Transcript
Josh (00:05):
Okay. A great week this week, I tried to capture all of the visuals associated with this week on this page. And you can see there’s a lot of logo action going on. Everything you see here is it represents a conversation that we had, a lead that we followed through with, or a partnership that’s pending. So these are not random logos. These are each conversations that are leading to something promising, and you can see that kind of everything’s shown here. We’ve got an amazing fundraising traction going. People are very eager to get involved. We’ve spoken with, I think, hundreds of funds by now. Many in the past few days. And it’s really heating up. We’re expecting term sheets here in the next few days on our seed raise. We’re talking to professional sports teams. We’ve got the captain of the New Jersey Devils getting started as an NHL team.
Josh (01:00):
For those that don’t know, we’ve got interest from NFL players, Carolina Panthers, in particular, this week spoken with reporters from Business Insider who are interested and following our raise a lot of interesting conversations with gyms and healthcare organizations like Forward, which is a very forward-thinking healthcare company that’s out in Los Angeles and they’re doing a lot of data-driven primary care, which is fantastic. Our enthusiasm this week was fantastic on Twitter as usual. I’ve kind of copied a few of these. We’ve got a whole slide dedicated to this, but really love seeing the enthusiasm, and although we’re still invitation only and that can be frustrating for people. It’s really amazing to see the desire that people have and the links that people are going to get their hands on the beta product despite this not being fully launched. We locked down two big… We call it marketing but primarily partnerships or affiliations this week.
Josh (02:02):
So one was Bulletproof, so we are moving ahead very quickly with Bulletproof. We’re going to have multiple podcasts. We’re going to have ads and we’re going to be running social posts with them. We’ll also be participating in the virtual Bulletproof conference, which is happening in October. So that’s going to be absolutely huge for us. And then also the affiliation with Ben Greenfield. So that’s been locked down as well and also is going to be kicking off in October. So we’re spooling up for, by far the biggest month to date in our October, November timeframe. And so super exciting. These are two of the biggest names or organizations in the world of biohacking or longevity or quantify itself. So I’m sure you’ve all heard of them and we’ll be hearing a lot more of it. We’ve got Eric Roza, who’s the new CEO of CrossFit. Just joined the beta program and super excited about what we’re doing.
Josh (02:52):
We’ve been sort of working with the CrossFit organization for a while now. And the new leadership is extremely forward-thinking about us. We’ve also got a special operations command. This is the joint chiefs that run essentially all special ops in the US military. We’ve got a couple leads there who are getting started in the program and are potentially going to push things much quicker than we had anticipated. Sara Gottfried, a very forward-thinking author and medical doctor, just joined the beta as well. Super excited about that one. She’s she works closely with people like David Perlmutter and others that we already have in the program on our team. So generally really awesome. I love also the quote right in the middle there. I love the app and thankful for the innovative tech it’s changing my life. So this is from someone who’s been using the program and is meaningfully adjusting their lifestyle as we speak.
Josh (03:46):
And then of course, another good one we need to throw out there. Mike Barwis, who is an absolute legend in professional sports. We had a quote from him last week. He said this is the most intriguing company, he spoke with him the last five years, at least. And they get thousands of requests partner every year. So this is really important and it speaks to the potential for professional sports in particular. Okay. So in terms of the bullets, we’ve got a research initiative actually kicked off this week with them. We signed the agreement with Dom D’Agostino a few weeks ago, but funds have been transferred from our company to his Ketone Technologies, LLC. And this is going to go directly towards metabolic research starting very soon. I mean, we don’t have the date when people are going to start using Levels in a clinical environment, there’s some IRB stuff to be worked on but essentially, we’ve moved the ball forward really fast here.
Josh (04:39):
And so we should have publishable clinical trial data underway soon, and this is awesome. We filled our head of ops role. You all probably received the welcome to the team email just a few minutes ago. Mike Mizra, he is coming to join us and take over operations and really help us scale into our growth phase. So this is fantastic. By far the leading candidate and really just super excited, couldn’t be happier to have him coming in and it’s a key role for us. Standby emails are up and running. We’ve already had a couple really nice benefits, such as people receiving a preemptive email, telling them when the order is intended to show up and to what address it’s going. And so people are able to email us and say, “Oh, I didn’t even think about this, but I’m going to be out of the state next week.
Josh (05:26):
Can you please forward to this address, for example?” So we’re catching some issues that would otherwise be a big problem. And so that’s a big win. It’s the small things that count. The insight cards. So these are kind of hard to overstate how important this next phase of the app experience is. And it’s a massive lift. These are just about ready, I think, potentially launching internally today. I’ll let David speak to that. But if you read through our meeting notes, all of the feedback calls that we do with all our customers, the primary theme is that people need this next phase, right? They want to have proactive insights surfacing. They want to know where to focus, how to get better. And so this is just going to be huge and obviously a major focus for product engineering the past few weeks. Part of that is the Dawn effect detection.
Josh (06:15):
So the data science team, Evan, Xinlu, Casey, all of the people who have been contributing to recognizing Dawn effect which is the body’s likely stress-induced response to the end of sleep and the need to get up and hit the day, which in some cases can be quite a high blood sugar elevation and can be modified with different behavioral changes. So recognizing that this is going to be the first pattern recognition insight that we roll out and this is also very close to launch-ready. So super stoked for that. I personally have a crazy Dawn effect myself. So I’m looking forward to learning something from this.
Josh (06:51):
Let’s see. Waitlist exceeded 31,000 this week. Numbers continue to climb and we haven’t even, again, we don’t have a marketing budget to speak of. So add in the affiliations with the biggest names and in this space. And I expect that the waitlist will continue to climb much more rapidly starting in October. And let’s push to full launch. An example, the Kevin Rose podcast approached 50,000 in revenue. And that was I think in eight days, which is pretty, pretty wild to think about. Definitely our biggest partner code yet. Any questions on this?
Josh (07:30):
Cool. Okay. So weekly beta trends, we shipped out 107 orders last week and 114 orders were placed. And generally, the total beta subscriptions have been pretty steady. Again, we’re we are not driving for a subscription model right now, but we’re seeing consistent conversions. It’s going to be something we’re going to lean into more heavily as we proceed from our current sort of phase, which is device costs drive, overall program costs to the future where we see hardware becoming increasingly commoditized and the options there improve. And we can start to lean into amortizing device costs across a couple of months and focusing on retention.
Megha (08:15):
Josh, quick question on this. Do we have a number for how many people have total have gone through the beta or in it now?
Josh (08:23):
That’s a good question. The exact number right now, I should probably have on the slide. I can update that for sure.
Megha (08:35):
It’s come up a couple of times with partners but I don’t know what the number is.
Sam (08:40):
Yeah, we have about a thousand go through it. We have, I think, 320-ish active right now.
Josh (08:45):
Yeah. I think it’s about 1,200 have gone through it or are currently live. All right, Sam, financial.
Sam (08:57):
Yeah. So we still have 2.7 million in cash. This just gives us plenty of runway. And we’re on track with our monthly revenue projections. I expect these are all the purchase orders. I expect these numbers are going to have to be adjusted as we figure out how we activate with Ben Greenfield and Dave Asprey in October, November. So on track there. Next slide. I think we had a record week last week for August 30th, which was the week that the Kevin Rose podcasts went live. We did 60,000 in cash that week. Those are people now being pushed all the way into November. So that’s a really good sign. Next one. So these are monthly revenue. We’re still in the process of transitioning over the system by which we recognize revenue, but we hit our revenue goals for August and we’re on track for September. So that’s it for the revenue side.
Josh (10:02):
Okay. Any questions on financial stuff? Pretty awesome to be hitting records. Okay. Recruiting. We’ve knocked off one-third of our recruiting goals for the current quarter. And we’re now focusing on the head of marketing and growth and head of content still. So we have two good candidates and consideration for each. Really for those in our network who are watching this, we’re really trying to find that head of marketing and growth person in particular. We know what we need for content, but finding the person who’s going to help us build this brand and take on the direct to consumer experience and achieve the Peloton quality of community strength and marketing strategy is what we’re looking for here. So just a shout out, anyone who knows anyone who could pull that off, please keep us in mind and send them our way. And then again, head of content, this is a really tricky one.
Josh (10:59):
It requires a tremendous amount of understanding of scientific concepts, and then also the ability to pull together editorial calendar with really a ton of different media vectors and maintain a high cadence of publishing while working with PubMed quality, original research. So anyway, complex, we have a few options in the pipeline, but the search continues. Any questions on hiring?
Josh (11:31):
Okay. So really awesome. Customer engagement examples from Twitter this week, a couple of these that are redundant from the first one, but generally speaking, people are hyping us big time. You’ve got people calling us out as the future of billion dollar companies and talking about the product as the most satisfying bionic-like experience. And yeah, generally I love Twitter. It’s quickly gone from my least favorite platform to my favorite, just because of all the Levels chatter coming through there. So I won’t tell you to go start a profile if you don’t have one, but definitely follow the social channel on Slack to see what’s going on there. And then Instagram also, we’re getting so much user-generated content, and it’s really insightful like this one in the middle here where Julia found out that this store-bought chia pudding, which she may not assume has any difference to the ones you would make at home is a shockingly different experience in terms of metabolic control and her followers are just in love with this.
Josh (12:32):
And it kind of speaks to the influencer strategy that we’re taking, which is helping basically by providing the product to people who have large followings. They do a huge amount of the educational heavy lifting for us with this very simple, but insightful user-generated content. So we’ll continue to do this. It’s really awesome and working in our favor. Quantified Bob, he’s been in the CGM space for decades, by the way, really a big fan of what we’re building. And he’s been in another program a few times and it just loves the app progress we’re making. So all right, over to podcast stuff.
Thomas (13:10):
Awesome. Josh, I’m going to let you know that I did create a Twitter profile this past week and so far so good. I recommend it to the rest of the team who has resisted it. Awesome. So the podcast train keeps humming another good week. We had one release, three recorded, six new ones secured, one really solid one, Diet Doctor Podcast, shout out to Casey for a lot of persistent follow-up to get that one on the books. And then otherwise just wanted to highlight how valuable Dom D’Agostino continues to be for our company along many different fronts. So Dom, those who don’t know has been really on every major health, fitness, biohacking podcast to date, where there are our wishlist of podcasts, including their Joe Rogan, Tim Ferriss, Peter Attia, multiple times each, and he’s even offered to make any introductions to any of these people that we want. So just shout out to Dom for continuing to be incredibly generous and invaluable to our company, not only for research collaborations, but for sales and marketing as well. So stay tuned for some of these connections. Next slide.
Thomas (14:22):
Awesome. So Josh mentioned this but just wanted to give a really quick snapshot of some of the podcast conversions today. I added a couple of other non-podcast partner codes in here just for reference, but yeah, Kevin Rose was pretty incredible. Just over a week, did 125 conversions and 50K in revenue. And from my perspective, this is a really strong signal for our company. I have a little bit of experience here, but they’re just as one data point, which is not entirely apples to apples, but still a good reference point. My last company, we sold a kind of health tech biohacking consumer product that was also a 3.99. And we were on the Kevin Rose show and did single digit conversions from that episode. The fact that we did 125 with no marketing engine behind us in one week, says a lot about the potential of our product in this space. Next slide.
Thomas (15:22):
Cool. So Josh mentioned this as well, but we’ve officially locked in as partners, Bulletproof, which is Dave Asprey and Ben Greenfield. And again, like for context, people who don’t know them, they’re really the number one and number two names in all of biohacking. The only other name that I’d put in there at their level is Tim Ferris and yeah, Dave Asprey, actually his name is in the Webster dictionary definition for biohacking, which is a fun fact that he likes to remind the world of he’s known as the father of biohacking. And again, yeah, anecdotally these two partners, for my last company by far represented the largest revenue of any partnership or marketing activation. And this is also the case for many other companies in this space that I’ve chatted with at conferences and events.
Thomas (16:16):
So particularly Bulletproof, you’ve got a ton coming up, podcast ads, this virtual conference that they’re doing. And then we also locked in two full-length podcast interviews, both with Josh and Casey. So stay tuned here. Our awareness is just going to explode over the next few months. The amount of inbound we’re going to get is going to be really, really exciting. And then I also note that some nameless competitors, we’re talking to both of these brands at the same time we were talking to them. So shout out to our team and our product experience because they chose us. Yeah.
Josh (16:54):
That’s been the case a few times now, including with Dom. So there are others out there, but no one’s executing like Levels. And especially when we start to just show up on everybody’s stream everywhere they look, it’s going to be very hard to ignore us and nobody wants to anyway, they want to be a part of this. So what we need to do is operationalize our growth and get these people their product. We’ve got quite a backlog right now. Okay. SEO.
Casey (17:23):
Awesome, great updates guys. Amazing progress. So we are switching over to doing once a month, SEO updates. So here is a recap from August. So some fun pearls here. So traffic source, we’ve been tracking organic search… People who come to our site from organic search closely. That’s a sign that essentially people are finding your site on their own by things that they Google and things that they’re looking to read and coming to the site that way. And that continues to move up and up. So back in April, we were about 5% organic searches, 600 visitors in a month. And now we’re at about 26% organic search traffic per site coming from organic search, which makes up about 10,500 visitors of our total visitors. So that’s really exciting. People are finding us on their own. In terms of blog traffic, we are continuing to also increase in growth month over month, every month.
Casey (18:20):
So we’ve had a five X month over month increase in traffic since April. And we had 21,000 page views in August. So that’s pretty respectable. Average time on page is three minutes, which is also very good. So on the right, we’ve also seen some really awesome organic shares of our blog posts from really respectable people. So Austin Perlmutter posted our… And we didn’t ask them to, they just did this after reading it and loved the content. So on the far right, Austin Perlmutter posted our behavior change article, Levels Theory of Behavior Change and Dom D’Agostino tweeted out to 70,000 followers, our article as well. So if you haven’t read that one, check it out. And on the bottom, you can just see the graph of our page views over time from basically very few in April to quite a bit this month. Next slide.
Casey (19:19):
We continue to do well with backlinks. We had 69 new backlinks from unique domains during August. And so that means that other respectable domains are basically linking us in some capacity. And what’s interesting about that number is that this is without any concerted effort in terms of a backlink strategy. We’re not horse-trading with people to put our links on their sites and send them to us. So these are just people who saw a blog post of ours, or who wrote user-generated content and posted about us. So we want to get that number up and up and up, but it’s neat to see organically people posting about us.
Casey (19:58):
Our average search position stayed pretty stable in July. We stayed at 13 and our featured snippets continue to improve. So we are ranking for at least 14 featured snippets now on Google and meaning that when people search it, we’re above the fold. The first thing that shows up for a particular search term. So we’re ranking for things still like metabolic fitness. We are now, what should my glucose levels be non-diabetic? Glucose and skin. So, that’s very promising that Google’s recognizing us as a very reputable source for this information. Next slide.
Casey (20:37):
In terms of an advisory update. So Josh mentioned, we have Dr. Sara Gottfried in our beta program now. We had a really great call with her this week. She is one of the key people we’d love to bring our advisory board. She’s been just a very forward-thinking thought leader about CGM use for optimized health and especially women’s health for years and years and years. And her books are really, really amazing and thoughtful. They’re listed below on the slide here. So she’s going to be in our program and using the app. And we’re going to continue that conversation. In the middle here, Dom, just to reiterate then an absolute, just based on the advisory front, he has been so helpful in so many ways, the podcasts connections, research strategy. We’re really moving along with the research front, as Josh mentioned, we’ve transferred funds to them.
Casey (21:22):
So to his group. So we are going to be moving fast and we’re really grateful for Dom making himself so available to us in these research discussions. There are many, many potential clinical research collaborations through the work that Dom’s doing. And here’s just a list of some of the academic institutions and other research entities that we might be able to work with in the coming year. So some really big names there, Vanderbilt, Duke, University of South Florida, Florida Medical Center, a number of military connections as well. So he’s also connected us with the United Health Group that runs United Health Care. And they are a large payer who is very interested in preventative health. And so we’re going to be getting in front of them soon as well. On the right here, we had an Instagram live with one of our other medical advisors, Molly Maloof yesterday.
Casey (22:13):
It was well-received. We got some nice comments about that. There’s one below from a user, the Instagram live was stellar. It’s definitely worth checking out. It’s up on our IGTV right now, Molly is absolutely brilliant and had a ton of really interesting pearls. We have upcoming conversations later in the month. We’ve connected with Dr. Perlmutter, and then we are pursuing connections with a number of other physicians, MDs, PhDs to build out our world-class medical advisory board. And so we’re pursuing connections with a number of others with the list there on the far right. And yeah, lots of just major shout outs to our network for being so willing to connect us with so many of these people. And on this list on the far right, Dr. Rhonda Patrick, and Dr. Peter Attia, obviously, people we love and who would love to have on our medical advisory board, Dom is going to be connecting us with them soon. So super exciting.
Josh (23:10):
Yeah. You mentioned United Health there. And I also wanted to throw in a little tidbit that I think it was Salesforce Sam today. They have a massive employee workforce, and they’ve indicated some interest in piloting something like Levels for their self-insured employee program, which would be… I mean, that’s just hard to overstate in terms of its potential. And that is the future. These employers getting on board with helping their employees take control and stay healthy rather than waiting until they have to pay for a very painful chronic illness. So, that’s exciting. Just wanted to mention that one.
Casey (23:49):
And it’s interesting to see that they’re quite interested in this. They’re definitely on the pulse of what’s happening here with CGM for the non-diabetic population for essentially this high value intervention for cost savings by getting on top of metabolic disease early, Dom was sharing a story on one of our calls that they actually like some people from their group kind of snuck into a talk he was giving about glucose monitoring and non-diabetics, and he saw them in the back and it’s just so cool to see that they are interested in this use case. And so there are some pretty, I think, exciting partnership opportunities there.
Josh (24:23):
Definitely. Any questions on Casey’s update?
Thomas (24:28):
Yeah, actually just quick question, Casey, can you give us just an overview of what Dom’s group is going to be doing? The research that they’re looking to do?
Casey (24:37):
Yeah, so right now we’re still in the stage of figuring out what are going to sort of be the best initial avenues for us because essentially the opportunities are so abundant. He is currently doing research with every group on that list right now, currently and actively doing research. So a number of them sort of really fit our use case well and some of them are a little bit more down the road in terms of being better suited towards showing really clinical efficacy of the product. Upfront, we’re trying to really show in our first stage of research that this app and our product is engaging to people.
Casey (25:15):
It’s used and it improves glucose metrics, but not so much showing that it prevents a reverse as an actual clinical disease. So there’s kind of multi-tiers to the research. So, really it’s going to come down to making sure in our first stage of research that we are teaming up with the groups that are going to kind of align with our research strategy and their research goals. So, within that list, we’re still kind of nailing down the details of which is going to be the best first phase for us, but it’s just incredible how many opportunities there are.
Josh (25:48):
Yeah. We’ve basically told Dom he’s got so many balls in the air and so many opportunities to basically push CGM and Levels and behavior change theory, our closely behavior change theory into his research that we just want to facilitate that as quickly as possible. And so a lot of this stuff he’s going to probably just tell us on the fly, “Hey, I was able to get kind of like a sub-cohort of this ongoing study on Levels and hope you guys are cool with that.” And we’re going to be like, “Yes, we are happy about that.” So there’ll be a lot of things that are just going to happen on the fly quite spontaneously early on. And then obviously we’re working with Dan and Casey and Dom towards large scale goals, which are to show the efficacy of not just CGM, but of the behavior change software, which is key to the experience and to establishing habit change. So yeah, we just want to be moving fast there.
Casey (26:37):
Yep.
Josh (26:38):
Anything else?
Megha (26:39):
Yes. A few quick things. First of all, I love the IG live. I think you guys did such a good job. Casey, two questions about that. One is I love the Molly’s know about Dan Ariely and it’s kind of like a different type of expert. Do you remember that in the IG live? She mentioned Dan Ariely, theory of behavior change. So it was just thinking like he could be a good person to weave into our overall content, not really on the nutrition science side of things on how that behavior change. And then the other thought I had, there was so many great nuggets in that interview. I was curious if you think there’s any potential in transcribing part of that and turning it into like a blog post.
Casey (27:22):
Yeah. This is going to be turned into one of our writers, Alex [Moscav 00:27:27] is going to turn this into a written blog post, and we’re going to be able to hopefully pull some clips from it to pair with that. But yeah. I’m so with you on that, I think it’s going to lend itself well to a really nice set of written articles. There were particular areas she really focused in on like mitochondrial health and some really cool topics that I think are going to be great for written format. So, yeah.
Josh (27:53):
Great. Okay. On to the customer feedback round-up. Mike?
Mike (27:58):
Yeah. Thanks Josh. So as always like to drop some quotes in here and on the right just show some of what comes inbound. That particular person happens to be a head performance coach where a very well-known major league baseball team and the cool thing was he got connected to us with someone else in the MLB that said that he needs to connect with us and we had a great call this morning. So that was pretty cool. On the feedback side, excitement engagement continues to be super high and some things are becoming repetitive, which is good. So we can start solving that with product and a couple of things in particular. As we are adding more people to the program, some of the getting started materials are getting lost in the shuffle, which is understandable.
Mike (29:02):
And I think even for myself, some of the products that I’m testing, I kind of just dive right in and I’m not going to read an email and I can get kind of lost in the shuffle. There’s a really good example is what I’m wearing on my arm would be Woop. I really haven’t read an email from them. But the exciting part about that is what we have planned, Alex [Magnola 00:29:31] videos. I am super excited for what she’s working on. And then the work that David, Xinlu and the team have done for these educational program parts, I’ve been playing around with them. I am really excited. I played around with them again yesterday and it was like, “I wish I had this when I first started CGM.” And it just a really big thing. And I’m excited to with the awesome work with Tom and Josh and Casey have done, they’ve secure partnerships with Bulletproof.
Mike (30:03):
And Ben Greenfield’s team, this is definitely something that we need and I’m excited to get feedback. And I think we all know a great product anticipates customers’ needs. And this is in my opinion, it’ll be a really big change to the experience. And then obviously the automated insights will take it even to another level. Oh, really quickly. Just wanted to highlight too though that quote. And I think Josh used it. The interesting thing about that is just kind of showing how much progress we have actually made to the product. This individual was actually kind of struggling and missed some of the getting started materials, but also somehow was able to throw that quote and that they’re still getting amazing value. And once we do make the getting started more of a guided journey, I can only imagine what that’s going to look like for someone like that.
Josh (31:00):
Nice. Any questions on the weekly feedback roundup? Always highly encouraged to go to the notion page and find the meeting notes page and just dig through the calls that we’re generating every week. I mean, we’re bringing in, I think something like 140, 150 customer facing calls every month. And so there’s a ton of content there. And honestly, everyone throughout the team should feel free to just read through them in long form and get a feel for how our customers are responding and where the sticking points are because we all need to be cognizant of them and run through them, dog food them ourselves. So, all right, cool. David?
David (31:41):
This stuff so exciting. Fantastic. So I was talking to Xinlu and Jhon and Andrew this morning. And I think we can say that the card’s framework is officially going to launch this week.
David (31:53):
So we’ve been working really hard on that, especially Jhon and Xinlu on the core framework. I think there’s probably 50 different tickets that we had, maybe 60 now to get this thing done. And it’s been a lot of effort. It’s a huge step change as Josh would say towards laying the foundation for the future improvements that we’re going to have. And this is going to start with the initial push. It’ll be 28 day program cards and education cards to help people have context on what to do the week one, week two, and things like that. And then very close to being finished is Evan’s Dawn effect work. There’s a few minor tweaks that we’re doing to make sure we accurately capture the user’s time zone. And then we’ll be able to push that out of the fast follow next week after we tested it.
David (32:39):
And that’s really cool too because that’s going to be the first event-based insight that we have. We’re going to follow that with a stream of other insights around like high glucose detection, variability, just a whole host of different things that the customers asking us questions about and we know the answers to, and we compare it in context to close the loop in real-time. So it’s just going to be a great step-change for this. Also in progress, Andrew sent the first production test of the automated fill requests, and this is going to be huge for our scaling efforts as well. So this is Level’s completely handling all of the manual order entry into true pills fulfillment system. We’ll take care of that automatically, trigger emails automatically. And that’s going to be one of the key blockers that’s currently preventing us from taking on hundreds, thousands of customers a month.
David (33:27):
So that’s not all we have to do, but it’s a key prerequisite. I’ll talk about in-app challenges in a bit, but let’s see what else. Hao is just about finished with the program tracking. So this is super exciting, letting us more automatically track the customer as the customer goes through our program and then capture certain events when they fall off, we can reach out. Trigger reports at the right times, things like that, super excited about it. And the work for persisting zones and event detection is ongoing and continues to progress really well. I’m excited to share some more updates on that next week. Let’s see. Changes for upcoming, nothing huge. We’ll be moving into… Yeah, I think on one end adding our integrations, automating our processes, and continuing to execute on the additional insights after we have this initial launch.
David (34:21):
So next slide, Josh. Just really quickly, the challenges have been one of the most popular things that customers have enjoyed about the Levels program so far. And we currently send them in a PDF. And so this is just a mini project that we took on to take it out of the PDF and put very simple text-based version of the challenges into the app. So launching next week, you’ll be able to play around with this internally, probably late maybe this weekend, early next week. Challenges now in the hamburger menu, our second item in there, you can tap it and you can go through each of the different challenges, read what to do, and this will just be a step in the right direction.
David (35:00):
But I’m excited to see that go live as well. Shout out to Murillo for developing that for us. And where this is going to go is in the future, you’re going to have the ability to associate entries or kick off new entries directly from these challenges. And then you can have an automatic comparison. So these are kind of like a structured test. It will automatically surface the result of it, show you your comparison and how things related to each other. And you can imagine maybe even doing like a multiple series of it to gain confidence over time. But that’s that, I think that’s it for the product and engineering side at this point. Any questions?
Josh (35:45):
Questions on product and eng? Cool. Okay. We’re on to the individual contributions here. So again, shooting for about 10 seconds on something we’re excited about, and I’m going to go bottom-up this time. So Evan, you want to start us?
Evan (36:01):
Wow. I used up four seconds. I got a negative last week. So I’m COVID negative so I can just do whatever I want now. Go places, whatever. Done.
Josh (36:13):
Congratulations. Casey.
Casey (36:19):
Well, right now, Portland has the worst air quality in the entire world, according to the air websites because of the fires. So we made a game time decision last night around 11:00 PM because my entire apartment smells like smoke to get an Airbnb four hours away, east of Portland to just basically we’re going to drive this afternoon and try and get out of the bad air quality. So we’re going to this town that I’ve never heard of called, I think [Trawler 00:36:48], Washington and staying in this tiny little Airbnb, but I’m excited for some fresh air and I’m really just, yeah. Heart goes out to the west coast and the firefighters and everyone who’s struggling. It’s really a crazy time and feel very, very fortunate that we’re able to get away. But yeah.
Josh (37:10):
Nice. Yeah. Get out of there, preserve the lungs. Mike.
Mike (37:16):
Casey took longer than 10 seconds so I’m going too. So, definitely just first shout out to our investors and our network we continued to get connected with ridiculous people. I don’t know how else to describe that. And the whole Bulletproof, Ben Greenfield thing. Awesome time. I remember in February, March, there was some chatter on Instagram about CGM and Dave and we’re like, “How are we going to do that? That’s happening.” The other thing, engineering, it’s just awesome to see these projects happen. I come from a finance background in a gigantic organization and it takes a year to even get an approval. So just awesome to see projects move. And personally, Philadelphia is now open for indoor dining at 25% capacity. So should be interesting. I won’t know how to act, see what happens.
Josh (38:19):
Keep it together. Mercy.
Mercy (38:24):
Personally, I’m helping my parents redo a lot of the rooms in our house. So just a lot of home projects this weekend. That’s about it.
Josh (38:34):
Okay. Let’s see. Yeah. I want to reiterate again for the 10th time on this call, but the Bulletproof and Greenfield situations, literally, I don’t know, 10, 12 weeks ago, this would have been earth-shattering. We would all be losing our minds about actually locking this down and having dates on the calendar. It’s just bizarre. I remember sitting around a campfire, I don’t know, maybe nine months or 10 months ago with some friends. And they were like, “Dude, imagine if you got Ben Greenfield to wear your product.” And although he’s he tried the product that long time ago, it was at arms length. And now it’s kind of official that one of the biggest names, the guy who chats with Eric Weinstein and Peter Attia about how to maintain blood sugar control is about to be doing so through Levels.
Josh (39:23):
And so that’s just cool. It’s very cool. And then personally, I’m excited. I’m planning a road trip and towards the end of this month, I’m going to drive out west and prospect some new areas for potentially living. My parents are slowly but surely zeroing in on a spot in Montana that it seems we’re going to have a presence out there with my family. So I’m excited about, yeah, excited about that still. It’s going to be an ongoing excitement. Gabriel.
Gabriel (39:57):
I’m excited. I got some new supplements that arrived yesterday. So I’m excited to run some blood sugar experiments using those with Levels and then personal life. Me and my wife, we’re going to go van shopping again this weekend. So maybe we’ll find the one.
Josh (40:12):
Nice.
Gabriel (40:13):
That’s it.
Josh (40:14):
Pictures requested. Jhon.
Jhon (40:19):
I’m excited to be participating in a tennis tournament with people from the neighborhood for the next five or six weeks. It’s the first time I would be competing. So let’s see how it goes.
Josh (40:35):
Nice. Tennis is a blast. I’m terrible at it. Megha.
Megha (40:44):
I am. I’m excited that I’m feeling a lot better. I got into a really bad bike accident over the weekend. So it was kind of out of commission for a bit. That’s why you can see black eye around my face. So this week was a little tough, but I’m feeling overall a ton better. And so I’m very happy about that. And I’m working on some fun creative Instagram ideas with Mercy and Stacy. So it was just really good to collaborate with them and just get a little bit deeper with our community on the ground.
Josh (41:16):
Really sorry to hear about the bike accident. Glad to hear you’re getting better though. All right. Dom is not on the call. So Tom.
Thomas (41:27):
Yeah. So one was the Mike Barwis call, which has been mentioned a couple of times, but Mike is kind of like the name in professional sports performance, hard guy to get a hold of. And I talked to him this week for an hour and he continues to text me every day just with his level of excitement around the product and constantly sharing new learnings, whether that’s a banana spikes him, but it doesn’t spike his wife or he can eat strawberries, but not bananas. He’s just so excited about the product and thinks that every professional athlete should be wearing it. So that’s super exciting. And then I really enjoyed my Donut call with Andrew this week. We got pretty deep into meditation. So that was fun.
Josh (42:13):
Nice. I don’t think Laurie is on the call. Laurie, are you out there? Okay. Over to Hao.
Hao (42:23):
Yeah. I think I gained a lot SEO tricks during my work on the Levels program tracking stuff. And it’s really helpful. Personally, low-interest rate being really low. We are refinancing our mortgage and even considering find a property outside the city. So we are going to do some property looking this weekend up on the island. And also the air quality is really bad here as well with the entire west coast on fire. So hopefully the rain coming in really soon.
Josh (43:08):
Wow. It’s crazy out there, Sam.
Sam (43:14):
Yeah, there’s just too many things. If we just took the things from this week, like every one of them. I think the thing that I’m most excited about is on the product and engineering side, the insights framework is going to really make Mike’s job a lot easier and it’s going to allow us to scale a lot faster and give people the feedback that they need to be able to make meaningful behavior change.
Josh (43:39):
Nice. All right. So I do this often, not as often as I used to, but I did not send out the story of the week cause I actually wasn’t sure if I was going to be in town and if were going to do this week. So I’ve prepared a little something from my own past related to today. So today is September 11th. So I vividly remember this day in 2001 and I just wanted to spend a few minutes talking about it and specifically how it affected our family. So my dad in 2001 was working for the Washington Field Office of the FBI on counterterrorism and weapons of mass destruction teams. And so his job was basically to be there when there was a massive threat to national security. And the picture on the left there is from his view as he was driving down a completely empty I-95 towards the Pentagon, about 15 minutes after the airplane had hit the Pentagon.
Josh (44:41):
And so this was what he was seeing and it was just eerie. And obviously, I didn’t see this picture for actually weeks afterward because I actually didn’t see my dad for weeks afterward, but I always, for some reason, associate this picture with that day because it’s the first one, I think he showed me when he got back to the house. He was basically living on the couch at the Pentagon for weeks. And then he went overseas and started embedding with organizations who were looking to track down who is responsible. So yeah, that experience… Actually, my dad and my uncle Jim were both in the FBI at the time. And they were in basically various parts of the country for about two years after September 11th and were intrinsic and a lot of really important programs to eventually track down significant portions of the people responsible.
Josh (45:42):
And my uncle ended up, he was in New York working the trade centers and he ended up inhaling so much of the debris during the actual evacuation process. He was there on the ground as the towers came down and he ended up getting non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which is actually super common for the first responders. So the jet fuel and the fumes were super overwhelming and everyone that was on the ground was exposed to them. And so a huge portion of people who were working during that time ended up getting severe cancers. And my uncle luckily made it through, my dad had also made it through. And happily, they’re now both working together on a production company, producing content about… It’s called XG Productions, it’s about people who used to serve in the military and law enforcement and telling their stories through TV and movies and as writers and producers.
Josh (46:40):
So it’s a happy place now, but I do recall very vividly that year and all the uncertainty around it. And I just want to kind of bring some attention to that. And just remember that this day was really a milestone, I think, in history for people around our age. And, yeah, just spend a few minutes thinking about that. So that’s all I’ve got and I’m sorry for not sending out the story of the day prompt, but I will next week. Okay. Any questions on todays’ forum?
Josh (47:19):
Yep. Well, we don’t have to end on a somber note. I want everybody to enjoy their Friday and enjoy their weekend. So get out there and have fun. And thank you for crushing it this week. And I look forward to talking to you guys soon.
Casey (47:34):
Thanks, Josh.