Josh Clemente (00:00):
Cool. Let’s do it. All right. Welcome to Friday Forum, March 10th, 2023. And okay, there we go. All right, quick reminder, Friday Forum is our weekly sync time. It’s primarily a celebration of recent achievements across different functions. We don’t always have visibility into what we each are achieving on a weekly basis, so this is our opportunity to share that and sync on it. We have other formats and forums for deeper parts of our culture, business analytics, et cetera. Okay, so this week Labs 2.0 went live, so this is really big. Bookings are rolling in. I think we’re already hitting something like 30 bookings or something like that, and appointments will start this week. So this is a big relaunch. Lots of stuff changed behind the scenes and also upfront in the app with our brand new representation in MyData. It’s really beautiful and I cannot wait for this new panel with five new metrics to really land and for people to start learning about this and optimizing around it.
(01:04):
Guides versions one through five are now complete. We had a notification, click-through rate retro on our notifications program in the product. We’re getting 15% click-through on zone ready and spike notifications where the industry average for click-through is something like 5%, so this is really good. There’s a lot of controllability on these notifications, which is great. Check out the retro from custom on this. It’s really insightful. Trends 1.0 and Labs v2, as I mentioned, released. And then on the guides front, really strong guides V5 survey results that indicate a really impressive willingness to pay. So people are saying that this is the type of thing that they want. They’re willing to pay for it. In fact, they’ve signed up and put money down. So this is gold standard of willingness to pay is actually paying and we’re starting to see indications here, which is really awesome. So shout-out to the whole team, Sonia, everyone involved in getting that across the finish line.
(01:55):
Happiness level on the membership or the member support side is now at five weeks above 90%, which is tremendous. Huge shout-out to the team. Replacement rate is also now 10 weeks at less than 10%, which is really fantastic. We’re at I think 9.7%, which is a record for the year. And then our… I’m sorry, that was the contact rate record, but contact rate record is now at 9.7. I think we’re trying to get below 20 or something like that. So really, really awesome work there. This is basically the amount of people who are reaching out to support, requiring personal assistance, and continuing to trend this down is a good indication. We’ve also hit our best SLA for, since liftoff, we’re at 76% three hour turnaround time on support tickets, which is really amazing. Obviously volumes have changed. Tons of stuff have changed since July this year, so huge shout-out to the team.
(02:43):
We released a retro on our New York City meetup from two weeks ago. Definitely check that out. It was really good. We got a nice survey as well with great results, so please review that, especially if you were at the meetup. And then we’ve got new performance management/review processes and new leveling currently in work. So the managers are reviewing some of these documents. This stuff’s rolling out very soon, so just progress happening there. Then we had three big AMAs this week, which I think they’re all recommended and/or mandatory viewing because a lot of really important stuff was touched on. So please check out those AMAs. There’s threads and comps.
(03:21):
Okay, we’ve hit 160 plus of 250 target signups for our Beta 1. So Beta 1 is, we’re calling it Metabolic Rebalance. The objective is to move from the Alpha mode that we’re in right now into Beta with more complete experience starting April 3rd with 250 people. So the last round of emails are going out next week to try and bridge that gap from 160 to 250. We also ran some pricing tests, some at $10, some at $20, and the conversion rate is varying between five and 9%, with obviously actually at the higher price point there seems to be a higher opportunity for total revenue. So really good results early on. And then we have a really excellent Try It, the Try It project that we ran, an excellent retro that came out this week, which is highly recommended for everyone to review. Great job, Sissy, and obviously the whole team who pulled that off.
(04:11):
On the signup front, so we shipped Signup 3.2 with crystal clear pricing. This is now live, the conversion rate is 15% up over the previous version of Signup, which was already very up, and 36% up on mobile. So these are really awesome results that we’re just continuing to see. Really great incremental improvement in our Signup flow. Crystal clear pricing is something that people really ask for and care a lot about. The next thing we’re working on is how it works, which is an explanation of levels, just really what you are buying and a deeper dive along with some testimonials. We also have an Apple Pay bug fix coming out. We’ve got a monthly cross-functional AMA, which we’re setting up, so that support and growth product can communicate directly and other people can tune in to see the implications of these constant iterations that we’re making. And then we’re shaping additional sensor education, new payment options and bundling as we roll out our new product strategy and improved study consent for our large IRB. Lots of stuff happening.
(05:10):
We’re launching the paid Alpha two with Stacey’s cohort for the software only MVP that’s happening I believe this week. And then we’re building trends 1.1 and we’re also, we’re going to hold on Android for the time being until we hit product market fit and going to focus mostly on ILS. And then this was the biggest week for our UK wait list, which is very exciting. We had a nice promotion from Dr. Hyman, which really skyrocketed our signups for the UK wait list. And then we gained 12,000 new followers on Instagram. It’s a huge week for Instagram for us and our weekly partnerships conversion targets. So we have these targets for what we want our partner codes to do for us, and we hit 10%. Sorry, we are above 10% and this is for a few weeks running now, which is great.
(05:56):
And then content editorial priorities. We had new memos released that dive into these, you can see these here. And we recorded our first whole new level advisor mashup, which you can see Dom and Rob there jamming with no other levels presence, which is awesome. I love seeing this. Cannot wait to listen to it, but this will be the first one of its kind. I’m sure we’ll do many more. We had another whole new level episode with Dr. Robin Rose, and a couple of great articles including one about this new trend of big companies caring about blood sugar friendly foods, which I think we can take at least a little bit responsibility along with the deep dive on how weight gain works, which is a really nice technical piece. Okay. I think that’s most of it. Great week. All right, jumping forward into a quick culture and kudos aside. So on the topic that we just discussed, we’ve got a UK liftoff update memo that is in draft, which Karen has done a great job updating as things happen in real-time.
(06:48):
So we’re going to do an AMA on that. There’s going to be a lot of secondary effects of decisions that we’re making on timing, and as we all know, we’re building in real time and adapting in real time. So that’s coming soon. And then we had a bunch of AMAs this week, so please go back and if you did not review them, watch the AMA with Sam. We touch on a lot of product implications, watch the AMA with the R&D team that also has product implications as well as just an update generally. And then we had a really nice one with Nicole on the team, not family value. So these are all really important, so please review those. Okay, and then quick shout-out to Dan Summers, happy one year. It’s crazy it’s been a year. Actually feels like more than that, but it’s amazing how much we’ve done so far.
(07:34):
And then we’ve got a ton of really awesome shout-outs for the team this week. I’ll start with Sissy, the retro on Sonia’s. Guides v5. We also had other retros that happen including Try It that are just really awesome examples that Sissy continues to push forward. So check out the retro. This a great example of how a project is incomplete until we’ve analyzed and shared the findings. So this retro is a prime example of that and there’s great stuff in there. And then I’ll just go down the list here. So Juan and Farhan both jumped in this week and made a ton, last week really, made a ton of progress for the guidance pod, even while most of the team was offsite, they made themselves more available proactively recognizing that there would be a gap and just generally built some major parts while a lot of the team was out. Jesse got several shout-outs this week that I need to just surface because he’s really representing in an amazing way on the R&D team.
(08:24):
Great attitude, just crushing hard work, learning new things fast and making other people want to work harder and achieve more faster, which is just really impressive since this is new territory for Jesse. And then for Paul, he’s proactively jumping in to find opportunities to optimize our use of tools and save money. In this example, trimming away some of the unused part of our drip platform. We had a lot of latent or expired addresses in there that we weren’t using and he was able to drop the monthly bill by 25% in one fell [inaudible 00:08:55]. So just very quick, low-hanging fruit, love all this. Thanks team. Okay, I am now handing it over to, I don’t know who’s taking it over here. I’m not going to lie.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
It’s me.
Josh Clemente (09:10):
Awesome, thank you Galit.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
No worries. Yeah. Okay, so I guess a little context here. I won’t go over the best processes and practices at Microsoft because it’s a big company and you could probably just google that. So I’ll go over the team that I was on and the best processes and practices we had there. So for a little context, I was on the team that powered all of the Microsoft virtual stores. So the one you might probably the most popular one is Xbox. So we worked with all of the content that was being recommended and we supported the product catalog that had billions of different apps, games, movies, music, I don’t know if anyone ever used Groove. It was back then, this was 2016. It was actually an incredible, it was bought by Spotify and it was better than Spotify back then, but like many Microsoft products just didn’t have the proper marketing.
(10:12):
Anyways, so yeah, the team was about the size of levels. It was mainly engineers. I won’t go over the engineering cultures because less relevant, but the two areas I thought were relevant for levels was around data and then team culture. So first of all, all the decisions we took on the team, both short and long-term, were driven by data. We were constantly running experiments and the content was divided by editorial, which was chosen by the experts. So people that knew about Halo coming out and things like that. And then everything else that wasn’t chosen by media experts or product was all decided based on data and trends. Many of the assumptions that we thought would be correct were actually incorrect once we ran experiments. So it was really cool to see how you can just by running, by really looking at the data, you get the correct picture of how consumers are actually using your product. And then that led into the second part of the culture that we had around knowing our data very well.
(11:38):
So we were pulling from tens of different internal Microsoft Teams, and there was a lot of work around understanding the data and what each change would imply on our services. And one of the things there that improved a lot during the time I was there was that just having cross-team communications at the IC level was super important and prevented a lot of bugs and false data assumptions that could be going on for years. So we spent a lot of energy and really understanding the data that we were getting from other teams and made sure to put in a lot of validation around that data. Another thing that was mentioned just now was we were very, very big into retros and specifically retros with action items. So every retro had at least one action item and sometimes they wouldn’t stick, it would just be too much of an effort, but a lot of times they would. And mainly I think having these retros led to identifying issues quickly and just wouldn’t have bad situations go on for a long time.
(13:11):
The next one, healthy conflict. I think that was more of a, So this team was in Israel, so I think this is more of a cultural Israel thing over Microsoft. Healthy is debatable. We had a lot of conflict on the team. I know a lot of the company read the book on the five dysfunctions, but conflict is one of them. But I’d say this negatively, this led to a lot of gossip and drama, which was unhealthy, but I think long-term, this made us a lot closer and increased our motivation and teamwork. We were all very aligned, we all knew where each other stood and we were all working, we all knew how to work with each other because of that. And the people on my team are still very good friends with me today. We’re all very good friends even though we all live in different countries, so that was nice. But we’re still like coworkers. We’re not a family, we’re still a team.
(14:15):
I don’t know, I definitely feel like it’s a conflicting sometimes. But yeah, that also led into the last one where we had, because of this we had joint team goals and it sounds like I’m repeating the book, but it really was like that. And I’d say another thing that led to joint team goals was, actually something we also implemented recently, was we had cross-functional teams working towards the same goal. So in each sprint we’d have everyone working towards the same goal of that week. And this led to everyone being more of a cohesive team and brought more interest into what other people are doing as well, even though they’re not working, they don’t have the same type of work as you. So for example, this led to a lot of motivation for people to mentor others and to involve them in more detail. And this led to also more introversional connections and interest in other areas that weren’t directly aligned with what you were doing. So yeah, that’s it.
Josh Clemente (15:34):
Awesome. Thank you, Galit. Yeah, it’s interesting to hear from the inside of Microsoft in this unique role it sounds like or team dynamic and how much interesting overlap there was on the values there. That’s really insightful. Awesome. Thanks very much for the share, Galit. Okay. Company objectives, main thing level shows you how food affects your health. Everyone should be working towards the priority. If you aren’t, definitely raise this. With that, I’m going to hand over products our top priority in Q1, but I’m going to hand over to Lauren and Riley. This is not a placeholder, they’re natural.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
I was going to say this is not a placeholder. This is the real thing.
Josh Clemente (16:12):
Sorry folks. We had some bloopers this week. It’s okay.
Speaker 3 (16:15):
Really excited to share with everybody the update to company objectives. As you know, we’ve been working to update what we were calling last quarter, the Okay Ours. We wanted to have a system in place that was simple, that was flexible, that would reflect the shared balance between our laser focus on finding product market fit, but also the importance of our long-term goals. There we go. Next slide. And so the adjustment that you’ll see here, again, meant to be as simplification, is we’re now thinking in terms of three time horizons, the near term which is today till the end of the year, medium term, which is the next three to five years, and the long term which is five plus years. And for each of these we have a goal and then an additional level of understanding what that goal means and why it’s important for us.
(17:01):
And what you’ll see here just really briefly, is the near term, as we all know, our goal is to achieve product market fit. And what does that mean? That means build something a lot of people want and sell it to those people. In the medium term, the goal is to become a billion dollar business and in the long term it’s to achieve our mission. And so we’re hoping that this sets the stage for being able to focus really specifically on what we need to do to get to the next step while not forgetting that we’re actually on a long-term journey here to really make a difference in the world. Next slide. So just zooming in a little bit on your term objectives and you’ll see that I sent a memo out I think two days ago that has a lot of detail on all of this, so I encourage everyone to check it out.
(17:41):
But just highlighting here again that we are looking for product market fit and specifically the two metrics that we’ve pulled out here are revenue, which is to hit or exceed $10 million per year in software revenue by the end of this year and retention. And that is assessed on a one month, three month and six month basis. Now I think it’s important to note that these are tentative goals that we’ve put in place to give us something to anchor to, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not adaptable or that they can’t be changed as we learn more about our market as we evolve our product and as we get into the real time iteration that is completely normal and expected for a startup at our stage. One really important thing I want to highlight here is you remember on the OKRs from last quarter, that we had a specific objective that was to improve member health.
(18:31):
We decided to replace that for our near term objectives with this guiding light statement, which is that everything we do is with the intent of improving member health and that we are operating in alignment with our values and that that is more important than company success. I believe this is the first time that we’ve made it this explicit, which is to say that if it ever comes to making the right decision for our users when it comes to their health versus our financial gain, we will always choose our users and what is right for them. So this is really important. And again, this replaces the previous objective of demonstrating member health. That has been continued to be included in the medium term and long term, but for a variety of reasons, we felt that this guiding light was a more powerful way to make sure that we can iterate really rapidly and with a focus on the right things while not forgetting that this value is a very important part and critical to our DNA next slide.
(19:23):
So what you can expect from this process. The first thing is a centralized metrics dashboard that will track our company progress towards our objectives. I will be handing the baton off to Riley to go over this next. So more to come on that. And you can expect a monthly Friday Forum update on that dashboard. You can also expect frequent progress updates and next milestones from product and growth as they track towards the near term objectives and they have sub objectives within that that they’ll be tracking towards on a monthly cadence and then reassessment of these near term objectives as needed. Because again, I think the goal is to be flexible, to be looking towards the future in our vision, but also to be really adaptive to what our needs are right here in the moment. So next, Oh and like I mentioned, you can check everything out in the company objectives menu and would welcome questions, perspectives, feedback, comments. And with that I will hand it off to Riley who’s going to give you the presentation on our dashboard.
Speaker 4 (20:19):
Perfect. Thanks Lauren. Perfect. Next slide please. So we’ll talk about key metrics and numbers without looking at too many numbers now I promise. So we’re going to be tracking some key metrics to provide a common language to understand where we’re heading, whether we’re on track and areas we may need to lean into in order to achieve the objectives Lauren just chatted about. This is number heavy, but it’s all should be read in the context of our guiding light principle as well, which is improving member health this year. So revenue is the one area that Lauren mentioned. We want to get to 10 million annual by the end of the year. In order to do that, we need to bring in new members, we need to make sure our members are actively engaging with our product, and we want to make sure that they value our service enough to pay us for it and generate enough revenue to get to 10 million.
(21:21):
So we’re going to be tracking new members, active members and membership revenue to give us an idea whether we’re on track to hit that $10 million annual revenue by the end of the year. We can’t get to $10 million annual revenue if our customers aren’t valuing our service and are leaving us. So we want to keep a close eye on retention. One thing that’s a real source of truth in terms of financials is whether our customers value us enough to pay for a membership. And so we’ll focus in on some paid retention metrics. Right now we have an annual product though, so the signaling from paid renewals is a little late and so we’ll be keeping track of active member retention. So whether people continue to engage with us one, three and six months after they sign up for levels. And to add some balancing metrics to revenue and retention, we need to make sure we’re achieving these objectives in the context of a sustainable business model.
(22:33):
So are we selling our product in a way that’s generating gross margin or cash flow or providing us cash that we can reinvest in the business? Also, we want to be mindful that the lifetime value of our customers are at a reasonable ratio to what we’re spending to attract and retain members on our platform. So just want to make sure that we’re not spending more money to bring in customers than they’re going to pay us over the long term. So profitability is a balancing metric. Next slide. So what does this look like over the next few months? So in the near term we are doing some experiments and working on getting to a general availability level with the CGM optional version of our product. And so we don’t expect big movements in our numbers between now and July 2023. So when we start looking at our metrics and how we’re tracking against these things, you’re going to see a lot of repetition right now, status needs work.
(23:46):
We have a hill to climb this year and that’s just acknowledging that we need to lean in to this product market fit this year. What we also want to do or what we’re going to be tracking is learning from our beta testing and experiments and that’ll help us not only evolve and refine our objectives, but we’ll also be able to take some positive signaling out of this. So are we making progress against these objectives or negative signaling? Are we seeing something in the experiments we’re running that maybe leads us to believe that some of the objectives might be at risk? So we’ll try our best to… A lot of the experiments we’re running won’t flow through into our company objectives. So we’ll try our best to synthesize this in our monthly updates. How are the experiments impacting how we’re tracking against these objectives?
(24:47):
In the future, so once we get running with general availability, we’re investing more heavily in growth in the second half of the year, we’ll be tracking progress against the numbers, that’ll start to be more prominent, and we’ll really lean into the monthly and weekly reporting and really dial into where we’re tracking against the numbers. Next slide. So follow up actions for the team, read the company objectives and key metrics, notion pages and review the dashboard, watch the loom of Lauren and I discussing the numbers for some added context, just financial and strategic insight into where the numbers are headed and just understand how these metrics relate to our current priorities and future performance. All right, that’s it everyone.
Josh Clemente (25:42):
Awesome. Appreciate you both. Great update and excited for this new initiative. It’s going to be a nice learning experience for us. Okay, Sam, jumping in with a company product overview. We have two more sections. I think we have this product update with Alan and then we also have Jackie doing a demand capture update. So I just want to make sure we’re on time. All right, Sam, over to you.
Speaker 5 (26:04):
Yeah, hopefully my internet works. If it starts not working, just frantically wave your hands and then I will know to switch over. So I wanted to give a broader context. Some of these things came up in AMA, so I wanted to make sure that we had more visibility onto it. So this is bringing our product strategy into the broader context of the company over the next several years. So as many of you have read the secret master plan from several years ago, stage one build premium software to quantify the effective diet on metabolic health. The next one is build a more affordable product. So we’re basically in stage two now, which is we’ve shown some real traction with the high cost version of the product and we have to figure out how to get it less expensive, more accessible, more affordable. So giving you a rough sense of the cost today versus what the future cost is if we’re able to reduce the dependency on hardware.
(27:03):
And this is the idea of hardware required versus hardware optional. You can imagine using a sensor, in fact, just like Dr. Chatterjee mentioned, using it for a couple weeks every few months as opposed to the necessity of wearing it all the time no matter what. That really has a huge impact on both our margins but also the cost of the service to our members. Next slide. And also bringing this into context, this concept is something that has been in the works for a long time. This is opposed from David from August of 2021. We have specs for this hardware optional version of the product going as far back as two years ago. So it has always been the plan, it was really just a matter of when we chose to do it.
(27:54):
Next slide. In a rough sense of the goal is, of course, to get revenue to have people purchase. And there are really two levers that impact the probability of somebody purchasing. There’s value and there’s cost. If the product is extremely valuable, then the cost can be quite high. If the value is relatively low, the cost has to be extremely low. And right now there’s a gap here in that we don’t capture very much of the value of the service because 90% of the cost is the hardware itself. And so we are focusing on both the cost lever and the value lever. How do we increase the value of the software and how do we bring the cost down? And by far our biggest factor for how we can reduce cost is reducing the need for using a CGM all the time. That’s the biggest factor for cost. And a lot of the stuff that we’re doing in our product strategy right now is figuring out how to also bring up value at the same time. Next slide.
(29:00):
It’s also tying in some of these product strategy concepts. Many of you remember we’ve used the terms education and accountability as the main pillars of our product strategy for a long time. Today we’ve really shifted that. It’s not as big a shift as I think many people project. Shifting from education and accountability to guidance, action, accountability. Many of the core themes are still the same, but with an added focus on this action element and a little bit more focus on what we mean when we say education, it’s about giving people a guide as opposed to giving them more generic content that’s not personalized. Guidance has more of a personalization element in it necessarily. Next slide.
(29:49):
So I’m just going to quickly go over these. These pillars are in the product strategy doc in the TLDR, this concept of guidance, every one of these concepts, this is the strategic pillar and within each of these we have specific features or implementations that we want to build in order to develop this. So within guidance we have three hypotheses that we want to test. Each of these are specific features. Guides is one hypothesis for proving out this guidance strategy event-based insights, data validated recipes and pantries is another. These are three hypotheses for how we will execute against this broader strategic initiative. Next slide. Action. Similarly, logging levels, levels, which is the metabolic program. These are hypotheses for how we will execute against this strategy of execution of action. Next slide.
(30:44):
And accountability, similarly, this is something that we’ve seen is a lot of times it’s the longer-term value proposition for people who stay with us for a long time. They really like the accountability that comes with it. And these are five hypotheses that we have of features we could build to execute against that. Next slide. Tying into Riley’s comment or Riley’s mention of short-term objectives of basically what are we focused on between now and July. And in terms of the company numbers on revenue, there are other shorter-term objectives that we’re focused on. This is a work in progress right now. So right now there are things that we are really focused on within the product org of things that are within our control around execution on delivering each of these features on a certain timeline. There were also metrics around retention that we’re going to be keeping track of. And I would say within growth we also have numbers around beta conversions that will give us more or less confidence in if we’re trending in the right direction for this intermediate time period between now and general availability in July.
(31:53):
And then once July hits as Riley mentioned, that’s when we’re going to be much more focused on specific metrics around membership revenue. Next slide. So last, I think this is the last slide here. I really recommend following along. There are a number of comms channels like the guides experiments if you want visibility into what is going on within guides, what we’re learning from each of these iterations, like the slide that Josh had related to Sissy’s retro, you can follow the guides experiment channel in comms. There are also growth channels, there are other product channels. Perhaps as a follow-up, we can figure out what the best channels are to subscribe to just to stay in the loop on all of these learnings and what progress that we’re making towards these things, because it can get really easy to lose that signal. I think that’s it for me.
Josh Clemente (32:53):
I think it’s over to Alan.
Speaker 6 (32:55):
All right, I’m going to take over the screen here, Josh. Thanks for being here everyone. I’m excited to present some of this to you. I have shared another loom on this in comms, but I’m going to do a slightly shorter version here just in case anyone missed it. Also, the slides are prettier, so I got to show you that too. So what are we talking about here? We’re talking about guided programs, and that’s because this is a theme that has come up a lot over the last two years, which is how do I get from here the very beginning to up here where my health goals are, I need a bit of a path, I need some support. Well, our program is supposed to be that. This is your plan to get to your goal and keep you moving forward. And these guides that we’ve been talking about, they’re going to help you get there. They’re going to carve out the path, they’re going to give you the tips and tricks, the hacks, the guidance to actually achieve your wellbeing goals.
(33:54):
So we’re creating this program and this is going to function as the foundation for providing more directed behavior-based guidance around your metabolic health. With that in place, we can start doing some of these other things, these more outcome-driven plans like weight loss, gaining muscle, managing PCOS, reversing pre-diabetes. We need this foundation in place so you can build an identity around these values around where you’re eating, how you’re exercising, sleeping, and so on. So we know that we’re focusing on Maureen right now. Maureen is our target persona, but this doesn’t exclude anyone else. And so what does she need? And if we look at her top pain points, she’s essentially dealing with the natural progression of age. Things like weight gain, reduced energy, low quality sleep. These all come to the foreground with someone like Maureen. So when we step back and we look at the program that we think can help her, we arrived at these three principles and these actually function as really essential principles for any plan.
(34:55):
It has to be personalized. Users are going to tell us what they need, their goals and what’s actually hindering them. This is also a super important part of this. We need to know their constraints, the things that get in the way. It’s got to be flexible. Nothing. I don’t know if you’ve ever done a marathon plan or running. Inevitably what happens is it falls apart because you miss a couple days. People lose motivation. We need to be flexible, we need to keep people moving forward and feeling like it’s okay to make mistakes or to move back or have that meal with your family that’s not metabolically aligned. It’s also got to be action-orientated. We need to feel like you’re doing something, you’re making change. And we think in the experience there’s all, both light and somewhat more heavy ways of doing that. It could be just these fun interactive learning moments like the glucose game, which are really positive responses to this.
(35:47):
It could be things like quizzes. This is actually a pretty common element in the behavior change space where we ask you what you’ve learned and then this creates a little bit of a reward moment at the end. It’s not super action-orientated unless you ate that particular thing, but it is testing your knowledge, it’s helping you learn and it’s also giving you this real feel. And then, of course, the things that we ultimately want you to do this is changing your behavior around food, sleep, activity. We’ll have these as well. So the first month of this program is obviously going to be super important. We need to, again, lay that foundation. And by the end of this program our members will have pledged to commit to a goal. It is really important. We want to really capture that commitment and get them going. We need them to understand the fundamentals.
(36:36):
Obviously we’ve done some of this before, a lot of this education. They’re going to need to define a healthy meal strategy and we’re going to help them do that. We’ve got all these insights, we’ve got these material. We can help adjust and make things that you’re already eating that you love a little bit more healthy for you. Things like introducing fiber and so on ordering your meals. We’re going to introduce consistent exercise into a daily routine. This can be as small as going for a walk or walking after a meal to cardio strength training and so on. And then we’re going to improve the quality and consistency of rest because we know this plays a role in your overall happiness and well-being and your insulin sensitivity. So all these things actually tie back to the pieces that are already in place in the product.
(37:22):
We’ve got this checklist and that’s essentially what people are going to come back to determine whether they’ve done these things. Looking at activity and movement, sleep, healthy foods, glucose stability. I think part of what’s happening here is we’re leveraging all these pieces that have come into place. So we’ve really invested in the parts that will allow this program to come together. So when we look at the guides work, we’ve got this big tab with all this great video content and educational material, interactive content. So how does that relate to the program? Well, and what is the structure actually here? Well, there’s going to be two primary categories of content that you’ll see. This evergreen material, this is actually attached to your journey. This is something that you will see no matter what every day, and this functions as a guidepost for both the program overall and the data that you’re experiencing.
(38:13):
And then there’s this ephemeral stuff. This is a day in the life. This is a bit more entertaining. It’s following Stacey or Sonia, whoever our guide is around. This keeps you motivated, this keeps you engaged. And actually make sure that if you are on the structured journey, we can augment it with things that are slightly aside from that in case you are not exactly on the path that we want you to be on at the moment. So we think about how that might work. This could be ranked by your behavior, initially it’d be ranked by our presentation of what we think is the most effective to start. It’ll be ranked by perhaps your demographics. So in this example we’ve got Lauren, perhaps she’s talking about something related to women’s health. We’ve got a user in the middle here, maybe it’s men 55 in maintenance mode. He may not see that at all or he may see it just reduced in rank in his feed.
(39:04):
We think he could still potentially benefit from it, but it won’t be quite as essential that he sees it. If we take a woman, 55, she’s also in maintenance mode, potentially it could have applied to her in the past or could apply to her right now. We’ll move that up. And then a target user, someone we think this actually could appeal to right now. Well, of course, we’ll keep on moving it up. So how long does a program like this last? Now this is going to be in one month cycles and they can continue on this journey for as long as they want. One of the reason that we’re breaking these into cycles or we’re calling loops, I’m using the word loop all the time now. We want to increase that sense of commitment, not urgency, but there is a period of time which you’re operating in not unlike something like Whole 30. And we’re going to do that because we also want to reduce the perceived effort that’s associated with this.
(39:58):
If it feels like you’re on the same journey forever or maybe that finish line is at the end when you die, people are going to demotivated, they’re going to fall off. So when we break that down specifically for the first month, we’re talking about weekly cycles. Obviously the first one is about learning the fundamentals. We want to start really lean towards content that gets you going, make you understanding where you’re at, what you need to think about looking forward, and then we’re going to start breaking it down by different times of day. And so you might be looking in that and thinking, I don’t even eat breakfast, or maybe why would you structure it like this? This is really intentional.
(40:38):
What we’re doing here is we’re trying to segment the day so that it can become practical and we can make habit formation. This is accessible as possible. And if we look at the data that we have on our users, we can see what prevents them from achieving their health goals? The very top one is time followed by lack of knowledge, bad eating habits, inconsistency, and then nothing, which is again my favorite because I think that’s a huge opportunity for us. Top five. They get all kinds of reasons to do this. So by breaking this down by time of day, we’re going to be developing strategies for them ultimately to win the entire day. And we’re hoping that that gives us a fair bit of structure that we consider provide our other content around.
(41:20):
And so what that might look like in terms of the passage of time is when you wake up in the morning, we can start talking about the role of insulin sensitivity, how that changes over the night. We can give you strategies for breakfast. We can give you strategies ultimately as you progress through the program around lunch, dinner and so on. It also creates a nice little arc. It’s natural. It feels like you’re in this journey that’s beginning at the start of the day and progressing. And if we look at why we’re starting specifically at the start of the day and we look at our data, we see that almost everybody has a very consistent trend amongst all our users, which is that they’re spiking the most in the evening.
(42:02):
This is surprisingly consistent to me. I almost thought the data was wrong at first, but most people are doing relatively well in the morning and that’s awesome. Now you could argue that we would start the later part of the day to make the most impact, but we think why start with the hardest part? We want to really consistently create successes for people. And so we’re going to start with the morning. The structure of a week for whatever week you’re on in this first month. We’ll start off with essentially a kickoff. We’ve essentially introduced the week, talk about what we’re going to focus on. We’re going to give you some expectations about what you’re going to achieve, what’s going to change. And then as you progress through the week, we’ll be able to touch on these primary pillars that we’re focusing on. Food, exercise, sleep, that’s the ephemeral content that we’ll mix in there probably at any time, but specifically start of the day, you’ll be talking about different themes.
(42:55):
And then at the end of the week we’re going to reflect on what happened, give you a little bit of insight into what’s going to be happening in the future. And then you might’ve heard me in the past talk about these weekly wins. We want to also celebrate people. We want to find people who over the course of the week have done really well and make sure that they feel acknowledged. So what does that look like in our content? This is where the guides material comes to the foreground. This program is creating the structure so that guides know what to talk about and when. And also likewise for users, what are they going to be expecting? What are they doing? So here’s Sonia at the start of the week, perhaps she’s going to the grocery store, she’s setting everyone up to know what to buy, followed by perhaps here’s a recipe Casey’s talking about why she really loves it. Little recipe card flies up and they can jump into other areas of experience.
(43:44):
Again, in the theme of the morning, what are you putting in your coffee? Is oat milk actually good for you? Moving forward, exercise, strength training, the role of early morning light. Now I really want to reinforce here that this is the evergreen stuff. This is the content that you start with in the day. But again, there’s all this amazing ephemeral content that our experts, folks like Stacy, Sonia, etc, will be providing. So it doesn’t feel like every day we’re only talking about just the morning or that weekly objective. And then finally at the end of the week, there’s a variety of different ways you could reflect. Could be these things like polls and quizzes. In this case it’s a poll. And this is again, a little touch point for users to look back. Perhaps there’s a guide in the background also setting up that question so that you can respond. So again, loops. This is my new favorite word. We’ve got the first week, second week, third week, fourth week, got this month. We’ve got everything put in place for you to succeed on your metabolic health journey.
(44:44):
And then so if you think about that first month we expand out, this is where we start thinking about integrating things like CGMs, lab work. So the initial month foundation, maybe we start moving into maintenance mode, month three, check-in, maybe perhaps we introduce blood. So something like this could also potentially be in play. We’re going to start expanding on this a little bit more. You can expect some more presentations from me next week on that. So in this example, you’ve got 12 months, month one, foundation, maybe month three, check-in, and you’ve got these periodic check-ins, or if you’re someone like us and you can go a little crazy, you can do blood work and CGM every single month. Kudos to you. So that is the program. Really quickly. How did I do? Yes. All right, so thank you so much for listening. We’ve got tons of work underway. I want to really call out folks like Azar, David Maas, Sonia, Stacey, Sissy. You guys are actually working super hard to pull this together and everyone’s just feeling very optimistic and motivated right now. Thank you.
Josh Clemente (45:47):
Awesome, thank you, Alan. Yeah, very excited about loops. Can’t wait for next week’s monthly update. Okay, we had one other section on growth, which we’re going to shift over to next week. Thank you Jackie for that awesome week. Obviously a packed meeting. We’ve got a ton of stuff going on and a really great week. I am going to quickly touch on hiring. No open roles at the moment. We still have our general careers page, so if you’re interested, please send your info in at levels.link/careers. And I don’t really have much time for individual contributions, but I’m going to jump into it anyway. So we might have one or two. I’m going to be heading to New York this weekend. Going to get a chance to catch up with Sam, see some other folks you see David, I think is going to be there. And otherwise that’s what I’m excited about personally and professionally. There’s a lot to talk about, a lot to think about.
(46:38):
And then anyone else in the last minute here? Very excited about Bloodwork 2.0. Results were super insightful. I had never done APOB before actually, and it was a surprising result for me, actually in a good way, which also was surprising. So yeah, huge shout out to the team for launching that. Love trends. Love the direction we’re heading again, got a lot to do. Thank you Rangan for joining us today. A ton of excitement about what we can do, not just here in the US but abroad very soon. So all right team, we’re going to call it here. Have a great weekend and thanks for an awesome week.