Josh (00:01):
Let’s jump straight in. Welcome to Friday Forum, 1st of November, 2022. And this week, so this week we’ve been iterating on the new e-commerce experience in the US. Squashing bugs left and right, just really working out the kinks of the new system for support and for member experience and for engineering. It’s been going really well. We’re starting to see it seems like quite a significant improvement in the amount of issues that are arising, and so really appreciate seeing the interaction and how quickly we’re converging here. We also had an active member survey. This went out to active members who are on a subscription are generating glucose data. We had 300 responses and had some really good trends. I mean, the deep dive is still coming. Chris gave an early insight into what’s going on here, some really good insights around potential renewal numbers, comprehension trends in terms of how aware of metabolic health concepts people are when they enter the program versus how they feel now.
(01:00):
So some really good stuff. Looking forward to the deep dive on this. On the IRB side, we are now at 9,000 enrolled primarily new members. So the split is something like 75 25, and we have about 25% 90 day retention in the IRB right now. So still a fairly early sample, meaning we launched this in July, but continuing to see some pretty promising stuff there. And this is without optimization. We’re also doing some deep dives on potential future product experiments. The oral glucose tolerance test, which some are familiar with others aren’t. We did something like this with the Coke challenge a year ago, but revisiting how we might be able to use these calibrated responses to better understand someone’s metabolic positioning and how we can intervene with great insights and with great recipes, et cetera. And then we also have an event insight live from our previous community challenge, which was the Apple Cider Vinegar Experiment.
(01:56):
Membership is continuing to be a major focus for the team. We’re shifting a lot of priorities to prepare for the upcoming renewal as well as really most importantly, experiment with the key levers for membership, what matters to people, price point, value proposition, CGM versus content. So there’s a ton that we can learn from this opportunity and really looking forward to it. We’re also getting ready for a gifting strategy coming up for the holidays. So we’re going to do a try it program with a single sensor. It’s going to be great. Also working on a launch campaign plan. So we went live, as we all know in July liftoff, and we have not really told the world about that. So we were in beta, we had a lot of press early on in Levels lifecycle, and we haven’t really emerged from that mode in a public way.
(02:45):
So getting ready for something likely in the beginning of 2023, more to come on this. US e-com 2.0 launched, as I mentioned, Levels, Levels V1.1 is in wrap up, just about ready to go. The Instacart integration is live internally to allow us to basically export grocery lists directly to Instacart. We’re also going to link that with the healthier food choices feature ahead of an Instacart event, which the company is doing Instacart and they want to reference Levels and this integration as one of the unique mechanisms that they’ve been able to leverage with their integrations. So that’s going to be cool. I was invited to keynote the Army Applications Lab Vertex Summit, which is interesting. It’s really the army looking at trends in industry to understand how they can optimize performance and really health because they consider metabolic function at this point. They’re not calling it that, but really it’s metabolic health trends to be a national security issue. And they’re trying not to go top down but actually understand what’s coming bottom up. So that’s going to be interesting, that’ll be in December.
(03:45):
Levels, kitchen launched. So this has been a long time coming. Tons and tons of preparation went into this. The Healthy Tacos episode and the mini doc episode, both went live with accompanying blog posts. We’ve got, I think 1200 subscribers came through from that so far. So still TBD, how many of those are existing Levels members versus new. But in general, numbers are looking great. Casey recorded with Liz Moody and Dr. Luke’s on a whole new level this week. My episode with Crazy Until It’s Not, which is I think our first UK episode that includes an access link. Went live this week and we’ve got a potential Men’s Health UK print feature coming up, which we’ll be talking to them this week.
(04:30):
Metabolical, so you can see the nice shot here of this really cool event that Sonia and Casey and many others on our team put on with the One Commune team. We brought together basically a large swath of the key people in our orbit who have worked with us to get this far. And you can see some familiar faces in the zoomed in photo, but really the goal here was to not just focus on Levels, but focus on the overarching goal of getting metabolic health and the zeitgeist. And there are some key takeaways the retro Sony has been putting together in Notion, but there’s really a campaign that we can build on momentum from this event to really activate all of these people in a common cause. So looking forward to seeing where that goes. We’re at 30,000 subscribers on YouTube. 50,000 whole new level plays in October of a 461,000 all time plays.
(05:19):
So really 10% month over month or 10% of all time plays happen this month, which is awesome. Product marketing and branded Ads. So we’re experimenting in both of these. You can see a product marketing email campaign here that [inaudible 00:05:33] sent out and amazing click-through numbers and open rates. The point here and we’re also experimenting with branded Ads for search. We’re really pulling focus onto tools we have not yet played with in a sense. So we really haven’t. We’ve been focusing on demand generation for so long that these additional tools that are very commonplace in the demand capture space and in really product function organizations haven’t yet been a priority. And so we’re starting to put that attention onto these tools. We’re going to have a lot more coming. We’ve got new demand capture memos coming soon. Tom’s going to talk about that a little later in this meeting.
(06:13):
But the point is we’re shifting focus onto this kind of whole new world of opportunity that we can start to really calibrate our expectations for and start using in predictable ways. So those memos will be coming soon, the UK close beta. We are pausing rollout to the wait list for just now to focus on the initial wave of feedback that we’ve got from the very earliest members. So let’s see. Anything else there? We’ve got a cool chat out from Balaji. If you haven’t listened to this episode on Lex Friedman’s podcast, I highly recommend it. He really understands where we’re heading and why. Let’s see. And we had an influencer in Venezuela, 2.4 million views on that Instagram Reel that she put up about Levels, tons of great memos this week, including an org structure announcement. We had a great fireside this week. And let’s see, some shoots with my brother Rodney and Taylor from research. I think that covers it.
(07:12):
All right, jumping ahead. I want to welcome Dulce. Dulce is a Levels partner, YouTuber, Podcaster. She’s deep into nutrition, dietetics, biohacking, super engaged with community, just really understands all the elements that Levels is building in. And Dulce has been a really awesome supporter for us. Super excited to have you here this morning. I appreciate you setting some time aside on your Friday morning to come and talk to the team. I would love to just hear your thoughts on metabolic health Levels, maybe in particular and your experience so far.
Dulce (07:42):
Hi Josh, thank you so much for inviting me. Thanks for the introduction and I’m actually honored to be here as a guest today at Levels. Well, my main goal sharing my own experience with how different foods are spiking my glucose in different ways, is basically to educate the Latino community who is 90% of my audience, Spanish speakers who lives here in the States. And actually they are not aware or informed about the importance of glucose spikes and how that affects your metabolism and your health in general. They don’t know. And I know that it is not even common among the white population, but it’s even less common among the Latino population. When they hear about glucose monitors because most of them haven’t heard about CGMs, but just common monitors, they relate it right away with diabetes. And it’s something that they think is far away from themselves.
(08:53):
And that is a disease that you can’t prevent and it just comes at some point of your life and that’s it. Especially among the elderly, because I also work with thousands of people over 65 years old and they think that it was just out of luck. So in my own experience, when I started sharing my glucose spikes using the CGM from Levels through Reels, YouTube, my podcast, well people that listen to the podcast is a little bit more educated, but the most common question and response from my audience is that, “I’m so sorry, don’t say that you have diabetes, I hope you get better.” That is the first response I get. And it was so interesting hearing that, or this is even more interesting, some colleagues, nutritionist who speak Spanish, living in the states who also have a large audience on their social media who are supposed to educate people in the nutrition field, were sending me direct messages asking, “Why would you measure your glucose response? Why would you measure your glucose?”
(10:03):
And that was pretty funny. And my answer was literally, why not? And then I started the discussion. It was good, good polemic. So my plan for my next podcast is to talk about the thermometers, how they were discovered and how indispensable are now. That everyone has won in their homes, same with intelligent watches, everybody is wearing one to track their steps, their heartbeats, and how CTMs should be as necessary as those gadgets that we use as part of our lives. So what I realized during these months as a conclusion of talking over and over again about glucose topics, one video after the other, they’ve been really, really successful. I actually have a glucose playlist on YouTube that you can find. If you guys speak Spanish, you’re more welcome to see it.
(11:07):
That there is a huge opportunity in the Latino population, which is actually really prone to get metabolic syndrome because it’s part of the statistics. We have it over there. And at the same time, people are getting interested in CGMs, they get interested, they are asking me a lot of questions, but they need the right information in an easy and friendly way. So yeah, that’s basically my experience.
Josh (11:39):
I love it. And it’s so for a team like us who are living this all the time and thinking about it regularly, it can sometimes be challenging to step outside and zoom out three layers and realize that even people, like you mentioned, who are in this, this is their professional career and commitment to help people understand their own metabolic health are confused about why you would be paying attention to metabolic markers like glucose continuously. So that just goes to show how much more opportunity there is really to improve education across the experts who can then trickle that into their audiences through their own personal style and approach.
(12:16):
I mean, if it’s the Spanish-speaking community and how you specifically can reach that audience, it’s so amazing for us to be able to communicate directly with you and share what we’re building. And so yeah, I appreciate you sharing that example and also really excited that we are leaning into the educational element of this as a key pillar of what we’re building. So definitely reminds us how important that is. Dulce, if there’s one thing that you wish that we had already built or would focus our attention on, what could Levels do, whether it’s a product feature, a new product altogether, a new service, what can we do to improve?
Dulce (12:55):
Oh wow, that’s so interesting question. I wasn’t expecting that. I really love it. Probably, probably a little bit more easy to read the graphics, probably that. I don’t know, more colors, but in general it’s been super easy to use. When I show it to my clients, for example, and they get interested in it, when they see the graphics, they tell me, “Oh, is it complicated? Why graphics?” And yeah, probably just a little bit more friendly in that part. But in general, I think it’s pretty awesome. And Jackie is right, Lauren, it’s going to come to my podcast and we are going to have the interview in Spanish, by the way.
Josh (13:50):
Amazing. Well, that’s going to be awesome. Unfortunately, I’m going to need the translated version. I’ve lost my… I’m a bit rusty on the Spanish these days, but I’m super excited to hear that conversation. And also I think what you mentioned there on product improvement, it’s just again, another reminder about how our product can make the most impact for people. It’s not about complexity, it’s not showing charts and graphs overlaid on top of each other. It’s really translating that into actionability insights that people can use. And so something that we, especially as we move beyond glucose into many molecules of tracking, which we hope to one day be able to do, keeping that approachable for people is core. Dulce, is there anything else you’d like to share with us? I really, again, appreciate we all really get so much value out of hearing these direct insights.
Dulce (14:39):
No, thank you so much Josh for inviting me and I would be more than happy to keep sharing my experience with my audience, my clients, to my elderly, and my [foreign language 00:14:50] that I call people over 65 years old. And yeah, I’m super excited to have also Lauren in my podcast soon, so.
Josh (15:01):
I’ll wait for it.
Dulce (15:01):
Yeah, wait for it.
Josh (15:05):
Looking forward. Well thank you again from the whole team. And if you’d like to stick around, I know you’re super busy, if you’d like to stick around for the rest of the meeting, please feel free to do so. We will dive into some of the stuff we’re working on here. But outside of that, again, thank you for sharing your time with us.
Dulce (15:20):
Thanks. See you guys. Bye.
Josh (15:24):
Bye-bye. All right, Culture and Kudos real quick. So just one thing, if you weren’t able to make it to the fireside that we did yesterday on the culture survey, retro, highly recommend doing that. There’s a lot of great takeaways, a lot of good conversation about some of the key themes that emerged there. And also I think most importantly is probably a recap, connecting the prior surveys to the outcomes. What has changed between the Q2, for example, and the Q3? Which is really important to just all of us remind ourselves that we are making constant improvements. These aren’t things that are just dragging us down quarter over quarter. And then, yeah, just wanted to highlight the Metabolical event there with a ton of great, great people. You can see Rob up front, Jeff from One Commune, Sean Stevenson, a bunch of other great people in the crowd there. Wish I had been able to make it, but looking forward to be to the next steps with these sorts of events. Okay, Miz.
Matt (16:14):
I’m taking this one. Yeah, cultural value of the week this week is don’t ask how you can help, just help. And when I think about this value and how it presents itself in members of our team, in my mind, it ultimately comes down to creating and building a roster of action oriented operators. So we’re all here because we’re competent individuals and can make an impact at this stage of our company’s growth. We trust you and at this stage there’s going to be plenty of low hanging fruit and opportunities to contribute. So when something goes wrong or you notice that it needs attention, we want everybody to have the confidence and mindset that they have, the power to do something and don’t need to wait until their number is called to do so.
(16:53):
So while asking how you can help may sound like you’re being a team player, it only puts the burden back onto the person who actually needs the help in the first place. And it also assumes that they know and understand your skillset. So to conclude, helping without being asked is a great way to signal the proactive approach to assistance that we want to encourage here. And it also fills the trust battery with other members on the team, and that’s your cultural value for the week.
Josh (17:18):
So good. Love that. Yeah, I think to provide some examples, some people they’ll tee up and ask with a pre-written draft of an email for example, and that’s something that wasn’t asked of you, but it makes life so much easier for the person on the receiving end of that ask. And I often like to say the puzzle pieces are all over the floor. If you want to start picking some up, just start doing that. It’s not going to interfere with my work, I’ve got my handhold here as well. So thank you Matt for jumping in on this one. Love the perspective there, Miz.
Miz (17:54):
Sounds great. Thanks Matt. This is just a quick reminder that this new memo is shared. We’re going to do this quarterly from now on just to make sure that the lay of the land is clear. So no big changes here, but our updated organ team structure can be found in Notion. The three kind of big pillars of this version of the company, an orientation around product focusing demand capture efforts, which we’ll hear from Tom later today in quite a bit more detail. And then embedding and integrating data science deep in engineering versus a subfunction of engineering. So a lot more detail in the memo. And if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me, to any of the functional leads on the screen or anyone really feel free to just post a thread. But this is just helpful so we all know how the company works, how it’s organized, so that we can use it effectively as a tool.
Josh (18:41):
All right, thank you Miz for tackling that one. Company objectives. So Level shows you how food affects your health. Everyone should be working towards this probably has not changed. The top Level objectives, remain member retention, new member acquisition and member health improvement and product is our top priority in Q4. Now we’re going to do an OKR functional dive here. These are the function taglines right now, and we’re breaking these out week by week to give a deeper dive into how those OKRs are manifesting for the functions and why. And with that, I’m going to tee up Miz. I’m going to stop sharing here and let him take over for Ops.
Miz (19:20):
Thanks. And Lauren, do you have any lead in if you’d like, I think you had one.
Josh (19:25):
I think Lauren’s got a bit of a tough connection from Mexico. But yeah, I did want to remind for those of you that aren’t familiar with the OKRs in your function and how they apply to the work you’re doing, definitely reach out to your manager, reach out to the function lead. We do all want to understand these OKRs. This is not just an exercise of bureaucracy, this is an exercise in all of us understanding specifically how our priorities stack up.
Miz (19:53):
Cool. Thanks Josh. All right. So this one is a little bit of a dive into operations as a whole. The functional tagline here is keep the company lights on and bright. And I’m speaking on behalf of Chris, Zach, Riley, Nicole, the entire support team. And hopefully this is not too abstract trying to thread the needle for everyone, regardless of your level of familiarity with what exactly is operations. So what it means is that we need to have the processes and frameworks in place to allow the company to operate effectively. At the surface level, two big buckets that are easy to think about this. Bucket number one is company Ops, the second bucket is business Ops. But across both of those, we want to run with accuracy, precision, efficiency, trust. Those are the principles that are consistent across all of our functions.
(20:43):
A metaphor for the hell of it, you’re in a car with a bunch of people going very fast down a highway, there’s a lot of obstacles and you need to get to your destination before the road underneath you is going to fall out, before the opportunity runs out. You want that person to be a good aggressive driver, but you also want to feel safe in the car and trust them to steer well. And so it’s a really fine balance to get this right, and that to me is really effective, efficient operations. That’s the right level of aggressive driving, but also being careful and being able to actually manage what we’re handling. So four big buckets that fall into operations today, member experience and support. It’s the business operations bucket. And then legal, finance and people are the functions that we have at Levels, and those are the company operations.
(21:30):
So we’ll run through each of those, explain why they exist, and then tie a line a little bit loosely to the OKRs that follow for each of them. And the ultimate goal running the company, keeping the lights on, keeping them bright. So bucket number one, business Ops. Probably the one that most of us are most familiar with. And at a high Level, it’s making sure the company runs for our members. So downstream of the company existing and the content team going out and creating a category and creating a movement and generating awareness and downstream of design, product, engineering, building an app and all the supporting engineering infrastructure that supports the product. And downstream of growth, going out and acquiring members and capturing the demand and converting them into paying members, we get to the point where we actually have to put CGMs into people’s hands and put kits into the mail and start dealing with all the kinds of things that happen once people start interacting with the system.
(22:26):
So support is the core of this. This is the big primary component and on the surface this is solving customer issues. Which sounds simple, someone needs a replacement, so we send them a replacement. Or they had an issue with their payment, so we fix the payment. Or they have a question about how to use a feature so we can walk through it. It’s the grease that keeps the orders moving and members interacting with the product and the company. But that’s just the surface. The layer beneath that, is that this creates a finger on the pulse. It’s not just about fixing when those things go wrong, it’s about being so dialed in that we know what the trends are so that when unexpected things happen, we can sense it just by looking at the content of an email. And so the support team through a lot of repetition, is really calibrated for what’s going on with our members and with our product in the field.
(23:16):
And if we stop doing that well or stop doing that at all, the product experience starts to fall apart. Things go wrong, people have negative poorer experiences, and if we’re too slow, things get messy and eventually negative CSAT is an indicator that the flywheel is reversing. And all the work that we’ve done to create this flywheel ends up going the other way and starts hurting us. It ends up being a detractor. And so that’s the focus in keeping this dialed in and working well is it keeps things moving in the right direction. And within this function, beyond support, there’s member experience, there’s understanding feedback, being the voice of the customer, the surveys, the analytics, keeping in touch, all these kinds of efforts that happen. All of these are inputs for us to run the business effectively so that when we do things like, send an announcement email or something simple. Or build an entirely new feature, we know who our customers are and that matters.
(24:09):
And behind the scenes from that is the actual infrastructure for maintaining orders in the physical world. This is processes, systems, rolling out things like e-commerce and taxes, designing the boxes that the kits go into, someone to look after the inventory to make sure we have enough of those boxes, a forecast for order so that those facilities are staffed correctly. And so there’s a management of performance on order fulfillment that has to happen. If an order takes a week to get out, it starts to hurt, if it takes a month, we’re in big trouble. So keeping this calibrated and running is important, and that’s part of the equation is having a partner like True Pill, but many other partners as well. So member experiences is all these things, but the focus to distill down, it’s running Levels of the business. It’s the forecasting, the planning, the team management. The team has to exist, communication internally and just generally being connective tissue that holds things together within the company.
(25:05):
So the OKRs for member experience are specifically around member support, around order fulfillment, around experience itself and managing vendors and just playing a role in the quality of the service that we’re delivering and making sure that we’re capacity planned effectively, we’re collecting outreach, we know all these different pieces. The specific SLAs that you’ll see, that the metrics, sorry the metrics that you’ll see are SLAs, service level agreements, NPS, net promoter scores, CSAT, these are all measurements of how we’re doing. And generally CSAT, if you get these right, it means that everything underneath is working effectively as well. So if we were to have issues with refunds, that means that our finance policy might be a little bit tricky. I was complaining a few weeks ago about trying to cancel my New York Times subscription, and that’s an indicator that in the company these functions aren’t working well together and there’s some unhappiness.
(26:01):
If there’s issues with the product that points the product in ENG having some issues. If there’s issues in CSAT that point to broken promises or people being confused, it’s a marketing issue. And so generally doing this well, having good CSAT means that all the other systems are working well and support is the top level indicator of all those, and it’s built to scale with all that. So that’s that kind of member experience, support function. One level deeper, a little bit more abstract. We needed a company to get here. And so June, 2019, Josh runs into Sam, you can check the podcast for more details. And they decided that they wanted to start a company. So they had an assemblage in LA and brought a bunch of people together, organized around an idea. And with that idea, they grew to a team of co-founders who agreed to start this company together and now we have a founding team.
(26:51):
But to make that actually turn into a company, they needed to file paperwork. And so we registered with the state of Delaware, made it official, probably went to a lawyer to help out with that, fill some applications and we have a company on paper. What is a company? It’s a bunch of contracts. And when we think of contracts, we usually think of lawyers. But to zoom this out a little bit, enter legal, contracts exist. They are what the company actually is at the core. Contracts between us and our investors, shareholders with employees, each of our relationships with the company, with the vendors. We’ve got software providers, all these different pieces. And that’s the DNA that creates a company. And it turns out that the quality of those contracts really matters. If we structure them the wrong way, we can kill the company. And many companies have died this way.
(27:41):
We could sign agreements that expose us to a lot of risk or responsibility that we shouldn’t take on. We can sign agreements that make us unattractive for further deals or agreements if we have obligations, financial or otherwise can control our information. Colloquially, poison pills may sound dramatic, but the spirit of that holds true, and that is the essence of legal. It’s making sure that we’ve got… We’re making good decisions, we fulfill our obligations across our contracts, and we can run the business the way we want to. And so within legal, we want to make sure that we’re giving opinions to the company that keep us in bounds, that we are aware of what we can do, what we can say without getting into trouble, that we have a governance structure, a board, that we have the right relationship with our investors.
(28:25):
And generally the goal is to create a structure whereby the team can play both offense and defense effectively and just operate on the field legally. So the legal OKRs you’ll see are around contracts, governance, legal opinions, negotiating contracts, surfacing our obligations. All of these pieces are in place to make sure that we can operate effectively, we’re buttoned up. When someone gives us tens of millions of dollars, which is the situation we’re in, we want to make sure that our obligations are clear and that we inspire confidence. And so a healthy legal system is what gets us there. And then for the team, having usable guidance on how we navigate things like HIPAA or tax or FDA or all these kinds of things. So all that’s great and we can build a really responsive legal function, but we need money to do that. Enter finance, money is our strongest tool, and without it, we’re just a pile of contracts.
(29:22):
So we can have a big mission and based on the culture survey, we all know what that is to solve the metabolic health crisis. But capital resources are what get us there. And you don’t have to look far to find a lot of companies going down in flames, running out of cash, closing their doors at a moment’s notice. There’s a lot of these stories you don’t hear too, where companies are scraping by week over week to make payroll. And that’s not a bad thing, it’s just the reality of the board game that we’re playing and the pieces that you get. On the flip side with good management and good decisions and some good luck, you can use capital as a tool. You manage your burn, you sign the right contracts with the right term links. You have systems in place that you can focus on the right level of strategy and planning instead of just paying the bills cycle to cycle and getting caught in that structure.
(30:11):
So expertise and perspective matters here in a real way. And you can kill the company or make the company. Something as simple as the tools that we use, the processes that we put in place. If you have expenses to pay, but we have an expense policy that doesn’t allow you to buy anything and you’re totally slowed down, we’re in trouble and we’re hurting the company. If we have a planning process that’s too onerous, we spend more time planning than actually executing. And we ultimately need to know what we’re spending on and whether or not we’re doing it responsibly. And so finance OKRs that you’ll see are around these areas. Planning, reporting, managing risk, making sure we’re complying and capital management in general. We’ve got a big balance to manage and a lot of accounting to bring that together. And last one, on the home stretch, we get to us, people.
(31:02):
We all have, we saw earlier a contract with the company that outlines our agreements. But in order for that to work, we need a culture more than just values, like how we actually work together. We can have the best mission, but if it’s not a great place to work, where we’re empowered, trusted, fairly compensated, recognized, a lot of that doesn’t actually matter. And so all these policies and structures that we’ve got are intentional. To me, it’s one of my favorite parts of Levels. One of the things that attracted me early on is that, we had an early team of founders that cared deeply about building a great place to work, focused on people, built on values, rooted in principles, trust, and that’s very easy to take for granted. But these principles are all really intentional and built into what it means to build a company.
(31:51):
So every single decision that we make across all the people, policies across what it means to run the company, those all affect what it feels like to work here. And it’s subjective, but also really measurable, that’s why we have the culture survey. And then you add that we’re innovating in the space and doing this remote and async thing, and then the whole way of working of just taking old HR policies and pulling them off the bookshelf and implementing them, it’s not that simple. And that’s not what drew us here. We want to do things intentionally and really think through them. And so to pull a little thread, as soon as you start looking into any one of these policies, you start to realize how all of these are connected. So we’ll take an example of employee compensation.
(32:34):
On the legal side, we have obligations in terms of ownership, contracts, equity, what it means to be an employer, what we have to comply with on the state side. On the finance side, we can hey everyone, all the money, but then we’ll run out of it in three months from now, and then the company is not here. And so we need to find the right balance of responsibility to the company, responsibility to the people, and thinking through how we promote development and impact, allow for growth, all these kinds of structures. And then on the people side, we want a system that’s fair and trusted across geographies and cultures. And that’s really, really hard to get right. It’s a delicate balance. There’s emotion, there’s reason, there’s sensibility, responsibility, just a big, big dance to get all these factors. And so all these functions start working together to find the right balance.
(33:24):
And so every single thing we implement that a lot of us just assume is in place, you really have to think through how these all fit together and what’s in the best interest of all these contracts that we’ve got that are all conflicting with each other that need to be balanced. So on the people side, plenty of depth here and happy to have Nicole, welcome Nicole, to help us dig into all these different areas. And then really design programs that are thoughtful and intentional. And the OKRs ultimately are making sure we’re satisfied at work, that we encourage high performance and maintain some standards that benefit the company, that we’re able to employ people. We have ways to onboard, we have ways to hire. We have the tools to do that. We can pay payroll, we can compensate with a good philosophy. That we have a good culture and system that works effectively across teams and we have the resources, people have the resources to do their job, tools that they need to get work done.
(34:16):
And that we’re connected with each other and speak to some of the deeper needs for connection at work beyond just the employment contract that we have. We have to trust one another and work together and have relationships. And so there’s components of that. And ultimately all that’s to achieve the mission so that we can hit the company goals. And that is the core of how we build a company on the operation side. I’m out of breath.
Josh (34:45):
Miz on Ted on operations. That was awesome. Thank you, Miz. Super deep dive and yeah, I learned a lot. So much that goes into that word operations. All right. Jumping into product updates, Maz.
Maz (35:05):
Thanks. Welcome to product update November 4th. We agreed that we’re going to keep the product update short on every other week, so just a quick update, but then we’ll go deeper into individual products on the other week. So every two weeks, so this is the short one. Just giving you guys a quick update of what’s going on. We are in build process for a lot of the core rails that we have been designing and concepting and shaping over the last few months. So those are all in production and it’s really exciting to see them come live one by one in internal betas and then get them out to members. So keep an eye out for these on the left side. On the right side, we have a lot of interesting stuff coming, a lot of work being done on trends, collaboration between data science research and product and design to figure out what are the correlations between my behaviors and glucose trends?
(35:59):
What are the correlations between glucose trends and outcome metrics? So a lot of great work is being done there and a great draws of collaboration. And the intention there is really, show more insights to members to help them tune their behaviors and help them get to their goals. And this could manifest in many places in the product, whether it’s weekly recaps, whether it’s in time, real time feedback. So really excited to see what comes out of that and that connects to the team to work on that. There’s another project going that is we’re looking at everything that we are trying to teach members and really make comprehension first class citizen in the app. And so there’s a lot of great content across our channels and how can we actually create that in a way that’s just in time and is digestible in the app mobile first.
(36:49):
So there’s a lot of work going on there and there’s thinking that, it will be content, that will be video, audio and text typically, and also interactive content like the glucose game. So there’s a lot of great work going on there and to really push our core concepts in a way that people love to consume and learn from. So, this is something that we’ve been talking about for a long time now, and I think it’s finally time to put some real energy into this. It is still very early, but there is something going around how can we actually leverage our strong community that we have in a much more integrated way that is delightful and will help with all the behavior design metrics that we’ve been talking about? So really look forward to see what this comes out. And I’m sure you guys have seen Sissy has joined the product team, which is fantastic.
(37:41):
I think we’re really happy that she joined our team and she will also help with this given her strong community background. So she will be added to this in time when we get a little bit further. But while she gets ramped up, she’s got a couple of really interesting projects including gifting. And as you notice these last two, you guys probably haven’t seen many features like this, but we’re shifting towards features that are around the membership and the value that it brings. For example, gifting will be an interesting way to try a new membership model, starting with gifting as an experiment.
(38:19):
And we could learn a lot from this and could actually develop new types of memberships for us. The next one is member portal. We know that we want people to be able to self-serve a lot of these things that we have instead of calling support. And so we’re working on that and hopefully that that will make the consumer experience a lot more delightful when it comes to these administrative tasks and also reduce the burden on our support team. So a lot’s going on, and then we’ll be back next week with more details and more features.
Josh (38:47):
Awesome, Thank you Maz. Exciting stuff there. Congrats to Sissy for the move. Okay, move over to Tom.
Tom (38:55):
All right, what’s up everyone? Happy Friday. This is going to be a demand capture update. Next slide. All right, so we’re going to cover what demand capture is and means. Just as a reminder, quick update on the numbers, a look back on how we got here from Tom’s perspective and our priorities over the next several months. I will probably be reiterating some of Ben’s points and themes last week in his demand generation presentation. So I would just recommend if you haven’t watched that yet, it was amazing so I encourage you to do so. Next slide.
(39:36):
Okay, my emojis are not showing up there. I’m not sure why. All right, well, we have eyeball email and order emojis there, so you can just imagine them. And we think of our growth funnel at the highest level as really a two stage process. So generating demand, in other words, generating interest in Levels, metabolic health, CGM, just what we’re building here. And then capturing that demand, in other words, converting that interest into revenue. And the framework that we use to understand this shorthand and communicate it out is eyeballs, emails, orders. So you’ve probably heard this before, and demand generation is focused on getting eyeballs to our website. And many of those people who go to our website end up signing up for our email list or they provide their email during the checkout process. And then demand capture is largely zeroed in on turning those eyeballs and emails into orders or new members. Next slide.
(40:37):
So it’s important to note that demand gen and demand capture work really closely together. They comprise the broader growth or marketing team, but I’m highlighting the team here that is formally known as demand capture. So Jackie, Karen, Paul, myself, and then of course shout out to JM who really built the foundation for this team and this function and is going to be really sorely missed. And you’ll see on the right side there, we’re going to dive into more of this in a bit, but these are some of the projects that sit in our camp. Next slide. All right, so current state of affairs. This is pulled from Ben’s presentation last week, but we set targets a while back. So pre liftoff and long story short, those targets have been harder to hit than we had hoped, though I would say candidly, this isn’t too much of a surprise and I’m going to talk a little bit about why and how we got here.
(41:34):
So next slide. All right, so one reason I want to talk about how we got here is that you may have heard something along these lines lately from either JM, originally, Sam, myself, Ben, that we’re still focused on building the growth infrastructure, which includes things like improving the checkout flow and then also just marketing the product and the benefits of Levels more explicitly and directly. And I’m calling this out upfront before doing the lookback because I think if I were you, I might be wondering why didn’t we build this infrastructure if it’s so table stakes seems like maybe we should have if we’re missing our growth targets now. So I think that’s a really reasonable question. Next slide. And so I wanted to give just a quick and pretty candid look back on how I’ve seen our approach to growth evolve over the last couple of years with a front row seat.
(42:32):
And so first, we very intentionally focused on building a demand gen engine. And so this was around creating the category of metabolic health and just defining the problem that we’re looking to solve. And we were doing this largely through editorial, press, which including the podcast tour in that and then partnerships. Demand capture, acquiring new members really just kind of came along for the ride. And frankly it was pretty easy and easier than I would say we were even expecting. We weren’t trying to grow too much, but we were objectively doing a lot of revenue and a lot of new members every single month. And just for context, we actually had to pause on many of these initiatives that were driving growth due to engine Ops considerations at the time and capacity constraints.
(43:17):
So as a result, we didn’t feel urgency around diverting our very limited resources away from education and building the organic growth engine that we knew would be really sustainable and set us up for success and towards some of the more common consumer marketing tactics, things like performance marketing, more just direct selling to our email base, more product marketing on the site, and then putting end resources towards making the checkout flow better.
(43:49):
And these are some of the things we mean when we say table stakes marketing. So then at that point we set your pretty aggressive growth targets as venture funded companies must do. And the hypothesis at the time was basically that enough people who are reading the blog ie, enough of the demand gen efforts, we’re going to kind of naturally convert well enough that we’re going to hit our targets in spite of not doing a lot of the common growth tactics. And long story short, we found out over the last few months that in fact this would not be enough to hit these aggressive targets. And so we are now more quickly I would say than we otherwise would turning our attention to some of these table stakes like growth engine initiatives.
(44:31):
And they were always on our roadmap. I think in just any perfect world, our demand gen efforts would’ve been enough to hit the targets for a while and we would’ve taken our time a little bit more. So this is what we’re focused on now, and I would say by the end of Q1 or certainly in Q1, we’re going to have a much clearer understanding of what our growth trajectory looks like. Next slide. Again, these emojis aren’t showing up, but all right, so back to priorities here. So these are some more growth truisms that you may have heard already. And the bottom line is that we’re trying to get more eyeballs to the site as always, but the thing to reiterate here is that there’s really a refocusing and putting more of a relative focus than we ever had in the past on turning those eyeballs and emails into orders.
(45:20):
Next slide. And so this is currently what our funnel looks like in a given month, roughly 200 K unique visitors to the site. At about 1% of those people are ending up actually converting to new members and then ballpark 15,000 new emails and often more checkout starts 20, 25, 30,000 per month. Next slide. All right, so the quantitative objectives right now for demand capture are to improve our conversion rate. And I made a note there just to give you a sense of how much leverage there is here. We get up to 30,000 checkout starts a month. So if conversion rate improves, say just 2%, which is not insignificant, that’s difficult to do. But if we prove conversion rate by 2%, that means up to a 30% increase month over month in new members. And then the second one here is just to grow 10% month over month.
(46:15):
This has been a goal for a while and the only thing I’d just call out here is that we’re really focused on improvement month over month during this period of sort of building the core infrastructure. And we don’t need to do a certain total volume say over the next six months. We’re really just looking to improve month over month. So if last month we miss our target, the goal still for this month is to grow 10%. Next slide. So these are the priorities right now that are driving those two objectives. More to come on all of these, they’re all going to have their own if they’re new, at least their own memos and DRIs and updates on forums. But I’m just going to provide a very high level overview.
(46:58):
So Karen is working on the checkout redesign, which we’re actually calling signup, redesign, sorry Karen, for not making that change. This includes improving product marketing as well as just reducing the friction in the mechanics of the process. And I put an asterisk there because she’s also going to be exploring pricing experiments and that’s going to interact with work that Maz and Sissy and the product team are doing around membership value. Paul’s going to be Kickstarting, email and lifecycle marketing. So think of this as we get 15,000 emails in a month, what do we do with those emails in order to convert them into members over the next 1, 2, 3 months?
(47:38):
And the short answer is not a ton right now beyond sending them editorial content, so there’s a lot of opportunity there. Paul’s also going to be focused on some paid retargeting Ads. So we’ve long held off on traditional paid social advertising, so think like Instagram Ads, but we’d like to start this in a limited capacity, specifically retargeting folks who have already demonstrated interest. They’ve been to our website or provided us their email. And so you think of this as collecting a lot of the low hanging fruit that’s out there. Partnerships, which Jackie is going to continue to focus on. This has been a pillar for years and it’s going to continue to be the notable change here is just that we’re going to be for a period of time less focused on just volume of partners that we’re onboarding and doubling down on tier one folks.
(48:24):
Then lastly, user referrals. This very much touches product as well and we’re still in the process of determining timeline and resourcing for it. But again, we view user referrals as one of the highest leverage points of growth for the company, just given the incredible virality that we know that exists within the product and our member base. Next slide. All right, so lastly, I just wanted to connect these priorities to the framework that Ben introduced last week, which was fantastic. So as a reminder, loops, levers and boosters. I’m not going to go over this again here, again, watch Ben’s presentation last week if you haven’t. But next slide.
(49:04):
What I wanted to do is just map the priorities that I outlined earlier to this framework. I also added a fourth category down there at the bottom. This comes from one of our investors and growth experts, Lenny, who calls these lubricants. So this isn’t like a growth engine metaphor, but it’s basically anything that makes the whole engine work better. And so just to summarize here, we want to build our first loop in user referrals. We want to create two additional growth levers in paid retargeting Ads, as well as just a more reliable email funnel. We’re going to continue with the partnerships work. And then lastly, and probably most importantly right now we’re going to improve the website and checkout experience in order to increase conversion rate. Next slide, I think, last slide. Yes. Lastly, I’m going to be sending out a memo that walks through some of this in more detail after this meeting. And Ben’s also a new memo that he put out. Growth, our one pager approach to growth is fantastic. So if you want to dig into any of this more, that’s where to go. That’s it.
Josh (50:14):
Well, I think everyone got a ton out of that. I know I did. Thanks a lot Tom. Looking forward to the memos. Can’t wait to start investing in demand capture aggressively. I think that background context, there’s a ton. If you look back through our memos and strategy documents in the past, you’ll see just how asymmetric the efforts were. Given that we were in this synthetic supply demand circumstance where we had a beta with a maximum cap that we could serve and we had to limit our growth levers. So this is going to be a new phase for Levels and I can’t wait. Quick hiring updates. We’ve got Juan, well actually Adam and Raphael are starting on Monday and Juan starting the following week. So super excited to have the team growing again with some awesome people. And with that, we have closed out the backend software engineering role or hiring need. So now we have general applications and we have the R&D engineering still open.
(51:15):
If you’re looking at Levels interested, waiting for an opportunity, definitely check out our careers page, send in a general application. We have a talent pool that we keep warm with all the information that’s going on here at Levels and of course we always want to meet great people. But awesome work to the ENG team. Closing that out. All right, got a couple of minutes here for individual contributions, stop the share. We use the reactions button down here. You can hit raise hand. I’ll go ahead and go first. I think I just did mine professionally. The demand capture stuff and just building this new muscle up in the company, shifting our focus and attention, I’m excited for it, it’s a huge opportunity. We can look glass half empty, we’re half full. And I think just seeing the numbers, it’s really charging me up to watch the team go to work.
(52:04):
And I appreciate Tom and everyone else just working so reflexively to make this happen. Seeing Sissy shift over, just all the stuff that’s happening, it’s going to come together into a symphony. I can see it happening. And then personally, yeah, got some family in town this weekend, so it’s a little bit cloudy and humid out there, but hoping to also work out a bit. All right, that’s me. Anybody else? Rebecca.
Rebecca (52:34):
So professionally, I’ve actually had a lot of fun with this New e-commerce 2.0. I think it’s been fun working out the kinks and working more closely with the engineering team. And Taylor taking lead on this has been super helpful and amazing. I feel like I’m getting a much more deeper understanding of what’s actually going on when people sign up and everything. So it’s been really fun and a little bit of a different change of pace than usual. And then personal things are good, life is good, just enjoying it. It’s my second year in Florida and it’s just nice that we’re not heading into a cold winter. It’s 85 degrees outside right now, so I’m really happy about that.
Josh (53:20):
That makes one of us. Chris.
Chris (53:26):
I just want to second Rebecca’s comment around e-commerce. It’s been really rewarding to watch the support team work with engineering real closely. It’s very similar, reminds me of when we went through liftoff of that kind of like whole new world, tight closed loop, get that feedback, solve the bug, identify what’s really a new issue to some of Miz’s comments. So is this normal or is this something new? And being able to pick those signals up really quickly was very fun to watch the team and also for the team members to learn new skills. I mean, Rebecca talked about understanding how orders work. A lot of this we used to rely on people like Braden who knew it like the back of his hand. And watching the team step-up to go deep around how the mechanics and the web hooks and what means and what’s a successful order and why it get stuck and how do we unstick it. It’s just great to watch.
(54:19):
And then super excited for next week to be in the Bay Area for a small meetup, but also really to be onsite for the True pill and the launch of over the counter for the IRB. Removing some of that friction, so to make Tom’s job easier and Karen’s around making more lubrication in the flow of removing some of the hard steps. So that’s going to be a real big unlock for the company and a big milestone that we’ve been waiting for ever since the IRB got approved. So super excited to watch that come together. And then personally, as of two days ago, winter is here, we probably have six inches of snow fully covered. I’ve already think about, I need to put the blade on the tractor and start thinking about plowing. I’m not prepared for it so. And Starlink is officially hooked up for the entire ranch. So Farm [inaudible 00:55:10] 2023 will now have high speed internet across the entire plantation. So yeah, so making improvements to the infrastructure for next year.
Josh (55:20):
All exciting developments. I will be there to use your Starlink bandwidth. Anyone else want to jump in? Personal, professional. All right, got Miz.
Miz (55:36):
I’ll drop one in. Not on the call given Singapore time zones, but really fun seeing Farhan onboard into ENG. He’s just been all over the place in terms of making improvements and patching things and giving feedback and so it’s always exciting when people come into the culture and they’re so excited about it from the outside that they just dive right in and get started. So been enjoying seeing him onboard. So welcome Farhan.
Josh (56:02):
Yeah, that’s fun. Cool, cool. Well, I think that was a super informative and awesome meeting. Lots to look forward to, lots of work and challenges up ahead, we’re going to learn a ton. It’s all exciting. So, all right, everybody have a great weekend. Thanks for contributing. Thanks for all the work this week. See you next week.