Josh Clemente (00:00):
Welcome to Friday Forum, July 22nd, 2022. This week, so we’ve had continued progress on … well, I’ll jump into the product stuff first. So continued progress on the scoring V2 model. So internally live today, including the stability score and the stability ring. So that should be going out to the team and we’ll be able to get some internal feedback before we push that out to members. And then engineering work is starting on our new logging flow, which you can kind of see some of the simplified mocks here. Goal is to just continue to drive down the overhead to get a log into the system. Beyond that, smart fulfillment and liftoff cleanup have both shipped. Along with an update to, it sounds like a feature flag issue that we’ve experienced, which was preventing the glucose game from going out. So this project has been kind of in flux, trying to figure out what was preventing it from going to members for a few months now.
(00:57):
It’s a really exciting project because it allows people to have an interactive way of understanding what to expect with the glucose chart before they ever see their own data. So lots of questions crop up when people see a blood sugar curve for the first time, and this is a way to, prior to seeing that, interact, play around with what the different foods and exercise can do to the curve. So very excited to have this out and looking forward to some learnings there. Okay, so moving on on the content side, we’re building out an email preferences page. This will allow people to really have more control over what types of content they want, set their preferences, cadence, et cetera. It just gives a little bit more control and I think that’s what we’re all about here, as well as experimenting with a new member story email.
(01:43):
So this will be essentially trying to find opportunity to get people who have shared goals, examples from our existing member base, like Charlotte’s, to help them understand why one might use Levels and what they could potentially learn. And so we’ll be experimenting with that new email cycle in the upcoming weeks. We’ve got replacement rates holding at 5%. So this is a significant improvement over where they were just a few weeks ago. Pretty dramatic benefit to us in terms of logistics and overhead. Content leverage is at 10 x, which is huge. And recently IRB new orders exceeded all subscriptions this past week. So this is definitely a great directional change. That said, it’s coming with a tremendous amount of overhead for our support team. Definitely want to highlight them a couple times in this meeting as the efforts have been amazing to keep up with the huge increase in volume since liftoff, as well as the changes in the types of support issues that we’re experiencing.
(02:44):
As new orders exceed subscriptions you have, that means a significantly higher number of people who are new to the Levels system, Levels ecosystem, Levels membership, they have the same or they have different degrees of interest in learning the very basics, especially as it relates to a new project like IRB, the new platform that we’re using for that. So again, just want to highlight the team there. On team topics, so Jesse is going to transition to the research team to continue supporting on major initiatives like the IRB. Mercy is taking on DRI for some partnerships projects on digital channel growth. And Mike D is taking on DRI for event-based insights. So I just want to highlight as people kind of navigate around and try new things, it’s always something we want to support.
(03:32):
On the research side, recently implemented updated threads and help scout frameworks. So improving the way in which issues are surfaced between ops, engineering and research. So we need to really continue to learn and improve the way those interfaces are handled so that those pipelines are really efficient. So this is then the new voice of research which Stati posted this morning. I highly recommend, it’s a sort of a long update as it’s their first one, but it’s really helpful. We had a record week for cash receipts, tracking well ahead of, well, tracking super well for our July run rate, slightly ahead of estimate for month one liftoff. This is great if you want to keep track of burn and how cash receipts relate to overall growth numbers, definitely check out Riley’s update. And we’re continuing to scale content and learning on YouTube. So we’ve been reposting, for example, this is Ben Bickman’s video recut and we’re seeing great retention, great click-through numbers.
(04:26):
So this is our sort of flywheel effect as we develop content, we continue to reuse it and scale it over time, as opposed to it sort of ethereally dropping off. And then lastly, we’ve got Tim Ferriss and Andrew Huberman podcast ads locked in. Those will be going out in the next two weeks. And Tom posted a really thoughtful post in threads about partnership analytics. We’ve had a couple outliers like David Sinclair’s podcast, which have really shifted the numbers dramatically for us. And the focus as we are now in growth mode is going to be A, continuing to find outliers, but B, settling into predictability. So it’s often unpredictable to know who’s going to be an outlier, who’s going to really drive numbers for us on a given month. And as we transition into growth, it’s all about consistency. So really helpful, I highly recommend everyone check that out to get a feel for that mindset.
(05:21):
Couple other things. So Lauren was on the Beyond Influential podcast, Miz on The Remote Show. Love seeing our team continue to scale into podcasts. We had a couple Levels in the wild sightings this week in New York, which is always cool. I personally saw this young lady in the farmer’s market with Casey, which is a great experience. Had a ton of love this week on Twitter for generally our transparent culture and the way the Levels Podcast continues to take on big challenging issues in society. We had Alice Magnola post her first video as an affiliate and continuing to get some great content from Bobby Parrish at Flavcity. Oh yeah, and then on the UK side, we’ve been approaching a deal with Fittest PR, which is JTPR’s UK partnership. So that’ll be probably the agency that we go with for the UK scaling.
(06:13):
All right, with that, Dr. Wahls is an advisor member and huge, huge thought leader in the world of metabolic health, and reversed her own MS using paleo principles. She’s been in our ecosystem for a few months now. We partnered with her formally. Dr. Wahls, I’m sorry Casey was not able to join and intro you, but I’m very excited to have you join us this morning. Thanks for taking some time.
Dr. Terry Wahls (06:35):
Great. Well thanks for having me. I’m going to first highlight that I’m doing some very interesting research. We’ve got a large clinical trial comparing a olive oil based ketogenic diet, the modified paleo elimination diet that I’ve used in my recovery and I’ve studied for nearly a decade now. And usual diet. We’ll be having 156 people that we enroll and we’ll follow them for two years. We’ll get clinical outcomes, patient report outcomes, MRIs at the initial visit. They’ll come back in three months for repeat lipids, glucose, A1C, and then back in two years for repeat clinical measures, patient reported outcomes and MRIs. So this will be the largest and longest dietary clinical trial in the study of MS. We’re very excited. We have screened 700 people through our online mechanism, of which about 280 are eligible. And so we’re in the process of verifying their diagnoses, verifying their interest, and getting them hopefully actually enrolled. That’s sort of a lengthy process, but again, we’re very, very excited about that.
(08:02):
We also have gone back to do some interesting … look at our existing data that we have from the recent study that we had done comparing the low saturated fat diet, known as the swank diet, and the modified paleo diet, known as obviously the Wahls diet. And we had captured glucose, A1C, lipids, insulin, BMI weight. Unfortunately we did not think to get a waist circumference. So we can’t quite get all of the measures for metabolic syndrome, but we’re using BMI as a surrogate and we’re working on a manuscript with that data. So we are looking at the impact of metabolic health on disease activity, on patient reported outcomes, clinical outcomes from our existing study. And we’ve added some of those measures to our new study of the EDQ. And Taylor and I have been having some conversations about potential research collaborations with Levels and we’re trying to sort out what we can design and do within the budgetary constraints that will be necessary for a successful project. And with that, if there are any questions or comments?
Josh Clemente (09:34):
Well I will speak for the team and just say that first of all, huge, huge fan of your work, really appreciate having you as an advisor and a believer in what Levels is trying to do with distributing real time biological awareness. And cannot wait to support on the research that you’re working on, especially as we get more familiar with and more capable of doing distributed remote research. I think this is the direction of the future, is being able to support on cutting edge and large scale end of many trials that provide end of many data points on the individual. So Dr. Wahls, I would love to just hear, as we kind of transition to the next phase of the meeting, would love to just hear any thoughts that you have, what you’re excited about for the future of first of all functional medicine and metabolic health, what are you excited for?
Dr. Terry Wahls (10:28):
I think we’ve known for some time that metabolic syndrome, diabetes accelerates aging, shortens the time to walker, wheelchair disability, job loss across many disease states, autoimmune disease states, and of course multiple sclerosis, which I care about greatly. And it’s really very interesting that there are some clinical trials investigating the use of metformin for its beneficial impact on anti-aging microglia. And now we’re looking is that going to translate into improved clinical outcomes, patient reported outcomes. We also know that there’s a higher incidence of metabolic dysfunction in autoimmunity in multiple sclerosis. So to me it makes a lot of sense that it’s worth investigating what happens for people who have a couple of risk factors for metabolic syndrome but don’t yet have metabolic syndrome or are unaware that they have it, what happens if we give them continuous glucose monitoring? What happens if we would combine continuous glucose monitoring in an [inaudible 00:11:46]?
(11:48):
What I would hypothesize is that we’ll have certainly improved patient reported outcomes, clinical outcomes. It’s not clear to me how long we would have to follow people to be able to pick up that difference. Can we see it in a short study that’s 12 weeks? Would we have to follow people six months? Would we have to follow them for a year? So there’ll be some preliminary work that would need to be done to tease out how long it would take and how we identify the people who would be most likely to have the greatest benefit.
Josh Clemente (12:27):
Well, it’s all very exciting and personally, I think that what’s most potentially beneficial is the large or the overall scale as we get the general population IRBs that we’re working on to scale on the order of 50 to 100,000 people. It’s going to provide, I think, a nice data to be able to compare some of this focused research specifically on, for example, autoimmunity or other subset disorders that we want to better understand. We’ll have a datum that we can compare that to, which previously didn’t exist. And so I know that speaking for the whole team, we’re very excited to be able to better understand the underlying factors that are involved in the development of specific conditions, as well as overall metabolic syndrome.
(13:14):
So Dr. Wahls, I can’t thank you enough first of all for supporting on the messaging. If you haven’t listened to Dr. Wahls and Casey Means podcasts, On A Whole New Level, I highly recommend it, it gives a really nice background and introduces what Dr. Wahls is working on, to our community and also can’t recommend The Wahls Protocol enough, if you’d like to read more about her work. Thank you for joining us on this Friday morning. I know we’re all very excited to have you in our orbit and as a supporter. And yeah, I know you’re super busy, if you’d like to stick around, we have quite a full meeting and you’re more than welcome to stay and see what we’re up to.
Dr. Terry Wahls (13:52):
Well, I’ll hang out for a while. I have another meeting I’ll have to jump off to, but I will hang out for a bit and see what your meetings are about.
Josh Clemente (13:59):
Fantastic. Thank you very much Dr. Wahls. Okay, jumping ahead. I want to welcome Lynette Diaz. She’s joined the support team this past week. Lynette, couldn’t be more excited to have you on the team. Love to hear a few words.
Lynette Diaz (14:15):
Hey, the entire Levels team and everyone who’s here, I am absolutely thrilled to be here. I’m sure you’ve seen me popping around on Facebook and YouTube and loving you guys everywhere, on Instagram. And to be part of this amazing culture and this amazing team with these incredible minds is just beyond, I’m kind of floating on cloud nine still. But I’m super excited to be part of support and help more people use Levels and get to know Levels and really reap the benefits of understanding all that metabolic data.
Josh Clemente (14:48):
Well, we’re super excited to have you, couldn’t come at a better time to have your support on support as we scale and as the team continues to have new challenges. So to everyone, please continue to make yourselves available to Lynette as she gets ramped up through onboarding.
Lynette Diaz (15:03):
Thank you. Thank you.
Josh Clemente (15:05):
Tripping ahead to Rebecca as well. So Rebecca joined this week, also in support. Again, couldn’t be more excited to have the team growing with such awesome folks. Rebecca would love to hear some thoughts.
Rebecca Breske (15:14):
Hey everyone, I’m Rebecca. It’s nice to meet you all. Like Lynette, I’m still in that honeymoon phase. This has been an amazing experience so far. I’m really excited to be here. I live in Florida with my fiance, Justin. We moved here in 2020 after living in Chicago for 12 years. A little bit about my background, after I moved to Florida, I started my own business as an integrative nutrition health coach. And I am super passionate about helping others get in the driver’s seat of their health, which is part of what brought me to Levels. I’ve seen firsthand with my own health and with many of my clients, how simply changing what we eat can change the trajectory of our entire lives. So prior to becoming a health coach, I was a key player in the Chicago restaurant group that opened Maple & Ash, which is a high-end steakhouse and one of the top 10 grossing independent restaurants in the country.
(16:06):
So I was the first employee there. So I had my hands in every project from sourcing steak knives, to picking fabrics for the interior, creating the brand, hosting investor meetings and dinners and traveling to new locations to oversee new restaurant openings. So joining Levels was kind of like just a right next step for me, combining my passion for empowering others in their health and then all of my experiences in the restaurant from the early days of startup and understanding the importance of culture, to the high end level of service that we provided. So aside from the mission here, I’m mostly excited about the culture and the people and working with all of you and I can’t wait to see what we can create together.
Josh Clemente (16:50):
Love it. Yeah, it’s worth mentioning that both Lynette and Rebecca seem to live quite close together in Florida, Melbourne, I’ve visited several times. I used to work out Cape Canaveral pretty frequently and would go down to Melbourne for food and seafood in particular. Very excited to have the team growing, especially support, which is such a huge tip of the spear for our interactions with our members and it sets the experience bar for people who are new to Levels and don’t quite understand us yet. And so having people like yourselves who are passionate about what we’re doing and really personally cared prior to knowing Levels and just recognize that the culture fits, just couldn’t be more excited for us. So thanks Lynette and Rebecca. Glad to have you onboard.
(17:37):
All right, jumping into culture and kudos. Crowded slide this week. We’ve got a couple meetups. So Hao, Scott and Jeremy and Jeremy’s wife were able to get some kayaking in out in Seattle, which looks fantastic. Jeremy also hit two years with Levels, so shout out Jeremy. We had a New York City meetup where three different dinners that happened. I was able to join for some of it. People were popping in and out. Tons of great stuff happening. My bingo cards moved in the right direction this week and I think several others did as well. So I believe people are still doing some coworking there. And then a couple kudos segments here. So JM this past week did a really great retro, or maybe it was the week prior, but want to highlight this because we have an increased focus on retros at the company. So retrospective, it’s essentially the part of the process for any project where we close the loop with the rest of the team.
(18:28):
So we synthesize learnings and then communicate those. And that’s a critical component of us iteratively getting better. And JM, prior to really the release of the retro memo that Sam put out just recently, JM made a really nice example of what this could look like with the purchase flow checkout revisions. So if you didn’t watch that, definitely recommend it. It’s data driven, it’s concise and it’s actionable. And this is what we’re going to be doing quite a bit more of as we scale retros across the org. Shout out JM for doing that. And then want to just take a second again to highlight the support team, those who have been with us for a while, those who are new, there’s just a ton happening there. It’s hard to understand the volumes for many of us who really aren’t in the help scout queue day after day, but just so much work is happening continuously to keep our members satisfied, keep our happiness high. So thank you all.
(19:20):
And then specifically Mercy set a goal for inbox zero even if just for 30 seconds, and hit that goal. So we were able to get to a help scout queue of zero, which is amazing. And then Jesse also made some technical changes to enable auto replies inside of help scout, just to keep people aware and set expectations up about SLAs due to higher volume. And these are the types of things that again, they manage expectations and keep people happy. And so just love seeing the team in action. Looking forward of course to being able to lower the volumes and lower the burden on support. But really appreciate all of you for just keeping us in our members good graces.
(20:02):
Okay, company objectives. So the main thing has not changed. Levels shows you how food affects your health. The way that we’re working towards that is through our top objectives of member retention, member health improvement, and new member acquisition. We are now in growth mode. So that is what has unlocked the acquisition and retention objectives. With that, we will hear from Moz, give me one sec.
Moz (20:28):
Product process update for this week. There are a number of things that we have been working on cross-functionally to improve our product development process. Number one is we are investing heavily in developing event-based insights. And now Mike D is the DRI end-to-end for these insights, which means that he’s responsible not only for the creation of these things, but the quality of how it speaks to members and how it helps them with behavior change and insights. So he’s now end-to-end empowered to make decisions on this process, which will be really important because it’d be one person that will look end-to-end on quality and effectiveness of these event-based insights. The second thing that we’ve been doing is really creating connections between different parts of the company, where Mike D will work with Casey, Sonya, Haney to actually bring the best of our content into the app in a way that’s obviously actionable and digestible.
(21:24):
So I think this change will make a big difference and it’s now creating event based insights. The first batch launched after [inaudible 00:21:32] finished the backend for showing these, triggering these insights based on what’s happening in the app for our members. So really exciting. I think this can really accelerate how we show content to members and add value in a big way and tackle the things that we’ve all been talking about in a just in time manner so that it’s within context and help members make that change. So really exciting. I think the second process updates that David has been working on is how do we actually test systematically our features internally and then externally, now that we’re general availability, to make sure it’s high quality and everybody tests it. I think there’ll be four steps. One is alpha, which is the people that are working on product will see the half finished product to make sure that it is what we intended.
(22:17):
Once that is finished, it will go to internal beta, which is effectively the finished feature, and for everybody within the company to use it and provide feedback on usability, bugs and things like that. In parallel or shortly thereafter, there will be an external beta, which will be a combination of our trusted members, plus new members, to test out the app to make sure that it is landing with our members. And again, it’s focused on bugs, usability. Once we finish those two phases, we’ll roll it out to general availability. But in that, we will make sure that if we’re very confident that both the betas and the alphas have resulted well, we may launch it to everybody or we may decide that we only do a partial launch on general availability. But this systematic approach for testing will help us to make sure we deliver high quality product to our members as we’re exiting beta and into general availability. So this process will be in place.
(23:13):
The second thing that we’re going to do is put a robust analytics analytics process in place, which effectively we will look at four sources of data to judge the success of the feature. Number one, we’ll look at [inaudible 00:23:29] and how people are interacting with the app. Number two, there will be a qualitative survey that we’ll send out to our members to see how they’d like the new feature. This will be a number of questions. And number three will be we will work closely with support to really keep an eye on things that we want to hear members feedback from, which will be effectively through support and through our social media channels. So this will be a proactive way to get feedback or collect feedback through these channels. And then fourth one will be things like NPSs and app reviews if the feature is picked up.
(24:02):
So we’ll monitor those four things and make sure that when we launch a feature, we can measure success. And obviously we’ll define those success criteria before we go into that process. The next thing is focusing on the product roadmap. As now we are coming to an end with the five pillars, which is we have shaped them and they’re in various stages of production. The now 2.0 which is now live, the scoring, which is now live in the beta. So recommend everybody to try that. The logging which was handed off with engineering this week and will start getting built, which I think both David and Alan will provide a walkthrough in, which is really exciting, really getting our logging fast and structured. And tagging, which is we’re investigating with the data science team and engineering and potentially external solution for the short term that gets us most of the way there, and make really tagging a great experience, it’s all complete and extraction to structured data will be strong.
(25:10):
So as we kind of complete this phase of focusing on improving the table stakes, so the rails for our current product, we’re transitioning into the features that will actually retain people over a long period of time. And so this is basically building on top of a 30 day, 90 day product, which is focused on helping you understand how food affects your health, into a product that people, be it the core component of people’s lives to be healthy. So it will turn a product from what it is today to a multi-year necessary product for health of our members. And so we’re going to start really focusing on that aspect of the app and developing features for that so we can actually be the trusted partner for our members. So that’s a big thing that we’re going to start working on with doing product design and the various teams. So excited to kick off that phase in the next week or so. That’s it for this week. Thanks very much.
Josh Clemente (26:11):
Thanks Moz. Yeah, so just to kind of reiterate what he was closing on there is right now putting the core rails of the product in place, is the focus. And then transitioning to, in order to retain membership and keep people involved in what Levels it’s building, it needs to provide value that is equivalent or greater. And so that value is improving our member’s health. So we need to … ultimately we’re transitioning from a metabolic awareness program that is helping people for the first time connect with the closed feedback loop to their bodies, into something that then takes that closed feedback loop and helps you improve and get on the trajectory that you want to be on to achieve your goals.
Chris (26:51):
Hey everybody, this is the experimentation and learning section for Friday Forum. The topic today is liftoff support learnings. So now that we’re almost a month past liftoff, wanted to take a little bit of a look back around how things went around support, good, bad, and other. So first off, let’s start with the good news, what went well. We had spent a lot of time with the team, tons of partnership between the research team and support to have a good set of knowledge available for both agents around snippets and our members with FAQs. The research training and specifically around adverse events, what they were, examples, I can’t say enough about the work Stati did here. I’ve actually conducted adverse event training at previous companies and wish I would’ve done a 1/10th the job that Stati did to kind of make it real, use specific examples that we saw versus theoreticals, which everyone’s like, “I don’t know what that means.” So really good job around this and was super proud. So thanks, Stati.
(27:58):
Liftoff support thread. This was an area around the feedback, closed feedback loop, the speed at which support would find an issue, post it in threads and engineering specifically, most of the time, Maxine, would jump on it and fix it, look into it, confirm it’s an issue or a one-off, was really impressive to watch. So that was a perfect example where we want to keep the support team as close to product engineering as possible to keep that feedback loop close and tight and efficient, versus it taking weeks to uncover about something new. And lastly, because I’m sure we all love a good Keanu Reeves movie, replacement reduction, we’ve seen about a 50% reduction in the amount of replacements per orders, which is roughly about a $5 savings per order. So that adds up and so far the results is showing that the number of people asking about replacements is well down. So that’s great.
(29:00):
On where we struggled, long tail of issues. This is a product that even though we did a pilot, we didn’t necessarily have a lot of edge cases built out. And specifically as we introduced things such as the transfer portal or trying to convert VIPs who’d never gone through Stripe or never gone through ID verification, there was a long tail of issues that we either had never seen or you’re kind of not getting rep set. So you see an issue and you’re like, “Do we have documentation on this? Do we know how to do it? Is this a one-off? Is it an issue? How do I fix it?” And you really want more of these things that are much more repeatable, things that you could knock out in a couple seconds, versus like, wow, I really have to go research this. I have to figure it out. I have several follow-ups.
(29:48):
A lot more of our Dexcom issues fell into kind of this one, both things we hadn’t seen before, and also complex. Unstable ground, because we were doing a lot of testing in production meant we were fixing a lot of bugs kind of just in time. So the answers of how we would respond to a member one week might change the next week and change the week after that as we are fixing bugs, adding new systems, setting up new things. So this was a little bit of terms of what’s the latest response that we give when things come in and what’s the latest. And where a lot of information was was in threads because this is where we post it, the team spent a lot of time searching threads, as all of us know, searching threads for anything makes you want to throw your computer through a window.
(30:35):
So this was causing a lot of frustration. It was hard to find information. And was a big reason why our AHT, which is our average handle time, went up roughly about 100%. So the volume of tickets went up maybe 10 to 20%, but the amount of time that we spent in the queue working it pretty much doubled. So you can imagine the pressure the team feels when you’re already … I mean, when your workload doubles overnight and you feel like you just can’t get your head above water. Another area that hit us that we weren’t expecting is app and sync issues. So as we were continuing to put in more app features, also we had some data sync issues. So this was an additional distraction, things coming in that we could have, at least on the app side, and I’ll give this a little bit, could we have controlled the split better?
(31:30):
And then we struggled on support SLAs, which I’ve been talking the last couple weeks, falling below our three-hour target to more of like a five to six hour target. Opportunities notion issue tracker, this is something Brittney pulled in Athena with Jesse to create kind of recently. We should have started this day one, around what is the list of issues kind of people could go to? What’s the current state? Is there a snippet? If there’s FAQ, is it resolved, is it not, versus searching threads. I mentioned leveraging Athena earlier, that’s for this one. Another opportunity is would we do a temporary code freeze for other things not related to liftoff? And this was in the changes we were making to the dashboards, into rolling out new features that were compiling our ability just to try to catch up with Dexcom.
(32:20):
And lastly, resetting expectations around metrics and SLAs during a big event like this. The example I use is whenever I would go do a race, I would look at the profile, I would look at the weather, I would look at the course conditions and I would adjust my internal goals based upon how hard am I going into headwinds, is it at altitude? And would make lots of adjustments based upon the course I was about to take. And we didn’t do that. We were coming into a much more complicated device, multiple sensors, things we’d never seen before. And we, meaning me, should have absolutely set expectations with the team earlier before we went into it versus after the fact.
(33:01):
And lastly, I cannot thank everyone enough for the work you did to support liftoff. It was encouraging to watch all teams, engineering, product, support working together, no finger pointing, just to do the right thing for our members. It was exactly how you people can design companies of how they should be working efficiently, effectively. And I just want to say from the bottom of my heart, a deep thanks for everyone. I know there’s a lot of hours worked, a lot of late nights and thank you.
Josh Clemente (33:31):
All right, thanks Chris. And thanks again, the support team, really helpful to be able to track and follow along with how these new challenges are panning out.
David Flinner (33:45):
Cool. So on the product side, just wanted to give you a quick update on how we’re experimenting on some of the features. As Moz and Josh mentioned, we are going live with the internal beta testing today for our scoring V2 initiative. And I would like to ask everyone here internally and any of our trusted testers, stay tuned for next week, listening into the forum, to try out the new stability score and scoring V2 experience. So what you can provide feedback on is this stability ring you see at the top, the animations that will come in on that top area when you get new insights or when your glucose changes from stable to spiking, you’re going to see that change at the top. How do the spikes look on your chart? Are we accurately detecting them? Is there anything unexpected in the usability of it?
(34:30):
And then the glucose state description. So between this, the ring and the graph you’re going to see, let’s say you’re stable, you’re spiking, things like that. One known issue is right now, if you test it out in this minute, that text part is always going to say you’re stable. But I’ll send out a note later today when we have the fix for that merged or whenever that goes out to also test that piece. So you can submit feedback by shaking your phone to launch the insta bug feedback form and then just tap on a bug or a feature idea to share your thoughts and then we’ll see that. But very, very cool to get to this point.
(35:05):
Assuming all goes well, next slide, we’ll be looping in for an internal beta using our trusted testers. So Mike is going to help, like we did with now V1, start to roll this out to a group of friendly members and we’ll get some of the same feedback from them. And then assuming that goes well, we’ll keep growing it out. The other part to call out here is that we have the dashboard experience ready. Steph and Murillo are going to be working on my data tab parts of this. So don’t expect to see anything in my data yet. We’re just focusing on the now tab on the dashboard. So that is it for scoring. Next slide.
(35:43):
And as Josh mentioned, the glucose game is finally live. Actually ignore the screenshot here, that’s supposed to be the glucose game screenshot. But huge thanks to everyone on the en side, on ops, JM, Maxine, Murillo, Justin and others who got this to go live. We launched LaunchDarkly, our new feature flag manager around the same time as glucose game and we’ve been trying to iron out the process for getting this to go live and it finally worked, which is huge. So all of our features going forward are going to be much easier to test. And it’s too early, I think, to say for sure how engagement is trending, but we have about 500 people who are new members who are not on the glucose game, and 100 people who are new members who do have the glucose game. And we’re seeing slightly higher average app opens per user for the glucose game ones.
(36:28):
So our hypothesis on this one was just that we would have more informed users who have higher comprehension of what the glucose chart is, how it relates to their food, just faster up ramp into what you need to know to close the loop on how your food affects your health. So we would see that in app engagement. And we’ll stay tuned on this one to see how this kind of evens out or stays as an improvement in future weeks. Next slide. And just a quick call out that we’re seeing sustained comprehension for the now V2 versus now V1 UI. So one of the main goals here was we wanted to make sure that members still saw, at a high rate, the insights that we were pushing to them between the full screen cards and the new pinned above the fold activities list. And we’re still seeing about 50% uptick in the percentage of members who open an insight and the average number of insights per day viewed. So we’ll keep monitoring that. Next slide.
(37:19):
And as Josh mentioned, we have a new logging experience that is aimed at focusing on speed, simplicity, and ironing out some of the UI complexities we have now. So I’m going to pass it off to a recording that Alan did on the next slide.
Alan (37:39):
Hi there. So we’ve got a new version of logging in the works. Might recall Brett’s been working on logging. I’ve jumped in recently to work a little bit on it. And we’ve gotten through a design review with engineering and we’re getting ready right now to build it. And so I’m excited to walk through some of the changes here. So the objective of this version of logging was to make it a lot faster, to address some of the usability issues that have grown there over time and add a little bit of an element of reward at the end. I want people to look forward to logging. And so the first thing we’re doing in terms of speed is getting rid of the initial camera load. That makes it a little bit slower. It’s got to load up that camera, it flies up to the very top and we’re seeing a lot of people are actually just skipping that camera.
(38:24):
And also the photos that were being provided often weren’t that great. The quality of it was relatively low. So it’s not really a great place to start. And then we’re also folding in anomalies into the log, so you get a chance that’s front and center, you can resolve them or you can move on with your log. In this case I’m going to disable or dismiss them. So goodbye. Nice little panel here close to your thumb at the bottom of the screen. I hit food and away I go. So you’ll notice here, there’s past logs, they’re typical in that respect. We’ve got metadata fields down here that you can edit. I’m going to start typing in this. I’m going to start going, I had chia seed pudding for breakfast. And so one notable addition here is that we’ve got an ingredients database, a past logs database.
(39:11):
We’re hoping that this provides a little bit more structure by having this in accordance right here. They can start tapping and adding it. And they’ve also had their past logs. So we’re giving it a little more flexibility in terms of input, while still retaining the feeling of sort of natural language text. Ultimately at some point we want to get to a point where you could just hold up your Apple Watch or hold up to your phone and dictate what you had and not have to do any of this kind of stuff. But for now, this is the input model. So I see what I want here, I had that chia seed pudding, I’m going to add that in. And great, I got that ingredient. I want to add some photos too. I had this breakfast, took this beautiful photo and add it here and use that image.
(39:54):
And so here comes the addition of [inaudible 00:39:57] AI, photos up here and it’s noticing these suggested ingredients based on what’s in the photo. I see a banana, I see some yogurt. I’m going to do that later, for now I want to adjust the time. And so here we’re trying to bring in some of the best of the homepage logging where we’ve got a nice big view with context on when that might have happened. It’s not 9:00 PM, maybe it’s 9:00 right now, but I actually had it for breakfast. So I’m going to be able to scroll this graph to the point that I want. We’ll drag and scroll. Maybe I had it in the morning, I missed that log and now I can select that time and it should update. And it goes away, there we go. So add that banana or that banana suggestion. Great.
(40:40):
And actually you know what? Don’t want that photo. I can get rid of the photo, cap it, get rid of it there. And then in terms of the reward, I actually couldn’t integrate it into the screen here, but we’ll hit done and we’ll have some sort of particle explosion, celebration animation at the end and hopefully people look forward to that next time and we can potentially randomize it and make it feel a little unpredictable. So that’s food logging. Exercise is largely the same. I hit, here we go, exercise, we start typing. I went for run in Central Park and I can indicate it was strenuous and change the time. We’re not going to use that graph there for this one, at least initially, we want to see how people respond to it in the food log. And if people love it, we’ll find a way to integrate it here too. For now, I’m going to hit update. I’m done.
(41:29):
So that’s food logging and exercise logging V3, V4, whatever it was. This is pretty mature in terms of design, so we’d love your thoughts and feedback, but probably the next set of feedback will probably be incorporated into V4, V5, whatever it is. Feel free to ask us any questions. Yeah, love to hear what you think. Thanks.
Josh Clemente (41:54):
Awesome. Lots to be excited about there. Can’t wait to see that live in app. David, back to you.
David Flinner (42:01):
I think that’s it actually. So we’ll pass it off. Is there another slide after this one?
Josh Clemente (42:09):
All right. Okay, quick hiring update, no change here. Taylor joining us September 6th on support. And then on open roles, so continuing to have the software engineering role open, as well as the R&D engineer role. And generally levels.link/careers has a general application for people to get in our orbit. If you’re interested or you know someone who might be, please forward them that link.
(42:35):
All right, we are at the individual contributions. I’m going to stop the share and we’ll get as far into these as we can in the 12 minutes we’ve got left. No worries if we can’t get to you today, we will start the order of operations backwards next week and make sure that we get to you. So we going, it starts with me, it looks like. Let’s see, personally, professionally, I’ve been kind of on the road since the end of June, getting back to Austin tomorrow. I’ve got a little conference today. It was really awesome to meet a bunch of people in New York who I had not yet met this past week and get to hang out with the Levels team. It’s always fun, especially since New York’s kind of where it all started at Union Square and we work with what is now three years ago and a much smaller team. So just love seeing it continuing to grow. That’s it for me. Miz.
Michael Mizrahi (43:22):
Yeah, on the professional side, really encouraged by just seeing the support team in action this week. I know we’ve said it a few times already, but the shift change that’s happening is an exciting one and waking up one day to an entirely different support world is jarring, but the team’s taking it in stride and it’s encouraging to see that. So good work everyone on that end. On the personal side, I’m headed to Hawaii to the Big Island this weekend, and I’ll be out next week. So looking forward to a vacation, which is overdue and I’ll be back the week after. See you all soon.
Josh Clemente (43:53):
Log out. Enjoy. Ben.
Ben Grynol (43:58):
Professionally, super stoked on support with inbox zero. Welcome, Rebecca, Lynette, Dr. Wahls, everyone here, super awesome. Personal side, my dad’s 70th birthday is this weekend, so we’re going to have a little shindig and that is about it.
Josh Clemente (44:14):
Nice. Happy birthday to him. Alan.
Alan Malean (44:20):
Hey. So personal side, I’m going to get back into bike riding again. I keep going on and off the train. I’m back in town and I get back on the train, I swear. Professionally, just excited to start seeing shipping again. Start seeing a new version of logging. Looking forward to having some reward mechanisms there at the end to just add a little more flavor to the app. Oh wait, I saw everybody, didn’t forget, I saw everybody in New York. How could I forget that? So yeah, that was awesome. Thanks.
Josh Clemente (44:51):
Ditto. Brittney.
Brittney McLeod (44:55):
Hi. On the professional side, really excited about the food logging features, so that is awesome. I’m so excited that Rebecca and Lynette started this week. Just can’t wait to get to know you both better and working with you. I’m very excited. So welcome to the two of you. And on the personal side, my husband and I are going to the Kenny Chesney concert this weekend and I’m very excited. We bought these tickets three years ago and finally the concert’s happening. So anyone who’s a country fan can understand, we’re excited. So yeah, that’s it on my end.
Josh Clemente (45:33):
I hope it’s everything three years deserves. Enjoy. Casey.
Casey Means (45:40):
Hello. Welcome Rebecca and Lynette. So excited to have you on board. I would say highlights of the week first, Terry being on the call today. Welcome. So excited that you’re here and that you’re an advisor. Dr. Wahls Ted Talk and her book completely changed my life and definitely planted one of the first seeds that got me going on a totally different path in clinical medicine. So I am just eternally grateful for her tireless, brave work and that we now get to work with her on our shared mission. Also, being in New York this week was such a joy. It was so fun to see the team just buzzing around the apartment, having amazing conversations in different corners. And I would say favorite moments, were probably biking to the city with little hoards of Levels team members and super, super fun.
Josh Clemente (46:34):
Love it. Dave.
Dave ten Have (46:43):
Professionally, Hui and Scott and I have been working really hard on tuning in job descriptions for engineering. It’s looking really good. I’m super pleased with that. Personally, got to be making a machine vision pipeline for my girls for this weekend. So yeah, that’s me.
Josh Clemente (47:06):
Sounds like fun. Helena.
Helena Belloff (47:11):
Yeah, I’ll just echo most of the things David just said. I’m really excited about the product process changes and all of the strategy that’s coming out of that. And then also on a personal note, I’m still coming off the high of seeing everyone in New York last night. I’m determined to stay in the bingo game this year, so excited to meet other people in person.
Josh Clemente (47:36):
Sam has an unfair advantage, I’ll just say it. Hui.
Hui Lu (47:43):
Yeah, professionally, I’m first of all excited about new team members always, welcome. And I’m really excited about the product updates, I guess both about the process and also we’re going to pivot to really building the product experience to retain our members. Really excited about that. On personal side, so I was reading my son, he was writing a, I guess, diary, just mimicking the Diary of a Wimpy Kid, so it was really fun. And just continued to enjoy the rest of summer, yeah.
Josh Clemente (48:21):
That’s great. Jason.
Jason Shu (48:25):
Just excited about inbox zero. All my interactions before I joined with support were always fantastic and just to know how much effort they put in, it’s awesome to see. And also excited to have been part of a product that’s going to get shipped and looking forward to seeing that. Personally, like Brittney, I waited three years to see a show. My favorite band was playing in San Francisco and it got canceled for COVID. Saw it last Saturday and it was awesome. It was worth the wait. But now dealing with a collapsed disc in my back and now I have really significant back pain, so I got to go to a doctor.
Josh Clemente (49:03):
I’m sorry to hear that. I’ve been in a similar boat, not quite as extreme, so I hope it gets better, Jason. Ben, I think I skipped over you. Did I do that?
Ben Grynol (49:14):
No, I went.
Josh Clemente (49:14):
Okay. Just making sure. Lynette.
Lynette Diaz (49:20):
Oh, I get to go. I’m just super excited to be here. I am learning a lot. Can’t believe the first week has flown by already. But yeah, just really excited to continue to get to know everyone and just so excited to be part of this culture and this mission. And yeah, hopefully I’ll get to connect more one-on-one with people as the weeks go on.
Josh Clemente (49:39):
Definitely, ditto. Jesse, you want to try one more time?
Jesse Lavine (49:44):
Yeah, can you hear me now?
Josh Clemente (49:45):
Yep.
Jesse Lavine (49:45):
Nice. Cool. Yeah, super excited for Lynette and Rebecca to be joining. And it’s just been awesome to be part of the support team right now with all the increased traffic and just to hear the expectations and messaging from Miz and Chris and to be a part of the action with the team. Personally, I just got my speedy road bike built yesterday in Austin, that I’m going to be riding really slowly with some group rides. And I’m going to be moving into a place in Austin tomorrow, so I’m pretty excited to be setting some roots down here. And excited for the next meetup in Austin for [inaudible 00:50:20] advantage once that shift happens.
Josh Clemente (50:22):
Looking forward to hanging out there. Mike D.
Mike DiDonato (50:28):
Yeah, so I guess I’ll plus one and say that as we enter this next phase shift, it’s really cool to see every team step up. Definitely support team, over the last two years we built like a playbook and now we have to build an entirely new one. So it’s awesome to see the team step up. And then with product eng and design to see specifically over the last few weeks, month, product evolve. It’s really awesome and motivating. And then personally, my sister and her family get to town Monday, so I have a few weeks with close family that I don’t normally get, so I’m super excited for that. And obviously event-based insights, I mean, just make that known, 100.
Josh Clemente (51:06):
Mike Haney
Mike Haney (51:08):
Yeah, professionally, just underline Chris’s presentation today, I think it was great to see just such a clear retro of what worked, what didn’t, the opportunities for improvement, just really edifying. Personally, my wife’s out of town, so it’s a Daddy Arthur weekend and we’re going to go check out an amusement park on the beach here that we haven’t been to yet since we moved here.
Josh Clemente (51:32):
Awesome. Sounds fun. Rebecca.
Rebecca Breske (51:36):
So professionally, this week has been incredible. I had high expectations and it’s even better than I thought. I’m feeling really energized by the work and by meeting all of you. So that’s really great. Personally, something that happened this week is so we have sea turtles. It’s sea turtle nesting season. So I finally saw one yesterday morning. They come during the night and they’re like 400 pounds, so they’re huge. And these sea turtles travel for two months to come lay their eggs on the same beach where they were born. So I finally saw one yesterday morning, which is really exciting.
Josh Clemente (52:11):
That is pretty wild. Rob.
Robert Lustig (52:16):
Hi everyone, nice to see you all again. It’s been the summer of travel. There was Seattle, Vancouver, Victoria, then Toronto for my daughter’s graduation, then Maui, then Minnesota. And August two to 12 I’ll be in East Hampton for any of you New Yorkers who venture out that far and can stand the expense of the place, let me know. From a professional standpoint, there is going to be a meeting in September. It’s a workshop in Racine, Wisconsin that’s basically going to address the Obesogen hypothesis and it’s going to turn out to be a showdown between team energy storage versus team energy balance. And I can’t wait because I get to play referee.
Josh Clemente (53:10):
Well that’s exciting. It’s like WWE Hall of Fame stuff here.
Robert Lustig (53:14):
Yeah.
Josh Clemente (53:16):
Love it. Sonia.
Sonia (53:19):
Amazing week in New York. So excited for our new team members. Excited about the distribution strategy for Levels Kitchen with Dr. Casey, working closely with Mike D and everyone in the company to make sure that we get the most out of all of the amazing work that Tony and Stacy and Casey and I did in Portland last week. And that’s it.
Josh Clemente (53:36):
Awesome. Thank you. Steph.
Stephanie Coates (53:40):
All right. Yes, huge welcome to Rebecca and Lynette. I am taking the alternate approach to filling my Bingo card, by hitting the non node areas. And so I saw Andrew last week I think, and then I’m actually in Salt Lake City right now at Sunny’s house and she had to step out for a meeting, but it’s super fun to hang out with her. And then, yeah, I’ve been living in an RV for I think a month now and I freaking love it. And so I’ll be snaking up the coast and hopefully hitting some of the people in Portland and Bend and Seattle as well. And so yes. And then in terms of Levels, I’m really excited about the product direction and to be able to jump into building some features with scoring.
Josh Clemente (54:18):
Love it. And I love the tactic to pick up the hard bingo cards. I think that’s going to be a winning one. You can just jump into the node anytime. Stacy, you know what, we’re only a minute over. You want to wrap up here for us? That’ll be everyone.
Stacie Flinner (54:30):
Professional and personal I guess are the same this week. Being in New York is super inspiring. I know we’re like all in on Async, but have to highly recommend seeing people face to face. This morning, Casey, Sonia and I went to work out with Levels member and neuroscientist Louisa Nicola and she absolutely destroyed us in the gym and I can’t use my arms. So yeah, it was great, a great morning. And yeah, lots of inspiring conversations around the kitchen island this week.
Josh Clemente (55:06):
Amazing. All right, team. Well went a little over this week, but it was a strong one. Thanks all of you. It was great to hang out in New York. Welcome to the new folks. Thanks Dr. Wahls for joining us and have a wonderful weekend everybody.