May 14, 2021

Josh Clemente:
All right team. I think we’ve got a good number here and we will… Let’s kick off at the top of the minute. We’re going to give some time for a few others to trickle in. Micah, good to see you, man.
Micah Rosenbloom:
Good to see you. Josh, are you in New York?
Josh Clemente:
I’m in Philly.
Micah Rosenbloom:
Okay.
Josh Clemente:
Yeah. Are you in New York?
Micah Rosenbloom:
I’m in the office today, everybody on this call to come to our Soho office and admire the SkipTheDishes plaque. You can’t really see it there, that you got to come visit it, the shrine to skip.
Ben Grynol:
Apparently. Yeah.
Josh Clemente:
That sounds awesome. All right. Let’s jump in into it. So achievements slide is always our first here. So I’ll start off with highlighting that the roadmap that we’re working on… Or I should say David has been working on for some time, all the content that goes into it, and the visualizations is being revisited this week. There are a number of secondary effects of a good roadmap. One is getting everyone converged on what we’re doing and why, and when, and then the second is planning resources for it. So this project is underway, right now. David’s got some really awesome visuals in work. I think we’re going to be distributing bit by bit, getting people introduced to it, getting feedback, and then probably going out to the wider audience.
Josh Clemente:
I’ll let David take it from there, but I’m very excited about this project and what it will enable for, team cohesion. Alan, Justin, Jhon, multiple others, I think probably inside the group have been cranking on these amazing chart improvements. I think this is something I don’t know anything about, to be honest with you. The intricacies of rendering inside an app. But all I know is that the examples that I’ve been able to play with are a massive improvement in terms of beauty and interface. And so this interaction, improvement and the rendering options that we get from it, are going to unlock a huge number of downstream features for the product. So really awesome, excited for that. Culture and documentation project underway. So this is an interesting one. We’re going to see where this goes, but the goal is to work through all of the team to understand what our cultural practices are and what the principles are through documentation.
Josh Clemente:
So by interviewing, by doing video and audio, and basically just speaking to the team in order to be able to get these practices on paper, so we can continue to reinforce them going forward. It’s one of these things where organically we’re producing something really great here, and we want to make sure that we can not just document, but also continue to improve upon it. So I think we’re going to be pushing out a memo and then there will be some action items for the team coming out of that shortly. Great week for interviews. So we spoke with or Casey spoke with Kara Swisher from Sway and New York times had a well and good interview and another interview for the Wall Street Journal, potentially a third piece coming from WSJ, which is pretty wild. So really solid on the press end, continues to be amazing to talk to the top tier in the press world.
Josh Clemente:
We’ve got a few of our team were invited to discuss the Working Backwards book about Amazon’s inside practices with Jeff Wilke the former CEO of Amazon Worldwide Consumer. So this is something that is an opportunity that we had, pretty amazing. We’re going to try it out. And this may spin into a book club opportunity where we’ll try to bring in experts in the field, maybe even authors on a continual basis to speak with them about the content of the books that we’re reading and try to integrate lessons learned into the culture going forward. And then really awesome planning has started for the Life Itself conference. This is late September, early October, Casey’s going to be speaking. We’re cooking up a CGM experience for attendees. So potentially 500 CGM wearers will be able to get live data and experimentation during the conference.
Josh Clemente:
And we’ll be able to do some cool data-driven renders on how people are different and the why of levels. And we’ll be able to do that immersively. So putting that together now, hat tip to the team who’s pushing that forward, Ben, Casey and others. And then a couple other great things that happened this week. Casey and the Oura CEO, Harpreet were on with Tempo CEO did a really cool future of fitness chat. Had an awesome IG live with Nick Gonzalez, which I think has 30,000 views already in 24 hours. We’re in touch with… Well, we got in touch with a couple other VIPs, including six MLB players this week. So lots streaming in. And then one of my first personal favorites here is Mr. Hippensteel, who is an eight-time CrossFit games athlete, and four-time fittest on earth over 60.
Josh Clemente:
So this man is an absolute machine in the CrossFit world, and I’m really excited to have him trying out Levels. I’m buddies with one of his sons, who’s in a pushup group with me. So it’s a cool close loop. And then this week we also recorded a video to send off to Will Smith. He’s doing the Big Willie challenge, which the goal of that is for him to get prepped for his superhero role coming up soon. And he’s got some COVID pounds he wants to shut off. And so we introduced him to the Level’s concept in this video and talked about Drew Manning’s experience. And I think we’re going to keep pushing, hopefully we can get Will into the program and if not, maybe contribute to the concepts around Big Willy challenge, giving people actionable insights into how their bodies are working and potentially ways to shed weight more easily and more directly.
Josh Clemente:
And I want to shout out to the content this week and all weeks, but the velocity and quality is unbelievable. In particular, the cancer article was just so enlightening for me, and I track this stuff. So the fact that we have these amazing, high-quality articles and just the velocity, we’ve got all these coming out in a single week. It’s really cool. It’s amazing. And then David also was on his first podcast Health Tech Matters. I want to shout that out. I think that’s most of what we got here. So with that, jump ahead and introduced Micah Rosenbloom. Micah is at Founder Collective. One of the first people I spoke to during fundraise process and he and Joseph Flaherty are also on the call right now. And I just want to call him out for being one of our earliest supporters. During the crazy times of COVID, we found FC and were able to partner with them very early in our journey. I think they were the ones who connected us as well with Ben Grynol. Is that true, Ben?
Ben Grynol:
That was Wiz Abdul.
Josh Clemente:
Wiz. Okay. I give [crosstalk 00:06:48] him credit. Early investors in SkipTheDishes, so that’s the connection there. But Micah we’d love to hear some words from you on how you’ve seen Levels from the outside, from the day we were introduced to you to where we are now and what you’re looking forward to in the future.
Micah Rosenbloom:
Yeah. And Josh and team, I recognize a bunch of names on here. It’s so cool to be with you guys. I actually remember doing this at SkipTheDishes and I had to go up to Winnipeg, Canada to do this. So I’m grateful to be standing in the office in Soho and not freezing my tail off. Although I told a really good story up there, which was, I was actually conceived in Winnipeg. But that’s a longer story, probably not appropriate for this, but not why I know that. Just as a 30-second background, I know I don’t have a lot of time. But I actually was a health tech entrepreneur out of business school. So I started a company called Brontes Technologies, which was a hardware software business for dentists. So this is a prototype wand, by the way, maybe some of your Levels experience is flashing off in your brain.
Micah Rosenbloom:
We built a wand that dentists now across the world, scan teeth in lieu of a dental impression. And so Josh, you were talking about IRBs and research studies. You and I have been emailing about patents. I spent 10 years going through all that stuff. And also remember all my software guys being like, “It’s so easy.” And I was like, “Yeah, but we just had a biotech issue. Or we just had a failure of hardware in the customer in Seattle.” And the complexity you guys are undertaking is enormous and I completely empathize, but it also creates a enormous moat. And I think that things are hard, tend to be more special. And that’s how I feel about you guys. And in the end we sold the company at 3m. I have another prop. We, after five years, got to work inside the belly of a big healthcare giant and had that experience. And always happy to chat about that.
Micah Rosenbloom:
Anyone’s welcome to visit me here in New York. Since then, I’ve been a partner at Founder Collective, we’ve been doing this for 11 years now. We’ve done a fair bit of health tech investing, but as you can see from the logos across different things. And as Joe and I were talking about you guys, one of our good friends, Scott Belsky wrote this book called The Messy Middle. And I think about this a lot, there’s the early days of company formation. I remember when I met Josh and Sam and you guys, you have all this excitement and you’re getting out there. And then there’s the teenage years, you got a customer issue, you got the software upgrade. These are the days that the go ups and downs is a bit of a grind.
Micah Rosenbloom:
It actually is where companies are made. And when you strip away the PR, and the financing and people like me, and you just focus on getting through that messy middle and solving the substantive problems, that’s where real value is created. And I encourage you to read the book. I’m happy to share a bunch of copies, because I think it’s quite interesting. I think the things that get you through the messy middle are things you’re doing. A great culture. Even this dialogue, the fact that you record it and send it to your investors, by the way, I’ve told other companies to start doing… I recommend they do this. You guys have innovated on culture and I think that’s really smart. The way Sam always has a document to share with me, it’s given me more reading than I’m used to, but I think it’s a special… I’m actually now seeing more companies do that.
Micah Rosenbloom:
And so anyway, this is all just to say, I think you guys are in that time where it’s enormously cross-functional, it’s important that you guys all trust each other and help each other through the ups and downs. This is a multi-variable challenge and there’s going to be a lot of competitors, and a lot of noise, and people are going to raise money and someone’s going to complain on Twitter. And someone’s going to say, “That Micah is an idiot. I can’t believe…” you’re going to get all that crap. And you got to focus on building the company and solving the critical problems. And the last thing I would say is, why I think this time, particularly for a healthcare company or these types companies is so important, I remember Joe and I were talking about this PillPack was about two years in and they got a cease and desist letter. Basically, Express Scripts cut them off. This was the largest PBM, basically the majority of prescriptions were going through.
Micah Rosenbloom:
And the management team really rose the occasion. I’ll never forget. So basically what they did, they said, “Look, we have all these customers who no longer can get their prescriptions.” Imagine Truepill saying, “We’re out.” This was massive. So TJ and Elliott, the founders created a website that was called fixpharmacy.com. And they basically went out to the PR waves and said, “This is what the PBMs pay patients, pay customers, not just PillPack customers. This is how PBMs are treating you and how they’re monopolistic and how much control they have.” And I don’t remember exactly how much longer, a few days later the CEO of Express Scripts, massive company called TJ, the founder of PillPack and said, “Please take that website down. We will allow you guys to… Let’s work something out so PillPack can continue to work through Express Scripts.”
Micah Rosenbloom:
And I always think about those are the challenges that I might not have rosen… That’s the make or break opportunities and challenges for companies. So anyway, I will shut up. Always happy to chat with any of you guys. I talk about… I’m not only an investor, I’ve been a customer, I’ve sent feedback to you guys and really excited for the journey ahead and always available.
Josh Clemente:
Awesome. I appreciate that. And it’s always cool to hear those examples. I wasn’t familiar with that PillPack situation. I’m going to go look that up, but love seeing innovation come through fits and starts. I think we’re doing something similar, so thank you, Micah. Thanks Jess for joining us. And with that, we will jump ahead to something somewhat relevant to what Mike was just talking about. I want to take a quick break from the normal broadcast here to discuss the what is Levels question. So we’ve been focusing on the mission. Levels exist to solve the metabolic health crisis, but this is more of the what, the how. So to just summarize and get everyone around a cohesive message, Levels is the world’s first metabolic fitness company.
Josh Clemente:
So that’s who we are. And then what we do is we build a biowearable that answers the question, “What should I eat and why?” With real-time feedback from my body. And that helps people understand without having to get into the specifics of glucose, and personal variability, and research and blood levels, it’s opening up the future roadmap for what we are going to build, which is well beyond CGM. But today what we do is we help people understand the connection between the actions they’re taking, the reactions to their body’s experience. And this captures that in a single sentence. So I wanted to put that out there for people to think about, ingest, use, when you’re running into people and they ask, “What do you do?”
Josh Clemente:
This is a good way to be able to broadcast that in a concise pitch. So if people have questions on this stuff or recommendations for how to tighten the message, always open to this. This is something that we’ll likely evolve. We’ll add future innovation and product roadmap that is going to probably evolve these statements. But today, I think this is a good way to capture that. Okay. Over to David.
David Flinner:
Cool. Thanks everyone. Let’s see, lots of great product work this week and across core things and as well as some interesting experiments. So I think the biggest thing is we finally launched the subscription sign up flow, which is huge. Now you can sign up fully self-served levels.link/subscribe. And I doubt you could actually maybe place them in that video. So it’s not the full flow. I don’t think we have an internal testing flow, so I didn’t fully sign up. But now there’s a beautiful UI. Our members can go in whenever they want, they can choose their subscription parameters and get that set up without ops involvement. And huge congrats to Jeremy for doing that. And for… You also launched a tool this week that automates the sensor replacement request that ops gets, which is going to save a bunch of time. A decent chunk of our sensors and up being replaced, so this is going to save a lot for apps. I think Miz will probably mention more. Next slide.
David Flinner:
One of the cool experiments that Murillo launched or it’s ready to launch this week is David Bot 2.0. In the very earliest days of the company, we gave people the CGM and told them to text us with questions. And we’re bringing that back. So since the earliest days, and now we switched fully to the app. We don’t have as much contact with our members, but we do get a lot of feedback. People saying that they want more meal analysis. And we hear them say that, but the intent with this experiment is to actually test it and see if you do have the choice to ask Levels about something or go deeper on your score, are people going to engage with that? So we just want to see if people are going to literally click the button. If they’re going to email us. There’s a variant too, of this, which doesn’t have an email.
David Flinner:
It just has an in-app, modal page that lets you register your interest in this feature and see what happens with it. So we’ll probably start out small with this one, in case we get inundated with emails, but I’m excited to try it out. Next slide.
Josh Clemente:
Just want to quickly highlight, I love that you’re calling out the experimental nature of this. So people have probably read the memo on the experiments that we’re doing as a culture or as a company. This is an example of something that we’re testing in the app. We’ll also have experiments outside the app, but it’s cool to see the difference between this and production.
David Flinner:
Yeah. And then we brought back… There was an opportunity to bring back the original community UI that we developed. And we tried it out internally as a team and there were things we liked about it and things that we didn’t. I think we learned that the engagement in the original iteration wasn’t super high, but that’s no flaw of the idea of community. I think it was the initial cut and we didn’t really quite iterate on it. But the whole 30… I think it’s the whole 30 leadership team that is trying out Levels and they asked for this feature essentially. So we resurrected it for them and we’re going to see if they like it, see what they have for feedback and do a qualitative debrief for it. So I’m excited to see where this goes. I think this is a really good example of something in the experiment world where you try something and it’s totally okay if it’s not the right thing on day one. This may last for years.
David Flinner:
We know there’s a huge opportunity in community and we’re going to try something, learn from it and move on to the next thing. Hopefully we get some good feedback from this one. Next slide. And then a couple of quarters ago we laid the foundation with the Insights framework, which was experimental at the first start. And with that, I think we pretty clearly learned that our members love the timely insights that are really related to something that they just did. The program cards are useful, but the generic tip-based ones aren’t as useful. So Gabriel built this new insight card that when you have a low scoring zone that you eat just before bed, essentially, we will remind you in the morning that, “Hey, you did this. Your late meal might be affecting your sleep.”
David Flinner:
And you can read more in that article. So the question here, I think it’d be great if people actually changed their behavior. Let’s see if that happens. But then also get some feedback on if they do indeed like this one. Nice work Gabriel, that’s actually live now. So I think you pushed that live just before I finished making these slides, next slide. And we know everyone likes the event detection, but one of the missing things from the original event detection UI was the ability to copy a past log, which is also heavily used. So Murillo, with very minimal spec from me added a really elegant design to bring back the copy past log interface into the anomaly UI.
David Flinner:
So excited to see even more friction-free logging for our users. Next slide. And let’s see. The new thing on this slide is the descriptive text underneath the zone review. So I think this is opinionated, it’s a quasi experimental. But in the past to date, on the zone review page, we’ve had your metrics at the top, like peak time and target average. And they were presented as quantitative metrics. And the change here is that this makes it feel more of a report. More like it was personally created for you. It’s the same metrics, but just delivered in sentence form. And it helps you understand that graph. And it’s a stepping stone for more personalized insights here. You can imagine this might more from not just describing what the metrics are, but also saying, “This large spike suggests that something in your meal had too many carbs.”
David Flinner:
Would be an iteration on this we could do. And then over time, it might get more specific with the next step. Next slide. And as Josh alluded to, there is some epic work going on with native charts. So I don’t also claim to know all the technical complexities of charting, but suffice to say that working with charts is incredibly challenging. And if you want to do them really beautifully and really well, it could effectively slow down your velocity to zero while you work on minor chart changes and inhibit our ability to experiment. So we did an internal experiment of sorts to see if we could revisit this. After Alan came on, he had some new ideas for beautiful charts that we originally wanted to do when we first started the company. But it was going to be too hard given the technical limitations and the time we wanted to devote to it. So we carved out a short period of time to see if we could do this.
David Flinner:
And Jhon and Justin really delivered quite exceptionally on finding a new, elegant technical way to do this, that if it works out at the end of this test, it’ll actually speed up our velocity. And it also so far has been substantially improving the performance of charts on Android, which is a known super laggy experience. So I’ll just walk you through a couple of those concepts in the next slide. This is what Alan presented, I think last week. So he made a demo on the left in D3, I think in JavaScript to serve as the inspiration for where we wanted to go. And Jhon whipped up a quick in that prototype of it. And then next slide. And then Justin’s been working on implementing all the finer details. So these are actual screenshots that I took from my data from the app. And you can see, as opposed to what we have in the app now, these beautiful gradients that just naturally flow with no break from white to red, the line is super smooth. That interpolation is very nice.
David Flinner:
The tick marks are custom. You can change them, subtle details, but very, very put together. And if we want to be a consumer app that scales up to 800 million people or something like that, these things matter. And that delight and the intangibles here are going to be really helpful. Next slide. And just a quick demo here. So the old chart… The new chart, so you can see as you’re scrubbing, that text label will be pinned to the side, which is custom. Justin got it set up to have the selected value change color. There’s so many more things we can try now that this offers more flexibility or tap into Zoom, things like that.
David Flinner:
Next slide. And one other experiment I wanted to call out and this cuts across the whole company. There’s been this idea that over the course of the company, bubbling up from time to time and recently from different angles, this idea where we have so many people testing out the personal responses, but what does that look like in aggregate? And how do we differ? How do I compare to other people? What foods jump out on the top and the bottom? Gabriel had a Slack thread where we put together some of the best and worst logs based on string matches and JM put together a really cool dashboard where you can search for strings and see the average zone score for different foods.
David Flinner:
And then Josh and I, last year, when we had the original reports, we had a similar concept on these food trials, based on categories. Like your best and worst fruits or all the different variations of oatmeal that you tried and which ones are best to worst. So there’s this new emerging experiment where we want to see, will members engage with these analyses of common foods that we’re getting excited about internally? So this is pretty early stages, but Gabriel is going to be doing some thinking about this and how we might test this out in a lightweight way with our members in the app. And if anyone else is working on this too, this is I think pretty broad-spread thing. Let me know. And we can try to combine efforts on it, next slide. All right. Kick it to an Alan.
Alan McLean:
Okay. So we continued some iterations on the food logging work this week. I think we’re getting really close to retaining some of the… smoothing the experience, but ensuring that we keep a really low-friction food logging experience. We know a lot of people love it. So some changes on the left, we’re going to keep. Go back to starting with the camera, but we’re going to add the camera roll as an option to scan through the bottom for people who are retroactively logging some nice auto complete and search features in the actual text completion there. And I think the last slide is meant to syndicate your images and indicate lots of potential room for other macros and other metadata in the future.
Alan McLean:
Next slide, looking at accessibility. So I’m trying to get a little bit of a better grasp of where are the pain points in the experience right now. And I think this is prompted by some discussion yesterday with Justin and something that I’ve been looking at since we first started. But just dealing with things like contrast issues. On the left, we’ve got a revised color palette that I worked on yesterday. On the right, we’ve got a representation of what it would look like with the most common form of color blindness. And so we’re going to go through the bit of the afternoon and start seeing colors change, contrast probably pick up a little bit. Just to make sure that we’re meeting our users where they are. Next slide.
Alan McLean:
And a lot of exploration. Been doing a lot of great conversations lately around community. So David and Josh and I yesterday had some great chats. Chatted with Andrew last week on community. And today I’ve got a little collaborative call with Dorothy and we’re going to be walking through some potential ideas on how to bring community more to the forefront for the Levels experience for our users. That’s it.
David Flinner:
Awesome. Awesome. So much more actually, work going on that I didn’t put a slide on for, with the limited time. But there were some really good stuff on the backend. Some authentication changes from Xinlu and retool improvements and better health kit imports. Actually, I think that… and it says Jhon, I think Justin also worked on that. What else? And then some other interesting visual explorations coming up from Jhon with an OpenGL 3D rendering thing of a glucose visual that Alan’s been conceptualizing. And then some really good other experiments that are in the initial stages… In the thought stages around maybe extending that Coke experiment to more members that JM is working on, the metabolic fitness kit that JM is working on as well. So lots of stuff going on, this slide is getting packed.
Josh Clemente:
Love it. Awesome work. Thanks everybody. Quick hiring update. Things are still the same. We’re moving plenty of candidates through the process. Lots of calls going, on lots of applications happening. So if you know people that are good for the roles listed, please forward them on, Miz.
Michael Mizrahi:
Two quick highlights. But before that, I’m completely blown away by that whole segment, David, Alan, and the entire engineering team. Every week it’s impressive. And this moment is awesome. Two quick highlights that David touched on in the beginning, that are particularly meaningful for ops. One is that subscription form is live. So previously we were using a jotform. Then we moved over to Stripe subscriptions, switched it to a typeform, been using all the formats out there. What was still happening regardless is that ops is manually moving over a subscription, creating it in Stripe, adding it to retool. We’re out of that business. Members can sign themselves up for subscriptions. And it’s one more place where we’re taking manual processes and removing them from the flow and making the whole system work with minimal input from us. And that’s where we want to move towards, it’s where we’re going to have to do if we’re going to have many more members.
Michael Mizrahi:
And so these are really meaningful steps. This also unlocks a lot of really cool features, buried in David’s preso there. But the screenshot here shows you that we can now choose subscription cadences. So we came up with three through a bunch of memos and exploration and conversation, but basically we’re doing the monthly. So two sensors a month supply depending on the brand, every other month and then quarterly. This was based on a lot of member feedback that sensors start to pile up. People like to take time off between to see if the accountability is real, all these kinds of things. So that’s a really nice improvement. And I think we’ll start to work this into other places on subscriptions to make it a little bit more prominent. The other big update that Jeremy got out this week on behalf of us was the replacements flow through retool.
Michael Mizrahi:
So previously when we needed to fill replacements, we’re going into the Truepill fulfillment app, manually moving over a patient’s information, address, shipping address. We’re accessing a lot of patient data. We’re seeing prescriptions, we’re getting out of that business too. We click a button and retool will fill in the form, hit submit, and fire it off to the Truepill API for a fill request. So really nice experience, a lot more scalability and efficiency for us, better member experience and really good hardening of the system. Big hat tip to Jeremy on both of these features, amongst many other things this week, scraper outage, a lot of other pieces. He’s definitely MVP from our end. So thanks Jeremy for this work, it’s meaningful stuff.
Michael Mizrahi:
And it’s pieces that we’ve been waiting on for a long time that really changed the dynamics of what we work on. So you’re going to have Braden, Jesse, Mercy, Laurie, and myself, trying to figure out where we go next. Because these are pretty massive pieces of our workflow that are now taken care of, which is great. That’s it from here for this week.
Josh Clemente:
Awesome. I think the translation from this improving operations’ lives, that’s directly to the end state for the member. Being able to get a replacement is a unique experience for Levels. We provide, I think delight through that. People are frustrated their sensor’s not working and to be able to not only get one from the company quickly, but then… Now, I imagine even faster with the improvements on the back end, these are the types of things that make us an [NPS 00:29:31] unicorn. So thank you, Jeremy. Thanks ops team. Sorry, jumping ahead to growth
Ben Grynol:
So growth, shout out Aaron Hansen. Aaron manages basically everything related to wearable challenge and wearable is what we’re piggybacking the getting started cohort on all of their infrastructure. So intuitively we thought, this is pretty straightforward. You send out a couple emails and there you go, you just have this community come together. And working with Aaron and seeing the way that he’s been communicating, like the transparency and thoroughness, the organization. And then just this speed in execution, it makes you realize you’re like, “Oh, we wouldn’t have done anything remotely close to as good as this, if we tried to do it ourselves as a team.” Not because of not being capable, but because of opportunity cost of time. And so big, big hat tip to Aaron, it’s just been immensely helpful to work with somebody and go, “Oh, this is how you really do it.” So awesome.
Ben Grynol:
Next slide please. Growth financial. So weekly recognized revenue, 110,000. Monthly, we’re already at 260. So we are well on our way to our goal of $300,000. 9.2 in the bank and sitting well there. Next slide please. So growth theme is alignment. We’ll do a quick recap on Life Itself, which is the conference that Casey will be speaking at. And we will be working with, so very high profile event. And I think conferences from the outside can seem sometimes like just another event. But when looking at this as an opportunity, this is a new event that’s being organized by Dr. Sanjay Gupta and Marc Hodosh. Marc had founded TedMed. So he has some experience in the tier one of tier one events. And this event is important because although there are only 500 attendees, pretty small in that respect, it is quite high profile.
Ben Grynol:
So we’re talking about people like Dr. Anthony Fauci, he will be there and he’s going to be on stage and he might even be a person that Casey applies a sensor to, which is to be determined. The point is that this event is going to have high profile coverage. So CNN’s going to be covering it. We from an opportunity perspective, have access to a new network. So these might be people who we have second and third degree connections to, but we actually haven’t had FaceTime with or haven’t had the opportunity to meet them. It’s going to help us spread the message of metabolic health and metabolic awareness. And then there’s a lot of social proof and signaling for Levels.
Ben Grynol:
So for us to be thought of as trustworthy enough and executing at a high enough level to be associated or aligned with an event like this, I think is a pretty big signal to the way that… We’ll call it events or organizations with profile are looking at Levels. And so that’s pretty neat. From a consideration perspective when thinking through, because we are giving an in kind contribution of 500 units, so it’s about $85,000 of capital outlay. The question really is around, will it help us to achieve our long term goal? And then what’s the opportunity cost of time is the most important thing? So is this a distraction or is this something meaningful for our team? And when we thought through it, it’s something that money can’t buy and the time is very well worth it. And so strategically this made sense and I’m pretty excited. Casey has two speaking slots and a lot of interesting things will come out of it. So we’ll keep the team updated, but onto Mike with member insights.
Mike Didonato:
Thanks, Ben. So we put together a document that outlines how we’ve thought about and our approach for feedback calls going forward, which I’ll distribute to the team later with some call notes. But just wanted to give a high level overview. So in the doc, it talks about the process from start to finish. So how and why we choose people to talk to ultimately through thanking and closing the loop with our members. And then another big thing discussed in this document is the need and how we plan to increase visibility, actionability, and improve the ability to track the feedback an action them as they come in. And then at the end, we talk about success measures, which are extremely important. And this will allow us not only to make sure that we’re continuing to learn from our members, but that we’re doing it in an efficient and effective way. This is going to be a dynamic and iterative process, so we’re going to continue to revisit it on a regular basis. Definitely welcome everyone’s comments and feedback. And I will send that this afternoon.
Josh Clemente:
Awesome. Thanks guys, Mercy.
Mercy Clemente:
Okay. Social update. For Instagram, we hit 27,700 followers. One really cool thing that happened on Instagram this week was Dr. Natalie Krane posted a few stories where she explained how metabolic scores and the whoop recovery score really correlates. We had a lot of positive feedback from them because it really showed our followers and also members that follow us on Instagram, the impact of how, if you’re eating poorly, it can then affect you the following day with your recovery score, how you sleep. And honestly, even days after that, maybe the following day as well. And it really shows how your body recovery and your function… how your body functions really is impacted by your metabolic score, so that was really interesting. Casey did another Instagram live with Nick Gonzalez and this tummy was a Q&A.
Mercy Clemente:
That is saved to Nick’s page. And I believe it’s also saved in our tag post. So if you weren’t able to catch it, I would definitely recommend watching that. And then Twitter, we just had a lot of enthusiasm. We’re just about at 14,000 followers. I think we have three, so we’re at 14,000. So that’s exciting to hit that number. That’s it for social.
Josh Clemente:
Cool. Thank you.
David Flinner:
Quick, Gabriel’s feature is going to do really well with that. I think that same Dr. Natalie post there in the middle, that’s exactly what we’re launching this week.
Mercy Clemente:
Awesome. It’s going to be… I think it’ll be a big hit then. Because really had a lot of positive feedback via DM and comments in that one.
Josh Clemente:
Nice, awesome, Tom.
Tom Griffin:
All right. Weekly partnerships updates. Again, shout out to David for doing his first podcast. It’s not easy to be put in the hot seat in that type of interview format when you haven’t done it before. So we appreciate him jumping in. We are slowly getting more team members involved beyond Josh and Casey in the podcast circuit, starting with Sam and David, and then eventually we’ll get Andrew in the mix and others as well. So in addition to building awareness around metabolic health and bio wearables and CGM, we’re also just looking to spread the word on how we’re building the company itself, the culture, our philosophies around product engineering, growth. And probably the most direct concrete value of this effort is just continuing to attract world-class talent to the team.
Tom Griffin:
New content we touched on most of this, I’ll call it the Ali Spagnola video. She did one on cold exposure and metabolic health. She told us at the video performing like 260% better than all of her other typical videos. So that’s important for us to note and then as always some fun VIPs across Hollywood fitness, professional sports. Next slide. Okay. So spotlight this week, upcoming podcast promotions, this should sound familiar. But I wanted to give some context around how we’re currently thinking about promotions right now. Notably, because we’re going to see a few more of them in the next few weeks pop up from familiar names like Bulletproof, Ben Greenfield, Kelly Leveque.
Tom Griffin:
As a reminder, we had paused promotions for a bit as we shored up our operations and engineering infrastructure in March and in April a bit. But we’ve now resumed them. But again, if we’re not in growth mode right now, why are we spending money on podcast advertising and partner promotions? And a few reasons, one, awareness. Just to increase awareness of levels and educate the world on what is really a brand new consumer category. And it’s worth noting that over the last few months, it’s become clear that our activity in the podcast channel is correlating directly to rate of waitlist signups as well as website traffic. So we just want to keep up the momentum on that front. Number two, partnerships. We’ve mentioned this before, but there are really a finite number of top tier partners in the podcast and content creator space.
Tom Griffin:
And so we need to lock them down and then keep them happy. Otherwise, it’s honestly realistic that a competitor would step in. And then lastly, revenue long term. We’re going to ramp up advertising in this space and this is ultimately going to be a significant source of revenue once we get to growth. In the meantime, focus on those top two things. That’s it.
Josh Clemente:
Thanks Tom. Haney.
Mike Haney:
On the content side, you mentioned the cancer piece that went up this week. That’s probably the deepest dive we’ve done yet, at least in my tenure here. And we had a really great new science writer we tried out to do that and a really good advisor process. And Dr. Michael, Hardacre, an oncologist who helped advise both on the front end and then review it on the back end. And then contrasting that, a couple of nice, tight, serviceable food pieces around flax and pasta. This week, we’ve really been focusing on working a lot with Casey on building out our expert network. Finding more folks, largely in Casey’s network and others. People we know who can help us review posts, who can help advise on the front end. So again, just keeping up that quality. Talking about doing some podcasts for our channel around content and how we do what we do. How you did it before I came on and how we’ve moving it forward since, and then some movement forward with reactive and a little bit internally on the site redesign.
Mike Haney:
Some of the pieces that are coming up. I feel like this week, I turned my gaze inward and worked a lot on Levels focus pieces. Both everyone on content, pieces with Jhon and with Ben, but also pieces around some of that data that Gabe and JM pulled out about our worst performing foods. We’ve got a nice article, I think, coming together on that. Where we’re going to not only list the foods, but also then give swaps to say, “Okay, we see that donuts don’t perform well, but here’s how you can make baked goods perform better by swapping these foods.” We’re right up around the Coke experiment. And then we’ve got a good partner piece coming up from Biosense.
Mike Haney:
I just want to call up one stat this week, not the full stats, but just for fun. I looked at the traffic so far in 2021 from January 1st to today or to yesterday, May 13th, and then compared it to last year, which I thought was an interesting thing. So last year at this point, we had had 11,000 users on the site in that time period. And this year it was 388,000. So even as I watched the weekly move up and down, it was really fun to just see, “Oh, we are still very much growing and adding lots of folks and getting eyeballs on the content.” So that was cool. That’s it for me.
Josh Clemente:
Awesome. This has been quite a year. No doubt about that. All right. Great updates team. 10 seconds each on something we’re excited about. I think a number of us are out today, so I expect this will move somewhat quickly. Mercy, go ahead and kick off.
Mercy Clemente:
Professionally, subscriptions and auto replacements, that is huge. Thank you, Jeremy, for all the work, the whole ops team really appreciates that. Personally, the weather is finally nice again, it was really cold this past week. And now it’s in the seventies. So going to just hang out and do nothing this weekend.
Josh Clemente:
Nice, Sam.
Sam Corcos:
I’d say the thing I’m most excited about is just the pipeline of really excellent candidates that we have. I’m still talking to a lot of engineers and we’re talking to some really excellent people.
Josh Clemente:
Great, Justin.
Justin Stanley:
Levels’ wise, all the experiments that we’re trying out is really cool. And it’s crazy that we’re trying this all out at the same time and then Love, Death and Robot season two just came out yesterday. So I’m going to check that out. It’s a really cool animation series on Netflix.
Josh Clemente:
Very cool. Personally, I had a great time hanging out with David the past few days up in New Hampshire, the land of Liberty. It was fun. And it’s two weeks in a row that I’ve hung out with Levels’ people, which is a first for sure. Mike.
Mike Didonato:
Yeah, I definitely would say the product improvement, especially around charting, pretty amazing. And then definitely content, cancer piece was really awesome. And then we also have the other pieces, like the food swaps that I think are just extremely helpful, I know to me and I’m sure to our members and the people that do read the blog. Personally, just excited for better weather, and more freedom and hopefully seeing more people
Josh Clemente:
Love it. I think Andrew’s out as well, so Haney.
Mike Haney:
Yeah. On the Levels’ side the number of experiments was so cool to see. It seems like just a couple of weeks ago, there was a memo about, “Hey, we should do more experiments.” And then suddenly there’s four experiments in the Friday forum that look awesome and are moving forward. And it’s just really cool to see that velocity. On the personal side, I completed my first book listen at 1.75X speed this week. And I’m pretty proud of myself. I didn’t think I could ever listen at the accelerated pace, Sam style. But I did it and it worked.
Josh Clemente:
My fiance is angry with me because I now can no longer listen to conversational TV shows at 1X speed because I only listen 2X, Gabriel.
Gabriel:
Yeah. So I’m Levels’ wise really excited about the new charting stuff, it’s super exciting to see. Personally, I’ve got some hiking plan this weekend, which I’m looking forward to. So I’m looking forward to some outdoor time.
Josh Clemente:
Awesome. Jhon.
Jhon Cruz:
Yeah. Levels-related, the charts exploration is great, amazing progress there. And personally, I will participate in a new tennis tournament this weekend. I rank second place last time. So let’s see if I can get the championship this time.
Josh Clemente:
Remind me not to compete with you in tennis in any form. Alan.
Alan McLean:
Hey, well, I’m obviously super excited about the charts, big chart fan over here. So love to see progress there. On the personal side, we had a bit of a COVID scare the last week or so. Kids were sick, but just got negative tests back yesterday. So we’re in the clear, so happy about that.
Josh Clemente:
Nice. Dom.
Dominic D’Agostino :
Yeah. Moving forward with the Allison Hall Levels study, got blood samples I’m sending to ZRT Lab for the pre-pilot study on that. Also sorting through a lot of great opportunities. A lot of podcasts Tom sent some my way, looking forward to that. There’s a Netflix documentary that I’m following up on, The Filmmaker, very interested in metabolic therapies and CGM. So excited about that.
Josh Clemente:
Amazing. I think Xinlu’s out, so Tom.
Tom Griffin:
I got three text messages this week from random people like seeing Levels or the Levels app in the Wild. About an hour ago, I got a Levels hat text in the Wild. Turns out, my friend was just with coincidentally Justin [Marice 00:45:43]. I’m not sure if that counts, my world just might be really small. And then personally, my best friend just got here from Nairobi, Kenya. So really excited to hang out with him.
Josh Clemente:
Very cool, Casey.
Casey Means:
Ooh, I’ve got to go with just content stuff. And especially that year over year growth and just being blown away every single day by what Haney gets accomplished. And getting to work with him, it’s awesome and inspires me always. And personally, I’m flying late tonight up to Portland, Oregon, which I realize I have a house there that’s been on the market for five months. And I have not been there since December 20th. So it’s been five months since I’ve been home. Everywhere feels like home now, but I’m really excited to see my condo and see a couple of friends next week and maybe do a hike this weekend.
Josh Clemente:
Pretty crazy, enjoy. Ben.
Ben Grynol:
Super stoked on subscription. So all the work Jeremy has been doing with getting the cadence over the line, that’s super important. Stoked on all the product velocity and experiments too. It’s crazy to see all that stuff, but hat tip to everybody. And personally it’s been very nice outside. It’s 75 this whole week and now I can sit on my patio and work outside. It’s pretty good. So pumped.
Josh Clemente:
Nice, Miz.
Michael Mizrahi:
Yeah. I’ll around us out at the end. I think it’s always interesting coming to these forums. The week can get tough. There’s so many priorities. You feel like there’s a lot going on and then just get totally inspired every Friday morning by this call. I think particularly Micah’s piece on culture and The Messy Middle, and then seeing what we’re actually doing around culture, isn’t just talk. And so it’s a dream to work at a company that cares about this stuff with people that care. So that’s awesome and exciting. And then on the personal side, I’m working from New York for the next two weeks, visiting family, seeing friends I haven’t seen in way too long. So looking forward to that.
Josh Clemente:
Awesome. Lori, I think I might have jumped over you, so I’m going to come back.
Laurie Morrison:
Yeah. I’m also absolutely loving the subscription and replacement automation. That’s going to be wonderful. Thank you, Jeremy. I feel like I’ve given you some faces over the last year, but this is exciting and today’s my birthday. So I’m going to my daughters. I’ve got a date night. It’s just going to be a really good day. Very excited.
Josh Clemente:
Happy birthday, Laurie.
Mike Didonato:
Happy birthday, Laurie.
Micah Rosenbloom:
Happy birthday, Laurie.
Josh Clemente:
On the Levels in the Wild, I posted this to Slack, but it was crazy this week. One of my sisters was going to her primary care doctor and was chatting about this beta test for CGM she’s in and her doctor not only knew the company, but knew me, in some way. Listened to the podcast and stuff. So we’re out there. It’s wild. All right. And with that, Jhon story of the week.
Jhon Cruz:
Yeah. Let me share my screen. Okay. So for today I’m feeling some responsibility as a Colombian. I want to spread the word about what’s going on in my country. These are the normal Colombian problems with drugs and inequality all over the place. This infographic on the right side is pre COVID. So things are likely worse now. More than 70% of the people live in poverty or extreme poverty. Most of the land is owned by a few people. Some of them being ex presidents, senators, and other political figures. Corruption is just a normal thing. And the system just encourages it, instead of actually punishing it harder. So with all of this plus COVID plus super slow vaccination rate, the government came out with a tax reform, which tried our patience and everything just exploded.
Jhon Cruz:
Moreover, the excessive use of force from the police, the limited education possibilities, and the unemployment rate is one of the factors that make people even angrier. So who is protesting right now in my country? Almost everyone. So truck drivers, farmers, teachers, students, everyone, especially people from low and middle classes. So what is this tax reform about? This was the biggest thing that happened before the protest. So the government tried to raise almost $7 billion to correct economic imbalance because of COVID. And they also tried to add VAT to basic products and basic services like internet, water, power, natural gas. And they also tried to add the income tax for people earning more than $600 a month. And they also tried to put more taxes on gases and other stuff.
Jhon Cruz:
So this is crazy because the one single corruption scandal here in Colombia named Reficar was about $4 billion. And that was just one scandal. So this is not only about correcting the deficit that COVID caused, but also trying to correct the corruption scandals that happened before. So it’s okay to pay taxes, but if we don’t have the example from the politicians that are creating these reforms, it’s not good. So for example, the president, vice president and many congressmen and other politicians just paid zero in taxes last years. And their salary is $12,000 a month plus other benefits. So that’s not okay.
Jhon Cruz:
In addition to that, the police abuse has significantly increased the last few days. The country is militarized. A few dozens of people’s have died. And there is a lot of people injured and a lot of shootings and illegal arrests happening in the last few days. But what are the protestors demands right now? So they want the tax reform to be removed. They want better vaccination rates. They want the police to end the violence against protestors. They want to start a basic income scheme for lower class people. And they also want free tuition for public universities for middle and lower classes. The wins so far as a consequence of this protest is that the government removed the tax reform, so that’s not happening. Of course the finance minister quit the job.
Jhon Cruz:
And the government also announced like two days ago that people from lower classes are going to get free tuition for public universities for the next semester. This is a trap because this is just for the next semester, but it’s progress and it’s okay. With more reporters, with more media coverage in the last few days, we have less violence, of course. Because the police officers are taking more care with their actions and the government also suspended some plans to buy airplanes for almost $4 billion, so that’s crazy. The effects of this protests for everyone here in Colombia is that everything is more expensive now because the roads are blocked. So farmers are losing their production. Cities and towns are not getting these products.
Jhon Cruz:
So everything is more expensive with all people getting together on the streets. The COVID spread is even bigger and of course, more violence than usual. So personally, I think this is the right way right now, because at this point, without this protest, the tax reform would be approved and other things could have happened. But I don’t think that violence is the way of doing that. So Pacific protest is the way of doing that from both sides or from the police side and from the protestor side. And it’s all right, so it’s in the constitution. So some possible alternatives for raising money for our country could be for example, marijuana legalization, like it has happening in other countries, like in the US.
Jhon Cruz:
Stop fighting the drug trafficking because we have been in this war for almost 30 years and we lost, and we are getting tons of money from the US, from other European countries. And we are not doing any progress there. And instead of spending money on that, we should invest on fighting corruption and investing in education and a better healthcare system, for example. So it’s okay to complain, but we should take care of what’s happening here. It’s very complex. We actually need performance, but not this way and maybe better ones or different ones. So what I say to other Colombians is that we should vote and do it properly. It’s incredible that probably half of the people living here don’t vote.
Jhon Cruz:
We should put ourselves in other people’s situation because we are not the same and we should try to help others and treat people the way we want to be treated. Education is also important. It has a multiplier effect. So try to coach and guide others and teach others to be better citizens. And of course, if you can donate, do it, and if you can spread the word, do it. So we don’t need to be in the front line of the protest to make this place a better country. We still can help with other actions. that’s the conclusion. That’s it.
Josh Clemente:
Well, Jhon, thank you for sharing from the inside perspective. This can sometimes be reduced to just headlines over here. I know for sure, so it’s really important to get a nuanced perspective and I appreciate you taking on a tough topic and I hope things improve and genuinely. Lot of conflict out there. So anyway, thank you, Jhon, for preparing that, thanks for sharing. Thanks everybody for contributing this week. Awesome meeting and have a great weekend.