Josh (00:00:00):
All right, let’s do it. January 28th, 2022. Welcome to the Friday Forum. All right, recent achievements for this week. In big news, our second product category, the Levels Metabolic Health Panel, officially launched this morning. So this is going out to members. This enables gold standard blood work with results automatically uploaded right to your app, and most importantly, this is gold standard blood work from the comfort of your own home. So this is a real step change in, I think, the experience of getting the lab work that is important to health and helping you understand how continuous feedback stacks up into overall health status change. Really excited for this. Thanks to everybody that pushed us across the finish line.
(00:00:43):
We have a lot of super strong candidates in the process. In particular, I think we’re getting towards end stages with design controller and chief of staff, so all really exciting. Overall, our pipelines are great and it’s just amazing to see the quantity of interest coming in for some of these roles. David Sinclair, so this is the activation of the Lifespan podcast with Sinclair, drove 27% of our weekly revenue and 39% of our new members this week, which is incredible. Whole New Level episode with Rob Lustig hit 3,000 plays for the first time of our Whole New Level catalog and YouTube growth over the past 90 days has been amazing. I think we just hit 2,300 subscribers. We’re around a million impressions and nine-and-a-half thousand hours of playback just this last 90 days, which is massive growth over previous periods. So we’re starting to focus on this and it’s paying off, which is great.
(00:01:37):
Our weekly orders matched last week’s record, so I think it was about 1,070 as of last week. Again, not growth mode, but these activations are really kind of amping the numbers up. Simultaneously, happiness is at 96%, which is always amazing. Our daily and weekly active user rates are climbing, which is obviously good news. We want to make sure that people who are ordering are using the product and jumping straight in. Then same day shipments are up, so Truepill is fulfilling orders rapidly, which is great.
(00:02:06):
Another big announcement here, this is a conditional approval, but the realtime IRB, which Taylor’s going to provide some more details on this, this has been in the works for a long time but it is conditionally approved as of this morning or maybe late last night, which is huge. We’ve got memos drafted to release this week, so a lot of strategy this week on the membership model research strategy, a pre-mortem from Sam, special projects, growth levers, tone and positioning memo about how we communicate both internally and externally. All really great stuff. If those have not been circulated widely, keep your eyes open, they’ll be posted to forums in the next few days.
(00:02:41):
Then lastly, this is kind of an internal culture note, but our first group of team members who have done the new self-review process are getting to the end of that. We’re going to do a round of feedback, constantly going to learn about how this is playing out in the real world, what’s working, what’s not working. A few revisions include potentially alternating between 360s and self reviews. So if you’re going through this process, please capture the experience and share it directly to Miz and leadership, and we will make sure that this continues to be beneficial.
(00:03:11):
Other exciting stuff, great episode of Whole New Level dropped with Dr. Johnson and Casey Means, so please go check that one out. Rick Johnson is probably the foremost fructose researcher in the world and some really fascinating stuff in that episode. So I think as our members continue to double down on episodes like Ben Bickman podcast, the Rob Lustig podcast, I think it really shows that these sorts of deep dives are resonating. It’s pretty awesome.
(00:03:44):
Had some great coverage this week in Well and Good, Wellness Trends in Just Bobby, the Bullet Pitch, this was actually really good right up in Bullet Pitch, and then we had a full deep dive Levels app review from Alex Fergus. See some updates to the Now page, including a community glucose response feature. The new design guidelines for the website and app, Alan released an amazing Loom about this, and then they’re showing up in our other assets. So I think this kind of covers it. Then as we touched on last week, Tony Robbins and Peter Diamandas, we’re going to continue to push forward that activation through their book. So lots of great stuff jumping ahead.
(00:04:29):
All right, I want to welcome Patrick McMahon, Levels member, sociologist, and travel and outdoor enthusiasts, but most importantly taking his time to share some thoughts with our team here today as a Levels member and part of our community. Really appreciate you taking the time, Pat or Patrick, Pat, which do you prefer? Oh, there we go.
Patrick McMahon (00:04:48):
Hey. Hi, Josh. Pat is fine. Yeah, Pat’s great.
Josh (00:04:51):
All right, great. Well, Pat, thanks for joining us. We would love to hear, in your own words, kind of what your experience has been like and some of the things that you’d like to share with our team on what you’re looking forward to in the future of metabolic health and Levels specifically.
Patrick McMahon (00:05:04):
Yeah, absolutely. Well, first off, thanks for having me. I mean, I really admire the company you guys are all building and excited to see where it’s going to go. I did take the opportunity to make a small investment when you guys opened that up, based on the experience I had with the product. So I’ll just kind of dive in here. I was going to give you some background, but you guys already did your homework on that, so first let me just talk about why was I interested in checking out Levels that I’m an early adopter with all this fitness and health tracking wearable stuff, a big believer in data and the whole thing where you can’t manage what you don’t measure. So I’ve been logging workouts since over a decade. About four years ago I started to include food, alcohol, gluten, supplements, and then a little more recently began wearing the OURA ring and tracking sleep since their Kickstarter campaign.
(00:06:16):
So one area that I wasn’t able to really see, I would kind of classify it as a blind spot, was metabolic health. I was seeing my numbers kind of creeping up with A1C, glucose, insulin. Still within standard range, but just definitely not optimal. So I was really anxious to try your guys’ product and a CGM. So in terms of what I learned, really the biggest eye-opening thing for me was… Well first, I’m typically gluten free, probably 95% of the time I avoid gluten. I’m not celiac, so occasionally I indulge in the pastas and pizzas, but for the most part I don’t. But the surprise I had was the impact of grains that don’t contain gluten and how sensitive I was to those, and that would be things like oats, corn, quinoa, and things that I included in my diet kind of thinking they were healthy, had decent glycemic indexes. So that area was the biggest surprise, I’m just super sensitive to that stuff. Other things I kind of expected, potatoes, rice, some of the fruits like pears and bananas and things. So that was the biggest thing I learned.
(00:07:55):
In terms of what I’m focusing on, two things. The first was why am I so sensitive to some of these foods? Because they’re under undermining otherwise healthy eating and it’s really irritating. So I kind of dove down some rabbit holes there, consuming a lot of blogs, podcasts, medical literature, things like that. I did stumble across articles and podcasts talking about the link between gut microbiome and glucose regulation. I was seeing these couple strains of bacteria that popping up in these discussions and I remembered I had done a microbiome test some time ago through a company called Thrive, I think they’re now rebranded as Ombre. But anyways, I pulled my report and overall the results were really good with respect to gut diversity and wellness, but they noted I had way underrepresentation for two really common bacteria. I’m going to butcher these names, but bifido bacterium, they were saying the average person that’s 9 to 40% of the composition, for me it was 1.2%. Then akkermansia, similar, average person was in the 12 to 42% and I was 0.3%.
(00:09:36):
So it turned out that these were the same bacteria that these articles were talking about and I was kind of fitting squarely into that mold. So continued doing research and I found a company you’re all probably familiar with, called Pendulum, that are selling probiotics to help rebuild these strains or at least get them to flourish while you’re taking the probiotics. So I just finished my second month with the akkermansia product and my plan here is to take another got biome test in February, see if my levels improved. Then also, I’m trying to work on foods that can naturally help boost those levels, but we’ll see what happens. I mean, even if you can get a 10% reduction in spikes, that would be super for where I stood.
(00:10:42):
Then the second big thing, my takeaway is reworking my diet to find alternatives to the foods that are causing me the biggest problems. These are things like cauliflower rice instead of quinoa, using green collards as a wrap instead of tortillas and things like that, optimizing cooking and preparation. I’ve learned crazy things like boiling sweet potatoes is better than roasting them. So just trying to learn as much as I can and make these kind of tweaks. Very difficult to do, but definitely doable. So then the plan is in March, I want to jump back in and start wearing a CGM and doing another loop through with Levels, and just keep iterating and improving and see what I can do.
(00:11:46):
I did a couple comments on the… Let’s see. So as far as your app, I had a spectacular experience in terms of onboarding was a breeze, I had no issues. Usability and reliability were excellent, never once needed any support, and the help content to understand the data and the reporting things. Plus your blog, it’s super high quality and very informative. Just as a comparison, my wife currently is trying one of your competitor’s products, she’s halfway through using the January product and her experience is the complete opposite. I mean, she’s been on support every day, there’s lags in the processing. So kudos to you guys for being so far along and having such a great product.
(00:12:49):
What else can I say? Yeah, so to me, everybody should have an experience wearing a CGM and using an app like yours. The realtime feedback and then the trends in the data you see are just unmatched in terms of giving you a peek inside the big black box. That’s your mission of your company, I just admire it so much. People ask me, I’ve been retired now for four years but kind of still itchy to do something, and people ask me, “What would it take to get you back in another startup and doing work?” I mean, this is the kind of company that maybe would get me to do that. I’m almost 60 but still going strong. So yeah, it’s just you guys are doing a great job and it’s going to be awesome to see what you do with this company.
Josh (00:13:57):
Wow, thanks so much, Pat. First of all, really impressed by the intentionality that you’re taking in your own approach to wellness. I love the N-of-1 strategy here of recognizing what’s specifically unique about you and then doing several rounds of iteration on lifestyle improvements and then checking status. That really syncs up with the strategy that we’re building across a couple different fronts, including research, to try and show how continuous feedback and tracking metrics and close time intervals can then build into larger metrics that show how you’re sort of moving up the levels, so to speak, of metabolic health status towards whatever’s optimal for you.
(00:14:37):
So I appreciate that you’re taking that intentional approach, and then also just really appreciate the support for the approach to business that we’re taking, in particular the support and educational materials. Would always appreciate direct feedback on what we can do to improve. It’s amazing to hear the wins, but there’s a lot we need to do as well to show people what to do differently. So this is one example of just taking your time on a Friday to sit down with us and share your experience directly, we all really appreciate it and it’s something we learn from every day.
(00:15:12):
All right, with that we’ll jump forward, quick culture and kudos slide. First off, Levels helps you see how food affects your health. The prayer, this week I want to reflect the shoutout that several members of our team shared about Xinlu just constantly raising the bar of what it means to be a great engineer. Can’t help but learn a lot when working with her. This doesn’t just go for engineers, I learn a ton from Xinlu constantly. Just her rigor in thinking, her sort of depth perception on problems that may be right outside of necessarily the box that we’re talking about, but she’s always careful to get it right. So just want to reflect that shoutout here, Xinlu’s doing great work for our company and it’s just been awesome to get to work with her. Then I’m going to hand it over to Alan real quick to chat about some collective work that we saw this week.
Alan (00:16:02):
Yeah, I think this conversation in the background that happens sometimes is how do you do effective collective work? It’s actually a really hard thing to do, especially in a startup, and we’re all remote and we’re all async, but I was really impressed this week by Justin, Steph, and Helena just jamming together, working with Mike and myself to just get this community glucose view thing together. It’s something we’ve talked about for a long time, it required a couple different skill sets, the backend, the front end, the data science, and it’s looking great. I was really impressed, so just wanted to give them a kudos for that.
Josh (00:16:37):
Thank you, Alan. Yeah, these things are really important, so highly encourage people to just share examples of, I think, upholding the culture of rapid iteration and transparency and working together. Thanks, Alan, for sharing, and thanks, team, for continuing to commit to how we built this company. Lastly, we have a belated one year here for Ben, I think on January 4th, which we didn’t have a meeting prior to that. We missed his anniversary. So Ben’s a year plus in and happy to have another one up and running here with Ben, and looking forward to many more. All right, over to Scott.
Scott (00:17:14):
Good morning, everybody. I hope you all had a chance to watch through the Loom. I saw tons of little emoji comments coming through throughout the day yesterday, which is a great thing to see. If you are ever wondering or want to read back through, or curious, getting stuck on something, all of the roadmap strategy and vision are available Levels.link ShortLinks. So we’re going to talk more about the fireside stuff later today, after the Friday forum, so next slide.
(00:17:44):
Quick reminder, two strategy pillars we’re working on. First, show people how food affects their health and then give them a home to become healthier with others. We are spending a lot of our time right now on the first one and it’s got some good rationale for when we’re going to pivot back over to the second one, or weave back over as I referred to it.
(00:18:00):
Next slide, same resource checkup. We’ve got this dinner plate thing of where we’re going to be spending our time. A quick reminder on priority one, that a lot of this is gated on external parties, so specifically the vendors that we’re using, but we did get some good product stuff kicked off between Maz and David this week around getting membership fired back up because we need to start to make a good bit of progress there.
(00:18:23):
So if you go to the next slide, this is how research is roughly shaked out this week. Great, this is exactly what we want to see. Again, the goal is for us to be maximally staffing down the priority list as much as feasibly possible. Once the product work and the clarity around what we’re going to do next on membership as it relates to the product team gets solidified, you’re going to see a lot of these people probably shift over into P-1 until we make some really good headway and then they can go back to P-2.
(00:18:47):
So next slide. Wanted to give a quick brief update about this new tool called Linear that we just implemented. Linear is, I think we can break this into two categories, there’s tooling and then there’s planning. So Linear is a tool, I just don’t want to conflate that Linear is also going to give us planning process because it’s not, so we had to kind of come up with that on our own.
(00:19:08):
So next slide. Quick, most of you have maybe heard of the tool Jira or Trello or Clubhouse, there’s a bunch of these floating around. I mean, software dev is such a big industry, you get a ton of tools like this, but we decided to implement switch from Notion over to Linear for two reasons. The first one is really around visibility. So instead of me and Andrew and Alan kind of poking around every single week and asking people, “Hey, where are things at? What are you up to? Are you blocked on anything? What’s complete?” it’s easier for us to have a centralized place to just go through and look at how tickets have been flowing, if there’s any comments, etc.
(00:19:46):
So this is the tool that really orchestrates all of that without us having to bug people and pull that status out of them. Just by virtue of people doing their work, they open up a branch, they create a poll request, they integrate into production, all of these tickets generally automatically move through the flow, and so it gives us a good sense of who’s working on what, what capacity they have, if they need to shift around, etc.
(00:20:09):
So next slide. For those of you that don’t know, the hardest thing about us taking some time to sort of sort this through in the Levels style was figuring out how to do it in an async and remote way. So most sprint planning meetings generally look like this, where everybody is zoned out on their own computer doing email, doing whatever, and you’ve got one manager talking to one person out of 12 in the room and then everybody sits there for quite a long time.
(00:20:37):
So next slide. What we wanted to do was take a much more Levels approach to this. So again, on classic sprint planning you might see a two hour meeting of which 10 of those minutes are maybe important to you individually. Everybody else is kind of spaced out, they’re not actually paying attention. All of this is over voice literally in the room, and so we’re not creating the documentation, the sort of exhaust of the work is not happening, and so people, they end up missing a lot and there’s no way to go back to sort of the planning stuff, the conversations that had happened in the room because they’re just lost, they’re gone. A lot of this tends to be, not all of it, but a lot of it tends to be leadership and comms theater for the manager. They can feel like, hey, I’ve orchestrated, herded the cats, we got some things figured out, etc.
(00:21:18):
So next slide. All right, usefulness of planning and tooling. So again, on the two things that we wanted to accomplish, the first was just around visibility. We didn’t want to be bugging people. The second I think is just clarity around what we’re doing. I mean, I think the benefit of having a tool like this is being able to commit to some amount of work that you’re pretty dang sure you’re going to get done during the week. So what do you need to do that? Well, you’ve got to be pretty clear about what you need, anything you’re blocked on, input sources. It’s a way for you to add some rigor and some discipline to do I really understand what’s in front of me? Do I have a handle on what’s expected? If I need other people or other resources, questions answered, let’s go ahead and get those answered now just so that we’re not sort of spinning our wheels. This is what the planning process I think really gives us the benefit of doing, is pulling up for a second to make sure do I have everything I need to be successful?
(00:22:11):
So next slide. Okay, so here’s where we landed. Our sprint planning process is not two hours long of a sync meeting with 12 people, it’s very async. So every Monday people generally can kind of get around it on their own time, take some reflection on the week, figure out how it went. We generally ask people to create a singular goal. Did I accomplish that goal? You can sort of do that reflection on your own time, write it down, it goes in Threads. It is self-directed, so we want people to be good at the process of planning. There’s no hierarchical structure where the manager is going to dictate how to plan some stuff. People might bring their own style or their own flare, their own way of doing it, they may sort of do it over a period of hours or write in one 30 minute sitting. It’s really up to them, so we would just want people to bring their own ability to do this how they want to.
(00:22:57):
The last thing is that the leadership team is now we’re sync blocked if you need us. So I think for me, Andrew, and Alan, all of our Tuesday mornings are blocked off for people to just book sync time if they need help. So we are available if you need us, but we generally can be working on other stuff if we don’t need to be in the room helping you out. So I just wanted, for all the developers and people on the Product Team, I want to encourage you to use that time. We have, honestly, a four hour chunk blocked off every single Tuesday for us to be around to help with this process. So we are available if you need us, but if not, we’ve got other stuff that we can definitely be doing. So I think that’s it on this.
(00:23:40):
Okay. Yeah, all right. So from my point of view, this is great to look through because on Wednesdays now, or Tuesday, whatever our sprint opening day is, we get these really nice summary things that are in Threads. I can wait for all of them to collect. I can sort of go through, scan through, is there anything I can feel like I can provide some commentary on or unblock somebody on. It’s just a really good way for people to summarize and maybe give a little bit of a Loom video about what they’re working on for the week, what they’re excited about.
(00:24:09):
So next slide. This picture might look familiar, and I just wanted to say that this is sort of the V zero of us trying linear in an async in a remote way. So we’re going to continue to iterate on this, but I felt like we got to a decent point around this aligning with the Levels values and also bringing sort of familiar elements for people that are on the Development Team for how they can add some visibility and some discipline into what they’re doing. So that’s it for me.
JM (00:24:37):
Right on, let’s go over to the next slide. Blood is launched as of yesterday afternoon, but really mostly this morning. 1.79 is the new rate. We cut from 1.99 to better align with members. An email has gone out, as has been activated a banner in the app. The feature is globally active now, so anyone using the right iOS and Android app versions will start seeing that. We’ve had about 50 sales in the last day or so. The time between when someone buys it from us to when they see the results in app is down to about seven days, and six of those days are just waiting for the person to come, so that’s really great. Tons of great work from a lot of people. Thank you to everyone, Murillo in particular for all the engineering. I’m going to put this down for a couple months, I think, but there are some next steps listed here and fleshed out a bit more in Threads. I think we can do a lot more with this, but it’s all very exciting. So that is it for me. Thanks, guys.
Josh (00:25:57):
Awesome and congrats for getting this launched, JM. All righty, Mike D?.
Mike D (00:26:04):
All right, thanks, Josh. This one’s a little bit longer, but I think it’s important. Feel free to hit me with the Grammy music if you need to give me the hook. So I think there’s this phrase, “In the lab,” but I think it’s regularly used in personal or professional development and it often refers to when someone is working to improve and/or create something new. Our project team has definitely been deep in the lab. Towards the beginning of this week we were still trying to find our footing, and while we definitely still have plenty of things to learn and work to do, it feels like as we close out this week, it seems like we’re starting to head in the right direction.
(00:26:47):
This week specifically Helena is continuing to flesh out the insights we wanted to surface for V1. I really appreciate all of the suggestions and comments, even the simple ones. She said, “Instead of relying on random ingredients and meals that Alan and I were working on, why don’t we just start with the most commonly logged items?” Sounds really simple, I’m not sure why we didn’t think of that. Then recently we shipped the foundational Now page to internal testing. There’s not a ton of functionality right now, but we’re able to get a feel for it in our hands. So big thanks to Justin, Steph, and Alan.
(00:27:24):
We also, as Josh alluded to on the first slide, we shipped the first version of what we’re calling like this community glucose comparison to internal testing. I think we talked about it last week on the forum. The thought here is the help provide members context on what they’re seeing. Currently, we’re using local data, but eventually this insight will pop up based on what our members actually log to. It’ll show right now the average zone score and response by the broader Levels community. We shipped this feature right now to the home screen, but it will be moving to the Now screen. Both of those things are available on the latest alpha build.
(00:28:02):
One other thing that came, the highlight from this week, is Alan and I were able to chat about a few things and we unlocked a nice amount of work that the team can jump into right away to go to what’s next. So first, could not fit everything on this slide, but I wanted to share a few things that are ready for Edge. The action items for me today, it’s to prioritize the full list of about 10 projects that are ready for Edge. In the interim, I let Justin know that we should start with getting the community glucose comparison into the Now page. I think that makes sense since we’ve did a lot of work around this week and it’s like the first version of the oatmeal insight that we talked about in the project page. I think that’s it. You’ll hear this from me often, and that’s because I mean it, I really can’t thank the Project Team and broader team members like David and Sam for all the help along the way. I think that’s it.
Josh (00:28:55):
Awesome. I just grabbed the new build and I see the Now page in my app, so it’s live. Thanks, guys. John?
John (00:29:05):
Yes, tagging. As you can see in the screenshot on the right side, the tag details, the screen is ready. First, we have a small insight on how the selected ingredient has impacted other members in terms of glucose and score. Then we have a chart where we can compare the current zone with other zones using the same ingredient. We also have a horizontal list to navigate to them. Finally, we have some related content coming from the explorer section. In this example, the tag is X, so we show any related articles to X. This is partially working with hard-coded values for now, Hal is working on getting us the real data and after that phase one will be finished. We expect to fully launch this internally next Monday to start getting some feedback. That’s pretty much it.
Josh (00:30:08):
Exciting stuff. Thank you, John, that’s huge. Murillo?
Murillo (00:30:13):
Right, so for Explore, this week we’ve released phase two, which were the interface changes and a bunch of new analytics tracking. So what you see on the right there is the new data coming in. You see this lined up into the right, but that’s just because we weren’t getting data before and we are now. As users start to use more and more, we’ll establish a baseline so we can evaluate what we’ll be releasing. So where it starts on phase three, which is around basic recommendations, so just to line ourselves up on the goals there, it’s not necessarily to make the best recommendations for our members yet, but more so we can bring some life to the Articles tab. The idea there is that as users come back again and again to that tab, it doesn’t change a lot, so it feels a little bit abandoned. That’s compounded a little bit by the fact that once you tap through a few articles, you see some broken audio links, which we are also working on fixing.
(00:31:26):
So we want to make that tab more inviting and that content more personalized. So we’ll have recommendations that are somewhat personalized, but what I’m saying is we’re not expecting those to be the best recommendations yet. The idea here is just to keep users coming back there and seeing fresh content. We’ll also be doing a partial release. So that means we’ll probably release this to half our users so that we can evaluate how the half that sees this content and the half that doesn’t, how the engagement is different between those two groups. But yeah, so we’re expecting this to be launched next week, so expect news then. That’s it for Explorer.
Josh (00:32:17):
Looking forward to the testing. Thanks, Murillo. Hal?
Hal (00:32:22):
Yeah, so we are actually wrapping up the phase one for the Prisma migration. Huge shout out to Xinlu and Kunal for get the Prisma Migrate into our production. So from now on we are actually using Prisma Migrate for any database schema change or new table creation stuff, so that’s a huge moving forward timeline milestone for this project. We are on track on all the phase one milestones and just wrapping up some C codes in PR, C code changes in PR, and we are going to move to the phase two, which we’ll just carefully migrate all the C codes from plain, raw C code to Prisma API. Currently, we have 58 migrated, we still have 200-ish to move on. This will be my last update weekly, I will provide monthly update from now on until we migrate all the C code. Thanks.
Josh (00:33:29):
Awesome, appreciate all the updates on this and congrats on getting it launched. Got an async from Andrew.
Andrew (00:33:38):
Hey, it’s Andrew from the very recent past. We’re going to give an update for the engineering SLAs and KPIs. First for Velocity, you’ll notice these numbers continue to go down. Part of this is, just like last week, we are measuring work hours only. So you can think about this as how much time is someone experiencing during the workday waiting on pull request review. The team did really great this week, less than two hours on average, and merged time of less than half a day, so this is really good. You’ll also see the number of pull requests quite high. We’re firing on all cylinders, so that’s fantastic. All the engineers are working on DRI projects. For engineering, recruiting, and hiring we have 11 active candidates that are past the intro call, so they’re in our process. None of them are stale right now and we’re still keeping an eye on how fast we’re able to get people through the pipeline. Talk to y’all later.
Josh (00:34:20):
Thanks, 1.5X Andrew.
Andrew (00:34:22):
Hey, it’s Andrew from the very-
Josh (00:34:23):
Nope, there we go. All right, hiring update, kind of covered this on the first slide. We’ve got some great pipelines going for many of these roles, but if you’re watching this, please share and refer people in. We are going to have the majority of our team growth ahead of us, obviously. We are a growth stage company. We’re not a growth stage company, we are not in growth mode, but we are a growing company, so please refer people in. We’re always looking to connect with awesome team members. Speaking of which Maxine and Cissy are both starting in the near future, Maxine in just a few days and Cissy in the third week of February, so exciting for two more members to be joining us. Over to Miz.
Miz (00:35:05):
Awesome. It was a busy week with my Culture Drip Campaign, so I want to do a recap of the four Threads that went out here. So some quick reminders. The first one was around vacation. As you know, we have an unlimited vacation policy, but in order to make sure that that actually comes to fruition, we have a mandatory minimum enforced there. Has a bunch of different purposes, one is to make sure that we actually take vacation and reinforce that that’s an okay and expected thing to do. The other is really for the company and for the teams we work on, it forces some really helpful redundancy, exposes gaps in documentation and process, makes sure that one person isn’t the sole failure point for any of our ongoing work. So there’s a bunch of other benefits there, but those are the two that I want to highlight there.
(00:35:47):
On recordings a few months ago we switched over to default recording all of our meetings, the ones that are happening, with the exception of one-on-ones and obviously performance and feedback calls, and things like that that are a little bit more personal. But we updated some of the guidance around this on how we’re going to treat edits and distribution of these meetings, and so there’s some detail in there.
(00:36:07):
Third one here was an update on the feedback and performance review processes. Getting to a really good spot, thanks for all the early pilot testers on this. Trying to get this to a really lightweight but thorough and effective process, so getting good insight on how long it’s taking, which steps are redundant, how we can better structure it around skillsets and areas specific to our roles, specific to culture, behavioral and character side of things. So really just adding some structure and improving the template on that side. If you haven’t yet done your six month or one year check-in, those are coming up, but all of the 60 day check-ins should not be happening regularly and Athena is helping us keep those on track.
(00:36:48):
Then finally, released a short memo and added a cultural value to the handbook around eliminating gossip. This one came directly from some of the book clubs that we’ve had, specifically No Rules, Rules from the Netflix book and then from the 13 Commitments of Conscious Leadership. I think it’s 13. There was a big chapter around gossip that got a lot of discussion in the book club there, and so we implemented this cultural value. It’s very explicit and kind of awkward on the surface, not something you talk about often, in terms of how to address gossip once it’s happened. So there’s a few pieces to that, but you should check that out and add any comments in the memo if you have thoughts on how we should word that, whether or not it feels comfortable to commit to it. It’s a very progressive culture in the way that we’re taking this, and so want to make sure that we are reiterating this and making sure everyone is on board with the changes and commitments that we’re making as a team. So that’s the fire round here. That’s it, Josh.
Josh (00:37:47):
Amazing update. Appreciate this, Miz, and all the documentation here. Tactically on that last point, the kind of key thing to put into use is if you’re getting feedback from someone about someone else, we can helpfully redirect by just saying, “What did that person say when you brought that up to them directly?” That’s a good way of just reminding people that the intention here is to have feedback be direct to the individual who can take action, the person closest to the decision-making. So we want to make sure that that loop is closed first before discussing peripherally, because that is not how improvements get made. So just wanted to add that, and thanks team for helping us stay on the trajectory that we’re claiming we’re on. So if you’re seeing areas for improvement, raise this to the team, especially Miz. Thank you. Alrighty, Alan?
Alan (00:38:38):
Yeah, thanks. You should all know, team, that behind the scenes every week I ping Josh to do a refresh, because these slides go in like 20 minutes before and I quietly update them. So terribly sorry, Josh, but thank you. So a big focus this week was thinking about how to scale design, actually, for me. I didn’t mention this a lot in Threads, but I did, as Justin framed it, Looming and Zooming, or maybe it was Steph. I forget who. Set like a Looming and Zooming record this week, probably 12 Looms this week all about sort of how we can build things, taking these guidelines from TWA, how to use them. Some quick wins.
(00:39:15):
Go to the next slide, please. Probably this lower, I saw this thumbnail and was like, I’m not going to include that picture of me, I look terrible. It’s like, oh, actually, that’s what’s happening. A lot of recording, a lot of Zooming, a lot of work. Been a big busy week. Next slide. So we have some nice little quick wins that we can roll out eventually for anyone who has bandwidth. We’ve got some motion, little animations like this add a nice little hotspot for users, a little bit of delight, gets people sort of feeling like the app is really polished, and so these are ready to go. Got some more.
(00:39:49):
Next slide. So video titling, making things feel just a little bit more together. Next slide. We’ve been rewriting a lot of the content. I just released a Loom on this morning about making some of our content more accessible and trying to scale that out to the rest of the team too. So here’s an example, you can actually go in this deck and you actually can see some of it still in there. You can update this text. We’re going to start rewriting some of our content to just be a little bit more engaging, a little bit quicker to read.
(00:40:21):
Next slide. Move after eating, get great sleep. So this is sort of adopting a format that we use for Instagram and so on. Should be a little bit prettier, should be a little more bite sized. Really excited about that. The Now page, it’s coming together, getting really excited about this. It’s starting to come into focus. I feel like we’re starting to get to a better place here. Queued up a bunch of work yesterday that people can dive into and build.
(00:40:47):
Go to the next slide. Yes, so one of the problems that we’ve got in the product right now is that sometimes people don’t know basically how it works. So we’re going to start rolling some of these little onboarding things out. Some of them are subtle, like little tool tips here. You can see on the left there, log food and exercise here, or after you log a meal telling them it’s going to take two hours. Kind of explaining a little bit more front and center about these things. This would be called integrated onboarding, rather than the typical sort of block the usage of the experience with explainer text.
(00:41:20):
Next slide. Yeah, there you go. So another challenge that we’ve seen in the product is that it’s overwhelming. There’s lots to do, there’s lots read, there’s data, there’s charts, and so we’re introducing a bit more hierarchy into the experience. So up top here we’ve got the thing that matters the most right now. This is a meal metabolizing in the background. Perhaps it could be an insight. I’ve talked about this a couple times, but we’re trying to really elevate with a big graphic presentation there what you should be focusing on right now as it relates to your Levels experience. In the middle, that’s one of the examples of the community insights. They’ve logged a Poptart. Yes, many people are eating Poptarts, you’d be surprised. Sometimes the keto Poptarts, for what it’s worth. But this is an example of bringing the community insight forward, they can tap on that and we sort of show the average zone score for some selected bits of content. Kind of interesting.
(00:42:14):
Next slide, things like postprandial crashes. I couldn’t include all my slides here, wanted to cut some for time. But again, around understanding, we’ve got all this great educational content, but we also kind of want to make some of this glucose stuff sort of fun. So if you’re having a postprandial crash, perhaps this is an event that we can make a little bit more exciting, a little bit like, “Oh, I’m having a post brand deal crash. I want to post it on social.” So things like this can be kind of fun and introduce a little bit of levity, as long as it’s sort of well calibrated.
(00:42:44):
Next slide. Final note, this is sort of a little bit more looking back, but I really believe that driving design through user experience and what people are doing is super important to have a product that succeeds. It’s not all high-minded design, we want to rely on data too. Change is good. So the next slide is an example of that, you might have seen some of this in some of these slides that I’ve been presenting lately. Just next slide.
(00:43:10):
There you go, it’s a little washed out there, but we’re bringing back the target range on the glucose chart. The reason we removed the lower bound on the target range was because we were seeing people very concerned about their overnight lows. They’re sleeping on their sensor, they’re getting low, they’re calling us about support, they’re going to the ER. Well, that only happened once, but we want to make sure that… So the thing we were evaluating was, if we remove that lower bound, will it impact support tickets? Will it impact people’s concern around the product? It didn’t. So we looked back at the data, thank you, Chris, and it looked like it didn’t make a big impact. So we’re going to bring it back because we think the positives outweigh the cons here. For people who are potentially undiagnosed type ones, we want to be able to make sure that we’ve got a lower down for them. That wraps up design.
Josh (00:44:00):
Awesome, appreciate it, Alan. Chris Jones?
Chris Jones (00:44:05):
Thanks, Josh. So member experience now coming to you in dark mode, ensuring 11% better insights and 5% better battery life. Next slide. I’ve covered this slide a little bit in the weekly updates, but just kind of wanted to bring it back just because I know we talked about not being in growth mode, but when I’m looking at the data, at least in January, it feels like we are. Every week we are just crushing record after record in terms of across the board. So one thing I was looking at is the number of new emails we kind of have coming in is on track for 20,000 in January, of which 50% are coming from David Sinclair. I know we talked about percent of revenue, percent of new orders. When it comes to emails, he’s on fire and driving half of the volume. So tons of growth in this area and it’s pretty exciting just to kind of watch.
(00:44:58):
Next slide. For those of you that listened to the NPS versus Product Market Fit podcast that a bunch of us did, one of the takeaways we agreed on was to do both, to have product market fit and NPSs. So one of the actions of that is, instead of having the product market fit be an afterthought where it was after an NPSs survey, we actually made it front and center. So for people that get their week one, two, and three, working with Scott we’ve actually swapped out the kind of NPS-Plus survey for a product market fit.
(00:45:33):
So these are kind of the four questions we ask, the product market fit and open-ended in terms of why, a little bit around which features are finding useful across the board or aware of, and then just what we can do to make the app more useful. So just launched this week. We don’t get a ton of traffic from this maybe 40 to 50 surveys a week, so it could take us a couple weeks to really get a good read on this. But just want to let you know that this is now live for people in week one, two, and three in the emails that we send them.
(00:46:02):
Next. On the voice of the member, a couple of pretty powerful pieces of feedback. So two themes, this is all from two members. The first theme, which we’ve actually seen come up in a couple different ways, or a handful of people this week, was people thinking when they sign up for a monthly subscription of Levels that they’re expecting 30 days of coverage. So when they get their sensors and only have 28 days of coverage, they’re like, “Well, wait a minute, what about the other two to three days?” They’re expecting to go back-to-back-to-back and almost expecting discounts for days where they don’t have monitors. So mentally they’re signing up for monthly subscription like you would Netflix or Amazon, but then when our sensors only cover 28 days, that starts adding up and the gap gets bigger and bigger. So just something to be aware of as people think about concepts of, “You’re charging me monthly, but I don’t get a full month of value.”
(00:47:02):
The next theme is, this is one we’ve been talking about for a while, around people not aware that their CGMs are going to expire. We have a project, which Braden’s going to give a little bit more of a deeper dive on later on, where we actually are sending out emails to people where they’ve gotten the kit, but we haven’t seen any glucose for them for several months and want to let them know that their sensors do expire and to kind of not have it sitting on the shelf forever until it goes bad.
(00:47:34):
These two columns are from one member of really his response to that email of the, “I was not told it was going to expire.” He’s really upset, threatening to write one star reviews on every form he can see about us. In his view, it was false marketed in terms of what his expectations and what he thought, and very upset. But at the same point he does say, “I’m willing to give you a chance if someone can help me.” So he does throw out the, “This is what I’m going to do unless you guys can rectify the situation.” So Braden got this ticket, which is kind of the feedback in the bottom right, kind of in green, in terms of the response after Braden interacted with him. I mean, obviously he refunded his order, he sent him a lot of information to try to answer questions he had, and really turned this member around.
(00:48:24):
So I just wanted to say huge shout out to Braden on this. We knew that by sending this email around sensors expiring, it was going to rustle some feathers. This is just kind of one example of that around do we need to address it further up when people are signing up about there is an expiration about these, they can’t just sit there forever, because we are catching some members off guard by this.
(00:48:47):
Next slide. Then lastly, a bit of a sneak peek. So I’ve been working with Ben a lot on this and have reached out to a number of leads. I’m really trying to cover a single place to get a lot of the KPIs across the company. This effort is to not replace a lot of the deep dives that people like Haney or Tom are doing in their verticals, but to kind of bring some of the higher metrics into a single kind of dashboard and place. So we’re expanding a lot of the coverage of things that I’ll pull them together into decks, the weekly deck. Eventually we’re trying to load this data into places like Snowflake, so you can kind of go look at any metric at a weekly or monthly clip. So all the areas with stars are kind of new areas where we’re bringing in things like financials, email marketing, content marketing, website performance. Again, this is not to replace all the great analytical work every individual function does, but more of just kind of a couple key ones from each area for broader coverage. That is it for member experience.
Josh (00:49:49):
An awesome update this week. Thank you, Chris and the entire member success team. All right, we have async from Ben.
Ben (00:50:02):
All right, I’ve surfaced after think week. I went dark for four days, sort of dark, and here we are. So growth is focused on providing value through membership during think week. Spent a lot of time thinking about growth levers for scale. There’s a memo coming out about it, but some of the things highlighted in it are things like retention, things like why membership is important. Again, that’s very qualitative, very high level, but some of the thoughts are in there. Also focused on things like funnel optimization and why it’s important, and how we might approach it moving forward, and why it’s such a strong growth lever for us.
(00:50:40):
As far as financials for the week, so very strong week. 138 recognized revenue and we’re at 970 for the month, so this is our best month to date. A lot of this is driven, most of this is driven, by David Sinclair. So very good to see that, we’re trending well to have a strong month and finish, we’ll see where it ends up. But cash, 166, no changes to debt or runway.
(00:51:04):
As far as [inaudible 00:51:05] go, big hat tip to Chris Jones. So Chris has been helping to put together some reporting, some very high level reporting for growth metrics so that we can have a master dashboard of all these things that are aggregated every week and we can look at different things like revenue growth, things like impressions from different digital platforms, growth in the audience on those platforms, and the list goes on. So appreciate all the work Chris has put into it.
(00:51:32):
From a personal standpoint, there is a new podcast coming out from Serial Productions, which is the company that put out Serial and S Town and it comes out next week, and I’m super excited about it because they always have high quality content. I think it’s called the Trojan Horse Affair, so excited for that. Braden is going to talk growth theme of the week, so he’s got some things he’s been doing around email and how it is important to consider moving forward, so talk through some of the experiments and the learnings. That is growth for the week.
Josh (00:52:02):
Great update. Thank you, Ben. I have no idea how you’re going to fit another podcast in your list, though. Braden?
Braden (00:52:10):
Yeah, awesome. So the growth theme for this week is email. We’ve been undertaking some email updates with the main goals of helping guide members through the onboarding experience and then bringing our existing emails up to date and on brand. A few reasons why we’re doing these updates is we can reach members that aren’t actively in the app, they’re easy to implement and experiment with without much engineering work, and we can personalize them based on actions members take and where they’re at in their experience. Then the updates we’re making are to the existing transactional emails. We’re doing a few experiments with new email campaigns and this will be an ongoing process that we continue to refine based on learnings.
(00:52:55):
Next slide. So starting with transactional emails, the main goals here is to try to move away from these link-heavy emails to simplify them and clearly explain what the member should expect next and a clear call to action for what they should do. So far the pre-delivery emails have shipped that a member receives before they get their Levels kit and the next steps will be updating the designs to be more on brand in the rest of the lifecycle emails.
(00:53:28):
Next slide. Then the two experiments we’ve kicked off so far, the first is the one that Chris mentioned to you, members who have received their Levels kits over two months ago but never got started. Currently around 20% of members who purchase Levels don’t get started or connect their accounts so we see their data. Really the purpose of this is try to learn why members aren’t getting started, help them get unstuck if they had any trouble getting onboarded, and to remind them of the sensor expiration date, because we learned that that’s one main reason that people haven’t gotten started right away.
(00:54:07):
The second one is to flag the subscription offering to members who don’t initially sign up when they first order Levels, this is around 70% of members. This is really driven by feedback on support that a lot of members who don’t sign up for a subscription at signup aren’t aware of the CGM offering. So we want to make sure that there’s awareness of this and it’s worth calling out that this isn’t intended to push censor sales on members, it’s really just to create awareness based on that feedback. Both these emails are being AB tested so we can see the impact and make sure they are meeting their intended goal.
Josh (00:54:47):
Awesome. Thanks for that update, Braden. Looking forward to the findings here. All right, Tom with a partnerships update.
Tom (00:54:57):
Hey team, happy Friday. Couple of themes this week for partnerships to call out. So first, planning and forecasting. We are taking a slightly more structured approach to thinking about the full calendar year ahead when it comes to partner content and promotions, particularly for some of our top partners. So for example, I’ve been working with Drew Pruitt and the Mark Hyman team to come up with a quarterly content calendar and checklist to ensure that we have predictable, evenly distributed, and consistent cadence of content going out across their various platforms. So this includes quarterly podcasts with Casey, which is huge, as well as paid marketing initiatives like podcast advertising, and just ensuring that we’re active across all their many platforms, so including Instagram and newsletter and a few other experiments that they’re going to be starting this year.
(00:55:39):
So this isn’t necessarily a departure from how we’ve done things, but it’s just more of an emphasis on being intentional about how we plan for and forecast some of these partnership initiatives, particularly those that are driving revenue since in 2022 we will be moving into growth mode and having a handle on these levers over time and being able to forecast and plan for them will become increasingly important.
(00:55:57):
Then next, a new partnership here with Fountain Life that I see as an interesting learning experience that I put into this category of B2B2C, which is a term you’ve heard me use probably in the past, which I’m personally just using to refer broadly to partnerships with organizations that are integrating Levels into their offerings. But unlike say the enterprise market or B2B, we’re still selling directly to the end consumer, it’s just facilitated through another company. So other examples of this would be like Whole30, if they were offering Levels to their community, or if Equinox was directing people to our website to buy. As I’ve emphasized in the past, this is still not top priority for us. These are sort of opportunistic partnerships relative to the content creator space, which is our top priority.
(00:56:35):
So just a really quick overview on Fountain Life, more information to come here. This is all happening quite quickly, but this is an umbrella company that was started by Peter Diamandis, who I imagine some or many you know, that’s really focused on providing a range of services and cutting-edge technologies to help people optimize their health and improve longevity. Very consistent with our values in terms of personalized data driven prevention focus.
(00:56:56):
Peter and Tony are co-authoring a book that is actually coming out very soon on February 5th, and some significant part of this book is focused on health optimization. They are creating, or they’ve created, a website, an app and portal around this new community, and part of that new offering is going to be directing people to technologies that they recommend. So there’s actually only four main technologies right now that are on this website, part of this application, and CGM is one of them and they want Levels to be their partner in that. So this is a pretty cool opportunity and represents kind of a new distribution channel for us and also allows us to continue to experiment with the longevity community, which I’m personally excited about given some of the recent conversations internally, as well as the success of the David Sinclair ads. Okay, that’s it for me. Have a great weekend, everyone.
Josh (00:57:39):
Thank you, Tom. All right.
Tom (00:57:41):
Hey team-
Josh (00:57:42):
Replay, there we go. Haney?
Haney (00:57:45):
I’m going to talk at .5X, just to balance everything out here. No, I’m just kidding. Yeah, some good pieces up this week. A big deep dive we’ve been working on for a long time on oxidative stress, it’s a term we talk about all the time, comes up, and this is really your kind of guide to what do we actually mean and why does it matter, so that’s a good one. Did the edited version of the Rick Johnson podcast for people that want to read it instead of listen to it. Then a post we’ve also been kind of thinking about for a long time, which this is what I’d call sort of a reference post, where we’ve gathered up all of the studies that Levels is a part of at this point in time and we’ll update this as this changes. Just did really quick overviews of what these studies are, what they’re trying to find out, how Levels it’s being used.
(00:58:33):
So I say reference post in that I think this question comes up sometimes. I know I’ve heard it from candidates say like, “Oh, are you guys doing any research?” The main point to this, this probably isn’t going to trigger a lot of SEO, but it’s so that we have an easy link to just send people and be like, “Yep, here’s the stuff we’re working on.” On the everyone on content front, this one’s great and huge and I think, again, reference link is going to be one that we send out a lot and refer people to. This is Miz talking about how we do internal communications. This was a huge effort on his part with some help from Aaron, everyone in content writer. I encourage everybody to head out to Medium.com/LevelsHealth and check out this piece. Even if you know how we do internal comments here, because we live it, this really helps give you the framework and the thinking of how we do it. Again, anybody asks how we do things here, this is a great link to send them.
(00:59:22):
Next slide. Other thing happening this week, we launched a project we’ve been working on for a while we call the Nurture Email Series. So this grew out of an email strategy project we did last summer with the content firm we work a lot with, Revel, where they took a look at all of our content, our sort of content and business strategy and initiatives, and then we came up with a handful of new email products we wanted to launch. So a couple of those we have, the Dr. Casey email, this was one of the other projects. So what this is, is a series of emails that will go out to anybody who signs up. So not just members, but anybody who gives us their email, whether it’s for the wait list or whether they just sign up for the email newsletter, it will kick off this automated sending of one of these emails each week for eight weeks.
(01:00:11):
The idea is just to kind of nurture the relationship with them, it’s to introduce people to some of this content. It’s getting at some of the same kinds of things we’re exploring in the blog redesign, which is there’s a lot of foundational knowledge to understand what the heck we’re talking about in all of the things that we talk about. Wait, why does insulin resistance matter again and what is that, and how’s that different than insulin sensitivity? Yeah, I get processed foods are bad, but what are they actually doing to me? Wait, how does exercise fit into all this stuff? So these are relatively short emails, each one of them links off to a core piece that covers whatever the topic is. So there’s eight of these covering eight kind of intro topics.
(01:00:51):
We’re going to do some experimentation, we’re going to run a few different cohorts over the first few weeks to experiment with frequency of sending. So we’re going to try twice a week and we’re also going to run a cohort where we only send this to actual members and not just anybody who signed up to see if that changes the engagement with these at all. Our metrics here are really just looking at are people opening them? Are they clicking through to those articles? Is the unsubscribed sort of staying steady? Are unsubs as a percentage of opens has been really good and actually declining, which shows people are, I think, generally finding value in these emails we’re sending out. But excited to get this out there, it’s just another tool in our kind of Spread the Metabolic Health Education Initiative that we’re working on. So that’s it for content.
Josh (01:01:33):
Amazing to see, especially since there’s typically an entire team dedicated to email and seeing all the awesome efforts here from you and Braden, and I guess ops and content, it’s huge. Appreciate you expanding the scope. All right, we’re at the end here. Sam’s not with us. Taylor, you want to kick off individual contributions?
Sam (01:01:53):
Sure. Individual contributions or just what I’m excited about?
Josh (01:02:00):
That.
Sam (01:02:01):
Got it, sorry. So this week, I mean I have to say… Well, all right, so I’m most excited about I’m this getting to know this team culture. I think I’ve experimented last week with traveling while I was working and I’m sort of in the middle of that and really excited. I’ve talked to three or four people about it, excited to learn more about it and participate in this culture. I think it’s so great to be able to figure out how to work in multiple environments. Then personally, I think today may be the day I kicked COVID. I almost had a negative test yesterday, so end of the day today hopefully will be my freedom from the COVID cave. Passing it on.
Josh (01:02:47):
Good luck, pulling for you.
Sam (01:02:48):
Thanks.
Josh (01:02:49):
Almost done. Karin?
Karin (01:02:52):
Hi, guys. Professionally, I’m super excited about the progress I’m making with the expansion memo, so hoping to have a first draft of that out to share with some guys on the team next week. On a personal level, I’m excited about my new house. You might be able to see all my boxes in the background, so it’s still very much living in a makeshift situation, but got lots of space and furniture to buy. That’s it, on to Alan. Scott?
Josh (01:03:24):
Big fan of that Wu-Tang poster in the background.
Karin (01:03:28):
That’s a commissioned Wu-Tang graffiti piece.
Josh (01:03:31):
That is cool. Scott?
Scott (01:03:36):
All right. Personally, I am coming up on the end of week two of starting with a trainer, so it’s nice to sort of get back into the gym, throw some weight around, and watching a little bit more of what I eat. I have agreed to sort of play this guy’s calorie in, calorie out game for a little while, so I’m going to match it up with my CGM data and we’ll sort of see how my blood moves as well, which is cool that we can do that now.
(01:03:58):
On the work front, we’ve got a lot of really cool, I think, more existential DRI product conversations going on in the background. These are going to be very foundational to the company, I think, moving forward. So it’s great that we’re having them, it’s great that people have the appetite to jump in, give things a shot, and we just sort of make changes as time goes on. So I’m really appreciative for all the team input here and being able to be game as we work through this stuff.
Josh (01:04:26):
Awesome. Sunny?
Sunny (01:04:28):
Hello. Professionally excited that I am able to recognize things in Help Scout and get through them a lot faster, and also have the opportunity to work through some things that were a little bit less documented or standard operating procedure kind of thing. So worked through some issues there and had some really great outcomes. Additionally, I’ve been really enjoying going through and seeing some projects going through the depths of the documentation to see what folks have been working on and a little bit with the personnel stuff. I enjoyed reading actually Taylor’s bio last night and was inspired by his Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday breakdown on his focus. So I may be dabbling a bit in that and excited about that. Then professionally, personally. Personally, hopeful to get some time on the slopes. It’s been a really low snow season, so hopefully a little bit of time out here skiing and then maybe Sunday just vegetating and doing some fun reading.
Josh (01:05:18):
Sounds awesome, enjoy. Alan?
Alan (01:05:21):
Cool. So professionally, I’ve had some really encouraging positive chats with a candidate recently focusing a lot on behavior change, and as a reminder to me that that’s why I’m here and that’s what I’m excited about. That’s been my real focus area, so I’m excited to start applying that back to the product again and just talking to all these really inspiring people. So that is a big work plus, and then personal side, it’s going to snow here I think this weekend and the kids are getting stoked. They’ve got their sleds out, we’re going to go to the park.
Josh (01:05:52):
Hitting the slopes too, look at that, two for two. John?
John (01:05:57):
Levels related, I’m excited because the tagging stuff is likely going to be used in the Now project. Not sure yet, but it makes sense to use all the insights we are collecting there. It will be great to see that it is not only useful for the project itself, but for other important efforts as well. On the personal front, nothing special. I will be just enjoying the good weather here before the rainy season starts.
Josh (01:06:30):
All right, sounds good. I think Pat had to jump. Miz?
Miz (01:06:33):
The product progress this week is great to see. It feels like things are turning a corner. There’s a lot coming up and the updates were all awesome, so I’m happy to see everything that’s going on there. I came across some very old forums, it was suggested in my YouTube videos, and I was looking at this screen in particular, the individual contributions, and it was six people and it said a few minutes most per person. It was fun to see that, but also really cool to see how the team has grown and just kind of have this whole team come together. It’s really cool to see. On the personal side, nothing special. Have a bike ride planned tomorrow, and otherwise just enjoying this incredibly sunny, clear, non-windy January here.
Josh (01:07:15):
Amazing. Yeah, the specific verbiage of that sentence has given me a lot of heartache. I’m trying to figure out how to phrase this. Stacy? Yeah, Justin’s out.
Stacy (01:07:28):
Professionally, I was actually blown away to discover that we have seven research studies going that are using Levels, that just seems phenomenal, and that they’re all over the world. If you read through the list, it’s a who’s who. Just felt really inspiring and exciting on that front. Then personally, David and I are headed to Kennebunkport this weekend. We have a press trip with a hotel I’m very excited about called the White Barn Inn. So yeah, going to just eat some beautiful food and enjoy the snowstorm from Kennebunkport.
Josh (01:08:05):
Sounds amazing, we’ll follow along. Matt?
Matt (01:08:10):
Yeah, I think professionally it’s been really fun to work on the digital engagement strategy memo this week. Excited to share that this Monday. It’s so cool to be able to respond to somebody on social media and they’re just thrilled that we would respond to somebody through that channel with a link to get past the wait list. So that always feels like a special moment, so I’m always excited to be doing that. Then personally, my grandma turned 98 this week and we’re having a small get-together this weekend to celebrate with her.
Josh (01:08:43):
That’s huge, congrats.
Matt (01:08:46):
Thank you.
Josh (01:08:47):
Tell her happy birthday from the team. Mercy?
Mercy (01:08:50):
Professionally, just honestly the design stuff, it’s beautiful to look at and it’s exciting to use. Then personally, just kind of don’t have much going on this weekend. I think it’s supposed to snow again, so I’m hoping we don’t lose power. That’s about it.
Josh (01:09:08):
Let’s see, Andrew. Is Andrew with us? No. Dave?
Dave (01:09:13):
Professionally, really enjoying connecting with the team, having meetings, feeling really good. Personally, we’ve got an omicron wave starting here in New Zealand, so it’s batten down the hatches. No ponies this weekend, maybe some rockets.
Josh (01:09:32):
Send the videos, love those. Dom was with us, I believe he had to jump. Lori?
Lori (01:09:41):
Hi, it’s been a while. It’s always so wonderful to hear each department, each team synthesize what they’re doing. I loved that interaction between Braden and the one member that was having some issues. I love that, that personal touch can change a mind and our team does that so well. Personally, we’ve had some family members kind of juggle COVID, so I still have my tree up. Sunday we’re having a combination Christmas party, double birthday party. I’m not quite sure how to decorate, but it’s going to be so good to see my family, so really looking forward to that.
Josh (01:10:26):
Love it, enjoy.
Lori (01:10:28):
Thank you.
Josh (01:10:28):
All right, Jesse?
Jesse (01:10:32):
Yeah, I’m excited about the continual masterclass that it feels like to get product updates from all the team members on what they’re working on. Also excited to be digging into the Help Scout. Support doc revamp with Brittany. On the personal side, yeah, nothing really special. I’m going to be playing golf with my dad this weekend, so I’m looking forward to that.
Josh (01:10:54):
Awesome, enjoy. Rob? You’re muted, Rob.
Rob (01:11:05):
Sorry. I am stoked about the metabolic health panel now being up and running. As an endocrinologist, blood is my lifeblood, so I’m really excited to see what comes of that, especially when we compare it to the CGMs. On another professional front, something I’ve mentioned to some of you before, I am the chief medical officer of a fiber company, we just did a redo of our prototype and the results are off the charts. If you want to control your glucose, I got the way. We’ll be six months from approaching Josh and Sam and the executive leadership, you’ll be impressed. Then on a personal note, I want you all to lean on Casey because she and I have the opportunity to be panelists at a seminar in Miami next month and she’s waffling as to whether she wants to go, so everybody push hard.
Josh (01:12:09):
Well, first of all, congrats. That’s awesome news, Rob. Yeah, ditto, I think what I’m most excited about is the launch of the metabolic health panel. Also equally excited about the progress on the IRB, but just moving blood work out of this frustrating office experience that ends up with a PDF lost in your email to something that is actionable and direct in the software that you’re making daily decisions about is a huge step function change. Yeah, I’m just so excited about it, it’s a thing that I want my family members to use to understand their status. I talk about all those esoteric things that they don’t care about, but seeing it I think in their hand is going to change that, so I’m stoked about it. Then personally, snow’s coming down. I think I’m going to get locked in this weekend and so I’m going to snuggle up with a good memo and that’s how it’s going to look. Lauren?
Lauren (01:12:55):
Yeah, Braden, hope you feel better soon. Let’s see, professionally, I’m just so excited the IRB is getting towards the end stages, at least our first protocol, more to come. Personally, I have no plans this weekend and I’m super excited about it. That’s it.
Josh (01:13:13):
Nice. Let’s see. Maz?
Maz (01:13:20):
Hey everyone, sorry it took me a second to unmute. I’m super excited about getting the IRB stuff done. Really great teamwork from Lauren, JM, and Taylor. That was really fantastic. Really excited about jumping into the memo work, which we got the memo out. Sorry, the membership memo work, we got the memo out and going to start a membership.
Josh (01:13:48):
Looking forward to it. Jackie?
Jackie (01:13:52):
Professionally, I was lurking in Help Scout this week and I just have a recognition in also seeing Braden’s interaction with that one member for how amazing our support team is and how many partnership requests they’re fielding. Just our support team’s so awesome and every time I loop you guys into [inaudible 01:14:11], I’m just like, I know that person’s going to be taken care of. I just thank you guys for being so amazing. Personally, I’m going to go on a hike tomorrow, which I’m really excited about. Yeah, that’s it.
Josh (01:14:26):
Big plus one on that. Zach’s out. Sean?
Sean (01:14:31):
Yeah, I thought the blood testing experience was awesome, especially as someone that’ll usually go to the doctor and not be able to do the draw right away because I’m not fasted or something, and then have to come back but just never end up coming back. So the in-home thing was sweet and then the turnaround time was super fast. I think I got mine back in two days. Then to be able to see that data in app versus having to throw it all into an Excel spreadsheet was super powerful. On the personal side, yeah, no big plans. Probably just going to take down some pizza tonight and see all my wearables go nuts.
Josh (01:15:12):
Sounds like a party. Murillo?
Murillo (01:15:16):
Yeah, so coming up on three weeks of very, very intense weeks. It’s great to see, first of all, the blood work ship, and I see it being popular and seeing people use it. The only problem with it that I see right now is that we don’t have that in Portugal. I would absolutely love to have something like that available to me. Personally, a week until my honeymoon and that’s all I’m thinking about.
Josh (01:15:50):
Exciting, coming soon. Mike D?
Mike D (01:15:54):
Yeah, so absolutely blood work. I remember when we did the pilot in the summer, the phlebotomist said I was the most excited person she’s ever seen to get blood taken, and I definitely was. It’s a huge milestone. Shout out to the whole team. Thank you, Lauren, for reminding me, that’s something I forgot, about the IRB that was mentioned. I know that’s been a huge effort for a lot of people on the team, it’s amazing. Then Jackie, the support team, I’m sure a lot of us have been following, but there’s some pretty well-known other wellness brands of wearables that have caught some flack about support. I think a few of us have experienced this and I’m glad that that’s a compromise that we’ve never made and we’ll never make and we have the strongest team alive.
Josh (01:16:36):
Huge. Chris?
Chris Jones (01:16:39):
First off, I’m really excited about what growth looks like when we’re not in growth mode and I’m scared to see what it’s going to look like when we are in growth mode. So it’s just impressive when getting to pull the numbers and see them just going up and to the right every week. Feels effortless, but I know it’s not. Lots of hard work goes into it. Nextly, on blood launch, that’s huge and I can’t wait for Blood 2.0 because JM promised me the male do-it-yourself blood kits that I can do, because I live in remote areas, so he’s got to ship that before he shuts down blood for a while. I’m holding him to that. Then lastly, it just warms my heart when Jackie made the comment of like, “Hey, I just went into Help Scout and looking at our members,” that’s awesome that the team feels empowered of they know the tools we use, know how to use it, and kind of go looking. So thank you, Jackie, next time I’ll be looking for your happiness score for all the members that you actually help when you take those tickets off our team.
(01:17:43):
On a personal side, looking forward to going cross-country skiing again with the dogs. This will be their second outing. Pro tip for those of you that do it with animals, when you’re hooked to your dog and you’re going downhill cross-country skiing and he sees a deer or another dog, you need a quick release, otherwise it’s going to be one heck of a ride when he just goes into full-on power mode and drags you behind him. So that was a lesson learned. That’s it.
Josh (01:18:12):
That’s called dog sledding, Chris, and I’d like I’d a video. Haney?
Haney (01:18:19):
Yeah, plus one everything. What a huge week, boy. IRB, blood work, so many huge milestones. The other thing I’ll just mention on the professional side, I had great first conversations this week with both Karin and Taylor, and it’s just always super fun to meet new people and get to know them and hear what they’re up to. On the personal, somewhat professional side, next week I’m going to start an experiment for February where I am much more prescriptive about how I’m spending my time during the day and trying to actually work less but work more efficiently. I feel like I’ve been slipping a little bit into kind of work all the time mode and probably not being that efficient, so I’m looking forward to seeing what can happen when I get intentional about it.
Josh (01:18:58):
I hear you. We should start a little reinforcement club on Threads because I need to do the same thing. Let’s see, Gabriel?
Gabriel (01:19:07):
Yeah, plus one to the IRB, plus one to the metabolic health panel. Also, seeing the progress on John’s tagging work is really exciting every week. Personally, unlike Jeremy, I forgot to book a trip to Paris, so I’m going to be taking it easy this weekend and I’m watching the snow from inside.
Josh (01:19:32):
Bummer, man, can’t believe you forgot that. Steph?
Steph (01:19:37):
Hi. I’m really excited about the Now screen and seeing it starting to get legs, if that makes sense, and the collaboration that’s been happening with that. Then also, with these different features that are happening in engineering, and Justin and I learned yesterday that a lot of the work that John has done actually plugs in really well with the community insights for the foods, and so that’s exciting. Personally, I have struggled so much this week. I thought I just had the flu, but it turns out it is COVID, and so it’s been on and off kind of trying to work, also sleeping a lot and just feeling like garbage. So continue to quarantine. Quarantine, wow. Quarantine this weekend and hopefully I’m better next week.
Josh (01:20:22):
Yeah, hoping you, Braden, Taylor, all of you feel better. Kunal?
Kunal (01:20:30):
I have grown really interested in electric motorcycles. I took a ride on one and have been 100% convinced that they’re the future of transportation, the only problem is they’re super expensive. They cost about $25,000, they’re really heavy at like 600 pounds, and the range is the worst of all. They barely get you 100 miles, which means you can’t leave the city in them. The interesting thing I found though is that batteries have come a long way and lithium ion batteries can be built with silicon instead of graphite, which allows the power density to be about 60% better. If you use solid state electrolytes instead of liquid state ones, you can get them to charge four times faster than they currently do, which means you can get the range up to 200 miles and they only take 15 minutes to recharge, which means suddenly they’re viable to take across the country.
(01:21:34):
So I got a friend of mine who just finished up his PhD in battery composition and another hardware friend, and we’re going to build one. We think it’s going to cost about $7,000 to build and we already know they sell it for $25,000 each, so this is growing increasingly interesting to me. So I have a whole bunch of batteries on the way to my place right now and we’re going to see what happens.
Josh (01:21:58):
This is a rabbit hole I’ve gone down, so I will follow this intently and retrofit my bikes if you get it cracked. Brittany?
Brittany (01:22:07):
Hello. So professionally, lots of things, but really excited for the launch of the metabolic health panel. I was able to do that and it was just such an easy, wonderful experience and super insightful. So I’m just really excited for all the members to be able to experience that too or have the opportunity to experience that. Also excited to work on the customer knowledge base revamp project with Jesse. It’s been a lot of fun this week doing that. Personally, I’m going paintballing tomorrow for a friend’s birthday, so that should be interesting. I don’t know how I agreed to this, but it’s happening, so we’ll see how it goes.
Josh (01:22:53):
I think it’s one of the most fun events you can do.
Brittany (01:22:56):
Really?
Josh (01:22:56):
Yeah, it’s a blast.
Brittany (01:22:56):
[inaudible 01:22:58].
Josh (01:22:58):
Ian?
Ian (01:23:01):
So in personal world, I ride a wave of dopamine into this week because I took silver with a mixed doubles partner in a local pickleball tournament. Pickleball, which is abbreviated PB, got mistaken for peanut butter on threads. On second thought, I think I’d be happy to compete in a peanut butter tournament. It’d be delicious. Then in Levels world, just happy to be on the verge of shipping my first kind of little thing that does something. It’s been fun working with Braden and Mercy to figure out just a little bit of functionality to add. Oh yeah, paintball also works for PB. Just something that’s going to go into retool and just happy to be continuing a ramp on shipping more complicated stuff.
Josh (01:23:56):
Nice, congrats on the first ship and the pickleball. Hal?
Hal (01:24:02):
Personally, just get back to the slope and practiced practice on some icy moguls. I will take all the snows from Chicago, Jeremy and Gabriel.
Josh (01:24:15):
Yeah, you and Xinlu both. Enjoy. JM?
JM (01:24:20):
Really awesome week. I’m excited about the million dollar mark we’re going to hit for the month for January, either today or Monday. On a personal note, my daughter’s school also has a Friday share and she is doing her Friday share this morning. I got a photo sent to me from… Oh gosh, it’s faded. Let me fix that, one second. There she is doing her presentation for her Friday share, so I thought I would share her Friday share as my Friday share since I more or less put her deck together. It’s going to snow a lot here this weekend. We were going to go upstate, we are not. We’ll be sledding in Central Park, if anyone’s looking for us. Have a good weekend.
Josh (01:25:02):
Love it. Thanks, JM. Casey?
Casey (01:25:06):
I’m still laughing at Haney’s comment, she’s not doing an async. That’s awesome. Always hard to follow JM on these. So super excited about the IRB. Congrats team, everyone who worked on that. So exciting about blood. I had an interview with the Wall Street Journal yesterday and I talked all about our blood panel, so I’m really hoping it makes it into that article. It’s going to be something along the lines of Be the CEO of Your Health type of article, so I think it would hopefully fit perfectly in there. Yeah, this week has been a lot of chief of staff interviews. We’ve had a ton of applicants and just major shout out to Tom for being the point person on that hiring process. He’s been running a really incredible, organized process and I’m just so impressed by his workflow. Personally, I pulled the trigger and booked a trip to the Dolomites in August, where I’m going to be backpacking for seven days. I’m really excited about that and I’ve officially been influenced by David and Stacy and their Instagram stories about their trip to the Dolomites, so yeah.
Josh (01:26:12):
Amazing, that’s going to be awesome. All right, Tony, wrap it up.
Tony (01:26:17):
Sure. Plus one to the blood work. I have not tried that yet, so I’m looking forward to getting that set up. Also, it was interesting digging into the brand guidelines from TWA and Alan this past week, so I’m looking forward to integrating a lot of those into upcoming video pieces as well. Personal side, we’re going to be getting at least a foot of snow this weekend, just like a lot of you, so looking forward to really just staying inside.
Josh (01:26:55):
Yeah, ditto. All right, well, huge week. Thanks everybody for all the work. It’s funny, even though we’re not in growth mode, it feels like the numbers are gaslighting us because they are going up despite us not trying to make them. So it’s always cool to have a week like this. Enjoy your weekends, enjoy your memo snuggling, if that’s what you’re going to do, and we’ll all see you either in the fireside next or next week.