Josh Clemente (00:00):
I’m going to go ahead and jump straight in. We might have somewhat of a light week this week. We got a couple of people in transit, but we will see how it fills out. All right, October 14th, 2022. So this week we saw a turnaround in a couple of things on the operations side. Our SLAs on fulfilling orders are nearing our target, so big improvement over the past few weeks as we’ve sort of hit a bit of a roadblock with some of the logistical partners we’ve got, but getting back on track. Happiness had a corresponding jump to 97%, which is huge. Really awesome to see. Replacement rate is now below 10% for six weeks running. Support contact rate, below target for five weeks, and content leverage, above target for four weeks, so all really good signs.
(00:45):
The team has just done an incredible job of churning through a really overwhelming amount of volume and change, as we’ve gone live and then run into a number of setbacks, so big appreciation there. Awesome work. We also had a big spike in app store ratings, so we pushed out an email campaign to ask our members to check us out in the app store and leave a review, and that was really awesome. I think we jumped to 4.2 from 3-point-something, which was a little bit of a stagnant rating after we’d rolled out a bunch of new features. On the N side. So day score, V0.1, height and weight, which are new Apple Health integrations and Labs V1.1 were all either released or partially released for internal testing. So everyone, please check these features out and continue to provide the team feedback.
(01:33):
On the next round of work, we’ve got scoring V2.2, healthier food choices, which I think we’re going to talk about today, and now V2.2 and the Instacart integration that we’re working on all approaching release, so into work right now. On the digital media side, we’ve got a big sort of strategy update going on, where essentially we’re evaluating how we will evolve our social and digital channels over the coming months. So a lot of great thinking going on there. One example is the Levels Kitchen. You can see a little sneak preview of the work that’s gone on there, but the Levels Kitchen content and the release strategy associated with it, so we’re going to do a five-part show with kind of a big drip email, social blog sort of article, per-episode campaign.
(02:25):
So, a lot of work going in. We’re continuing to evolve our sort media platform that we’re building, and putting a lot of thought into quality and which efforts require the most evolution. We’ve got a new advisory master tracker, so we’ve got an amazing advisory board as I think we all know, and a ton of projects in flight. It can be kind of hard to keep up, so a new tracker that Sony built out, really awesome. A couple items to note there, we’re working on a newsletter activation with Dr. David Perlmutter. We’re working on season two of a lifespan partnership with David Sinclair, and then a whole new level episode featuring Dr. Gerald Schulman, so just a sampling of some of the exciting stuff that we’re working on with our advisors.
(03:08):
Definitely check out that notion page for that master tracker to see what’s in flight. We’re starting to ramp up our internal testing of the Comms By Levels tool, so this is really exciting. Look for more info on this in the next few weeks. Some teams are already trying it out. A lot of bugs and features that are still being built, so no one should expect this to be fully polished, but it is a product built in the image of Levels comms and how we do work, so I’ve been on it for a couple of weeks now, and I’m very excited. On the podcast side, so Casey was on Ben Greenfield this week. Taylor was on Sonya Looney’s show, and Lauren appeared on Brave New Girl, which also was the first UK wait list, skip the link sort of partner episode, which is really awesome.
(03:56):
I mean, it’s kind of reminiscent of the earliest days of podcast appearances with our wait list here in the US, so really awesome. Looking forward to learning more on that. Then, Levels was on CBS news, a feature on weight loss tools this week, which is great. The IRB study, we’ve hit big numbers. We’re now approaching half a million glucose days in the IRB dataset. We’re averaging about 60-plus glucose days per participant with a very low withdrawal rate. These are big numbers, and there isn’t a similar study out there. We’re at scales that really just don’t exist, as far as we know, in the CGM research literature. So pretty awesome there. We’ve got a new research strategy memo that is approaching readiness for review.
(04:39):
Finally, on membership, so membership renewals are going to be up at the year mark in early Q1. So there’s a lot that we can do to prepare across all the functions in the company for what will be kind of a big moment. We’re going to learn a lot, we’re going to need to experiment, we’re going to need to adapt. There will be a high amount of support volume, I’m sure, and just generally, we need to be ready to capture all of those lessons and adapt in real time, and probably experiment up ahead of that. So a new strategy memo is being worked on right now for membership renewals, and Sissy’s taking the lead on helping to keep us moving there, so pretty awesome stuff. A couple visuals; this is a little sneak preview of the Instacart integration that we’re working towards.
(05:24):
We’ve got some really nice new eye candy. These are photo assets for the Levels product, and a ton of really exciting partnerships and UGC that have gone live in the last week, week-plus. Sorry for the barking in the background. [inaudible 00:05:39] too much about that. All right. With that, I want to welcome Stephanie Nickitas. Stephanie’s a member at Levels, former professional tennis player, and D1 coach. She’s now a CrossFit coach and owner of CrossFit Winter Park, and I’m really excited to have you join us today. Stephanie, would love to hear about your journey as a CrossFitter, as an athlete, as someone who teaches athletes into metabolic health, and what you’re most excited about on the metabolic technology side.
Stephanie Nickitas (06:06):
Well, first of all, thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here. This is a really cool opportunity, and hopefully I can share some knowledge, I guess. Background, obviously, you see it. Been involved with sports and fitness since the age of four, I think, is when I picked up a tennis racket. So the physical aspect of sports has always been an integral part of my life through my competitive career, and then switching over into coaching division one college athletes for 15 years, and also being a part of their whole journey of trying to perform better on the tennis court, in the weight room, and all of that. So then moving on, I found CrossFit as a physical fitness program for myself. Just started being a member somewhere, and absolutely loved it, and really kind of dived in and wanted to get more involved.
(07:01):
Took my coaching seminar with CrossFit, and then really just dove in and opened an affiliate nine years ago. We just had our nine-year anniversary a couple of weeks ago. So juggled both for a little while and was a D1 coach and a CrossFit owner for a handful of years, and then was able to step away from my former tennis career, and then head over into fully coaching, owning CrossFit. Also, a bootcamp along with CrossFit, so I get to be in front of a lot of people and try to help them on their health and wellness journey. We like to say it’s not just the 60 minutes they spend in the gym a day. There’s 23 other hours of the day that they have huge impacts on their life, and we want to help them with that. So nutrition, diet, all of that’s been a huge part of my life.
(07:58):
Since I was young, my mom was super into health and fitness at a young age and showed me the ropes. So basically, you have people that come into the gym, they want to get fit, lose weight. They’ve got all kinds of different things going on, and when I heard about Levels, and right when you guys launched, pretty early on, I was super excited, for numerous reasons, just for myself to try it, because just having that data, I actually have a good friend who is a type one diabetic, and he actually coached at my gym and so he obviously needed to wear one out of necessity, a CGM, and had his insulin pump, and we talked about that a lot. Then, with me having the ability to also get one, how we were able to compare, contrast, and talk about things, that was super educational for me as well as soon as I was able to put on Levels.
(08:55):
So I just learned so much, not only for myself, so selfishly, of course, I wanted to use Levels to see how it would affect different things. I’ve got performance that I still want to perform well in the gym. I still like to do my workouts. I’m not as competitive as I used to be, so you’ve got the performance aspect. Then, you’ve got longevity, health, wellness. Things that we’re doing now to our bodies are going to affect us down the road many years. So learning and gathering all this data, even for somebody that is not, at the current time, metabolically unhealthy, I’m so into preventative health. Our medical system nowadays is so into sick care and waiting until things go wrong, and then give you something to fix it, like medication, but why not do something like this, proactively, to get ahead of the curve?
(09:48):
So I was excited to use myself as a little bit of a Guinea pig, and then be able to translate that information to others, but it made me change some habits that I had, some different ways that I eat and the way that I train. Seeing how lack of sleep, stress, there’s so many things that come into what is happening inside of you, your glucose, and being able to pair that with other trackers. I’ve had a WHOOP for five years, and then seeing and being able to compare the two and understand what’s going on. So it was just really eyeopening, and then taking that information, translating it into talking with members when we work with them on nutrition, or their stress Levels, their lack of sleep, and different things. It’s just been such an amazing tool to have and learn from myself, and then share that knowledge.
Josh Clemente (10:50):
A lot of really familiar elements of that story, and I just love to hear the use case, and especially how you focused on, primarily, I think what I heard a lot of is all the elements of the factors outside of nutrition that you were also learning about, and there’s just so much to mine there. I think there’s nonlinear benefits when you can have multiple different metrics that are all sort of helping you pinpoint the major drivers. For some of us, it is nutrition, and for others it’s managing sleep, and for others it’s work stress. So I’d love to hear, from your perspective, as you’ve used Levels over the past journey that we’ve been sort of building on, what are you most excited for us to build that doesn’t exist today? What feature or improvement would you love to see that would be super eyeopening for you?
Stephanie Nickitas (11:48):
I think maybe you get a snapshot of your week of individual meals, maybe a little bit more long-term, like how, from my first year of using it into my second year, have you noticed changes in trends? Can the system tell us, “All right. It looks like your average glucose for a long time was up here, but you’ve done something to change it.” Maybe there’s a way to connect those dots. I think that would be really, really cool, because we can see it in small snapshots, but be able to get a program to do all that math for us and show us kind of the broader picture after using it for a longer time.
(12:30):
I think that’ll get people to stick with it longer as well too, to keep having that input on a monthly or maybe every half a year basis or something like that. Then, maybe integration with third-party apps. It would be really cool to see integration with Loop or something like that, where you just get more data, more information. I mean, more data in some circles it’s not always the best thing, but I think with this, I think it would be awesome to be able to integrate and see, “Okay. This happened, and I was really poorly recovered. My HRV was super low, and my resting heart rate the night before was super high, and then I’m eating the same things the next day, but my glucose is out of control,” so being able to pair those two together would be really cool.
Josh Clemente (13:25):
I love both of those. Just to shed a little light, we are thinking a lot about the first one, of the long-term trends. This IRB study we’re running, where we now have 400,000 plus days of continuous glucose information, that’s going to be really helpful for us to be able to, not only build internal features that we think matter, but also share that with the larger community, the metabolic science community to establish, hopefully, a new industry standard, in a sense, for how continuous metrics are both shown and used for long-term health improvement, if that is what is happening.
(14:03):
And so, still don’t have results. Obviously, that’s work in progress, but I’m really looking forward to that. That’s sort of a big effort, and then we also have this concept of north star metrics versus feedback metrics and how the continuous data feeds into the large, well-established medical industry standard north star metrics, so being able to work with our metabolic health panel to do gold standard blood work and show kind how those two things might work in concert. Yeah, just connecting those dots. Finally, the integrations thing; this is a hot topic right now, and we’re talking right now about kind of an Instacart integration to help make it easier for people to get food items that might be recommended into their pantry to try out.
(14:45):
But I am a data geek as well. I’ve got multiple wearables on right now besides Levels, and excited to be able to start to synergize this stuff, so switching between apps is really difficult to maintain context, and we definitely hear you there. So this is really awesome. I appreciate, first of all, your support as a member, you sharing Levels with other people in your community, and just sticking with us through the journey here. Can’t wait to do this in the future again, as we continue to evolve, and I know the whole team really appreciates hearing directly from you.
Stephanie Nickitas (15:19):
Yeah. Thank you, guys. I mean, I really appreciate it, and can’t thank you enough for all the work you’ve been doing. I just can’t wait to see where it goes in the future, so I’ll be there with you.
Josh Clemente (15:29):
Awesome. Thanks a lot Stephanie. If you’d like to stick around, we do have a packed meeting, but totally understand if you have to jump. The team really appreciates you hanging out.
Stephanie Nickitas (15:35):
All right, appreciate it. Thank you.
Josh Clemente (15:37):
All right. Bye-bye. Quick culture and kudos slide here. So firstly, happy one year to Lauren and Jackie Both hit one year just this week. Pretty wild. There’s been so much change over the past year, and both of you have been integral to that, so thanks. Also, a huge shout-out to Helena. So she’s been helping on just a ton of support challenges to make sure that we’ve got the data that we need to be wrestling with the challenges that team is consistently working through, so thanks Helena for supporting there, and Xinlu, for also building out more tooling, just constantly helping us to adapt in real time. On the culture side, internal side, we’ve got the Q3 2022 survey going on right now. We’re a little bit overdue. I’m going to throw my hand up and say I am one of the offenders here.
(16:27):
So let’s all set some time aside, we really want to get to 100 percent participation in this Q3 survey. If you’re not sure if you should take it, just Ping Miz, but please check out threads and take that. Then, lastly, I just want to highlight Riley and Miz for continuing to do the best they can to evolve our platforms and our systems, to make sure that we have the best options and benefits that we can. We are transitioning from Rippling to JustWorks, which is a professional employer organization. This is going to require some work on each of our part to set up this new system, so please keep your eyes open for emails on that and for the communications from Riley and Miz, associated with it, and just thanks to those two for pushing this. Open enrollment next week, it’s a good call. Miz, I believe this is you?
Michael Mizrahi (17:12):
Yeah. I’ll hop in on this one. We’re all super smart and not likely to get swindled or conned, but they’re trying. Almost every single person on the team, and if you haven’t been included, don’t worry, you’ll be included soon, is getting SMS messages with people phishing. It’s kind of innocuous. They just want Apple gift cards, which honestly is no big deal, but let’s not give it to them, and let’s also just kind of be mindful, because this can be more malicious in the future if there’s other parts of the company that people are trying to get into.
(17:42):
So we, obviously, have a lot of content information out there. I think this forum is probably going to be on YouTube one day. Our phone numbers are probably getting skimmed from LinkedIn or something like this, so just keep an eye open. Be super attentive, and if something doesn’t seem quite right, then it’s probably not, and just ignore it altogether. I’ve thrown up actual SMS messages that we’ve gotten across the team, but these also come in via email as well, so just keep your eyes open, be mindful of your computer, make sure your advanced settings are right, and put on 2FA wherever you can, all the right things. Just be on top of this. It’s a PSA. That’s it.
Josh Clemente (18:21):
Thank you, Miz. All right, company objectives. So main thing, Levels shows you how food affects your health. No change here. This is the main priority. Top level objectives that stack up into that objective are member retention, new member acquisition, and member health improvement, and all of the functional OKRs that we’re working on right now and measuring success against are stacking into each of these. All right. I’m going to hand off to, I believe, Cosima, for this week.
Cosmina Travis (18:46):
Yeah. We’ve got [inaudible 00:18:48] in the air, so our normal MC is not here. If you go to the next slide, so no major changes since last week. Labs 1.1 is no longer on this list, because we’re done with development. We’re currently doing validation QA, and are likely to hold some of the elements of that released for labs 2.0, so that we’re really creating more discovery and excitement around the new panel. Just a couple more updates, personalization is moving along nicely with collaboration with Charro on data science, and you’ll see Instacart added to the list, so I’ll actually jump in and talk more about Instacart, and then hand over to Alan for some design updates. Go to the next slide, so what are we doing with Instacart? So if you go to the next slide, the what.
(19:40):
At this point, it’s very much an experiment, and as we’re always kind of trying to do skateboard fashion, we really are trying to learn whether members find some sort of one-click-to-buy option something that’s helpful. So we have many places now in the app, where we’re introducing recipes, we’re recommending swaps, and we want to see whether it will be helpful to members to actually help them find a way to, “Okay. You told me to swap oat milk for almond milk. Show me exactly what product to buy and help me close that loop.” So we wanted to use an existing rail. Event-based insights is one of our most mature rails now for content, so we’re starting off with basically two experiences; one that jumps off from specific recipes, and another that jumps off from a sort of more general recommended pantry selection.
(20:35):
So in one case, it’ll be you get a recommendation for, “Hey, why don’t you try, instead of oatmeal, this chia recipe,” and then there’ll be an option to click, and when a member clicks, they’ll be taken to a shopping cart that’s pre-populated with all of the ingredients to make that. The other case is more of a pantry browsing experience. Basically, if we, let’s say, as an example, see someone logging some sort of processed food snack, we might recommend, “Hey, check out this pantry that we’ve built of Levels approved or Levels favorite snacks that sort of aren’t highly processed,” and that’s a little bit more of a browsing experience. If you go to the next slide, so just some of the why’s. One of our main focuses is trying to get members to have actions above the action line.
(21:34):
So how can we get members to actually want to do the things that we’re recommending to do? So we need to make it as easy to do and as specific as possible, so rather than just saying, “Generally, it’s good not to eat certain things,” how can we not only give them a recipe but also help them actually actuate on that by buying the products? Then, this sort of fits in, but the idea of closing the loop. So I think we’ve all experienced the idea of like, “Oh. This really makes sense. That would be a healthy change for me to make,” but we forget about it, we’re busy. So how can we help members not only understand what is a great swap, but actually make it easy for them to close the loop and see that impact? Then, part of why we’re doing it in such a skateboard, lightweight way is that we want to see how many people even click the button.
(22:24):
There’ll be lots more to do if we find that this is a great opportunity, but we’re starting pretty lean. Then, if you jump to the next slide, so what’s next? Development is kicked off this spring. We’re currently, I’m working with Mike D, who I consider our level snack guru to build out the snack pantry that we have in Instacart. That’s something we can always change behind the scenes, and we can build multiple different pantries, but this is, you’ll see a lot of things similar to what we have at our assemblages in the stack pantry. Then, also a big piece of this is while we can look at basic engagement metrics, like how many people are clicking. We’re really going to want to go deep on serving our members, so understanding, even though 96% of people in the US could use Instacart based on their zip code, how many people actually are willing to?
(23:16):
It doesn’t take very much to build an account; just your name, basically, and credit card, but that might be enough for people to say, “Oh. I don’t have an Instacart. I wouldn’t use this.” We definitely are open, if we get positive signal, to exploring other services. Amazon’s an obvious one, but Instacart was a nice one to start off with, and there’s definitely, if we get positive signal, we want to look at other rails in our product that are maybe a little less mature, like healthier food choices. We’ll have tons of recipes, as that feature goes live, and some of our personality driven content. You could imagine a great video of Mallory sharing her favorite ketogenic waffle, and then you’re able to see how she builds her shopping cart in Instacart. Yeah, that’s the update. Then, I think Alan is probably next.
Alan McLean (24:14):
Still muted. Hi. Behind the scenes, every single Friday that I present, I ask Josh, quietly, and with a grimace, to please refresh, so this is me buying time as he refreshes. Next slide, please. Oh. Did we get a refresh? Back one more slide. Yes, all right. Now we’re up-to-date. Thank you. So you might’ve recalled, if you’ve been watching this for a while, that there was a while ago where I said we might need to potentially lighten up a little bit in the product experience. This is Dieter Rams. He’s drawing out some amazing radio or something. Designers love to model after his minimalist, functionalist approach. We might need to experiment in that, and I talked about that before.
(25:03):
We’ve done some of that, next slide, please, and it has not been successful. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t, and this is, actually, one of the beautiful things about working at a startup as a designer, is that you can try all kinds of wacky stuff. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. We tried things like this, and we moved away from it, but it was a fun way to just pulse check a little bit on how people relate to the product experience, and we’re going to continue to do more of that. One of the ways that you’re going to start seeing some of that is in Levels Levels, and this top ring spot and some of the ways that we reward good behavior, healthy choices.
(25:43):
Next slide. And so here’s one example. We’re taking the illustration aesthetic that we have currently, and starting to speak to how your body is responding. Right now you only see that little weird emoji at the top for stable time. We’re going to get rid of that and start replacing it with different types of imagery. This is an homage to Josh without telling him about it, a scramjet speaking to shooting up into space with your glucose. Then, the next slide, a very different aesthetic. This is a bit more soft. This is rounder. It’s got some animation. It’s kind of playful, but maybe it works for us, maybe it doesn’t. We want to see how people respond to that. We’re starting to play with that a little bit in context in the app.
(26:28):
Next slide, so I’m not actually sure what to call Levels Levels anymore. I tried to explain to friends Levels Levels, and they’re like, “Levels Levels? Come up with a better name.” I don’t know what that is. Maybe it’s “metabolic milestones.” I think that could work. This is, again, essentially our game, our in-product game to get you to make better choices in the day, focusing on three key pillars, which is metabolically healthy foods, stable glucose, and healthy habits. This has been a fair bit of work. This has sort of been all consuming the last little while and getting this in place. A couple of reasons for that is that we need to sort of architect the page a little bit more so that we can support some new additions that are going to be pretty important. We’ve got some design system updates for that.
(27:13):
You’re going to start seeing some of those changes continuing to roll out. On this, we actually did some surveys to see how users responded to this concept of points. Next slide. And just a reminder to the high level, why are people here, we’ve got a fairly good number of responses for this kind of outreach. Prevent disease, manage weight, live longer, increase energy, this should not be too much of a surprise to most of us. Next slide. I was reminded again, though, that the age of our users is actually something that we don’t talk about all that often, but it does skew a little bit older, and so that’s a good reminder on who we’re designing for and just how to think about their needs. I think that’s another reason why prevent disease is so high up there.
(28:00):
At least on the design side, we are constantly thinking about our users, but the natural inclincation is to think about the user as you, and they may not be actually you who’s using it. Actually, I’m 40. So oh, well. Next slide. And a kudos to everyone on the team. You should feel encouraged that, when we ask people how satisfied they were, it very much skewed to the right here and very satisfied. So I think that’s a pretty good sign, in terms of user satisfaction. So onto some designs. Specifically, the thing that we were trying to pulse check around was points. Points can really can stir strong emotions in the product space, because it can feel like you’re sort of obviously gamifying things. People don’t like to be manipulated. We were very encouraged to see though that there was a strong skew of positivity in survey responses to the idea of adding points to healthy habits.
(28:55):
I’d largely say that the theme was pretty much like this, “It’d be great. It’d be awesome. Go for it, do it. I love it.” Next slide. There were a couple of people that were concerned about it like, “What does it add up to?” “I don’t need another checklist in my life,” was one of the comments totally reasonable feedback. I think it’s going to require us to be subtle and nuanced in how much we surface the notion of points for healthy habits. We’re going to have to be mindful of not hitting people over the head too much with it while still trying to leverage the obvious benefits you get from gamifying healthy choices. Next slide. So Victor and I have been working on some of the UX for it. It’s starting to really come along. Here, on the left, you’re seeing an example of us acknowledging and rewarding some points for a really excellent meal.
(29:43):
This is an example of identifying some healthy ingredients we classify as high fiber, whole foods, or anti-inflammatory. They’re all blueberries today. That’s the design copy edit issue. But either way, that’s the general gist of it, is that here’s an example of a little nudge that will fly up, and you can tap on it and you can go see a little bit more about your points. Next slide. There’ll be a variety of these things, and this is, again, where we’re playing with some of the imagery, so talking about healthy habits, like great sleep or getting some strenuous activity, having a stable morning. We want to create memorable moments around leveling up and getting progress. And so you’re going to start to see more of that manifest in the product pretty soon. I think that’s it. Next slide. Yeah, that’s it. All right. Thanks, everybody.
Josh Clemente (30:34):
Awesome. Yeah, I really like this, and I can also see how this, for people who respond well to the point system, could continue to be helpful. Maybe when you’re sort of in between sensors, it can kind of keep a trajectory of helpful feedback that you know correlates back to the data that you had. Awesome. Thanks, Alan, and product team. I believe Lauren and Ben are taking the next few slides.
Lauren Kelley-Chew (31:01):
Yeah, so just picking up from where you left off, Josh, as we know, we’re going to recap every week one deep dive on a function, and also just to recap our functional OKRs and how they line up to our company OKRs. So again, product is our top priority in Q4, and broadly speaking, we are trying to build something that people want, sell it, and do all of that while keeping the lights on and shining bright. So you can see here where the functions, broadly speaking, line up, although of course, all of the functions are helping out on many of these goals. Next slide. This week we are going to focus on demand generation, and the tagline is, “To build a media company that educates people about metabolic health and brings awareness to Levels,” and with that, I will hand it off to Ben.
Ben Grynol (31:50):
All right. Let’s see if we can do this one here. So demand gen. Our tagline that we keep revolving or aligning on is the idea of building a media company that educates people about metabolic health and brings awareness to Levels. Next slide, please. So demand gen, very much, starts at the top of the funnel. On the left, we’ve got this marketing funnel. If people are familiar with it, it is very much around the idea of awareness, consideration, and conversion. It is basically the steps that people take when they become familiar with a product or a company, and they start to hear about it. The consideration part of it is the why, like why should I actually make a decision around these? With the funnel, it’s not a super linear thing. Not to digress too much, but when you get into the idea of attribution, there isn’t some clear like, “And Tim Ferris drove the sale.”
(32:37):
It’s like 10 different touch points that happen over time from a friend, an Instagram post, or some YouTube video. All of these things are the awareness and consideration, and eventually there’s a tipping point, which is the conversion. And so it’s this idea, of this entire funnel is very much this marriage of demand generation and demand capture. The idea with demand generation is to start at the top and to educate people. So when you think about what actually drives top of funnel for Levels, it’s very much this idea of content and editorial. Some of it gets a little bit technical, but if you think about the blog being really our pillar content and then you think about what we do from a podcast standpoint, but more from the video perspective and how we put those out on YouTube, that brings a lot of awareness to Levels and to metabolic health and what we’re doing.
(33:23):
The technical aspect, as far as search or organic search, is what drives the eyeballs to our website, and that’s what we want to do. We want to get eyes on our web property so that eventually we can capture the email consideration, start nurturing them through the funnel, and then that can lead to a conversion down the road. So SEO, search engine optimization, that’s tied into the blog. That’s tied into the way that we present the product on the website. That’s tied into all the information that’s going to help us index on Google, and so what else drives top of funnel? What’s this idea of earned media? That, being things like the honestly podcast is earned media, or if Riley’s best friend takes a picture of himself using Levels, that is earned media called UGC, user generated content. That helps to drive impressions, and a lot of times that drives a lot of trust because Riley’s going to take stock or his best friend’s going to take stock in what he does more than some stranger on the street.
(34:14):
But you see those touchpoints enough times, and that ends up building this foundation of trust or the consideration, the middle part of the funnel. The own media, that’s everything that we put out on digital platforms. So it can be our pillar content, it could be YouTube videos, it can be podcasts. All of these things are owned media. Then, the last, it’s tied into earned media, but the idea of press, podcast, media appearances, those are all things that drive that top of funnel awareness. So when we think about this very long-winded way of getting to the OKRs, but when we get around the idea of OKRs that support demand gen, it’s the idea of producing content, so educating people about metabolic health, increasing email. That’s the audience and the engagement. Then, growing all of our own platforms. Again, audiences and engagement, and then supporting product with the development of content and content creation, so that people can get insight into what food is actually doing to their health.
(35:05):
So next slide, please. So here we go. The funnel works very much in sync across demand gen and demand capture. You can see it is very much a marriage of the two. When we talk about the two buckets, it’s really easy to think about them as pillars in isolation, independent of each other, but they can’t be because there’s always some overlap,” so it’s hard to start framing and go, “Oh. That feels more like a demand capture thing or more like a demand gen thing.” Consideration, this middle of the funnel, there are so many parts that happen with consideration, that being the actual checkout flow. You could say that’s a conversion activity, but there’s also consideration of how we get people into that point and why they would consider going through the flow. So demand gen fills the funnel, awareness and consideration, and then demand capture turns those potential leads into paying members through consideration and conversion.
(35:54):
Then, retention is the last part of the funnel. Once you have the paying member, how do you actually retain them? It’s the idea of having great product paired with strong support for member success, community content, all these things. So next slide, please. When we’re talking about OKRs, here’s some of the sample initiatives that we’re doing to drive those tactics as far as creating content, creating awareness. Some of the tactics include downloadable PDFs of articles. Some of these are experiments, where they’re mobile-centric, and we’ve talked about a lot of these tactics or these principles on past forms, but it’s the idea of, how do we get leads to actually take the content that we’re creating? You get them into the consideration phase, you capture that email, and you can start to nurture them. That’s one tactic that we use to say, “Is that helping us to achieve our OKR of email capture, growing the audience, engaging them more?”
(36:42):
Splitting the YouTube channels, that is very much aligned with the OKR of growing the audience on specifically metabolic health, so that we can serve up content that they’re actually going to be interested in, and that will help with the algorithm and all the things, so when we’re talking about what are key results around what’s the why? Why would we split those channels? Well, our key result is to, over the next 12 months, to grow to a 100,000 people. That’s not a vanity metric. It’s more about how do you grow to that level on YouTube so you can serve up content that gets more engagement. It’s all tied together. The last thing is, how do you increase the engagement? How do you get more reach out of the content? Tactics like thumbnails, right? So, increasing the production value of content.
(37:28):
But the main takeaway is, by being very focused in what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, to actually achieve the OKRs, to create more content, to create more quality, that’s going to help us achieve that key result of very focusing, not just saying, “Hey, we’re growing content.” It’s, “We are putting out more content so we can get to the value, like the key metric of 100K subscribers on that channel.” Get it mature, go to the next one. So last slide, please. It’s the why. Why is all of this being done? Well, we’ve talked about this before. Demand gen, demand capture, inextricably linked. You can’t separate the two. Audience growth, content cadence, increase quality, all of these will help us with the framework. Eyeballs, emails, orders, memorize it. It’s not the last time you’ll hear it. That’s growth, or demand gen, I guess. Demand gen OKRs for the week.
Josh Clemente (38:18):
Awesome. Thanks for that dive, Ben. Love the [inaudible 00:38:23] there. All right. Experimentation, learning. Haney this week.
Mike Haney (38:27):
Yeah. Good segue. Speaking of content, so I’m going to talk about the Austin McGuffey blog summary videos and what it’s been about now, maybe 10-month experiment in doing these. This largely draws on a really good retro that Ben wrote, so if you want to dive into more in the stats that’s out in notion. So last January, we engaged Austin, who had kind of come into our orbit, who’s making stuff on his own, to do short videos that summarize the blog post. You’ve probably seen these. There’s been over 50 of them done now. Creating video around this or to support the education mission of the blog was something we wanted to do really since the beginning, but video is kind of hard to produce, and you have to find the right voice, and everything sort of came together in Austin.
(39:13):
Somebody was passionate about this, very good at explaining things in simple terms, and a really skilled video producer. So we tried a couple. We liked him. We brought them on board to just produce these regularly. Like I said, he’s done about 51 now. In terms of all those things that Ben just talked about, the idea was really, the points down at the bottom here, one, just to help people understand this stuff better. Our blog posts can be long. They can be complex. It’s a lot to commit to. Eight minutes, ten minutes to 20 minutes to read one of these posts. If you can get pulled in or get the gist of it in a few minutes, that’s better than getting nothing at all. So we’d love to give people lots of ways to just learn the stuff we’re trying to help them learn. It also adds value and hopefully increases engagement. Again, people like it. They learn stuff, they stick around, they watch more.
(40:04):
There’s a couple of learnings we had at the, I would say, through the process while we were doing this that relate to the process, and then I’ll talk about the final learnings. One was we realized, about halfway in, that we had given Austin full reign to just pick the posts that he wanted to do videos about. That largely worked. We wanted things that he was passionate about, that he understood, that he felt like he could represent, but at some point we noticed like, “Oh. These might not be the highest value post.” There wasn’t necessarily a lineup between the posts that people were looking at a lot and what he was making videos for, and so we jumped in and created a new process, where he would sort of nominate the ones he wanted to do, and then we’d go in and say yes or no or point them otherwise. And so the learning there, I think, was just like it’s good to give your contractors freedom.
(40:50):
But it’s also good to give them guidance where you need to, just to make sure their efforts are still aligned with where we want to go. The other thing we realized about halfway through this process was that we didn’t ever actually set a DRI for this. It was just sort of co-owned between Ben, Tony, and I, and we were all sort of popping into threads as needed. But there are ways also that, like that previous learning, that can sort of go off the rails. We decided just to make sure that somebody actually owned this one, and I think this is just a good example of, even within our very rigorous way of working here, it’s possible for things like that to happen, like even with three people working on it, to just get into a project and realize like, “Wait. We don’t actually have an owner with this, and we don’t know exactly what the process is,” so just thinking about that upfront. So next slide. What did we learn at the end of this?
(41:40):
Well, one of the things we realized maybe about a month ago through some analysis that Ben and Tony were doing is that these short videos were not great performers on YouTube. And that’s a little bit of a bummer. I think I was at least sort of hoping that doing short, easy-to-grasp videos with a very engaging personality would be one way to get this education out there for people who don’t want to read, who aren’t coming to the blog. Maybe they’re experiencing those through YouTube. Not terrible performance by any means, but to see the number of views and watch time here, but they weren’t runaway hits. They did a little better on Instagram. So we didn’t do all the videos on Instagram. We did some different experimentation with ways of having them out there and doing them in that form factor. Compared to other videos, they did a little better there, which maybe makes sense, a little bit more of a personal platform.
(42:27):
But where they actually seemed to provide the most benefit was on the blog post. So we went through, with some help of Athena, a couple weeks ago, and just analyzed the oldest 20 videos that he had done, so the ones that had been on the site the longest, and he started last January, and looked at particularly bounce rate, which is when people land on a page and immediately leave. So you want that number to be as low as possible and time on page, which tells us about engagement and our people hanging out. What we found is, you see the numbers here, that increased time on page, an average of about 15% over those 20 posts, and it decreased the bounce rate by about 11%, those are pretty significant numbers in terms of increases there. Those are just the averages. What we saw is that on some posts, the changes were as much as 25% increased engagement rate or decreased bounce rate, and there weren’t any pages, I don’t think, at least among the 20 we looked at, where we had a significant adverse effect.
(43:19):
There wasn’t anywhere where it was like people just roundly rejected, and it made people run away. What we did was compare the stats for when the video is posted versus the same time period before there was a video on that blog post, that we were trying to compare apples to apples there. So what does this mean moving forward? We’re actually pausing making these videos with Austin, in part because, although he’s a great value in terms of video producing, it’s still a pretty significant line item in terms of the growth budget, and as an ongoing expense, not necessarily serving some of the top line things we need to serve right now. But we are going to continue to work with Austin. We love him. He’s great. And so we’re actively developing some new projects with him. Given that we’ve seen this potential increase in engagement on the blog, what we want to do is create and test some different kinds of blog videos.
(44:07):
So Austin doing this is one way to do it, but you could imagine Levels team members, doctors, nutritionists, or illustrated style, like the cool stuff that Azure does, the research nuggets, or other kinds of illustrated styles. There’s tons of different things we could do if the mandate is just, “Explain the story in two to three minutes,” and so we want to start testing that. Then, the other sort of learning going forward is, as we look at that, as we look at a kind of next iteration of blog videos, to be much more intentional about how we’re testing. So rather than have Austin just kind run with it, do this for 10 months, and make 50 of them, let’s do 5 of this, 5 of that, 5 of the other, and do a really intentional AB comparison or ABC comparison, look at the stats, and just kind of iterate that way on it, and not let a project run away. Again, not in a bad way, but I think just being much more intentional about what we’re doing and why. I think that’s it.
Josh Clemente (45:00):
It’s a really great dive. Thanks, Haney. I love the takeaways. Generally speaking, I just really appreciate the distributed data that we’re starting to see show up in all the different functions that we’re using to close loops on these sorts of experiments. So just having those takeaways and recognizing that blog video does have a huge purpose, it may not be boosting our digital channel, but it is boosting that sort of organic benefit of the article. That’s just a huge takeaway, so looking forward to seeing the next iterations, and thanks, Austin, for all the help on a really cool experiment that many people benefited from.
(45:36):
All right, quick hiring updates. So, Priya, joining us on the 17th, Nicole, who has joined us on this call for a bit. Nicole, thanks for joining us. Today we’ll do the formal introduction after she gets started, but also joining us on the 17th, and then Farhan is joining the mobile engineering team on the 25th, so a lot of exciting stuff. Looking forward to all these new members on the team. Open roles haven’t changed, so I’m still looking for software engineering and R&D engineering. Then, please, point people who are a great culture fit to Levels.links/careers or go there, yourself, if you’re watching this. Lastly, individual contributions made it, so I’m going to stop the share, and we’re going to do the raise-the-hand approach.
(46:23):
So let’s see if I can figure this out myself. Here we go. Just raise your hand if you want to do a quick share. Professional is appreciated, personal is recommended. We all love hearing from each other. Let’s see. For me, I will say that on the professional side I’m really excited about, I think mostly the lean in that we’re doing on digital channel quality. I watched the Levels Kitchen video, and it’s ultra-high quality visuals, audio production. It’s a departure from what we’ve done previously, and of course, it’s taken an exponentially greater amount of time and effort from the team, but I think the return’s going to be really interesting to see, and it’s feeling more like a digital media vertical now in a really serious way than it did before, so I’m very excited about that, and just continuing to learn from everybody who has the skillset that I just do not have. On a personal side, we got great weather here in Austin, and I’m looking forward to getting out there and enjoying it. Chris?
Chris Jones (47:34):
So first off, huge welcome to Nicole. Super excited to be working with you. So I was having you sneak in there. I feel bad that I didn’t invite Priya, so way to shame me. I also echo Josh’s comment. The amount of ideas I’m seeing come around content and videos in the kitchen, and the Levels Pantry, and the Instacart, it’s just really cool to see just the number of things that we’re trying and experimenting and trying to do it quickly and as we learn. So it’s just great to see on all fronts that every team is learning as quickly as we can, so it’s just really fun to watch and fun to learn. On the personal side, it is fall. We also have great weather here, but winter is coming, so I’ll be getting out both chainsaws this weekend. I have a lot of wood to cut up, so focus is build the wood pile because it’s getting rather low.
Josh Clemente (48:36):
Build the wall. Winter’s coming. Ryley?
Ryley Walker (48:40):
I’m just really excited professionally. I’ve been kind of heads down or buried in a couple of implementations, so the JustWorks project has been really great to work with Miz, and see Miz in action on the broad spectrum of completely in the weeds to high-level decision making and thought. So just always a pleasure to work with him, but really excited about that project. Enrollment next week. So shout out to everyone if you haven’t got in and opened an account. Do so soon so you’re ready to enroll next week. The other one that I’m working on that kicked off in the last couple of weeks is Cube, which is just basically a database that captures accounting and financial information, and makes it a little bit more accessible to the team. So not a lot of words from me on that, but hopefully an intro coming in the next couple of weeks on stuff I’ve learned.
Josh Clemente (49:38):
Awesome. Taylor?
Taylor Sittler (49:42):
Yeah. I’m going to do [inaudible 00:49:46] related to [inaudible 00:49:47]. So I’m excited. This was the first Friday forum I was able to come to. I hope to do that a lot more, because I love walking. Then, number two, I think New York was awesome, like to run around [inaudible 00:50:06] Manhattan with Moz and doing another pic-to-phone session with the team was amazing. I’m just going to say, Maxine, thank you. Kidney Chic.
Josh Clemente (50:17):
We got 82% of the message there, but I think we got the majority makes-
Taylor Sittler (50:22):
So it’s still not working?
Josh Clemente (50:26):
Better than nothing. Sam.
Sam Corcos (50:29):
Yeah. I think on the professional side, I’m very excited for all of these retros that are coming out. I’m glad that’s becoming more ingrained in the culture. I learn something every time when I read them. The awesome McGuffy retro is particularly interesting as well. There’s a lot of counterintuitive stuff in there. Similarly, on the personal side, I really enjoyed the meetups here in New York, and I really had a lot of fun. This was an epic pic-to-phone game. That was a fun one.
Josh Clemente (51:08):
I think I got some pictures of the meetup, and unfortunately, I don’t check my texts enough to get them into the meeting today. So those will have to go into the Levels meetups channel on Threads. Haney?
Mike Haney (51:25):
There we go. Professionally, just adding to the New York meetup, as kind of my first intentional Levels meetup, and I’m very much alike. I would hide in San Diego all the time if I could, but I’m glad that I came out here and was so lucky to see so many people. I think I’ve met 10 or 12 Levels members here. So yeah, just an endorsement for, get on a plane, go somewhere, and meet some folks. It’s, absolutely, worth the effort.
Josh Clemente (51:50):
Awesome. I feel like my bingo numbers are at risk with all these folks. Ben.
Ben Grynol (52:00):
All right. Professionally, I’ve been pretty stoked on comms, the comms platform, for anyone who is using it, because when it first started, nevermind the network. Part of it, it’s only going to be as useful as the people on it, but it’s not that useful if it’s janky and all these things, and we keep hitting bugs, and that can be frustrating. But when there are all these little updates, like emoji reactions and things, and it sounds arbitrary, but just sort of making the comms more fluid and fixing the latency problem that we have in Threads, it just feels better.
(52:35):
It feels like it’s getting to this place. It sounds silly, but when triaging communication feels more fluid and fun again, as opposed to Threads, you’re like, “Oh. This is what it’s supposed to feel like,” so I’ve been super stoked on just watching the progress and seeing that come together. So lots of work there, and then on the personal front, today our house is up for sale. It’s getting sold. Today’s the day it’s going to be sold. Our offer date is next week, so that’ll be done, and we are migrating. We’re migrating south. We’re leaving the country. We’re going to Austin, Texas, so that’s the news of the day.
Josh Clemente (53:13):
The big announcement is formally out there. Congrats on all that. That’s huge. And yeah, Ben, will be at your next meetup here in Austin, folks. Get your bingo ready. Sunny.
Sunny Negless (53:28):
Man, I don’t want to follow that. Immigration is a huge thing. What can I say? Professionally, it’s been a busy week. Thank you so much to my colleagues on the support team. I’ve been heads down, working with, really, going through and doing a lot of cleanup on the true pill side, as far as orders that have been sitting waiting for a long time, so really getting a tight hold on what needs action right now, and we’re working on that new team coming on, how to really best build the relationship between both support teams and support what we’re trying to do here.
(54:01):
So I digress, but that’s been really great, and I have also been light in the queue this week, so thank you so much to my colleagues for supporting that work. I’m excited that Priya is joining. So exciting, next week. And also, I got a little tag here. I had a coffee chat that was not exactly a coffee chat with Sam. It was really just picking his brain on comms this morning. Sorry about that, Sam. But two pieces came together for me, and that’s something I’ve realized. My superpower is not writing. I’m a pretty good writer, but it’s really hard to get that ball rolling. I’m a much better editor, and that always feels like a real jerk move like, “Oh. I can clean up someone else’s work.”
(54:41):
But I have a pretty good lens on, “Okay. That’s a good start. How can we make this more a thing that everyone can really understand and benefit from?” And between Jen and Sam, I had a revelation this morning, that I was like, “Oh. I could record a video.” Actually, Sam gave the idea. I can record a video and delegate it to Athena, give it a little experimentation, and have them take a stab at a first start on documentation. I have a list. I have a list of comms and list of notes that I want to follow up on, so watch out, Athena. I’ve already done two delegations, and now I’m unstoppable. So excited for that. Personally, I’m off next week, and my mother’s coming into town, so it’s not exactly time off, but I’m very excited to see her. I think we’re going to have a lot of yard work in the future. That’s that.
Josh Clemente (55:31):
Love it all. Head to head against Chris. Matt.
Matt Flanagan (55:36):
Yeah. Levels wise, awesome to see everybody in New York a few days ago. Sorry I had to pop out early, but those sink made ups are always awesome. Highly recommend everybody to come out to a New York dinner. Personally, this morning I saw a pot of whales off of the coast of New Jersey where I live. I’ve seen it in the local Facebook group of people seeing them breach and everything, but this was the first morning I was actually able to see them myself, so super excited about that.
Josh Clemente (56:04):
That’s pretty awesome. Miz.
Michael Mizrahi (56:08):
Nice. Yeah, hats off to support team for all the work through a rocky few weeks, but happy that we’re on the end of that. Then, we’re at the PSA, big thanks to Maxine. We uncovered the subscription bugs. Obviously, a lot of people have seen that big turn question of, why did we lose 10% across every single cohort in the same month? It turns out it wasn’t macroeconomic. There was a pretty nasty subscription bug, so Maxine stepped up with Scott, cleaned it up, and we’re in the final stages of recovering there. So not too much member impact, because the timing worked out okay, but happy we got some closure on that. Obviously, a lot of work still to do on subscriptions, renewals, and churn, but that was a good save, and I appreciate the work from Maxine and Teams to clean that up, so thanks for the ownership and work. Other than that, excited for Priya to start, Nicole to start, and JustWork, culture survey. A lot going on. I’m excited for all the learning and changes we can make as a result.
Josh Clemente (57:05):
That’s what we’ll wrap on right there. Everybody, have a wonderful weekend. We’ll see you next week.