July 30, 2021

Friday Forum is an All Hands meeting for the Levels team, where they discuss their progress and traction each week.

Josh Clemente: Welcome to the last Friday Forum of July, 2021. We are entering August rapidly, which I guess is a good thing. All right. This week, there will be more on this in this meeting, but we are rolling out a tool called Threads, which is intended to improve and streamline communication culture. Ideally, it takes the best of email and Slack and combines it into a single tool, we can move our internal email communications off to there, and then we will be experimenting with ways to optimize it for the social components of keeping the Levels team interacting and dynamic, but going to really appreciate everyone one’s efforts to rip the bandaid off and make this tool what I think it can be and to share feedback on the way so we can improve its use. We had a call this week with a16z. Josh Clemente: So, we had Mark, Ben, Jeff, and VJ on the same call talking with us about hardware and supply chain risks, it was really awesome. You can see a little screenshot there of my very sweaty face and the other guys discussing these things. And if you want to see the whole thing, you have to migrate to Threads, that’s where that video is posted. So, there’s a little carrot there for everyone to jump over. Our first in-app social concept is actively in development, we’ve got in-app reports, I think starting with the weekly report in work, proactive meal insights coming to life, and then the Stripe ID verification is nearly code complete. So, those are some of the big rocks that were moved this week, or are in the process of being moved. Josh Clemente: We had a really cool, super great six-page print spread here in Real Woman Magazine, shout out to Casey for knocking that one out, it was really awesome. And then a fit insider piece on how Levels hires, which Miz contributed to. So, very cool press this week and super exciting to continue to get print. It’s always amazing to see Levels in magazines and see all of the beautiful content and assets that Stacie and David and others have developed for us continuing to bear fruit for us. I was able to join a wearables panel at the CrossFit Games this week, I’m here right now actually. And it was wild, we had five people up there, all MDs, except for Kristen Holmes, who was there as well. Josh Clemente: But four of the five people were wearing Levels and Levels was the main focal point of the conversation, which was not predetermined. But several people had… Several of these doctors were describing life changing effects of Levels on both themselves and their practice, and attributed it to us, which is crazy. So, it was really good. I mean, it was fairly small, but they did record it and I think they’re going to redistribute through the CrossFit community for a while, which is awesome. And it opened up a couple of really good conversations for potential partnerships with the CrossFit organization. We have a bunch of website updates happening, so several aggregation pages, which are the press video and podcast pages, kind of see those stacked. Josh Clemente: But the goal is to provide our assets and continue to boost our assets across the web presence. And then, we have a new Twitter river as well, which should work significantly more smoothly. We also have concepts for the blog redesigned [inaudible 00:03:18], I think that came in this week, so a lot of great stuff there. And then a couple partnerships opportunities cropped up, so an invitation to present at the Metabolic Health Summit, which Dom is deeply involved in and I think is one of the best opportunities in these sorts of events for us, as far as I can tell, all of the… It’s the who’s who of people who think like us, they’re helping to spread the message. So, I think we will probably be involved in some capacity in that event. Josh Clemente: And then, some early conversations, like I said, with CrossFit HQ and one of the largest companies in the world, which I don’t want to mention directly just yet, because I think is premature. And then we had some, let’s see, great partnerships conversations across YouTube, Tom is continuing to lead the chase there to get us deeper into the depths of that channel, so a couple of very cool opportunities arising with these affiliates, in the middle are potential affiliates, Kelly LeVeque posted a really cool day in the life with Level CGM post, which now has 2200 likes and over 100,000 views. We had ads on Ben Greenfield Fitness, Wellness Mama this week. Some really nice… Josh Clemente: We had this really nice testimonial here from one of our members who’s been using Levels for 16 weeks and both dropped 10 pounds and reversed prediabetes, it’s been a game changer for, love hearing those stories. Kevin Juball posted this YouTube video, I don’t live without this about Levels. It’s really awesome. Definitely watch this one, I think Tom has sent it out and linked it in a couple of spots, but it’s just so good to see this completely organic content cropping up. And then, we’ve had a few new VIPs join the program from [Onet 00:04:59] Pro team and Julia Glanz. And so, I believe that is the majority of the stuff this week. Really awesome. Okay. With that, I want to welcome Brandon McDaniel. I’m going to let Mike D do the quick intro here and take it from there. Mike Didonato: Thanks, Josh. Welcome Brandon. Brandon is the director of performance for the Los Angeles Dodgers. For those of us that don’t know, the Dodgers are the defending World Series champions. They are one of the most well known and decorated sports franchises in the world. Brandon’s been using the product, I think he can correct me if I’m wrong, since like December of 2020. He’s been a huge advocate for Levels, has helped get players and other key stakeholders within the Dodgers organization set up and as well as make introductions to people within his network that might be a good fit for Levels. So with that, I just want to say thanks for your support and thanks for joining us on a Friday. Brandon, I’ll leave it to you. Brandon McDaniel: Mike, thanks for that and I appreciate everybody taking the time. Just amazing to see this many people on a call, I don’t know if we would ever be able to get 20 people on an internal Zoom to discuss things like this, so really appreciate everyone’s time. And then, more importantly, I think everybody on this call should know that I personally believe, and a lot of the people that I work with personally believe that Levels is going to change the industry, and it’s going to change the way we look at health, and it’s going to change the way we look at exercise and it’s going to change the way we look at how we eat. And I’ve been searching for something like this for a long time. Brandon McDaniel: I’ve struggled with weight since I was a little kid and probably am in the field of exercise and strength and conditioning and things like that because of my own personal endeavors with this and Levels personally has just, it’s made me more accountable than I could ever probably hold myself or have another human hold me account to. And then ultimately, it’s educated me, and it’s educated me in a way, not only with the foods that I put in my mouth or what time I do that or what I pair them with, but how stressful my life probably really was, and how that was affecting my blood sugar and how that was affecting probably my insulin and my weight gain and things like that. It’s helped me understand my sleep better. Brandon McDaniel: It’s helped me understand when I eat something, and maybe when I sleep poorly, why I am. And so, that part has been unbelievable, but as a practitioner, as a coach, as someone who oversees the health and fitness of an organization, I’ve had a lot of athletes on this, I’ve even had my front office who has some of the most stressful jobs in professional sports that they don’t sleep, they don’t eat well, they travel a lot, I put them on it and they say a lot of the same things. And the accountability I think is the part that comes up the most with anybody that I work with or meet with, and that it’s easy to go pay for a personal trainer, it’s easy to have a strength coach around for one hour a day, for an hour and a half a day if you’re lucky. Brandon McDaniel: And have someone like a full-time strength coach with you eight hours a day, but there’s no one around you for the other 17 to 23 hours, and Levels is just that. And so, to see the relationships that you guys have created just on that intro that Josh put together there, it’s really cool, Ben Greenfield’s awesome. And to see that you guys are at CrossFit, CrossFit changed fitness 15 years ago. And I know that one of my previous jobs that I had before I worked with Los Angeles Dodgers was working with our special ops. And I was hired to eliminate CrossFit because in 2009, there was more surgeries performed, orthopedic surgeries performed by military doctors because of CrossFit, than there was because of combat. Brandon McDaniel: And what I found when I got into working with the special officers at CrossFit was great. CrossFit actually wasn’t necessarily the reason why, there are no bad exercises, there are no bad workout plans, there’s only bad implementation, there’s only wrong timely implementation. And so, I love to hear that you guys are working with that group, because I think that they have advanced us in this field more with strength conditioning and nutrition than anybody else has. And I think you guys are the objective measure, you are the future and you are the way to take us into a new data-driven way of health and fitness. Brandon McDaniel: And hopefully everybody jumps on board as much as I am with this and helps drive that, because I think we can have a healthier world to live in if we all have something like this to utilize. So, thank you for your time, happy to answer any questions or chat about anything else you’d like, if you guys need to move on, move on, but hope you guys know the impact that you’re having on everybody. Josh Clemente: Super awesome. Love all that, Brandon. Thank you for sharing the personal side and also the bigger picture, it’s really cool to hear from the tip of the spear folks like yourself, just the way this potentially could impact in your communities, it’s pretty wild, hard to believe. So, we’re going to jump ahead, but I do appreciate you taking the time on a Friday to join us and please feel free to stick through the meeting. We’ve got personal shares at the end, we’d love to hear from you again, if you can do so, but don’t feel obliged, it’s always great to have you. Brandon McDaniel: I’ll stay on as long as I can, we are working through some trades right now, so hopefully we get those done while I’m on the phone, but I’ll stay on as long as I can. Thank you. Josh Clemente: Awesome. Well, best of luck with the trades. Brandon McDaniel: Thank you. Josh Clemente: All right. Quick culture and kudo slide. So, always love to see two Levels team members in the same location at the same time, so here we have JM and Mike Haney spending some time in New York. Very cool to see, want to share a happy one year to Xinlu, which is coming up this next week. Crazy that it’s been a year. I remember the early conversations with Xinlu and how excited I was that she accepted when that happened. So, it’s amazing it’s been 12 months. I’m going to repeat the prayer. So, Levels, we help you see how food affects your health. So, we do more than that, but that’s the distillation of what Levels can do, is give the direct line of sight into your immediate actions and how they affect you specifically with nutrition. Josh Clemente: And then, I do want to give a shout out to Scott. So, it’s been really awesome to see Scott ramping up and contributing and hitting the ground running across so many different, I think vectors of our business and just getting quickly integrated into the community of the team, sharing the background to why he made the decision he made to join Levels. I know that he, like myself is very interested in energy and I know that he was almost pulled away into a different industry, so it’s awesome to have Scott on the team from a technical perspective, but also for the contributions he makes to the group. And so thank you, Scott, for diving in head first. All right, with that over to you, David. David Flinner: Okay. So, as you know, challenges are one of the core ways we help our members learn how their food affects their health. And right now, we have a really nice suite of main program challenges. In the future, we’re going to have social challenges, talk a little bit more about that later, but John finished the first version of porting our challenges from the hamburger menu into the new learn experience, so over time, this will be the homepage where when you have out of band non-guided journey part things, you come in here, you learn about what you could be doing, participate in the challenges, we’ll surface some of these things in our home feed as well, but this is ready for internal testing. So, go ahead, and download the latest internal build, take it for a spin. David Flinner: Actually, I’m not sure if it’s out right now, but it should be out by the end of the day. And give it a spin. See what you think. So, thank you, John, for that. And for Alan for the new, my data changes, our information architecture changes. Next slide. Sweet, you can play that Josh. So, I just wanted to call out a quick one here, Miz had some testing feedback earlier this week and we quickly discussed that this is a really nice thing to do. Basically, if you are searching to copy a past log and there’s no results, it just gave you a dead end. And he suggested that we should just say, hey, based on what the user typed, we know they want to add that as a log, let’s just add a button to create a log for that and so, Gabriel quickly jumped in and added a nice feature here. David Flinner: One of the biggest things we’re designing for is this friction free app food logging experience to help people get in, get out, and then we can get on with the insights and the learning to help you understand how your food is affecting your health and so, this is a quick win that I’m really happy about and thank you Gabriel for doing that. Please give this one a test as well. This will be going live in this week’s build so, very important we thoroughly test it. And thanks Miz for filing feedback. Next slide. All right, Justin has been totally killing it on iterations with the My Data project this week. Can you play that first video Josh? One thing I just want to highlight is, he’s breaking it up into bite-sized chunks and shipping videos alongside his progress, which has been really helpful for me and Alan. David Flinner: And I think the rest of the team and seeing where we’re at, and providing feedback in flight, so thank you Justin for that. And right now, in the app internally, you can test the new glucose summary cards, which you can see on the left, which give you at a glance how your days went, and then coming up, we’ll be working on the day view, so if you drill into that, then you’ll see the existing stats experience where you can use the day slider to go back and forth and see all the context on any given day. So, excited to hear the team’s feedback on how this one’s going. Next slide. All right. I’m going to hand it over to Alan to talk through some of the social experiments we’re working through. Alan McClean: Thanks, David. Social experiments, I think we’ve talked a lot about community and what it could potentially offer Levels, we’ve got a lot of really engaged users in other channels and social. So, what might it mean to actually bring it into the Levels experience? We’re going to start launching some experiments to evaluate essentially what are the ingredients for social experience on Levels? Next slide please. So, we look at social today and all these different products, social products, they have their own little medium, their ingredients. Instagram it’s photos, you’ve got comments and everything there, stories. TikTok obviously is being hugely successful with very short bite-sized videos, on their right, you’ve got crazy posts from your relatives on Facebook. Alan McClean: All this is news articles and so on, all very engaging content and so, what does it mean to do this in a wellness space? Go to the next slide. For Strava it’s segments. They’ve had a lot of success around looking at how quickly or where you rode and helping you compare to your friends and other people riding on the same area of the road or running. Kayla Itsines, she made a fitness empire out of the after photos in this Bikini Body Guide. And so, same on Fitbit, sort of comparative step challenges, seeing how you compared to your friends, who’s walking the most and so on. And so, I think some interesting questions for us that we need to evaluate are, what does it mean to make a social experience around potentially food. Alan McClean: Can you do that in a way that will be compelling, will be interesting and also ensure that people still feel comfortable using the Levels experience. Next slide. So, we’re going to do a couple of experiments to evaluate this, I think first phase of this is some small internal experiments primarily with us. So, we’re going to be running some tests, John is working on one right now. Phase two, we’re going to start scaling these to potentially some selected users, get some feedback out in the wild, and then finally, phase three, we’re going to consolidate that feedback and see what does it mean for us, what could all the learnings from these different experiments mean as a consolidated social experience from Levels. Alan McClean: Maybe the whole app is social or maybe just small segments of it are. Next slide. So, the first experiment is the glucose observer. The things that we want to learn around this specifically are, do people want to actually even see it as data? I think we’ve all sort of gone to a restaurant and maybe watched the glucose climb as we’re eating. Is there a social experience for, that’s potentially compelling. Do you even care about what other people’s glucose is doing? These are things that we really want to know, and I think we have a hypothesis right now that the glucose trace is super interesting, but let’s validate that, let’s see what people are saying. So here, we’ve got all these glucose traces climbing after a meal, you’re highlighted, comes to the foreground. Alan McClean: And then also, there’s this other really important thing that I alluded to earlier, which is how comfortable are people around having this kind of data in a social context. So, we’ve got a big banner there at the top saying your data is not visible, but in this view, others Level employees data is, and it’s showing the most glucose friendly meals on the bottom, the least glucose friendly meals. And so, we want to get some information there around general comfort around posting this kind of stuff. So, John’s working on the that now, looking forward to getting some feedback on that. Next slide. I’ll quickly… Oh, that’s okay. There’s some other experiments, we’ll go through that at another date and you’ll see the [crosstalk 00:18:41]. David Flinner: … you need a refresh? Alan McClean: Other than that, I think- David Flinner: [Crosstalk 00:18:42]. Okay. Alan McClean: Yeah, I posted them in Slack, so it’s cool. All good. Josh Clemente: All right. David Flinner: I’ve got a few more social things I’ll talk about at the end too. So, open the next slide. Oh, there they are. Okay. Josh Clemente: I did a refresh, sorry. Alan McClean: There’s the Zone Score. So, can we gamify zones a little bit like guest zone for a given meal, perhaps you’re swiping through these meals and you can evaluate and see what other people are guessing. It could be potentially really interesting to see what other people think about what your meal is going to end up to be. And so, can we build like a little bit more anticipation in that buildup of that two hour window where we’re evaluating the glucose response? Next slide. Oh, there you go. That’s it. David Flinner: Awesome. Okay. This one has a incorrect title, I forgot to change it. This should be in-app weekly report and Gabriel is actively working on this one. One of the long time requests we’ve had from many members is they want more of their data and trends in the app. We’ve had it almost from day one that we want to have the weekly and monthly reports in the app. It’s a core of the main experience we’re building that we want to build that first. And so, we’re finally at the stage where we can start pulling in a lot of the foundational things we know users love into the app. And so, we’re starting with a pretty fast moving approach. So, the first approach is moving largely the existing weekly report into the app, it’ll show up as a feed card on your homepage. David Flinner: Members will be able to tap into it, see the same report that they’re getting over email now. And then, this is the surface we can iterate on as we move forward and figure out what other types of weekly ritual, weekly loops we’ll have in the improve user journey, how we’d want to change this going forward. So, Gabriel’s working on moving the simplest possible way forward, we’ll launch that, and then we’ll see how it goes. So thank you, Gabriel. Next slide. All right. So, last week I talked a little bit about how we were doing some MVP jamming or some jamming on MVP on how we might help members better understand their food via their food choices, unpacking what maybe went wrong, what to do instead. Something that Casey and Alan and I have been discussing for a while, Josh as well. David Flinner: And related to, can we understand a bit more about what the user wrote in the note and what’s in the meal, and then potentially surface things that we know might be potential spikers? And so, Jim is working on a prototype for this now. The original idea was that we’d give you a meal analysis at the bottom of the page, we’d show you, hey, based on what you logged, we found these things that we know are typically high glycemic index foods so that people could have a targeted response on what to swap out. Most people aren’t as expert on optimizing their diet as we are, working at Levels. So, it could be a big one there. We don’t know, we’re going to test it. And then Xinlu had some good ideas to bring that information upfront. David Flinner: If we know that something is going to be potentially problematic, then we could help you understand that at the moment of logging, not just after the meal and maybe suggest that you go for a walk. So here, you see on the right, we’ve identified sweet potatoes as a potential spiker and suggest a brisk walk right after dinner to keep your glucose in range. So, this is just a prototype, we’ll see how it goes, but in progress and excited to see where it goes. Next slide. So, Stripe identity verification, like Josh mentioned is coming along very nicely, a little ahead of schedule. I think Scott mentioned that this should be ready for internal testing on Monday, assuming all things go well. Again, a plug for the team to dive in and test. David Flinner: This is going to be a very new path for our members, and we want to make sure that it is smooth and intuitive, and I think we’ll all be looking forward to your few feedback on how we might improve things. Next slide. All right. I think that was it. So, Josh, do you mind if I share my screen real quick? Is that cool? Josh Clemente: Yeah, go for it. David Flinner: Cool. I just wanted to touch on some other social stuff too. I’ve for a long time been talking about various social concepts and I just wanted to… I spent 10 minutes and I laid out how I thought a lot of the different things I’ve been talking about, like Dr. Casey’s data, Yelp for food experts integration in Levels, just like a very rough sketch on how, I see some of these things potentially working together independent of the social dynamics that we want. So like, there’s going to be social dynamics and hooks that Alan was talking about, core experiences that I’ve not charted here, but I just see some foundational things that we may want to have in there, and that’s what I wanted to briefly just share in like two minutes this. David Flinner: So, what you see here is some of the concepts that I’ve done before in inside rectangles. And so, the rectangles are some of the core social primitives that I think we probably want no matter what, so you can see with any social app, you’re going to have some sort of profile, right? So, your representation, your user account, obviously your private one on your new page. Well, we might want to consider making something optionally public, right? And so, we’ve talked about Dr. Casey’s data, letting health influencers share their data more publicly so in that case, it starts with your profile, what you want to share. There’s some sort of people aggregation experience where you come in, and maybe there’s like a people app or something you can see. David Flinner: You can like drill in, see other people, I don’t know, it’s very hand wavy, but there’s something where you can find and explore other friends and people in this layer. So if you have a basic understanding of people and ways to connect with them, then there might be ways like, what are the experiences that we want to connect with people? And I think a lot of what Alan was talking about are some of the experience we want to try there. Some of the other things we’ve talked about are maybe open group challenges, we saw a lot of success with the Coke Challenge, right? And so, if you could connect with other people and the Levels of that, and there’s representation of them, could we come together and build thing on the core user journey that was about like, hey, it’s week one, join one of the open challenges. David Flinner: You and other people can come together and try one of the open challenges. Or maybe there’s something we could experiment with with close groups, which we tried in the past, where you can connect with your friends or family. I think Brandon mentioned his teammates were looking for accountability, so what if he could connect with like 10 of his teammates that were in Levels, and it’s not really about competition, it’s just about seeing each other and being there for each other. But we’ve also talked about like health experts and nutritionist, and there’d be some way to connect all of these things as well. Some way in the future, you can connect with the experts, they could layer in, see your food, make suggestions, that kind of stuff. David Flinner: And then, finally down here, this is like public food catalog Yelper pages. There’s going to be, I would imagine there would be something involved with understanding, like how food affects people look broadly, and it’s going to connect somehow back to other people. So very, very core strokes. Take all this super lightly, but I just wanted to share some sort of a unifying thread on where my current thinking is pulling a lot of the basic structure into place. Again, it has nothing to do with the dynamics or the actual experience we want to usher people through, but it’s very likely that we’ll have something like a profile, or something like some sort of a group. We don’t know what these things would be, but that’s what’s been in my head. Josh Clemente: Awesome. Summary slide. There you go. David Flinner: There’s been a lot of great experience thinking that’s ongoing with social, James been leading the charge on the membership model and we’ve been engaging a lot there on what does that membership model look like, and how does it relate to potentially a free version of Levels? So, there’s a lot of documentation in Threads, you can dive in and hear more details on that. I’ll leave it there. Josh Clemente: Amazing. I just want to say the proactive meal stuff and the social concepts, it feels like a paradigm shift coming soon. So, it’s awesome to see that work happening. All right. Quick hiring update. This week, you’ll notice that we downgraded from three published jobs to two. We temporarily paused the web applications for the head of clinical product. We’re still looking for candidates for this, we’re still interviewing, having conversations with people. This is just a resourcing thing, we have not been able to keep up with the applications we’ve been getting, there’s a ton of interest in this role. Josh Clemente: So, we’re going to pause things, catch up. If you are watching this and you know someone who would be great for this role, please do not hold back on recommending them, we still are very much looking for this person. And levels.link/careers for our general application. Okay. I believe this is JM. Josh Mohrer: Thank you. Coke challenge finished up this week. We sent out an email thanking the participants. I wrote a retrospective that I sent around over email, you can take a look if you’d like. And we did a podcast with Ben and Josh and myself to talk about it, as the beginning of an interesting chapter of doing research using Levels. And that was a lot of fun. Thanks to everyone for their help for that. And then finally, on membership model, I am hosting the work now publicly in Notion, you should see the little addition on the menu. I’ll set up a go link and a regular link if you’d like to take a look. I touched on this last week and we’ll be giving updates each week that I’m here, but this is moving forward, it’s very exciting. And you can take a look if you’d like. And that’s all for me. Thank you. Josh Clemente: Thank you, Ben. Ben Grynol: All right. So, going to do an update on a project that is kicking off, it’s a project for in-app video. So, we’ll go through the what, the why and the how very quickly. So, David has put together this wireframe on the left hand side, the what. Right now, when people see events, so an event happens, whether it’s low glucose or high glucose, it’s something that they don’t really know what think of it, they think so what. And then, they get served up an insight card, so it is relatively short, but it’s still text based. And so, they open it and they look at this and it’s like, they don’t even know what to think as far as an answer goes. And so, it’s the now what, they just want a quick answer that gives them some insight to take away and go, oh cool. I do or I don’t need to be concerned about this. Ben Grynol: When we hear this, Mike has heard this over and over and over in feedback calls. And so, the hypothesis is, if we serve up video in place of the text that is being served up in these insight cards, will people engage with it more, and will it give them more value? And so, the way that we’re approaching this is from a scrappy video perspective and scrappy does not mean low quality production value. What it means is fast. We want to get answers relatively quickly and keep the information value really high and so, we’ll do some videos with Casey, likely Josh as well, but we’re going to do roughly five to of 10 videos, and the how is using data. So, right now we’ve got data where we can see the top, the top 10, the top 20 insight cards that people engage with over and over again. Ben Grynol: A lot of them are what you’d think like low glucose or high glucose events. So, we’ll use that data to say, cool, we’re going to produce 30 to 90-second videos in place of the current cards, and then we’ll measure it and say, quantitatively, did people engage with the videos more than the text? And then qualitatively, Mike will have a little bit of work cut out for him in doing some feedback calls. So, we’ll probably tap the Levels ambassadors and a number of people who are using the product as well as our own internal team. So, week over week, we are going to update on this project and the idea is to get something shipped as quickly as possible. So, expect something tomorrow by 8:00 AM in the app. Next slide, please. Ben Grynol: Growth shout-outs. So, Tom and I have been having lots of great conversations with candidates for the partnership specialists, as always, references from within our network and within our cap table are much appreciated. So, shout out to Lenny, Sarah Kunst from Cleo Capital, Beth Newman from Andreessen Horowitz, and then Alex Cunningham who is a startup advisor. So, thank you as always, really appreciate the insight and putting forth great candidates. Next slide please. So financials, weekly, $80,000 are just below 80 of recognized revenue, really strong week. Ben Grynol: And then monthly we’re just North of 600, which is again, it’s one of these things where our goal is $300,000. We are not in growth mode and doubling the goal is surprising and it’s interesting and so, really strong month. No changes to cash or debt or runway, and that is growth for the week. Josh Clemente: Love it. Thanks, Ben. Tom. Tom Griffin: All right. Just one slide for me this week, few highlights to call out. So, Josh mentioned on the left here, Kevin Juball, MD. Kevin is a former surgeon who stopped practicing to pursue med tech focused on healthcare and health and wellness, which includes his YouTube content. And Kevin had interviewed Josh and Casey for his channel in the past. But this new video that came out this week is a 10 minute feature on Levels in Kevin’s experience using the product, and it’s really, really good. So, again, recommend watching it, it’s on par with the best EGC that we’ve seen to date. It’s also driven about 10 conversions in 24 hours, which is great. So, I’m going to be chatting with Kevin about ongoing potential content creation. Tom Griffin: And then, on that note, now, in the middle of the screen, mentioned a couple of weeks ago, but we’ve ramped up YouTube outreach. JTPR has been helping a lot with this and it is paying dividends already, so we’ve reached out to 30 channels, which takes a lot of time with personalized outreach, we’ve got nine active conversations going. And again, this is organic, affiliate paid tests. So, excited about this progress there. And then on the right side, just highlighting again, Kelly’s Instagram post from a couple of days ago, we get spoiled by this stuff, but it’s worth just pausing and celebrating, not only because of the performance, 109,000 video plays in like 36 hours, which is incredible and 20 conversions. Tom Griffin: But also, it’s great to just see partners and members presenting and promoting Levels in like unique and creative ways. So, Kelly did a walkthrough of her day by actually scrolling through her glucose curve, spliced with video footage of different workouts and meals and her responses so, it’s really cool to see this different type of content naturally emerge, and it’s going to inform ideas for future partners and content creators. That’s it. Josh Clemente: Awesome. Thank you, Tom. Agreed. Haney. Casey Means: Haney is on a vacation this week, so I’m going to jump in with the content update. So, two wonderful new posts this week to check out. The first is about migraine, it’s a bit of a new approach. It’s a personal story written by the journalist about her experience with migraine and blood sugar coupled with a really deep explainer. So, there’s a lot of science and a lot of information in there, but also a personal narrative. Really, really strong article. The second is an article from an ER physician, Bryan Tepper that Josh and I first connected with in early 2020, who is interested in Levels and have maintained that relationship with him. And he did a wonderful interview for the blog. So, really great piece, check that out. Casey Means: The pipeline is just on fire right now for our next pieces coming out. I’m so excited for the next month. We’ve got written and in sort of editing, Alzheimer’s, ultimate guide to Alzheimer’s, prediabetes, longevity, cholesterol explainer, eggs, fiber, and our dietary philosophy. So, it’s going to be a great month for content. Haney’s just getting so many amazing things through. We also have a new newsletter format coming out starting next week, which is going to be great, and a lot of new features to that. Stat of the week, 107,000 blog page views in July. Always cool to see huge numbers like that. And interestingly still, to date, about 34,000 of those come from our ultimate guide to healthy blood glucose Levels. Casey Means: So, it’s usually always about a quarter to a third of those total views are that one post and still people spending about six minutes on that page. So, people love knowing what’s normal and what’s not. Next slide. Just that I would put also a quick press update here because it’s having 6-page spread prelaunch, is I feel like pretty unheard of, this is beautiful. Shout-out to JTPR and so many of Stacie’s gorgeous images. This is an incredibly positive piece, and just really highlights the systems’ issues related to metabolic health, the journalist’s personal experience, the impact of fitness and personalized diet. So, congrats everyone. Big kudos. Josh Clemente: Awesome. Plus one. Thank you, Casey. Okay. I believe this is Miz. Mike Mizrahi: Yeah. So, we’re looking at a chart. This is a chart of our company from inception in June, 2019 through the end of this year. And this is our head counts, our projected hires. We have a few new hires coming in the month of August already signed, total of three and then hopefully continuing to hire through December. So, a lot’s changed and pretty fun growth rate. The things we can do have also changed. We’re turning out a ton more product, a ton more design, a lot more engineering capacity, more support capacity, growth on the operation side. So, all of that is awesome, but with that growth, what used to be simple and what used to be straight forward is now a little bit harder. And so, next slide, Josh. Got a few examples here. Mike Mizrahi: This is an example of our communications where we default to the tools that we have. And so, this is an email to a few people where it was easy to include early on, the right handful of people you needed for a project, but as the team has grown, there’s more and more input that’s necessary. Before, when we didn’t have design for example, there was no Alan on the thread, before we have a lawyer, there’s no lawyer on the thread, before we have a marketing team, we didn’t have operations input, support input. And so, things that used to be two or three people could bang it out very easily are now way more complex and what ends up happening is that we use the features and the tools that are built in. Mike Mizrahi: And so, we forward people something, we’ll copy someone else, we’ll move to BCC and ends up happening is that we all have different versions of the same source of truth, and fragmented conversations as a result. And so, we’re kind of adding friction into our workflow. This particularly is an email example, but generalizing it, this can be true with Slack even Notion in some cases so, not specific to email in this case. Onto the next slide, a few other quick examples. Here’s an example where we were having parallel conversations about the same initiative with different audiences. This one was about a metabolic health shopping list. The details aren’t so significant, but Mike had an idea and we ended up having two separate conversations in the same week with different groups of people. Mike Mizrahi: And it’s important to note, this is not anyone’s fault, it’s just us working the way we’re working using the tools that we’ve got at our disposal. Onto the next slide. One last example. This is a example of a very long thread, we were making some updates to the subscription kit email, shipment email. It had six people on it, but over the course of the month, there were something like 24 different messages. So, that means each person had to triage this thread, or in total, this thread got triaged to 144 times in aggregate. And so, that’s a lot of cognitive load, that’s a lot of context switching. And so, it’s not the most efficient way to work together. And these issues, these examples are only a few of the issues we’re seeing. Mike Mizrahi: It’s worth noting that where you sit in the organization might look different. So, you might be an engineer sitting on this call and saying, I don’t get that much email, not an issue for me, totally different experience. Your experience as Sam might be different from your experience as Josh, as Ben, as Tom, whoever it might be. And so, it manifests differently, but the core problem remains, which is that we’re a growing team, communicating in a knowledge work environment is pretty tough as it is, and then doing it as a remote and distributed team is even harder. And so, as a innovative in intentional team, we’re looking at ways to iterate on the way we’re working and stay ahead and try different things. And so, that’s the basis of this. Mike Mizrahi: So, one more slide, Josh. So, there’s a memo in Notion that explores our communication tools. There’s this how to use Threads memo, but there’s also an exploration of our communication tools, some communication principle that Sam did a draft on earlier on. And so, there’s three different, long, very dense documents. If you’re interested in this, go to town, if not, you can skip those and just focus on this primary, how to use Threads at Levels memo. But all that is just a bunch of background work that happened which led us to a few principles and so, I have those messily. So, a few of the problems that we discovered were information overload, trouble triaging, information silos that happen, unclear action items, kind of phonetic hyperactive work environments, multiple channels. Mike Mizrahi: So, those are all explored. Next slide. As a result of those, we came up with a few principles, one more, few principles and goals. These aren’t locked in, this isn’t inscribed on the tablets coming down. This is just an exploration based on some of the memos that we’ve had. And at the core, there’s a few things that are true. One is that we’re an asynchronous team and our communication systems and our principles and our process should align with our values as that kind of team. And so, a few of the highlights, we roughly think work should be asynchronous as much as possible. It’s the best way we’ve found so far to build a distributed team that works together. Everyone who wants to contribute should have an opportunity to be heard. Mike Mizrahi: Our channels shouldn’t create a sense of FOMO or anxiety if you’re not keeping up with it. Second one, which is pretty core to our identity is that we prioritize long-form thoughts and generally environments that promote deep work and minimize distraction. We’ve seen the benefits of that through our work so far, and that’s an environment that we want to keep promoting. Following, conversations should be transparent and discoverable, they shouldn’t create unnecessary info asymmetry or happen in silos, oftentimes with an email, thread or a select DM things can get, as we saw in some of the examples, get siloed and in an environment where we want people to be autonomous and make decisions, being informed is super important. Mike Mizrahi: Our tools should instill confidence and control, they should allow for triage, explicit closed loops. And finally, we should use the right tools to solve the right problems. There’s different use cases for synchronous video, for phone calls, for long-form memos, for collaboration and discussion, we want to be really intentional about using the right tools to solve the right problems and not the wrong tools for certain problems, right? You can use tool X to solve problem Y, but it might not be the best one or promote the culture that we’re trying to have. And then, one last slide, like Josh mentioned at the top, we’re trying out Threads, it’s a tool that combines email and Slack. It’s like email in that it promotes writing in full sentences and long formed thought. Mike Mizrahi: Kind of like a forum if you’re familiar with Reddit or any other user forum, it’s a very similar format to that. But it’s also like Slack in that things are organized, conversations are organized by channels essentially, they allow for comments and reactions, and there’s also a DM function, that’s long-form like emailing, but DMS are supported. And so, this week, 11 of us have tried it, we’re playing around with features like the closed loop feedback system, they’re requesting feedback, visibility across teams, figuring out how projects worked and then playing with all the different features. So, 11 of us are onboarded. I think we’re going to open up invites a little bit more widely following today for any of the team that wants to try it out. Mike Mizrahi: And we’re testing two primary things. One, the tool itself, we want to find the features that we need, we want to find the workflows that make sense, the notification setting tweaks that are important, and see if that’s a better way of working. And the second, we want to test working in it as well and see what use cases it does better, where there’s some spots missing. It’s been a lot of really good conversation and feedback so far around the value that we get from Slack around social cohesion, around kind of semi-sync work chat. We want to make sure we’re not losing those things if they are adding value. So, give it an honest try, share feedback liberally, and we’ll see where it takes us. Josh Clemente: Awesome. Sam Corcos: I’ll jump been real quick. Definitely take notes on things that are good and bad. I’m in touch with the CEO there, and they’re really open to some of our use cases. So, we might be able to get some features and primitives changed in the product. So, definitely take a ton of notes. We have a channel for it. Josh Clemente: Yeah, it should be noted, they’re fairly early to age I think, and there’ll be some growing pains, but the nice thing is that they are like us in development and open to that feedback, which is good. So, hopefully the product can grow with us, and I will say that I really enjoy it so far. To me, it’s a very good solution. So, I can say confidently that I think it will fill the need that we have. All right. Let’s jump straight into the individual contributions. For me, let’s see, personally, my brother is getting out of the Marine [Corps 00:44:27] on Monday and so, that’s going to be awesome to hang with him in his new free living experience. And then, I just want to say that this week at CrossFit Games has been amazing. Josh Clemente: The rate of uptake of what we’re doing has been massive in this community, I didn’t actually know how many people are knowing about and thinking about Levels until I was sitting on a panel with the five people with four of them wearing the product and all of them talking about it. And I went to dinner with some people and I had one really interesting conversation that I wanted to share. Brigid Titgemeier, she works with Kelly LeVeque, was really raving about how Levels has changed the game. She’s a dietician, and it has completely transformed her patients experiences with food and helped them to be accountable. She was saying you guys are improving lives, you don’t realize it. Josh Clemente: But then she said, “I’m curious, what AI do you use for your member success, because it’s so interesting how good the responses are.” And she’s like, “It’s so fast and so good and so relevant.” And I was like, “We don’t use AI, those are real people.” And she was like, “That can’t be true, it’s so immediate. And it’s on weekends and stuff.” So, I just wanted to share that that we’re fooling people with how good and how fast the feedback is. Sam Corcos: It’s the Mercy Bot and the Braden bot. Josh Clemente: Exactly. That’s what I’m excited about. Scott. Scott Klein: Man, work-wise, first feature coming to a close, I think Levels is just, I’m just finding it’s a lot more popular than even I had imagined I knew it. Yesterday, I went to a fun little booze cruise thing that some VC firm here in town sponsored, and I was telling people, “Oh, I just got a job at this company called Levels.” And like more than one person was like, “Ah, we looked at that and we passed and we’re really upset about that now.” And so, it’s just really cool that… Really excited about that. Personally, the baby’s a wreck right now, so I’m excited for the weekend. I hope to just get some downtime and get some naps and- Josh Clemente: Awesome. Enjoy it, Gabriel. Gabriel: Work-wise, I’m really excited about my data stuff that Justin’s been working on. I think it looks great. Personally, here in Chicago, the weather is finally getting [inaudible 00:46:45] of a human level again after being very, very warm humid. So, I’m looking forward to spending some time outdoors this weekend. Josh Clemente: Awesome. Ben. Ben Grynol: Hat tip to Braden. So, Braden is in the process of organizing a book club with Rob and Casey and the Levels community, and really appreciate all the work he’s doing on that. On the personal front, I am going way down the lake this weekend so, there are 14,000 islands on this lake, Lake of the Woods and I’m picking one way out there. So, I’ll be doing that for two day on Monday and Tuesday and super pumped. Josh Clemente: Great enjoy. I’m going to, I know Rob has to jump off shortly, so I want to accelerate him. So, Rob, if you want to jump ahead to right here. Robert Lustig: Thanks, josh. Greetings from Lake Tahoe, I’m at a peds conference and I gave a talk on using insulin as the North star for obesity and metabolic health. And I will tell you that the general pediatricians here have never heard this before, and that was both maddening, but also very, shall we say, encouraging that the message was so easily picked up. Also wanted to tell you, I participated by Skype in the Israeli nutrition conference this week, where they had a round table on ultra-processed food. They had 300 dieticians in the room, and none of them had ever heard that ultra-processed food might actually be bad for you. Robert Lustig: So again, another revelation, another awakening, but what it means is that we have a tremendous amount of work to do, and I’m very happy to help Levels move that along. But I will tell you that the professions are not in our loop, so we have to do even better. Josh Clemente: Absolutely. Thanks for sharing, Rob. Stacie. Stacie Flinner: Personal side, really excited to have our friends in town. I don’t know. I think a few members of the team might know a [Montana 00:48:46] and Will Chamberlain. And then, from the Levels perspective, love seeing Kelly’s day in the life, just really great engagement on that post and also everything that comes out of design, just love how the app is changing almost on a daily basis and it’s beautiful. Josh Clemente: Absolutely. Tom. Tom Griffin: I think for me, just all of the public validation, Brandon being on the call today was really cool, very surreal, seeing Josh at the CrossFit Games and having all those panelists use the product. I got two texts in the last few days from people in my network, screenshotting people on social media posting about Levels, influencer types, assuming given my that I would know who they are or be in contact with them. And both times I had no idea who they were so, it’s already expanded beyond our reach as a company, which is just crazy that it’s happened so quickly and personally just hoping to feel better any day. Now, I feel every morning, like I had four Vermont Double IPAs the night before, and I’m getting pretty sick of the brain fog. So, fingers crossed. Josh Clemente: Pulling for you. Mike D. Mike Didonato: The social experiments, seeing that come to life it’s pretty awesome. I think from the earliest days, our members have always told us that it’s a really social experience and they want more and more ways to share and also see what other people are doing. So, to see those designs come to life is pretty awesome. Personally, like Tom, I’ve been sick for like the last week it feels like, seems like I’m turning the corner so I’m pretty pumped about that. Josh Clemente: Get better, guys. I think Murillo is on vacation, John. John: Levels-wise, plus one on the new social concepts and experiments. I love them. And on the personal front, one of my best friends is getting married in September and we are going to have a bachelor party next Friday. It’s going to be wild. Josh Clemente: Have a great time. Are you going to play that game that you taught us about? I don’t remember the specifics, but it was intense. Sam Corcos: [Tayho 00:51:06]. Josh Clemente: Tayho, Awesome. Love it. JM. Josh Mohrer: I’m going away next week to Acadia in Maine, very excited about that. I’ll be hard to reach and I’ll miss you. On the work front, Coke Challenge is like the first thing that I finished at Levels, and so I’m happy to hit that milestone and I’ll see you guys in a week. Josh Clemente: Awesome. Coke Challenge is very cool to wrap and we’ve still got some, I think some goodies heading out to the people that participated. Mercy. Mercy Clemente: Professionally, the Stripe ID verification, that is exciting. It’s exciting that it’s happening sooner than expected to. Personally, I also have been sick for where it feels like a million years, but it’s actually been like this week, so I also feel like I’m starting to feel a little bit better, so I’m hoping by next week I am totally done with this because it’s been awful. Josh Clemente: Feel better. Alan. Alan McClean: I hate to boost my own work. I’m super excited to do the social stuff. It’s something I wanted to do for a long time, not just as someone interested in health, but as a Type 1, so I’m stoked to explore that area. And on the personal side, the Canadian border’s going to open up pretty soon so, my parents are talking about potentially visiting. It’s been a long time since they could come down. They’re not sure about Delta, but we’ll figure it out, but promising. Josh Clemente: Awesome. Enjoy. And plus one on the social, Jesse. Jesse Lavine: I’m also really excited about the social, this concept resonate with how I viewed my blood sugars as a Type 1, so excited for everyone to experience that, and for the testing and Rob just left, but I always love hearing his updates and the traditional medical culture that he breaks into. And I’m just going to take it easy this weekend, I’m excited for that. Josh Clemente: Great. Dom. Dominic D’Agostino: Well, I’m driving so that’s why I have my video off, but personally and professionally heading off to LA and for little vacation with my wife, and also have some podcasts lined up where I plan to introduce CGM into the discussion on that. Josh Clemente: Very cool. Excited to listen. Have a good trip. Dominic D’Agostino: Thank you. Josh Clemente: Miz. Mike Mizrahi: The feedback that you shared earlier on, I forgot who shared it, about the support team feeling like a AI chatbot put a huge smile on my face, so huge, huge hat tip to the support team for the work that you guys are doing constantly. It can feel repetitive, but it is super impactful for customers. So really, really happy to see the at on the member side. The other quick hat tip is that small change that Jeremy was able to do after coming to everyone on support session seems small, but really improves workflow. So, really happy that we’re getting those quick hits in. And then on the personal side, really enjoying the Olympics for the last week, watching a ton of new sports that I’ve never watched before. And it’s fun to see. Josh Clemente: I have watched zero minutes of Olympics coverage unfortunately, but I’ve heard it’s good. Hao. Hao Li: Speaking of Olympics, I didn’t spot any Levels patch there, but I believe we will see some next one in next one. Personally, I’m taking a firearm license, a fair arm license this weekend just for the, prepare for the zombie apocalypse. Josh Clemente: Awesome. Good luck. And Tom, what’s the deal with no Olympians wearing Levels. I thought you were all over that, let’s make that happen next time. Sam. Sam Corcos: I think the thing I’m most excited about is just the quality of candidates that we’re seeing for all the different roles that we’re looking at, engineers for roles that we don’t even have open yet. It’s just been really cool to see the quality of people that I’m talking to. Josh Clemente: That’s amazing. Justin. Justin Stanley: I’m also going to say the social stuff, all that, getting outside of your own little bubble and expanding that is great and even just seeing people and not even like interacting, just seeing data about the people is helpful to people. Personally, we’re taking a quick overnight road trip to visit my dad and Canara and then Sean’s sister in [inaudible 00:55:53]. So, it’d be nice to see people. Josh Clemente: Enjoy the trip, Casey. Casey Means: I think professionally, this week I’m most excited about what Miz and Sam are working on with how they’re thinking about scaling communication at the company as we grow. I think just to be a part of an organization that’s continually adapting as the company changes is really inspiring rather than just hitting our heads against the wall with tools that don’t work and the first principal’s approach and the documentation, I just feel like I’m learning constantly just from watching how they’re doing this and approaching this. So, amazing, huge kudos. Personally, I’ve started doing the Power Zone series on Peloton on Josh’s recommendation, which he made the recommendation like two months ago. I’m obsessed with it. And Sarah [inaudible 00:56:42] also recommend it, and I’m not going back. Matt Wilpers for life. Josh Clemente: I’m a Denis guy personally, but I hear you. Power Zone’s where it’s at. I think Miz is a part of this too. Actually, Miz shared about the Power Zone pack, which is like this whole community that’s built on the Peloton community. So, it’s an interesting archetype for what can be done. Okay. I believe we got everyone and somebody please correct me if I’m wrong. Okay, cool. With that, I will stop the share here and stop the recorder.