Josh Clemente (00:00):
Let’s jump into it. Friday Forum the 1st of March, 2023. As a reminder, we’ll do this every week, but this is our weekly sync time. Celebrate recent achievements, talk about what’s going on across various functions of the organization where we are fully remote and that can create a lot of progress that is not always visible to everyone, so this is where we get to sync on that. This is not where we do deep dives on business analytics. This is not where we do our primary social connection, so just our weekly checkpoint. With that, so this week we had a good chunk of people that were on site in New York for the meetup there and it was a good success. Another really good learning experience I would say, for these kinds of events and how we can weave them into the Levels culture as we continue to grow. We’re going to have some more detailed takeaways I think once we finish processing that over the next few days and we’ll share those with the wider group.
(00:59):
Very productive. I think overall it was great for people to be able to connect with one another and meet each other. And then for those who didn’t attend, there were no major decisions, no important consequential changes or updates there that are worth a big call-out. So no need to be concerned about that. And again, we’ll share a bigger update on how this all went down soon. You can see what it looks like when that many Levels team are together. Okay, so Crystal Clear Pricing shipped to 50% of conversion checkout starts and we beat the old flow by about 6%, which is a really nice result. So that will now become the new sign-up flow for the website. Crystal Clear Pricing, it’s going to just become sign-up. Now building how it works, we’re going to explain better what the Levels experience is, what the pieces are, what you’re paying for. So that’s going to be the next iteration.
(01:53):
And then sign up 3.4 is going to be defaulting to a subscription just to help people understand the confluence of choices that they have and what we recommend. And then we’re going to have design upgrades to bring it more in line with the Levels, surfaces in app, and we’ll be introducing social proof into the sign-up flow. So a lot of great stuff still happening there and great work to the growth team. Our podcasts across three various feeds have hit over a million all time downloads. This is really crazy. Kind of a zoom out moment where I just remember Ben being like, “Let’s record the first episode right now, just like go into your closet and turn on the mic.” And here we are, a million downloads later, it’s amazing. And then YouTube had a huge month, I think we basically doubled views where with over a half million views in February alone, biggest month since May of 2022 and over 8,000 new subscribers, which is awesome.
(02:45):
On the YouTube front we are going live with Levels ads. We’re also shaping smoke tests. So this will be kind of how we start to introduce a more complete new product journey, so relevant to the new product that we’re building and that will be used to help test conversion rates or test interest and prior to the product actually being fully fleshed out. So we’re shaping that now. This month we also had really high partner conversions, so Dr. Becky and Andrew Huberman both had really strong months for us and we came in 15% over target for February, which is awesome. On the product front. So Trends 1.0, Labs V2 both released internally and we’re trending towards a Monday general release. Everybody please update your apps, check these new features out, share bug reports. We’ve got obviously a ton of vetting to do before we can go live with this, but awesome to finally be here.
(03:36):
And then work is proceeding on the Kitchen Tab and the Guides Profiles for the upcoming Guides Beta in app. And then of course Trends 1.1. So the work continues as we get ready for the big beta 1. Oops. And then we launched a new study website for our ongoing general population observational research. So Stoddy’s going to give us an update on that today. Big improvement. And then Guides Beta 1. So we are starting the email outreach campaign. So the Guides Beta 1, this is going to go live April 3rd, and it’s going to be essentially a paid experiment for kind of the new product experience with Guides. We are starting to bring in interest and starting to convert people for that April launch right now. And then we are testing changing the terminology from Guides to Levels Coaches. We’re calling the overall program Metabolic Rebalance so people can understand the difference between a guide, which some people think is a PDF document versus the overall concept that we’re building.
(04:30):
And then on the sport front, awesome, four weeks with happiness over 90%, our lowest replacement rate in five months in February. And our best SLAs since July, we’re now approaching that 80% target again for the first time since general availability and overall replacement rates have been trending down for nine weeks straight. And then we’re also launching mailers for CGM refills. It’s a lot of great stuff going on in the sport front as usual team is crushing it.
(04:56):
Some stuff here. So we had a really big UGC hit with Jenna Kutcher, you can see some of those Metabolic Rebalance program emails here, which will include content to get people hyped about that new product experience, Levels being discussed in the same sentence as Dr. Attia, some landing pages for the new Maureen program. And yeah, some other mentions in content this week. And then this is some of the new sign-up flow work that’s being shaped. Okay, with that I want to introduce our special guest Jen. Jen is a Levels member, she’s a designer, advocate for health and humans, self-described farm kid, crazy plant lady, all stuff I love. Jen, excuse me. Thank you for joining us this morning. We really love hearing directly from people like yourself and I would just love to hear a little bit more about your story with Levels, how you came into the experience and what you’re most excited about in the world of health today.
Jen Adam (05:50):
Sure. Hi everyone. Can you guys hear me okay? Hopefully nothing cuts out on me. We’re getting crazy weather here in Kentucky, so hopefully I don’t lose connection. But I also have kids at home because they canceled school, hence the mom piece. And crazy is just sort of generally for life I guess. But I’m a designer and I work in the healthcare space. I actually design benefits and benefit experiences for Medicare members. And it’s a long crazy road, but I started as an industrial designer and then made my way through all the iterations of specialization and design basically. And now I sit in the design strategy and service design space. So my ride here with Levels really started with, again, this is kind of related to my work stuff. I’ve worked on remote diagnostics in the Medicare space and in that time started to become a little bit of a, I don’t want to say full quantified self junkie, but I got really interested in how do we see inside of ourselves and biofeedback.
(07:11):
And so I started really with heart rate monitoring and then went to Oura. So I’ve been an Oura user for many years and then had started to learn about through some stuff with work around sadly diabetic foot wounds and ulcers and amputations. Started to learn a lot more about how we can better understand our glucose and glucose levels. At the same time I have a family history of diabetes and my grandma Noni was diagnosed with it in her forties. My dad, and this was really the trigger for me to join Levels was my dad became full on diabetic in 2021. And so in these things in a family and family settings, there’s I think sometimes a tendency to think of genetics as fate. And so I think there’s just a moment where I had to decide how am I going to tackle this? It’s part of who I am. I have a lot of similar health propensities as my dad and my grandmother and so how was I going to tackle it?
(08:35):
And so sort of leaned into all of my experience as a designer and then interest in this space and started using Levels. I think overall for me, I’m a learner by this is just how I live and just having Levels and having access to a continuous glucometer has really helped me to learn about my N-of-1 little experiment, understanding what works for me that doesn’t work for others, and separating generalized nutrition information from what is real for me. So for some people or maybe before I would’ve thought like, oh, a bowl of ice cream is the worst possible thing I could eat. Actually it’s a bowl of Rice Chex with oat milk is like an absolute train wreck for me. So just being able to learn about my own body and what works for me. I think it’s been interesting to use it to be a health advocate for myself and tell my doctor, “Hey, I do want my A1C.” And she’s like, “Don’t go looking for trouble.” I’m like, “I’m trying to avoid trouble.” I’m not trying to look for trouble.
(10:05):
And that really did pivot me toward, I don’t know, you mentioned guides a little bit there in your update, but I ended up, I’m engaged with BeingBrigid. I ended up doing My Food is Health because I needed more guidance. I also have some food intolerances, so I needed extra help. And so I first engaged with Brigid through the Levels app and then continue with My Food is Health, which has been so much more than I even expected because I was thinking very narrowly about blood sugar. And it’s turned into much, much more in addressing symptoms I’ve had for a long time that had been sort of dismissed by traditional medicine. Specific because I’m a designer so I might as well just go there around the app, I love some of the recent improvements. I love the rocket ship. I know it’s super playful, maybe not for everyone. I love it. I love the idea of closing the ring and showing that sort of consistency. Those I think improvements are wonderful.
(11:15):
I like the insights in terms of like, “Hey, you just ate this. This would be more helpful or maybe a better choice.” I think something I would like to see is I use the Oura trends over time. I have almost five years of data now, so I can’t really deny what’s helpful for me. It helps me be honest with myself. So a little bit of, I don’t know, Jen, just no rice, just don’t eat rice. Sometimes a little straight talk like that would be really helpful. I’ve also had a little bit of jankiness with data integration with Oura for whatever reason. Some of my data doesn’t move back and forth correctly. Tried a couple different things. So I think having that even more seamless experience would be helpful.
(12:10):
And then again, putting my design hat on, I think about the role of the glucometer and overall membership and what that really means over time and how I think about this with myself. The glucometer for me is a learning tool, but I can imagine there are circumstances where it might become a dark pattern in terms of how people interact with it, maybe overuse it, sort of don’t treat it maybe as training wheels that could lead to behaviors that maybe aren’t ideal, but disordered eating, that sort of thing. So I think a lot about, and I’m really curious to see where you guys take membership as a concept and this growing ecosystem of devices that can help people see inside and understand themselves and really delivering a unique value prop around membership. I mean, it’s something frankly I’m also working on in the insurance space, what does it mean to be a Medicare Advantage member? And so leading with that member value, making sure that you’re delivering it in the lightest touch way possible. Those are longitudinal goals I think for everyone. I’m really excited to see where you guys take it.
Josh Clemente (13:42):
Well, I had a couple of questions, but you actually seamlessly touched on all of those topics, which was awesome. So you kind of led us through some things you love, some things that you would want us to improve. So that was really awesome and super insightful Jen. One thing that you shared with us before joining was that one of your goals is to move from fear to empowered health. And I think that sort of perfectly encapsulates what we’re seeking to do is give people some concrete truth that they can anchor around and make decisions on. And so I love all of that and you raised some extremely important points about membership and about the role of the CGM in a person’s life. And so we’re working on some exciting stuff that I can’t wait to have you try, which would be kind of stringing the experience between sensor uses because it’s true and it’s always been part of our objective to make it such that the person doesn’t have to wear a sensor continuously for the rest of their lives.
(14:37):
And so we want to make sure that you can still reinforce those lessons learned in the long term, whether or not you’re wearing a sensor in real time. So a lot of exciting stuff and I think it’s great to hear because I think this is going to be an exciting feature set when we start to roll it out.
Jen Adam (14:53):
Great.
Josh Clemente (14:54):
Yeah, Jen, I really appreciate it. We’ve got some stuff to work on obviously, as you mentioned. And if you’d like to stick around for the rest of the meeting, we’re going to dive into some of the function stuff we’d love to have you do. So if not, I know it’s a busy day over there, hopefully the weather holds out, but-
Jen Adam (15:06):
I say, as long as the weather holds, I’ll stay. How about that?
Josh Clemente (15:09):
Perfect. Well either way for the whole team, thank you so much. This is really valuable. I appreciate you sharing your time with us. Okay, jumping into some culture and kudos. So firstly I want to highlight the memo that Sam shared this week about treating people like adults. Definitely, I think this is borderline, not optional. Everyone please read this. And we have an AMA already scheduled, but I think this really goes deeper into what we mean with this phrase that can oftentimes be assumed to be sort of just this abstract-ism, but it really does have meaning and it is a tactical usable concept. So please definitely dig into that and join us on the AMA. And then a couple shout-outs. So happy one year to Ryley. That feels super fast. Happy three years to Laurie. That feels super short. And let’s see, we had Dave from New Zealand, Haney from San Diego here on site this last week, which was awesome.
(16:10):
We got to go grab some Terry Black’s Barbecue, which Dave absolutely crushed. And then I want to shout out Dan for, it’s a little behind the scenes, but just the work that Dan is doing to continually update the documentation process that is driving our R&D program. There’s really some awesome work on continually refining and simplifying and keeping us focused on top three priorities. And sometimes documentation just is not working the way we had anticipated. And this past week, Dan kind of just wiped the slate and reformulated all of the documentation we had and to a new and improved roadmap that honestly was just super simple and straightforward. And it’s sometimes hard to cut our losses with some cost in documentation sense sometimes. But he did it pretty nicely and it’s going to improve our updates weekly and continue to I think make it really simple for people to grok what we need to be focused on. So shout out to Dan on that. With that, I’m handing it over to Farhan.
Farhan (17:15):
Hey, I’m going to share some learnings from finding product market fit at Sourcegraph, which was my last company. So the first lesson that I took away from my time at Sourcegraph was that making decisions quickly and with conviction is very important and can lead to the company’s growth and product market fit. So in the first couple of years at Sourcegraph, we changed the product completely probably five or six times, and it was probably one of the most uncomfortable things that we did, but also the most important. So we had built some really cool tech. For example, we were one of the first to put Visual Studio Code, which is a code editor, in the browser. And at any given time we had a few customers paying us and it would always seem crazy to throw away months and months of hard work and to tell these customers that we would stop taking their money for now.
(18:05):
But being honest with ourselves about the trajectory of the current product and whether it would take us to our goals was extremely important. And if we had not done that and we threw away some $50,000 contracts, which seemed crazy at the time, we would never close some of the big companies, the biggest companies in the world that eventually became customers. So it was always scary to throw away products or completely shift the product strategy in the early days, but it’s part of figuring out how to find the right fit and the right customers for your product. So without it would not have been nearly as successful as it was. Second is that your company’s solutions are unique and may not follow the market. So for Sourcegraph in particular, we had initially a cloud product, which we had a lot of happy developers using it on open source code or on their side project code.
(18:55):
And we really had trouble getting them to use it on their work code and bringing it into their companies, which was how we were going to make money and go from default dead to default alive. So we kept hearing that companies didn’t want to give us access to their code because for tech companies in particular, code is their most valuable asset. And we were a young startup and they didn’t know whether we would survive. They didn’t know if we had taken security seriously and so on. So building a cloud product was the obvious solution, and every company or most products that you use are in the cloud. You just log in, you give them access to whatever it is and they host everything for you. But building that for our customers at the time would’ve been very difficult and actually very slow. So we actually went on-prem, so we said, “Hey, we’re going to let you manage the product on your own infrastructure so none of your code will ever touch our servers.” Which was not conventional at all.
(19:52):
And nobody said that that was the right decision at the time, but it actually was the key unlock for us. I don’t think any other big or new tech company at the time was going and shipping something on-premises for their customers. But once we did that, we actually were able to sign some of the biggest companies as customers. We finally found that we had, we actually figured out that the product that we had built was valuable and it was just packaging it in a different way that led us actually start growing and closing customers. So yeah, the company solution was unique and did not follow the market, and I’m glad we made that difficult decision to shift the product into on-prem, otherwise we would never have figured out that what we built was actually valuable.
(20:32):
And finally, one of the big lessons that I saw throughout my time was that rejection is not final and persistence is key. So this applied to everything from product features to closing customers, to even closing candidates when we were hiring. So every customer that we had, we had probably spoken to many, many times before with many different iterations of our product and before we ever want them as a customer, we had to hear that they didn’t want to buy our product many times and they would always give us different reasons why, but this is sometimes the most valuable thing. And it’s actually the beginning of how you actually build a relationship with these clients. So once you figure out why they won’t buy something, it gives you a sense of what you need to actually build to solve their problem. And it never happens that the first time they see a product, they become a user. So being persistent and staying engaged is very key. And this even applied to hiring people.
(21:26):
We had several people early in the company’s time where they went to go and accept another offer from another company, but we stayed engaged and a few months later actually came back and asked if the offer was on the table and came back. So these sort of touch points and rejections are really valuable and can provide the roadmap for how to succeed from all sorts of perspectives. And I think just overall the advice that being persistent is key was a theme that I constantly saw. So yeah, hopefully these three are helpful and I’m sure there are ways that I can already think of that Levels are applying these lessons. So I think we’re going in the right direction and really excited to see how it goes with the new product strategy as well.
Josh Clemente (22:10):
Awesome. Thank you Farhan. Yeah, some great stuff there. I particularly love the persistence message, which showed up in Chris’s share about Beartooth as well, I think. Just talking about how persistence was the difference maker even though they went through some serious struggle along the way. So thank you Farhan. All right, company objectives. So Levels shows you how food affects your health. No change to the main thing, working towards this is the chief priority. If you aren’t, definitely raise that concern and product is top priority this quarter. Okay, with that, I’m going to hit a refresh here and pass it off to Maz.
Maziar Brumand (22:47):
Hi everyone. Welcome to Product Update March 3rd, first week of March. Next slide please. All right, so we’re going to zoom out and revisit our product strategy and where we are in that journey. So we’re creating a specific product to solve specific needs for members in 2023. We’re focusing on Maureen and we’re really helping her improve her metabolism, but primarily to achieve two downstream goals, which is managed weight and avoid disease. And so all the work that we’re doing right now is really focused on those two. Now, how we prioritize which one to tackle first since we can’t build both of them is something that we are currently researching. We are currently working with over 500 Maureen’s in our guide program, so we are bring a lot of feedback from Maureen’s and it has been really fascinating to really do that research with our a customer base. Next slide.
(23:50):
So what’s the difference between what we built in 2022 and what we’re building in 2023? Really 2022 was really focused on being an educational product and a biological feedback product, really showing people where they are. And then 2023, what’s different is actually being really member centric and goal centric, meaning actually taking the member from where they are to where they want to go instead of just providing them tools that shows where they are and really relying on them to figure out how to get to their goal. Next slide please.
(24:24):
The analogy to this is the analogy of GPS. In 2022, we effectively had the map and a GPS coordinate and people were at the blue dot and they want to get to the other blue dot and they experimented to get to that point. And really what we were building in 2023 is that guidance layer, that software layer that in combination with other features will help people get from point A to B. So really guide them there and also track where they are and reward them as they get closer to that goal. So really taking the different parts of our software and putting it together to create a full guidance and guidance application to help people to get to where they are versus just showing them where they are on map. Next slide please.
(25:15):
So the definition of that to really help people get from point A to point B is what we call programs and it’s always been part of the product vision and what we’re doing right now is actually creating that program and we’ll walk you through what we have currently de-risk and where we are trying to go to de-risk, the rest of this journey. Next slide please. So as part of this program we wanted to see whether people actually resonated with one to many guidance from people. And so we really designed the guides experiment one through five plus the Alphas to really learn whether people do resonate with other people, teaching them principles and guiding them. And that’s really what we wanted to learn is does it resonate with people to learn from other people? And we also wanted in Alphas to see whether actually people use the Levels app for this purpose.
(26:19):
We knew that in Instagram people were really engaging with the content and really the Alphas are to see if people will actually engage with the app in the same way. And we also wanted to see whether people take action. And I think what the Guides experiment has helped us de-risk plus the Alphas, which is in progress right now is do actually people engage with guidance from other people, [inaudible 00:26:42] Guides and do they actually take the action? And I think what we’ve seen is that they do. And I think the task ahead of us in Beta 1, 2, 3 is really to show whether people will actually follow a program to reach their goal. So to go to the next slide, Beta 1 is going to be focused on de-risking whether people actually take a program which is the guided program of gaining from point A to B, and help them achieve their goal.
(27:13):
And this is going to be software only for the first version because we only have limited, we have to focus and develop that piece first. And then really Beta 2 is putting it all together where it’s software plus CGM. And if you remember it’s a CGM optional, it’s not a CGM-free experience. So really how do we actually put the experience together in a way that both the software piece and biological feedback can work together to create these programs and help people achieve their goal. And really Beta 3 is around optimization and really figuring out the details of how do we make it more resonant with people and more engaging. And from Beta 3’s launch into the general availability. So where we are right now is to really work and develop these programs specifically, what’s involved, what are the loops, what is the journey, and that’s the work we’re doing right now. And we will start testing that ahead of Beta 1 in a out of the app version and in Beta 1 bring that into the app. That’s it on my side.
Cosima Travis (28:24):
Yeah, I’m going to jump in and just give a quick PSA that last week we talked a bit about notifications going live and they’ve been live for about a week with proper tracking and post-hoc just sharing and there’s a deeper results Notion and Loom. I linked it out at the bottom too, but just some results and takeaways from this first version we released. So right now about 60% of members are getting notifications every day from Levels and the members that do have it on are getting on average around four and a half notifications a day, which is a combination of things like your spiking as well as your meal zone is ready. Very soon, as soon as labs launches, they’ll start to get notifications for your panel results are in. So time to check those out. In terms of our click-through rate, we’re seeing about a 15% click-through rate.
(29:18):
And what’s interesting is that’s pretty evenly distributed across your spiking and meal zone ready. Part of why this is interesting is the your spiking notification allows a member to take immediate action whether or not they actually jump in and view what their spike looks like in the app. But I think people are super curious when you find out that you’re spiking right now to go check it out. So we’re getting a pretty consistently high click-through rate for that. In terms of meal zone ready, similar click-through rate. And I think what might be resonant here is this idea that yeah, it’s nice to know that your meal zone is ready but it’s a little bit less time sensitive, right? Spiking is something that if you catch it in the moment and can address it right away, you can actually make a difference. Your meal zone will be your meal zone regardless. So people might appreciate the notification but it’s perhaps a little less time sensitive.
(30:16):
I think maybe the largest takeaway is even though we try to do everything as a skateboard, one kind of non-negotiable on this project was we knew we wanted to make it configurable. So from the get-go, members are able to go in and adjust on a notification-by-notification basis which ones they want on and off. And truly, I feel like in this day and age people have really different ideas of the right signal to noise and we’ve seen that. Every day, different people are going in toggling stuff on and off and we’ve gotten, it’s been very quiet in terms of any member complaints about the feature and I think that’s because it’s so configurable. So I think this lays the nice foundation for us to feel comfortable adding more notifications that different cohorts might find really helpful without needing to have any fear or risk of introducing noise for people who are not interested.
(31:12):
Yeah, I think we’ve got a really great framework and it should be pretty low lift to add more notifications. We’ll obviously be mindful to not overwhelm, but yeah, we have a great framework to build on. And yeah, that’s a quick update more in Notion and Loom if you want to read out.
Josh Clemente (31:33):
Awesome. Super cool results. Yeah, and very excited about the transition towards GPS and the recent launches with trends as well this week. All right. Stoddy?
Stoddy Carey (31:48):
Next slide please. Sweet. So I’m going to do a really quick kind of state of the union in terms of our clinical research efforts. We haven’t really had an update since I think last September. So just wanted to kind of do a quick refresher on what we’re doing on clinical research, what’s the status of our current clinical trial, an updated sort of study website, and then what’s on the horizon. So next slide please. So what is our observational clinical trial? So we are doing an observational trial, aka we are not taking any active intervention in this study. Members are able to opt in, it’s completely voluntary, they’re able to opt out at any time. They opt in during the signup process. So when they choose their CGM, they go through the process of signing the informed consent form and opt-in. We are collecting demographics, sleep and activity data in concert with glucose and then this data is being aggregated for internal product use and then future external collaborators once we have a bandwidth that allows.
(32:53):
Who’s able to adjoin? They basically just need to attest to the eligibility criteria and then sign the informed consent form and that’s all they need to do. We have a goal of enrolling 50,000 members with the potential to expand this if we add additional sites or devices. Next slide please. So why are we doing this? We are trying to create the largest known data set of continuous time series glucose data, provide unprecedented insight into what healthy glucose looks like. We are also trying to generate low lift, high value insights for the CGM product offering and lastly, improve the understanding of the onsite progression and treatment for metabolic disorders. Next slide please. Study event reporting process. So I just wanted to give a quick overview. We have streamlined this a couple of times and we’re kind of hit a steady state here and it’s been a really awesome. Shout out to Priya who’s been doing a lot of work getting this going.
(33:52):
So step one, so basically support team has been promptly responding to member’s issue. Step two is that a keyword triggers an automatic workflow that aggregates all relevant events to our study. And then step three, we have a weekly review process to identify unexpected events and essentially we are going to be also soon leveraging OpenAI to help us triage these quicker and make the process faster. And then after step three we are basically doing a secondary review process and then all edge cases and C zero events are being sort of conferenced with Dom and then we complete reports as necessary. Quarterly and yearly reports are needed by Dexcom and Advarra. And so doing these processes daily and weekly help us do those quarterly and yearly reports quickly. So next slide please. Awesome.
(34:47):
So the events we’ve had up until now, so majority of our events are bleeding sensors, redness, soreness and bruising. We’ve had some less frequent ones around anxiety, around glucose values. Protocol deviations, members sharing their sensors, a lack of ICF on file and then some people who disclose insulin use in their medical consults. But they said in their eligibility criteria that they weren’t using insulin. So the big takeaways here are that our support team effectively handles these events and protocol deviations actively identifying issues and [inaudible 00:35:22] things quickly. So support team crushing it. Next slide. Awesome. Okay, so we just went through an updated Study website. So why did we improve our studies website? Essentially the website was driving support questions. It was unclear and hard to navigate. We basically needed to essentially update the website in tandem every single time we updated the support site. So it was very much like a double layer process and then it was not aligned with our other brand services.
(35:54):
So what did we to gain in updating this? We wanted to improve the study of visibility, increase the study site’s connection with this other support resources and ensure parallel branding across all member facing services and then leverage the study to get potential members excited about this groundbreaking research we’re doing here. And as you can see on the right, this is the little graph that Caitlin shared the other week and so basically we just did it all in concert with her new blog structure rollout and then deprecated this old notion form. So everything is on the blog. Next slide please. So what did we do? So basically we transformed it into a clear, easy to read format. We decreased the cognitive load of going to our site because essentially this is linked in the signup flow. And so if we have someone who’s going to be reading this while they’re also checking out, we want them to be able to understand the information concisely and easily.
(36:47):
We answered a bunch of commonly asked questions that we’re getting in the queue like why do this study? What’s an informed consent form? What are the privacy implications for study participation and am I eligible for this study? So basically just making sure that we very clearly answer all of those questions without sending them to different multiple pages, which is the way that it was formatted before. We simplified the Study background for non-scientific audiences so that it was easy to read so people really understand the purpose, the why of doing this and why it’s important for members to get involved. We plugged it into the new blog structure as I mentioned before, and then we directly linked the support site which reduces the area that the IRB has the sort of jurisdiction to review. So essentially it’s way easier for us to just sort of set it and forget it and be able to do one update and not have to constantly submit more modifications which are both costly in time and money and then automatically update with the changes in HelpScout and prevent the double work I mentioned before.
(37:50):
So that went live on Monday. Next slide please. Awesome. So what’s in the pipeline? So we are going to be updating the study ICF format because as it’s been shown in a couple of different flows, people end up spending a lot of time on the ICF and so we want to make sure that we can format it in a way that’s easy to digest in the same way that we reformatted, oh yeah, informed consent, sorry, in the informed consent form basically. So it’s formatted similarly to the website where it’s easy to read, easy to digest, and easy to understand, which currently it’s a continuous scroll that’s quite long, which is maybe not the best user experience possible. Next slide please. We are also experimenting with shaping, basically putting the informed consent to post purchase so that we can reduce the amount of steps to check out to before regardless of sensor. So that’s in the works and hopefully we can launch that after a couple of more things on the roadmap for demand capture. Okay, that’s it for me. Thanks.
Josh Clemente (38:55):
Awesome update, Stoddy. Thank you for first of all, behind the scenes, keeping the IRB turning and doing its thing and to the whole support team and everyone that’s working to make this as smooth as it is, it’s pretty profound and I think the team generally isn’t probably as familiar with how this sort of research is normally operated. It usually involves large teams on site and millions of dollars spent and we’ve effectively inverted most of that resource demand by really intelligent work and some amazing remote documentation practice and obviously great folks keeping this thing moving. So very cool update and yeah, looking forward to continuing to expand our research program with this sort of thing.
(39:35):
Okay, hiring updates, no open roles at the moment, but please do check out levels.link/careers if you or someone are interested in what we’re building here and we will be in touch in the future. We are here at the individual contribution, so got some time. I’m going to stop the share. Let’s go ahead and do our raise the hand thing. So down in your Zoom toolbar you can hit reactions and raise your hand. Ryley, you beat me to it, so you’re number one.
Ryley Walker (40:06):
Thanks Josh. So pumped to be celebrating one year with the company and can’t believe it’s gone so fast. Really lucky to have that coincide with an offsite in New York and get the opportunity to spend my one-year anniversary with the team. So it was a really, really great week.
Josh Clemente (40:29):
Amazing. Yeah, we’re excited to have you here Ryley, I hope you know that. Let’s see. So for me, yeah, it was awesome to get to hang out in New York and meet a couple of people that have been at the company for a long time and I have not yet had a chance to have a one-on-one conversation with, so that was great. And I think that’s probably, I mean I’m very stoked about product stuff right now and I won’t reiterate that too many times, but just I’m loving seeing this incremental progress and the feedback that we’re getting along the way, just slicing off bite-sized chunks and getting that feedback and moving so fast. It’s really cool. Things shipped this week even though most of the team was doing the offsite, certainly on the product and engineering side. So it’s just awesome to see that.
(41:16):
And on the personal front, I don’t have much to report. I think this is going to be just getting back into the routine sort of weekend, which is always nice as well. And Lynette, the puppy’s doing well, you can’t hear her barking, which is, that’s your progress bar. Rob?
Robert Lustig (41:38):
So I don’t know, some of you may know that I’ve been working on a three-year project in the Middle East to re-engineer processed food to make it metabolically healthy. The paper was accepted this morning at Frontiers in Nutrition. As soon as it is galley proofed, I will send it to you guys and I think it will be very important because a lot of what we do at Levels is expressed within the confines of the paper. While Levels isn’t mentioned directly, a lot of what we think about food is, and I think this will be a touchstone and hopefully it’ll be a change for how the food industry views food and maybe can be used as a roadmap and a template for food industry conversion over time. In addition, two weeks from yesterday is Future Food-Tech San Francisco and so I will be on the lookout for companies that are, shall we say, Levels worthy and I will do my best to be watching for appropriate partnerships for us and for making things happen.
Josh Clemente (43:01):
Huge update. Thanks Rob. That’s awesome. And congrats on the publication or the acceptance. That’s awesome. Sonja?
Sonja Manning (43:10):
That might be my new highlight, Rob. I tell everyone anecdotally about this work that you’re doing in the Middle East, so I can’t wait to amplify it further. Congratulations. But my highlight for the week has just been Guide. We’re almost end of week four of Guide and it’s been so phenomenal working across the team. Huge thank you to Keeney and to Taitland and [inaudible 00:43:32] to everybody who’s provided feedback and helped and it’s just been awesome for me to get a lot closer to Maureen, our members and get feedback with constructive and positive. Couple of DMs I got this week. One person said she was so inspired by this, she was thinking of a career change to focus on metabolic health. So it’s really fun to see, I think the opportunity that we have with this next phase of our product vision and be part of it. So just big thanks to that huge cross-functional effort that’s happening across the team for Guides.
Josh Clemente (44:02):
Crazy, it’s been four weeks already. That’s super exciting.
Sonja Manning (44:05):
Yeah.
Josh Clemente (44:05):
Scott?
Scott Klein (44:09):
Man, pretty overwhelming couple of days I was able to pull my WHOOP score out of the gutter last night, which felt really, really good, if I’m being honest. A little bit sad, I think the vast majority of you, I got to give a hug this week and spent some good in-person time with, but I’m thankful for that. Just let everybody know on the work front we’ve got a good bit to distill in terms of learnings and going forward and so we’re going to be sending that out as soon as possible. On the personal front, I have next week off timing’s actually both good and bad, but going to Hawaii for a week and so excited to go spend some time with the kids in the water and get some sun back in my life and hope to get to the spring here in the Pacific Northwest. So that’s me.
Josh Clemente (44:52):
Great, enjoy. Stoddy?
Stoddy Carey (44:56):
I just wanted to underscore professionally how often the notifications are. I’ve been wanting that feature for a really long time. I was always obsessively checking if I was spiking or not. So having that super awesome thanks Kosima and team for launching that. Super stoked. And then personally, I’m doing my first CrossFit workout ever tomorrow morning, so that’ll be very interesting. I’ve been running too much and I’m realizing that I need to get some lifting in so it’ll be interesting, will report back and maybe by the time I get to Texas I’ll be able to join everyone for a workout.
Josh Clemente (45:30):
I think CrossFit is making a resurgence inside the Levels ecosystem. Very interesting. Enjoy. Miz?
Michael Mizrahi (45:39):
Yeah, so I’ve got a Firebase habit. I don’t get the notifications, but I do have a Safari bookmark and every time I go in it’s kind of just like little dopamine hit to see what I get. This last week dramatically changed the app I think in the last two weeks. So massive kudos to the products and engineering team for iterating and all those. I think we’ve heard trends, we’ve heard my data, we’ve heard Labs 2.0, we’ve heard push notifications, but all of a sudden that all came together and the app is like a dramatically different experience. I remember that last step change a few months ago, so it feels like we just hit one and that polish feels great. So kudos everyone for shipping all those features. Super excited about Labs and can’t wait to get that to members. Really cool seeing our own results in there and it all coming together. The Rob video front and center now I fixed that. That popped up for me. That bug’s gone, so that was awesome.
(46:25):
On the New York front, really, really great to meet so many people in person. You forget how much we lose over Zoom that you get in person. So definitely tiring and thrilling and overwhelming in great ways, but excited to take a few days to chill and unwind. And then on the personal side, was supposed to go skiing this weekend, but the snow is absolutely crazy in Tahoe and I pushed myself a little too far in a Levels run for six miles. So yeah, taking it easy and excited to relax.
Josh Clemente (46:59):
Yeah, the trends rollout was shockingly awesome to open that and just see the scrolling list of all the trends stacked and visually aligned. Shout out to Miz for running the greatest distance that he’s ever run with the Levels team. Peer pressure is real folks and it’s some cases a good thing. We got 10 more minutes here. Somebody, anyone want to jump in? Cissy?
Cissy Hu (47:24):
I just want to give Scott, Nicole, Miz and Mike D., a shout-out. They put so much thought and care into curating our three days together and really appreciate all the work that you did for pulling us all together and on top of all the other things that you all had going on. So thank you. And for the folks that were in New York really enjoyed getting to know a bunch of you a lot better and just generally really appreciated the willingness across the team to go deep. I feel like there was not a lot of small talk. We had a lot of big talk, which I really appreciated. And I think personally the best thing that happened this week was my Oura Ring died, so I couldn’t actually look at how terrible my sleep score was. So I’m feeling, finally got my sleep score back to a good place, but I’m glad that for a couple of days I just had to into it what my body was feeling and it wasn’t great. So thanks for a great week.
Josh Clemente (48:17):
Fun. Mike?
Mike DiDonato (48:20):
Yeah, so it was definitely great to see more people in New York and I think it’s exciting and it’s also a reminder of just how many amazing people that we have on the team and how different we all are, come from various walks of life. We have different perspectives and process things differently. And I think it’s just another reminder for me. I think sometimes translating it to the remote world, things move so fast and we’re so busy and we’re making so many different things happen, but just like a reminder to check in with each other, just get a pulse, see how everyone’s doing. Some of us are closer than others, so just grateful for the intentionality that we bring to this. And then personally been dealing with a little bit of an injury, but I’m excited that I got it checked out. It’s a little bit worse than I expected, but I have visibility and should be back in a couple of weeks and I’m excited.
Josh Clemente (49:20):
Gives the rest of us a chance to catch up. So get out there folks. Mike’s down. Feel better. Ben?
Ben Grynol (49:30):
Yeah. Plus one on all the work that went into New York and the meetup. That was not a light lift and that was managed pretty seamlessly, I think by Scott, Nicole, Miz, Mike, Cissy, everyone that contributed to that. It’s just a huge amount of work, so very much appreciated. Other note on the professional front, super stoked and hat tip to Kosima on the release notes. So there’s a couple threads that went out if everyone has seen them. Trends, notifications, blood work or Labs 2.0, and just seeing the Looms and the thoroughness of the release notes. It’s such an easy way for us to all feel, not only informed, but it’s thorough and it allows us to think, hey, what can we do given our respective roles to help to amplify those things. So hat tip two, Kosima and the team and everybody who works on all these things, because it’s awesome.
(50:23):
And then the last piece, which is personal slash professional, super stoked on Labs 2.0. So seeing the results come in is kind of that anticipation. I think because we’ve got some new markers, it just reinvigorates that excitement to go down the rabbit hole to figure out what can I do to fix some of these numbers? And I remember having these feelings with when I first started wearing a CGM and then when we had Labs 1.0. And so it’s sort of that same thing of feeling like a member that has this experience so very stoked and there’s work to be done. So that is it for now.
Josh Clemente (51:04):
All right, we’ve got time for one or two more. Anyone feel like jumping in?
Michael Mizrahi (51:11):
I’ll say something just in case the chat doesn’t make the recording Loom feature request, by the way, to Zoom to Loom, import chat comments into the Loom it’s filed, don’t worry. Yeah, massive Kudos to Sonja. A lot of the Meetup planning really happened before the Meetup itself and Sonja really helped guide Nicole, Scott and myself with a lot of that. So thank you Sonja for the work there, even though it wasn’t seen.
Josh Clemente (51:39):
For sure. Rebecca?
Rebecca Breske (51:41):
I feel like I’ve been talking about this for a while, but I got married over the weekend. It was amazing. It was awesome and it was really great to know that I didn’t have to worry about work the whole time. It was just so special. It’s also kind of the joy of missing out with the New York Meetup and then also just not being involved in work for just about nine days was, it’s just how you just kind of feel, you come back and you’re like, oh, I’m kind of like, oh, what’s going on here? Okay, what has happened? So I’m just kind of showing myself grace, allowing myself to get caught up. But yeah, I’m glad to be back.
Josh Clemente (52:16):
Big congrats. That’s awesome. Sam?
Sam Corcos (52:21):
I think for me it maybe it’s somewhere between both personal and work, it was, I told a lot of other founders and people I know that I was planning to, in the spirit of treat people like adults, I was planning on sharing a lot more information openly about Burn Runway team size with everyone. And everyone told me it was a terrible idea and it would be a disaster. And I said, “You just have to trust me. The people we have on this team are going to understand it and they’re going to act appropriately.” And I was really encouraged and inspired by how well everyone took that conversation, which is I think what we expect. And that was a really positive sign. So that was really encouraging. So on the personal front, I don’t think I have anything on the personal front.
Josh Clemente (53:14):
Yeah, big plus one on that. Chris?
Chris Jones (53:21):
On a personal note, I’m in Palm Springs watching my wife ride horses and I expect to, she’s got one first place ribbon and then had a couple faults, so lots more horsey show time.
Josh Clemente (53:37):
Well enjoy the rest of that trip. And yeah, just to leave everyone with something that I was struck by was in person as well. I think we had a lot of difficult conversations and a lot of it centered on how we can be super effective in this challenging time. And just generally the inspiring thing was, to support what everyone was saying. It was very, very practical. And let’s get to the root cause and let’s figure out exactly what our priorities should be, how we can each play best to our strengths. And so lots of just really inspiring, I think, adult conversation and that’s really where we want to be. So it was awesome. It was also awesome to see 25 people lined up to get their blood drawn with tons of excitement, jamming on ApoB and all the nuances there. So we’re all in good company here. All right with that, enjoy your extra two minutes, have a great week or weekend rather. And thanks for all the hard work.