Ben Grynol (00:00):
Friday Forum, last Friday of Q2, 2022. Very hard to believe that we are already here, but June 24th, here we go. Big week as always. So Tim Ferriss, the 5-Bullet Friday is finally distributed. As of right now, and we’re starting to see some orders drip in, which is awesome. New checkout is live on all the partner pages, so appreciate all the work that everyone’s been putting into all of these efforts. It is very cool to be here, and to feel that we’re right on the cusp of it, right on the cusp of this general availability.
(00:34):
Strong week for Blood. So the product marketing email that went out recently, and then all the initiatives that Brayden’s starting to undersee, and a lot of these smaller initiatives are starting to compound in the efforts that we put forward to grow some of these revenue streams. Subs had the best week to date, so 50% week over week, which is awesome to see. Realtime hardware access has been provided to partners and VIPs, such as Matthew Walker, Joey Thurman, and Jesse Itzler. They’re all now members, and they’re giving feedback about the experience. Very cool to see that.
(01:08):
As far as the UK expansion goes, starting to develop the podcast and creator pipeline or the infrastructure from a partnership perspective, so that as we ramp up to expansion and have more infrastructure in place, we’ve got these relationships there. We know how long it took in the US to build the network that we have now, and build a lot of the infrastructure that has allowed us to get the traction and awareness. So doing that same thing in the UK starting yesterday, starting weeks ago, it’s very important that we’re doing this, and we’re doing this moving forward.
(01:40):
From a US partnerships perspective, starting to finalize some of the details for second half of the year, with paid spots for some of our partners like Dave Asprey, OneCommune, new partner, but we’re exploring opportunities there. And then the art of being well. As far as analytics. So Paul and Jason and JM and Helena, everybody that has some contribution to data. Paul is now connected Google Search Console to Google Analytics, so we’ve got better insight into traffic and some of the patterns as far as where the traffic comes from and what we can do from it moving forward. The biggest consideration is taking into account the privacy policy and the way that we think about the data, so we don’t want anything to ever breach that. But a lot of considerations gone into that and a lot of work, and so it’s been great to see that get kicked off.
(02:31):
YouTube, we hit 20K subs or just over 20K subs, and now the Dr. Perlmutter and Casey video is the second most viewed video for Dr. Perlmutter on YouTube for all of the videos that he has up. So it’s very cool to see that. And it’s the number one video for Casey. So just over 800,000 views, which is awesome, trending towards a million and it’ll probably get there in the next couple of weeks. And so as Paul says, “What do we need to do to get the next million?” Which is awesome and we will do it.
(03:00):
Happiness is at 92 for the week. It’s been at over 90 for eight weeks in a row, which is amazing, and support volumes are all very manageable. So, kudos to everyone on the support team that’s putting in the effort day over day, week over week to make sure that members are well served. As far as what else do we have? So podcast, number of episodes went out, Haney, Chris, Miz, and then Casey did an episode with Nora LaTorre about kids in nutrition. Casey was on the Ultimate Health podcast. Dom was on Mind and Matter.
(03:35):
The Wearable Challenge, so that’s kicking off July 5th. He’s been doing a lot of work with Aaron Hansen and the team. Editorial projects, Haney’s got, there’s so many editorial projects on the go all the time, so Haney now has a dock where he’s aggregated all of these projects and you can see different statuses for some of the things that we have going on because editorial continues to get more and more traction and we’re doing more from a content perspective.
(04:02):
What else do we have? Allie. So Allie did a video on popcorn. When she first started Levels, she did this video on popcorn. She wanted to see what her metabolic response would be, and she was doing this interesting thing, maybe we’ll air quotes interesting. She was spraying water on the popcorn and putting salt on it so that it would minimize the fat content. And so, she revisited this a couple years later and she realized that, “Hey, by putting olive oil, by putting more fat, start to see a better glycemic response to the food or metabolic response.” So video there.
(04:33):
Austin did one as far as the surprising causes of insulin resistance. Fantasia did one around migraines and sugar, and then there was a video and it’s also a podcast episode that went out with Casey, Jackie and Miz and talking more about feedback. And so sharing some stories and anecdotes of the way that we can create cohesion across the team from some of the interactions that we have week over week.
(04:57):
And I believe that is it. So, onto Michael. Welcome Michael, special guest for the week. Michael is a physician, he’s a member, and he’s got some very interesting stories around what he’s been doing with patients from a wearables’ perspective. So Michael, would love to hear more about your experience with Levels, the way that you’ve been using wearables, where you think they’re going from a healthcare perspective. And then, what we always love to hear as a team is feedback about ways in which we can always improve. So, let you take the floor and kick it off.
Michael Kurisu (05:34):
Great, thank you. Okay. Sound check. Can everyone hear me okay? Just thumbs up. All right, great. Big fan of your company and everything and the audacious goal that you guys are trying to accomplish. As you can see, I’m an osteopathic integrative family physician. Used to be the Director for Center for Integrative Medicine at UC San Diego, and have a background in computational neuroscience from college. And so, finally got to see where technology is catching up with medicine. And I’ve been launching a clinic, kind of a virtual, somewhat of a virtual clinic to start with, but mainly looking at longitudinal time series in medicine. And the best way to go about doing that is I’m leaning heavily on the wearables market because you can look at longitudinal time series. We do longitudinal time series in many other industries out there.
(06:21):
Some of you might come from finance, some of you’re in finance, so that’s the best analogy that I use is you go to see your financial planner and they know all about you, every day about your accounts, what’s happening. You go to see your doctor and we know nothing about you. We ask you questions and we’re trying to get the answers from you. And sometimes, that’s not the best thing. So why don’t we rely on data to do that? And I’m looking at the wearable consumer market because I just started looking at all of my patients who have these things on. And all information and continuous data streams, they’re going to the cloud, they’re going to Google, they’re going to Amazon, and they’re going to sell you a bunch of stuff that you probably don’t need. So why can’t I intercept some of those data streams and use it for good? What I’ve been doing is trying to “wire up” all of my patients with different wearable devices, whether it’s continuous glucose monitors and using the apps like Levels, it’s what you guys have.
(07:09):
It’s the Oura Ring, it’s Apple Watch, it’s Fitbits. Well, I’m staying agnostic to whatever the data stream is. I’m just trying to capture that data stream and see what sort of insights that we can gather from different patients and their lifestyle. And what I’m interested in is looking at some of the metadata. So, I’ve had a very similar call like this with the Oura team. And so, how do we start combining some of the Oura and sleep data with the data from your company? How do we combine what we can see from the Apple HealthKit with the data from glucose, with the data coming from some devices that patients are using to monitor the micro weather and their environment? And so, again, I’m looking at longitudinal time streams, and I think it’s the way where I think medicine is going, but you can see a lot of these health companies are leaning towards that way anyway.
(07:55):
Apple keeps getting more and more clearance for their device of doing more and more different things from an FDA perspective. And so, a lot of these patients are finding useful insights in their life, and we’re starting to see really interesting trends in some of the data streams from patients. I’m more than happy to have a different call where you can show some of those insights that have been gained through, especially during Covid times, what patients are learning about themselves through different sleep patterns. But the glucose one is a really, really interesting one because I think it’s eye-opening for a lot of people because the way they live their life, I don’t think most people are aware, including myself, you’re not aware of what your blood sugar is doing. You might have some sense of awareness of, “I ate a whole loaf of white bread, what’s going to happen?” That sort of thing.
(08:42):
But I had no clue what my own glucose was doing for my own stress response. I’ll just use that as a perfect example that I use with other people, and that with intermittent fasting, and so my exercise is around 10:00 AM. But I was noticing a huge spike in my blood sugars to 160 with nothing in my stomach, not even coffee, pretty much every morning at 8:15. And I talked to other moms who were doing the same thing with their Levels app and I’m like, “Well what’s happening at 8:15?” And we’re all dropping our kids off at school. So from 8:00 to 8:15, it’s like, “Get your shoes on, get out the door, well do this.” And I mean, that is more worse for my blood sugar than eating a piece of pizza or something. So it’s, again, these eye-opening insights, and I like to think that all of this technology and everything, what it does for the individual human, and I’ll speak for myself, what it does is it makes you more, not only insightful, but it makes you more intuitive, right?
(09:33):
So a lot of people say like, “Oh, I’m very intuitive about myself.” And I’m like, “Are you really? You really know yourself that well?” And so, that’s what I formed my whole clinic on is the basis of [foreign language 00:09:44], which is know thyself. And so, how do you know thyself in today’s digital age and everything? And so, again, more than happy to share more insights later on if you guys are interested. Shoot me an email. I think a lot of you have my contact for your email, and I’ve met with Casey several times.
(09:59):
And more than, again, more than happy to chat, love what you guys are doing. My patients love this. I could get a few patients on as a focus group for you. They meet monthly about all these different things and insights they learn with their data. So happy to do so, and continue all the good work that you’re doing.
Ben Grynol (10:20):
Amazing, appreciate all the insight, especially the anecdote of dropping kids off at school. I think a number of team members can attest to that. I don’t know if anybody has tried eating pizza while dropping their kids off to school, but that is probably a pretty big metabolic response. If you do have any feedback about areas where, just based on product experience or any of our support experience, anything that you can offer as far as areas where we can continue to get better, would love to hear any little details like that.
Michael Kurisu (10:51):
Well, two things. One is, your app is great. Whoever the design team that you guys have for your app is really, I mean, part of my background from college is in user experience, user interface design. And so, as far as getting individuals to learn about and how to do self-controlled studies all that sort of stuff, I think it’s very intuitive design. You guys are on the right track there, so keep doing that.
(11:12):
One of the things that could be useful, again is, working with a company now that’s measuring continuous HRV monitoring, and so they’re looking in what other apps that they can link onto. So it’s like how can, again, like I was saying, I’m interested in the metadata around all of this. I know companies and IP get into sticky situations, but being able to share different data streams, right, with different companies. So Apple HealthKit does grab, it’s a big API grabber, but finding companies that are in that similar space of what you’re trying to do. So sleep is a big function for metabolic health, being able to share those data streams.
(11:49):
The other thing that could be very useful within the app is you guys have great educational pieces, but being able to connect with the community. So, for example, when I’m looking at my patient’s data, I do a Zoom call, we have to share their screen, they bring up one, another patient brings up their screen. The group of patients together are interested in sharing their data amongst each other. So having communities share communities of data, that could be really useful. I don’t know if that’s helpful at all.
Ben Grynol (12:17):
Very, very helpful, and especially some of the anecdotes around accountability and visibility from a, we’ll call it a micro-community setting, or some of the use cases where you’ve seen just wanting to access data in these smaller groups.
Michael Kurisu (12:32):
Yeah, my professional triathletes, I’m sure you guys know that, these are the ones that crazy individuals on earth that just want to monitor everything. And so, they’re the ones that got together. It’s like, “Hey, can we share our data? We want to train together, we want to do this, we want to compete.” But then that kind of spilled over into different groups. Of course the diabetics, but then patients with Parkinson’s notice that they have on-off periods of time with their meds with Parkinson’s and glucose, and they’re like, “Well, why can’t I share my data with them?” And so having, like I said, those kind of micro communities, can you opt in, join different groups, and I’m stitching it together myself on the back end with all my monitors of everything for the patients. But having an app that can do that would be useful.
Ben Grynol (13:13):
Very cool. Well, appreciate you sharing all the insight, and you’re more than welcome to stay. We’ve got a full meeting that goes right till 12:00, well 12:30 central. I think you’re Pacific. So 10:30 your time. And welcome to stay. If you have to hop off, totally fine too. So, thank you again for joining us. Thanks for all your input.
Michael Kurisu (13:33):
No problem.
Ben Grynol (13:33):
And everything you’re doing as Levels member.
Michael Kurisu (13:36):
Yeah, keep up the good work everybody. And so, again, shoot me an email if anyone have any questions and more anecdotes, all that sort of stuff. That’s great.
Ben Grynol (13:45):
Very cool. Onto culture and kudos. So, big week as far as a number of kudos things. Scott, Tuesday. So Tuesday was the summer solstice and that was Scott’s one year, so happy one year to Scott, as of Tuesday the 21st. Seattle, we had Natalie Vanderpump and Taylor do a meetup and a hike, which is cool to see Levels team and Levels community come together. San Francisco, we had a meetup with Cissy and Sonja and Miz and Stodi at Miz’s house for cooking, and then the next day they did pickleball. And somehow, ian managed to make his way into San Francisco just to play pickleball. So, kudos to all five of you for that pickleball game.
(14:27):
As far as kudos when it comes to work. So, Tom was doing some exploration around this idea of a Levels approved program, and some of the outreach that he was doing within the network ended up being with Melissa Urban from Whole30. And everyone knows Whole30 has the Whole30 approved program, and so they’ve spent a lot of time developing that. And so, Melissa provided a lot of feedback and insight and took time to really dig into what would need to be true for this to happen for Levels. And after assessing the opportunity and assessing the time that it would take to do this and do it well, the team gave feedback to a memo that Tom had written, and ultimately decided not to move forward with this in the near term.
(15:13):
And so, rather than leaving it there, Tom reached out to Melissa and closed the loop with her and said, “Hey, we came to this decision. We appreciate all the feedback and all the help. Here’s the document, here’s the memo that we created. Here’s a short recap of the loom.” And Melissa reached back out and said, “Great, I totally understand.” She’s invested all this time. “I’m actually very interested in the full memo and when you’re ready to pursue it, I’m here to help you.” So, kudos to Tom for closing the loop, being transparent, addressing some of these difficult conversations because it’s not always easy to go back to people that have given us feedback and say, “Hey, we’re kind of not going to do what you gave us feedback on.” And then he documented it really well, so great example of that. Casey had flagged this, and yeah, appreciate all the work, Tommy, and everyone who’s always following up with people in our network, because it really helps to build that confidence and trust in what we’re doing.
(16:09):
As far as other culture and kudos. So as of tomorrow, June 25th, we turn three and it is very, very hard to believe that June 25th, 2019 was the first day when Levels was officially incorporated. So here, these are not the only pillars, but these are some pillars of things that have happened in June of each year leading up to now. So June of 2019, the first logo, the Levels logo, and that was on emails and it was on a bunch of the collateral that went out. So there were three team members, David, Josh, and Sam. Shortly after, Casey and Andrew followed in the fall. June of ’20. So the wait list hit 17,000 people, which was very exciting. There were 10 team members. Tom had joined in June of ’20. By June of ’21, we had 22 team members. So Scott had joined, and then Michelle last came on as a contractor, and we were tracking Instagram growing to 32,000 followers, which is hard to believe that was a year ago and we’re at 109,000 now. So very cool to have watched that grown.
(17:09):
And then YouTube, which didn’t exist last year, is now at 24 million impressions have been generated. So from June of ’21 at basically zero to 24 million is a very cool jump. We’re now at 53 full-time team members. So, happy birthday Levels, happy birthday to everybody. And yeah, thank you for everyone’s hard work and all of these cool pillars. We’ll watch it grow. There’s a document that Sonja is a DRI of, and if you haven’t seen it, you can see the company timeline and the milestones of what happens month over month, and it’s cool to look back at all these things.
(17:46):
Company objectives. Levels shows you how food affects your health. Everyone knows this. If you’re not working on this, please flag it. It’s a priority for everyone. As far as Liftoff, update from JM. Here we go.
JM (18:10):
Good afternoon and good morning. It is Thursday at 5:00 PM. I wanted to give you a quick walkthrough async of what went on this week in Liftoff. You’ll recall last week, we started sending our first invites to existing subscribers. I mentioned at forum last week that I thought this email could be better. The team, starting on Monday morning, really hit the ground running and made this beautiful, which took not just writing and creating a new email, but also getting it through the IRB. Jesse, Stodi, Ben, Jen and others worked super fast to get this going, and it did much better. Our click-through rate on the old one was 26%, and this one was 35%, and 35 is more than 26, so that’s good. But in all seriousness, this email hit a lot harder and will continue going out every week to existing subscribers and members to get them to move in.
(19:00):
As you’ll recall, we try to send this right around the time, like a week or two before they’d be getting their next subscription shipment. That’s on the existing side. On the new side, we started inviting off the wait list. We did a couple of tests this week. The first one actually had four different variations, a couple with the lifestyle photo and a couple with the app photo. Some had short texts and some had long. And the winner by kind of a lot was short text and picture of the product, which is actually a similar lesson that we learned last year, so that really stands. And we rolled this out to about 5,000 people yesterday, another thousand this morning, and got the first 40 or so sales in new checkout. New checkout. New checkout is live right now as if Thursday afternoon. Anyone going through will see it, not just wait list invites, but everybody.
(19:44):
Tomorrow, we’re going to start the Tim Ferriss campaign, and I just want to show that on this link now, I’m sure others will be speaking about this, but on this link now which is live, if you join Levels, you’ll get the new checkout, and Maxine will be on in a moment to talk through that. It’s been a very exciting week. If you want to know where we are, check out the departure schedule. I had a real flight this afternoon that was canceled, so the Liftoff effort is more reliable than Delta Airlines, to say the least. Thanks to everyone who worked on this, including, especially Maxine, who I’ll now async pass the mic to. Thank you.
Maxine Whitely (20:17):
Thank you so much for having me on the JM show. My bags are packed and I’m ready for Liftoff.
(20:24):
Today, I’m going to go over some of the work that the engineering team has been doing in preparation for Liftoff. So we have two new experiences, one for existing Levels members and one for new users. And the idea is to get more folks using Levels, fewer folks scanning if they don’t want to, and to have people join our research study. So before I begin, huge thanks to JM, Scott, Moz, Steven, Chris, Hau, Jeremy, Ian, the rest of ENG support research. The whole team has been so helpful in helping ENG get lifted off. So without further ado, no more scanning.
(21:00):
I get this email as an existing user and I want to upgrade my CHM. This sounds great. So I click the link and I’m prompted to join the Levels research study, and this is the new transfer portal for existing members. When I continue, then I fill out an eligibility questionnaire, which I have to be able to answer no to all of these questions in order to participate, I can answer no. So then I move on to the research study consent, which explains what participating in the research study means for me. Super helpful information. I love the sciences, I definitely want to sign up, so I’m going to sign my name to continue. And I have to sign my real name or else I will not be able to continue. So Maxine Whitely is the name that we have on file. Maxine Whitely is the name I signed. Let’s go.
(21:37):
Now, my medical questions are already filled in based on past medical consults that I filled out as a Levels member. So this is super easy. I just verify that this information is still correct, which it is. If there’s any questions I haven’t filled out, I filled them out now. Then I get to pick my subscription cadence. I know I love Levels, so I want it every 30 days, and my address and card are correct, so super easy for me. Then the last step that I would do is purchase. So within a minute, now I am swapped from a manual scan to a realtime scan, and what an awesome experience that I’m going to have as an existing Levels member. Now I’m going to pause, and then I’ll show you what a new user’s going to see.
(22:15):
Okay. So now, I’m a new user, and let’s say I’ve been following Levels for a while, but this realtime data access sounds amazing. This is the thing that’s going to really push me over the edge to try out Levels. So I select my sensor, I definitely want realtime. I have the eligibility questions show up here. I can answer no to all of these. If I couldn’t, I can still complete a purchase. It will just be with the manual scan sensors. So now, I’m going to sign the research study consent here as well. So same information, and I have to sign, I can’t just sign my first name. I’m going to sign my first and my last name to continue. When I get to pick my subscription, I think I’m going to start with just a single box of sensors because I am new to Levels, so I want to experience it before I make a monthly commitment. And then I get to fill in my information here.
(23:01):
And I can do some autofilling. This dropdown is super helpful because this makes sure that the address that we have on file for a new user is correct and avoids any shipping issues. I agree to the terms of service and I could read those if I wanted to. And then the last thing that I would do is put in my payment information. So, it’s that simple to get started as a new user, and I’m really excited to see what the realtime streaming experience is going to be like for new users and existing users alike. Thanks.
Ben Grynol (23:27):
Very cool. Love seeing it all come together. That’s awesome. The autoplay. Here we go. Experimentation and learning. Brayden with blood work update.
Brayden (23:41):
Hi everyone. I wanted to share an update on some initiatives around the Metabolic Health Panel and the results of a survey that went out this week. This first chart shows the percent of members who have ever ordered a Metabolic Health Panel and it groups the members in the cohorts based on when they sign up for Levels. So this blue bar shows the percent of members who signed up in January and have ordered a Metabolic Health Panel. Then this yellow bar shows the percent of members who signed up in January and have ever subscribed to CGM and ordered Metabolic Health Panel. Then this final green bar is just the signup rate among active subscribers who got started in January. So as you can see, in most months, the participation rate in the Metabolic Health Panel is below 5%, but that percent significantly increases among members who use CGM with Levels for longer than one month.
(24:24):
Jumping to the second chart, this shows the weekly orders for the Metabolic Health Panel since it was first launched in November, and you’ll see these three big jumps in orders, and these all coincided with emails about the Metabolic Health Panel. This first one was the initial beta launch, followed by the full launch to our home member base at that time. And then this final one was the product email that went out a few weeks ago and highlighted the Metabolic Health Panel with sign up info.
(24:46):
So I think one thing that this shows is one reason that the Metabolic Health Panel order rate is lower is that it’s due to awareness, and increasing awareness of this offering could go a long way and increasing the participation rate in the Metabolic Health Panel. So big thanks to Jen who’s been working on an email that will go out to all new members with info on the Metabolic Health Panel and how to sign up if they’re interested.
(25:09):
Okay, so jumping to the survey. The survey went out to 500 members who have completed the Metabolic Health Panel and we received a total of 86 submissions. The first question was around reading the experience across a few different aspects of the Metabolic Health Panel. The lowest rated aspect was the value received for the price. So this was a theme that came up more below, so I’ll jump on that later. But the few highest rated aspects they experienced were the actual logistics of the desk. So the process of scheduling the appointment online and then having the phlebotomist come to their house and take the blood test was overall well rated, which is good to see.
(25:39):
The next aspect surveyed was around the insights and education provided in the Levels app. This is another one that had mixed results, and these next two question questions provide some more insight onto why some members rated this lower. The first question is around the understanding of the results, and the second question is around the what to do next, and being confident that these members know how to improve their results. So you can see that in the first question, the understanding of the results was rated pretty highly. People were confident that they understood their results and most either agreed or strongly agreed. The knowing what to do to improve their results, people weren’t as confident in that, and you can see there’s a meaningful percentage that averaged strongly disagreed or disagreed, and many were undecided on this question.
(26:19):
This next question asked about one idea that’s been proposed to address some more of this feedback around interest in more personal guidance and advice, and this is a one-on-one consultation with a physician following the test for more personal guidance, and around 70% of members said they would be interested in this type of offering for $50.
(26:42):
The next few questions were on the motivations for these members to complete the Metabolic Health Panel, and did they learn what they’re hoping to when they signed up? So these answers were, these responses were pretty similar. Most were around establishing a baseline of their metabolic health status and these metrics, and then getting a more holistic view of their metabolic health beyond just glucose. Then a few other themes that came up were around measuring insulin resistance and inflammation.
(27:04):
This question was around how often do these members plan on completing the Metabolic Health Panel? Most members said they would be interested in completing the panel two to four times per year, and many of the other responses were at least three times per year as well. There’re also a handful of people that said they’re only interested in one times per year, and they don’t plan on doing it again. This was followed up by a question on what would make these members more interested and taking it more frequently. So, unsurprisingly, the most common answer here was lowering the cost of the panel.
(27:31):
The next one was around adding new tests to the panel that aren’t currently available. And one final theme to call out here is that there are few responses around people genuinely just asking like, “Is it valuable to take more frequently than once? And how long do I need to wait to see changes?” So, this is one where it might be helpful to have some more education on the value of taking tests and what’s a good cadence to take these tests.
(27:55):
That was follow up by question on what other tests people would be interested in seeing. So, the most common responses were uric acid, LDL particle size and vitamin D. These are all tests being considered for the panel to be added to the panel. So it’s good to see that these are what members are interested in as well. The final freeform question was open-ended around anything else that would make the experience more valuable for these members. So a lot of similar themes here, but I’ll go through a couple of them.
(28:18):
The interpretation is robust, but the action plan is vague. So this was, again, around this member is looking for more what to do next and they understand the results, but they want to know how to improve. Again, around the cost, which is a theme that came up in a few different spots. The one member specifically mentioned the option to discuss the results one-on-one with a physician, more personalization from Levels, and then finally, more on actionable next steps and tangible lifestyle adjustments to approve.
(28:46):
And finally, the last question was around, was an MPS on the Metabolic Health Panel, and the score is eight. There’s, I think there’s a lot of ways in the survey around how to improve to bring that number up over time. That’s all. Thanks.
Ben Grynol (28:59):
Amazing. Very cool, Brayden. Everyone put in a lot of work to get the questions together for that survey. So Brayden put forward some questions and everyone influenced that the way that survey came together. So all the qualitative feedback and some of the things that we can do from even a marker perspective, some of the things we can do from a support and awareness perspective, it keeps helping us make things better. So, it’s awesome to see that.
(29:26):
Here we go. Hiring updates. Lynette will be joining us very soon in support, so July 11th. Taylor in October, and Cosama is coming on as a Senior Product Manager in the beginning of July, July 5th. And then, Rebecca accepted an offer this week, so July 18th, she’ll be joining us in support as well. So the team is growing and that is awesome to see.
David Finner (29:49):
I wanted to share with everyone just a real quick product experiment update, both on the Now v2 efforts and then on scoring. So, this week, we are releasing, for learning, the core navigation portion of the Now v2 project. And so this is the part that really took all the feedback we got from users, from our members for that first phase. We saw some of this in threads yesterday as people were trying out the new dashboard and felt the loss of control, couldn’t find the graph, things like that. Well, we’re releasing the new version and just been hard at work on what you see here, to focus on giving back that sense of agency and comprehension. So, just a shout-out that you can try this out. Please help us test it. And you’ll see here is trying to retain the awareness of the insights and the comprehension of it through an animation and pinning the insights above the bulb, in exchange for the forced open full screen cards.
(30:36):
So, we’ll be measuring this over the next week after we roll this out. And the next slide? This is a partial release. So what we really want to get to is including this navigation update alongside of the new score, the stability ring score that we’ve been developing with the research team and data science team. And this is going to lay the foundation for our behavior change, our behavior change efforts, all of these core stable rails that we built together in a system.
(31:01):
But what I wanted to call out here was just the internal experimentation that we’ve been doing, the collaboration across research, data science, ENG, PM to experiment and iterate on detecting the spikes so that this is grounded in science, but also framed in a mental model and user experience that is going to resonate with our members and help lay the foundation for that behavior change portion. So, engineering started on the v1 of this implementation this week. Merlo and Justin are working on that. It’ll be over the next two weeks. And meanwhile, data science, research, and design, we’re all continuing to internally iterate on this and experiment on how we might adjust the parameters to make this both scientifically relevant and also conform to the user experience we want. That’s it.
Ben Grynol (31:44):
Very cool. Can’t wait to see that once there’s the algo in place as far as detection goes. It’s just such an important part as far as behavior change goes. So very cool to see that. Love the stability ring and it is awesome to see the iterations coming through.
(31:59):
Hiring updates. We are on open roles. Open roles still… Open role for software engineers, so if anyone watching knows any great engineers, specifically mobile engineers, I believe we’re going to open up a role relatively soon for senior mobile engineer. That would be great. And then visual designer, that role is still open. So if you know any great leads, please reach out to Alan or send them our way.
(32:24):
We are here. Individual contributions. So, let’s stop here and let’s go down the list. We’ll start with, I’m just going to go vertically what I see here. So Miz, kick it off.
Michael Mizrahi (32:41):
All right, I’m up. Awesome week meeting some SF folks in person, so really enjoyed that. And then we have a dinner tonight at Duende at Paul’s restaurant whom we all know. So looking forward to that. I think Dr. Sarah Gottfried’s joining us, Casey will be there, and so it’ll be a nice meetup. And the other quick shout-out I’ll give is, appreciate a lot of the work Michelle’s been doing in the recruiting side, there’s a lot of organization there. And the insane group effort on Liftoff is just really, really notable, so love seeing all the different functions come together and just the machine work across functions is awesome. So thanks for that, and thanks Mike for a great assemblage week. Very much enjoyed the time with people.
Ben Grynol (33:19):
Amazing. Have to take pictures for meetups. We need more and more of those. Enjoy Paul’s restaurant too. And get Paul in the picture if you can too. Josh Clemente, first time participant, many time host.
John Clemente (33:32):
Happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me, Ben. You handled the meeting well. Yeah. I’m excited to, I guess professionally, to be an attendee at my first Friday Forum. This has been really fun. And I found that I absorbed the information better when I am able to just focus on the information, which is cool. Unbelievable past week, I think. A lot of things have come to fruition and are, I think, going to come breaking through the gates here shortly thereafter.
(34:07):
A lot of this stuff is being, I think, we’re seeing some compounding benefits and it’s just amazing. It’s really, seeing Tim Ferris’ page go live, knowing that the IRB is live and that there is a second one waiting in the wings, it’s all just very exciting and just an amazing effort. Really appreciate everybody, and had a good think week this week. Didn’t get everything done. I’m going to do a little postmortem on it, but excited to get this memo over the finish line.
Ben Grynol (34:36):
And I’m guessing you’re looking for other co-hosts so that you can participate in chat on a weekly basis now.
John Clemente (34:42):
Yeah, maybe we’ll do around Robin.
Ben Grynol (34:45):
There you go. Chris Jones.
Chris Jones (34:49):
On the Levels standpoint, definitely Liftoff and just seeing every new channel, and it reminds me of just all the levels of complexity from how we handle VIPs to transfers to new orders and new checkout flows. So the amount of work was just incredible. So I completely, huge plus one to what Miz said in terms of how the team worked together. It was, especially, I was especially proud to kind of watch the interaction with support and engineering as these things went live. The real time updates around, we found a bug, we highlighted, engineering’s all over it, fixes it, ships it, getting the people back on. So that was exceptional to watch, kind of that just happening organically in that very tight connection. So, that was awesome to see.
(35:36):
On a personal front, I am extremely excited. Later on today, I should be getting my updated passport, which I’ve been stressing out about of am I going to miss my fishing trip over the 4th of July because it’s in the government’s hands? So some random expedition I think paid off, so whatever. So, I’m constantly waiting for the FedEx guy to show up and be like, “All right, I can please go to that wonderful place up north.”
Ben Grynol (36:05):
We welcome you here, Chris Jones, we welcome you here. Cissy.
Cissy (36:11):
On the professional front, amazing updates from everyone today for Forum. Enjoyed cooking and playing pickleball for the first time with Miz, Sonja and Stodi. Turns out it’s nothing like tennis. So, sorry to my partner, Miz. We lost both games to Stodi and Sonja. Excited for dinner this evening. And on the personal front, I’m going to my first field day tomorrow. It’s a friend’s birthday and his birthday theme is having a field day in Golden Gate Park, so going to be doing balloon tosses and three-legged races and wheelbarrow, all those summer camp things.
Ben Grynol (36:49):
Nice, amazing. Miss those, miss all of those things, the tug of wars and fun things like that. Dom?
Dominic D’Agostino (36:56):
Yeah, personally, last night we got four goats to add to the farm, so we’re kind of training our goats and getting them ready. Professionally, I’m excited to give a lightning talk later today and putting together some slides right now. And it’s a great exercise for a long-winded academic because we’re used to, very comfortable giving one-hour talks, two hour talks, but it’s been fun to knock down 100 slides into three or four slides for the lightning talk later today.
Ben Grynol (37:29):
Nice. Well, you might just be buying yourself a spot as host for future forums, som here we go.
Dominic D’Agostino (37:36):
Oh, cool. Great.
Ben Grynol (37:38):
Helena.
Helena Belloff (37:41):
Professionally, I have to echo what Chris said about the interaction between engineering and support, squashing bugs. I just happen to be lurking in the Liftoff forum and I kind of saw this interaction as an outsider, and it was back and forth, back and forth. So organized, everything got resolved. That was so cool to see. And then personally, I have, I’m in charge of babysitting four dogs next week, so I’m going to use this weekend to decompress and prepare myself for the barking.
Ben Grynol (38:18):
Nice. Very cool. Full weekend ahead. Hui?
Hui Lu (38:23):
Yeah, really excited about the Liftoff updates. Really enjoyed the cooking class. I think the recipe is really simple and the paella was very delicious, and it produced absolutely no change to my glucose chart, so that’s great. I’m planning to do it again on Sunday with, I guess, the rest of the ingredients I bought. Yeah, looking forward to dinner tonight. Personal wise, it has been a hot week, I guess, in terms of Bay Area standard for the past week. The weekend will be cooler, so I’m going to enjoy that. Yeah.
Ben Grynol (39:01):
Nice. Very cool. Mr. Jason, you’re up. I think you’re on mute still.
Jason Shu (39:13):
Sorry. Yeah. Professionally, just super excited to go live with data and analytics organization. I think Helena has done yeoman’s work as the lone wolf data scientist for a while, but with Charu coming out of onboarding last week and myself coming off it today, we’re going to hit the ground running. Met with a lot of teams already, and just super excited for our opportunity to contribute and really make a positive change. Personally, folks are in town for their final weekend, and I’m just going to take them to the coast and show them the rest of the area, and relax for a bit.
Ben Grynol (39:53):
Nice. And they finally know that that house is your house, which-
Jason Shu (39:57):
That’s right.
Ben Grynol (39:57):
… is really important. Jenn?
Jenn Palandro (40:01):
Levels-wise, really excited about Liftoff and the [foreign language 00:40:09] this was super cool. It was my first one, so I really enjoyed all of that. And personally, my mother-in-law’s coming town tomorrow because we’re going to take her to see Jack Johnson, so very excited about that.
Ben Grynol (40:17):
Nice. That will be very, very fun. Maxine, the TV star.
Maxine Whitely (40:24):
Professionally, other than being featured on JM show, it’s so exciting to be there. It’s just been, Liftoff has been so fun. I feel like my understanding of the organization has totally expanded during this, and it’s been a real joy to work across the organization, so that’s been amazing. And personally, funny enough, my friend and I are also having a field/game day tomorrow in Prospect Park. So if you’re around, come through, play some games.
Ben Grynol (40:51):
Nice, amazing. Love hearing that too. It’s so cool just how everyone’s lens and learning expands so much by having so much transparency, and it reinforces the importance of what we’re doing in documentation. So, glad that that’s been the experience. Mercy?
Mercy Clemente (41:09):
Professionally, Liftoff, just really exciting. And then also the kind of timeline check-in of over the past three years and how much has happened, I guess. It’s just really cool to be part of it. Personally, just probably going to play more pickleball this weekend, and yeah, spend time outside but also try to stay cool.
Ben Grynol (41:31):
Nice. Yet to try pickleball. Maybe, I think it might just be a never happening thing, but we’ll see. You can’t say it till you’ve tried it, that’s for sure. We’ll go on to, why don’t we go Mike D here.
Mike D (41:44):
Thanks, Ben. I’m Mike D, longtime listener, first time caller, and definitely plus one to Liftoff. And seeing the Tim Ferriss email come into my inbox, it was pretty wild. And just really appreciate our approach to most things, but specifically on the partnership side, we’re really in this to build relationships, and we always tell everybody we’re playing the long game. We’re not in here for transactions, and just awesome to really see that come together.
Ben Grynol (42:16):
Plus one to all of that. Michael, do you want to try, I saw you went on mute and off mute. Do you want to see if we can hear you again?
Michael Kurisu (42:24):
Is that better? Sorry about that.
Ben Grynol (42:25):
There we go.
Michael Kurisu (42:26):
Okay. Yeah, no, especially wrapping up things and it ties in with personally because I’m about to go on vacation for the next 15 days out to Minnesota where my wife’s family’s from. So a lot of lake time and a lot of fun time in the sunshine and not complaining about sunshine from someone coming from California. But Midwestern vacation’s a little bit different than beach vacations for my kids. So looking forward to family time and everything. And again, really appreciate the time given me today. So, great culture you guys have in your company here.
Ben Grynol (42:58):
Amazing. Enjoy the Midwest summer, enjoy the extended light. It’s great with kids, and by that I say it facetiously, but no, it truly is nice. Haney.
Mike Haney (43:11):
Professionally, I’ll echo what Helena said. I was just lurking this week, kind of watching all the Liftoff stuff happen, and I feel like the real test of a culture is how does it work in the what could potentially be the most stressful and crazy moments, and watching this culture hold the positivity, the support, the collaboration, the async nature was really inspiring. It was a real moment of, wow, Levels really works. So that was super cool to watch. On a personal level, my kid has been doing circus camp this week, so this afternoon, I get to go watch a showcase of what he’s been learning at circus camp.
Ben Grynol (43:46):
Share secrets with Sonny. I can share notes. Mr. Ryley Walker.
Ryley WAlker (43:53):
I’m going to riff off a couple of the comments I’d see in the team work together and work through problems with Liftoff. So I think, for me, this is my first async remote company, and I actually feel more connected to the problems we’re solving and the team, seeing all this happening. So huge testament to the way people communicate and document and stuff. I think it really helps.
Ben Grynol (44:20):
Very, very cool. Sonja?
Sonja Manning (44:24):
Sorry, I was frantically messaging Maxine about Minnesota things. Wow. Professionally or Levels-wise, it’s been so awesome to meet more folks here in SF. We had a really interesting and really nice conversation when we were cooking around what makes this level of culture so amazing. It’s really, I think the connections that are able to form to async, and then continued when we have opportunities to meet in person are just really built on a genuine kind of friendship and interest. Not on gossip, not on any sort of common enemy or anything, because we really all are so invested in this mission and this work.
(45:01):
So it was just a really nice time and looking forward to dinner tonight, and meeting more new people. Assemblage has been awesome. Thank you Mike for coordinating. I’m really looking forward to Dom, your lightning talk next. And then, I guess, sort of personally and professionally, last weekend, I went to a really interesting event up at OneCommune at the Commune Topanga. I’ll put a little message and threads about it, and they’re looking forward to our partnership. But it was really interesting. There was a conversation with two authors on the intersection of wellness and social justice, which is a very critically important topic, especially today and just overall. So I really enjoyed that and looking forward to future partnerships with OneCommune.
Ben Grynol (45:47):
Very cool. Yeah, it’s been awesome to see how that’s come together and how things have been explored further and further. Steph.
Stephanie Coates (45:56):
Hey, can you guys hear me all right? Yeah? Okay. My AirPods aren’t working and so I’m going AirPod-less. But yeah, Levels-wise, a couple things. It’s so, I know no one joined the team specifically this week, but seeing just these teams within Levels grow, of the data science team and Liftoff and all of these things happening in parallel has been so exciting to watch, and it’s hard to keep up, but I guess that’s a good thing. And I want to shout out to Hui, I’ve had such a fun time meeting with her and having her join as the Mobile Team Manager, and it’s just really apparent that she wants everyone to rise up and she wants to help everybody grow. And so that’s been a really positive experience so far.
(46:39):
And personal wise, some people have seen this week through video calls, but I actually bought a trailer. And it’s funny, we did the Digital Nomad podcast a couple weeks or months ago, and a couple weeks after that, I was like, you know what? The nomad itch is back and I just want to get on the road. And apparently, living in the foothills of Colorado wasn’t enough. And so, I’m currently living and working out of this trailer and it’s going great so far.
(47:12):
This is week one, but just being able to do big 13 or 14 hikes in the morning and go biking up to work and be in the mountains, I feel so alive. And it feels like a great balance in between being able to take my job to these great places where now I can, yeah, have both the wilderness side of me honored and still keep a job that I love. And so, yes, that’s it. If anyone wants a RV parked in the driveway, let me know and I will come visit you.
Ben Grynol (47:45):
Love it. That is so cool to see and hear how that has transpired after the podcast that has inspired some of this thinking, and yeah, it’s awesome. Love seeing Levels remote and how everyone lives the values in such different ways. So, very cool there. Tommy.
Tom Griffin (48:01):
Hey everyone, happy Friday. This week was great along a number of different fronts, notably just Liftoff and finally starting to tell folks that Dexcom is available, which is just so exciting because we’ve been chit-chatting about it with a lot of partners and VIPs for a long time. I’m also just about at two years with Levels, which is really surreal. So it was a particularly exciting week in part due to that. And then obviously, Tim Ferriss was also really exciting and had a number of friends text me who saw it and just couldn’t believe it, and had a few coworkers at my last company. We’d been trying to land Ferriss for years and came nowhere close. So they were like, “How the hell did you manage to do this? What was the magic bullet? How did it happen?” And I basically said, “No silver bullet here, just a good product.”
(48:58):
And then we had probably 50 of Tim Ferriss’ friends personally text him and email him and bother him about this, including Dom who’s on this call. So thank you, Dom. I think you were probably very influential. Dom’s been on Tim’s podcast multiple times, and Dom actually made it into the copy for the advertisement. We said, they’re backed by a world-class team, including people like Dom D’Agostino who’s been on the podcast multiple times. So, thanks again for that, Dom. And, yeah, personally, just up in Cape Cod at the beach with family, so spending some downtime with them.
Ben Grynol (49:31):
Nice. Very, very cool. Plus one to all of that. Tony.
Tony Milio (49:37):
Yeah, definitely do one to Liftoff and have to give a shout-out out to Mike, obviously, for an assemblage again. And, of course, all this is awesome swag that I got the other day. So, looking forward to showing it off.
Ben Grynol (49:58):
Nice. Well, we are, right, five minutes early. We’ll wrap it up here. Professionally, super stoked on Ferriss. It’s one of those sort of surreal things that it’s live now because being a Ferris fan for so long, it just seemed like this other world, and now we’re here and watching that happen, so stoked on that. Stoked on all the work that the entire team’s done to get us there. And then checkout. Just seeing that. I remember seeing it as screenshots, like, “This is what it might look like.” And then you go through the flow, all the work that Max has done and all the work that Alan’s done. Everyone’s put in so much work and just seeing that. I’m like, “This thing is live. That’s the real thing. That’s the thing you go through.” And it’s, yeah, it’s just very cool. So super soaked on that.
(50:42):
Big hat tip to Mike D on all the assemblage work. There’s a ton of coordination that goes into that, so appreciate how much he’s been hammering on that. And then personally, my best friend is in from Nashville, so he has flown in. He’s here for a couple of weeks and we’re going to spend the afternoon together. So, really looking forward to that because we don’t get a ton of time to spend together, but when we do, it is very, very meaningful. So yeah, we’re not sure what we’re going to do. Maybe go jam. Maybe go swing some golf clubs, but we’ll see. He’ll be here in precisely four minutes. So, on that note, everyone have a great weekend and we’ll see you next week, Q3.