Josh Clemente (00:00):
Go ahead and jump in. Welcome to Friday Forum, November 11th, 2022. All right. This week, exciting team growth. We’ve got Rafael and Adam both joining us full time. Their first day was earlier this week. Rafael will be having a cafe right after this call, for those of us on the team that can join. And Kelly Leveque is… she’s been a strong supporter, been in our orbit, been boosting the Levels message for a very long time. She’s now an official Levels advisor. We’re going to be working very closely together and definitely growth in the team direction. We’ve making some great e-commerce enhancements. So the support team has been working hand in hand with the eng team to really methodically buy down all of the new platform debt that we’ve got. So tons of great enhancements there. I just really want to shout out the partnership, and everyone understanding each other and each other’s requirements, and working together to get us into a better place.
(01:02):
So it’s really exciting to see lots of work has happened over the past few weeks on this. And then we had an annual visit… or a quarterly visit with Truepill, and a quarterly business review with them. It’s like a montage of photos here, but you can see a lot of really cool Levels action pallets and boxes, lots and lots of performance covers and sensors. And overall, it was a really great visit. Good to realign with the Truepill team and just understand each other’s goals and growth trajectory, and basically just sync up in-person. We’re also making logistics progress towards relaunching blood work with more reliable infrastructure. So we definitely have validated, that’s an important part of our product offering, and we need to make sure that we can scale that to people who need it and they can get that in a reliable manner.
(01:46):
So some partnership changes coming soon, but a lot of great work going on behind the scenes there. Updates were shipped to the spike window detection, the Healthy Food Choices feature set has shipped to all members now, and we’ve got 20% of our members getting access to the Instacart shopping list. So basically, we’re in feedback mode now on a lot of these new features, which is great. We’ve also got progress on new spike based scoring system. So taking variability into account, it’s a very explainable system in the way that the old scoring system was not, it was more of a black box. And so again, we’ll be rolling this out and getting a lot of feedback in terms of how the spike detection, the stability score, the stability ring, all of these things mesh into an awareness of, behavior wise, ingredient wise, what’s driving blood sugar variability.
(02:41):
On the fulfillment side, we’ve got non-prescription fulfillment coming soon. So there’s a lot of work going on behind the scenes to make sure that that system is set up and going to operate correctly for our IRB, so it’s an IRB specific capability. Our gifting system is in work, so we’re getting ready for the holiday season with gifting. Our membership renewal portal is in work, and then Levels levels and app onboarding also being built out right now. So a lot going on that’s going to be showing up in various surfaces. We’ve got a new episode of Levels Kitchen, Casey’s Brunch episode is live. Four new blog pieces are up along with a deep dive on HbA1c, which I think is a really important evaluation of a metric that our members know a lot about. And it’s not always clear exactly how that correlates with CGM data. So that was a really good one. And the member story with Katie Mathews.
(03:32):
Demand Capture Strategy, this is a big one. So everyone has been paying attention to the process of demand generation and demand capture and how our growth is going after leaving beta. So Tom has written up a great new memo here. It was distributed through Threads. Highly recommend reading it, absorbing it, leaving comments, leaving feedback, just trying to understand the context of where we are, where we came from, what we’ve tried, what we haven’t tried, and what we can try and will be trying in the next few weeks and months. We’re definitely going to be shifting our focus to some levers that we haven’t really needed to pull on recently. So product marketing, signup user experience, all of this stuff is new capability that we’re going to be building and definitely shifting focus to right now.
(04:15):
Gifting is a great opportunity for this. So we’re going to build a new gifting landing page system and be able to try some really great product marketing experimentation. So we’ll learn a huge amount from people that are willing to or excited to share the product with other people, gifted to other people. It’s still important for us to be able to nail the message, what is this thing? What can it do for people, and why? So excited for that. And then looking ahead to 2023, we’ve learned quite a bit about the leadership, the thought leadership that really resonates on our platform. And it’s become super clear that health experts, health thought leaders resonate over and above some of the business thought leaders that we’ve had on our platform. So we’re going to very much double down there. We’re starting to book some tier one partners for 2023, and we’ll be experimenting with the special offers that we roll out along with those partnerships.
(05:06):
So we’ve continued to learn about how we can mutually boost messages with partners. And as we have a membership, it’s important to be able to think of ways to incentivize the audiences of our partners to give Levels a shot. And they’re also evaluating methods on the research side to understand insulin sensitivity. So we’ve done the Coke Challenge. We’ve considered oral glucose tolerance tests through calibrated drinks or meals. There’s a lot we can do here, and it’s such an important mechanism that drives CGM response. So a lot of research going on behind the scenes to understand how we can pull insulin sensitivity information out through the product feature set. And then we’ve got a community experiment in analysis right now from Halloween. Let’s see… We had a great dive into expansion with Karen and Kosima, and we’ve got Taylor on No Meat Athlete this week.
(05:59):
Some exciting news coming from Fast Company. We’ve got ads live on Ben Greenfield and Tim Ferriss this week. Dr. Lauren Kelley-Chew showing up on Wellness Mama. Spoke to a ton of really exciting potential growth opportunities to see a lot of logos here. More to come on that, mostly partnerships or potential feature expansion partnerships. See some cool visuals here about Levels levels. So some of the badge work, some of the rewards showing up here, including ingredient breakdown and how these individual ingredients are correlating with the Levels levels, and how you can build points and get reinforcement for positive actions. So we’re building in a positive way as opposed to what can be a negative feeling around scoring. So beautiful new visuals. This is the skeleton for a gifting landing page. You can see Levels Kitchen here, and then a ton of great UGC and expert content including Jeff Krasno who is on with us right now.
(06:55):
All right. On that topic, I want to welcome Jeff. Jeff is a Levels partner, a really awesome thought leader in the space of wellness. He’s been building the space for a lot longer than any of us have been paying attention to it, most likely, maybe with the exception of Rob. Co-founder and CEO and podcast host. He’s building Commune Media, he built Wanderlust, which all of which pulled together wellness, yoga, mindfulness practices. Really an amazing partner to Levels, partnered with us most recently on the metabolic event, which we talked about last week. Jeff, I really appreciate you taking some time to hang out with us and the team. First of all, thank you for being such a strong supporter, and secondly, for coming here to chat with us this morning.
Jeff Krasno (07:42):
Yeah, nice. Great to be with you.
Josh Clemente (07:45):
Love to. from your vantage point, you’ve been working in the space of wellness for a very long time, and I’m really curious, I’d love to just hear from you what you’re most excited about in the world, specifically of metabolic health, but also just generally speaking of health and wellness.
Jeff Krasno (08:04):
Yeah. Well, there’s a lot to be excited about. I think of this era as the age of agency, in a lot of ways. 20 some odd years ago, I think marked the end of genetic determinism. And since that time, we’ve seen this efflorescence of different fields of study, epigenetics, and the microbiome, and neuroplasticity, essentially that we’re not fixed and our destiny is not faded, that we have a tremendous amount of agency over our own health and wellbeing. And clearly, that’s a huge part of a Level story. We just have this ability now to have a greater dashboard into our own physiology, such that we can greater align with nature’s foundational wisdom, if you will, and live a healthier lives. So I really am on this quest to spread education and amplify the thoughts and ideas of top doctors and thought leaders, because I think the more that we can educate people, the more empowerment and agency they can have over their own health. And obviously, for me, health is central to every single issue that we face both individually and as a society. So that’s a lot of what I’m thinking about these days.
Josh Clemente (09:36):
Yeah, I love the era of agency, that’s a great way to put it. We certainly are looking to shift the balance of power or at least the balance of responsibility away from an unknown or amorphic system onto the individual. It’s no longer someone else’s responsibility. And at the same time, we also need to empower people with the right tool set to be able to understand where they are, and where they’re headed, and how to make better choices. Specific to metabolic health and the role of technology in improving health and behavior change, I’d love to hear how you’re thinking about Levels specifically, and what we could do better to make this an effective tool that doesn’t necessarily unintentionally lead people in the wrong direction. What are the important elements of a tool like Levels so that people are making intentional improvement?
Jeff Krasno (10:32):
Yeah. Well, I guess I’ll just share a little bit of my personal story in connection with Levels. As you noted in your kind introduction, I’ve been immersed in the wellness industry for really the better part of my adult career. And I always assumed that I was pretty healthy, I was checking a lot of boxes, and eating well, and huffing it out on the treadmill and stuff. But I was experiencing symptoms like chronic fatigue, and brain fog, and a lot of the symptoms that are upstream, in some ways, from chronic disease. And so I got a continuous glucose monitor, I wear it, and lo and behold, I discovered that I was pre-diabetic, and this isn’t really that long ago, this is maybe a year ago, that I was running glucose serum levels of like 120 milligrams per deciliter just on a fasting basis. And then I was having these huge spikes.
(11:44):
And then just being able to assimilate or integrate a lot of the data that I was getting and adopt a whole different series of protocols that was appropriate for my bioindividuality, over the course of the last year, I lost somewhere between 45 and 50 pounds, my energy levels are through the roof. Obviously, my blood glucose went way down. I’m now in that fasting level of 75 to 85, and I’ve achieved what I think is metabolic flexibility, where I can burn fat and glucose seamlessly and interchangeably depending on the situation. And now, I don’t have to be neurotic about it to be honest. I can go out and have a good time and have dinner with my family. And I have three daughters, so we’re offering eating late at night and different things, and I found a way to navigate that.
(12:42):
And so just as a product of my direct experience, I can see the transformation that technology and tools like Levels can provide for people. So I know viscerally how important this is. So now, I think, is how do we go from, I’m fortunate enough that I get to spend a good chunk of my life thinking about this, and that I have the means for it, but now, how do we democratize this, is really, I think, the big challenge, is how do we work in partnership with insurance providers, with the medical community, in general, to make this kind of technology more available at a mass scale? Because often, it is the case with wellness, is that the people that need it the most actually have the least access to it, and I think that represents one of the biggest challenges to moving this society across the spectrum from very diseased to well. And I think that’s the big challenge.
Josh Clemente (13:58):
Such an important point, and something that I do love is there are secondary effects to the proliferation of this technology. It’s not necessarily the case that everyone has to be a primary user of Levels, but by default, people start to bring these practices home and they start to affect their significant other and children, and there’s a ripple effect. But absolutely, the point can’t be lost that accessibility is the primary limiting factor to the impact that the technology can have. Jeff, from your perspective, if there’s one thing that Levels could do better, whether it’s a product feature or a systematic way of thinking about things, what would you recommend that we focus on?
Jeff Krasno (14:39):
That’s a good question. Just in my personal experience with the app, I had to do some calibration to get my readings correctly. So this is a little more of a geeky approach to your question, but I had to do some kind of finger pricking to make sure that the reading was proper. So I think that that’s just more of a data thing, it was not a big deal to do it, but that was something that I had to tweak within the app to make it work best for me. Yeah, otherwise, I think what you guys are doing is a tremendous service, and I guess I always hover on how do we move from individual wellbeing to societal wellbeing? That was really the premise of Commune and has been the thread that I’ve been able to pull through my own life, is how do we create community around wellness so it doesn’t just become this individual Silicon Valley quest for a mortality or biohacking thing where it can actually truly encompass community?
(16:06):
And I think you guys are doing that. But I guess I would challenge you, if there’s anything that I could say outside of just more of the geeky stuff, is how do you move this from an individual pursuit to a collective pursuit? And I think when we look at metabolic dysfunction as the precursor for chronic disease, yeah, sure, we can quote a lot of statistics and 60% of Americans have one form of chronic disease, 40% have two or more, and obviously, that’s leading to a tremendous amount of suffering on the individual level.
(16:48):
But that suffering is not just confined to the individual, and we think of all of the families that need to take care of people who have chronic disease as they are kind of limp along this kind debilitating path. And we think about the societal financial expense, $4 trillion worth of annual sick care. And then we just had an election in this country. And I really think that a lot of the societal inflammation that we experience in this country with polarization around our body politic, if you will, is very, very linked to underlying personal inflammation. And if people are getting up and feeling sick and unable to afford insulin, and increasingly living in cities where main streets have been shut down and the only available food is at a convenience store level, it is really no wonder that a lot of people are angry and that society is very inflamed.
(18:04):
So I really see metabolic health as a societal issue as much as an individual issue. So if there’s anything that you guys could do to tackle moving this conversation into the collective as much as it is an individual pursuit, I think that would be fantastic.
Josh Clemente (18:30):
That’s an awesome note. A lot of themes that we certainly resonate with on bringing social and community elements into the forefront and major features of how this can really have lasting impact. So Jeff, really, really appreciate your perspectives and your time coming here to hang out with the team, just speaking on behalf of all of us, it’s super powerful and it’s really important to have people like yourself supporting the mission. So thank you. If you’d love to stick around for the rest of the meeting, we’ve got a bunch more, and you’re more than welcome, but if not… yeah, once again, thanks for taking the time.
Jeff Krasno (19:04):
Yeah. Thanks for having me and thanks for making such a huge contribution to my own health and wellbeing. It’s really just been an amazing transformation, and my daughters thank you also.
Josh Clemente (19:16):
Awesome. Thanks very much.
Jeff Krasno (19:19):
Okay. Cool.
Josh Clemente (19:20):
All right. Jumping ahead, excited to welcome Adam Tilton to the team. Adam is joining us in the R&D group. He has a deep background, cross-functional engineer covering everything from mechanical to signal processing and data. He’s going to be diving into helping us better understand how multi molecule sensing and analytics can make their way eventually into our platform. And yeah, super stoked to work with Adam on many exciting problems. I will not speak for you, Adam, would love to hear a few words.
Adam Tilton (19:50):
Hey, everybody. Super exciting to be here. Yeah, few words, currently in Portland, on my way down to Austin. Super excited to be in the office with the Levels team, and also because there’s a Formula 1 race in Austin, so big hobby of mine. Yeah, I’m from Illinois, went to school at Illinois. I spent most of my last 10 years in the wearable space around signal processing, embedded in firmware development, ML, backended infrastructure, managing peripherals, BLE peripherals off of mobile devices. So kind of covered a pretty big swath of stuff. And at Levels, I’m stoked, it’s going to be a lot of fun, data analysis, ML, data, infrastructure, all things that I get a kick out of and really enjoy spending time on. And also, I just feel really at home in a small team with a tight mission and vision, and yeah, it’s going to be great. So pumped to be here and happy to answer any questions, if everybody has any, or turn it back over to Josh.
Josh Clemente (20:56):
Well, we got some brisket lovers on the team, so Adam is also a connoisseur there, so we’ll need a brisket channel soon in Comms.
Adam Tilton (21:03):
Working on it. Yeah.
Josh Clemente (21:05):
Adam, stoked to have you. Everybody who has been through onboarding before knows where Adam’s at, reach out. We had a coffee this week, but it’s always great to connect and help people work their way through the onboarding process. So excited to have you here, Adam, and thanks everyone for making a warm welcome.
Adam Tilton (21:22):
Thank you.
Josh Clemente (21:24):
All right. Secondly, I want to welcome Rafael onto the mobile software engineering team. Another awesome addition to the mobile team, Rafael is joining us. Original background is in graphic design, industrial design. He’s been a UX designer. He brings a lot of, again, cross-functional skills that we really need to build in our consumer platform. And so Rafael, would love to hear a few words.
Rafael Lüder (21:48):
Hey, everyone, really excited to be here. I have my interesting story joining Levels. I was on the wait list and I was really excited for trying a product, and I got an email, it was actually an email to join the team or go through the process for hiring. So that was really exciting. So yeah, looking forward to getting to know everyone and get my hands on some code. I had a chance to get my Levels account a few days before I joined, so I’ve been using it for about two weeks now. And yeah, it was exactly what I thought it would be. It was also a little scary because it really made me really aware of some of the habits that were not necessarily so good about my eating habits and things like that, but it’s great insight. So I already feel like the impact there. So yeah, thanks for having me and looking forward to working together.
Josh Clemente (22:51):
Awesome. Ditto. Welcome to the team, both of you and to everyone. Rafael again has a coffee chat right after this call or this meeting. So hop in, say hi and make yourselves available as he gets through onboarding. Looking forward to working together. All right. Culture and kudos. So got a couple shout-outs this week. First off, I want to shout out Hao, this is coming from the eng team, but there’s just a ton of appreciation for how Hao always jumps in and always looks for the best solution and is never fixated on sunk costs. What he’s built already is willing to reassess based on better information, newer information, and is just always willing to just jump in selflessly and contribute as a generous team member. So shout out, Hao. He’s been here a long time and just really grinds workout, it’s awesome to see. Secondly, Taylor. So Taylor has really been crushing it.
(23:47):
Generally, I think the interface between engineering and support has really improved with Taylor’s ability to flex between that and share information rapidly, and build a cohesive picture of what’s happening, what’s changing, and how we can get better. And so we’ve had a ton of appreciation for Taylor joining the team very recently, but just really stepping in a big way. Sunny also doing an amazing job, understanding how the machinery is changing, understanding the data structures of new systems like e-commerce, and just adapting in real time, and just keeping a very positive, and if I may, Sunny perspective, as things are changing and it can get quite frustrating sometimes, but really just appreciate the goodwill, the good faith that has maintained constantly. Another shout out for Chris. Huge resource, fount of knowledge across many things. Might’ve seen Chris jumping in and helping out with data science requests on backend data logs, and food logs, and how that might make its way into product features, and just doing an amazing job of constantly contributing across so many surfaces and it is not missed. We all see it and appreciate it. Thank you, Chris.
(24:55):
And then I want to highlight Adam who just started and I think he may have the record for the earliest use of Athena. His first delegation was on day two, and that I think is a record that’s going to be hard to beat. So just jumping in, embracing culture ASAP and making use of the scaling tools that we have at our disposal. Awesome to see both is well for the future and as our culture continues to grow. So thanks everyone on this slide. Obviously, there’s a ton that goes on behind the scenes that we aren’t all able to see, but yeah, thanks everyone for doing your part. All right, hand it over to Miz.
Michael Mizrahi (25:35):
Switched up a new order. All right. So we are moving from Threads to Comms, and I’m having a Tom issue where my emoji’s not showing, but picture the Threads emoji on the far left. We’ve been talking about this for a few months, so I wanted to take a few minutes just to chat about it because the time is here and it’s coming. So Threads as we know it, this legacy version of Threads that we’ve been in, is being deprecated by the Threads team. They’ve been working on a new version that incorporates a lot of their learnings, honestly, from us as a very vocal customer, and also just from their market research. And the new version is more like a Twitter, where you post short updates and then those can become Threads. It’s really interesting. But I think the decision that we made a few months back when we saw some of the performance and some of the product decisions is that we want to control our own destiny here and be our own customer, and not just be another customer on the list for something that’s as important to us as team communication.
(26:27):
That’s a pretty critical thing to how we work, how we get things done, how we collaborate. And it’s something that I think everyone here knows we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. And so we want to own some of that, and that led to us deciding to build our own tool here. So big picture, the timeline is somewhat flexible. They released their new product about two months ago and we have some time to get off of the legacy version, they’re going to keep it up and running, but as you all know, the performance is falling flat. If you’re used to it, you might not realize it, but it’s really struggling here. And so we have about maybe, let’s say, two months until we get another nudge over email saying, “Are you migrating or getting out?” Which means that the sooner we move over to our own tool, the longer time we have to overlap and reference old archived Threads and the better off the transition will be.
(27:16):
So it’s a movable goalpost, but living in both worlds is also painful. And so the idea is for us to move over by the end of next week all of our core communications. We’ll have Threads on the background for anything that breaks or things that we need to reference, but we’ll set that as a goal. If we don’t hit it, it’s okay, but we do want to start moving so that we get out of this two tool world. A bunch of teams are already in there. I think the big ones that need to have some traction are support and engineering, those are the last two to come in, and so that traction will really get things moving. But a handful of teams have been in here for a number of weeks now and are fully working that way. It’s been interesting to see, I think R&D is a good example of that.
(27:55):
Some of the people… sorry. Well, so yeah, people, Nicole, myself, Riley, Zach have been using it. Sam, Josh, leads across the board have been using it as a primary tool. So there is a lot of activity in there. For some visibility on what kind of work we’re spending on this, it seems like a lot to build our own tool and to replicate a Slack, or a Threads, or one of these other Comms tools. So we’ve got John, who’s a contract engineer. He’s on this full-time, on an hourly basis as a contractor, and has been focusing and even product managing the whole thing. Roland from Athena is managing release notes, onboarding, feature requests, aggregating all of those pieces. Sam spent some time directing this on the order of three to four hours a week, and you can see that pretty transparently in some of the looms and some of the guidance that he’s giving John.
(28:48):
And then I’m spending a little bit of time on it with reminders and migration. But on the whole, this is a pretty self-sufficient project and it’s amazing to see what we can achieve with that level of resourcing. It’s been a number of months, there’s been a lot of work into it, but yeah, on the whole, it’s been manageable. We may need to pull in our own resources just to kind of pinch it as like a DevOps thing. There’s a little bit of overflow to build our own tools, but that’ll be as needed and if we have excess capacity. So that’s not the primary approach here. A few things to remember. This needs to work for everyone. It’s a communications tool. It’s something that’s universal. It’s not like a specialized tool like a Figma for engineers… for designers, or GitHub for engineers, or a code editor.
(29:34):
Email has to work for everyone, communications, and that’s why it’s so hard for some of these email clients to actually innovate because they have to hit a common denominator. And that’s what is interesting about Superhuman, is that they were able to bring Inbox Zero to everyone and push forward some feature sets. But it’s also important to realize that different people work differently, and our tool definitely has some opinions. Opinions are okay, but we need to make sure that it meets everyone where they’re at, and totally understanding different people have different preferences. So feedback’s invited. We have full control over the tool. If you don’t like something, we can change it. If enough people are unhappy about a particular feature, that’s adjustable, and it’s really nice to have that power. So all of that feedback, please post to Comms meta, and just a peek ahead, a few of the current top feature requests priority inbox so that you can see beyond P1 to P2, so you don’t have to feel like you have to triage everything, is on the map and coming pretty soon.
(30:33):
The pro-tip that I’ve been been using, if you’d like, is just command K fomo, for focus mode, and configure your focus mode to hide P1, so you can peek ahead and see what you want to. And it actually is a really good way to focus on a batch of communications. Those that need your response, those that are just updates. So that’s a cool workaround until that priority inbox is built. Mobile friendliness is on the roadmap. Heard this from a few people that, “While the philosophy is you should do your work while you’re at your computer, and when you’re away, do your own thing,” the inverse also exists. Having mobile access lets people disconnect with comfort. I heard this loud and clear from Chris, which I appreciate. I think Alan has shared some of the same sentiment with me, and that’s a good thing, that’s okay.
(31:15):
In the meantime, the way this works is that if you configure your profile to send you notifications, if you get an urgent message, a triple at, then you’ll get a text message and you can have some peace of mind that you can access that, and maybe even load it to see it, even if the dimensions and an aspect ratio’s all off. That’s okay, but yeah, loud and clear mobile support coming soon and will at least allow for some more visibility. And then other things to wrap up, give it an honest try, provide lots of feedback. It is a change in philosophy for some people in keyboard shortcuts and Inbox Zero working. But what’s important about these tools is that everyone needs to work the same way. To the earlier points of why these often don’t work is because, if you have a ticketing system and some people close their tickets and some people don’t, the whole thing falls apart.
(32:04):
That’s why a lot of these project management tools don’t really get traction. So we all have to work in the same way in order for this to be effective, and that’s the tricky part. So we’re going to give it an effort, and in the meantime, if you have questions and feedback, post it there liberally, it’s all being aggregated and categorized, and I’ll see you on Comms.
Josh Clemente (32:23):
Great update, yeah. From someone who is almost fully on Comms now, I can just say that there is light at the end of the tunnel. It is a platform made in the image of what we’ve learned and what we embrace as Levels, communication style that we care about, minimizing distraction, deep work. It really is quite promising. It’s exciting to see something that we can continue to shape and not rely on external teams that are maybe not sharing the same values. So yeah, plus one. All right. Main thing. Levels shows you how food affects your health. Everyone’s working toward this. If you don’t feel that you are, raise the concern. Top objectives haven’t changed, member retention, new member acquisition, member health improvement. You’ll see this showing up in our demand capture, demand generation, and our research and product development. Product is our top priority in Q4.
(33:13):
We’re shifting focus in real time towards demand capture as well. So lots of memos, circulating lots of projects in flight here. On the functional groups, these are the overarching taglines or goals, so to speak. OKRs stack up through this. Everyone should really understand your functions, OKRs, and how they apply to this overarching top three company objectives. So if you don’t, definitely chat with your function lead to get more familiar with these and to really understand that context. All right-
Michael Mizrahi (33:44):
I think our culture slide might have gotten slipped.
Josh Clemente (33:47):
Oh, interesting. I think you’re right. Do a quick refresh here and see if it comes back. There we go. Sorry about that. This is Maxine, today she’s going to take our culture token of the day.
Maxine Whitely (34:05):
Hey, yeah, let me know if y’all can’t hear me, my internet is going in and out. But today, we’re talking about close the loop. So when I first started at Levels, I thought of closing the loop as just making sure I responded to Threads messages in a timely manner. And I think this is a component of the principle, but I think it’s come to me more than just getting back to people on time. In my opinion, closing the loop means really fully completing your work. So [inaudible 00:34:32] removing the mental burden for a decision or a to-do in the future. And in practice, that looks like making sure your understandings, and your next steps, and future improvements are all documented and communicated in a way that gives others visibility into your process and outcomes. So a few examples of this, if you’re working on a pull request and you’re making a trade-off that should be reviewed in the future, you can create a ticket and link it right in the code.
(34:56):
If you make a decision that you want to double check at a later date, you can create a calendar event for yourself six months from now. And one more, if you decide not to work on something or change course for something, document why and share with other stakeholders about how you got to that decision, because these little actions all add up to a truly closed loop where your work is complete, other people understand what you did, and there’s a lower mental burden on future you and future teammates. And that’s closing the loop in my opinion. Thanks.
Josh Clemente (35:25):
I love that. Closing the loop for yourself as well as others, it’s absolutely true, building those feedback loops for behavior. Awesome. Thank you, Maxine. I really love these. Okay. Jumping forward, handing it off to you, Alan.
Alan McLean (35:45):
Awesome. So design-focused update. Excited to share some stuff that we’re working on here. All right, go to the next slide, please. So I’ve broken this up into three basic chapters. Got some small tactical updates that we’ve been working on this week. We’ll talk a little bit about scaling design and some explorations that we’re on. Next slide. So just some small things as it relates to Levels levels, we’ve seen these more exciting and dynamic onboarding experiences for things like the score and the app in general with the wavy lines showing glucose responses and things like that. We’ve got a bit of an update here for Levels levels. It’s a bit more simple, it’s not interactive in the same way, but I think onboarding is one of these experiences where some people definitely just tap through it and ignore it, and that’s fine, for those folks, we’re going to have more integrated onboarding experiences. But just as a baseline, we want to start with something that essentially explains the fundamental concepts, and we’re going to reuse these in other contexts too, like in the Levels levels experience.
(36:52):
So we wrap that up this week, we’ve got that underway. Here’s just a couple screens from it, and basically talks through the concepts of metabolically healthy food, stable glucose, and getting activity and adequate rest. So next slide. We’re also iterating on some of these views. You’re going to be seeing in the app now. And there’s something really special about actually seeing it in the app, you get a feel for how it works, and what’s working, and what isn’t. One of the things that we’ve heard feedback on is that it’s actually not totally clear when you’re done this checklist. And so we want to better indicate that on the progress for you on the left.
(37:31):
So there’ll be a little check marks that fill in as you get it. And then we want to also do a better job of indicating what applies to each category. So you’ll have those default states on the right, shows the things that you can do to check this off, and then improve your insulin sensitivity, and so on. Next slide, please. Okay. A fun project that I think we’ve been hearing about for quite a while, and we’ve always wanted to do, which is trends. Long-term trends change over time. We talk about this map metaphor quite a bit, where we put you on this map and we’re providing a GPS to help you get to where you want to go. And we think trends can play a big role in that, and also developing more investment in the product experience.
(38:16):
So next slide, please. So Viktor’s been doing some really great explorations here. Some of this is an evolution of my data, where we’re taking up some of the data that we know people care about, things like the day score, average glucose, and then also looking at just basic change over time. And then down the road, we’ll be exploring actually more along the lines of patterns and correlations. So when I sleep, what happens to my glucose response? When I get more activity, what happens? If we can better connect those lines, I think we’re going to start to see more reinforcement around great choices. And honestly, users have been asking for this for a while, so it’s an exciting phase to be in.
(39:00):
Next slide, please. So we all love the web profile page. I swear to God, on day two, someone pinged me and said, “Alan, you got to look at the web profile page.” And I have intentionally not looked at it because it looks like this. And not trying to diss anyone here who made it, but it’s been around for a while, and we all love it in its own special way because it’s so functional, and so we appreciate that. However, it’s going away, we’re going to replace it. Next slide, please. Again, we’re calling Viktor’s work victories. So this is a nice example of that, starting to evolve the screens a little bit. We’re going to provide more functionality for users. There’s going to be mobile versions so you can open in the app and so it looks natural.
(39:51):
Next slide, please. Just some basic stuff too that we don’t really do all that well, like indicating if your subscription has expired, your status, and the product experience, also linking off to your data, getting started guide. These things are available but they’re hard to see currently. Next slide. And some… oh, yeah, updating profile information, obvious stuff. Next slide, though I think is more interesting, in that, eventually, we’re going to get to a place where we can manage your subscription. We get a lot of support tickets now getting refreshes, getting more sensors. These are the kinds of things that eventually we want to be able to surface. And so we’ve got some designs for it. Viktor’s done a great job, another victory.
(40:34):
Next slide. So in terms of the world of explorations, there’s actually a lot on my plate in this area, which is really exciting. I’d love to get back into the more broader explorations around what this product is and what it can do for people. And so we’re looking pretty expansively at what’s the role of social in the product, looking at other products that are in our domain in the health and wellness space. And left here an example of a sweat program. And some of these fundamentals that drive a lot of engagement and interest and entertainment, such as TikTok, and Instagram, and so on. No designs to share for this yet, but I’m looking forward to developing that. Next slide. So one thing that we think a lot about is how do you build identity in the product? How do you have this represent you, your choices, and your relationship to your health and wellness?
(41:26):
And so this is a bias. All the engineers know, probably not that many other people know, this is essentially a heat map of the things that you’re doing. So we could start looking at maybe your stability, exercise, food, these fundamentals that are related to Levels levels. And so the better it is that day… Actually, maybe I should explain this first. Each column is a day, and each row is one of the metrics. And so if you do really great on that day, we can highlight it and fill it in like a heat map. This is very similar to a GitHub profile where it shows the amount of commits you’ve pushed in a given day. There’s some interesting patterns that emerge here. This is all real data. You see, some people, they don’t log exercise or food, but they’re rock solid all day.
(42:09):
That’s the second person. Maybe look at the bottom, someone who’s logging lots of great food, no exercise, and they have really high stability. And so we think we can play with this and create some investment and idea of how you’re doing. Next slide. So in that vein, also explorations around, we’ve got this badging system. Levels levels, as you do more great things, your level progresses, you’re collecting these points and so on. But we’ve got this badge at the top and it’s not that compelling. It shows a number of increments. Maybe we go hire someone to make a hundred different images, a hundred plus. I think though that there’s this really rich opportunity around identity to somehow find a way to visualize what’s happening during that level in a more interesting and compelling way, something that’s maybe not as still artistic, very similar to this badge, but looking at essentially fingerprinting what you do, and then you get a level. And this would be very tuned for social and would be fun, and hopefully, evolve as you’re in the experience in a more creative and interesting way.
(43:16):
Next slide. Oh, that was the slide meant to explain that… Oh, well. Let’s see. Next slide. Okay. So we’re looking a lot at scaling design. There’s obviously only two of us right now, so we’re looking at how we could potentially use Athena to help us do some of this design QA work. That design QA is essentially, we come up with designs, engineering builds it, and that’s always an interpretation or an interpolation. It’s not always going to look exactly the same as what we design, and that’s just natural because you’ve got different screen sizes, different devices, and so frankly, design always designs for the optimal. And we get to this place where it fills in with data and is starting to handle different screen sizes. And so we have to jump in at the end and make sure it actually lines up with the mocks.
(44:03):
That’s quite a taxing and painful process for us because we’ve usually transitioned to another project, because we’re quite busy, but we think that maybe Athena can do some of this and potentially look at the before and after file tickets, and potentially boost the quality of the experience and free up some time for us. Finally, there’s a new design rule. We’re going to post this pretty soon, potentially take advantage of this Twitter, Facebook, et cetera, et cetera thing. I think there’s a bunch of compelling candidates that are opening up into the workforce. And so we’re going to try to take advantage of that and expand the capacity of the design team so that we can get a bit more work in the pipelines. And that is it for design this week. Thanks, everybody.
Josh Clemente (44:50):
Love that update. Excited for the team to continue growing, and lots of motivating stuff there. So thanks design team. All right. We’ve got an editorial dive. Haney.
Mike Haney (45:02):
All right. New Friday forum rule, nobody has to follow Alan, this is very unfair, but I will do my best. This is the boring words part, not the pretty visuals part. You can jump to the next slide. So keeping with what other folks have done on these sections the last few weeks, I’m going to take today to do an editorial overview. So this is a little bit of just what we’re up to here and why we do editorial for especially a lot of the new people who may not know as much about what we’re doing here, and then in future Friday forums, we’ll dive into more specific products. So go to the next slide. So I thought it might be useful just to level set that editorial is actually not the same as content. I use the word interchangeably all the time, and I probably will on this presentation.
(45:44):
But I think of content more as everything that we produce as a company in words and audio and video, and really, every team does that, community research nuggets, insight cards, social posts. I think of editorial as a subset of that. We’re just the branch of content here whose mandate is focused solely on education. And there’s some principles that I’ve listed there that we try to hold up to keep that mission in mind. But I would say, what’s interesting here is that because some of these principles about being research-based and being intellectually honest were established really early on by Sam and Casey and the rest of the founding team, I think here, those principles pervade the content that happens across these other departments, not just in editorial. So I think the difference between editorial and content here is, it is less between us and the other departments and more between how we do it and how other companies do it.
(46:31):
So next slide. To that point, I thought it might be useful just to say something about content marketing versus editorial. For the most part, when you see content on other company sites, I threw up WHOOP here as an example, but mostly, what they’re doing is content marketing, which means, essentially, they’re writing articles, and they could be either really selly articles or something that looks closer to what we do, but the intent is really to get you to buy something. It’s really a conversion tool. It’s really to say, “Our product’s great, our company is great,” or, “Hey, you really, really need this.” We do something much more akin to, or at least what we aim for, is something much more akin to New York Times, Vox, Runner’s World. Our real goal is education. We try very hard not to make it about, “Hey, you really need our product.” “Hey, our company is really awesome.” It’s much more about, “Hey, you should know about this thing called metabolic health.”
(47:16):
And there are some other differences in terms of quality and audience, and that kind of thing, that span these two, but just knowing that that right bucket is very much where we try to live, and it’s a little different than what other companies. So next slide. There we go. So why? Why do we do things this way? I think mission is really the thing I think about the most in terms of editorial, that if you think about the company’s mission to reverse the metabolic health crisis, I describe that colloquially as we’re just trying to make folks healthier and our product is a phenomenal way to do that. But to reach the scale that we want to reach, it can’t be the only thing we do. And content is the other really big product, if you will, we have to help achieve that mission. And it’s really critical, because as we know, most people still don’t know anything about metabolic health, and they certainly don’t know what they can do to improve it.
(48:04):
And so that’s really what we’re trying to do with the content side of things here. It’s really a tool to help us achieve the broader mission of just making people healthier. But hey, it also has a growth benefit as well, which is, nobody’s going to buy a product around metabolic health if they don’t know what metabolic health is, if we haven’t done that work in the beginning. So next slide. So why do we do it the way we do it? Why do we focus on editorial and not say content marketing? And it really comes down to trust. So it’s a completely natural reaction to look at our blog and say like, “Why don’t we put more buy buttons in the middle of our article? Why don’t we put join buttons on it? We have all this traffic coming in, wouldn’t it be great to do it?” Well, the reason we do that is because we really want people to understand, when they come and read these articles, that these articles are designed with the intent of education.
(48:49):
We’re not just trying to trick them into buying a CGM, or even just convince them to buy a CGM from us, or to join our product. And when we start to put things like buy buttons or pepper in articles, like Five Reasons You Need a CGM Today, what we’re doing is subtly communicating to people that we have a different intent, that our motive here is really about getting you to join the company. And then you start to approach that information a little bit skeptically. You can get great information from companies, but you’ll discount it a little bit because you’re going to, “Well, of course they’re telling me glycemic variability matters because they want me to put on this device, it’s going to tell me about glycemic variability.” So instead, we try really hard to communicate to people in every way we can that this is independently reported, fully vetted information that’s really just aimed at making them smarter.
(49:36):
But again, it also has a growth benefit to it, which is, if we can earn their trust doing editorial this way, they’re going to be much more likely to buy from us. And I think that’s something that I’ve come to learn over the couple of years I’ve been here, in particular as we’ve moved into growth mode, that that trust, that deep relationship, that nurtured relationship we’re making with our customers is a really important part of our whole growth funnel. It’s not sort of incidental, it’s not that we’re doing editorial as just charitable side project over on the side, these things all work together. And also, I really believe people can’t make healthy choices around bad information, and there’s plenty of bad information out there, bias information, skewed information in the health space. And again, if we want people to be healthier, we got to give them good information, and hopefully, information they believe to make that change.
(50:23):
Next slide. Finally, the other reason we do all these editorials is eyeballs. We all know eyeballs, emails, orders, eyeballs is really the main growth output of all the editorials. These are just some stats around it. I think the 44% of organic search in that pie chart in the middle is really interesting, it’s grown a bit over time. But what that means is, about half the people coming in are people who haven’t heard Levels. They’re searching something else because trying to get healthier. They’re trying to learn about something and we sort of side door them into our world because they landed us, thanks to an organic search result, and our keywords and that kind of thing are going up over time. So again, the gamble, the bet, the idea that we’re testing here is that doing editorial this way, achieving those last couple of points I made about having trust in the articles will bring more quality eyeballs.
(51:14):
We could probably get 2X, 5X this traffic doing a purely SEO driven content strategy, where we just cranked out as many articles as we could with a much lower quality bar, just trying to grab every search term that would be even remotely in our universe. We could get more traffic. I think our theory is that that would be very low quality traffic. A, it wouldn’t be helping our mission because we wouldn’t make people healthier, but also, it wouldn’t be the kind of folks who are going to convert. We’re going to make that behavior change, you’re going to stick with us over time. And so that’s the big experiment we’re running here. And so far, I think it’s working, but I’m super excited to see where this goes over the next couple of years.
(51:51):
Next slide. So quickly, I’ll just touch on how we do what we do. You guys have probably heard this phrase from me before of what I call the Levels editorial prayer, but it’s how we sort of bucket all the content we do. So the first part of the sentence is, Metabolic health Is A Thing. This means all the articles we do, that are just explainers, where we’re just unpacking what is glycemic variability, what is metabolic health, what is insulin resistance, getting over that first bucket. Next slide. It Matters. That’s the part where we connect all these concepts we just told you about to the things you have heard of or you might be thinking about yourself, like migraines, or cancer, or Alzheimer’s disease, or erectile dysfunction, or fertility in general, or joint health. That’s the great thing about metabolic health, it has an intersection with lots of other stuff. And so that’s where we try to connect that dot. Next slide. And then the fun stuff, You Can Do Something About It.
(52:42):
I think Jeff set this up perfectly and what he was talking about how actionable metabolic health actually is. Once we get people to understand it’s a thing, once we get them to understand it matters, then we can actually give them a whole bunch of things they can do, and crucially, a whole bunch of things they can do that doesn’t require them to buy our product. That’s how I think content can help so much with our mission, is that there’s just so many incremental steps people can take before they ever take the leap of signing up for a product or putting on a CGM to improve their health. And so we always say in editorial, “If somebody reads something we do, they walk into a grocery store and they make a better decision, we win.” That’s really the metric success. So just as a compositional standpoint, this makes up about half of what we do, the advice side stuff, the service, and then the other buckets are about a quarter each, because people just tend to like advice more than they like homework, and there is so much to write about here. So next slide.
(53:33):
I won’t go through each one of these steps, but the actual mechanics of how do things go from those high level principles to being words on the blog? All I would say about this sequence of steps here is that this is very similar to what you’d find in any kind of an editorial newsroom, whether again that’s Vox, or a magazine, or something like that. The editors really come up with the ideas, taking a whole bunch of different inputs, we assign them to journalists, we work really closely with them to try to shape the articles, we do really careful edits on it, usually, a couple of different rounds of revision, then we fact check everything, that’s something we do pretty uniquely. Other sites like Healthline and those do a fact-check, I think ours goes deeper. Our fact-checkers literally report the entire story. They read every single study that is linked in that article.
(54:14):
And as you’ve seen, some of ours have dozens of studies. They are very careful about telling us if we’ve misrepresented the study, if there’s a better study out there, if the study is an animal study and we haven’t said as much, or if it has a low sample size and we didn’t say as much. And then I just wanted to put up these core principles over on the right there that shape how we do a lot of the content that we do. And I won’t go through each one of them, but a couple to call out that really make us different is explain the physiology. This is something that Casey and I worked on a lot in the early days of content, built on the theory that if we really help people understand what’s going on inside their body, that’s much more likely to lead to behavior change, and it’s much more likely to stick with them.
(54:52):
And so it’s really hard to do and nobody else is really doing this, the health lines of the world are not getting into the cellular mechanisms that are going on or the hormonal pathways. And we try, and it’s hard to do it and not make it wonky, but that’s one of the things we try to do. And the other thing I’ll just mention here, shout out to Casey for the phrase, add to the internet. This is something she said early on when we were coming up with ideas, is what are we adding to the internet? And it’s the idea that there’s a lot of health information out there and we should make sure that things we’re doing are things where we can provide a unique value, a unique take, a unique perspective, a unique synthesis, something like that. And so we try to put all of our stuff through that filter. Almost done. Next slide.
(55:32):
So I won’t go through each one of these, we’ll dive into these in the future, but these are some of the things we’re working on in the next year. I would say that the TLDR here is, we’ve built a really impressive library, we’ve got close to 400 articles out there. We’ve covered a lot of the big milestones. I think we’ve proven we can make an editorial site. I think the next year, we really want to make sure that the site is working for the people who are coming there, whether they’re coming through search or other channels, that they’re finding the answers to what they need, that it’s easy to navigate, that the search works really well, that we’re answering the questions they’re asking the internet. If anybody’s asking the internet anything about metabolic health, they should find us, and we should know what those are so we can write articles in our high quality vetted way so that that’s the information that people are finding.
(56:11):
So that’s really what we’re focusing on, I think. One more slide. Yeah. So if you want to read more about this, there’s two big memos out there where you can read all my words. And these are complimentary, one didn’t replace the other, but if you want to learn more about what we’re up to, check out those memos. I think that’s it.
Josh Clemente (56:30):
Fantastic. I would love to see the world of consumer product adapt this philosophy. This should be the explainer for how to do educational distribution. I don’t know. It’s so refreshing to hear the depth and quality. And a lot of this stuff is behind the scenes for so many of us here, so thanks for surfacing it. We should definitely clip this and share it somewhere more consistently because it’s such important work. But thank you editorial team. All right. Hiring updates. We’ve got Juan joining us beginning of next week. And that is all the new members joining for now. And then we have a general software engineering role open, and general R&D engineering role open, as well as just our general talent pool. So if you or someone you know is interested in a role here at Levels, check out levels.link/careers. And we do have that upcoming design role, which Alan is shaping, so I do want to put that on the radar. We’ll have more information available, it’ll show up on this slide next week. But if you know somebody you want to refer them in ahead of time, please do.
(57:35):
Okay. We are right about on time here. I’m going to stop the share and just briefly say that that was an awesome meeting. I really loved the energy here and all the awesome stuff that’s just in flight, and just an appreciation to look back on some of the teams and what’s going on. Super exciting. Anyone else want to slip in a personal professional contribution this morning? All right. Well, we’ve got 60 seconds left. Enjoy your weekends. Ben, jump in.
Ben Grynol (58:09):
Just going to say, subjectively, love these longer updates where we get deep dives on design and editorial. They just feel so much fuller to get the depth and understanding. So overall, seems to be going well, but a lot better than the thin, two-minute, hammer out whatever you can. So I’m stoked on that.
Josh Clemente (58:27):
Yeah, live is great too. Miz?
Michael Mizrahi (58:30):
Yeah. Onsite this week with Chris, Priya, and Taylor at Truepill. So just massive thanks to Chris for organizing that. And it was really awesome to see everyone in action and get to spend time together. So that was awesome.
Josh Clemente (58:42):
Very cool. Yeah, I liked the imagery there. So throwback to visiting Truepill in the very beginning before we had an infrastructure. So it’s cool to see. All right, everybody, have a great weekend and thank you for all the awesome work. See you in Comms.