Josh Clemente (00:00):
All righty, let’s do it. Welcome to the first Friday Forum of 2023. Pretty exciting. We’re now in the fourth calendar year of Levels existence, which is pretty freaky. Lot of great stuff coming this year. Just a quick reminder on what this meeting is for. This is Async time, it’s to celebrate achievements, it’s to get stoked, it’s to hear from our members and partners. It’s not the business review meeting. It’s not where we go deep on the analytics and metrics of what’s driving our company. Those happen elsewhere. Reminder that asynchronous updates are done in depth across all the functions and those are sent out compiled in a video every Friday. So I highly recommend if you want deep dive into the functions, check those out. Okay, this week. So some of this stuff has been happening for some time.
(00:49):
We had a week off prior to this for the holidays. I hope everyone was really enjoying their time away. We came back and December happiness is at 96%, the highest in 20 months, which is pretty huge, pretty phenomenal. The content leverage of support is super high as well. So we had over 50,000 visits to our support FAQ, basically people being able to self-help themselves, which is huge. And then membership renewals, this is the first time we’ve done this largely smooth sailing. Certainly it sounds like there has been a queue, which the support team, I really appreciate all the effort to churn through that. But overall, really successful rollout of the membership renewals project and we have the autonomy pilot starting as of Tuesday of this week to help us support flexing up and down support, which is going to be a really important learning. This month, we published December’s Month in Metabolic Health, which is always a great roundup of what’s going on.
(01:44):
And then otherwise it was a little bit slower as we make some technical changes to the blog, but Haney did a nice year-over-year review. Blog traffic is up year over year 82%. Overall site audience is up 60%. Organic search, which is really important, these are new people finding us through search, up 71%/. And then email traffic up over 100%. So lots of really awesome numbers. These numbers are in the millions, so pretty awesome to see something go up 80% from millions. And then Logging 5.2, so in the app we’ve got a picture here. Oh sorry, I think this is 5.1. It’s either 5.1 or 5.2. But basically we now have a prettier logging interface with these little pills that pop up with the suggestions based on image recognition. So this will be rolling out imminently and should be much nicer, a cleaner approach to having suggestions that people can tag.
(02:40):
And then we’ve got rate the app, Labs 2.0/2.1 on the backend and frontend work, trends 1.0 basically being able to improve my data with trends on what’s happening over longer time periods as opposed to just on a daily basis. The engineering team has really hit the ground running on 2023 projects that could use some refactoring. So essentially prioritizing the work that could be basically filling in gaps on new work in order to refactor and keep our code base super fresh, which is great. And then Levels Levels 1.4 is very close to done. Okay. December orders were slow, so this was to be expected. We’ve essentially confirmed as of this month for the first time, we’ve had the doors fully open, the gates lifted, people are able to order ad libitum so to speak, and there’s definitely some seasonality involved here.
(03:37):
So December orders were down, but January is tracking super strong and not just because of renewals, but even if we adjust for renewals, January is up substantially. So it seems like we’re getting back on track and this is going to be a really nice substrate to start testing some of our demand capture initiatives, which on that topic, Signup 3.0 was a huge success. So as of right now, we have seen conversion rate increase of 33% over the previous flow. And just as a reminder, this was mostly just a communication, like messaging and aesthetics improvement. There are still tons of low hanging fruit I think to continue to improve the checkout funnel, the signup experience. So a huge shout out to the team for pulling that together, executing on it and really a huge success. This is like $50,000 in revenue on the table just by improving this.
(04:29):
And then the Try It experiment, which is the $99 Try It. We hit two times the target signup, so sending out to a single cohort, we hit a 40% checkout completion rate. So from people that start checkout to completing it, 40% of those people end up finishing. That’s 20 times higher than our standard checkout. So this is huge. Now, it’s a small end. I don’t want to say that this is going to hold at scale, but it really indicates that we’re onto something here with having an easier on-ramp into the product that doesn’t cost quite as much. So lots more to learn here. We’re going to do some retargeting on this as well and then have a final synopsis. We’re also learning quickly from performance ads experiments. Our January CAC numbers are much better than the target right now. Obviously we are very early in January so need to see how this plays out, but good learnings there.
(05:18):
And then we’ve got a Drip Nurture campaign, so six emails essentially describing Levels, explaining how it fits into someone’s life and leading people through the funnels, something we haven’t done in a long time and I think this is in the final checks before it’s going to go live. And then we had some big print pieces. So these are magazine print articles in men’s health and men’s fitness both in the UK. We featured pretty prominently in these and they were both super, super favorable and then we had a ton of other just smaller press come out this week. So getting some great coverage, obviously priming the UK audience, which is awesome to see. And then also Mark Hyman’s newsletter went live with a supplement promotion. And then finally the work on what we’re calling the growth rails, just essentially building the instrumentation to get better insight into week over week, month over month numbers, post hog drip, lots of work.
(06:09):
And this is already paying dividends, which is huge. And we’ve got some new memos coming out on how we’re fitting the demand capture strategy to the upcoming product improvements or changes to our roadmap and an expansion outlook update based on UK. So big shout out to Tom and Karen who are working hard on those and looking forward to them. A couple other things here. Dr. Anjali Dsouza had a really nice podcast with Haney, which I’m looking forward to listening to, I have not yet, about functional medicine. We had Carl Banks on Metabolic Insights and let’s see, a couple other pieces that were rerun like Sam got a huge shout out on first round review and we’ve got some upcoming mission patches. So I think that’s basically it, but lots of great stuff this week.
(06:54):
All right, with that, I want to welcome Ryan Baxter. Ryan is a Levels member, health coach, professional software engineer/I would say health technologist given where he sits in the juxtaposition of those two spaces. And Ryan, you’ve been in this world longer than most people and I’m really excited to hear your perspective on what you’re excited about for metabolic health and your experience with Levels so far.
Ryan Baxter (07:21):
Yeah, thanks Josh and thanks for everyone for having me. Super cool to speak to everyone. Like Josh said, I’m a software engineer and health coach, so software engineering full-time and part-time health coaching in the lovely state of New Hampshire here. And I first heard about Levels on a podcast, I can’t remember which one, several years ago and at the time it was still closed beta and just went to the website and signed up for the beta list, just gave my email address and I think a couple hours later I got an email from Sam, which was quite surprising asking me why I was interested. And so I gave him my background and because I have my foot in both the software engineering space and the health and wellness space, I’m particularly fond of anything that combines the two together. So I love technology and I love health and wellness and CGM fits right in there in the middle.
(08:25):
And back then it was pretty much impossible to get a CGM unless you get a doctor’s prescription. So obviously I wasn’t getting one, I was not medically qualified for that. So to get one through a third party, it was interesting, so I jumped on the opportunity to join the closed beta and play around with it. And even though it was a beta and obviously all betas have their rough edges, I immediately saw the value in seeing just real time what my blood sugar was doing based on the food I was eating and the sleep I was getting or not getting and the stress that I was under or not under. And even doing things like saunas and cold exposure and stuff like that, it was pretty cool to see the changes in real time and I immediately saw the value not only for myself as an athlete because I’ve gone through several experiments for playing with different diets and stuff like that, but as a health coach for my clients who are also interested in their own metabolic health.
(09:32):
So I eventually have something that I could recommend to them that they could [inaudible 00:09:37] or do similar experiments and then we could adjust lifestyle things based on what we saw in the CGM, which was extremely valuable. ‘Cause it’s one thing to guess and poke around in the dark and see if things are making changes and with blood testing you only know several months down the line usually, but with the CGM you can see it within minutes or hours or days. You can see different patterns show up, which is really cool. And that’s the value that I see in this stuff. And I’ve seen Levels evolve over the years now and just appreciate the technology and everything you guys are doing because it does truly help everyone out. And I see it not just for myself but for my clients as well.
Josh Clemente (10:26):
That’s really awesome here. I love the personal experience as well as from the position of a practitioner, someone who’s trying to bring other people into an awareness of what’s happening in their bodies. If you could manifest one thing that Levels were to focus on, whether it’s a new product, new service improvement to what we’re already doing, what would that be? What would you encourage us to focus on most?
Ryan Baxter (10:52):
That’s a good question. I think for myself, I’m definitely a niche user because I think most people come to Levels and they look at it for just general health and wellness type of things. Maybe they’re interested in body composition or just general health and their doctor’s told them they’re pre-diabetic and then they get things under control or whatever it might be. But for myself, I’m more interested in the athletic performance side of things and so I think that my pattern when it comes to blood sugar spikes and just levels and stuff like that, because of the amount of carbohydrates I consume in one sitting, tends to look not so good in the app if you were the average person. But from an athlete, it’s to I guess, provide a lens or more specific why you’re using the app and then shift things towards your goal, I guess is what I’m saying. So that as an athlete you might get a different set of insights than someone who’s more sedentary just looking for a general help and wellness, that type of thing.
Josh Clemente (12:13):
Makes total sense. The personalization layer, it’s the key goal-based program I think experience. So that makes total sense. I really appreciate that perspective as well and certainly can relate. So anyway, Ryan, I really appreciate you setting some time aside on Friday to come hang out with the team. Feel free to stick around for the rest of the meeting. We’ve got it typically runs for about an hour, but some deeper dives into stuff and would love to have you join. Otherwise, this is just invaluable feedback and appreciate you coming and join us.
Ryan Baxter (12:46):
Cool. Thanks again. I’ll hang out for a little bit.
Josh Clemente (12:48):
Awesome. All right, culture and kudos. So Ben has hit two years as of this week. It’s a huge shout out to Ben, New Austin city native like myself now and Britney and Dave have both hit one year as well this week. So congrats everybody. Really awesome to be working with you, still so excited for this next year. And then a couple shout outs that we had this week. Firstly we had this great example of Adam sharing how he’s massively boosting his workflow. If you haven’t seen this, definitely check it out. ChatGPT is a new tool that everyone’s hearing the hype on, but this is a real world example of Adam just taking it and sharing how to fit it right into your workflow and literally 10X output. So pretty awesome there.
(13:34):
And then big one from Murillo who has been doing a ton to clean out dead code and take care of tech debt. So it looks like Murillo has been able to remove about 25,000 lines of dead code, which this is baggage essentially and the compounding effects of not cleaning this up is really hard to understand and so it takes an additional amount of effort to set aside time to go and do something that is not a visible problem. This is the type of stuff that lingers in the background. So big shout out to Murillo’s efforts here, keeping us cleaner, lighter weight, able to move faster. So all that efficiency, really appreciate it. Okay, Sam, over to you.
Sam Corcos (14:20):
All right, hopefully my internet holds up. If it [inaudible 00:14:23], give me a thumbs down signal and I’ll have to switch to tethering on my phone. So the goal here is to go over one of our books that we did for book club a little while back, which is No Rules Rules, which is a book on Netflix culture. We share a lot of our culture values with other companies. I think Netflix is one of the companies that is maybe most similar to how we think about it. One of the core values that they have that we share is to treat people like adults. And this is something that we really can’t emphasize enough when it comes to decision-making. I also highly recommend reading this book and participating in the book club if you can. We do a book about once a month, a lot of them are on company culture and it’s part of the evolution of our company and how we’re thinking about building things and how we all want to work together.
(15:17):
One of them, treat people like adults I think is probably the most important of all of the cultural values, which is they give an example in the book where there was a decision that was being made around whether a particular department was going to be shut down in the company or not, and the question they had internally was, should we tell them about this now as a possibility or should we wait six months until we’re sure and then we make the change? And the question they always ask themselves is, what would an adult want to know in this situation? Sure, they might get upset, they might be concerned, but an adult would want to know whether this affects their ability to buy a house or make other life changes. An adult would want to know that as soon as the conversation comes up.
(16:06):
So oftentimes when people think about what sort of feedback to give people, they think, well, what if they reacted this way? What if they reacted that way? What if these negative consequences happen? What’s really important is to ask yourself, how would an adult want to handle this? How would I want to handle this? Well, what information would I want to know in this situation? And the answer is almost always, I’d want to know directly what it is as soon as possible. And that’s something that a lot of people… I often emphasize this in our interviews, that when we’re interviewing new candidates, this is something that we do take seriously and everyone says that they want this. In practice, not everybody does. And so it’s just something that we need to continue to reinforce internally and to just really be intentional about it and not hold things back from people because we don’t think they can handle it.
(17:01):
Another major concept here is around talent density, which is one of the reasons why you probably noticed we take performance management seriously and we’re increasingly taking it seriously. Casey and Nicole are upleveling our management training and helping people with the ability to give better feedback to people and help them improve. Another is around feedback and transparency. You’ve probably noticed that we’re much more transparent than the typical company is. We share our financials with everyone. We share a lot more information than most companies do about our strategy and our goals and about our performance. Most companies hide these things or they sugarcoat them to the team and only a handful of people really know the situation and it’s just part of our culture that we want everyone to know. Again, coming back to you treat people like adults because an adult would want to know what the situation is. And so that’s a big part of our culture.
(18:01):
The last is that we’re a team, not a family, and this is one that it can be controversial, but it’s also in some ways kind of obvious where you can’t hold people to performance standards when they’re a family. When you’re a family, you’re there through thick and thin and it comes with it often for those who’ve worked in environments as I have where there was this familial language, it can really create this pathology around changing where you work or making hard decisions because you can’t really leave a family. So it can create a really toxic set of circumstances that we really just don’t want to have here. So just recognizing that we are a team, we are here to solve a purpose, we have a mission to solve the metabolic health crisis and that we’re all working on that together and that we are, as a collective, here to solve a problem and to hold each other accountable for that.
Josh Clemente (19:07):
Well said. This book was a really great read and awesome recap. I highly recommend everyone going back and checking that out. And also, some of these perennial books, we should probably just do another run through at some point soon. This one in particular because it’s got so many themes that we’re building into our culture. So thanks a lot Sam. All right, company objectives, Levels shows you how food affects your health. No changes here, everyone should be working towards this priority. Products is top priority in Q1. So as we all know, we’ve got some updates coming to the product roadmap that’s going to be distributed as completed. And then of course demand capture remains a focus. All right, over to Sonja for a retro on Levels Kitchen.
Sonja Manning (19:55):
Okay, Levels Kitchen Retrospective. Assume you guys can all see the slides. Let’s do this. So this all started in Casey’s Kitchen in Bend, Oregon.
Casey Means (20:09):
Hello. It’s Sunday night. I just got back from a awesome hike in Bend and I’m in one of those moods where I do not know what I want.
Sonja Manning (20:19):
Just a little flavor of V1. Obviously Casey is a very knowledgeable and enjoys creating metabolically healthy meals in this video that Casey just did in her kitchen sparked discussions initiated by the growth team about creating a V2 version of this with higher production value given a ton of our members are frequently asking for more recipe instruction and there have been some strategy memos outlining, exploring, creating and distributing some more high quality content. So we scoped an experiment. It started off with five objectives. One was testing out Levels owned to produce content in-house, which is something that we had never really done before.
(20:56):
Second was understanding if increasing the quality lever, mostly going from Zoom recordings to high production on YouTube would impact views and engagement. Third was a new type of content for YouTube, which is recipes and food. One of our goals is to create content for our members and community that showcased affordable and accessible metabolically healthy recipes. Terry Wahls said something to me that really stuck with me at metabolic a couple months ago that teaching people how to cook is maybe the most important thing we could do to solve the metabolic health crisis. And people’s entry point to metabolic health might not be learning about insulin resistance, it might be almond flour pancakes. And so our goal was to teach them more than a pancake recipe, but why food can be one of the most powerful tools we have to feel our best.
(21:45):
Fourth was to really leverage the same content across platforms to gain learnings for editorial and social. And lastly, this was a bit of a stretch goal, but we knew we wanted to have this viral mindset to try to reverse engineer virality when thinking about creating the content and thinking about the distribution. So we went to Portland, Oregon, we rented an Airbnb, we turned it into a production studio and we created this content. On the right, you’ll see there is extensive documentation to make this run seamlessly. Everything from call sheets, which I had never seen before. I made one to [inaudible 00:22:23] points to grocery lists. I also want to a pause and say here, it’s super rare that we get to work together in person to execute the work, but we did this for 12 plus hours a day, five days in a row, and it was a real pleasure to work with Tony, Casey and Stacy in person on this.
(22:43):
And then we made a Netflix style cooking show. It had six episodes, a trailer. This was V2, a docuseries video, 30 minute tacos, healthy bread, a power bowl, and low spike brownies. Just to give you a flavor of V2.
Casey Means (22:59):
Hello. Today we are going to make a Levels favorite recipe. This is the metabolic power bowls. These are perfect…
Sonja Manning (23:12):
And our audience loved it. We had lots of positive comments on YouTube, on social, and this was likely because the content was high quality, it was accessible and it was valuable. The YouTube videos had strong retention and click-through rate. Our subscriber rates showed that our audience was engaged and as you can hear from the comments, our community responded very positively on social. Of course not all feedback is rosy. Some members asked for more clarity on recipe steps in the video, many members ask for a PDF and we had to print recipes which we put together and is now available. I imagine next you want to dig into the results, but… Whoops, let’s talk about how we disagree with the content before we get into the results. So we created a surround sound distribution plan leveraging a number of things, one being a landing page.
(24:12):
So this was a demand capture experiment. The first email we sent about Levels Kitchen, we drove people to a landing page to basically sign up to be notified when future recipes dropped. Many of our advisors and partners helped amplify the landing page as well. And overall this was successful. We’ve never done something like this, but we had 13,000 views. We collected almost 4,300 emails and 3,000 of those emails were brand new, so it’ll be interesting to see how these could convert in the future. The second was email and blog posts. This was a huge lever for us, so we sent four different emails promoting the release of each video as well as that first email that I mentioned that went to the landing page. And 50% of the views on YouTube were driven by external sources, mostly from email. And so email is a very important lever in this kind of surround sound distribution.
(25:03):
And then social, we had 27 total pieces of content. We had reels, we had carousel posts, we had stories, we had LinkedIn posts, we had tweets, we had a number of things as you can see here. And overall on Instagram, our carousel and a grid post performed well, but the reel performance was just average. The content was in the same ballpark in terms of views and impressions as other Levels Instagram content. And our hypothesis and our learning here is that if we had scoped out the creative direction for these reels in the beginning and then filmed native social content during the shoot, it would’ve performed better. High production quality on Instagram does not correlate to views and engagement. It’s really the quality of the post itself and the reels that we put out were not necessarily purpose engineered for Instagram since our number one focus was YouTube.
(25:54):
And then last but certainly not least, we had advisor and partner amplification, big thanks to Terry Wahls, to David Perlmutter, to Mark Hyman and many more advisors and we saw that we had a pretty significant impact from coordinating with our advisors. The reels that they promoted specifically had three to four times the views and perhaps more interestingly, we had a higher percentage impressions on Levels Kitchen YouTube videos convert to subscribers, which we think was driven by some of the informed leads of those people coming from our advisors and our partners. So big thanks to all of our advisors and partners for your support. Okay, now we can get into how did we do and the results of this experiment and what’s next. So let’s go back to our objectives. Number one, test out Levels owned and produced content. We did this, we learned a few things.
(26:44):
One, we should scope digital content shoots to be less than two months from ideation to production to distribution. Now we have a better sense of how long things take in-house so we can better project manage from start to finish in the future and loop in contractors to maximize our team. Efficiency, which was another learning, is it’s best to execute the blended approach of in-house and contracted support to minimize our internal team investment time, outsource as much as possible without sacrificing creative direction or brand quality. Number two, understand if the quality lever impacted views on YouTube. So the answer here is sort of. The original video had about 1200 views and the average views for the Levels Kitchen videos is around 4,000. The first video that I showed you obviously didn’t have any positioning or marketing support. We just threw it up on YouTube.
(27:35):
And so what we’re realizing is that the promotion of the content and the positioning was one of the largest levers that we have in increasing views and engagement and we should invest in that moving forward. Number three, experimenting testing new types of content. We did this, we learned however that our metabolic health thought leader content still drives more viewership on YouTube, but the takeaway is that offering high quality food and recipe content certainly builds brand hype on social and can be used to retain members in app. We know that the cooking content does well, so we should continue to iterate on formats like more reels, more shorts and other delivery mechanisms on social or in app or through partners and advisors. Leverage content across platforms. We did this as well.
(28:21):
This was really the first time that we created this sort of surround sound distribution and realized that we should implement and systematize this for major digital content releases in the future. And in addition to leveraging all the platforms, we should continue to integrate demand capture experiments like landing pages and PDFs of content into our project plans considering the importance of that as one of our priorities right now. And last, while we did not make a viral cooking video, we did exceed our goal of getting 5-10,000 views in the first 30 days. And since YouTube is perennial, the videos will continue to gain views. Our overall learning here is we can still improve as a team and having a virality mindset and understanding how to produce stuff that’s highly engaging for people and learn from who’s doing it super well in the industry and pick up some more best practices. So what is the verdict of Levels Kitchen?
(29:18):
The verdict is in, this was a successful experiment. We met all of our learning objectives and then some. I think the icing on our metabolically friendly brownies, so to say, is that we captured 3,000 new emails. We learned how to build this ground sound support system for amplifying our content, and we really signaled that Levels as a brand produces high quality content even if people didn’t necessarily comment or watch. You may be wondering if we’re going to be having a second season dropping soon, and the answer here is we’re not going to be doing Levels Kitchen again in the same way. We know cooking content does well, so we’ll continue to iterate on our format like more reels and more shorts, potentially even inviting creators or advisors to cook with us in other delivery mechanisms, again, social, in app or through partners and advisors.
(30:09):
So biggest takeaway as I think from this experiment, we learned that our team is very much capable of being a high impact media company, and we learned a bunch of optimizations to make our projects and our content more successful and more impactful for our community. So curious to read more. There’s a very long retro in notion and want to close by saying big, big thank you to the whole team that supported. Ben, Casey, Stacy, Tony, Jen, Caitlyn, Haney, Matt, and probably more people. Hopefully I’m not forgetting anyone. So thanks so much.
Josh Clemente (30:45):
Sweet. Thank you Sonja. And thanks team for that awesome project. I am going to try and take share back here. Okay, there we go. Awesome slide Sonja. Okay, what’s the member? I think this is Chris.
Chris Jones (31:00):
Thanks Josh. Can you do a quick refresh just in case? Thank you. So there’s two things I want to do. One quick recap since it’s that time of the year, and then I’m going to get into a voice of the member specifically around the membership renewal effort that we did and some of the themes that came around it. So just a couple of metrics from a support I’ll just call out. In terms of our case volume going up, no surprise. Members helped our SLA around getting back to members within three hours at 80%. This is one where ever since liftoff we have struggled with this one. And the reality is even though the volume of cases hasn’t necessarily gone up to the degree that members have, the complexity and the challenge and the investigation of those cases are much, much harder. So instead of like, hey, I can answer these cases, when’s it going to be available in my country or my state? We can answer those in half a second.
(32:00):
Why doesn’t this work? Investigating with engineering can take hours of trying to figure out for one single member. So this is more of a reflection of the complexity around the types of issues that come across our desk, and just the new reality of what goes on. On the flip side, we’ve talked a lot about the self-service. Earlier in the year we had our goal of 8X which we hit for the year and we’ve actually raised that to 10X. In the last couple of months I think we’re actually at 12X, so the real thing that I’m looking at is us leaning into self-service, newsletters, content where people don’t have to reach out to us. The contact rate for new members is actually going down which is good, because as we scale members, we can’t scale support the same rate. We have to lean into self-service, we have to lean into FAQs, videos and let them take it just because we can’t ramp up at the same scale as our members do.
(33:01):
Next slide please. Just a little bit as I think about what I think is going to happen for 2023. This is the world according to Chris, pull out my crystal ball, what’s happening? Cases and members will go up at the same kind of clip. We will continue to struggle with this three hour SLA unless we throw a lot more resources at things like ramping up autonomy, but that comes with a cost. It doesn’t come for free, so it’s going to be a decision between me and Ryley around what is the budget for support to chase some of these metrics. And we really plan to really lean into self-service to increase that and to really drive down the new member contact rate and some of these goals. Cool. All right, next slide. Now back into membership renewal. As Josh talked about earlier, this was from a support perspective a really successful even though it was really busy for us.
(33:56):
So as many of you know, on the left we had a number of different emails that we sent out reminding them a month out, three days out when it happened. The table on the upper right is a list of some of those emails we sent to pretty much all of our members and how many cases it drove. So in updating your memberships, it’s up for renewal, it’s going to renew soon, it’s going to expire soon, it has ended. We’ve now just charged you so you can see each time we email our member, we get a backlash of the responses of people having questions. The chart on the bottom right is actually the overall inbound messages received from those campaigns or cases getting almost 400 additional cases from just this campaign. The back half of this and really for the last two weeks, remember during the time that we added a lot of this volume we were short-staffed.
(34:52):
The team was really on holiday breaks, they were spending time with family, taking breaks, recharging for what we knew was going to be a busy January and February so we were more like weekend level support. So team members coming back from a holiday vacation with family, I’m like, oh there are 300 unanswered support questions in the queue. That’s a new record. Normally we like to keep it around 50 or 75. So it probably was a gut punch, but one that we expected. We knew this volume was coming and it actually could have been a lot worse. So we view this as a success, but it was a reality of every time we engage and message our users it’s going to drive volume. So now when we have those cases and how much volume, let’s get into a little bit of some of the themes. Next slide.
(35:38):
First theme, roughly 10% of the cases, so I just did a sample, I picked about a 100 cases, read through them and did some rough categorization. Please cancel my membership. Can you please cancel it? Please do not renew. This is an area where we’ve been doing a lot of work around the member portal and specifically around member portal 2.0. So I just want a big hat tip to Kasim and the team, this is going to be huge for support. But even no matter how easy you make it, you put a big call to action in the email, you make a good portal, it’s all self-serve, you are always going to get some people that say, “Can you just do this for me?” This is just a nature of the beast, but the member portal we’re super excited about. The more things that we can push people to do themselves versus us having to do it is going to be a game changer for support. Next slide.
(36:26):
Membership discounts not applied. As probably many of you are aware, we actually did some experimentations for people that we said, well what if we offered them to renew for $99 or 149 or we gave them a discount? So there were some experiments going on in addition to this, and what happened was people saw the offer and then they went to checkout and they didn’t see the discount price. This wasn’t too much, but it happened enough. The real takeaway from our perspective is, and I’m not sure how people close to coupons know, we’ve been making a lot of changes of how coupon codes are done. We used to be all through Retool. You add a partner code to the end of a URL and it cascades through, then we moved it to Stripe, then we had the Black Friday where you entered it in the coupon code within the cart.
(37:17):
So the way that we apply discounts and coupons has been very changing. So more just continue to educate not just support or the team, but company-wide how you apply discounts. Here’s how you discount code coupon codes and how it works just so we’re all on the same page. So this is one where as we’re changing systems, there was a couple of things that got missed of how does that say? Does it carry through, does it not? Do they apply at the checkout or not? So next slide. Membership versus subscription up. Thanks Taylor on this one. This is one we see a lot of. So a couple callouts. The things in orange are me adding context where someone says, “Can you delay my membership to once every six months?” They’re talking about subscription. “I’ve extended my membership to April, 2023.” They’re talking about subscription. Or people saying, “Hey, I am not a 100% clear here. I signed up for a subscription, and that doesn’t include CGMs?”
(38:19):
And the confusion around people interchanging subscription and membership happens all the time. So it confuses members, it then also confuses support. When you get someone who says, oh, I did this with subscription or I did this with membership and they’re really using the terms incorrectly, we have to have the ask is this what you really mean another? So the thing on the ask from us is, and I know a lot of these are starting to happen on the signup 3.0, explaining the memberships to memberships and not just at signup because a year later people are going to forget. Are we including it in the app or in our newsletters? Are we reminding them the benefits of membership so it’s something consistent? And then with us charging 199 for both of them adds an additional layer of confusion.
(39:05):
It’s harder for them to know that these are two different things when we charge the same amount because they think dollar amount to item. So we’re absolutely adding, we’re causing additional confusion by the fact that we charge the same amount for them. Next slide. “I didn’t sign up for membership.” This is related again where people are blowing through the cart. They’re like, I want a level CGM, I’m just going to hit next, next, next. They agree to the terms. They’re not really reading everything and they’re like, “I didn’t even realize I had a membership. I don’t even know what a membership is. Has this been on the whole time? Why did I get this?” Again, this clear calls around what membership is, the values of it and not just at the checkout, but over the entire experience with members. To make it from like, yes, I understand what membership is, I know the value of it, and I understand when it comes to renewal versus being caught by surprise. Next slide.
(40:01):
And the last one is membership extension ask. There was a lot of people that said, “Hey, I ordered this a year ago and I just am now getting around to opening my box. Can I get an extra month, an extra two months of membership? If I start my sensor now, on January 3rd is it going to not work?” So this is one where we see a lot of people that it became a call to action of, oh, what’s going to happen if I have these unused sensors? Do I need to pay another 199 for just an extra week or two weeks of sensor use? The two calls outs to the team. One big consideration of us doing monthly memberships. I know that’s on the backlog of things to consider, and also a way that we did it, and I just want to do a hat tip to Scott for we added a monthly day membership extension. So now the support team has a super easy way to be like, hey, we understand this things happened. Let me just give you a free extension for 45 days to give you more time to get through those sensors.
(41:01):
So this is the recap of what we heard across and roughly about the sizes of it from the membership renewal project. And that’s it. Thanks.
Josh Clemente (41:14):
Oh, good. Excellent update. Thanks to the support team for once again another new challenge and new season for support tasks really to adapt to this stuff. So the insights are awesome. I know this is going to help us continue to improve our messaging, our product marketing, our funnel. So awesome. So thanks team for the work that goes into this, and also surfacing these retros. All right, quick hiring update. So we have Subhiksha Somanathan joining the R&D team, very excited about this. She’s going to bring a great skillset and expertise to that research development program which should be starting January 20th and that is the newest team update. We still have an open role there as we continue to converge on our core team. If you are interested in a role at Levels, or interested in the culture that we’re building here, shoot us a note. Send a standard application in or point your friends and family to levels.link/careers.
(42:20):
Okay, well, we made it through pretty quick. Got some individual contribution time for the first time in a few weeks. We will do this, I’m going to stop the share, and you can use the reactions to raise your hand like this. I highly encourage everyone to jump in, share something professionals, share something personal. I’m going to say I am just absolutely jazzed for 2023. I got sick on Christmas and have been working through that for the last 10 days, but the mentality is strong right now even if the body is weak. So I’m ready for the challenge. Super excited about the team. We’ve got so many good things in progress and it’s just crazy that we’re four years in right now and I feel like we’re just getting started. So also the weather down here in Austin is pretty nice and as soon as I kick this thing, I’m going to be getting back after it and trying to catch up to Mike D. Sam.
Sam Corcos (43:25):
I’m especially excited for the upcoming product strategy and roadmap. I know that Alan and Maz have been working on that for quite a long time. I’ve been involved with that as well Casey and a lot of other folks, so if there’s anything that we here can do to support that effort, let’s do it. It’s a really important one.
Josh Clemente (43:45):
Plus one. Casey.
Casey Means (43:48):
Sam stole mine. I was also going to reiterate enthusiasm just for all the amazing work that’s happening across product. Getting to work a little bit more closely with that team it’s just really amazing seeing Alan, David, Maz, Sissy, Kasima, others just work so well together, work with the content team. Caitlin, Haney, and just following along with threads it’s very exciting and I just feel this sense of just amazing optimism for this year and I have this deep sense this is just going to be our best year yet at Levels and I’m so excited and just really just so amazed by this team. And so just feeling great about that and excited to see what the next few weeks are going to bring as the product stuff really gels up and comes together.
(44:37):
I’m in Bend right now and we got some good snow this week and so I am going to try and get out to go cross country skiing tomorrow morning, which I’m super excited about. And if anyone’s looking for a little winter escape, I have a guest bedroom, you’re welcome to come ski. So have a great weekend everyone.
Josh Clemente (44:57):
Sounds awesome. Yeah let’s make it the best year yet. Ryley.
Ryley Walker (45:02):
That was an awesome update. I love cross country skiing, so I might have to take you up on that Casey, but I’m going to tie a few things together and say that I really appreciated just our culture of having some peaceful time off around Christmas. It was really nice to get back with family, recharge and reset and really excited heading into the new year. I want to couple that with I guess some humility and realization that it may not have been as peaceful for everyone, so huge shout out to the support team and great support update today by Chris. But thank you guys so much for coming back and dealing with a big queue and working through that. So appreciate that, really excited and charged up for ’23.
Josh Clemente (45:51):
Love it. Mercy.
Mercy Clemente (45:57):
It was exciting to have the membership renewal stuff go through. Just I remember when memberships was brought up as an idea of changing the plan and now that it’s come full circle and people are actually renewing was kind of crazy to see in the queue. Even though it’s hectic, it was exciting. So it’s exciting to think what 2023, all the things that are going to happen this year versus the past few. And then personally, my parents are coming to Austin for I think the weekend TBD how long, so excited for that.
Josh Clemente (46:28):
Same. Sonja. Oh, we got you on mute.
Casey Means (46:44):
We can’t hear you Sonja.
Sonja Manning (46:44):
Okay. I just have to talk with Tony after this about my mic system. A super fun photo Mercy, by the way. I love that, your Zoom photo. Okay, so I am feeling super energized also for 2023, especially from a call that Casey and I had yesterday, a Q&A with members that was done as a demand capture experiment. It was probably more of a successful member engagement experiment than demand capture, but it was just this incredible group of 20 members and just their depth of questions and their appreciation and their curiosity and seeing how Levels is truly changing the way they live their life was super inspiring and exciting and I want to do more community calls in the future because that was really energizing for me.
(47:25):
And personally, everyone in my family and my partner’s family got COVID over the holidays except for me somehow. I don’t know how I escaped it, and so we are making up for some lost time over the holidays and I’m going kayaking up in the Channel Islands tomorrow morning. So that should be really fun.
Josh Clemente (47:43):
That sounds awesome. Sorry to hear about the fam. We also got hit pretty hard. Matt.
Matt Flanagan (47:52):
What everybody else said about 2023, really excited for it, but I’ve been really pleased to see the autonomy agents getting onboarded and ramped up over this past week. This was their first week just really digesting our onboarding documents and just all the culture videos and everything, and it’s just really cool to see them engaging with us in Loom and really diving in and talking about what they appreciate about the existing documentation. It just goes to show how long of a way the documentation culture we have here at Levels is, and I’m really appreciative for that as they get ramped up. So I’m really excited about their progress there, and then personally headed to Florida next week to hopefully get some warm weather and swim with manatees. So that’s the update. Hope everybody has a good week.
Josh Clemente (48:40):
Very nice. Love it. Maz.
Maziar Brumand (48:44):
Hi everyone. On the product side, the thing that has been really exciting is the experiment that Casey has been doing. She’s been doing an experiment with a 100 members with CGM and without CGM to test the hypothesis, some of the hypothesis that we’re designing to, and it’s just been really fascinating seeing their feedback, their pain points. It is just unreal to see this 100 people interact with Casey, and it’s really encouraging, the results. And I just want to say a big thanks to Casey and all the team that has been supporting her to actually stand up this experiment in a true Levels fashion of testing stuff before we build it. So big thanks to Casey and everybody that’s been supporting that. On the personal side, it’s been raining here for about two weeks and looks like it’s about to stop, but who knows? So hope get out and do [inaudible 00:49:36]. Thanks.
Josh Clemente (49:39):
Awesome. We need to call that experiment the Casey bot to refer back to the early days of the David bot. Chris.
Chris Jones (49:51):
I completely echo a lot of the comments of what people are excited about. The roadmap, where we’ve come, what we’ve done, all the exciting things that we have planned for this year, super jazzed and just can’t wait. A couple specifics, I love the update from Karen on the signup 3.0. The changes look great, and as you back it up with data, a 33% lift in conversion rate is massive and they’re just getting started. So just being able to do things around clarity and making it be mobile friendly, there’s just so much to be gained on that to unlock growth. So I don’t think we can do enough in that area. So Karen, I just want to appreciate your leadership on that program and your effort to drive it forward. It’s been awesome.
(50:41):
Also, as I mentioned I think earlier, again, big thanks to Kasim and the team for member portal 2.0. The more that we can get people to self-service and change memberships themselves, it’s a better experience, it reduces volume as opposed to them having to wait for us to ship something earlier or later or cancel. So I just really appreciate you and the team taking a cycle to think about support and reducing contact volume. So just big shout out. And then lastly, I want to thank our engineering partners in crime, those that are in the trenches with support every day. Scott, Maxine, Ian, Hall. And I realize sometimes they’re like, oh my God, will support just stop emailing me whatever this new bug is? But it’s part of the us learning in live. We launch features, we need velocity. We can’t take five months to QA something in every edge case. We learn by getting it in front of 5,000, 10,000 members around what breaks and having that quick feedback loop to be like, oh, we missed that edge case and let’s fix it quickly, that just feels great.
(51:52):
I’ve never had a company where the feedback loop between support and engineering is that fast, and I just want to make sure I want to say thank you to engineering for being such a great partner.
Josh Clemente (52:04):
Beautifully said. Chris, thank you. Applauds there. Stoked for those efforts. Awesome shout outs. Scott.
Scott Klein (52:13):
That’s sweet, Chris. Thanks bud. Professionally, I feel like we hit a new step change in there’s so much going on, I can’t keep track of it on a level that I maybe couldn’t keep track of earlier and that always feels good. I think also too we’ve added, we’ve closed up on hiring for a little bit, but the last engineers that we added I feel like I’ve just had really good interactions with. So Juan and Farhan and Rafael, good to see you guys getting up to speed and doing some stuff. On the personal front, my parents couldn’t come for Christmas because they had two flights canceled. Neither of which were on Southwest, which kind of sucked, but we just booked Hawaii in March which is going to be super fun. So I’ll go out for a week to do that. Also going to San Francisco later in the months so if anyone’s out and in town, it would be cool to see you.
(53:02):
On a weird personal front, just personal finance stuff I found this new app called Copilot, which was really cool. I just feel like all the financial stuff’s just spread way too far and it is the most beautiful by a long shot interface that I’ve ever seen. And every single day we’re going through to triage and it’s like this new cool thing that me and my wife get to do just to make sure we don’t get lazy on the money front. So anyway, I love talking about this stuff so if you guys want to talk about it or it’s super interesting to you, let me know and definitely give Copilot a try because it’s always scary to do the end of year recap and going, oh shoot, I think we should have been a little tighter this year, but we didn’t.
Josh Clemente (53:40):
Does it link with the Apple Card?
Scott Klein (53:43):
No, but you shouldn’t use the Apple Card because they’re way better options.
Josh Clemente (53:46):
All right, fine. I’m lazy though. All right, great tips. We’re getting the whole nine yards on today’s Friday Forum. I love it. ChatGPT plus Copilot, never touch your finances again. Awesome. Anyone else for shares here? We got a couple minutes left. Any great tips and tricks? All right, well, just to remind, we’ve got cafes after this. Nicole, anything on that that we should share with everyone?
Nicole Miller (54:19):
Yeah, I’ll just do a quick plug. Speaking of finances, I was going to pitch as our theme for breakouts to be 2023 goals or habits that you want to focus on, or conversely how much you hate yearly goal setting if that’s your passion too because I know that’s also a hot topic. So if you want to stick around and talk about that, we’ll have a few minutes as a big group and then we’ll break out into three or four per group and we can talk about that or you can go wherever the conversation meanders. But feel free to stick around and we’ll stay on the same link so you don’t have to go anywhere or change Zoom links. But feel free to stick around and we’ll give people a chance to leave so don’t feel like you’re trapped into the next breakouts either.
Josh Clemente (55:06):
All right, awesome. Well, I’ll give it a couple minutes here if anyone else want to share something, otherwise feel free to jump off if you need to run and I will hand it over to Nicole.