Josh (00:00):
July 1st, 2022. Welcome to Friday Forum. Start off with the achievements as usual. So happiness this week, it’s been nine consecutive weeks with happiness above 90%, so this is the rating of just our member support and member success, so this is really exciting. Replacement rates are below 10%, which is a great number for four weeks in a row. That fluctuates quite a bit and especially as we start to learn more and migrate people onto a new platform, expect some more bouncing around. But it’s great that we’ve been a month straight below 10. IRB stuff, so new members, 311 new IRB orders this week with 11 opt-outs. So we’ve got a total of 620-ish IRB shipments went out this week, which is the first with more than half IRB orders. So big milestone there as we’ve transitioned to the majority of our orders being through the new IRB program that we’ve launched. Casey recorded two tier one podcasts this week, with Drew and Shawn Stevenson, which is great, continuing to make the tour there.
(01:00):
Our new visual designer, Viktor just accepted his offer so we can finally close our visual designer role, which is huge. We’ve been searching for that and it’s going to be a really critical one to continue to up level our brand and our assets across the company. Now page V2, so you can see the now page V2 down here compared with V1 and what we’re doing is shipping the core navigation, which actually went out today I believe, to essentially validate the interaction patterns and chart. So we will have a new feature up top here, which will eventually include the stability ring, but for now we’re going to ship the core navigation, including some animations to help draw attention down to the point where the interesting insights and activities are located without necessarily putting it below the fold so it can be there, it can catch attention when people need it, but we still have the chart readily available.
(01:53):
So we’ll be able to get some good learnings here and this is a nice iterative step forward. Invitations are going out for the getting started cohort B with wearable challenge, so our goal is to get 60 members who are all starting together and going through the first 30 days of their Levels experience together. We’re going to learn quite a bit. This is a focused group so they have an interest in weight loss if they’re going through the wearable challenge. So it’ll be a really nice opportunity for us to better learn about that profile and also experiment with community.
(02:28):
Let’s see. First kickoff meeting with UK launch PR. So JTPR is going to be helping us out with our international press push. This is going to be on us sooner than we realize. Luckily JTPR has great experience with other brands as well working internationally, so this is going to be just a big moment for us when we start that press push and first meeting went well. And then we’re working on our first iteration. Fortunately there’s some overlap on the text there, sorry about that. But new checkout copy, now that we have a good sample of people going through the new checkout flow, we’ve got good conversion data, we’re starting to see where people are finding confusion. We’re getting feedback from members specifically on what they are understanding, not understanding. So we’re going to make another round of tweaks here and continue to learn as we improve that funnel.
(03:11):
Let’s see. On whole new level, we had a ton of great recordings this week. Talked about the clinical trial, talked with [LES Eid 00:03:18], just generally a bunch of great conversations as usual there. Rigid ran an IG live on Cheerios and heart health as benchmarked against glucose variability, which is an important metric of cardiovascular health. So that’s a really great… I just love seeing those opportunities to surface reality in the face of what could otherwise be misleading marketing. Talked to a couple brands including Lifetime Fitness. We showed up this week in… I think it was at least two fundraising slides in the broader industry. So companies who are raising, are really putting Levels up in the top tier of wellness products, which is really cool to see. They’re benchmarking us for opening this new market that they are then hoping to move into as well.
(04:08):
Got some good boosts from people on Twitter as usual with just our deep work culture. So you can’t really see this conversation, but a lot of people who are continuing to read and appreciate the materials we’re putting out and the relentless focus on protecting deep work and big believers in what we’re doing. And of course this is a really nice selection filter for people who want to come and work in that environment. Let’s see, we had several new YouTube videos go live, so studying glucose patterns, this was a good explanation from Taylor on the purpose of the IRB study that we’ve launched. Good conversation about non-technical SEO and how content, high quality content is always going to set companies apart. And then Austin with a few new videos this week.
(04:55):
Let’s see, and then Ali joined us officially as a Levels affiliate and we’ve got Janet and Kevin I believe from Fit Men Cook who are both potentially going to be affiliates. We’re going to be working out some opportunities in the next few weeks. And we have officially started podcast ads with Doctor’s Farmacy with Mark Hyman. All right, jumping ahead. I want to welcome Azure formally and full-time to the team. So Azure’s been working with us on the research front as a contractor for a few months now. Has been doing a ton of great work with us on thinking through enabling research, thinking through charting a path to a metabolic health program that is much greater than just continuous glucose and fully joining us now to take on research design leadership and really super excited to be working together. Azure, love to hear some words.
Azure (05:49):
Yeah, thank you guys so much. I’m super, super excited to do this, jumping in with both feet and get to know everybody and do the full onboarding while I was traveling. This is by far the most excited I’ve ever been to work with a team of people and I’m really impressed with everyone here and feel like it’s going to make me a much better researcher and hopefully if we do it right, this could be a really, really cool lab outside academia. So thanks everybody for what you’ve taught me so far and very grateful to be here. Oh wait, Josh, you’re muted now.
Josh (06:29):
Yeah. Okay. Azure’s taking over the spike detection work from Taylor as he takes off a little bit of time away, and that’s going to be I think probably the first big project that will be kind of connecting your work and time series tools into the product and helping us test a new approach to scoring and sort of a gamification as opposed to the existing metabolic health score, which is much more kind of an asymptotic or potentially step function decrease in score over the day. The stability score could potentially be something that people can really gamify and improve throughout the day. So looking forward to that. Everybody please make yourselves available to help Azure as she goes through more of the onboarding process into full-time and really becomes, yeah, full-time member on the team. So very excited for it and thanks for all the work so far.
Azure (07:24):
Thank you. And biggest shout out to Jason and Helena for everything on spike detection, so.
Josh (07:29):
Totally. All right, quick culture and kudos aside. So first off, happy two years to Tom. Hit two years on the 29th, which was Thursday. Crazy how time has flown. I have to say it feels like a lot longer than that though, so congrats Tom. We got a ton of great stuff from this week. Casey and Sonia kind of all over the map, hanging out with Allie, hitting Barry’s Bootcamp, hanging out with a whole bunch of great people at Paul Canale’s restaurant. I see Lauren, I see Sonia, I see Hui, I see Miz, I believe I see Dr. Gottfried and Sissy, Stati. So I just love seeing all that. And then hanging with Max Lugavere and Shawn and Anne Stevenson, both tier one podcasters with Drew. And then I want to highlight Justin. So this is just kind of a reinforcement and a reminder about just good approaches that we can all take to watching out for opportunities to ship faster with earlier validation.
(08:26):
So this is related to kind of shipping the stability ring and the functions around the new stability scoring. So Justin just recommended can’t we push a subset of these features out sooner than when all of them will be ready and we can then validate some of those features without necessarily meeting the remainders. And this was just a great recommendation. It’s not necessarily specific to the circumstances, but really generally it’s an opportunity for us to remind ourselves that by watching out and checking for pace of progress, but also chunking out the lessons that we want to learn, we can accelerate cycles and learnings. So always appreciate Justin for raising these opportunities and everyone else on the team, David, for being receptive to these opportunities and going with the flow. So thank you Justin.
(09:26):
All right, the main thing. So Levels shows you how food affects your health. No changes here. This week has been… we had a really big week stepping into liftoff, IRB launch and new checkout flow, new product features going out and this week has been I think a lot of stepping back and capturing learnings in order to make the next cycle of iterations. So ultimately though each of these projects stacks into this main thing, Levels is showing us how food affects our health. And so if you feel like your work could be focused on this in a more intentional way or aren’t entirely sure how it aligns with this overarching goal, definitely raise that directly in any forum on Threads, directly with your manager, however you prefer. With that, over to Moz.
Moz (10:17):
Quick update on committee objectives. The three objectives remain the same, which is member retention, improving members’ health and member acquisition. There has been a lot of work on all three starting with the great work that Sam have been leading on org structure, which will hopefully increase our velocity to achieve PMF and achieve all these three goals. So it’s really the foundation. And so we had a fireside today if you hadn’t had a chance to take part or listen to it yet, encourage you to do so, I think it will be really helpful for everyone. Hopefully this will increase our velocity and remove friction and deduplication of decisions and better and clear accountability. So please take a look at that.
(11:06):
On member acquisition, liftoff continues to make progress and I believe Jam will give an update on that. On the improve members’ health and retention there’s a lot of work going on in product, we’re really focusing on building the rails that we can build a behavior exchange framework on top of which obviously are now 2.0, which just got launched today, so we’re looking forward to getting feedback from our members on that.
(11:33):
On scoring 2.0, that has been a great collaboration between data science research, product design, and it’s really building a new muscle for the company to really be able to back test our algorithms in parallel to building the engineering scaffolding so that when it all comes together with something that we tested, we know that it works. So that’s really great. We’ve learned a lot through that process. In addition to scoring a now 2.0 is event based insights, which really will drive the just in time relevant insights to people and it’s triggered in a way that people would respond to. So there’s a work going on there both in the backend work that needs to be done and also in the content creation, which we’re going to prioritize. In addition to that, we’re working on iterating on logging and making it easier, faster, better as the next iteration.
(12:26):
So there’s design and part of work going on there and then tagging will follow to make sure that it meets the needs of logging and event based insights. So all that work are the rails. In addition to that, we’re building the first generation of behavior change by using food swaps as a launching pad, really using behavior change frameworks to design an experience that will help people make those changes. And all of this when it comes together will hopefully improve member retention and health improvement. We’ve also started to think about labs as Braden gave a presentation last week on the survey. It’s really kick starting some of the thinking there and how do we build labs as a way to measure efficacy and retention by driving towards that efficacy. In addition to labs, we’re obviously also going to look at self-report quality of life metrics and reusing glucose variability. So all of these things hopefully will come together in a way that will improve member retention and health efficacy and there’s a lot more there too that we’ll give updates on in future forms. That’s it. Thanks very much. Bye.
Josh (13:40):
All right, good comprehensive update on product direction there. Thank you Moz. And company culture from Miz.
Miz (13:50):
Hey team, sharing an update on our org and team structure memo, which got sent out last Friday. We also did a team fireside discussion about this yesterday. So if you weren’t able to catch that on Thursday, definitely catch the recording. I wanted to go over this here today because it’s important that we’re all in sync about the changes that we’ve made, why we’ve made them importantly and what this means functionally for our work. And so this starts with a little bit of background. Historically, we’ve hired heads of certain functions and when the company was much smaller, there were only a certain number of functions and each of those was a pretty discrete area and so there’s very little overlap between areas and calling it head of made it very clear what fell within that area. But as we’ve grown, those functions have grown and now we have a lot of these different functions oftentimes with the need to collaborate cross-functionally, a lot of overlap and sometimes end up in situations where there’s conflicting direction or information between these groups.
(14:49):
And so we wanted to make sense of all these different functions that have sprung up and organize a little bit more effectively so that we can collaborate better, make better decisions, and just have a better sense of where things fit within the company. And so that led us to this different grouping of functions that you see over here. What’s important to note is that this isn’t a hierarchy. This isn’t a traditional kind of org tree structure where you have the top and then everything kind of funnels down into specific trees and each of those are reporting lines. It’s a little bit more flexible than that and really just groups together functions where decisions need to be made together amongst that group of people. And so reporting lines still exist and those might be different from what you see here, but functionally, each group has a name attached to it and that person is responsible for making sure that decisions are made within that group effectively.
(15:38):
There’s still room for disagreement, for discourse, for discussion, for good ideas, for challenging of ideas, all these kinds of things that we want to encourage, experimentation, still plenty of room for that and ways to do that. And the rest of this memo explains some of those cases of how this actually ends up playing out from examples we’ve seen in the past and things that we want to embrace moving forward. Functionally, this now aligns us closer to how we were operating and then add some efficiencies in areas where we could really use it and on a day-to-day basis doesn’t change any priorities or current projects or shift anything around.
(16:15):
It’s really just an organization and a mapping exercise. With that, welcome and encourage discussion, input, thoughts. We had some good chat on the fireside yesterday, but if there’s other thoughts that you’d like to add, please add them to the bottom of this memo in the discussion section or start a Thread to bring it up. And we welcome kind of the input and experiences that people have had in the past and things that we should keep an eye out for moving forward as we see more of these kinds of changes that happen over time as the company gets larger. So that’s it. Thanks for the update here. And again, any thoughts or discussions or questions, definitely welcome and encouraged.
Josh (16:52):
All right, thank you Miz. Just want to reinforce that. Any questions or concerns, please raise them. It’s intended to be a conversation and we’ll continue to iterate, this is going to change with time of course as the company evolves. So thanks everybody for working together on it. All right, we got the JM Show.
Speaker 5 (17:17):
Cliff lift off. Take off.
JM (17:22):
Good morning from the Flight tech, the fastened seatbelt sign is still on, so please stay in your seats as we are still lifting off. On the new member side, Checkout has been live for a little more than a week. We were live last weekend and this week here is new member purchases by CGM brand. On subscription shipments, the transition continues. We are inching up towards the halfway mark on the week by week basis. As I said before, we pitch existing subscribers one or two weeks before their next shipment, so we’ll be rolling those out over the next 9 to 10 weeks until we touch everybody. And then a combined view of all outgoing CGMs by week, this was the first week and more on that as that bar expands hopefully to entirely yellow in future weeks. We did a lot of emailing this week.
(18:06):
We sent a wait list email and subject line and we did a subject line experiment. This was to about 12,000 folks. We tested five lines and what’s interesting is the test was optimized for clickthrough rate and on that dimension, the original line won. On the revenue side though a different one was the winner. And the reality is none of these numbers reach the hurdle of statistical significance unfortunately. So it was a bit of a toss up, always fun to run experiments. Important that the results are actually meaningful, whereas in this case they unfortunately were not. A couple days later, I believe this was either Wednesday or Thursday yesterday we ran an experiment, another one. This was to a larger group of about 26,000 and Checkout was the control where they went would go straight there to see Josh’s video, hey Josh, and the variation was a landing page interstitial where you would first land there, see the pretty picture of the box in the app and then continue to the Josh video.
(19:04):
And this was a response to some feedback we’ve been getting on Checkout that it’s not so clear. People are not understanding exactly what they’re getting themselves into and that was feedback we got through support and through some folks internally, but also the results of Checkout itself, in terms of the funnel. For the first week we had about 550 people buy through the new system and the conversion rate on that was a little more than 7.5%, which is a little bit low. And so we are working on some adjustments to that. Jen, with feedback from Tom and Jesse and some others and I appreciate all that feedback and keep it coming, we’re going to try to clarify a little more what exactly you’re getting yourself into when you do this and those changes should be going up sometime next week. Shifting gears for a second, it’s July 1 and now that we are nearly lifted off, we will have goals of new members and so in the blue are our first six months.
(19:57):
As you of course know, we’ve been sort of holding that back with the wait list and limits in other ways to reduce volume and keep scraper volumes low. 2,500 will be our new member goal for July, which would be the most ever, and then a 10% rate of growth month over month from that point forward. More on that soon. A bit on what comes next, the next stage when I’ll finally let you take your seatbelts off will be general availability and we’ll do this by changing some links on the website from request access to join Levels, so that anyone who comes onto the website will be able to buy right away if they so choose. Internationally request access will remain as we collect email addresses for the international wait list focused of course on the UK, which we’ll be launching later this year and we might experiment with that here and there.
(20:47):
Maybe have it go live for a couple of days in the coming week just to sort of see what that feels like after the changes are made that I talked about a minute ago and it should be very exciting from that point. Let me know if you have any questions. Thank you very much and I’ll see you soon. Have a good weekend.
Josh (21:04):
Such an exciting update. I love all the data and the visibility that we have across the steps and stages, just helping us kind of walk through this super important moment and continue to iterate finding areas of opportunity, no improvement outside of the bottleneck improves throughput, so this is a great opportunity to see the bottlenecks and continue to march towards these new goals that we’ve got. Crazy that this day is here. All right, hiring updates. So we’ve got quite a few new faces coming to join. Lynette, Taylor and Rebecca on support joining across. Lynette actually starts July 11th and then the 18th for Rebecca and October for Taylor, and then Cosima for senior product manager and now Viktor Engborg who’s coming to join as lead visual designer and he’s starting July 11th, which is quite exciting.
(21:55):
So yeah, everyone please, there are a couple Threads with some welcome surprises for these folks. Please make sure that you respond if you can and help out with those and can’t wait to start working together. All right, on that note, we still have engineering roles open, but the rest of the roles are currently down and/or filled. If you or someone you know are a good fit for the Levels culture, please continue though to check out levels.link/careers and submit information for our general fit and we’ll always reach out when new roles come available. All right. I cannot currently see, so I have to just ask, did Michael make it on the call?
Michael (22:38):
Yes.
Josh (22:39):
Awesome. Okay, sweet. Well, in that case, I want to welcome Mike, Michael, partner at Levels, CEO and co-founder of H.V.M.N, Twitter aficionado and generally a really great athlete and deep thinker on business and especially metabolic health. H.V.M.N. for those of you that don’t know, builds some pretty incredible products including ketone esters, which I know many of the folks on this call have experimented with. They’ve really pushed, I think the evolution of exogenous ketones forward along with many other products that we know and love and just love the science forward approach and the groundbreaking, I think, focus on ketosis as a performance function. So would love to hear some thoughts. Michael, thanks for taking some time to join us.
Michael (23:32):
Josh, thanks for so much for having me. Thanks everyone for being here. I don’t know if I’ve been called in aficionado before. Sounds like Italian for think boy.
Josh (23:42):
Something like that.
Michael (23:44):
But good to spend time on Twitter. We share a lot of, I think similar talking points and similar community and I know my co-founder invested really early in Levels. I invested in the crowd funding campaign that you did and there’s a million different ways I spoke at… Casey invited me to guest speak at her class at Stanford and we shout out Levels on all of our email welcome series. We’re all climbing the same hill. I ended up talking about Levels on almost every podcast I go on. I talk about Ketone IQ obviously, and people are always curious broadly, how do I think about the space? What I always say is the reason it’s the right time for Ketone IQ is because it’s the right time for hardware. People know what’s going on inside of their body, therefore they’re making more informed choices about the nutrition that they’re eating.
(24:36):
We’re promised nutrition of the future and we got acai berries, we got a lot of marketing fluff. And the forward look on the next decade I would say is that as everyone knows their glucose levels, ketone levels, HRV, sleep score, as people have more of a dashboard of what’s going on inside of their body, they’re making more objectively informed decisions and that’s where what we’re doing is really interesting with Ketone IQ. We’ve been working on exogenous ketones for several years with the… we have a $6 million contract with the Department of Defense, Special Operations Command. We work a lot with elite operators. But as you all know, everyone’s doing metabolism all the time and tool like Ketone IQ is really for anyone and everyone who’s trying to feel more alert, feel better recovery, feel more cognitive focused through what they’re doing, better endurance, stamina.
(25:32):
But the reason why now, why are ketones happening now, why is our business able to succeed now as opposed to a decade ago, I give a lot of credit to what’s going on in the overall ecosystem with hardware and just general education on metabolic health and performance. So massive kudos to what you all are doing and it’s been great, just long extended partnership all together over the years.
Josh (25:55):
Awesome. Yeah, early on, it was ketones that actually grabbed my attention because of their pretty unbelievable effects on neurophysiology and it’s pretty cool to have the full circle. Looked at Geoff Woo and the rest of the H.V.M.N team alongside you as real thought leaders who are pushing forward development of these what were otherwise clinical tools being brought to the performance and wellness world. It was reading about Dom and his work in the lab to improve central nervous system toxicity and then suddenly being able to access these same products for focus and attention and long-term brain health. It’s pretty amazing. And just love what you guys are doing and yeah, I agree. We’re rowing in the same direction. I’d love to hear from you what you’re stoked about for specifically, as you mentioned, the moment for hardware is kind of now, and I’m curious what you’re excited about in our category product specifically and/or just the metabolic biotechnology hardware space.
Michael (27:05):
And first off, if anyone wants to try out Ketone IQ who hasn’t or just… I’m not necessarily checking, if you just want another freebie, shoot me an email. I think someone on your side might be coordinating a form or just email me, [email protected]. We’ll make sure to send over a bottle. We have a ton of other information I don’t want to… we can put the specific biochemistry around ketones aside for a sec, but yeah, if you can organize your requests, send me over anyone on your team who would like to try Ketone IQ, we’ll get some over. Yeah, question around hardware, why do we think it is interesting now or what is interesting now? Continuous ketone monitoring, super interesting where glucose and ketones are always cousins, where generally when you have low glucose, you have higher ketones and vice versa, and so there’s the interplay between them. So it’s cool that we have continuous glucose monitoring now.
(28:03):
It’s really cool if we have continuous glucose and ketone monitoring, so that’s an easy answer. First most exciting thing is continuous ketone monitoring is really cool. One way that we say it, which is… one way we say it is that our goal is to help people spend more time with elevated ketone levels, which you can do by eating low carb, you can do by fasting, you can do by exercising, you can do by drinking Ketone IQ. So there’s a lot of overlap with the exact same things that you advise to people. Our one addition maybe is that we have a tool in the toolkit that directly elevates your ketone level. So I would say that’s what’s most exciting, but I think there’s a lot else with… I think pregnancy tracking, fertility tracking’s going to be super interesting. I think that… not I think, fertility rates are dropping, a lot of people are having a harder time conceiving. There’s a lot of innovation going on in that space, and I think that that’s going to be a really ripe area for development.
(29:05):
If the question specifically is what hardware, what consumer hardware around health am I most bullish around or what use case would be around, I think fertility… I think people are down to spend money. People will spend $10,000, $20,000 plus plus to get pregnant. So if there’s something in your daily life that can help you track this hormone level or this biomarker level and bring it into a X few hundred dollar price point like you guys have done, I think that’s a massive win. To me that would be huge, so.
Josh (29:37):
Ditto. Yeah, the biological observability concept that we are developing on is really all about this. It’s about not just having therapeutic targets, not just having acute long-term risk factors, but really a general awareness of the operating function of all of the different systems in the body, and it’s really incredible how little information we have continuously. I know everybody on this call agrees with you that there are the fundamentals that are shared across all of these different goals, weight loss and fertility and so on, the shared cellular function, but there are specifics that could really help to grab an edge and better understand what choices we’re making that can improve our chances of succeeding in these goals. So yeah, couldn’t agree more.
(30:26):
We of course, all think alike in this category, it seems. So yeah, everybody, Michael, for you, your team, I know we always want to make ourselves available if there’s any way we can help. And then vice versa, if anybody on this call, H.V.M.N team is just awesome, always willing to help out, share thoughts, share resources, so let’s continue that collaboration and get the team on Ketone IQ so we can function even better. I think I need some right now after yesterday’s travel day.
Michael (30:55):
Yeah. And yeah, just to double down in that, at any level, any function, I think all of our… at the founder level, we’re all friends. But it’s like if your supply chain person wants to talk to Garston, our supply chain person, I know our chief of staffs talk. Any position anywhere is in the company, Ben, I know you’re talking with Mike, our growth marketing guy, so anyone at any level, we want to trade notes, free open invitation. It’s totally win-win.
Josh (31:24):
Love it. Well, thanks a lot for taking time. I know you had a packed morning and likely have a packed full day, so thanks for joining the team and sharing some thoughts and really excited to continue to open this space up together.
Michael (31:37):
Thanks for having me.
Josh (31:38):
All right. Okay, with that we’re jumping into individual contributions. So I’m going to pop open my participants list and we will take it from the bottom this week, which means Tony, you’re kicking us off.
Tony (32:00):
Sorry about that. Yeah, just personal side, obviously looking forward to the 4th of July weekend. Then if there’s any Stranger Things fans out there, definitely going to be binging that this weekend. It’s the end of the season. So yeah, looking forward to that.
Josh (32:23):
I’ve watched season one, but I’m behind. But I’ve heard great things.
Tony (32:27):
Yeah.
Josh (32:28):
Enjoy. Tom?
Tom (32:32):
Hello. I forgot Stranger Things is coming back. I’m excited for that too. It’s one of the few shows I’ve watched. Personally excited to have a low key weekend in New York. The city’s quieter, but a lot of my friends are around, so we’re going to be getting together. Professionally, so much. I’m just excited to be lifting off and I’m excited for the… frankly, I think I’m excited for the pressure ahead to be accountable to monthly growth targets. I think we’re going to learn a ton and it’s going to be really interesting. And just grateful for our culture. I did a lot of writing this week and was also around a couple of friends who were complaining a lot about their jobs and companies and the politics and the bureaucracy, and I just kept telling them that we don’t have any of that and Levels is perfect. Not really, but.
Josh (33:27):
Come on, Tom. You’re two years in now. You got to evangelize. No, I agree. I took a think week two weeks ago and it was just kind of a weird experience to be able to just singularly focus on something important and know that the team had my back to be able to do that. It’s really, really cool. Happy two years. Haney.
Tom (33:50):
Thank you.
Haney (33:50):
That came up fast. Yeah, professionally I agree with Tom. The liftoff stuff between JM’s updates and the landing pages and emails going out, it’s just fun to see a shift into this gear and see this machine being turned onto that particular challenge and everything that lies ahead for that. Personally, I’m excited. I’m going to a concert tonight by myself because that’s a thing you do sometimes when you’re a parent and I’m going to see a ’90s hip hop band. If anybody recognizes its name, give me love in the chat. I’m going to see the Digable Planets.
Josh (34:27):
Well, I know what I’m going to be listening to on Spotify today. Enjoy. Mike Di?
Mike Di (34:35):
Shit. Yeah, so lifting off and then I’d say product, new product direction. I think a lot of things that we’ve talked about for a long time are really taking shape. Specifically had a conversation with Moz, David around event-based insights, something we’ve been talking about for a really long time. Really excited to see that come to life and really hopefully help our members succeed. And personally, down at the beach, get some work done, get some sun, work out, pumped.
Josh (35:18):
Enjoy. Ditto. Lauren.
Lauren (35:24):
I am here in Toronto with my parents, hence the masking situation at the moment. And professionally, yeah, it was really fun to see everyone in San Francisco or actually in Oakland. Everyone came within five minutes of my apartment, which felt like a real luxury for me, and it was just great to see everyone. Sarah Godfrey was there with her partner and we had a really nice time. So that was a big highlight for me in the last week.
Josh (35:49):
A lot of fun. Jen?
Jen (35:55):
Liftoff is just so, so exciting. And 4th of July plans, long weekend. It’ll all be so fun.
Josh (36:05):
Awesome. Have fun. Hui?
Hui (36:09):
Yeah, workwise really excited now V2 got released and really excited about… we are doing a faster release and quicker experiment with scoring V2 and really shout out to Justin and David being their culture steward here. Yeah, personalized… I guess, yeah, nothing too special. Just looking forward to the long weekend. Yeah.
Josh (36:39):
Nice. Galit?
Galit (36:43):
Levels wise, definitely lift off and also what Moz was talking about, how the new way that we’re going to be working with product design, data science and engineering altogether, really exciting. And then personally finally leaving middle of nowhere and moving to Brooklyn this weekend. So if anyone’s in New York until September, let me know. I’m around.
Josh (37:10):
Very cool. Congrats. It’s a big move. Dom?
Dom (37:18):
Yeah, hopefully y’all can hear me. I’m driving right now, but personally I’ll start there. Lots of exciting meetings this week with university, government and industry and Levels wise, I think I’ve had conversations this week with commercial space flight mission that’s going to be a twins mission, actually a twin study like Scott and Mark Kelly, but a different twins were selected and they’re super laser focused on metabolism and mitochondria. So with commercial space flight, they would love to have partners, industry partners, and unlike NASA where you need a space research contract. So I’m opening up the discussion and we’re talking about CGMs and things like that, so maybe some opportunity with Levels to work there. I’ve let them know about Levels and they’re super intrigued and excited. So this liftoff would be 2024 or 2025, this twin study.
Josh (38:13):
Yeah, we’re going to have to jump on that. Yeah, Dom definitely let us know how we can support on that even though it might be a small scale. This is something that combines interests for me.
Dom (38:26):
I will send you a white paper on this mission, it’s with Axiom.
Josh (38:32):
Amazing.
Dom (38:33):
Commercial space flight.
Josh (38:35):
That’s exciting. It’s only a matter of time till CGM’s in space. That’s what they say. All right, great. Have a great weekend. Cissy.
Cissy (38:45):
So cool, Dom. On the Levels side, definitely the liftoff. Really amazing to see all the work come to life and starting to see some of the behavior change experiments that we’re running in the app. And I got an opportunity to work with Haney and Jen closely this week and saw the power of copywriting through some of the getting started emails. So thank you both for showing the magic of copywriting and just running different experiments and Drip. Feel like I hadn’t really used Drip to its full capacity and now it’s pretty cool to see all the segments you can run and things like that. Personally, I’m feeling a bit under the weather, which is a bummer because originally I was supposed to go on my first backpacking trip in Yosemite, so thinking it’s going to be a low key weekend and hopefully it’s not Covid.
Josh (39:33):
Sorry to hear that. Yosemite’s awesome, but it’s not going anywhere. Chris.
Chris (39:40):
Well, I feel like I now need to change what I’m excited about with Levels of its Levels going to the moon literally. So that’s pretty cool. Related to that, I guess I would say I’m excited as we to undo a lot of what Ben said for months and months and years of the, “We are not in growth mode of the,” to say, “Okay, I guess we are in growth mode.” And to unleash Tom and Jackie to start hitting those goals and as they have goals and targets to a degree we can do it, I think is pretty exciting around like, “All right, we had a good month or bad month and just naturally comes in,” versus, “Can we actually hit it constantly in terms of setting goals for ourselves and all the levers?” So that’s going to be really exciting to operationalize the performance marketing and so that’s cool. Personally, on Sunday I leave for the Great White North for my week off to go fishing off Vancouver Island, so I would expect to be completely off the grid whether I like it or not.
(40:39):
Miz has instructed me to uninstall my Threads app and he’ll be making sure I’m not absolutely watching to make sure I’m a good citizen. So I’m excited to absolutely unplug and catch some fish.
Josh (40:52):
Sounds incredible. Enjoy that. Azure?
Azure (40:58):
Hey, I feel like starting with personal stuff makes sense first. I just got back from the longest trip I think I’ve ever taken around Europe and then came back excited to start full time, moved and then was kind of amazed at how many things had changed coming back to lift off, coming back to all of the updates and the push on the spike detection algorithm and then also just the excitement around starting internal and community experiments. It was the nicest fire hose. So that’s what I’m excited about.
Josh (41:33):
Amazing. Excited once again to have you joining us full-time. Ben?
Ben (41:41):
Yeah, a few things. Super stoked on… Cissy’s been working on a bunch of community things specifically, this getting to green library, which is very cool to see. And then we’ve been talking about challenges on and off as part of the core strategy and we had a conversation last week and she moved very quickly, talked to Taylor, talked to Azure, and now we’ve got something in the pipeline to test again, kind of like Koch challenge where it’s going to be internal first, but just love seeing the speed, the execution and the reason why we keep experimenting.
(42:14):
Also, JM digging in, grabbing a shovel and just breaking apart pages in WordPress so that we can redesign landing pages. That type of building puts such a big smile on my face. It makes me want to run through walls when I see that. So huge hat tip to that. And then the other thing, Miz has been from… I mean he’s always doing so much, but you realize all the work that he’s done when… had some people ops things that we had to look into for Pam and I, and he went so far above and beyond that I’m like, “Man, what are you doing?” And he’s like, “This is our responsibility. That’s what we do as a team.” But it was not unnecessary, it was so appreciated, but completely unexpected. So just such a huge hat tip that we have a team that works like that and cares so much. So yeah, just that really means a lot. So that’s it. And then personally, Tom Segura’s has got this new book out, so if you like Segura, go and check it out.
Josh (43:18):
Nice. Great update and great shout out. Couldn’t agree more on our own Miz. You’re up.
Miz (43:25):
Thanks Ben. Yeah, appreciate it. I genuinely enjoy working here. It’s fun and wholesome. I’m dying of laughter over here, but it’s fun that we get to build this company. Watching Haney and Tom Bicker is great, super excited about Viktor and his excitement about joining, but also in the work itself, seeing the collaboration has been great between the ops team and copywriting and product and growth and community and all these things coming together, which is awesome. On the personal side, it is foggy in San Francisco. It’s reliably foggy on July 4th in San Francisco every single year, 55 degrees, cloudy. Our fireworks are less like bursts of light in clouds if even that. But I’m going blueberry picking tomorrow, which is really wholesome and enjoyable up in Sevastopol to get some sun. And I dropped a link in the chat because it’s raining.
Josh (44:25):
Wait, what? I have to open this up. Okay. Anchovies are raining from the sky in San Francisco. All right. That’s a great update. Let’s see. On my end, I am… yeah, we were describing two years ago our circumstances as a twin engine boat with an anchor dragging on the sea floor, and that was the non-scalable architecture for our data. And so now being in a position where we are able to open the gates and now able to press the accelerator for the first time without a boat anchor dragging us down and really just flex our muscles and see what we can do is just super exciting. So yeah, totally agreed. I think we’re really set up well to do something big over the next few months and it’s going to be really quite exciting. So stoked for that. I am personally back in New Jersey, Strathmore, New Jersey where I lived through Covid and hanging out at the shore, which is exciting. Travel was absolutely terrible yesterday.
(45:32):
I did not sleep well. My brain feels like it’s filled with pudding and so I’m going to hopefully catch up on some sleep. But with that, great week everybody. Really appreciate all of the learning and iterating and rapid WordPress action. And yeah, have a great weekend. Have a great fourth and I will see you all soon.