Josh Clemente (00:00:00):
Okay. November 12th, 2021. Pretty exciting week, especially yesterday. We kicked off our series A with a fundraise or a crowd funding raise component. The intention here was to allow up to two and a half million in allocation for our early members to participate. And it’s nice to say this was a wild success. We rolled it out on WeFunder and watched in real time as we hit that limit in 77 minutes. And then we felt that that was unfair because there’s no chance that even a majority of our members have been able to see that notification. So we doubled the allocation and that was filled by 4:30 PM Eastern, about five and a half hours after we launched it. So this was just an incredible success. I want to shout out to the 1000 plus member investors who participated in this. Everyone who boosted it. It’s just amazing. There’s a little JIF right here of the buzz.
(00:01:01):
So there’s a buzz page on Wefunder, just people leaving comments as they were submitting their reservations for this investment. And I spent all night last night just scrolling through this over and over again. It was just surreal to see. There’s so much organic true excitement for what we’re doing and people are so excited to be able to participate and thankful that we gave them that opportunity. And I want to highlight, I personally felt that this was going to take weeks to fill. This is not to say anything negative about our members, but just I anticipated that to fill $2.5 million was going to be a campaign. And this was a single communication sent at 11:00 AM Eastern on a Thursday with no podcast, no amp up, no marketing before it. And in 77 minutes that cap was hit. So everyone should feel really, really good about this. This was amazing and I want to thank anybody who’s watching this who participated. It’s really meaningful to us all. We were like, yesterday was a big day of excitement on our team.
Sam Carcos (00:02:03):
Yeah, it’s also worth noting that the cap was $25,000. Actually, thought initially that we didn’t put the cap, there was an error, but it just came in that quickly and there were so many 100, $500 tax.
Josh Clemente (00:02:19):
Yes, that’s a really great point. This was not big cap investors taking the whole round. It was truly people who were putting in what they could to participate in what we’re building. And that’s the intention. That’s why we have the 25K cap on there and it’s just really, really gratifying and validating. And special shout out to Zach for setting this up with Wefunder and making this all happen. There was a lot that went on behind the scenes and although none of us anticipated the pace at which this would go, I think overall it was clearly a huge success.
(00:02:54):
Okay. On to the other line item. So updated audio strategy memo. This will define our next phase of podcast. Podcast has been going phenomenally well. We now have Tony on board. We have bandwidth for more projects. We need to lay out the next phase for this and other audio projects.
(00:03:09):
Culture 4.0 project. This has been underway, so it’ll be in production next week. We got in-app sign up in engineering today. So this’ll be really an exciting opportunity for people to use the app to sign up for levels. Got guided looping phase. I think just the phase one proposal is underway. I’ll let David fill us in on that.
(00:03:31):
HERMS launch. So this’ll significantly improve the iOS boot up pace for our iOS app. Thanks Justin. We hit four weeks in a row of 97 to 98% member happiness. So this is a streak that is not… This is just not a fluke at this point. So that’s a mic dropping moment for the member ops or member success team. Thank you for continuing to just blow us away with this log specific icons launch. This is part of the structured data and tagging initiative. We rolled out a new metabolic score and what we learned from this, we’ll touch on it in just a minute, but it revealed how much people are indexing on our scores, how much they care about the data and the way that we presented to them, which was a really valuable lesson to us. So a lot of good work went into that. A lot of great lessons will come out of it.
(00:04:16):
PR for the ancillary testing results page was submitted, the first eight internal appointments. Several of us on this call have been signed up to have their in-home phlebotomy appointment and we should be live, I’m sure JM will have an update, in 17 states possibly today. So we’re moving quick on that. It’s exciting. And then no major update on the IRB study/studies continuing to move forward. This should be a scalable opportunity to increase the data set for research and for our general purposes. And then Zach participated in Digital Health Center of Excellence panel. This was really cool. He’s getting quite a bit of exposure and also is carrying the banner for levels across every portion of the business that we were exposed to. So love that Zach is out there sharing knowledge.
(00:05:00):
We have a whole new level. We recorded with Rick Johnson, we’ve got Vinet and we’ve got Austen McGuffy from Building Generational Health. All of that’s happening in real time. And then you’ll see a lot of familiar faces here around the crowdfunding portion here. So VIPs that are either participating or potentially participating in both levels as affiliates and influencers or as investors. So a lot of exciting stuff happening.
(00:05:25):
And then just some more hype on Twitter. A lot of people that were just so excited to participate in sharing how this affected them. And one in particular, this is one I wanted to highlight from the buzz. This person had improved their A1C by a full point within three months. They hit their goal weight at six months. They’re now a year in. Their body fat percentage has improved even further. Their A1C is down to 5.8 and that’s why they’re investing in levels.
(00:05:50):
So it’s like this is a transformation in their health, which they attribute to us. So everyone should feel really, really good about what we’re all working for. With that, want to welcome Austen. So Austen is an investor in Levels co-founder and CEO of Lambda School, which if you don’t know about Lambda, you should definitely check it out. It’s a technical coding school which uses an income share arrangement to allow students to get their education, get a new career without having to take on a massive debt burden in advance. And it’s really, it’s the future of education in my opinion. I’ve been following it for years. Really excited to have you on the call, Austen, and love to hear some thoughts.
Austen Allred (00:06:30):
Awesome. Thanks for having me. Good to see you all. Big, big Levels fan. Literally. Oh my gosh, wow that t-shirt from the Kickstarter. That was 2016. That’s pretty cool. Let’s see. Yeah, I think Levels is one of the coolest products ever and really excited to see where you guys take it and see what next phases of getting data on people looks like. Really, really cool.
Josh Clemente (00:07:04):
Yeah. One of the other fun facts is when levels came out of stealth mode, we put a website up and we had first had a public presence, Austen tweeted I think a screenshot of Levels of the app and this is when we were bare bones basically just out of pork tacos phase. And he posted a screenshot and literally our wait list went nuts. We were all losing our minds because Austen’s got a really strong following. A lot of great tech people, a lot of VCs that care a lot. And our wait list and the value of it went from zero to, I don’t know, thousands basically overnight. I remember this was maybe December 31st or New Year’s Day 2020. And it was huge. It was a big inflection point. I’ll never forget it. So Austen, shout out for being the one to kick that off.
Austen Allred (00:07:52):
That’s awesome. I realize, I mean I knew I drove some signups. I didn’t realize it was that level of criticality. I suppose. [inaudible 00:08:03] You would’ve, I mean, let’s be real. You don’t have a wait list problem or at least you haven’t for a long time. The problem is working through that. But yeah, happy to… I mean look, I think if I take a step back and think about why I invested in Levels and why I was one of the earliest users, it is so incredibly difficult to get any real data on anything that is happening physically. And really the best we have right now is weight or weird body fat measurements that are difficult to get and everybody is flying blind. Everything physically. We just have no idea unless you go do incredibly expensive, incredibly invasive lab tests once a month, which nobody does.
(00:08:54):
I think just the prospect of getting data outside of what is happening in your body is such an obvious… 20 years from now I think we’ll look back and be like, “Do you remember when we just had no idea what our blood glucose was?” And I’d imagine 20 years from now Levels is measuring and giving you data on much more than just that. But it’s crazy. We know nothing. As a Silicon Valley, data driven person, it’s like it’s not even frustrating. It’s embarrassing that we have no idea. So big fan of Levels, big fan of the mission. I’m fans of the way you guys have all executed. I think it’s been really fun to watch.
Josh Clemente (00:09:37):
Awesome. Really appreciate that, Austen, and appreciate having you in our corner. So more to come. We’re still building as you know. So anyway, thanks for doing what you do as well. It’s producing a pipeline of future potential Levels people, which we’re all quite excited about. So keep at it and thank you for joining us today.
Austen Allred (00:09:57):
Awesome. Yeah, thanks for having me.
Josh Clemente (00:10:01):
Of course. Quick culture slides. This week I got to participate in two East coast meetups, which were both quite fun. Jesse took a detour. Appreciate it man, for coming all the way down despite your feet situation after the marathon. Jesse let us in on some of his travails after finishing that marathon and it was great to hang out right before he went to Mexico. Then we had a big group of us up in New York last week, which is really exciting. So these sorts of things are always fun, putting faces to… Well putting bodies I guess to faces is kind of how it goes. And then we hit two years for Mike D today. So congratulations Mike on and thank you for being a part of Levels for two years now. And Mike Haney will be hitting his one year in just a couple days. So it’s crazy how fast these are coming up and I can’t believe we are having multiple two year anniversaries now.
(00:10:54):
And then got to repeat the prayer. Levels helps you see how food affects your health. Second culture slide. So I’m going to start on the right here and just shout out to Helena and Steph. People have been noticing just how much these two have been embracing cultural values, especially with providing thoughtful feedback and giving their own insights. Even when there’s disagreement involved, it’s always really nuanced and articulated in a way that is intended to push us forward. It’s never passive criticism. They also kind of practice this buddy system during onboard to an amazing extent. Went on remote trips together and just really getting to know each other in real life, which is awesome to watch. So just want to give you two a shout out. Everyone’s really appreciated watching it and love having you two on the team.
(00:11:40):
Middle thing. So we’ve got culture handbooks. This went out last week and this has been in draft for a long time. I really want to thank Miz for all the effort that went into consolidating the principles and what we’re doing here into a single notion reference. The main intention here is to lay out the cultural principles as we’ve sort of been practicing them in the real world rather than just abstractly. And it all comes down to a foundation of assuming best intent among each other. And so this is something that we each have to practice every day, especially in most importantly in a remote asynchronous culture where information is exchanged without the nuance of in-person communication. So assuming best intent is I would say one of the foundational pieces of the culture we’re building here and really, really would love everyone to spend time in the culture handbook, share comments. If there’s something that doesn’t make much sense or we’re using euphemisms or something, please let us know so we can constantly improve this.
(00:12:37):
That’s another major piece of Levels is that everything that we’re building is new and it’s an experiment and it has to be improved continuously. And to bring it all back to some of our newer members, Helena, staff, Jackie, others, there is this element of constantly offering feedback that is intended to improve and that’s something that we really want to continue to pull out.
(00:12:58):
And then the last thing is hitting rewind. So I want to thank everybody that was involved in the new metabolic score that rolled out. There was a lot of work that went into it that rolled out and members reacted and there was a lot of confusion, there was some concerns, some heartache. Mostly what we learned is that this feature really matters to people. Like this is not something that they just see in the app and kind of glance past. It’s something that they’re designing behaviors around, which is the intention.
(00:13:27):
But we didn’t really know that as viscerally until this change went out. The change was to make it easier to interpret and give a zero to 100 range instead of a more arbitrary one. But we’re going to roll this back to give our members the data that they are familiar with and then we’re going to re-approach it with sort of a more maybe structured rollout so that people can understand what’s coming and we can get them comfortable with it. But this is a lesson that we learned that is really valuable. And so this is not something that we should be worried about or upset with ourselves for. This is the type of experiment and lesson learned that we have to do. And it is the exclusive kind of domain of beta and fast moving, build, test, iterate, startup that we are in. So just this is a success. I just want everyone to know that. And there are more of these that are happening in real time. We won’t be able to highlight all of them. This one in particular I think is a really good one. Over to Scott.
Scott Klein (00:14:32):
You all hear me okay? Okay, cool. All right. Quick update on active priorities for November should look roughly the same. The growing design changes have been completed. Also table stakes design have been completed, so these are going to come off of the exception and unplanned list. Everything else should be on track as normal. So sort of membership change with yearly billing and the ancillary services on nutrition and blood work. Core looping getting kicked off in earnest I think next week. So I saw that on the calendar. David scheduled for us to get some of the end stuff rolling and then tagging of course is in progress. Next slide.
(00:15:09):
All right, so let’s dig into scoring. I think Josh’s note was absolutely spot on. There are going to be things that we do that we want to move quickly that we’re going to air on the side of moving quickly and sometimes we’re not going to go completely as planned and that’s okay. What I do want to talk about is a little bit of the nuance for how we approach the decision to roll back because the actual rollback wasn’t necessarily obvious at the start. And so just some numbers I think to sort of orient. So we had about 3 of or 4% of our daily active users write in to tell us, “Hey this is confusing me. I’m a little bit upset with this.” This is a large number. I think for people to take time out of their day to actually open up their email client team at Levels Health or whatever it is. That’s enough for us to definitely start to pay attention to.
(00:15:50):
And if it wasn’t obvious, we actually bundled two separate updates into one. So this is, I want to sort of pick apart the learnings that I think we can take forward. We bundled two updates into one. The first thing was obviously the floor dropping from 55 to zero, but the second thing was that different parts of the score started to weigh more heavily than the others. So I think people were confused about the floor going from 55 to zero. I think some of them didn’t even know that the floor was 55 and so they’re just starting to see scores that they maybe never seen before. So two separate things rolling out at once. I think we could have done a decent, maybe a better job of explaining it, but I think the bundling was part of the confusion. So yesterday we met to talk about where do we go from here?
(00:16:31):
Also important to call out, the previous score was developed in December of last year by a part-time data person. So it’s possible that there’s some inflation already going on that we’re going to have to walk back and talk people through just so that we can get to a better place for what the news score is going to be.
(00:16:47):
All right, so options are sort of number one. We could just plow through and update the app to explain it a little bit better and just tell people, “Hey, this is reality, this is what to do.” Option two is sort of roll it back entirely. The third thing that was proposed was actually just to raise the floor back to 55 and sort of keep the waiting change but just to remove the floor component. It’s a very tempting option because it seems like this might sort of release the pressure valve.
(00:17:11):
Maybe it would buy us a little bit more time to look into the data. But in the end we decided to just do a complete rollback. And so I just wanted to give you an explanation why. So I think what makes Levels magic is our ability to help people facilitate change. But that sword definitely can cut in both directions. And so with this we felt like we were playing with fire and we weren’t that confident that just sort of doing the quick fix was going to make the change.
(00:17:36):
Now, in contrast, we just had a situation like this where we removed the ability to add a food log from the time scrubber. That caused people a lot of frustration and [inaudible 00:17:46] we definitely heard about it a lot. It was a little bit unexpected and in that case we decided to just plow through and fix it as opposed to roll it back immediately.
(00:17:53):
But I think that we’re starting to understand that especially around the score and especially around the way that we provide maybe what they would consider to be judgment or an opinion about the decisions that they’ve made and how they are as a person. These cut a lot more emotionally deep and we just don’t want to be throwing a new dart at the board to see if it sticks and try to do a quick patch. So this wasn’t going to be the funnest thing to do a rollback and re approach, but I think it’s going to at the end, engender a lot of trust in us because it’s going to show A, that we’re listening to the customer base, B, that when we do hit a nerve like this that we don’t just try to play Whac-A-Mole to fix it and just sort get the complaining to stop. It’s that, hey, we actually really do care about this and we’re going to just take a more measured approach and sort of explain the approach along the way. So it’s a little bit of product stuff around scoring.
(00:18:45):
All right, so next steps really quick. We’re going to roll back the changes and then I’m going to send I think an email with maybe a little bit of an explainer video as to why we decided to roll back and what to expect coming up.
(00:18:57):
All right, next slide. Let’s talk about process for a little while. So August and September we saw the introduction of the responsible individual process and we probably ran a ton of projects through it. A lot of them were in flight that just got adopted into it. A lot of new ones kicked off. And now that we’ve had a couple months that we’ve seen some results, so we’ve put a couple of these on hold. So to consolidate resources, this is things like social, some of them are actually starting to finish and launch. This is nutrition, blood work and scoring. And then we’re also in the middle stages where we’re sort of figuring out how to bring these existential parts of the company together. So this is membership in particular and I think we’re starting to feel a little bit of the jostling and jarring and I just wanted to take a moment to A, name that and B, just to say, any new process is usually not that great and that’s okay. That’s an all right thing. This is part of the process of building the process.
(00:19:51):
So in the areas that we’re starting to see where our initial thinking didn’t line up with reality or we need some clarification, we’re sort of going through the machinations or the struggle of getting the process updated. Now, unfortunately it’s not the most fun thing to do. It sucks. It really sucks bad. So let’s talk about why it sucks. I kind of liken this sort of updating the process or the process of the process to driving on a winding road. I’m in the mountains right now.
(00:20:21):
We just literally did this drive and my daughter was in the back the whole time being like, “Daddy, my tummy hurts,” and I didn’t really have a fix for her. It was just like, “Hey, this is just the thing. We’re going through the thing to get to the thing. I know that when we get there it’s going to be a lot of fun and it’s going to be great, but for right now it’s really not fun.” It was not fun for her. She’s not driving, she can’t sort of choose to slow down. A lot of you are not in control of the process. You’re just sort of party to the ride.
(00:20:46):
You can get car sick, we can slow down for a minute, but you’re just going to get car sick a little bit again when we restart. We just have to get through it. And the point is that we’re kind of all in this car together and everybody, like we need… It’s not something that we can just have you check out and not participate in. It’s 100% something that we need everybody to help out. So if you’re feeling a little bit of a despair around the edges, I think that’s fine. I do want you all to know that I’m not worried about it and here’s why I’m not worried about it. So next slide.
(00:21:13):
I’ve floated this idea with a couple of you. It’s actually not like a new idea, but there’s something called the Tuckman model that talks about how teams form, gather together. And you go through these four stages of how you align butts in seats, who’s leaders, all the things of just like, “Hey, we’ve assembled new people with new rules, how are things going to respond to that?” So in short, you sort of have this forming phase where everybody’s excited, “Hey, we’ve got this new responsibility process. This is fantastic, this is great, I’m loving it.” And then reality sets in and you get to this what’s called the storming phase where people have a bunch of really good experience, “Hey, I’ve worked at a startup before, why don’t we try this?” We’re sort of trying to line all these things up together. And also I think the bright eyedness of, “Hey, we’re bringing new projects into a process,” reality’s setting in a little bit. And that’s okay, they just call this a storming process. It’s good to just name it to just know this we’re sort of right here.
(00:22:05):
And then on the backside of this is when we get to sort the normalization phase where everybody knows what the ground rules are and we’re starting to have comfort in them and really operate in them. We’ve sort of gone through the winding road of getting the process established and it’s starting to work for us. And then in the latter stages is really when it starts to perform. So new people that are coming into the process, we’re not going to go back to the storming phase necessarily. They’re just going to sort of slot into it and it’s going to be working okay. So next slide.
(00:22:30):
I just want to reiterate, we’re sort of in this storming phase and we may be here for a couple more weeks or months where the team’s growing. We’re getting a lot of new smart people on board and I think it’s okay and it’s just good for us to just name, “Hey, we’re sort of in this part of the process,” where it’s going to feel like a little jarring and it’s going to suck maybe a little bit and that’s okay.
(00:22:48):
So I need you all to show up to help me out and to help each other out. We’re going to get this to a good spot. I don’t think it’s in a bad spot right now just to be clear. We’re just sort of going through the normal things of how do we come together as a team to do stuff together? So little. I think that’s it. That’s it for me. Oh yeah, next slide.
(00:23:07):
I think we, last week, I spent a lot of time, David did a great job interviewing all of the responsible individuals that have sort of gone through one of their projects so far. We got a lot of good learnings out of that and I need some help sort of reviewing the updates that we’re doing to the process. So in the memo’s database, I will send this out, but at the top I sort of summarize the big changes because they can kind of go a little bit unnoticed. So for example, we moved instead of to a project approval to phase based approvals. That’s something you might miss if you didn’t read with a fine tooth comb. So anyway, all those are at the top. I will send that out. I would love to hear feedback and I look forward to making this better and more fun coming up in the next couple of weeks.
Josh Clemente (00:23:47):
Thank you Scott. Appreciate all that. And agreed, where are we at here? This is David. Yeah.
David Flinner (00:23:55):
So good work this week on the membership model transition. So the reason that we’re really focused on this one right now is because we want to fully go live with our membership model before we start to go in growth mode. And one of the key parts of this is that in order to get live in the app store and off test flight, the real Apple approval that we want to get to is approving our app that has the membership signup experience in the app. So the main project that’s underway right now is the ability to get in app signup using our membership model underway. And Gabriel and Jeremy are working on two components of this actively right now under edge development. So the GIF you see on the right is Gabriel put together a prototype where he embedded our existing sign up flow from the web inside of the app just to see if it worked because we didn’t know if it would.
(00:24:41):
And the good news is that it does seem to work. You can ignore all the UI and styling that you’re seeing scrolling by you there. On the other hand, Jeremy is working on the left at styling this experience so that it looks like it’ll be mobile. It’ll feel really smooth when that happens. And then also working on the interplay between… There’s some technical details between the server and the mobile app that have to communicate back and forth. Anyway, this is going well. There’re no blockers right now and we’re aiming at getting this live and submitted to Apple before the end of the month. Fingers crossed we can get this live in the app store by the end of the month. So, great work Jeremy and Gabriel.
(00:25:19):
And then Miz and I are looking at the logistics of the extra details that have to go into the Apple App Store submission as well. That’s things like the final icon, screenshots, what do we want to put in the description, what is the actual name of the Levels app? Is It Levels, Levels Health, Levels Health Tracker, all those kinds of things. And we’re aiming to get that done by mid next week. So yeah, we’ll keep you posted on this. We’re posting daily updates in the membership project in threads so, so far, so good.
Josh Mohrer (00:25:49):
Blood work, which I’ll spend a little more time talking about. We are in internal round two, so thank you for everyone who ordered phlebotomy this week and has had it. That photo of me is actually getting it done yesterday. I got the results back in about six hours. So that’s cool. That part works. There’s some hiccups on where we can offer this at the moment. As of yesterday was like five states. We seem to be expanded to about 17 now. It’s still a bit short of what I hope we can eventually do, but we’re getting there.
(00:26:23):
Marillo has done some really incredible work. If you’ve not checked out the loom with the results screen, you should do that. But here are some screenshots from that. It’s looking really, really good and there’s a few more things that need to be done but we should… This will probably go out next week and I regret that I’ve said that for each of the last four weeks. It does not feel good to say that and have it not be the case. But I am more confident now than I previously was that this will in fact go out next week. So thanks everyone for your patience. That’s it for me.
Josh Clemente (00:26:55):
Thank you JM. This is so exciting. I don’t think we’re going to use that image for the banner logo or for the banner hero image on the website, but I appreciate you going through that pain for us, JM. Looking good, Jhon?
Jhon Cruz (00:27:11):
Yes, we are in the final weeks of the tagging project one. Today we are launching log specific icons to all members. Please give it a try if you haven’t yet. I will send a new threat today on what to spec and what to test. Additionally, how has been working on the back filling process for when tax are added or updated. And he’s also implementing the logic for detecting tax on two grams and three grams. That is with two and three words. Please note that tagging and therefore log specific icons only work with n-grams for now. So for example, ice cream is not going to work yet. For next week we will hopefully have the first versions of that. So we will be iterating on it. That’s it for me.
Josh Clemente (00:28:11):
Amazing, great work Cal and Jhon. Really excited for this one. Murillo.
Murillo (00:28:18):
Yeah, so not a lot to touch there that wasn’t already brilliantly touched by Scott and Josh. So just wanted to talk about some of the learnings that we had rolling this out and some of the things that didn’t hold up. You see, well you see there is the intro to scoring that we rolled out to users and it turns out that most of them just didn’t see it or saw it and just dismissed it and then were surprised by the future. So this is one of those things where we do it and then we learn how to communicate better about these changes, so. When we revisit this, we’ll be with these learnings compiled and just wanted to take some time to touch on that. And yeah, thank everyone who supported this project from the get go. It was a tough one, but I’m glad to see that we’re taking some learnings away from it.
Josh Clemente (00:29:18):
Awesome. Yeah, the score will definitely evolve from here based on these learnings. So thanks Murillo. Guadoulupe.
David Flinner (00:29:30):
Yeah, so there is a proposal out for the phasing for the two parts of this. There’s an experience in the morning that’s intended to orient you for the day and an experience in the evening, our day oriented and our night review. And this week Alan was working on a lot of the final polish for the actual beautiful slides that you’ve been seeing for the date orient. And those are fairly ready to go. The night review, we’ve been playing around with a few different concepts and we found that we’re not quite sure what’s going to resonate with our members yet. So Alan put together a lightweight UX survey that we’re going to be sending out today hopefully to our members to figure out which directions are resonating with them before we start getting engineering against this. So that’ll be really cool to see the result of that.
(00:30:18):
That’s probably one of the first times we’ve done this more formal review with a research angle to it. And then as Scott mentioned, the core stakeholders are going to be having a kickoff meeting on Monday to walk through the proposals and see if there’s any open questions. But really excited to get this started. There’s a doc that I’ll link to here after the meeting, but we’re going to be ideally starting with the day orient on some of the things that we already have with the score and some of the insight cards repurposed into this. We can start there very quickly, iterate on that. Some of the new stuff like the positivity slides and mood collection and other things. Very excited about this one and yeah, can’t wait to get started.
Josh Clemente (00:31:05):
Awesome. Thanks David, and Alan.
Alan McClean (00:31:09):
Great, thanks Josh. Thanks David. Yeah, so I guess I should kill this slide. We don’t really need it. How about the next slide that gets the visual preview of what I’ve been spending time on this week. So this week is primarily dominated by looping night review the brand work with TWA and hiring. Next slide please. So yeah, the TWA project initially there’s a loom on threads if you want to walk through, but the initial take on some of this brand work was not so great, but that’s okay. There’s always this phase at the beginning where the work is not strong and we end up taking feedback and steering them towards the right direction. You should expect that from me too. I’ll do a bunch of really crappy work before it ends up looking any good. Yeah, I guess that is storming.
(00:32:04):
And so we had a photography review. The initial photography was quite weak, was not the direction we wanted. It was losing that premium feel. We had an update yesterday. I’m going to put a post something to threads right after this about that. And it’s coming along. I think it’s starting to look much stronger, much more in line with what we’re hoping to accomplish with the brand and with the project overall. Next slide. And so they’re working on the website. They’ve been experimenting with this purple color. They will get rid of the purple. I mean I kind of like it on a light background, but I don’t think it works for the brand. And so actually we’re starting to reach some good conclusions about what makes sense with that, the logo mark up there. It could just be that actually it’s always knocked out and the Levels text and the mark is always the same color when you see it.
(00:32:55):
Next slide. So yet more riffs on the website. These are just thematic imagery, they’re from stock sites, but this is sort of the direction with imagery for the hero image at the top that’s a little bit more optimistic, a little bit stronger. Yeah, I think this will be a good direction to go. Not so sure about that dark green back there, but we’ll see. Next slide please. So they’ve made some good progress on badges. I think starting to center around this sort of geometric theme for badging. Something that, these are some examples that they showed yesterday. I don’t think they’re quite there yet. But starting to get to this geometric feel where they shaped kind of develop as, say for example, you’re on a streak and they fill in and get more interesting and more complex, the more progress you’re making. So this opportunity for people to celebrate and say, “Look at this cool thing.” This is what it looks like when you get to seven days in a row, 14 days in a row, food logging, things like that.
(00:33:56):
So we want to create something sort of aspirational that people want to go to and show off a little bit with things like badging. So very excited about that. Next slide please. So that’s brand. I’ve been spending a fair bit of time trying to develop a bit of a design candidate pipeline. I will be brutally honest here. It is very, very quiet on the design hiring front. So we’re starting to expand how we reach out and I rewrite some of these job descriptions. Maybe we’ll have two going at the same time in having meetings. And I think I’ve been reminded that a big part of hiring is actually cold calling and have to start reaching out directly to people on Figma Community and actually just starting to engage a little bit more directly with people we don’t know.
(00:34:38):
Next slide. So they review… There’s a fair bit of production work related to this and we’re almost there. I said I would fire myself if I wasn’t done by Wednesday. So I guess I’m fired. Sorry, didn’t finish it. There was a bunch of other stuff happening this week. But we’re translating a lot of these cards into the sort of rich presentation on the left and some of it requires a bit of a rewrite or new imagery. You see that image on the right, that’s not really going to work anymore. So a fair bit of production work there, just about done with that. Next slide.
(00:35:10):
So that brings me to the night review. So the concept around the night review is another version of core looping where we’re trying to have a bit more of a cadence with members and talking to them a little bit more checking in with them. The idea behind the night review is that it’s a bit more of chill vibes, sort of check-ins, not quant self. And this is something that I think we have an instinct, could potentially be interesting, but as David mentioned, we’re going to send a little user survey out and just kind of test the waters a little bit. We’re going to show a couple screens. We’re going to ask them about what other qualitative and quantitative metrics they might want to check or be tracking within the Levels ecosystem?
(00:35:44):
That could include things like mood, stress, anxiety. It could include other things like ketones too? We’ll just get a little bit of a pulse check on that. Or for women it could be menstrual cycle. A lot of these things manifest in your glucose trace and so we want to know, what are people most interested in? Next slide.
(00:36:04):
So here’s some examples of what that might look like. This is an opportunity at the end of the day to kind of backfill any missing logs, ask them how it’s going, potentially a bit more of a journal type model. I think one interesting thing I’ve noticed over time in the wellness space is that a lot of the things that get in the way of taking care of yourself are more contextual in nature. Say your kids are sick and you got to skip a gym workout or maybe you got a cold or just things, COVID, people stop exercising or going out as much when these kinds of things happen. So I think there’s some potential here with journaling to sort of capture a larger picture of what’s happening in people’s lives.
(00:36:41):
And then we’ve got this idea here on the right of just how did things go? We need to do a bit of gut checking with members to make sure that we’re asking the questions in the right way. Maybe this seems like we’re asking how their food was or something, but this is meant to be sort of a light check-in as opposed to really deep on metabolic health. A lot of people just before bed, they’re not thinking about their metabolic health. Next slide please.
(00:37:08):
So I think one thing just on process and experimentation, I started a couple weeks ago with very direct tracking in my calendar and making sure that I dedicated one day per project. That has completely failed this week. Maybe the last two weeks. I’ve been totally oversubscribed. These are all the different things that are going on right now. I’m going to next slide, I’m going to reduce my allocation across all those and just focus on getting membership out with David and Jeremy and Gabriel and then start digging into Scoring again.
(00:37:39):
So all those little ones, if you’re working on any of those kinds of projects, you probably won’t hear from me for a little bit. So that’s it for design.
Josh Clemente (00:37:50):
Awesome update. Thank you Alan. Always look forward to these and appreciate the focus at the end here. All right, quick hiring update. I don’t know how much this slide really gives insight. The data interpretability is not there given the x axis, so we’re going to probably rework this soon, point being we’ve got inbound coming across community manager, associate editor and software engineer and visual designer, we’re going to continue to expand the pipeline. So we’ll likely be doing an investor ask with our upcoming update and just generally looking for new opportunities as Alan touched on. And then we have a few new hires including Taylor, Jeff and Brittany, which will all be coming aboard in January. And I think that’s it. Chris.
Ben (00:38:39):
Thanks Josh. On the member insight side, we have an early read on The Nutritionalist marketplace or the beta feature, which is kind of on the right. So we got a really good strong response from that. The TLDR on why people weren’t really weren’t using The Nutritionalist is one, either the cost. They didn’t think they needed one, they were already working with one or they felt the app should do that itself and not be an additional pay. Like, “Hey, that’s why I’m using Levels. I expect that level of insight around my personalized nutrition.” More to come in terms as we look at all the open ends, but this is just kind of more of a early read on it.
(00:39:19):
As already mentioned, we are preparing to work with Alan and David on the kind of tracking levels. The good news of what highlights is, it feels good to now start getting into ritual about every week we’re trying to launch some research project and execute and get results. It’s like a flywheel. And part of that it’s making us look at our current survey tools, which is type form as kind of our main tool around what it can do, the types of survey, the types of questions it allows us in terms of like, it’s a beautiful experience, but is it really a robust market research tool as we want to ask very specific questions? So I’ll be going deeper around like, do we actually need to build up the tool set for us to give us richer insights?
(00:39:58):
But I really like that we’re starting to get into that flywheel look like weekly projects. On support we already talked about the happiness, which is great. In the last week and a half we kind of saw three individual spikes which caused the support team a bit of a scramble around the skipping of the line, which is pretty prominent on the product update release, the scoring be .2 that we talked about in the Wefunder. So lots of different questions coming in. So the team did a great job to rally to kind of come up what are those FAQs of saver applies to kind of get the content even as if we were trying to build it in parallel.
(00:40:35):
On the Op side, the only real callout, mentioned it last week. We are currently on pause for North Carolina. I’m working with Truepill on different options and until we actually something that feels good about the experience, I’m reaching out to those members that are kind of in flux individually in terms of if they just want to wait or if they want their money back. So it’s about one person a day from a volume standpoint. Next slide.
(00:41:00):
And back by popular demand. So thank you for the feedback, Sam. We’re bringing that kind of the member insight slide from some of the old Friday forums. So on the left we kind of want to highlight areas for focus or on the right, member love. So my takeaway on the left was this member was looking at things of, “Hey, I feel like I’m really healthy. I exercise every day, but there are certain things I’m not willing to do. I’m not giving up my non-fat latte. That’s a deal breaker, so don’t even try it.”
(00:41:31):
Then as we promote things like a nutritionalist, she’s actually starting to question like, “I think I’m healthy, but now you’re telling me I need a nutritionalist? Maybe I’m not as healthy as I thought.” So it’s having her cause doubt in her kind of experience in her journey. [inaudible 00:41:50] talking about, I do the same thing and I get different scores and it’s inconsistent and I don’t know why. Is it due to the sensor or is it due to all these multi-variable [inaudible 00:42:00] conditions like sleep or stress and she just can’t pull it apart and that’s causing anxiety like, “Do I trust the score if I do the same thing and get five different scores on five different days? I don’t know what to do with it and I don’t trust it.”
(00:42:12):
On the right on that members love people that are saying, “Hey, this is holding me accountable, this is great.” And as I look at this, you get people that are using this as a tool and saying, “Hey, it’s up to me to be accountable for what I do and I’m using this to learn and experiment,” versus those that say, “I think Levels should tell me exactly what to go do and how to do it.” So that’s really where are we meeting the expectations around where people think our level of kind of feedback is going to be? And that’s a lot of times when we see the split around people that are kind of like on the fence are promoters. And that’s it for member experience.
Josh Clemente (00:42:49):
Love it. Really happy to have the member insights back and those numbers continue to impress. Thanks for deepening the insights as well with what the data is. All right, Ben coming to us asynchronous.
Ben (00:43:10):
Hey team, here is growth for the week. So $137,000 of recognized revenue pass our goal of 75 and 312 for the month. So tracking well already being about halfway through. Cash, 79, no changes to debt and the change in our cash position gives us about 40 months of runway. As far as culture documentation, so this is the project where we are continuing to iterate on culture video. So we’re focused on to recap from last week, we’re focused on creating videos that are more tactical for people to learn about some of the ways that we work, whether it’s through Notion or through Loom or you name it. And so Notion is the first one that we experimented with. Sam and I recorded yesterday. And it’s basically a screen sharing walkthrough where we talk about some of the philosophies of what we do and why we do it.
(00:44:02):
We focus on architecture of information, transparency of documents, productivity and shortcuts, discoverability of information, and then the idea of onboarding and re-onboarding. So how does somebody come into an organization? Doesn’t matter whether it’s levels or another organization and digest when there’s a large database of information hosted in Ocean. So Tony’s going to cut the video we recorded for an hour and he’ll cut it down so that it’s snappier, but it’s basically conversational topics about Notion and why we do some of the things we do. So update there.
(00:44:39):
Growth theme of the week. So scaling attention, the podcast continues to see growth. You can see the chart here. Pretty wild what happens when we increase a cadence? So April is when we launched. Pretty steady state. That was one a week. In September, we went to two episodes per week and it’s been exponential in growth ever since then.
(00:45:00):
What we see here is 3,000+ plays, that’s 3,000+ hours of attention or near that. And so what we can see is that in a given week we get 2,000 to 3,000 hours of attention from people, which is an incredible amount of attention to hold and engagement in what we’re doing. Them really feeling compelled to listen to the episodes that we put out. And so episodes do have different retention rates. Some will be higher than others. It depends on the topic, it depends on the audience, but the audience is growing. And so if we start to think about how do we scale this attention? Well, things that we can do with the podcast are spread production across the team, which is something we’ve already been doing as far as having multiple hosts, having multiple people involved in the conversations, focus on distribution of assets, so getting wider in the derivative assets and then creating very shareable content for any guests that we have on who do have profile.
(00:46:01):
We don’t want to engineer. It’s still a strategy, but we don’t want to engineer it where we only have guests that have a wide amount of distribution because then we’re not focused on having meaningful internal conversations about important things like, how does our engineering team think? What’s our philosophy? So we’ll focus on distribution of assets. Experiment with the cadence of episode,. So you could see the inflection point back when we went to two per week. From the survey that Tony put out yesterday or put out Wednesday, sorry, we heard that people do like a cadence of one to two per week, but some of the top podcasts like Gary V puts out a ton of content, Jason Calcans does. And some of these podcasts that put out daily content just do have wider distribution. So we’re going to see what does retention look like, what does engagement look like, what is too much where people can pick and choose what they want to listen to?
(00:46:55):
And then the last is broadening the topics that we record. So focusing more on things like metabolic health content, focusing more on Levels related team conversations, things that people replied in the survey and said that they really liked hearing. So that is growth for the week. As far as car votes, so big hat tip to Zach for all the work that went into the campaign and everybody who contributed to all aspects of reviewing it and launching it. It was just incredible to watch that happen yesterday. Also, hat tip to Miz. So Miz quietly behind the scenes does so many different things and really is the glue of the organization. So shout out to Miz because he’s always working really hard and doing lots of different things to keep us moving forward. On the personal front, it’s snowed overnight and we have waist deep snow out our back door and it’s winter’s here. It’s time to start shoveling. So that’s it.
Josh Clemente (00:47:52):
Thank you Ben. Great growth update this week. Going to jump ahead without replaying this. Tom.
Tom Griffin (00:48:02):
All right, just a quick update from me this week. There’s a lot of exciting stuff happening in the partnerships world. Hard to keep up with frankly, but here are just a few of the things that were happening this week. We had a couple of podcasts drop. So Casey aired on Human Upgrade, formerly known as Bulletproof Yesterday, which somehow got a bit lost in the shuffle this week. This is our second appearance on Dave Asbury’s show and just a really big deal. It’s going to lead to huge amount of awareness. It’s pretty hard to imagine a year ago a Bulletproof podcast drop getting lost in the shuffle, but here we are. And then David was on Better Product Podcast, so really cool to see David doing some more shows and Miz is going to be recording one soon as well. So it’s just great to get additional team members doing some of these externally facing comms that have just proven so valuable to us in terms of recruiting and just generally sharing our strategies with the world.
(00:48:57):
And then some new partners as of this week. These are just verbal commitments right now. Contract’s not signed, but exciting nevertheless. So Matt Frazier as an investor and rich role as a partner, potential advisor and Matt is pretty much unanimously known as the best CrossFit athlete of all time. So he’s just a very big deal and has huge distribution across the world of health and fitness. And then Rich Roll, I’m sure most people know, but he kind of became known for his ultra endurance work basically as an athlete, but then became just a thought leader across health and wellness and has an extremely popular podcast that I highly recommend. So Rich has been on our sort of top 10 list for a really long time, so it’s a big get. Excited about that.
(00:49:44):
And then lastly, over there on the right, just lots of exciting conversations happening this week. Most of these were related to the series A callout Tim Ferris who we’re finally in touch with his team. He actually spoke about Levels on a recent podcast interview, which was really cool. Recommend listening to that. And then you’ll see a bunch of other pretty big names here. And all of these folks are interested in levels actively and were in conversation with them about investing. So exciting stuff.
Josh Clemente (00:50:16):
Super exciting stuff. Thank you Tom for taking charge on all these conversations.
Casey Means (00:50:21):
Okay, quick press recap for the last month. It was a pretty amazing month. Big shout outs to JT PR for facilitating these opportunities and to Stacy Flinner for her incredible photography that really just makes these articles. The top highlights for the month were the New Yorker, Men’s Health, Women’s Wear Daily and Good Morning America, but a few others as well. One exciting thing was on the left here, we had a nice piece in protocol about our culture of transparency that Sam totally rocked. We have been making a concerted push to pursue more external pieces about our culture, so this is a great example of that. In the middle here, we of course had the New Yorker piece, which was a deep dive on the journalist Nicks experience using Levels and a really nuanced discussion about glucose management and how it can improve our energy levels. On the right, we had just a easy nutrition win on glucose friendly breakfast. Next slide.
(00:51:24):
We actually also had a big piece in Women’s Wear Daily this month, which is a huge outlet. It’s been around for about 100 years. It’s referred to as the Bible of Fashion. And this was an interesting piece that kind of got lost in the shuffle, but it was about Gen Z using personalized wellness tools and it was really complimentary of levels. Shout out to JM for pulling some data about our Gen Z members very quickly for this piece. In the middle we had a Men’s Journal article with a sweet photo of Mike D that Stacy took, and then our Women’s Wear Daily article on the right here was syndicated in Yahoo News. Next slide.
(00:52:03):
Obviously GMA was a massive slam dunk. Becky, the journalist, just really got what we were doing. And so it was a really great summary, like concise, but also nuanced about how glucose affects health and how levels can help, many app screenshots. Totally amazing. Next step for press over the next couple months. So we’re increasingly collaborating with our advisors on press and using the amazing JPR engine to help amplify what they’re doing. So Dr. Perlmutter’s new book, Drop Acid, Dr. St. Clair’s new podcast, Dr. Gottfried’s book. We’ve been working with the team there to just magnify these topics. We’re working on series A messaging, focusing on pitches that evolve the narrative from just about glucose monitoring to more of the broader landscape of biosensors and observability. We’re doing more Levels, culture pitches, and then just continuing the drum beat of tier one press about metabolic health and Levels. That’s it.
Josh Clemente (00:53:01):
Unbelievable. Thank you, Casey. It’s crazy that all of this happened this past month. Haney?
Mike Haney (00:53:10):
Yeah, so we had four pieces drop since last we spoke, so I’ll just give a little context to each of these. The first one to hear about craving was actually a piece I started not long after I started. Example of sort of a small failure and then a resurrection. Just the first couple drafts just didn’t work. Revel, our content agency, took it over, took another stab at it and I think it’s a strong piece. Also a nice expert review from Austin Pearlmutter added some nice insights to it. Then we took the second one there. The piece with Dr. Molly is actually an example of the sort of what we call the kind of micro content. So taking a piece of content and creating something new from it. So this was actually inspired by Casey and Molly’s conversation on Instagram live probably a year and a half ago, quite a while ago.
(00:53:55):
But we gave the transcript to a writer and she went through and pulled out seven tips. So we turned it into a real kind of action oriented piece that’s specifically about using CGM, which I think is interesting. It’s an angle we don’t always have and will probably be useful in the app as well. And ran it by Molly and she dug it. The postprandial blood sugar piece is an example of one of our SEO driven pieces. So this is a term that our SEO firm said, “Look, you guys should own this. There’s not a lot of competition there. If we write a piece dedicated to it, I think we can rank really highly for it.” It also fits really nicely into the bucket of metabolic basics, which we’re trying to fill out on the site. So the very basic like, “What is after meal blood sugar and why does it matter?” So that’s a nice piece and some really good writers on that. [inaudible 00:54:41] sourcing some really high quality RDs and PhDs.
(00:54:44):
And then finally, the last ones example of something we’re doing a lot more of, which is taking some of these bigger podcast conversations that people have, like Dr. Lustig, or in this case Dr. Philip Avidio. We had a previous Q&A with Philip. He’s great. Super interesting heart surgeon. So this is just taking that transcript, kind of cleaning it up a little bit, making a little bit more readable, adding some subheads and then putting it out on the blog. So they’re really long articles, but I think they’re helpful to have up when we have people that have a lot of good insights to share there. So that’s all for content this week.
Josh Clemente (00:55:18):
Amazing. I’m excited for that post prandial article in particular and also love the reuse of content. That’s something I think we’re uniquely good at. Thank you, Haney. All right, we’re close to the end here and I want to be respectful of our guests who are not on the same timeframe as us. So I think it’s just Rob. Rob, just to be respectful in case you have to jump at 1:00, do you want to kick us off? I don’t want to put you on the spot, but I always love your shares.
Robert Lustig (00:55:50):
Okay, so first of all, looking forward to talking with Taylor next week, Thursday about our, shall we say, mutual efforts to up the ante in terms of analytes. The other thing I wanted to let you all know is I participated in a National Space Society symposium on Food to Mars, which is really interesting. Turns out, and I don’t know how many of you know this, but long term astronauts suffer from generalized mitochondrial dysfunction. And whether it’s due to the radiation or whether it’s due to the food or whether it’s due to something else entirely, is not clear yet. But I have a feeling that Levels is going to end up going to Mars before this is over because they’re going to be needing to track blood glucose and many other mitochondrial outputs such as lactate and so I’m thinking we’re going to have to up our game in terms of other analytes real quick, before Elon gets his spaceship up on that platform.
Josh Clemente (00:57:03):
It’s always been the plan, Rob, it’s always been a Mars play. I love that. Really awesome that you’re involved and we talked a lot about this actually when I was on the life support program and most of the assumption was the inactivity because you can kind of try to emulate exercise on orbit, but it’s not that easy and it’s not that effective. So really cool and would love to learn more about what’s going on there. Hao.
Hao Li (00:57:30):
Yeah, super excited about Levels to Mars. No, for real. I did a review on the new profill page. Lilo did and it’s really exciting and to see it coming along.
Josh Clemente (00:57:47):
Awesome. Yeah, that looks so good. Alan.
Alan McClean (00:57:51):
Yeah, I think highlight for the week for me was just seeing that crazy Wefunder action yesterday. Just sometimes I just forget that actually other people besides us are using this app. I just hanging on screens all day and then you see that thread and it’s like, “Ooh, wow, that’s really exciting.” So very excited about that. My kids got vaccinated. So that is a huge relief for us. So that’s a personal highlight.
Josh Clemente (00:58:19):
Awesome. Scott.
Scott Klein (00:58:22):
I think we have these moments where we just realized there’s 1,000s of people that are rooting for us even if they’re not active subscribers. Everyone’s on our team and I think that’s a really… It’s you can’t spend money to get that. That’s really awesome to get reminded of that from time to time. Personally, I’m kind of in this mix of creature comfort and nature. So there’s like 50 elk right off the deck behind me and a golf course and heated cabins, so life’s going to be good this weekend.
Josh Clemente (00:58:46):
Where is that?
Scott Klein (00:58:47):
Cle Elum? It’s about 80 miles outside of Seattle, so short drive for the kids, but fun.
Josh Clemente (00:58:53):
Enjoy. Haney.
Mike Haney (00:58:56):
Yeah, work wise, following the rays along from a trail about 8,000 feet above Palm Springs whenever I could get a signal yesterday was pretty exciting. And then I came home and found out my wife invested $100 because she was so caught up in the excitement and frenzy. On the personal side, this weekend is another episode of Haney takes his kid to LA Museums in a luxury car. So we’re renting a Mercedes convertible and going to the road tomorrow, so that’ll be fun.
Josh Clemente (00:59:23):
Is it a contemporary or a classic convertible?
Mike Haney (00:59:26):
It is a contemporary. He has no interest in classic cars, so he’s settling for a C class because daddy wouldn’t spring for the S class.
Josh Clemente (00:59:35):
All right. Enjoy. Matt.
Matt Flanagan (00:59:38):
Yeah. Plus one on the New York meetup. That was a lot of fun. Definitely highlight for the week and then yeah, the Wefunder was awesome to see. I kept refreshing the page to kind of get the number live, but personally we’re doing a way too early Thanksgiving dinner this weekend, so that should be fun. Looking forward to it.
Josh Clemente (00:59:58):
Nice. Jesse?
Jesse Lavine (01:00:01):
Yeah, plus one to the we funder and also really appreciate Scott and Josh’s perspectives on just the part of the company that we’re at and the scoring this week. Also personal and professional. It’s also going to meet up with Josh and Mike and Mercy in Philly and also Jackie in New York and really stoked to hang out with, be in Mexico City today.
Josh Clemente (01:00:22):
Love it Tony.
Zac Henderson (01:00:25):
Yeah, definitely. Plus one on the level side as far as the crowd funding. Really excited hearing all those results. Professional and personally, it was just really great meeting so many members of the team this past week. Just really loved that and looking forward to more meetups.
Josh Clemente (01:00:45):
Awesome. Gabriel.
Gabriel Brady (01:00:49):
Yeah, plus one to the fundraise. Super exciting. And then on a personal note, I’ve been training my cat to use an exercise wheel and it’s going really well.
Josh Clemente (01:01:00):
Got to keep those mitochondria dense. Mercy?
Mercy Clemente (01:01:07):
Professionally it was, I mean, yesterday was crazy. I stepped away to take a walk and I got a text from my sister saying, “What the heck is going on?” Because she just got the email about the fundraise and she was watching it and notifying us every 30 seconds she was reloading the page and texting on updates of it. So that was crazy. And then also it was really great to meet so many Levels people on this past week, both Philly and New York, and then personally just in Philly for another week and just going to explore a bit. But yeah, that’s it.
Josh Clemente (01:01:42):
Nice. Casey?
Casey Means (01:01:44):
Yeah, plus one yesterday was crazy with the crowd funding. I felt like it was emotional because just to see how much our members who have used the product believe in us, that was just incredible to see it coming in so fast. And I think every single person I know who’s used the product invested something and it was just, I don’t know, that’s just really bowled me over. And I think we should all just feel so proud of that. Highlight of the week also is seeing the team and then I get to have dinner with Sarah Gottfried tonight, which I’m really excited about after her. Dr. Oz recording. And then the last thing is just I was on Twitter and saw the video Sam posted about him and Jackie doing work and I just want to give a shout out to Tony because that edit of that video was so incredible and professional and done so fast and didn’t really get any major mention on threads, but it was so amazing. He’s just turning out this stuff constantly and so just the ramp up has been so fast and super impressive. So snaps for Tony.
Josh Clemente (01:02:45):
Love that. Miz.
Michael Mizrahi (01:02:47):
Awesome. Yeah, the thing about the Wefunder that was most exciting is just the member comments from folks that we don’t know, just members who have had the product and seeing how meaningful it is to them is a very good reminder. I think we get caught up in our own stuff often, so staying connected to what’s going on out there is fun. On the company side, one other note, it feels like the team is growing, processes are falling into play, so it feels like a nice inflection point generally and nice to just reflect on everything we built and what’s going on. And on the personal side in New York and Josh is messing with my lighting, so that’s about it.
Josh Clemente (01:03:25):
I love it. Where are we, Lauren?
Lauren Kelly-Chew (01:03:29):
Yeah, it’s been so cool just being new to Levels at this moment when there’s so much momentum. It’s just the craziest and most exciting feeling and kind of crossing over on personal. I have a friend who just started using Levels and when she got the thing about the fundraise, she was texting me, she’s like, “Oh my God, I’m trying to get in. It’s only been two hours, but it’s so cool,” and to feel like I’m part of the Levels team now after just a little time while all this is happening has just been so cool. So it’s really exciting.
Josh Clemente (01:03:56):
That’s fun. Awesome.
Murillo (01:04:00):
Yeah, just two huge themes this week. One being just the support. I just incredibly grateful for the support I received throughout the entire scoring project and just passion. Just seeing how passionate everyone is about what we’re building here is incredibly humbling and yeah, keeps me super excited to show up every morning.
Josh Clemente (01:04:25):
That’s one there? Mike D?
Mike D (01:04:29):
Yeah, so yesterday morning got a text from a relative and said, “Hey, you probably already know about this and shared the Tim Ferris episode,” which is pretty awesome to hear that organic shout out from Marco. I’ll definitely plus one to the meetups and then finally half the plus one to the Wefunder. That was super. It was wild. Similar Mercy, I was out and then I was working, checked my phone, I had all these messages and even found out that some friends had invested. So it’s super humbling and inspiring.
Josh Clemente (01:05:01):
So cool. Chris.
Chris Jones (01:05:03):
On the level side, definitely the Wefunder. That is just a huge milestone and I fully echo Josh’s comments early on where I was expecting us to have to do a campaign to do it as well to post it on our LinkedIn forums. I’ve worked with a number of startups when they do their kind of Kickstarter or Indiegogo at that first launch and the amount of coordinated effort to try to launch a bunch of press at the same time and get the halo and the spin effects, and for us it was like we just threw the ball up in the air and it swooshed like without any effort and that just goes to all the hard work the team’s put in for multiple years to be able to take that momentum.
(01:05:41):
I’d be really interested to see what if we would’ve made it a campaign, just how big we could have made that. So was really fun and exciting to watch. And definitely plus one on Levels on Mars. So love that. Can’t wait to get my takes on that one. On a personal side, if you remember in last week’s episode of #Farm Life, the team was taking bets on whether or not I could make it all the way to Bozeman in my farm truck without breaking down. The unders had it. I made it 10 miles and my truck broke down in spectacular fashion and I limped home. So I’m excited to get my farm truck fixed because I got a lot of chores that are starting to pile up without it as my hefty seat, so and that’s it.
Josh Clemente (01:06:24):
Wow, 10 miles is impressive. I mean that’s not very far. Let’s see, Justin I don’t think is with us, so Ben’s not either, Zac.
Zac Henderson (01:06:35):
Yeah, I mean just what a fun week. I mean professionally, all of this has been exciting. I do think my favorite moment was we talk about we hit 2.5 million on the raise in 77 minutes, but I think we hit 600,000 in five minutes or something. And that was when I had a freak out was like, “Did we put the cap in?” And the moment we were able to kind of confirm, nope, this is mostly small donors. That was the moment I had that emotional experience that Casey described, just realizing like, “Wow, we really are building something special and let’s keep that our load star.” It’s just really neat stuff. So I think that’s my professional and personal as well.
Josh Clemente (01:07:14):
Amazing. I like how Zac uses Lone Star for the North Star idiom because he’s a Texan. Sam.
Sam Carcos (01:07:23):
I think, echoing what a lot of people said, for me it was looking at the feedback from our members in the Wefunder and really… I’d sort of lost touch of just how much people care about this and how much we’ve really helped people. And so Chris bringing back the member insight slides and Ben putting in some more effort to bring more members on as Friday forum guests, is just really encouraging for me to see that.
Josh Clemente (01:07:57):
Yeah, definitely. Stacie.
Stacie Flinner (01:08:01):
Plus one to the Wefunder, the comments were incredible and even just the way things build, the incredible press that we’ve had in the last month, I feel like the momentum is just thrilling. A personal front, we moved into our house, things are in disarray, but have lots of things ahead. It’s a fixer upper and we’re excited for the projects.
Josh Clemente (01:08:24):
You two are perfect for that project. Enjoy. JM.
Josh Mohrer (01:08:30):
Super, super exciting to see how fast the fundraise went. I mean it was just echoed everyone elses. It was kind of surreal. I think that people who have used the product were the ones writing… That’s a really, really good sign. It’s not just startup investors who think we’re really cool. It’s people who have actually used the system and the product in the app and everything. So really, really excited. On a personal note, it was lovely to meet everyone this week at dinner. Miz has invaded my office. I’m not actually sure when he’s going to leave, but maybe invite him somewhere. Anyway, have a great weekend, everybody.
Josh Clemente (01:09:07):
Love that. Let’s see. Firstly, meeting people in person is so fun. So Jesse, Jackie, Chinle, Matt, Kunal, Tony. I think that’s everyone I met for the first time. But anyway, it was awesome. And then to go right from that, just being so hyped up on the team into the next day, this going out, the Wefunder going out and I had a lot of stress, not a lot of stress, but just I had heard quite a bit of advice that doing crowdfunding is an act of desperation. It’s for small companies who are building a new coffee mug or something like that. And if it doesn’t fill, it looks terrible. VCs run away, professional investors run away. There’s just so much negativity about it. And then to see when Zack put the first update in, 30 minutes in and there was $800,000 in there.
(01:09:56):
My eyes like literally fell out of my head. I had no idea what he was talking about. That couldn’t be right. So that was such a surreal moment. And then I finished off the day trying to read every single comment. And it was, as JM mentioned, it was, I don’t know, 98% people, 99% people who had used the product and had experienced something dramatic. And that’s why they were investing. I mean, it was mind blowing. Yesterday was amazing. It was like one of the moments I will never forget about this journey. So yeah, thanks everybody for helping make that happen. Kunul.
Kunal Shah (01:10:32):
Plus one again to dinner, got to meet Josh, Chin Lu, Matt and Tony in person for the first time. So that was great. Beyond that, I got a call from my parents saying that Levels invited them to invest and they were so excited. They had never invested in a private tech company before, and of course loved the company, so they were just ecstatic on the phone trying to figure out what’s a good number to put in. So that was pretty cool to see. And then beyond that, on a personal front, I have an 8K cross country race tomorrow morning and it’s been quite some time since I’ve raced before, so I’m pretty excited for that.
Josh Clemente (01:11:10):
Awesome. Good luck. We’ll jump to Steph and then we’ll finish up with Jackie.
Steph Coates (01:11:16):
Yeah, I appreciate the shout out at the beginning of the meeting. I guess my professional will be just a high level appreciation of the culture here in general. I’ve been reflecting a lot about how growing up there was this mentality of work is not supposed to be fun and it’s supposed to just provide security and money and something that you have to do. And since I joined this team, I have not had more fun in general and the product that we get to work on and seeing the feedback from members of this actually changing people’s lives and then also just the amazing people that I get to work with every day. And so I am feeling super grateful and both getting to work with people in person of living with Helena and meeting others on the team as well as just the quality of the relationships even remotely of getting to meet Lauren this week and have the coffee chat has been so much fun.
(01:12:08):
And so yeah, just feeling incredibly happy and grateful to be a part of this team. And personally, I am in Illinois for the rest of November for Thanksgiving and I’m excited. This is the first weekend that I’m not driving more than, I don’t know, 6 to 7 hours across the country. And so I’m excited to just chill.
Josh Clemente (01:12:29):
Nice. Looking forward to the Digital Nomad podcast featuring Casey, Sam and Steph with a variety of perspectives and points on their journey. All right, Jackie, you want to give it a try?
Jackie Tsontakis (01:12:43):
Yeah. Is my audio working now? Okay, cool. Yeah, yesterday was so cool to see. So plus one to all the comments on that. And then Casey, thanks for pulling together the month in review. I can’t believe all of that happened over the past month since I’ve been here. And it just makes me feel really lucky to be here. And personally meeting everyone in New York was such a highlight this week. Like it was really, really cool to see everyone in person and yeah, that was fun.
Josh Clemente (01:13:13):
Awesome. All right, so we have a cafe set aside, I’m going to hit stop on the recording, just have to figure out how.