https://youtu.be/yOngl6rBkrA
Transcript:
Josh Clemente: All right. Everybody see that?
Mike Didonato: Yep.
Josh Clemente: Cool. March 12, 2021. First off… And I just saw his smiling face on the call. I want to welcome John Maravilla. I want to make sure I’m pronouncing your last name. You can correct me in a moment here, but John is one of our early beta members and the first beta member to join us on the Friday Forum. So, I want to give him a warm welcome. Thank you for setting aside time. Thank you for being a supporter of Levels, especially this early in what we’re doing, and you have a pretty awesome story about just improving weight, A1C improvement, cholesterol values coming down, awesome stuff, and Levels and the accountability function seems to be a component of that. So, John would love to hear just a few words from you on everything, what you’re interested in, and how Levels factors in.
John Maravilla: All right. That was fast. I was not expecting to jump in right away. Okay, then. Okay, there we go. All right. I’m John Maravilla, or Maravilla, depending on how you want to pronounce it. I’m here in Chicago. Usually we would have a… You could see the skyline behind me, but it’s really bright right now, which is a good thing. And I’m just a managing consultant on safe, agile projects. So I’m pretty much stuck at home. I’ve been working from home for the past three or four years, so this hasn’t been the big change for me with COVID. But with Levels, it really did help me during this COVID pandemic thing, but I’ll get into that a little bit later. So, basically just like most of like everybody else, we’re trying to get into shape, right?
John Maravilla: I’m trying to get into shape. I want to try to get into shape every year. You try to say that, but back in September 23rd of 2019, I said, “All right, this is it. I really have to get to this and start with my workout program.” So, ended up getting a trainer. Signed up at Equinox here in Chicago and just been hitting it hard, right? So five days a week, weight lifting, cycling, and doing Metcon stuff, and then classes. And started seeing some improvement. It was great, but you know what? I still wasn’t losing the weight. I was still chubby in certain areas and I still wasn’t feeling that great. I felt some improvements, but not a whole lot. And then so fast forward to 2020, and scrolling through Instagram, and I saw this ad. I saw this ad for Levels and I started reading up on it.
John Maravilla: And I actually heard about using CGM for metabolic conditioning. And so, I kind of read more into it and I said, “All right, I’ve made up my mind.” I go, “I want to do this. I really want to try and I think this is what’s going to get me over the hump.” And so, I think I must have spoken or emailed some of you guys, and whoever was monitoring the sign up was probably thinking, “Who is this guy who keeps on emailing me?” Because I think every couple weeks I would say, “Is it my turn yet? Is it my turn yet to do this beta test?” And finally I got it. Right? So I finally got into this beta test back in, I think it started end of October, beginning of November.
John Maravilla: And not to sound cliche, but it really was life changing. I couldn’t believe it. It was one of the things where I think that I thought I was doing right in regards to the diet. It was totally wrong for me. Right? So yeah, so it was this total game changer. I totally learned that I was trying to do this and it still really wasn’t quite working and I needed to get into the specifics. And that’s where Levels fit into that, is to get into that specific of what I can and can’t eat or can’t do. So, definitely learned that eating right depends on [inaudible 00:04:06] that one program from one person. And my best friend is this total CrossFitter guy, and he was giving me his workout plans or his diet plants, and it really wasn’t working. It wasn’t working out for me.
John Maravilla: So some of the highlights that I definitely learned was keeping glucose in check will definitely help you lose weight in a healthy way. Right? And I learned that I can’t eat most things and… Oh, that I learned that I could eat most things and I really don’t have to change what I currently eat. I just have to do this modifications and it’s really more on how I eat it. And so, my biggest example here, and my biggest aha that I always tell people, was we had this restaurant here called RL, at the Ralph Lauren store. So this really nice, really good restaurant. It has the best burger in Chicago. So I said, “Do you know what? I’m going to do it. I’ll have a cheeseburger.” But I said, “Let me try doing a kale Caesar salad beforehand and I’m just going to have the burger with the fries.”
John Maravilla: I usually take out the top bun anyways, because it’s just so much bread for me, but I did not spike at all. And it was one of the things where I just like, “Holy crap,” I can eat easily and still enjoy the foods that I want, especially here in Chicago where we’ve got a lot of fast food type of stuff, and I can eat what I want. That sounds really stupid, but I can. And as long as I followed that-
Josh Clemente: [crosstalk 00:05:44].
John Maravilla: Mantra in terms of… Yeah, exactly. And I was fine. So I took that. I took that to the next level and said, “All right, so let’s make that modification, making sure that I do have that salad beforehand or make sure that I have some sort of high protein meal before I want to be bad.” And that was totally fine. Definitely learned that I could eat pizza. Right? Pizza was one of the thing… Oh, okay. Not Chicago pizza. No matter what I do with Chicago pizza, that still spikes me. So, that’s… I can still have it every once in a while, but I can have pizza. It is one of the things that I definitely learned.
John Maravilla: So, following all the things that I learned for myself. So it’s actually self-learning, right? So Levels helped me self-learn how to control my own diet, which then I think really… You don’t fall off the wagon at all, or so far, I haven’t fallen off the wagon. I mean, if you were following somebody else’s diet or following a textbook diet or something like that, I think you’ll probably fall off a little easier, but now that I’ve trained myself, I am doing really well. I mean, that’s the thing.
John Maravilla: And surprisingly, I couldn’t believe how fast I lost weight, in a healthy way, and how much more defined I have gotten in terms of muscle tone. A couple months ago… Actually not a couple months ago. Last month I went and saw my physician and did my annual, and my blood work up was incredible. He just looked at me. He said, “What in the heck did you just do?” And I explained to him. I just said, “Hey, I’m just monitoring, making sure that my glucose as much as possible is between that 110 and 170.”
John Maravilla: And he’s like, “Are you eating special foods or not?” I said, “No. I’ll still have a candy bar. I know I can have a candy bar if I want to,” but it’s one of those things where I’ll look at my levels and say, “All right, well, I had this candy bar, so I better watch out what I eat for my next meal so that I stay within that range.” And just because I’m staying within that range, I have so much more energy. I’m losing weight, and it’s doing well for me. And I feel like I’m rambling.
Josh Clemente: No, this is… John, really appreciate all of that background context, detail. It’s amazing to hear the specifics of an individual experience. Since so many of us are on different paths, starting at different points, it’s always fun to hear the unique perspective. So, thank you for giving us a spin based on an Instagram post.
John Maravilla: It was. Somebody asked me, he’s like, “Why do you keep on subscribing?” I said, “You know what though, the reason why I want to keep on subscribing is it just keeps me accountable.” Right? And I think that’s the main thing. And I said, “As much as I can, I’m going to have this patch on and that way I can just make myself accountable.”
Josh Clemente: Love it.
John Maravilla: Thanks again. Thanks for all you guys do and what you’re working on and can’t wait to see what you guys will have in the future. And yeah, I’m in all the way.
Josh Clemente: Love it. Well, thank you for joining us. Thank you for sharing that. And I’m excited to keep following along as you continue. Much more to come for us and I’m sure for your experience. So yeah, we all appreciate you sharing.
John Maravilla: Cool. Thanks.
Josh Clemente: All right. Jumping into the achievements this week. So, as you all know, Assemblage week is well underway. This is always, it’s always fun, especially as the team is growing. And I can say personally, I’ve been having a blast with you all just doing these events we’ve done this week. A lot of fun, couple more left before the end of today. A couple shoutouts on the inside. So, I believe it was [Hal 00:09:35] that migrated this, but we’ve successfully moved Chrome for a data collection out of our production back end, and this is less evident to someone like myself, but apparently massive improvement in stability and performance. So, awesome there.
Josh Clemente: [Shinlu 00:09:50] built a new tool to collect production stats, latency, et cetera. And then also a really beautiful dashboard for those metrics and for visibility, which will lead to better triage and potentially cutting things off before they become an issue for our members. So, that’s exciting. On the product side, we’ve got Levels Lessons, Dashboard V2, wellness disclaimer, all available for internal testing. Those will be going out to customers once we kind of give them the go ahead. David will have more detail there. But yeah, Dashboard V2 obviously is huge. Lessons are huge. The wellness disclaimer is establishing what Levels intentions are as a product. So, all big stuff. And then, a huge shout out. Jeremy Miz currently migrating the first subscription customers into Stripe. This is big. This has been at work for a long time. Lori please try to contain your excitement.
Josh Clemente: I know this is going to be a huge win for us. The NFL Players Association, Tom and I had a follow up call yesterday with a few of the stakeholders there. They’re absolutely loving Levels. It’s been the most insightful breakthrough for them since sleep tracking, and they’re very interested in a number of partnership opportunities with us. NFL Players Association for those don’t know, is the entity that controls interfacing between industry and players. The leagues don’t do this and the coaches and teams don’t control this. So, in terms of getting opportunities like research with the Harvard Football Players Health Study, which is looking at former football players at scale through Harvard in a longitudinal way to see all the implications on health and wellness for people who have put themselves through a career of professional football, this is kind of the only way, and Levels could be a part of both the research and obviously getting more integrated into the performance community. This is a great opportunity. So, more to come there.
Josh Clemente: Had a great call with the CVS VP of Health Strategy and Innovation. CVS is looking to get more nutrition, more general wellness into their CVS health offerings and are very excited about the Levels value proposition to general population. And then, of course, wait list exceeded a hundred thousand this week, which is kind of wild. It’s currently at 102,000. So, got ground to cover to start clearing that soon. A couple big shoutouts. An awesome article from Mr. Dyson on the content side. I’m sure Haney will cover this later, but I really enjoyed that one. We’ve got a Clubhouse series coming up soon. We’ve got one with Sam and GitHub or the head of remote at GitLab. They’re going to cover remote best practices, building a company, remote… This is going to be awesome.
Josh Clemente: And then, another focus on women’s health with Kelly LeVeque, Christie Allen and our team. And so, Clubhouse is turning into a great platform for us. We’re getting a ton of awareness through it. We were invited to the Goldman Sachs digital health conference. This is going to be, I think, April, which is exciting. We had a huge number… I mean, you’re seeing a lot of big names here on the screen, athletes across the board, wrestling, MMA, football, swimming. We’ve got actor Mena Massoud who played Aladdin, Maria Emmerich who’s a huge wellness influencer, all kind of entering the program in real time or becoming part of the Levels network. So, big week, despite the fact that we’ve been focused on Assemblage stuff. So, congrats everybody.
Josh Clemente: And let’s jump ahead to culture. This is another little Assemblage note. I just want to shout out to everybody participating in the Assemblage this week. Like I said, it’s been a lot of fun. The most important thing we’re building is the team. And so, it really is important and appreciated that you all set time aside to participate together. I had a ton of fun the other night cooking with you all and then trivia and we just finished the breath work stuff. So, thanks for continuing to take part in these. Thank you Miz, especially, for designing and executing these events. It’s been… Of course, adding that on top of your list of responsibilities is kind of absurd, but I appreciate you continuing to make it happen. All right, over to David.
David Flinner: Awesome. Yeah. Josh, I think you covered some of these quite well already, but yeah, huge congrats to Jeremy and Miz for the first member being migrated to Stripe today. I know that there’s so many things that you’re doing together, iterating on the small features, the small tweaks to make this happen, and it’s pretty big. So, great work on that. Next slide. As Josh mentioned, Dashboard V2 is ready to test so no updates visually here since last week, but please do download the internal build and give it a spin. The things that we are really be interested in testing here are… Well, A, at a high level, did we get the right framework for this? Is it the right… Do you like having that qualitative page that is focused on at a glance? How should you be feeling about your day and what can you be doing next in terms of education or challenges, things like that?
David Flinner: And then a separate canvas that goes deep on the data. What is my data showing me, how can I drill into it? Where can I get more context? You’re going to see in the app right now that we have that top level glance card, your zone summary, and then also the insight cards and the education cards are front and center. What we’ll be working on over the next week is adding the education stack. So with the new lessons feature, you’ll be able to see that on the home screen. Not today, but soon you can see your next suggested lesson. And then, other things we’ll be adding there to suggested challenges. Pretty much a stream of things that you could be doing based on what we know will be relevant for your point in the journey and what you’ve not done yet so far. So yeah, give it a spin.
David Flinner: Next slide. And last week I showed a similar slide to this, but it was a mock. This week is a screen recording of Murillo’s awesome feature that’s ready for testing. The in-app lessons look pretty much spot on with what I had in Figma, which is awesome. Great work on this, Murillo. Please take this one for a spin too. You’ll find it in a separate build actually. If you download version 1.1.350, you’ll find the lessons here. And right now it’s just in the learn tab. Click on the new lessons tab within that sub tab, and then you can explore the guided experience with it. I’m still working on loading it with the proper content. It has some placeholder content right now, so you can just kind of get a feel for what it will be like, but that’s ready for testing in the app. And yeah, huge thanks Murillo for that. And huge, thanks to Haney for cuing up some of the content.
David Flinner: We’ve been iterating on this quite a bit on the content side, and he has a big backlog of new, simple to understand summaries of a lot of our best blog posts and new content that will be making a more app first product, first experience around that. Next slide. And Josh mentioned the wellness disclaimer. So this will be showing up for everyone the first time they log into the Levels app. It’s just a reminder that Levels is for health and wellness, and that our program is designed for metabolic awareness. It’s designed within the constraints of the normal mainstream population who’s not actively managing a condition right now. And it’s a really important warning for regulatory reasons, but also just to provide the right context on what you can and can’t expect from Levels so that you don’t look to do something that it’s not going to be able to provide you. For example, we bound the data. We don’t show data beyond 200 milligrams per deciliter. So, it’s important that you have this context up front, and it’s also important for us to get a record of this acknowledgement.
David Flinner: Next slide. And the next thing I’m working on with Haney, and then hopefully pass off to engineering soon, is the Program Journey. Right now we embed, we link a PDF to what the Levels’ 20 day program is, and you have to open this PDF in the app and it’s not the best experience. So we’re merging that into an in-app experience where you get at a glance, what should you expect in the arc or the journey for week one when you’re exploring baseline in your normal diet, seeing how you respond, and then progressing towards optimizing towards the end. And this will be a nice in-app experience. Some parallels with the lessons, but still working on the design for that and the content. Haney is also working on new content for this, which is great.
David Flinner: Next slide. Yeah, and this is just a quick reminder, again, you’ll see those education stacks below the new dashboard. Go to next slide. I think that is wrapping it up. So, Josh actually got into a lot more detail than I did on the summary slide. The Eng team has been working a lot on some of the background stuff and setting up awesome analytics and dashboards, which are really going to be critical for helping us reach more users, but also get more insight into how our systems are working and how people are using our features. So, those are really nice to see. Beyond that, still working on some of the day score two B2 backend infrastructure. So saw a few coachings come in from [Xingu] on that, which is also exciting. And I think the other one to call out is Murillo is working on offline mode fixes. So, hopefully we can get a new build out soon with the offline mode fixes and wellness disclaimer. And then, as soon as we’re ready internally with the lessons and Dashboard V2, we’ll push that out as well.
Josh Clemente: Awesome. Thank you, David. Thanks team. Quick hiring update. We’ve got Workable live as our candidate tracker now for hiring. This is going to be much more convenient than Notion. Everyone should please get set up if you are working in the hiring space right now, or you want to see the candidates that are processing, please get your Workable team login setup, and you can touch base with Miz to get that figured out. Still looking for the roles listed and then check out our careers page for general application. Mike D.
Mike Didonato: Thanks, Josh. So, it’s a great week connecting with our members. By the end of today, we will have spoken with more than eight people. One theme in particular I want to call out, and it’s one that we’ve seen before and that we’ve been tracking, is that need for more guidance. And it’s kind of falling into two different categories, either A, just not having the time to dig into our material and/or B, just kind of being a little bit overwhelmed when our members get into the app and are looking for some more of that structure. So really excited to, now that we’re testing the Dashboard V2 and then ultimately the Levels Lessons, really excited to see how that changes the feedback that we’re getting, since ultimately we want to try and solve these issues so that they do not come up anymore. And then, one other quick thing I wanted to give a quick update on.
Mike Didonato: I think I spoke about this last week or the week before, one of the projects that we’re working on this quarter is connecting with more of our subscription members to find out the job basically that Levels is doing. And a few things stand out in particular. Our members are really just loving that continued feedback, and I think as John mentioned at the top of the call, the accountability. And then the other is the additional context that Levels provides beyond that raw data stream. Being able to understand how nutrition and activities affect a given glycemic response.
Mike Didonato: And then, the final one is a real shout out to the Eng team, and to David, is the pace at which we’re iterating; basically comes up on almost every call. Almost to the point where if you just keep improving the app, I’m going to keep using it. And I think… Oh, and then one final thing is, what does it take to continue with Levels? It said A, continue to improve, but ultimately when we get closer to those more automated insights based on their data, that’ll be a game changer obviously for the entire experience, but for our repeat members as well. That’s all I have.
Josh Clemente: Awesome. That’s super helpful. Yeah, I love the theme breakout. So, super helpful. Thank you, Mike. Okay. Over to Miz.
Michael Mizrahi: Great. So two quick updates, the health and wellness disclaimers were mentioned earlier. Heads up that this is showing up in two places. So one is in the app. All members are going to have to accept and understand that disclaimer there. And the second one is on our insert cards. We’ve added that disclaimer text as the insert cards in the boxes. Just some context for everyone on why this is important. So as we all know, Levels is a health and wellness product, not designed to treat any specific conditions, and not designed for diabetes. And so, we want to make sure that all of our members understand that, regardless of where they are in the flow. Important for regulatory purposes and also just to make sure that we’re in the clear on this. We do have the ability to screen out consults before they get to a position.
Michael Mizrahi: If someone identifies as diabetic on the consult form, and so that might be something that we investigate in the future just to tighten it up a little bit. But so long as everyone understands that this is a condition of using the product, we’re okay. So, no need to worry on those cases. Second update here, subscription migration is underway, so huge thanks to Jeremy for all the work over the past month and a half, two months or so, but we’re finally getting some members transitioned over. And as of this morning, we’ve moved over one member. We’re doing 15 over the next weekend, basically through Monday. And then, we’re going to chart the path to 882; hopefully in bulk. So, we can see the finish line. We’re at mile three of the marathon, but almost there, and so really excited to get this out the door.
Michael Mizrahi: There will be things that come up, this isn’t a one and done, and we can close the door on subscriptions. There’s going to be edge cases. There’s going to be different support cases that we’re not used to supporting. And so, we’ll learn all of that and grow with it, but this is a really exciting milestone just in terms of manual brute force work that we have to do. So, stay tuned there. On the analytics side, you’ll see this bottom right dashboard that Josh Moore has hooked up in retool. Thank you, Josh. We pulled out these analytics for performance purposes a few months back. And so, we were kind of flying without instrumentation, but we’re back in business. We understand our daily, weekly, monthly active users. And so, we’re seeing around 1600 weekly actives at the moment, which is good to know. We have a ton of better performance on the engineering side, but also this has other implications across monthly subscriptions, support capacity, and just kind of general awareness.
Michael Mizrahi: So, we’ll share that once it’s released more broadly, but really excited to have that visibility. Subscribers I covered already. And then, we had a short outage earlier this week caused by one of our providers by Amazon, so our authentication was down. Some members got logged out of the app, but well handled across Ops and Eng and did everything we could until Amazon got it back up. So, we’re getting better at these outages. I think we’ve had a handful over the last few weeks, but with that comes really good practice and repetition, messaging, save replies, help scout articles posted. And so, we’re all over it when these things happen, which is just good hygiene. That’s it on the upside.
Josh Clemente: Awesome. Thank you. All right, Ben.
Ben Grynol: All right. Growth. So, we will start with some shout-outs. So Darren Murph is head of remote at GitLab, and he has been the Clubhouse connector. He and Sam are doing the show. It’s a four week show starting March 23rd, and Darren autonomously just started connecting with people in the tech ecosystem, and so this informal email thread has now turned into a pretty meaningful event with lots of high profile VCs and other founders on it. So hat tip to Darren for that. Next slide, please. So week over week, we’ll start talking about financials in this respect. It’ll be easier to chunk things out. So what we’re looking at is weekly revenue, monthly revenue, and then cash on hand. When you look at the bars, you see the white bar is our target, the green bar is our recognized revenue, and then the gray bar is cash generated.
Ben Grynol: So from a weekly perspective, we’re on track to hit our target for recognized revenue. But what you’ll see is that our cash is lower, and the reason why, is because we’ve turned off the tap on a lot of the growth initiatives we are undertaking to control some of the MAUs that will be coming in. From a monthly revenue perspective, we are on track to hit our goal of $300,000. We’re just over a third of the way there. And you can see the gray bar is the cash generated, which is around a 185,000 bucks, so we’re doing well there. And we’ll continue to see that we’ll grow a recognize revenue because there’s a lot of orders that are being carried over from February as they’re fulfilled. Cash, we’re at 10.4 in the bank, so that’s less than last week, and the reason being is we’ve allocated a hundred thousand dollars to a research initiative. So hat tip to Josh for getting that going.
Ben Grynol: Next slide, please. So theme of the week: forecasting. So we’ll talk about three things, how we forecast, why forecasts are important, and then where we’re headed. And so, we’ve got a number of models that are now done for five year growth forecasts. And what these models are linked to is things like revenue, team growth, member growth and runway. And when doing forecasts, we end up having three cases. So we’ll do a low case, a base case and a high case. And each of these cases are based on assumptions that we have about a future state, where we might be headed. And so, all these assumptions that we have, or hypotheses, are backed up with data that we use from our current state. So anytime we get things around conversions from doing a growth initiative or things like monthly active users.
Ben Grynol: Why are they important? So, they give us a rough guideline of where we are now and where we’re headed. And what we’ll realize is once we start pursuing growth more actively, it’s so important to be on track, in the sense that if we get off track by 1%, it doesn’t seem like a big amount, but over time, that compounds quite a bit. So we want to make sure that we’re not only keeping ourself in check, but understanding our targets versus our actuals. And then, that’s how we’ll design growth initiatives around that to say, “Cool, where we’re headed is working based on these tactics.”
Ben Grynol: And so, where we’re headed. This graph here, what we’re looking at is one from the five year forecast, which are in Slack, if anyone’s curious. This is member growth over the course of five years. And so, it’s realistic to assume that once we start expanding internationally, we can get to a million monthly active members. It’s our goal is to help as many people as we can, and when you start to tie these numbers to things like revenue, it’s hard to comprehend the numbers, but it’s a realistic scenario. So, really interesting. If you do have questions, let me know. Once you dig in, in Slack and happy to answer them. That’s it for growth.
Josh Clemente: Nice. Thank you, Ben. Those are big numbers. Mercy.
Mercy Clemente: So social, Instagram, we’re at 23 or just over 23,000 followers, which is pretty crazy. Twitter, we’re at over 12,000. One common theme that was seen on Instagram this past week was a lot of people are doing the comparisons on just different foods and trying them with a walk, versus without, or this banana versus donut one; that one really blew my mind because the spikes were so similar. And then on Twitter, and that common theme was people noticing that dips in their blood sugar or spikes in their blood sugar related to other migraines or when they’re having crazy dreams. And I thought that was really interesting, because I never would’ve honestly put the two and two together, but just kind of enlightening moments for some of our members this week. That’s it for social.
Josh Clemente: Thank you. All righty. Tom.
Tom Griffin: Really quick podcast and Clubhouse update. So again, that middle column is a list of the large tier one shows that we are tracking on, that are upcoming. Those top three or those top… Oh Josh, can you refresh actually? Okay, cool. So those top three are still upcoming soon that we’re going to be recording, the A16Z podcast BOSSBABE and Whoop. They are all huge podcasts. Josh recorded Acquired this week, which is great. And then those other three on the bottom have recorded and we’re going to be releasing some time in May. And then Clubhouse update, Josh covered most of this. The ongoing remote culture series that Sam’s going to be leading. Future Now, so this is Aladdin’s clubhouse, Mena Massoud, if I’m pronouncing that correctly, and he is beyond excited to have Josh and/or Casey on for a one-on-one chat, and he cannot believe that I’m giving him a skip the line wait list access code, even though he is in fact Aladdin. So, excited about that.
Tom Griffin: And then, yeah, the Women’s Health. One, a lot of heavy hitters here. So Christie Allen is an actress with millions of followers and we all know Kelly Leveque so excited for that. Next slide. Okay. No major updates here. So again, these are all of our partner promotions that include skip the line links that are going to be generating revenue. We’ve pushed all of these to May. That’s it. No other updates. And then yeah, a lot on the athlete influencer front this week. I actually thought I wasn’t going to have much to report on because it was a fast week and a lot of Assemblage stuff going on. But then I dug in and realized we got connected to a lot of people.
Tom Griffin: It’s cool this flywheel has sort of started, as Ben would like to say, where a lot of our athletes and influencers just on a weekly basis, are emailing and texting me, asking to get their friends connected to the program. So yeah, head of nutrition for the 49ers, the Baltimore Ravens, Chicago Cubs, all joined; a few Olympic medalists in snowboarding, swimming, wrestling, and then, a few big time influencers as well. That’s it.
Josh Clemente: Awesome, thank you. Haney.
Mike Haney: Yeah. So in content, thanks Josh, for mentioning earlier the Esther dice and profile, this is a good example of a type of story I want to do. We’ve talked about doing people stories, which is largely taking the form of member profiles and we’ll definitely keep doing those and be ramping up more of those, but we also want to talk to all these amazing people in our network who have really smart perspectives on metabolic health and health in general. And so, we sort of started that with Esther, had a really nice conversation with her and the next one coming up in this sort of series is Mike [inaudible 00:32:21], who I had a wonderful conversation with yesterday as you all remember from his guest spot on Friday Forum. He’s just really engaging, really smart. So, that’s just an example of another type of story that we’re going to keep doing more of.
Mike Haney: And then the cinnamon and fasting where the other couple stories move up this week, both really nice kind of thorough guides to a couple of key parts of what we’re doing. Next slide. And the other thing, just following up on what David mentioned, this is just my to-do list basically within the product content. But just to say, there’s now with all that great infrastructure in place in the app, we’re going to be able to really start populating the app with some of these new kinds of short hit, really hopefully nice, clear explainers for different parts of the program. And you should start seeing a regular cadence of these things coming through to the app. That’s it for content.
Josh Clemente: Nice. Thank you. Okay. Individual contribution time, Casey.
Casey Means: Yeah, I’m excited. My best friend from New York City is out here this weekend and next week working remotely, so it’ll be great to catch up. We’re both now vaccinated. And so, it’ll be great to see a friend after a long time.
Josh Clemente: Nice. John Maravilla.
John Maravilla: Hey, thanks again. Weather’s really nice out here. Excited to get out in the lakefront and ride some bikes.
Josh Clemente: Enjoy. Lori.
Lori: Well, hopefully we will fix our fish pond this weekend, so I’m excited about that, and really loving the Assemblage. Everything’s been great so far.
Josh Clemente: Nice. Hal.
Hao Li: Nothing much here, but get ready to enjoy the early spring time season in Victoria.
Josh Clemente: Nice. Stacy.
Stacie Flinner: Can’t help but be happy when it’s 63 degrees in New Hampshire.
Josh Clemente: Agree. It’s all happening at once. Gabriel.
Gabriel: I’m a little unwell today, but I’ve had a real blast with the Assemblage stuff all week. So I’ve really been enjoying that.
Josh Clemente: Nice. Haney.
Mike Haney: I’ll go the opposite way. I’m excited that it’s freezing cold here in San Diego. It’s been in the low 60s and it’s just a really nice change of pace to finally get a little bit of winter.
Josh Clemente: All right. I’m going to move past that one quickly. Mike D.
Mike Didonato: Yeah. So let’s move past that. I’m here in LA and the other night it was hailing somehow. I don’t really understand what was happening, but anyway, really just shout out to Miz for the Assemblage. It’s been really awesome. Really fun experience. The other thing, Mike Haney, just how many articles he keeps publishing. I think Tom said can’t keep up, and then personally, excited to have a little bit more of like a low key weekend. Spend some time with family and get some more work done. That’s it.
Josh Clemente: Nice. Murillo.
Marillo: Yeah, excited and relieved to have my girlfriend home safe and sound. That’s great. And enjoying the weekend together. And on Levels front, I’m just excited to see all the progress that’s being done on the app, excited to see all that come together.
Josh Clemente: Definitely. Sam.
Sam: I’m most excited by, I’ve been doing a lot more outbound to engineers, and the feedback that I’ve been getting on all of the docs and process that mostly Andrew and Miz have put together, the number of people who said this is the best process they’ve ever experienced is astronomically high. So, hat tip to them for putting this all together.
Josh Clemente: Definitely. John Cruz.
Jhon Cruz: I am excited to have my first master class with Serena Williams on how to play tennis. Just a couple of episodes in, I’m already learning a lot.
Josh Clemente: That’s great. Yeah. Everyone make sure you tune into that master class and we’re going to be discussing in Slack. This is going to be a long term learning process. JM.
Josh Mohrer: It’s been a wonderful first couple of weeks. I really enjoyed Assemblage as well, and I’m going to be away for a few days next week with my family, but excited to get back and get back to work and have a great weekend.
Josh Clemente: Enjoy. Tom.
Tom Griffin: Yeah, Assemblage, definitely real highlight for me, ton of fun, and just cool to hang out with people in a different environment. And then, the weather here in New York has been amazing, 66 and sunny today. There’s a real buzz in the air and I’ve been doing my 400 meter training, which has made my legs more sore than they’ve been since probably high school soccer. So, that’s been exciting.
Josh Clemente: Looking forward to the gains there. Mercy.
Mercy Clemente: I’m excited for subscriptions. That’s going to be huge. Also, Assemblage has been a lot of fun. I haven’t been able to join in all the events, but it’s been cool. And then personally, I’m in LA visiting two of my sisters. So, it’s going to be nice to just hang out with them for a couple days before I head back.
Josh Clemente: Sounds fun. Miz.
Michael Mizrahi: I’m excited that the outlook over the next month and a half, two months, is starting to look up with vaccinations, with just things reopening slowly. It’s been quite a year and that there’s finally light at the end of the tunnel, even though we got to be careful, is just great. So, having dinner with friends tonight at an outdoor restaurant, which I haven’t done in a long time, so the simple things are exciting.
Josh Clemente: I am, let’s see, professionally excited about… I really enjoy speaking with the top metabolic researchers out there and having them be like, “What you guys are doing is going to set the standard for the future. This could potentially change the paradigm that we’re operating in.” And just being reminded of that by these types of people is really fun. So I’ve had a few of those great conversations this week, and then personally, I’m really loving this kettlebell. I’ve never owned one. So it’s really beating me up. And I have basically just pain everywhere right now, but it’s been fun. And then also it’s nice to be in our new place in Philly. The convenience of being back in the city is awesome. There’s a grocery store 25 steps away and a soccer field where I can work out right down the street. So, it’s just been nice to be back there. And Ben.
Ben Grynol: Two weeks in a row hat tip, Miz, Assemblage is awesome. So seriously, thank you for all the work. I think we’ve all thoroughly enjoyed it. Carve Out is this new biggie doc on Netflix. Super cool to see how he became the way he is and compelling story. So check it out.
Josh Clemente: Is that the Notorious?
Ben Grynol: The Notorious B-I-G.
Josh Clemente: Oh, interesting. I’ll have to watch that one.
Ben Grynol: Yes. Really good.
Josh Clemente: Cool. All right. We’re cruising here. Onto Jeremy’s My Favorite Bug So Far, story of the week.
Jeremy Phelps: All right. So this is my favorite bug so far. I hope it’s a good one. Bugs have a tendency to be boring, but I think this one’s pretty good. So, to set the scene, I guess, I used to work for this company. What this company does is they make package lockers for big apartment buildings. If you are in and around San Francisco, you may also know of their sister company called Laundry Locker, where it’s a dry cleaning business also involving lockers. So, the way that these things work is, you get an email that you have a package in your locker having been delivered by UPS or FedEx or the postal service, whatever it is. We had our main user interface for these lockers to open them up was just a plain ole iPad. Trouble is, iPads are not really suited for this, and especially because the product was very, very new, basically in alpha, they broke all the time. We had to keep an inventory of about a hundred or so on hand because we were frequently just going out and swapping them out, for whatever reason, they stopped working.
Jeremy Phelps: So, I kept getting reports from customers. And when I say customers, I mean, both folks picking up packages and the property managers at these big properties. And the complaint was that we had an iPad going, they said it would just turn off. Right? Which is weird. Right? iPads don’t do that. And I said, “Yeah, sure. Okay.” So this location happened to be one that had two iPads, which made it a really fun test. Right? So they complained that it would turn off randomly and we say, “Okay, fine. These things break all the time.” And so we sent somebody out, swapped it out. Complaints continued. We swapped it out several times. The catch is, is that the other iPad is literally in the same room, never went offline. Stayed online the entire time, never turned off. Our monitoring that I set up to try to track down this problem never broke for that one.
Jeremy Phelps: However, the one that did break would go offline… It would go offline most days, but it wouldn’t be every day. Right? So it would go offline maybe Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, but not Tuesday and Sunday. Never the same day, never the same day of the week, never the same part of the month. It would, however, go off at roughly the same time of day. Roughly around 10:00 AM, 2:00 PM somewhere between there. But that varied too, right? Sometimes it would start at 9:00 AM, sometimes it would go as late as one. It was all over the place. And this went on for quite a while. We continued feeling customer complaints. We continued swapping out the iPads. I’m digging through code, and maybe my… I don’t know. It’s hard to say. Right?
Jeremy Phelps: So, finally, after weeks of pulling my hair out, I’m frustrated, customers are frustrated. We’ve decided a few things, right? It’s not the network, because the other iPad never went offline. It’s not the iPad itself, we’ve replaced that damn thing three or four times. The only lead that I have is that it happened roughly at the same time of day. I’m like, “Okay, well, I guess that’s what I’ll go with.” Right? So, fortunately, we had security cameras on all of these iPads and all of these lockers. I cleared my schedule and I said, “I’m going to stake this thing out.” And so I sat there from 8:00 AM and watched it. I watched the feed. When I tuned into the feed, this is sort of what I saw. This isn’t the exact picture, but it’s pretty close.
Jeremy Phelps: And so, I’m like, “Okay. So I guess I’ll just sit here and watch this thing turn off.” Right? Is it a delivery person doing something? Is it a customer? Is it… What’s the deal? Right? So I’m sitting here after maybe, I don’t know, a couple of hours. I finally found the root cause. Not a single human interacted with this. It just turned off. And the root cause is at the center of our solar system. As you can see here, it would be pretty easy for a certain time of day for the sun to march across, shine directly onto the iPad, overheat it, and cause it to turn off.
Jeremy Phelps: As time went on, the sun moved away, the iPad went in the shadow and it came back online as it cooled off. This is our fix, a $25 sun shield. That was it. That was the entire problem. So, there is a takeaway here, I think, which is that the real world is messy. We know this because we exist in the real world also. And so, I think it should be our jobs to never forget exactly how our product exists in the real world, because weird stuff happens. That’s it.
Josh Clemente: The moral at the end, it’s so good.
Jeremy Phelps: Finally, we got it sorted out. And so I did speak to a friend who still works there and they said everything is much better now that they sun shades. They even have outdoor lockers. So, I think they owe me some cash.
Josh Clemente: Undoubtedly. All right. That was fun. Thanks everybody for contributing. We got through 10 minutes faster than usual this week. Nice work, straight to the point. All right, team. We’ve got another assemblage activity to wrap us up later this evening and I think that’s it. We’ll close it here.