged and message me at any time. If there’s anything in particular you want to see or learn about, I’m here to help you.
Alan McLean (30:53):
Great. There we go. Why does that always happen? Anyway, so I think hopefully that captures the energy, the kind of humanity personality we want to bring into the experience. It’s a little bit less sit there and observe and more of bringing some human voices into it, making it feel just a little bit more personable, that these guides, they’re going to actually, we hope help make the daily loop a little bit more sticky.
(31:23):
It’s going to translate the what’s and the why’s into the how’s and really keep you motivated by acknowledging you, acknowledging your efforts. So things like what does that mean by the what and the why? Well, how do we take this guidance around exercising more or eating better? How do we make it really tractable, really understandable, fit it into your daily life? That’s what the guides are going to help us do. In terms of acknowledgements and motivation because we have all this wonderful data and we can see what people are doing and you’ll be contributing to that, whether you’re wearing a CGM or not, we’ll be able to have a broadcast of one to many, highlighting people who are doing really well and really making you feel elevated when you’re one of them.
(32:07):
Obviously our data plays a big role in this experience. Every day, the Maureen, well all of us will see both her data made better by other members of the community. So this is our chance to leverage the participation of our users to really make both the CGM optional and the CGM included experience a lot better. You’re going to see it in community scores, community responses in meals so you don’t actually need to have that CGM, of course you’re going to see it in the pantry where we can talk about the typical response to these ingredients. Perhaps we connect back to ingredients. In the kitchen of course, this is going to play a big part for the community where you’re going to be able to comment and see what other people are doing, their glucose responses and yeah, just the commenting actually I think, it’s not necessarily biological data, but it is that sort of emotional data that is going to I think provide a lot of interest to our users.
(33:06):
The main point I’m trying to make here is that this is all kind of connected. You’ve got your data, maybe you blog a meal and that’s connected to recipes, the weekly wins, community scores, recipe scores, the pantry, it’s all connected in the experience and this data that we have is intended to build that trust that we’re not just someone talking at you, we’re showing you the proof. So as we expand into the weekly, monthly loop, this is really again, I said the moment of reflection, a chance to plot progress towards your objective. So here’s a look at what my data might look like, whether if you’re not wearing a CGM. We can see the daily checklist, how successful we’ve been. We’ve also got the other data we’re passively collecting from healthcare down there, sleep, exercise, weight.
(33:53):
And as you continue to move on in that point of reflection, we’re going to gather those, do the baseline assessment again, we’re going to continue to see, are you making progress towards your objectives? Should we adjust some of your daily goals to get you closer or is it too easy? Can we make it increase the difficulty or should we reduce it? And then ultimately, you get to this monthly point where we’re going to have sort of a rich report showing all your wins, all the opportunities, the progress against the ultimate objective that you have. Here’s an example of someone aiming to lose some weight and we’ve been tracking their weight over time and we’ve been doing these weigh-ins on a weekly basis.
(34:32):
So at this point, you’ve got this foundation, you’re starting to make progress, you’re engaged, you’re motivated through these guides. Maureen is going to level up a little bit, and so other foundations like that, she can actually order some of these experiences like the labs or CGM and step into what the experience that we know today because we’ve been surrounding her by this community of glucose data and food data and so on, now she’s going to participate too and I think because that foundation is laid, it’s actually almost a much richer experience than if you start with a CGM in some ways.
(35:09):
She’s going to see her own response to these foods, not just the community and he’s also contributing back to that sort of collective knowledge around food, which I think for a lot of our users have this feeling like you’re part of something, this is one way to help achieve that, and then finally, the lab’s results. So I think what we’re talking about here with these lab results and CGMs, it’s almost like we’re transitioning to a model that is more reflective of the way people use these experiences where they maybe not wearing a CGM or doing labs every month or all the time, but they will be able to choose their own adventure and do the check-ins when it makes sense for them and we keep them engaged and excited and motivated in between those times.
(35:49):
Lab results and more plotting progress, yes. So that’s ultimately what we’re talking about here. I hope I was under the time limit here. Guides keep her motivated, check-ins keep her on track, CGM and labs track long-term progress. This is what we hope will be the ingredients to get Maureen to become sort of a committed Levels member and super invested in the experience. Just blasted through that.
Josh Clemente (36:22):
That was awesome. Thank you Alan. Now let’s go do it. Yeah, exactly. Awesome overview. I mean really exciting. We’ve got a lot here that I think is again, capitalizing on what we’ve already built, which I think is a really important thing to remind ourselves of is we’ve built something that people love, it’s extraordinarily hard to afford right now, and now we’re expanding accessibility and enabling these feedback loops that build on that sort of community data, the mechanisms that we’ve all learned and the guides concepts that we’ve tested and seen some really amazing resonance with and can’t say it better than Alan, but just love what you did there and excited to go do it. Editorial update.
Caitlyn (37:00):
Hello, can everybody hear me okay? Yes, it looks like you can. Okay, so editorial update for this week, I’m going to be talking through Levels related content on the blog, the history of it, and mostly the future of it. Next slide please. Yes, my dystopian broccolis are back. So currently there’s not a lot of Levels related content on the blog and that is for a very good reason. Namely, it’s not the point of the blog. The point of the blog is to provide the widest possible audience with a free education about metabolic health so they can improve their metabolic health, and if we were to simultaneously be trying to talk about product or sell the product, that would kind of muddy things from a production standpoint in terms of it’s hard to create articles that are successfully educating people and also driving to conversion and be successful on both.
(37:58):
And then from a consumption standpoint, people can tell when a blog is really just a place for product marketing and that’s not going to be the type of place that they go to get their health and science education. So in order to keep our blog trustworthy and successful at educating people, we’ve really avoided talking about the product, talking about Levels too much, or even really focusing on CGM because we don’t want our readers to feel like we’re pushing CGM or prioritizing people who are wearing one, and that’s great, that’s allowed us to create high quality content and start to get trust from our readers, but it also means that we haven’t been producing the full breadth of content that we might. Next slide please.
(38:53):
So because we sort of have these implicit rules around, we’re not going to talk about product, we’re not going to talk about CGM, we’re not going to try to convert people, that means that we’re missing what could be great long form content explaining what exactly the product is, who it’s for, reaching out to people who are using CGM and have questions about their glucose curve and providing a good education on those topics. We also don’t really have a place to speak to our members in a written way and talk to them about definitely preempt questions they might have about product or provide a more extensive onboarding education. Again, because that would be talking about product, that would be talking about Levels, that would not be for the everyone audience that we’re targeting. So on the one hand, we want to uphold these sort of editorial rules and guidelines around what we do and don’t say on the blog so that we can be trustworthy and a source of education. On the other hand, we’re not creating all the content that we could. So what do we do? Next slide please.
(40:04):
What we are going to do is create a vertical within the blog called Inside Levels that all of this content is housed in. So if you take one thing from this presentation, it’s that we are going to start talking to people with CGM to people who are members and to perspective members, but only in this very contained section of the blog, and in producing this content, we’re going to uphold our standards in terms of writing quality, supporting everything with science and taking our signature editorial approach to it, love it or hate it, but it’s going to be about this new categories of content. Next slide please. So what actually all is this content? I know this diagram is kind of crazy looking, but basically there’s going to be four broad new categories of content and that’s in the gray. One is about our research. So right now, we’re starting to surface really cool findings from our IRB, from our dataset, and we don’t really have a place to put it because again, that would be very level centric and braggy about our awesome study.
(41:23):
Now, we’re going to have a place where we can do different kinds of write-ups about what we’re finding from our research and surface them on the blog and then hopefully also have that lead to derivative content that we might be able to surface in app. So you could imagine if we see in our lab a certain trend in a certain demographic, the editorial team can sort of do an in-depth writeup of that finding, and then maybe a more concise version could be a demographic based insight that appears in product, and this is sort of a broader theme of this content and why I’m excited about it is that I really hope as much as possible for this to also be content that in addition to better serving current members, prospective members, people with CGM, also internally serve as content that can have sort of secondary lives within the product and also for support among other uses.
(42:24):
So yeah, so the next category and all the multicolored rectangles are specific article types. It’s not exhaustive and I’m not going to go through them all, but to give you a sense of the breadth of things that could be covered, but quickly, Y Levels is essentially the closest we’ll be coming to more traditional product marketing. So really giving prospective members an idea of what is it like to use Levels, why should I use it and could focus on particular use cases of why Levels might be helpful for weight loss or more generally, make the case for CGM. So how CGM can help you dial in your diet. The next category, understanding your Levels. This is getting at those what’s normal questions that I talked about in the last presentation. So we have observed both among our members, but among the broader population of people using CGM, they look at their graph and they have questions either about how to interpret it in general or how to interpret it in a given context.
(43:31):
So why is my curve doing this while I exercise? Again, this is the type of content that we wouldn’t have necessarily focused on in the past because we don’t want to prioritize people with CGM and now we can kind of answer those questions and something like that, I think it gives us an opportunity to possibly preempt questions that are asked of support by maybe expanding on an onboarding education or if we hear for support, we’d love to have an article like this that we can just link out to people. We can develop that for them.
(44:06):
And clearly something like understanding your Levels, this type of article would also be useful again as a derivative for in-app insights. So if we decide we want to do a deep dive on what you can expect following coffee, then maybe that’s a shorter version of that gets triggered inside the app when somebody logs coffee. I won’t go through the rest in this category, but essentially, this I think where we’re going to have the most new content is in this using Levels section and again, it’s an ability to for the first time assume that we’re talking to people for some of these that have the product or are using CGM and improve education for those populations. The last two categories are actually areas where we already have content. So our culture is really everyone on content pieces, company announcements, maybe conversations with industry leaders, things like that.
(45:09):
So I think having them in the Inside Levels vertical is just going to allow us to surface those better and make sure people who are really wondering about Levels the company know where to find that content, and similarly, community, we have had member Q&As and first person member stories before, but I think because we were hesitant to feature them and maybe make them seem like product testimonials, we weren’t totally sure what to do with them. So now I think they can be closer to something like product testimonials, but in a classy Levels way. If you want to read through all of the new content categories and the structure of what these different article types would look like, I do have a memo that goes into it so I will be sending that out soon. Next slide please.
(46:06):
Yeah, so there’s lots that we’re still trying to figure out with Inside Levels in particular what choices we can make to make Inside Levels articles look and feel a little bit different. We don’t ever want readers to confuse our product focused content with our pure educational content. So what little tweaks can we make that aren’t too labor-intensive? Also deciding how we want to surface these. Which types of emails might we send this content out in and how frequently will we surface it on social? Questions like that, right now while we figure everything out, Inside Levels is a little bit hidden, but if you are looking for it, you have to go to that all at the top right of metabolic insights, and then under all Levels categories, you’ll see Inside Levels.
(46:54):
And right now it’s mostly just that culture and community content that we already had. Next slide and that is the end, but again, I’m going to be sending around memos on this and definitely if everyone should look at them, but particularly product and support, if you can identify areas where you’re like, “Oh, that content type would really help us and in fact, I have ideas already.” Would love to hear them and that is it from me.
Josh Clemente (47:27):
That’s great, thank you Caitlyn. Yeah, I mean plus one to what everybody’s saying in the chat, but this sort of new categorization and variety of content I think we’re going to be able to triple down on a lot of these areas and leverage it across different functions. I mean taking the same incredible editorial quality and applying it to other areas of the business is going to be a huge unlock, so excited for it. Okay, hiring updates. So we have an announcement that Jeremy Hernandez is going to be joining for the R&D team, going to be doing a lot of work with us down there at the lab and he’ll be starting on the 30th. More to come on that announcement.
(48:09):
Open roles, still have a general rollup, but if you are interested, check out Levels.link/careers and send us your information or send people that and love who would love to fit into the Levels culture to the same link, right? Made it and stop the share here. Got some time for individual contributions. Again, we’ve got three weeks running, we’ve had a chance to hang out a little bit, which is great. Go ahead and raise your hand like this if you want to share, highly recommend it. It’s a nice way to catch up with each other.
(48:41):
Try and kick off here, I mean the dominating thought in my mind is just my excitement for this year and what we’re going to build on the product front. There’s a lot of specifics that I’m also interested in and very excited for like the new launch of labs just in particular. I love that product, I want that product. Can’t wait to use that product, but yeah, so there’s a lot of really cool stuff in flight and I just think that the sprint by the team, the alignment that had to happen and all of I think the distribution of the content about this product update has been really high quality and very thoughtful and I just appreciate that. Now, on the personal side, I think I’m just excited to chill out this weekend. Hopefully I can do some of that. It’s kind of all I have to report on. Chris.
Chris Jones (49:33):
Sorry, I had to come off mute. On a Levels side, most of my excitement right now, twofold. One, all the product evolution, reading the looms, the document, the detail, the care, the research, the thought that went behind that. It wasn’t just a, “Hey, let’s try this.” And student body left. It was a very deliberate intentional thing and I love that Maz started with this is not a pivot, this is an evolution and I definitely want to make sure that people think we’ve always been talking about this vision. It’s more like this is the time for us to focus on it.
(50:11):
I’ve sat because of all the gray hairs through a lot of changes in product at a lot of companies and this is by far the most well though out one I have ever seen by a long shot. Normally you’d see, “All right, we’re going to start working on B.” And you have all these questions across the company going, “Why are we doing that? I don’t agree, I don’t understand, but they pay me so I must fall in line.” So I can’t thank the team enough in terms of all the hours and thought they put behind this. It was a joy to read and I’m super excited about it.
(50:46):
And then the other part on Nicole, I just finished reading all the comments or at least for my team on the culture survey and I love that part. So I’m doing a deep dive. So it’s important and again, thank you for everyone for filling it out and it’s critical to us to kind of like, “Are we on the right track? Are we taking care of our people? Do they want to be here a long time?” So those are really two highlights of my week. Personally, right now it’s snowing, that’s why I was not on the camera. I was out walking the sled dogs in the middle of the snowstorm and I am looking forward to doing a lot more customer skiing in better conditions.
Josh Clemente (51:23):
Beautiful. Well said Chris, thank you. Mike Di?
Mike Di (51:28):
Haven’t done this in a while, so forgive me if I go a little long, but I think just generally I want to just plug how amazing our culture and company is that we all know just how thoughtful, intentional, transparent we are with everything from company strategy to the macroeconomic environment and we’re definitely a team and not a family, but it’s just pretty amazing to work with people that care so much and in Chris’s coffee talk yesterday, it really resonated with me. He was just talking about the environment and what would happen and I got to see the other side of this perspective this week.
(52:10):
So my girlfriend’s health tech company, they have like 500 people and out of nowhere they woke up to an email that were laying people off. Luckily, she didn’t get laid off, but literally 150 people got laid off overnight and they did it pretty harshly. The support team, the entire team got gutted. They didn’t have any control, it was just one group Zoom, they didn’t have any control, they couldn’t turn their mic on, couldn’t turn their video on and then that was it. So I just really appreciate it. I’m super grateful as always and just piggyback on that, the work with the product is super exciting with the vision and just seeing everyone rally around, huge kudos to obviously Alan, David, and Casey, and Sonya. Everyone’s just crushing it and it’s just super motivating.
Josh Clemente (53:02):
Nothing to add. Thank you Mike Di. Hui?
Hui (53:10):
Yeah, I guess I just want to echo Chris’s two points and first is definitely the product strategy and it is such amazing, informative and at the same time, intensive read. I think Justin has a deep reading session of this so I’m just going to make a plug for him. Yeah, and I can also attest to I guess Chris’s words about this is their most thoughtful and just thoroughly I guess researched, investigated and decided kind of products that I have seen, and I think what it’s even more amazing is we kind of published this to everyone and everyone, please read this, please understand the reason behind it and in the past in the companies where I was an IC or even a manager, I actually didn’t have visibility into that. It’s always like, “We’re going to do this.” And then after two weeks, actually just kidding, we’re not going to do this.
(54:17):
So I really like it and the second is obviously the culture survey. Thanks people ops team, Nicole for running that. I only had time to watch the first 10 minutes of the Lumen recording and I think it’s already a lot of information. I’ll definitely spend time to read the survey results for the whole company and definitely I guess dedicate time to understand their engineering team wants, and on personal side, I just did my first walking Friday Forum, so yeah, on Chat Bill, so I never exercised in the morning, so I don’t know if that will make my day productive or totally scrub my whole day. So we’ll see. Yeah, that’s all. Thank you.
Josh Clemente (55:06):
That’s one of the tips and tricks from the Levels guides is the treadmill walking day. Casey.
Casey (55:15):
Awesome, these are such great shares. They are giving me all the feels. Just a few shout-outs to run through. I thought the culture survey was so awesome, just reading through all the free text comments and seeing everyone. So much enthusiasm for the mission and it just really is so heartening and just really feels like we are just this incredible power team that really has the potential to solve the biggest health issue that’s ever faced our globe. It’s just so exciting and it got me super amped up.
(55:47):
Huge shout out to Nicole. So much is going on behind the scenes with people ops stuff. The culture survey is one of 50 things she did this week and it does it all with kindness and grace and just huge shout out to her and is also still gearing up, and so it’s just amazing to see how she’s firing on all cylinders. Stacey and David are running the guides before experiment right now and it is so cool. The daily updates are my favorite thing in communications. If you’re not following the guides channel, it’s actually worth just popping in because the rapid experimentation and learning and execution that’s happening there is completely incredible, and just the conversion rates and engagement rates with the followers of Stacy on this experiment are astronomical. It’s so cool.
(56:30):
I just want to also of course shout out Maz and Alan for leading the product strategy rollout this week. It’s just incredible and it has been one of my favorite things to be a part of at Levels. I also want to shout out Sissy, she did all the backend work for an AMA I did with members yesterday and I think she’s one of the most organized and growth mindset people I’ve ever met. Basically, even with something as small as an AMA, everything was perfectly organized. We got tons of learnings out of it. They’re documented and I’m just wildly impressed by how she works, and then the last one I wanted to shout out is Hui. We got to have a one-on-one this week and we haven’t had a one-on-one in a very long time, and just so fabulous to hear more about her interest in just a huge history of being a manager at several companies and so many great thoughts on people management and also wrote a novel this past year, which is just totally incredible. So I’m just grateful for our team and just feeling so inspired by everyone.
Josh Clemente (57:25):
Beautiful. Thank you Casey. Maz.
Maz (57:28):
Hey everyone. You might not see, but we were all packed, the house is empty, so I don’t know if the sound echoes, but on the personal front, we got packed today. We’re moving out of our house after about two and a half years, so that was fun. It happened yesterday. That was great. We feel relieved. On the work front, I just want to thank the team. I think this would have not been possible without having a crazy experience and passionate and just capable team and it’s only have led to what you guys see, but the journey was really delightful. Getting here was fun. We actually had a lot of fun and we forged relationships that I don’t think we could have if we didn’t have the culture, if really doing it in an async fashion is just amazing.
(58:16):
So I just want to say that I’m really grateful for the team that we have and I feel like we can do anything and I think this is all real competitive advantage against anybody in the field is we don’t know whether this memo or whether this product strategy would work, but what I’m confident is we’ll find something that will and this is just a starting point and we can iterate.
(58:36):
I want to give a big shout out to Stacy and David. I think what they’re doing right now is experimentation V2.0. We’ve always talked about the experimentation at Levels and how important it is, but have never seen something like this where it is happening on a daily basis. They’re running the guys experiment. It’s a paid experiment using Instagram and literally doing a retro every day of the Instagram experience, pulling data, looking at what resonated, looking at what members are doing, creating the infrastructure, creating the Reels, creating what we can create to actually create a community of content creators. Obviously with huge support from Sissy, Sonya, and obviously Casey, but it’s just amazing to see. I’ve never seen anything like this anywhere to have basically a daily retro. So anyways, super impressed with the team. Big thank you and also thank you for Alan for being out of office, but still jumping on today to do the walkthrough. So anyways, really proud of the team. Thanks everyone.
Josh Clemente (59:41):
Amazing. Good luck with the rest of the move, Maz. Great meeting. Thanks everybody. Great shares, great contributions. Have an amazing weekend and let’s go attack 2023.