Transcript
[00:00:00] Josh Clemente: I think we’ve got a quorum here so we’ll kick this thing off. Welcome to July 24th, 2020. Very excited to kick off this meeting. We’ve got some new people here, which we will introduce shortly, but first off, I’m grateful for, we always start the meeting with something that I’m grateful for and that’s one of the side benefits of hosting this meeting. So I get to share something I’m excited about. So I’m grateful for a weekend away, I’m going to be in the Chesapeake Bay area of Maryland with a couple friends, socially distancing in a large house, but hanging out and playing some games and catching up a little bit. Nice opportunity, it doesn’t happen often these days. And yeah, so that’s exciting. Maybe get some kayaking in. Alright. First off, recent achievements this week – another great week. We’ve continued to get some, just really enthusiastic interest, in particular through channels that we otherwise wouldn’t expect, like Twitter. I think this is a kind of an outlier, in the sense that people on Twitter are salivating over what we’ve got going on. And you get these anecdotes like the one on the top left, where this person is saying, “Tell me what I have to do, up to and including paying double, to get this thing on my arm.” And that’s the type of stuff that we’ve been getting continually. Throughout the Friday forums, going back, we have these anecdotes of just amazing FOMO on Twitter, which is a very good sign.
Wearable Challenge sign-ups started for cohort 3. So for those of you that don’t know what the Wearable Challenge is, this is an initiative that Justin Mares, who’s a good friend of the company. He started Perfect Keto and Kettle&Fire, 2 consumer brands that are doing very well. He kicked off this concept where people who want to lose some weight, they get Levels at a discounted rate, they put up a wager of close to $1000 upfront, and then for every day that they can keep their glucose within a certain range, they can get paid back a portion of that wager. And so there’s the financial incentive, there’s a social incentive, and then there’s the closed feedback loop of Levels. And so we’ve done this now for 2 consecutive cohorts. The third cohort has started signing up this week and it should be about 60 people. I think the first day of the actual challenge is going to be August 10th. And so these are an exceptional learning opportunity for us as we work with, kind of an audience that is not necessarily CGM focused, they’re not your average bio-hacker. These are people who would otherwise, maybe do Weight Watchers or try a different diet program. And so this is a very different thing for them and a lot of them are really loving the metabolic awareness component.
Our waitlist has broken 225. This is continuing to climb at a really great rate with negligible ad spend. And most of this is very organic, people are signing up because they see Ali’s videos, they see a podcasts, they’re watching us on Twitter, and Really cool to continue to see the growth rate there. Regarding our podcast system, which I really want to shout out Nick and Tom in particular on this, they have built this interesting Kanban board and filtration mechanism, which is basically pulling in millions of potential podcast episodes. Filtering them by prior guests and subject matter, and then pulling out the areas of opportunity for us, basically where should we focus our efforts? And we have a company called Lemon Pie, which we’re working with to help to target some of the lower tier shows and get us more volume. And they said, “In 4 years of doing this, nobody comes close to what you’ve put together here.” This is just an exceptional system and we’re seeing the fruits of those efforts. Casey and I, I think had 3 podcast recordings on the same day last week. And this is like with very little actual effort, in terms of we’re not having to sell ourselves very hard. It’s basically a matter of meeting and reaching out to the appropriate people and just telling our story. This is awesome. We’re going to continue to lean in here. There’s some crazy concepts rolling around in the company of starting our own podcast and other such things. But the point is that this vector of not just paying the Facebook machine for getting interest, but actually telling the story and educating people, is great. And so this amazing system that these guys have built is going to be, I think, a really huge asset for us.
Another very cool thing that happened this week – We got in touch with the Whoop team. We’ve actually talked to several of their people and a lot of them are in the Levels beta. But for those of you that don’t know, Whoop is, they have a wearable called the Whoop strap, which is primarily interested in recovery. So it’s measuring heart rate and heart rate variability, and then also activity. And their team, they have a very successful product, their team, Kristin Holmes is one of the research leads over there and she and I had a great conversation. And then she and Casey had an even better conversation and they basically are trying to pull Levels into the largest study on female physiology ever, which they are currently building. And they’re very enthusiastic, they love what we’re doing, just a ton of synergy with their team. And so being associated with Whoop, which is very much in the center of the mainstream right now, especially with athletes or athletes and technologists, is, I think, a really awesome opportunity and even more awesome to be able to be a part of a published physiology study this early. So really cool, hopefully that goes through quickly.
And then I had a great call with the chief NCO, non-commissioned officer at the 1st Battalion of the Marine Force Recon Services, which are like an elite group inside the Marine Corps. And they’re starting the very early process of generating a wellness program. They’re trying to keep their Marines healthy, which, this is not always been a thing. It’s basically been -Marines are disposable, put them out there and make them do crazy things and then when they get out of the service, they’ll figure it out. So now they’re changing that and wellness is very new to them. They’re very intrigued by what we have going on here. And so he’s going to start using the beta and hopefully we’ll have, there is an opportunity to get in front of their wellness board for a potential long-term collaboration there as well.
I want to shout out Hao and his efforts to get the report system fixed. So a lot of data issues on the back end were causing some roadblocks on getting our monthly reports out to people and his, just what he did in his first week has unlocked literally orders of magnitude of time improvement versus the very early stages of report production. So we’re now able to give people a very nice representation of their monthly reports with clean data. And I think David knocked out 40 of these in 60 minutes, which just as a benchmark, with the early stages of this, say again…
[00:06:01] David: It’s closer to 50, I think.
[00:06:03] Josh Clemente: Closer to 50 over 60 minutes. So at the early, I think early on it was like 6 hours to produce one of these reports, so just like amazing work there. This is the boat that we tie on the monthly experience. So after 28 days of logging and putting in all this effort and learning new things, the monthly report is the deliverable at the end that really seals the deal and it gives closure to these customers. So that’s awesome. Thanks for all that work.
Insight cards – I’m super excited for this. There’s kind of a paradigm shift coming to the app and experience and Jhon and David in particular doing some awesome work here. There’s a little screenshot just of what’s going on with the early internal testing. But basically, it changes the user experience where we now can surface insights and can surface next steps, even when there’s a roadblock in terms of getting CGM data, for example. We can still get people educational opportunities and surface the information we want to surface through this cards interface. So I’ll let David handle the rest of that, but yeah, very exciting to see. And then Levels was featured by Kim Hildreth and Sarah Schermerhorn, see them there, this is the American Volleyball professionals tournament, which streamed live on NBC and Amazon Prime this week. They didn’t do a, unfortunately they didn’t crush it but the point is that we got some really cool exposure. And this is a great opportunity for us to learn about potential future athlete collaborations and sponsorships. And I think that, it looks just incredible, the pictures we got from the tournament were fantastic and Levels just looks absolutely right at home on the arms of these girls in the midst of elite level competition. So very cool to see.
And then, Ali Spagnola please watch her videos. She does an amazing job, she’s there in the middle, the upper middle. She released her third video about her Levels experience and she’s just a great advocate for what we’re doing and does an amazing job of explaining what Levels is and why. And then of course there’s some stuff, some anecdotes from Twitter here and our Spartan video, Spartan podcast has exceeded 46,000 views. It’s on its way to 50,000 views, so getting some good coverage there. Any questions on any of that?
[00:08:00] Dr. Casey Means: [00:08:00] So exciting. That’s awesome.
[00:08:04] Josh Clemente: Thank you. Yeah, and there’s even more in here. I spoke with the founder of Bleacher Report and Inverse, which was just an awesome conversation, he’s super excited, tons of connections in media world. David had a conversation with Suggestic who does AI integrations with food recognition, menu management, like some really cool stuff that we could potentially integrate into our app. Yeah, so that’s all for this week that I was able to fit on the slide, but there’s always, it’s always tough real estate on this slide. So if I miss something, I apologize. Quick blurb about the virtual assemblage. So locked down the agenda here, this is how it’s going to look. So Thursday the 30th. 06:00 to about 08:30 or 09:00 PM. We’ll do a bucket list challenge, just like an ice-breaker for the team. It’s going to be fun. And then we’re going to do lightning rounds. So these will be like 5-7 minute talks. Each person will, you can present something if you’d like, or you can, it can be primarily audio, 5-7 minute presentation. And then 2-3 minutes of QA per person. We’ll just move through these quickly. It’s just supposed to be fun, educational, talk about something Levels related, you can talk about something personal. We love the personal stuff. And that’ll be Thursday and then Friday, the idea is we will all order dinner, delivery dinner, and we can just enjoy dinner together and have a game night. And so Evan’s gonna host Quiz Breaker, which is like a trivia night and then Jackbox TV, which is a really cool actually, game concept that Andrew will host. It’s really fun. It was hilarious last time we did it. And so we’re just going to have a chill night on Friday and yeah, eat and hang out together. So you’ll get a prompt from me on the lightning rounds. I’ll make a suggestion and then you can just disregard that if you’d like and pick your own topic. But yeah, that’s the idea.
Milestones to track, for anyone new to this meeting, we will probably have these 3 bullets on this page for as long as it takes until we eliminate them. So we need to roll out pre-orders so that we basically have a path to purchasing or reserving the Levels program. We need to get launch ready with our app feature set and experience. And then a big one is securing our next generation hardware partnership. And if you want more specifics on any of these, feel free to reach out. You’ll hear a lot about these specifically in the coming weeks, months, whatever it takes.
Weekly beta trends – So these are the numbers of people that were moving through our beta program. This past week, or since the last forum, we had 105 new orders and 119 shipments. The numbers don’t perfectly sync up with this Friday forum, but the point is that we are continuing to move about 100 orders a week, which is quite a high volume compared to about 2 months ago. Sam.
[00:10:30] Sam Corcos: Yeah. So still doing great in terms of cash. We’ve raised a little bit more money from some really exceptional angels. Next slide.
These are our monthly revenue numbers. So the gray is our projected revenue and the green is our actual recognized revenue. We have overshot it somewhat already. That’s because we ended up rushing a lot more people into the July cohort than we anticipated. So hopefully that doesn’t cause any problems in terms of ops and customer support. I know Mike is a little bit underwater right now, so we need to figure out how to resolve that before it becomes too much of a problem. But yeah, definitely on track there. Next slide.
And in terms of cash we’re taking in every week, this week was also a really good week. Don’t let the previous 2 weeks, that were totally disproportionate, confuse you. But yeah, doing really great in terms of number of orders. So things are good all around on that front.
[00:11:30] Josh Clemente: Yeah, I think that July 5th week we can attribute almost exclusively to one tweet from Todd Goldberg.
[00:11:36] Sam Corcos: That’s only about half of it actually.
[00:11:40] Josh Clemente: Okay. A large portion, you’ll see these crazy turnarounds from people just tweeting something, a particular screenshot. So it’s pretty crazy to see. Cool. Any questions on finance, biz, dev stuff? Casey.
[00:11:49] Dr. Casey Means: Yeah, some of those trends are mirrored in our SEO as well. We had a really crazy week last week with our search rankings getting up to 12 and we’ve had a little bit of a flattening this week. You know, what I feared a little bit, was we were exponential on the increasing our average position and we leveled off this week. So at the top here you can see, we were at 12 last week, we’re at 13 this week. Yeah, so leveling but we’re going to dig into this and keep getting that number up. I’m getting excited to break 10. We’re moving in that direction. 7-day active users continues to be strong. We had 39,000 active users this month, which is, clearly huge increase if you look over the last 2 months. We’re ranking really highly, down here on the bottom right, for all terms related to glucose. So we’re in the top 10 for most of these terms, 10, 11, 12. And so that’s really strong. We’re really focusing on different glucose phrases in our blog posts. And that seems to be paying off with good rankings for those terms. Next slide.
Just gonna recap – we’re having some really exciting research partnerships that are popping up. Josh mentioned our engagement with Whoop. So we’re really trying to push forward to get into this study, which is going to be one of the largest studies on female physiology ever done in 100s of female, division one, college athletes, tracking different biomarkers of heart rate variability, stress, nutrition, menstrual cycle, performance, and they’re hoping to potentially add glucose. So we’re talking about that actively right now. Also looking at joining in on a study with another really neat startup called The Cusp, which is looking at trying to disrupt the menopause market. And it’s a really cool company started by a very awesome MD, Taylor Sitler. And he’s trying to bring us into a study on, basically hot flashes and glucose spikes and the strong research mechanistic relationship between those two things. In active discussions about getting into that trial. Also continuing, I’m chatting with UPenn about an academic research partnership there. And then we’ve partnered with a clinical research organization called Proof Pilot. Which is an organization that specific focus is on helping companies and academic institutions show clinical validity of products. And so they’re going to help us, basically put together a study design and institutional review board, authorization for a number of studies. And yeah, lots of different cylinders firing on the research front. And we’re also considering bringing on a clinical research coordinator who can really help manage a lot of these things. So there’s a lot of really exciting opportunities coming up. Just also want to highlight on the right, we’re starting to rank for Google News. So be sure to follow us on Google News. You have to follow the Levels blog, but there’s a very sort of specific algorithm that Google uses to bring articles from different blogs into their Google News source, and so we’re trying to shape our blog posts to meet those criteria so that they’ll get picked up by Google News. So yeah, be sure to follow us there by searching for the Levels blog. Next slide.
We submit, we submitted to Fast Company, Most Innovative Company Awards for a number of different categories, health, wellness, sports. These don’t get judged until September but I think we’re in a good position. And it was pretty fun working with, a big shout out to Nick and Evan, Sam, Josh for working on this and editing and looking at these and helping write this application, but it was pretty cool putting together some of the data of the metrics that we successfully accomplished in 2020. And I just screenshotted part of the application here, some of the quantitative metrics that we’ve achieved. We have, Evan pulled this piece of data, so we have 343,000 person hours of continuous glucose reading and paired with food and exercise choices this makes it the largest dataset of its kind. We have, obviously over 25, 21,000 individuals on our wait list. We’ve, and on the bottom here, we’ve had 10 X growth in traffic to our websites since January 1st, with 38,000 unique visitors per month. This month and our average Google search ranking position has increased from 40 to 12 since May 1st of 2020. And we’ve gone, since May 1st, from 500 search impressions daily per day to 23,000 search impressions per day. So that’s in the past 3 months. So just really exciting stuff. And I think a lot of our investment in content is really paying off. Next slide.
Huge push on the podcast front, Tom and Nick, huge props for making this process. Just so much more efficient. This is stuff that’s actively in the work right now. So on the far left, these are all podcasts that are either scheduled or already recorded and haven’t been released yet. In the middle here, these 3 – Optimal Performance, Keto Camp, and Get Over Yourself are podcasts that were booked this week. Keto Camp and Get Over Yourself has had guests like Peter Ochoa, Dave Asprey, Ben Greenfield, Mark Manson, like really top tier people on these podcasts. I’m going to be doing Get Over Yourself on Monday, Optimal Performance the following week, and Keto Camp 4 weeks from now. So really looking forward to that. Podcasts that aired this week, Josh was on the Fit Farming Food Mom podcast that came out this week so take a listen. And I was on Mind Hub talking all about metabolic health, so take a listen. They’re both on Spotify and Apple podcasts. And then, as Josh mentioned, we brought on an agency to really, even help us further, push down the road of podcasts. This is called Lemon Pie and they really help podcasts build brand, sorry, companies build brand awareness through podcast exposure. Yeah, firing on a lot of cylinders. But can’t thank Tom and Nick enough for the awesome work and organization on this. So it’s been a wonderful team effort and I think this is going to be a great channel for us for marketing and inbound traffic. Next slide.
[00:17:32] Josh Clemente: Yeah, 100%. Yeah, I love the content update there, Casey. You’re crushing it with this.
[00:17:36] David: Awesome. I just wanted to revisit what we’ve been talking about for a few weeks. So one of the main company goals is to enable 10 X growth. Right now we’ve got 200 active users at any given time. How can we take that up to 1000 or 2000 active users? And one of that is anticipating some of the trade-offs with the data delays that we might experience. Just wanted to call out real quick that we are about to push the first implementation of one of these, one of these efforts, which is our asynchronous onboarding flow. Now we won’t have users wait while they’re checking for the connection, cause that may get delayed now. So instead, we have this new experience that the user will, after they share their account with Levels, while they’re waiting for that connection to be established they’ll go to the dashboard homepage, which is showing the first implementation of the card feed. Showing you that the 2 education cards that are most appropriate, the “How to apply your sensor” video, that we get a lot of great feedback on that that Casey recorded. And the metabolic fitness program, 28 day overview, down below. So while they’re waiting, they can enjoy those. I’m so excited to see that rollout. Next up. I think Jhon will be working on some of the data pending states on the graph. So once you do have your data, if the data is delayed, having better states on the graph to give you a context for what to expect. Next slide.
And we’re about to roll out a major update to the app that makes it really lightning fast on iOS. And a huge performance enhancement, as well, on Android. This is something that one of our contractor friends, pronounced Murio, worked on. And it basically makes the day slider and graph updates instantaneous on iOS and much more performant on Android. Test it out. Hope you enjoy it. It’s a big improvement. What’s that?
[00:19:15] Dr. Casey Means: Is that your data?
[00:19:16] David: Yeah.
[00:19:17] Dr. Casey Means: It’s so good.
[00:19:18] David: It’s so pretty.
[00:19:19] Dr. Casey Means: Flatlined. It’s all green.
[00:19:21] David: Yeah. And I haven’t even been eating really keto. I’ve been eating bad things. So I don’t know what the deal is.
[00:19:25] Josh Clemente: You unlocked the next level of metabolic fitness.
[00:19:30] David: Yeah.
[00:19:31] Dr. Casey Means: Black belt.
[00:19:32] David: Although right now I’m sailing at, I think 170. I just had big bunch of breakfast potatoes. I’m going to grab the share screen. So last week you’ll recall, I gave you a prototype demo of the cards concept, and that was focused on the education cards and the program cards, as well as event driven cards. So if you had your very first high glucose event and you didn’t know what it meant, we’ll pair that with an education card that’s driven by the event of a high glucose card. Saying how to interpret high glucose events events. Right now I’m going to show you, briefly, another concept. So this is very similar, using the same framework, but this is detected anomalies. If you forget to, one of our other goals is to encourage people to log and adhere to that so we can give you insights and give you actual data on your zone scores and your metabolic health. If you forget to log, which is pretty common, and very human to do, with anomaly detection we hope to detect those missing logs. And you can see here, one concept, where we’ve painted on the graph – there’s an event that happens here. What happened? You can imagine if you tap that you would get a card, a pin saying – what happened at this time? Add a log.”, something like that. So here, the concept also shows that these are preloaded into the activity responses section. That may, we may not do that, but we would at least have it up here where you can add it on the graph. Let’s say you actually didn’t see that, you just went to sleep, scan in the morning, and then you had that previous day’s experience happen. We could then show you an insight card down below saying that we auto detected 3 events with missing logs from yesterday, go and review. Something like that. We can send you a push notification depending on how confident we were on it, that kind of thing.
And then on day 4 of the program, currently in the program, we want to show the dawn effect. Because a large percentage of people are asking, “Why did I rise in the morning? I didn’t log anything. I didn’t do anything. Is that bad?” So this is a concept for, very similar, how we could paint interesting things in the graph. Just like an insight highlight here. And if you were to click that, it would pin the card. But I don’t have that mocked up, but to show them, “Hey, this is the Dawn effect. Notice the morning rise? This is a natural phenomenon.” Something like that. These are just baby steps we’re taking towards the more robust closing the loop action-oriented, insight framework that we want to have out there, or even future nudges that we might want to give. Let’s say you have really high glucose, can we push you in the right direction towards taking a little bit longer break between your meals or other suggestions to take action. And I’ll pass it back to you, Josh, unless there’s questions.
[00:21:58] Dr. Casey Means: Very exciting stuff, David. That’s awesome.
[00:22:00] David: Maybe I’ll say one more thing. Timeline-wise, this is not currently in development, that’s just feature work, but we do have to get to all that in Q3. So the next couple of months. The current focus is still executing on a scaling 10X efforts. And then we’ll shift gears towards getting the education cards out and the program cards for the whole 28 day experience. And that also includes, actually understanding what the program is. Right now we don’t fully track on the backend. Like Casey’s on day 6, Tom’s on day 13. Once we have that and we have, in the UI implementation of these cards, and the content behind the cards, we’ll get that out. And then we’ll shift gears towards the actionable insights.
[00:22:36] Josh Clemente: All right, here we go, it is off to Anj.
[00:22:40] Andrew: Could you just reload? So yeah, quick updates. Yeah, the team is expanding and we have 2 more joining soon. So Anjin Lou and Gabriel will be starting in August. Yeah, when they come make sure to give them a warm welcome. So I think we’ve touched on a lot of this. There’s, the monthly reports are a lot cleaner. They’re working for more customers, which is fantastic. The app has continued to get a few more performance improvements. So play around with that, especially the top scroll bar and the asynchronous connection. Yeah, good stuff all around. This graph here is, so Evan’s been diving into the data to find interesting insights. One of the things, maybe I’ve mentioned this to a few of you. Back in the day, OkCupid had this blog where, there were a dating website and they did really interesting data insights. Who responds to what types of messages and stuff like that. And so we have a cool opportunity to use our dataset, which we think is the largest dataset in the world of non-diabetic continuous glucose on paired with food. And yeah, there’s a lot of really interesting content we can churn out. And highlight different things that are common in people. So this is just a simple one showing some average, across male-female currently.
[00:23:46] Josh Clemente: Yeah, we’re gonna have to get some targeted insights David, to the male community. What are they doing wrong here? I feel like, I feel personally attacked by this graph, by the way.
[00:23:56] David: I sensed this myself and just talking to some females, I’ve seen that they’re usually lower for some reason. I wonder why.
[00:24:01] Josh Clemente: Yeah. Huh. We’ll have to get to the bottom of this. Okay, so we’re at the point of the meeting where we each spend a couple seconds just sharing something we’re each excited about. Personal is encouraged. So Sam.
[00:24:13] Sam Corcos: I think that the thing that I’m most excited about is just how quickly things are moving on the podcast front. It’s interesting. It’s like across the board with what we’re doing, where, like SEO and content is supposed to be like a multi-year endeavor. And we’re seeing it work very quickly. And podcasts outreach is supposed to be this very hard thing that nobody can do and we seem to be executing on it extremely well. I’ve just been really impressed with the rate of execution. And so it’s exciting to see, coming up with systems level thinking, on how to solve these problems and approach them in a really consistent way. I think we can not only provide a lot of value for ourselves, but a lot of the people, like our investors. Or Matteo from Eight Sleep or Will from Whoop. These other organizations that are very similar, that don’t have quite the same level of sophistication on the podcast strategy can probably benefit from it as well. So I think there’s a lot of peripheral benefits to it as well.
[00:25:14] Josh Clemente: Yeah it’s a good one. Jhon.
[00:25:18] Jhon: Personally, I know this is what all parents say about their children, but I’m so impressed about how my toddler is growing up. A year ago I remember him struggling with walking and running, and now he’s an expert with the bike and the scooter. And he doesn’t stop running and jumping all over the place. I’m also excited about having my mother-in-law coming home next week. She will help us with the kid for a few days and hopefully my wife and I will have some free time. It’s going to be the first time we get any visit from the family since the pandemic started. And my son will be really excited as well.
[00:25:56] Josh Clemente: Awesome. That’s super cool. Lori is not with us this week, I don’t believe. Lori, if you are please correct me. Otherwise, Hao, go ahead and jump in.
[00:26:06] Hao: Yeah. We send out our 2 two months old puppies this week. So they’re now at their forever home. And it was both sad and actually exciting because I can have good sleep now. So yeah, that’s me this week.
[00:26:25] Josh Clemente: Nice. Enjoy. Tom.
[00:26:29] Tom: Alright, so on the Levels front, there was this moment, at some point this week, it was maybe like a 24 hour period, where there were a few sort of small wins in rapid session on kind of the partnerships and business development front. So there were a lot, but off the top of my head, I got a really good response from the USA weightlifting coach. Who’s also one of the biggest names and coaches within the CrossFit space. Another one was Dr. Lindsey Shaw, who owns Biofeedback for the US Olympic committee. She works with athletes across every team and responded immediately saying that she’s been pricking people’s fingers and she can’t wait to get on Levels. We also had the Perfect Keto guys offer to introduce us to like really high-level influencers, a lot of them, in the health and fitness space. And then I think Whoop kinda accelerated right after that. And it was just this moment where I was like, “Wow. We are and can get to literally everyone really fast.” And I think it’s a big part of our moat strategy. It just got me super excited about how our company is going to develop in the public eye over the next few months.
[00:27:36] Josh Clemente: Nice. Mike.
[00:27:38] Mike: As always, more than a few things. I’d say like, Tom and Sam alluded to this, that it’s pretty awesome to see the company network expand. I had a great conversation with the CEO of TB12 yesterday. And we were talking about Josh’s podcast with Joe from Spartan. And he’s “Oh, I know Joe really well. I was on the board of this company.” And it’s interesting to see how connected this community is. And not only that, but also how willing people are to make introductions for us. And it’s not ever that easy in life for people to make intros on a normal level. So it’s pretty awesome. The final 2 things – the amount of orders that we’re processing and getting, it’s pretty amazing to see it every day on a weekly trend. Especially with Sam’s slides. And finally like a quick thank you, Sam mentioned, operationally, we are getting a little constrained, but everyone, especially like quick thank you, I know she’s not on here, but Lori has been killing it. And then also thank you to Sam, Josh, and Andrew, especially, for always being available and happy to support me.
[00:28:50] Josh Clemente: Nice. Nick.
[00:28:49] Nick: Let’s see here, I’m excited about a couple of things. One is, I’m coming up on month 2, I think, and we’ve tried a lot of stuff and I actually feel really good about the confidence that we’ve now built on certain processes. Podcasts has been called out as one thing, but that just makes me feel great. Another thing I’m excited about, I was telling my mom about Levels and she was saying, “Yeah, what glucose? I had a bagel one morning and my blood sugar spiked.”, she had to go to the doctor or something. And it almost made the individual pin prick signal completely useless. And it was surprising to me that this was something that is almost more mainstream than I’d expected. When she was feeding that insight to me rather than the other way around, which was pretty fascinating. Personally, I was on Instagram with a buddy of mine today who owns a bike shop. I’ve had quite a difficult time finding a bicycle, he’s in a country right now that he has asked me not to disclose where he may have a supply of bicycles. Of which I can potentially buy one. I’m very excited about possibly doing that. And Yeah, lastly, I guess just a lot of time this week working with Tom, getting the affiliate stuff going and re-writing a lot of the coms. So I’m excited about our end to end communications. And I’m especially excited about the work we’ve been able to accomplish with Casey and Sam and Josh and everybody to get this Fast Company thing together. If you have an opportunity, you should read it. I actually think, in one page, for someone who’s really coming in from a vacuum, I think it’s really a succinct summary of why what we’re doing matters and what we accomplish. If you have an opportunity you should consider taking a minute to read it. That’s my update.
[00:30:23] Josh Clemente: Nice. Agreed. Casey.
[00:30:28] Dr. Casey Means: Yeah, and I will send out the PDF of our answers, after this call to everyone, so you guys can read it. Yeah, just on a Levels front, excited about so much. We talked about these things, but like podcasts, research partnerships, content partnerships, working with Evan and Nick on database blog posts, like bringing on new team members. Like, it just feels like a very exciting time. We say this every week, but every week feels so exciting. Working on the Fast Company thing was fun this week. I think one part of the application was showing some clinical metrics that we’ve succeeded on. And looking at some of the reports of some of our users who have had great success over the course of their month was really exciting. Because it was like people who have gone from 80% time and range on week 1 to 100% percent time and range on week 4. People have gone from an average glucose of 94, their first week, to 92, 87, 82 by the fourth week. And these are clinical improvements that I never have ever seen in my clinical practice. These don’t happen in clinical practice. This is not, we’re not in a disease reversal type of ethos in conventional medicine. And so it’s just incredible to see that we’re making such quantitative, measurable improvements in people’s health. This is very exciting. And to see that impact, these are people who are using our product and will probably have a much better life and less risk of chronic disease, pain, and suffering because of using the product. So I think we can all just feel really good about it. And I think as we create our pipeline for being able to generate more data and bigger reports on our improvements over time, it’s going to just be more and more exciting to see the impact that we’re making on people’s health. Let’s see, personally, I had a fun double date ping pong tournament on Tuesday with my partner and a couple of his friends. And ping pong is an excellent COVID safe, socially distant, sort of sport. And it was just really fun to be outside and play a game and miss those things over the past few months. So that felt really good.
[00:32:19]Josh Clemente: Awesome. Yeah, I’ve been having a large volume of calls the past few weeks. And it’s my barometer for how things are going, in a sense. And it’s just, I don’t want to keep reiterating this type of thing, but the conversations are starting halfway complete. It’s like they’ve already been sold. And now they’re trying to get us involved in something they’re interested in. And this, we’re talking about, like the Whoop head of research. We’re talking about the guy who started Bleacher Report and Inverse. The head of human performance for the Hot Shots, which are, there’s about 200 of them in California and they’re like the elite firefighters. These are people who are trying to get us to do something with them right off the bat. And it’s really crazy. And then the podcast thing, I had to 2 podcasts, I was like, slide into my DMs on Twitter and my response was just like, “Oh, I love that episode with this person that you had on your show.” And then their response is, “Please come on my show whenever you’re ready.” So it’s just cool. And it speaks to, it’s not about me, it’s like that speaks to the company and like what they see in it and how excited they are to talk about it. And I just, it’s so cool. And especially as we build steam with the team growing, I just see us as like a multiplying force for this like really awesome ultimate vision. And so, just excited to see the team growing and this like, inertia continues to build. And then I do want to call out, I didn’t shout Mike out at the beginning, but I do want to shout him out. Because although we continue to see volume in numbers are increasing and stuff, and we’re automating and growing, there’s always been one constant. And that is there as one customer support, customer success professional, and that’s Mike. And he is like our frontline of defense with hundreds of people coming through the program every month. And so that is a colossal job. And I don’t mean to smooth over it, but yeah, Mike’s doing a killer job on multiple platforms, always staying flexible and keeping people moving through. And it’s amazing how well he’s doing. So thank you for that. And now we are onto the story of the day. Evan, do you need me to share anything? You’re muted.
[00:34:12] Evan: Ah, shucks. All right, I need to share my screen and I’ve never done that before, so I appreciate your patience in this trying time, everybody. Yes.
[00:34:20] Josh Clemente: I stopped sharing mine.
[00:34:26] Evan: All right, I’m gonna share. Wow, there’s a lot of Chrome everywhere. Okay, let’s see. Great. So I want to talk about my note taking system. And quick aside, I’m at the [unclear] space the internet might go out real quick. And if that happens, well, I’ll be back real quick. Wow, there’s so much stuff on this screen. Yes.
So I want to talk about zettlekasten. This is my note taking system and basically, the thing that I’m really interested in, across a lot of stuff, is accretion. Like, how does stuff build on the previous thing that was there? And what’s really interesting about zettlekasten as a note taking system, is rather than just like making isolated notes, you wind up building connections between completely disparate things. And so, I’ll read a website and I’ll make a note about it, and it just builds up into this bigger and bigger, second brain, if you will, that lets me do all kinds of new stuff. And I read papers about glucose metabolism or complexity, and it goes into the settlekasten. And I read a lot about … how do I do next slide? Yeah, there we go… about history. And I just finished this book called The Profiteers, about this shadowy company called Bechtel. And I was reading about how it was started in the late 1800’s by this guy named Warren Bechtel. And it’s like a family company that’s been in the family for 5 generations, which is super rare. And they’ve built a bunch of stuff that you might’ve heard of, like BART, the Bay Area public transit system, Hoover dam, major airports, most of the oil infrastructure in the middle east. If you haven’t heard of them or heard of their works, you’ve benefited down the line. And so I’m reading this book about Bechtel and they just finished building the Hoover dam at this point. And let’s put a pin in that, we’ll come back in a minute. And so I made notes about The Profiteers, this book, in my zettlekasten. And going back, the way the zettlekasten works is, when you read something, you make a bibliographic note that’s just really brief. It’s like, the title, how to find it, who the author was, when it was published, maybe like a 1 or 2 sentence summary. Maybe a sentence or 2 about why it’s interesting. And then if it’s something that I thought was really interesting and really relevant, then I’ll make a literature note, where rather than just underlining or writing in the margins, I’ll re-summarize the section that I underlined, and put it in context. And this way it’s all like I’m having a conversation with the author trying to figure out, in this thing that I thought was interesting, why is it interesting? What’s relevant about it? And as I start to read more about a topic, different things will come together and those will become a permanent note. And permanent notes are something that I would share, say like a blog post, and then literature notes are more private, and say, intimate and less polished.
And so I make notes about what I’m reading, as books, and then if somebody, internally, is like, “Evan, you should watch this YouTube video.” or “Evan, should read this essay.”, I’ll make a note on it. So Nick Krasny, in all of his infinite wisdom, telling me about proper nouns recommended I read this blog post about engineering products vs engineering primitives. And it’s basically, on a very high-level, about how there’s two kinds of engineers. There’s engineers that build deeper, like closer to the system things. Like software that’ll send out emails. And then there’s engineers that build products like newsletter software. And the 2 things are really important, and they work together. However, he introduced this idea of, basically people who build tools, people who build tools for engineers, people who build tools for users, and engineers can be a type of user. And so I made a note about this. And this is like a bibliographic note up top and then there’s literature notes of things I highlighted and then rewrote. And then this got me thinking about like, in our metabolic system what are the products and what are the primitives? And so I made a note about insulin primitives and how insulin therapy was started in 1922. And people who take insulin as medication think in terms of – This meal has so many carbs. My blood glucose is at this. And so I need so many units. And the unit, if you will, is like the product, of insulin. And then the primitive is that it’s enough insulin to induce hypoglycemia in rabbits, which was the initial unit of measurement. And then this led me, creating this thing about insulin primitives reminded me about how Warren Bechtel, the founder of Bechtel, died in Soviet Russia of an insulin overdose. Which then led me to conclude, by making these disparate connections, that Dad Bechtel, as he was called, was murdered by Stalin. Because insulin therapy had already been around for about 11 years. And he was surrounded by doctors who would have been familiar with this. And he was basically let alone in a hotel room to die. And so I thought, “Wow, this is really suspicious.” and based on what I had been writing about insulin, as opposed to just reading it and forgetting it, I was able to make this connection. And now I have something that’s most of the way to a tiny blog post that I could post on a conspiracy forum. Or just a one-off note that I made myself for fun by making this connection between things. And that’s how I take notes. And what’s really cool about the zettlekasten is that it lets me make disparate connections from all kinds of places. So that’s my story.
[00:39:59] Dr. Casey Means: That is so interesting. Question for you, is this like a program that you developed or is this an off the shelf products that people can buy and use?
[00:40:08] Evan: So I use, anybody, there’s a lot of different ways to do it. There’s like, the initial way, the discoverer of the zettlekasten system or inventor is, he’s a German sociologist who died in the 20th century. So he just used like pieces of paper and like a slip box cover. That’s what zettlekasten stands for – is like box of cards. I use software called Roam Research, and I just watched a bunch of videos about how to use Roam as a zettlekasten, and that’s how I came up with my system.
[00:40:39] Dr. Casey Means: Very cool.
[00:40:40] Josh Clemente: Love it. These shares are great. Well we’re right on time here. I appreciate everyone bearing with me, with my terrible internet today, but I think we made it through. And hopefully we got enough visuals in there to keep everyone happy. Have a great Friday, great weekend and we will talk soon.