Josh Clemente (00:00):
All right, let’s do it. Welcome to the Friday Forum, October 21st, 2022. Jumping straight in, our support continues to move out of the woods. It can always reverse course but, for right now, the volume and contact rates are both in a really good place. Some of the best numbers we’ve seen in a long time. This is after, certainly, weeks of high volume, low contact rate as people adjusted to our new platforms, our new general availability, we had new audiences. So, good to see these turning a corner. We also have order-to-delivery, so the turnaround time under target. The target is right now I think about five days and we’ve been well above that for a long time. We’re starting to really see the light there as well. So 4.8 days currently, and that’s just awesome. Contact rate has also been below target for six weeks in a row, so we’re really getting a lot of leverage from the self-help, FAQs and materials that we provide for members.
(01:00):
That’s the content leverage that we have. So, it’s really awesome to see people being able to answer their own questions through the scalable content we put out there. On the backend side, the Python data science service is finished. Shout out to Jin Lu who jumped in there, but essentially now data science can operate fully in Python. They don’t have to do an extra step transposing into TypeScript, so that’s a big benefit. We’ve got healthy Food Choices Labs V1.1 and height and weight data now in member feedback mode, so those are live.
(01:34):
And continuing the next phases on product, we’ve got Labs V2 Levels levels work, onboarding flow, rewards animations, Instacart integration and redundant fulfillment integrations being built out now. So that’s a combination of backend and frontend work, but a lot in flight there. Yeah, thanks David. Big shout out to Jason Charu and Galit on the Python stuff. It’s going to be a big improvement in the integration between, or the efficiency of the backend work. You can see in the middle here we’ve got some pictures of our phlebotomy and blood collection processing storage that we built out over the past few weeks. Big shout out to Jesse, Evan, Shawn here for being the first donor, but essentially on the R&D side, as we continue to learn about the contents of blood plasma and eventually interstitial fluid, we need a way to reliably collect blood and process it.
(02:35):
So, we’ve built out that capability. We’ve leveraged outside vendors, like TraveLab, to be able to reliably do this process and repeatedly. This is a really big move for us as we continue to explore the different molecules on the feedback side, the continuous feedback loops as well as the North Star metrics that drive member health. So, a lot of exciting stuff happening there. We also closed a really exciting signal and algorithms hire, more to come on that, but good stuff happening as we continue to learn ways that we can provide feedback for our members through the many molecules, beyond glucose, that matter.
(03:10):
On the UK side, beta is continuing to add new members. We’ve got the US Commerce and tax systems live. We’ve got people trickling in straight from the homepage directly into that new system. Membership renewal is upcoming. We all know in January we will hit one year for our first membership. These are folks who converted when we first rolled that out and they’re now at their 12-month renewal moment. So there’s a lot that we have to prepare for, a lot we have to learn as we hit that first renewal season, we’ll call it. And so there’s a project in flight now.
(03:44):
Sissy has stepped in to DRI that. We’re also certainly going to be revisiting overall structures, value experiments, pricing. So a lot’s going to happen in the next few months. None of this is going to be existential. What we have to think about it as is a really good learning opportunity. On the content side, we’ve got a new micronutrient spotlight format. This was really relevant to me. I’ve started supplementing magnesium and seen an instant improvement in heart rate and heart rate variability overnight, which is really surprising. And the first micronutrient spotlight was magnesium. So this’ll be an exciting new blog direction.
(04:18):
We’ve also got a cool project on Metabolic Health 101. Haney did a really good job diving into this on his async, but essentially a deep dive on the SEO, so the keywords that people are finding us through and how we might be able to build out a Metabolic Health 101 content structure that matches, kind of does double duty, really helps us optimize SEO, make sure that we have discoverability while simultaneously connecting people to the answers to their questions.
(04:46):
All right, a couple of other things I’ll run through here. iOS App Store assets are updated now. They’re looking beautiful. Member headshot treatments, so we’re going to attempt to… Here we go, attempt to add a treatment to the visuals for our members who say, “Let’s join the whole new level or blog articles.” So we’re going to attempt that. It’s an experiment just to see how it looks, how it lands. Levels kitchen, we’ve got a big video drop starting October 25th, which I believe is Tuesday. So that’s going to start trickling out. It’s huge.
(05:18):
And then we have some product photos. Yeah, product photos right here on our lab panel. We haven’t done much visually for that product and that’s looking beautiful. The community newsletter is at a 58% open rate and we had a huge moment where Brigid Titgemeier, one of our nutritionist dietician partners, put out a blood sugar reset offer through our community newsletter and we had a 72% conversion rate based on clicks there, which was something like 1,000 people signed up, which was pretty wild. So we’ve got to learn more about that. And Sissy did a 30-minute IG live on that. Tons to learn.
(05:54):
And then, lastly, we’re exploring new ways to leverage past partners for the UK rollout. For example, we have tier one podcasts that are already out with evergreen content here in the US. We can potentially link people to UK landing pages and get them into the beta based on updating show notes there, so pretty awesome stuff. Excuse me.
(06:17):
All right, a couple of other things here, some great shows coming out, tier one, Be Well with Kelly, Wellness Mama with Lauren, Moonshots and Mindsets is coming up. Recording-wise, we’re digging into YouTube shorts to try to scale our visibility there. And we had a bunch of content produced this week internally, which is all, I’m not going to touch on all of it, but a lot of great stuff. And Sol Orwell was on A Whole New Level. He’s from examine.com. A really awesome episode.
(06:45):
All right, with that I want to welcome Shawn Stevenson. He’s a member and partner with Levels. We’ve all likely heard of Shawn. He’s an author, bestselling author, host of the Model Health Show, which is the largest health podcast in the US, which is pretty wild. Shawn had Casey on, it was a really amazing episode. I mean really one of the best episodes I think I recall in recent memory. And Shawn’s just deep into all things health, nutrition, mental, physical, metabolic. I really appreciate you joining us today Shawn. Would love to just hear from your perspective what you’re excited about in the world of health and wellness from your vantage point.
Shawn Stevevson (07:26):
All right, how’s it going everybody? Thank you so much for the love. I don’t know, can everybody see me or they’re just seeing this handsome GQ picture of me?
Josh Clemente (07:37):
We got both.
Shawn Stevevson (07:38):
Both. Okay. Well, I hope everybody’s doing awesome today. This is a good way to kick off a Friday. I love this vibe with everybody. I just wanted to share a couple of things that I’ve been seeing with Levels. I just actually have, every single Monday for the past five years, I’m part of a mastermind. And in this mastermind is an eclectic group of superstars. One of them is Pat Flynn, who’s this brilliant guy in the space of marketing and passive income and podcasting. When we started our podcast, I actually used Pat Flynn’s template with the tech side, and how to format, distribute the podcast, that kind of stuff.
(08:24):
And then within a year we were number one in the country and I sent him a… I see you, Team Flynn. I sent him a DM on Twitter, I think it was, which I still don’t use Twitter that much to this day, but I was just like, “Pat, thank you so much for your advice. We were number one in the country because of your assistance.” He didn’t know who I was, and I guess from that moment on, he was like… Well, first of all he replied and he said, “You can’t go to number one unless there’s something really exceptional about your show, but thank you for the love.”
(08:57):
And he started listening to my show, little did I know, and within about a year Pat was like a big fan and we ended up getting together and hanging out and all the things. And eventually we’re in a mastermind together. So I’ve got this gold mine of a human being that I get to talk to every Monday, but I got Pat Flynn, Jamie Masters, who’s the founder of Eventual Millionaire, and Todd Tresidder, top person in financial coaching. Rosemarie Garner, she’s the top person in the mommy blogging sphere. And everybody was interested in a continuous glucose monitor.
(09:36):
Because I just told them some of the stuff we had going on, they’re like, “Oh me, can I?” And so they just all got their continuous glucose monitors maybe a couple of weeks ago and just the stories already, the insights that they’re getting. But this is the thing I wanted to point to. Number one, of course, just that there’s an excitement around this technology, but something exceptional about Levels. There’s a statement, I believe it was Winston Churchill that said this, that “There’s nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.” And many people are going to try to replicate this. They’re going to have a continuous glucose monitor, but what makes Levels exceptional is the people, and nobody can match that.
(10:21):
And so just the experience, that’s what they were talking about, the experience, being able to make sense of the data that they were getting. That’s what really stood out to me. And also, I don’t know if you guys really think about this very often, but obviously the biggest inroads into this technology is looking at how food impacts our physiology. But what we’re really looking at is a stress response at the real heart of it all. And it’s just like, why would food be stressful? It’s something we need. Well, your body, obviously, your immune system, your endocrine system, all these things have to be front and center to figure out what to do with this. And does this resonate with this particular thing that we’re trying to accomplish with thriving and moving forward as a human being?
(11:10):
And so yes, food can be a stressor, but what stood out to me the most in my personal use was how psychological stress can impact my blood sugar and/or how my body responds to a meal when I’m under stress. There’s so much more to extract from this that’s still to come because, as you guys well know, more than ever today we’re dealing with a tremendous amount of stress. And this is published in JAMA. Upwards of 80% of all physician visits today are for stress-related illnesses. And because stress is invisible, it doesn’t have calories, per se, we don’t tend to think about it. And really helping to manage this overall stress load, Levels is a technology, it gives people a peek inside to understand what’s happening with their biology.
(12:07):
On top of that, for me, I’m not a big self quantification person. I really want to get people to a place where they’re listening to their bodies. But for somebody like myself, Levels can affirm that. So it’s just like, “Damn, I feel really tired all of a sudden after this meal,” and you can go grab your phone and take a look. Like, “Damn, my blood sugar crashed after that.” And you could start to take psychological data and combine that with real world data. I don’t know if that’s somebody on the Levels team texting me, telling me to hurry the hell up. But that’s pretty much all I want to share with you guys.
(12:48):
I’m just really excited about this. And again, what really makes Levels stand out and cannot be replicated, you’re in such a powerful position, is the people, on the behind-the-scenes side, but also just on the education side is something that is really inspiring to me and I just want to thank you guys for that.
Josh Clemente (13:10):
Well, thank you, Shawn. I love that perspective, specifically not making it about the technology, it’s about what can be learned through it. I think everyone here feels similarly in that we aren’t interested in distributing gadgets or producing something that’s fun and novel. The goal is to really reinforce the behaviors that people will experiment with and they’ll have a sense for, “I think this thing is causing a problem for my body,” or “I think this thing is really working well for me.” And being able to see objectively, get that digital receipt for something that you are sensing, I think it’s the unique element and it’s all about the educational experience. It’s about the magic moments.
(13:54):
So yeah, I think as someone who used to discount the concept of stress, discount the concept of sleep matters, those sorts of things seemed they were out of sight, out of mind. Like you said, there’s no calories, you can’t burn stress or feel it burning inside of you. So I think the CGM fundamentally changed my perspective around stress and mental health. Shawn, if there was one thing that you would love to see this team produce, whether it’s a new feature related to CGM or an altogether new product or educational concept, what would that be?
Shawn Stevevson (14:29):
I mean, what I said earlier is a good lead into this, which is for me, I’m on the education side of things. And so having some features developed and/or more education around the stress component and in particular, you just mentioned another hot word today, which is sleep, and how sleep deprivation can affect how your body manages blood sugar and your metabolic health. Again, we could try to find some fancy supplement, try to dial in our nutrition, but if we’re sleep-deprived, it’s going to throw a monkey wrench in the whole thing.
(15:02):
So, just looking towards in the future some more education and inroads with the technology to give people feedback on stress and encouraging people… Oh, I’m going to share this with you guys. Nobody knows this yet, but I’m sure most of you guys know what telomeres are. These are one of the best biological markers that we have as far as how biologically old we are, in a sense, our biological age versus our chronological age. And so our telomeres are these kind of end caps at the end of our chromosomes, and as we age and time goes on, and/or we can accelerate that process of them getting snipped off, i.e., lower quality copies of ourselves are getting printed, in a sense. This is very rudimentary how I’m saying this.
(15:51):
Anyways, Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn won the Nobel Prize, I think maybe 2015, for her discovery of telomere. This is an enzyme that can effectively add length back onto our telomeres in a way. So not reversing age in a sense, but slowing the process down because it’s constantly getting degraded. So her co-author on the book, The Telomere Effect, Dr. Elissa Epel, she’s more of the order, somebody that can communicate the information, but also she’s a psychiatrist psychologist. So she’s coming into the fold saying how your mind affects your aging process, your mind affects your biology.
(16:38):
And so in a couple of weeks here, she has a new book coming out and I’m one of the first people to get it and it’s all about stress. But here’s the thing, because stress can be a dirty word. It’s not looking at stress in this conventional sense of it’s bad for you, but how to properly metabolize stress, how to associate with stress better, because we can’t run from stress. And, also, science-backed stress integration methods, not just stress management because, even though we know that stress management’s important, we’re not doing it.
(17:12):
I think it’s creating a shift in our association around it. So I have that coming up very soon and this is another inroads, a connection of course with this technology. So I just wanted to share that, creating something that can help to educate people/give them feedback on how their body is managing and metabolizing stress and some of the things they can proactively do to be better at it.
Josh Clemente (17:44):
I love that and I’m excited for that book. I think, to your point, demonizing any one concept, especially something that our bodies rely on to survive, like stress, is not a very effective method. So finding a way to use stress as a tool in our favor. We need it to drive physiologic processes, to exercise hard, to be able to get up in the morning, all these effects, and you can see this in the pattern of your blood sugar trace, but also likely in many other molecules, which we are digging deep into on the research side.
(18:18):
And I just want to say we do have some features that I think we’ll be able to surface for people. It’ll make it more easy to log a note that reminds you that you were stressed in a moment and come back and see how your body was physiologically responding to that moment. For me, it’s podcasts. If I do a podcast, my blood sugar’s through the roof. I don’t even have to check anymore. I can feel it, but that’s a magic moment for a lot of people.
(18:41):
So, Shawn, I know you’re super busy. I really appreciate you spending time with us this morning. We’d love to have you stick around for the rest of the meeting if you can. If you have the time, please do, otherwise, from the whole team, thank you for joining us. Thank you for surfacing the message on your platform with Casey, and looking forward to continuing to partner with you.
Shawn Stevevson (18:59):
Awesome. Thank you guys so much. I’m actually heading to the studio, so I hope you guys have an amazing day, amazing weekend, and we’ll be in touch.
Josh Clemente (19:09):
Same to you. Thank you very much.
Shawn Stevevson (19:11):
Bye.
Josh Clemente (19:13):
Bye-Bye. All right. Now welcoming Priya Bhasin. Priya has joined us on the support side. I won’t read her slide for you. I would love to instead hand the mic over to you, Priya. Welcome to the Friday Forum live. Love to hear a few thoughts.
Priya Bhasin (19:27):
Hi, everybody. I’m so excited to be here. And that was just really awesome to have Shawn as the first guest for my first Friday Forum. I’m really excited. I’ll just go through really quick. I’m in the Bay Area. I’m in Larkspur, which is in Marin, just about 10 minutes north of the Golden Gate Bridge. My background is in kinesiology from the University of Michigan. I think we have, I forget who, but another Michigan alum. So, go blue. And I started my career actually, funny enough, after kinesiology, in teaching. I was an elementary school teacher and then I switched over to occupational therapy.
(20:05):
I am just coming out of six years of running my own business, Begin Balanced, where I work with families and babies in the first 1,000 days of life, mostly. And so if any of you with kids have questions, you can always send them my way. I’m happy to answer and help where I can. Hobbies, I love connecting people, throwing parties, lots of snail mail over here. So if I ever ask for your address, that’s the reason. It’s not for anything else. I’m probably sending you a letter or a postcard. I love traveling, markets, local market food is my favorite and I love using it to make my healthy meals at home.
(20:48):
What am I excited about here at Levels? Oh, my gosh, so many things. Just what Shawn said, all the people. I’m so excited to be around all of you guys and learn from you. This last week has been so amazing. Everyone’s been so kind and helpful. I also want to continue to improve my own metabolic health. I feel like the education part of things has been so helpful for me and for my parents, to be honest. Ever since reading the Levels blog, they suddenly are putting things with canola oil back on the shelf, which I have never seen them do no matter how much I talk about it, so that has been awesome.
(21:22):
And just this common mission, the metabolic… If you’ve read my Spotlight article, you probably know my life sort of started with all these metabolic issues when I was younger because of the way that the processed food was infused into my life. No longer, but it’s left these lasting consequences for me to some degree. So I’m just excited to help people not have to go through what I did, and just learning. I feel like I’ve already learned so much in this first week, so I don’t want to take up too much time but thanks for this opportunity and I’m excited to be here.
Josh Clemente (21:53):
We’re all excited to have you here, Priya. Definitely check out Priya’s Spotlight article. It’s a really great background and a nice way to get to know her a little more, and then reach out. I think we have a coffee, I’m sure, scheduled. Maybe that already happened. My chronology’s broken.
Priya Bhasin (22:08):
Next week. Next week.
Josh Clemente (22:09):
Next week. Okay, great. Well, thank you, Priya, for being a part of the team. Very excited to have you here and to work together.
Priya Bhasin (22:16):
Same here. Thank you.
Josh Clemente (22:17):
All right, jumping in to welcome Nicole. Nicole has taken over People Ops, which Miz has been carrying the torch for a long time, and Nicole is now going to unlock some amazing new bandwidth here and just bring an awesome perspective from her time working, really, in a culture very similar, so remote, globally distributed. Nicole brings a ton of great lessons learned, and I won’t read your slide either. I would love to hear right from you. Nicole, welcome.
Nicole Miller (22:43):
Thank you so much. I’m also thrilled to be here. The first week has been amazing. Hi, everyone. I live in the southwest Washington state area in a small town called Woodland. We have two boys and about five acres and a whole smorgasbord of animals, horses and cats and dogs and Guinea pigs that share my office with me and things like that, so we’re very tied into nature and outdoors and all that great stuff.
(23:17):
But on the work side of things, I’ve been plugged into a computer pretty much nonstop for the last eight to 12 years. So yeah, I worked for a company called Buffer and it was globally distributed, remote first and asynchronous as well, a little bit ahead of the curve in that way, too. We were very transparent, we had transparent salaries and tried to do a lot of our culture experiments very visibly, build-in-public, that sort of thing, really early on, back in 2014, 2015, before it was a little bit more common and I’m glad to see it become more common. And I think that Levels is really taking things to a whole new step from what even we were doing at Buffer. So I’m excited to contribute to that and to be able to push the boundaries on what really is the future of work, in my opinion.
(24:10):
I have two boys, five and six, and we homeschool them. We like to do things different, too. And kind of in the realm of remote work, I also write historical fiction novels. I love hearing that there’s a novel-writing community even within Levels. We also ride horses, we play around with Jeeps and rally cars and all that fun stuff on the weekends. We farm a lot of our own food and we’re very big into canning and fermenting and all of that, and are really big about whole food and knowing where your food comes from, processing your own meat and things. I’m excited about growing and supporting this amazing team. I’m also really exciting to dive into metabolic health and all of the resources here. It’s been a huge thing for me in my own personal journey. So, thank you so much everyone.
Josh Clemente (25:00):
Thank you. And welcome, again, to both of you. Very excited to see the team continue to expand with such aligned passion and mission-driven folks, so here’s to the future. All right, quick culture aside, some highlights on the left there. We had Jackie and Sonja together in Santa Monica, my old stomping grounds. And in New York there’s a big meetup this week, notable feature. There are many notable people who traveled in for it, but I just want to highlight that Karen was able to make it from the UK and join the team there.
(25:31):
And yeah, these meetups continue. Sam puts out it’s on Threads when he’s organizing them. So if you’re interested in joining, definitely check those out. And I want to highlight real quick a couple of folks. Well, actually, first I’ll just say thank you to everyone who participated in the Q3 survey. The results are coming soon, but we had over a 90% participation rate, which is way out from Q2, so thank you all.
(25:57):
Dave. So, Dave has, in the background, been not only pushing a huge number of visibility metrics projects internally so that we can track how the engineering team, how efficient and how effective we’re being, but also has been really pushing some processes to select outsourced engineering contracting. This has been quite a challenging project and he’s been balancing it just phenomenally and has been able to find some engineering contracting and start to set up a process that we can feed projects that will specifically benefit from having outside contracting support as opposed to internal.
(26:35):
This is a tricky balance to find, and he’s just been doing it notably well. I appreciate all of that work, as well as supporting Hui on the engineering hiring side. We’ve had a wave of engineering hires and we’ve got three closed fourth and final stages, so this is all awesome stuff. Hiring is very hard. And to both Dave and Hui, thank you for doing this so effectively, as well as scaling our outsourced structure.
(27:04):
Ian, I want to shout out to Ian. We get some great shout-outs through the week and, just, Ian has been noted multiple times for consistently pushing quality in the code and developer experience. So all of the things that make it easy to understand what’s been done, code readability, documentation while pushing forward a project on schedule, on time, just exuding Levels’ culture. So, async comms, feedback is a gift. A lot of great stuff here. Shout out to Ian. Thanks for being a culture and technical bar raiser.
(27:35):
And, lastly, Rebecca has just crushed the HelpScout queue lately, day in and out, feeding learnings back into Threads so that we can all understand from her perspective what the themes are and how we might be able to improve member experience. So thank you for not only pushing volume, but also taking the time to create learnings for the rest of us, Rebecca. All right, I’m going to hand it over from here to Ian to do our culture token.
Ian Schumann (28:05):
Okay, you really warmed up the crowd for me. Is the audio coming through okay on this? Am I good? All right. So this little phrase, this came up in my onboarding back in January, this is sort of like a correction to what, for me, is a common misconception. Levels has such a sparkle and sheen from the outside as being really thoughtful and well run and well put together. And I felt like I was about to join a company of the most high functioning people that I had ever worked with, which turned out to be true.
(28:40):
And when I got in, the initial impression was like everything has been thought through so well, I just need to catch up and figure out how I can participate in the puzzle that’s already been put together. And I’ll talk about why that’s a misconception in a minute. I’m actually going to jump over to the engineering world. There’s a parallel mistake here where, when you’re an engineer and you’re joining a code base and a team that has had code running for several years, you might think that all the machinery that’s running already has been well-designed. It’s got to be well-designed because it’s running.
(29:21):
And this is also a misunderstanding. In both cases at a company that is small and growing quickly, we are all doing the best we can at any given moment. And anything that gets put in place, whether it’s a piece of engineering machinery or it’s a company policy, or the way a team is arranged or a process or whatever, it is the result of smart people having limited resources and coming up with the best thing that they could, that made the most sense at the time.
(29:51):
And because the company’s changing so quickly and becoming a new company every three months, six months, those decisions, those assumptions decay almost immediately. And so what we end up with is, if you’re new to the company or you’re new to an area, or you’re just deciding to pay attention to something, again, you might have the most up-to-date and thoughtful opinion about it at that moment because you have fresh eyes and you’re the last person to pay attention to it.
(30:22):
This was just a lesson that took away during my onboarding because I think I mentioned to Miz and Matt or something at the time that maybe we can make a few tweaks to onboarding, “Here’s what I noticed.” And they were like, “Yeah, go change it. Go make your changes.” And I was like, “Okay. I can do that?” And so this is just an encouragement, we need everyone to be doing this. The company is the product. We need to constantly be growing it because the decisions that we made yesterday, two weeks ago or three months ago, are not going to be up to the task of the challenges that we’re facing today or tomorrow. And so everyone that we bring in, everyone that’s new, you are qualified by being here. You are qualified to make those changes and make those improvements, and that’s the message.
Josh Clemente (31:08):
Couldn’t have said it better. Yeah, things are written in pencil, another term we like to use, but yeah, I love that perspective. Thank you, Ian. We’re all here trying to build the same thing and don’t assume that anything is perfected, because nothing is. So yeah, not much more to add. Thank you, Ian, for taking this week’s. You can change things here, folks. All right. I don’t think Ben’s on the call, but we’re going to run a little evolution of forum upcoming. Nothing major to change, but we’re going to do what we can to structure things a little bit more consistently so that people can know in advance when they’re going to have a section in the forum. It’ll just help, I think, with a lot of cognitive overhead. People are not always clear when they’re expected to present and what, so this is just a forward-looking statement.
(31:59):
Starting next week, we’re going to try this out, so keep your eyes open for more communications on this and who we’d like to present will be on a functional rotation. And just thank you everyone for continuing to support on getting this forum out every week. Okay. Main thing, Levels shows you how food affects your health. Nothing changed here. Top Level objectives remain member retention, new member acquisition, member health improvement. I’m going to hand it over to Lauren.
Lauren Kelley-Chew (32:26):
Yeah, we’re taking a break this week from an in-depth OKR functional dive. So instead, I’ll just use the moment to remind everybody that if you do not know how your work directly contributes to both your function’s OKRs as well as the company OKRs, please ask your manager or someone else. That’s the most important thing we can all do to make sure we’re all moving in the same direction. And just a reminder here that, for this quarter, product is our top priority. And I think if you can link the work you’re doing to something on this list of building something people want, selling it or keeping the company lights on, then you’re probably on the right track. But again, always best to ask and we’ll come back to dives next week.
Josh Clemente (33:08):
Great, thank you. Lauren, do we have anything on this one?
Lauren Kelley-Chew (33:14):
Nope. Except that hopefully by the end of this quarter everyone should have some idea of the taglines for every function and certainly your function. This is our shortcut to making sure we’re all moving in the same direction.
Josh Clemente (33:25):
Love it. All right, thank you. Product updates, David or Maz.
Maziar Brumand (33:33):
Thanks, Josh. My voice is a little bit crackly today, so excuse the voice. Welcome to Friday Forum, October 21st, product updates. Just before we get into it, I want to say to Shawn, thanks for coming on the show, our show. There’s a lot going on to connect both the physiology… connection between physiology and glucose curves and also behavior and glucose curves, anywhere from stress. What does that do to your glucose? And behaviors like sleep, how does that affect your glucose? So there’s a lot of good work going on in the background by the team, and we hope to have something to show everybody soon.
(34:14):
All right, let’s jump into it. Next slide, please. All right, what is this beautiful creature? This is the Mexican Axolotl, and I had to actually listen to that being pronounced a few times to get it right. It’s named after the Aztec Xolotl, light and fire. And then I learned also death, but I’m going to leave that piece out. Okay. Why is this creature so amazing? It’s part of the salamander family, and what makes it amazing is that it can self regenerate. So if it loses a limb, it can self regenerate. If it loses a part of its brain, it can still regenerate, and that is just super amazing that’s such a thing exists. Why are we talking about the Mexican Axolotl? Next slide, please.
(35:00):
We’ve been working with the team, and this is still very early innings, but there has been really fantastic work by the team, whether it’s Sissy in the community, whether it’s Sonja taking over social, obviously the fantastic work that Haney and Jackie and Tony are doing and Ben, but we’re really thinking about, if we’re really after affecting a billion people, how can we create an ecosystem for content and really starting some of that experimentation that it’s self-regenerating so that we can create an ecosystem where content creators, supported by Levels, can create content that is high quality and high volume and low marginal cost.
(35:45):
And the reason the marginal cost matters is because it will help us to create a lot of content and not have to be selective in what we contract and what we don’t contract, but really create the ecosystem for people to create change in metabolic health. Why is this relevant and why am I talking about this? It’s because we’re going to try this in the product and really leverage the great work that the team is doing to bring in content into the app to teach people the concepts that we want to teach and put it in the loop of behavior change and really try to push forward the metabolic health goal. So, going to the next slide.
(36:26):
We’ll get into some of the examples of that. David will talk through it later. But really focusing on the concept of regenerating content. In the active projects, we’re still working on a lot of our priorities here and we’ll give a quick update on a couple of these. But we’ve also added the trends and notification. Trends is what we were talking about earlier. Can we find correlation between behavior and physiology and glucose? There’s a lot of exciting work on there.
(36:54):
Big shout-out to Sharluk Kozimon and the rest of the team, too, on that work. And new one is also notifications. Can we actually, as part of this behavior change framework, how can we notify people, treating people in the right moments with the right information? So really starting to think about that as well in addition to everything else that we are doing. With that, I’ll hand it over to David.
David Finner (37:18):
Thanks, Maz. So before we get into some of that regenerative content, I wanted to shout out to Steph for… We’re going to be launching today or tomorrow, whenever Apple approves our build, the now will be 2.2 updates, which… What we did with this was we needed to make some new space to free up on the main Levels’ now page, more space for Levels’ levels and make room for that. And we also had some feedback that we wanted to iterate on the dashboard with that we heard from our members. So what you’re going to see, and you’ve probably seen this in the app over the last couple of weeks, the glucose-state text that was below the ring has moved into the ring. So right now if you are crashing, recovering, et cetera, you’ll see that as a little bit of text underneath a new animated icon.
(38:01):
So we’re also introducing some more fun, playful, animated emojis that will be going along with your glucose state and we want to see if that provides some levity and is engaging with our members. The other exciting thing is that we’re bringing back a larger version of the latest glucose number. So now you can tap the ring to toggle between your current glucose state and your most recent glucose number. You can see that on the right screen here where it says 92 on your glucose. That was something that we heard from members, that they loved seeing their stability and spike counts, but it was a little bit hard to see the latest glucose numbers. So we’re going to see how that resonates with our members and learn from that.
(38:40):
And the other minor change here is that we’ve simplified the tool tip. So when you select the graph, we’ve removed a little bit of clutter in there. So now it’s just clean, just the number that represents your current glucose and a little bit better affordance on tapping a data log. So really excited to learn if these changes are resonating with our members and whether they like that levity introduced with the animated emoji icons. Next slide.
(39:10):
The other thing that is coming up for testing and release is Healthier Food Choices. As a reminder, this is one of the things that we’re doing in the app upfront to provide both motivation and ability for our members. Oftentimes we hear, “I know I need to keep my glucose stable, but I don’t know really what to do in terms of an interesting food option that I can use to make for that. So we’re providing a series of… It’s an experiment with seven days’ worth of healthy food choices. They’re recipes that you can make in the app and we’ll drip those out one by one and see how members engage with that.
(39:45):
So, we’re not only looking to see if this increases people’s ability and motivation to eat healthy choices, but we’re also looking at how people engage day-by-day. So, is this something that they come in day one, day two, day three? Can this be a driver within the app for that? And this is really a team effort. So what this is doing is pulling in a whole bunch of great things from across the content teams, like media production, where this is the first experience for recipes within the app. And yeah, we’d love for you to help test this.
(40:19):
If you think you’d like to test, please reach out to me and would love to have you committed to trying this out internally. We basically want to figure out if it’s bug free and if the experience makes sense before we roll this out to members. I can see that there’s already some stuff coming into the chat. There’s a typo here with the author. So thanks, Haney, for that. Always could use your help in proofreading this and just generally the experience.
(40:46):
The vision for this is, really, it’s also sort of the V1 for programs. This is the very first thing that we’re doing that introduces in what should I be doing instead? And this is going to pair very well with the system that we’re introducing with Levels’ levels. So you can imagine we’re increasing the ability and options members can take, and if they do do this, we’re going to guide them and reward them with points in that other system that we’ve explained in different weeks. Yeah, this is just a screenshot here. Next slide.
(41:14):
I wanted to take a moment and circle back to what Maz was saying with regenerative content. We have this bigger vision and opportunity with Levels to build this ecosystem where we can try to align incentives where, as Levels, we want to help our members achieve their best health and we want to help show them where they’re at, point the direction for where they should be going, and then motivate them to actually make that change. And we know that we have the right interventions to do that, that people resonate with different intervention styles and delivery styles.
(41:44):
Some people like to read really in-depth articles. Some people like to listen to someone who resonates with their journey talk to them about that message. And so we are thinking through at a high level, how can we test out this incentive-aligned ecosystem? And then we’re also zooming into a micro level saying, even within the Levels customers, can we develop content that is highly engaging day-over-day? There’s two, just two experiments underway that I wanted to give people an update on. One of them is the In-App Personality. We gave a few updates in the past. We’ve been working with Mallory to provide a series of videos, I think about five or six videos, where we see our members are going to come in daily and reengage with those content pieces. We know that they like the style a lot.
(42:36):
While that’s currently underway, we also have an opportunity to extend this out a bit more. And we’re going to be doing the same sort of experiment with Austin McGuffie. He has a bunch of content that he’s produced for Levels already. We’re going to be leveraging that. Some of the things that Tony has been identifying, Tony and Haney have been using, such as the coffee video, we’re going to be producing a series with… Well, leveraging the existing content we have with In-App Personalities using Austin’s content there.
(43:04):
And then the other thing that I wanted to call out was we want to test, with Healthy Food Choices, can we come up with a win-win incentive from our partners, like Brigid, people who are our health coaches or personal trainers or dieticians, they have businesses that they have that are flourishing with their customers. Can there be a win-win incentive to reach more Levels members or, even if they already have Levels members, using their content in the Levels app?
(43:36):
This is a conversation right now. This is not something that we’ve fully aligned on, but I’m talking with Brigid who is running this Metabolic Health Reset program that engaged so well that Josh mentioned, I think what 1,200 conversions or so? We had a conversation about, “Hey, would this be helpful to have your existing recipes, your existing content in the app?” It pretty much one-to-one maps exactly to what we built with Healthier Food Choices. And at first blush, that sounded like a really interesting opportunity for her that would potentially gain more exposure to Levels members. And for her many Levels members that already exist, make it really easy for them to go through her program.
(44:13):
So, it’s something that we’re exploring, but if it works out, it will be a really interesting validation point along our way to figuring out what’s important for incentive alignment for that ecosystem. I think what’s really important here is coming up with a structure of micro experiments where we see what are the things that will move the needle as we build out this ecosystem and which ones aren’t, so whether something works out or doesn’t, all of that is really helpful for us to orient to get to that point where we are confident to reach that billion-person platform. And I think that’s it.
Josh Clemente (44:45):
Really exciting. Yeah, I feel the makings of a potential platform here. Yeah, I mean obviously the personalities are resonating in such amazing ways, both with the experiment we did, In-App Personalities, and then also with 1,000 conversions on Brigid’s Blood Sugar Reset. I think this is a thread we should pull on. Love it. Thanks product team and eng team. Jumping ahead to hiring. Farhan is joining us October 25th and we’ll have another update here in a couple of days.
(45:17):
But as I mentioned, we have a single processing engineer joining us, Adam Tilton, and more to come on that. And then Open Roles, R&D engineering, still open backend and software, or backend and mobile on the software side. And then generally just reach out to us at levels.link/careers if you’re interested in what we’re building here.
(45:34):
Okay, a couple of minutes extra for individual contributions this week. I’m going to stop the share and we will switch over to the hand raise method. So if you’d like to share a little something personally, professionally, go ahead and hit your reactions button, you can raise your hand like this. So this week for me professionally, I had some really invigorating conversations with the team just about…
(46:03):
I think all of the different threads across the various functions are starting to feel like they’re becoming a fabric that makes sense in my mind is kind of the analogy I was using. Where I’m seeing the potential for a real media and content platform and that meshes that provides so much value, but also meshes with the experiences on the CGM and blood work that we’re building and also meshes with our RD and our research through the IRB program as we look into multi-molecule and what’s going to make a difference in people’s lives and behavior, long term.
(46:36):
It’s starting to seem like a nice synchronous machine instead of these disparate projects so that’s been really fun to just… Although we have many challenges that we have to overcome, right now I’m feeling very excited for the future and then stoked about the new edition with Adam. And lastly, personally, my in-laws are in town and we’re going to hang out this weekend and I’m excited. Ian?
Ian Schumann (47:07):
On the work front. I’ve hinted a couple of times over the last couple of months about how eCommerce keeps getting closer and closer. And yesterday we let real orders come into the eCommerce rails for the first time and the system behaved itself and it’s a little bit like seeing my child grow up and start to go to college. Really thrilled with the first production test drive yesterday. Really excited about how the next few weeks are going to go.
(47:38):
On the personal or I guess sort of hybrid personal/work front, I didn’t get to say last week, but the meetup in New York was just a freaking blast. And I think Scott said it best at the end of that week. He was like, “These are always magical.” And the meetups that I’ve been to, they’ve always felt that way. I just had a great time meeting and socializing and getting to know people last week.
Josh Clemente (48:01):
Love it. Looked awesome. Steph?
Stephanie Coates (48:07):
Hey, I haven’t participated enough on Friday Forum for him in a while so this is exciting. What Shawn had spoke about at the beginning of the meeting about stress impacting health, gosh, that resonates so much because, really, over the past few months, I feel like I’ve been in living situations and just things outside of work that were totally impacting my ability to build good routines that then led to good metabolic health. And so turning the dial on that to figure out how can I live a life that’s low stress enough so that I can abide by those certain routines has been so powerful.
(48:39):
And yeah, I’m excited to see more of that in the app of just how health is so much more than just nutrition. It’s this huge foundation of habits that can lead us to eating well. And so yeah, it was super cool to have him the podcast, or on the Friday Forum because I’ve been listening to his podcasts for years now. And personally, if anyone saw my water cooler chat thread, I am pet sitting near Aspen, Colorado and my first time figuring out what owning dogs is like. And it’s so much fun. So if anyone needs a pet sitter, I’m happy to help out.
Josh Clemente (49:15):
Awesome. Yeah, I loved having Shawn on as well. That was really cool. Chris?
Chris Jones (49:25):
First off, just a super warm welcome to Priya and Nicole. It’s incredible to have both of you on the team. And, really, it just reminds me every time someone new joins, you think you’ve heard all the cool stories about the cool things, and all of a sudden you’re like, “Yeah. No, we’re not done yet.” We keep bringing in just phenomenal people with different variance backgrounds to make the team richer as opposed to like, “Oh, yeah, we all went to the same school, we all worked at the same company.” I just really love the diversity of the people on the team, where they come from and what they can add to it. So huge shout out there.
(50:00):
Also, as we prepare for a lot of changes to our systems, Ian talked about the new eCommerce system. We’re rolling out the membership renewal, we’re changing how we charge for some states around taxes. I just want to thank everyone involved in lots of those key member-facing projects in terms of the thought, the dedication, the follow-up, the how do we approach it versus just like, “Oh, let’s just roll it out and see what happens.” Everyone cares about how do we do this in the best possible way and get in front of it as much as we can. So I just want to say thank you for all the cross-functional teams that are involved in all those efforts.
(50:42):
And then personally, winter is officially here. We’re expecting snow probably later today, right around the time I’ll likely be climbing up on my machine shed to re-point the Starlink at the clear skies. So if you don’t hear from me this weekend on Threads, it’s because either Miz has still told the Threads team to not allow me to view it through my mobile app, or I’ve fallen and I hurt myself, one of those two.
Josh Clemente (51:14):
Be careful, Chris. We need more live streams from the farm. Can’t lose that thread and the culture. Justin?
Justin Stanley (51:24):
Well, I’ve had COVID since I came back from Montana and it’s lingering and I’m coughing still, but I’m finally feeling better. I got a Hydrow Wave Rower back when I first got COVID and I couldn’t really use it, so I’ve been going into slower workouts just to get in and it’s amazing. I love it. So, excited to keep going on that. And then in general, just all the updates of the app are just making it feel so much more fun and wanting me to actually log again and see these things and these animations. It’s all just great. So, I’m excited for the future and what’s coming in addition to what’s already there.
Josh Clemente (52:07):
Ditto. Got the new Peloton rowers out, too, if you want to pay a lot more for your rower.
Justin Stanley (52:15):
Way more expensive, yeah.
Josh Clemente (52:18):
All right. Any other shares this week? Personal, professional, random? All right. Well, we’ll save the extra seven minutes. Go enjoy your weekends. Thanks, everybody, for a great week. A lot of successes here. Great meeting. Welcome, Priya and Nicole. Bye.