Josh Clemente (00:00):
Go ahead and jump in. Welcome to our last Friday Forum of October 2022. Okay, this week we are transitioning onto some new systems. The e-commerce system, for example, is new and this is creating a lot of new challenges and new material for our support team to learn in real time and there aren’t always opportunities to sandbox these things. So the support team has been dealing with another set of new challenges with new systems and doing a tremendous job of adapting. That said, it’s created some challenges as expected. On the highlight side, 90 plus percent reduction in our order delays. So the orders that are getting delayed for extended time periods are way down and we’ve got the best time to delivery of the year this week, which is huge. And then on the contact rate and leverage, so our support content leverage, both above goals for six and seven weeks respectively.
(00:59):
So a lot of stuff to be excited about there. We’re getting a ton of leverage out of what we’re building. On the content side, I think we just crossed over 360 blog articles historically, which is to be honest, with the amount of volume, I think that makes a lot of sense. But this week we had a new content piece on 50 nutritious foods, which is going to be really helpful for in-app content. And then we had a nice article I wanted to highlight where a super user, Gabe Mendoza, who’s been a real part of our community and also one of the most attentive people to how he integrates CGM into his life, a really interesting highlight on building muscle in the context of glycemic friendliness. So I highly recommend this one. And we’re going to be thinking through ways to resurface that huge back catalog with 360 articles. There’s so much content that it may not be immediately surfaced when you land on our blog site.
(01:50):
And so being able to resurface that, retarget it to people at times when most useful to them is going to be on the agenda soon. We got some results from the fat burning sweet spot. I think 12 participants did 32 trials, and we have some very early interesting data that shows most people are able to quickly reduce glucose in the zone one and zone two exercise modalities. Some even are able to drop glucose up to zone three, but there is a corresponding increase in glucose as heart rate starts to climb beyond zone two typically. So we need more data including potentially ketones or other fat results like glycerol. But this is indicating that you can quite quickly deplete the glucose energy store and start to transition towards fat most likely. So lots more to do here, but some compelling early results. We’ve got a 100% of our UK orders over on the e-commerce system and we’re on track for all US orders on e-commerce by 11/1.
(02:49):
Labs, V1.1 and Healthy Food Choices have been released with Healthy Food Choices out to I think 20% of members this week. And we’ve got some really awesome eng metrics this week so I want to just shout out the whole team for really hitting cycle times and review times and deploy times. Levels levels and stability score are both in development. The stability score is kind of the next generation of what used to be the metabolic health score. A lot of good stuff there. And then we’re working on shaping widgets, so iOS widgets, core comprehension content. In other words, how people initially start to get familiar with what metabolic health means and all of the sort of early education that we went through need to make sure that new members can get the same. We’ve got a new lab signup flow and member portal in shaping and lots more in work obviously. Levels Kitchen trailers dropped. You can see the highlight here. These are now out.
(03:40):
We’re taking signups. I think we had 200 early signups. The first two episodes of this series are going out on November 1st, which is going to be a very exciting experiment. We’re building out a creator pipeline for in-app creators, and some of this stuff can be seen. There were some recent drops, which you can see in Threads, but Austin McGuffie and Mallory Rodriguez both produced in-app content, which I saw the Austin videos and they’re really fantastic. It’s super exciting to think about being able to build this platform to elevate people who can tell stories in a really effective way and in their own voice that weave in the concepts that we’re all learning. This week we got MetaBOOlical, which is a get together launched by Levels and One Commune. We’re going to have about 50 people who are in our network and big supporters over the years. This is across entrepreneurship, chefs, researchers, authors, investors, podcasters, you name it, they’ll be there.
(04:35):
It’s going to be really interesting to get connected with these folks and in the real world, and it’s going to be interesting to see what we learn. And then lastly, partnerships. As we really get deep into the growth phase and have some departures from the team, some new additions to the team, we’re shifting partnerships focus to tier one partners over smaller promos. We’re going to continue focusing on running experiments with targeted learning and accessible analytics and metrics for the whole team. And then we’re also launching a new gifting strategy for the 2022 holiday season. We got some activations this week with Peter Diamandas, Huberman Lab, Bulletproof, and Ben Greenfield. Put out a newsletter with a two-month offer. You can see a ton of great UGC this week and community membership or community newsletter for November is getting ready to go out. And then, I think we pretty much touched on all this.
(05:27):
So from there, I’m going to jump ahead. Hanna’s on this call. I want to welcome Hanna Hyvaerinen who’s a member of Levels, health coach and trainer, and a very motivated person in terms of understanding how to tweak lifestyle to avoid chronic illness, which I think is one of the core messages that we hear from Levels members, is that this is not necessarily about managing something current, it’s about preventing something in the longterm. And I definitely identify with that. And Hanna, I appreciate you taking some time here on Friday to hang out with the team. We’d love to hear what you’re excited about and maybe more about your journey into metabolic health.
Hanna Hyvaerinen (06:06):
Hi, good morning. Thank you for having me. Yeah, actually this came at a really good time for me, the whole Levels thing. I saw an influencer on Instagram having an early signup link last year, so I tried it because my dad was diagnosed with diabetes and I found out when he was diagnosed that he had been a pre-diabetic for five years and he just never got any good information on it. So I wanted to kind of check where I am and just see what it really looks like in everyday life. And I was going through a lot of testing for other stuff anyway, so I had interesting moment when they did that one time very intensive blood sugar testing in lab versus what it looks like when you have it on continuously. Because every time they do that in the lab, they tell me that my Levels are really great, excellent. And when looking at it continuously, it was really low actually. Explain why I’m dizzy and not feeling great.
(07:26):
And it gave a really different perspective on how easy it is to fall to following a diet plan. For example, when somebody tells you, this is really good, this is how you should be eating and you feel like it’s not really working for you. And when you have that kind of data all the time, you can connect… That’s what happened to me. I was able to connect back to how I feel and what it looks like in real time data on me because I had gotten so far from that just believing that, okay, if I’m at this amount of grams here and keeping this gap of time here, I’m good. I have to be good. And looking at that explained a lot of why, for example, eating the same breakfast on some mornings I still felt hungry. I was like, oh wow, my blood sugar levels didn’t actually raise enough. So it was really interesting to look at that.
(08:26):
And what I like about Levels is I follow social media and all, so it gives me kind of these continuous reminders that even if I’m not looking at those, they aren’t going away. There isn’t getting away that lifestyle choices every day affect you all the time. And another interesting insight, I’ve never gotten a worse spike when I was looking at the data then one evening I went to bed and I got the dreadful feeling that I had forgotten something very important, cold sweat. And when I looked at that, the app pinged me that, hey, are you okay? Something happened? It was very insightful to see that the spike and the crash and the connection of that and what they call emotional eating, it was like, oh wow, it’s not just lack of willpower, it’s a physiological reaction. And it was so insightful. It really helped me to see how, for example, stress management is not just nice to have. It’s essential.
Josh Clemente (09:43):
Yeah, I love that. A couple items there that you highlighted that really resonate and we actually talked about last week on this meeting including cortisol and the stress response and how sometimes counterintuitively people learn the most about the mental physical access even potentially more so than their nutrition. So that’s really powerful and I think I for one, certainly see the effects of cortisol in my blood sugar and I’m really excited to elevate that as a feature that we are building. Current focus is primarily how food affects health, but there’s so much more to it, including what mind state we’re in. So certainly resonate there. And also I really love what we highlighted, just the dynamics.
(10:25):
Right now we consider the best case scenario after fasting for 12 hours and going into the doctor’s office after eating nothing, that’s what we check and how we try to understand the state of the system. But the reality is that how we’re responding to the load that we’re putting on our bodies is really what’s most important. How well can we stand up to the degrading forces that happen all day every day for most of us? And if there’s one thing that you would love to see as an improvement in the Levels experience, which could be anything. It could be a new product, a new service, or just a new feature within the app that you’ve used, what would you love to see us invest in to improve your experience, your comprehension?
Hanna Hyvaerinen (11:04):
I think even more of daily reminders and nudges. No, not in annoying way, but it just helps to keep it on top of the mind that there are action steps you can always take to mitigate. No, I used to be very much all or nothing person. So you eat really healthy, but then you go out and you have a piece of chocolate cake and whatever. Day is already gone, you already made that choice so I can just as well go and have a pizza and whatever. And wearing this and looking at the data, it reminded me that there are action steps you can take after the chocolate cake. It’s fine, you can get off the roller coaster. So I would like even more reminders of that. Like, hey, here’s what you can do. Go for a walk, drink more water in a positive way, helping people see that it’s not all or nothing.
Josh Clemente (12:07):
Absolutely love that. We’ve done a lot of thinking about the psychology of scores and how if a score just only goes down over the day, it’s not as motivating. It doesn’t actually give you the empowerment that you have, which is that this is really a process where we make hundreds of decisions every day. And if we can get 95 of those to be in the right direction, it’s okay if five of them aren’t. And so one thing that we’re doing here is there’s a new feature we’re building called Levels Levels. You might have saw that on the front page and it will really be built in this direction. It’s going to be a fun experiment to see how the psychology shifts as we can really motivate individual positive actions, irrelevant whether or not we made one or two deliberate splurges here or there. So it’s going to be fun to see and I really appreciate you highlighting that.
(12:53):
Yeah, the realtime insights, the realtime nature of what we’re building is the crux benefit, so looking forward to making more strides there. Hanna, thanks so much for joining us. We have a full meeting. If you’d like to stick around, please do. You’re more than welcome and we would love to have you do so. If not, just from the whole team, we really, really appreciate hearing directly from members like yourself and thank you for being our supporter.
Hanna Hyvaerinen (13:15):
Thank you.
Josh Clemente (13:17):
All right. Jumping up, I want to welcome Farhan to the software engineering team. Farhan, I’m not going to read your slide, but I’m really excited to have you here on the team. Love all the interest in first of all, taking on the outdoors and building a really exciting adrenaline filled life it looks like, but also the reasons that you’re here and seeing that passion come through and what you’re excited about. So I’ll hand it over to you from here.
Farhan Attamimi (13:42):
Yeah, thanks Josh. Hey everyone. My name is Farhan. It’s great to be here. Really, really excited. I’m currently based in Singapore, so excited to add to the list of timezones at Levels as well. Yeah, I’ve had Levels on my radar for quite a while now. I kept telling people in the interview process that I had a friend who was testing it in 2018 only to learn that the company was founded in 2019. So it’s felt like a long time coming and after reading all the blog posts and listening to all the podcasts, it’s pretty surreal to be here. So yeah, just excited to be part of a really amazing team tackling a huge problem and helping folks improve their health and prevent chronic disease with really actionable data and a great product. So really stoked to start working with everyone and meet more folks over the next few weeks.
Josh Clemente (14:42):
Awesome. Another super valuable bingo slot with Farhan over in Singapore, it’s going to be the first to collect that bingo card. Congrats to you. Farhan, I can’t wait to work together, very excited to have you aboard. And thanks for joining the team. Everyone, as usual, please make yourselves available. I think you had coffee right before this meeting with a couple of people and just keep reaching out. It’s a unique onboarding process we have here at Levels as we all know. So let’s try and make that as easy and as painless as possible. All right, quick culture slide. Jhon has been with us now for three years, which is amazing. Jhon was our very first full-time engineer and has now just been really building at an increasing pace it seems, over the past few years with us and couldn’t be more excited to have you as a continued member of the team, Jhon. Thanks for everything you’ve done.
(15:35):
Culture survey Q3, so everyone did a great job. We almost did a 100% participation. We’re going to keep striving for that next quarter, a 100% participation, but we got some really great results. It’s trustworthy. The sample size is huge and the results are going out via… I think they’re already actually out in threads and you can review the summary page and dig into those results in notion. And then we’re also going to do on the third a fireside, which we typically do to review these and take the themes and kind of talk about not just what we learned in this Q3 result package, but also what we learned in Q2 and what we did about it and how those trends have shifted from Q2 to Q3, which is really important just to identify that we made some really major strides over the last quarter and seeing kind of the target shift is a really good indicator. It means that we’re not continuously hearing the same themes.
(16:24):
There are new themes that come up and of course the company will always be under construction. Everything here is written in pencil, and so we expect to have areas of opportunity for the company. So definitely please dive into this. And yeah, thanks for the engagement on it, looking forward to the fireside. All right, from here I’m going to hand it over to Mike D.
Mike DiDonato (16:45):
All right, all right. All right. I’m excited for this. I am going to do my best to keep it as brief as possible ’cause I know the TV show is capped at 60 minutes. So the culture axiom I’m going to talk about is giving away your Legos. And like many of our other acting, it’s adjacent to and riffs off of other ones. And the two that come to mind for me are everything’s written in pencil and make yourself obsolete. Where it differs from make yourself obsolete is when I think of that, it’s more tactical thinking systems. And for me, giving away your Legos, it’s more of a mindset and an awareness and having self-awareness and an understanding and an appreciation of what it is that we signed up for when we joined Levels. Being part of a startup, it’s interesting feelings of ambiguity, at times chaos, stress. Sam says this all the time, every six months we basically have a new company and I can confirm that’s been true thus far.
(17:53):
And as the company changes, at a personal level, we need to be ready, willing and able to adapt and change with that. May mean a lot of different things. Oftentimes it will mean giving away responsibilities, taking on new responsibilities. And when this happens, it can be accompanied by some strange feelings. We borrowed this from, I believe it was the first round review piece, and the author, Molly Graham says one of the reasons she called it giving away her Legos is the feelings that you feel, it’s not that different than what a small child feels when they have to share or give away their Legos. They oftentimes become anxious, insecure, and a lot of other feelings. And it’s a little bit counterintuitive because the only way to grow and evolve from that is to lean into those things. Like in general, when we lose something or something’s taken away, we index really heavily on what we lost and it’s harder to focus on what we gained or that new opportunity.
(19:12):
So as long as we remember why we’re here and the responsibility that we have to our members, our mission and our team, then everything will be fine. And just a reminder for us all that we know, is this mission is really big. And to borrow a baseball metaphor, since my Phillies are in the World Series, we are in the very early innings of building this thing. So just a reminder, don’t be afraid to give some Legos away. And one final thing I just wanted to add is if you are feeling these things, we have a thing that says don’t fail in silence, don’t suffer in silence because we have a lot of awesome people on the team that either are or have experienced these things and have been amazing resources to me personally and to other people on the team. I think that’s it.
Josh Clemente (20:06):
Love that. And I love the piece, it’s been helpful for me as well. Early on in the company, it’s a constant process of scaling and making yourself capable of taking on new things. And that can’t happen unless you give away some of the old. And so I just want to appreciate everyone who’s done this, who’s gone through this process. It is a strange experience to have a certain set of responsibilities and feel that it fits perfectly in your zone of competence. And then to end up having to hand some of that stuff off, it can feel confusing. Sometimes we can feel lost in the woods, but this is part of the process. Got to kind of trust it. And thanks a lot Mike for sharing that. I really resonate with it.
(20:48):
All right, we are continuing to work on an evolution to the forum. So just for everyone that presents, our objective is to have clarity on who will present each week, an opportunity to go deeper and spend more time on specific updates. So still getting our arms around this process, but just a heads-up that we’re going to continue to try and drive structure around this whole thing so there’s less ambiguity and so everyone can kind of know what they’ve got on the agenda and how much time they’ll have. So appreciate everyone bearing with us on this process of improvement. Okay, company objectives. I believe this should of course not have changed. The main thing, Levels shows you how food affects your health. I think we have an update. Okay. Yep. So main objectives are still member retention, new member acquisition, and member health improvement and product is our top priority in Q4. I believe Lauren is going to intro an OKR presentation from Taylor.
Lauren Kelley-Chew (21:41):
Just repeating the refrain from the last few weeks, which is as we kick off our new functional OKR process, just for everyone to make sure that you can really identify what you’re working on, links to your functions, OKRs, and how those OKRs link to the company OKRs. Again, as Josh said, product is our top priority right now and really all of the functions are very interconnected this quarter. So a lot of connection. Next slide. As always, if you have any questions about your work in relation to OKRs, reach out to me, to Sonia, to your team lead, to your functional lead, or really to anyone on the leadership team. And yeah, we’ll get a conversation going. Thanks.
Josh Clemente (22:23):
Okay. I’m going to do a quick overview on member personas. So this is a sort of a repetition, not diminishing the prayer, but I just want to highlight again our primary demographic right now. This is Maureen Fisher. This is a persona that Lauren and Sonia and others put together amongst the other personas, core personas with the Levels user base. So if you are not familiar with the presentation, please go back and review this. It’s critical and it’s also a super helpful tool to really understand and put ourselves in the mindset of the person who is using it in the specific challenges and objectives that they have. So I’m not going to read through the entire slide. Essentially, Maureen is a 56-year-old retired therapist. She lives in California, has two kids, and her objectives are primarily to improve sleep and concerned about health in the long term.
(23:09):
So she wants to lose a little bit of weight, she wants to feel more energetic, and she wants to reduce some of the concerning health metrics that she’s seen. And she also doesn’t understand some of the reasons why this has happened. Some of the cool things about the personas deck is that it introduces some mantras, some priorities, information sources and brands. And I think this is some of the most powerful stuff, is to be able to really picture what this person’s lifestyle is like, how they might be interfacing with other people, learning about new information, trying new things, where does all that come from? What products does this person trust? And that can give a really good representation of what products we should consider replicating or what brands we might consider emulating. So this is really powerful. Maureen is of course our core persona right now, but we will be expanding concentrically outward as we continue to execute on product objectives.
(24:05):
On her journey, so she learned about us through Dr. Hyman’s podcast. During her first week with Levels, she had very low stability, so this was likely confusing, concerning. Why is this happening? Why am I doing poorly? Started reading Levels content, making some simple food swaps. Ultimately she’s now continuing to log food daily. Scores are dramatically improved and she shares in the Levels Facebook group a lot of the recipes she loves that have led her along the journey. So that’s a quick overview of the type of journey. We’re going to continue to do these sort of repetitions and persona highlights, and of course expect some of this to change and evolve as we move forward. Some of the features that we talk about here on the journey will adapt as we build new features. And yeah, thank you to the team who put this together. And for everyone who hasn’t yet reviewed our personas, please go do so. All right, over to product team.
David Flinner (24:53):
Can you do a quick refresh, Josh?
Maziar Brumand (24:59):
I can kick it off. Whenever you’re ready, Josh. All right, welcome to product updates, October 28th. The main things are still the main things. We have handed off Levels Levels to engineering. Labs 2.0 continues to be worked on, and handed off to engineering in-app content. David will give an update today. A lot of exciting things going on and we’re prototyping some of the concepts we talked about last week. Metabolic Score handed off to engineering and Instacart handed off to engineering and at the final stages, so looking pretty good on the left-hand side of the equation. And on the right hand, we’re exploring a number of new things. And to Hanna’s point, we’re actually exploring notifications to make sure how can we do this in a way that people appreciate and it’s not annoying, but at the same time really offers the concept of the right trigger at the right time in the behavior design model? So we’re actively thinking about it. It’s really good to hear from Hanna that that would be helpful and important. With that, I will hand it off to David.
David Flinner (26:05):
Thanks, Maz. Great. So last week we talked about regenerative content and the opportunity that we have to really come up with things that help increase our members’ motivation and ability and leverage our broader community over time to create content that is aligned with our members that help pair our Levels philosophy interventions in a way that really resonates with our members. So this week I am excited to share, as Josh mentioned, that Healthier Food Choices is live to 20% of our members. So huge congrats to Justin for getting that one out the door. And the second one that I’ll talk about briefly is the in-app personalities experiment that we’re running. We have some really, really awesome Austin videos that dropped this week, so I’d encourage you to watch those. Next slide.
(26:56):
And on the healthier food choices front, so this is really about increasing our members’ ability and reducing friction so that they know how to make healthy choices. It’s one thing once we teach them our principles on what the levers are they can pull and what they should be doing. But there’s still a high bar in terms of getting that food, getting the idea, the inspiration for what they should be eating concretely, getting that food into their life. And so healthier food choices are first foray into that. While this has started to roll out, we’re really not fully celebrating until we get the learning. So we’re looking to see, are people coming back to this feature on a repeat daily manner? Are they finding value in a stay over day? It’s a seven-day journey through different food options. And then are they finding success in making the meals?
(27:42):
I think this would be really, really awesome to see if they actually are making these, but even if they are coming back and dwelling on the content day over day, I think it’s really promising signal. This is setting up the future. This is really kind of a new primitive for the UI where we’re setting up a future items that also help with behavior change. So as Maz mentioned, the Instacart integration will be a really nice easy one here where you can have one tap to go, add this to your shopping list and get it delivered to you. And then this is also a platform for the future, which will tie into a people layer when we not just have Levels telling you these are the Levels recommended seven days of recipes, but other coaches, leaders, people in our ecosystem, how can we help facilitate them?
(28:23):
Do you find value with their own members finding more reach with the Levels membership? And then enabling our members to find value from those people. So really exciting to see this one again. Great job Justin. Next slide. And then a bit more on the in-app content. So Stacy has been working with Austin to come up with some really cool series as well as with Mallory to test the second version of our in-app personality. So if you recall, Levels has a whole bunch of principles that we want to teach our members that we think will help them lead to more stable glucose and lead to meeting their health goals. And so this is about delivering our intervention principle and a delivery style that resonates with the member. And we’re starting with… The first version, we tested one video with Mallory and that went well. The second experiment that we’re running is okay, people told us that they would engage every day.
(29:16):
They would come back and watch similar videos if we provided them. So this time we’re providing them with a series of five videos, one per day. We’re doing this with Austin McGuffie and then we’re also doing this with Mallory Rodriguez, as Josh mentioned. The Austin videos started rolling out on Monday and we’re starting to collect feedback. I’ll have more feedback on this next week when the series is complete, but qualitatively, some of the feedback coming in really centers around that this was both quality information, but it’s landing because it’s delivered in an entertaining way and it resonates with certain people. Now, this style is probably not going to resonate with everyone. Some people do want that more clinical style. Some people do want to go deep and read in-depth articles. And so what we need to have is a style for everyone and the choice that resonates in each and every person’s style.
(30:01):
And so if this concept keeps going well, we’ll keep rolling this out. And we’ve already talked, I think as a company that there’s a whole bunch of content underway. The Levels Kitchen is another great initiative, which is probably going to be super appropriate to fit into this style with healthier food choices as well among many other things. If you haven’t seen it yet, go to levels.link/pizza and you can see one of the Austin videos. They’re super high quality. And one of the cool things here is that Austin is doing this of his own initiative. He is… Sorry, I’m getting a phone call, it’s hard to concentrate. Yeah, so go ahead and see it. I highly recommend it. It’s pretty amazing. Next slide. The Austin videos so far are performing even better than the Mallory test, and we have so far, 92% of people have said that they would come back into the app to see this day every day. So we’ll see where this lands as we pull the final numbers. That’s it. Oh, off to Alan.
Alan McLean (31:11):
Hey everybody. So we’ve wrapped up the design for the next iteration of scoring. We’re not going to really be too explicit about it being a score. This is more of an evaluation of your glucose stability. We think there’s some improvements here relative to the initial pass at scoring in that it’s dependent on just a single metric standard deviation of glucose. The nice thing about this is that it recovers in an early spike. You might recall in the past that if you had a big spike in the morning, you’re done. And this will, if you managed to improve more stable time during the day, the score should go up and should improve. I think also, it doesn’t depend on average glucose in the same way. So in that regard, if you’ve got sensor to sensor variability, it should manage to mitigate the drop in scoring that you might see.
(32:07):
Next slide please. Oh, there it is in the calendar view. Next slide. And there it is in the list view. So you can see in the left we’ve got applying it over time and those are real charts. That’s David’s data. He’s just crushing it with these stable values. But you might also notice it’s running a little bit hotter than some people might expect. It’s all around 110, 100, which in the past would’ve created some problems in terms of average glucose and dropping the score. Next slide please. We’ve got some nice onboarding for it too. We’re going to leverage the real curves. David’s doing so well, I got to say I was impressed too. In terms of onboarding, we’re trying to leverage the glucose game experience so that we can help people really see and feel what this actually means, which was always missing in the past. And this should be kind of a fun way of looking at it.
(33:02):
We’ve got a little live demo on the next slide. So users should be able to see this line wobble and move as you log release. This is all sped up, but move up and down based on what you’re logging, it should account for exercise and then ultimately in the end you can adjust the amplitude, get an illustration of what good and not so good stability looks like. So that’s in development right now and looking forward to seeing that go up.
Josh Clemente (33:34):
Got to say, I love those interactive and visual onboarding for new features. It’s so beautiful and I couldn’t think of a better way to do it. Awesome work, product team and design. All right, I believe this is Ben.
Ben Grynol (33:49):
Okay, here we go. So thought it would be good to do overview of growth. It’s been a while since we’ve done one. A lot of team growth, a lot of changes as far as we now have targets and it’s always good to check in on these things and have the conversation around them. So what we’ll do is we’re going to go through a bit of history, where we’ve been, where we’re headed, talk about growth as far as some of the frameworks and some of the things that we’re working on between demand gen and demand capture, and then go from there. So next slide please. So some of you are familiar, Mike D is absolutely familiar. This is Cameron Hanes. He is one of the best archers, one of the best bow hunters in the world, and he’s been training for more than 40 years and he’s very much notorious for being able to put the arrow in the middle of the target from almost anywhere as far as being pretty far away in yardage in any conditions. And he does this time and time again. Next slide please.
(34:50):
We’ve been shooting for four months. So what we’re doing is we’re actually a little left of center. We’re not that nice illustration on the right-hand side. We’re not shooting way off target where we’re just throwing arrows out and not really hitting anything at all. There’s a lot of opportunity to get closer to target. That’s what we need to do, but this takes, as you can see with Cameron Hanes, 40 years to get in the center of the target every single time. Next slide. So we’re at roughly 18% below our total targets for the year. This is an aggregation of July till October, and it doesn’t feel good not hitting targets. This is something that I think inherently it can put us into a state of wondering how far are we off targets? Is this bad? Is this really bad? Is it okay? And the answer is it’s never going to feel good, but it is necessary so that we can keep working and keep striving to hit those targets to figure out the levers that we need to pull to get there.
(35:50):
So our target members between July, and we’re not quite there, and October is around 10,000, and the actual members that we’ve brought in is around 8,000. So we’ve got this delta of just under 2,000 members. So it’s roughly 18 to 20% that we’re under. That’s not great, but again, it’s not to put us into panic mode that we’re way off and that things aren’t in a good place. So next slide please. So where we’ve been. 2019, the company was founded. June 25th, 2019. And between July and December, $45,000 of revenue was generated, which is a heck of a lot for a new company. That is now what we make, 45 to $50,000 in a day. In 2020, that’s a full calendar year, we generated $1.5 million dollars of revenue and that’s what we now make in roughly a month. In 2021, six and a half. And in 2022, so far we’re just over $12 million and our goal this year was to 3X.
(36:49):
So we’re trending to hit around 2., Ryley can keep me honest on this, it will probably end up somewhere around 2.3X in overall revenue by end of year. But if we look at that chart on the right-hand side, you can see that is our monthly revenue by year. And that number 577, that is what we were at last year. So last October we generated $577,000 of revenue. We’re now looking at… We’re trending to about 1.4 for this month. And you can see that little airplane, that is liftoff, that’s where we get that huge surge in revenue. And so since liftoff, we’ve been generating. We went from just under a million bucks to now we’re generating just under a million and a half a month. Next slide please. So as a reminder, we’re very much at this foundational phase of growth. We’re in the product market fit stage. We’re testing and finding growth levers. The last thing that you want to do is double down on growth levers before product’s ready.
(37:49):
Or maybe you’ve got levers that aren’t necessarily the right ones to allocate capital to. And this can get to be a dangerous game where you’re just trying to throw money at targets and that puts you in a worse place because you’re not scaling in a way that is sustainable. Next slide please. So what have we done from a demand standpoint? So over the past few years, we’ve driven 4 million all-time users to the website. We currently get just over 200,000 people to the website every month. And of that traffic, 70,000 people land on our site. So 35% of traffic to the site is organic each month. And the way that happens is through content, through all the blog content, everything that’s indexing on Google. We’re creating a huge foundation or this huge pillar to build upon, which is really great. Next slide please.
(38:42):
So when you think about approaches to growth, you can have a blend, but this is a bit of a case study, product-led growth. What is product-led growth? Well, it’s very much what Dropbox used as their strategy. It’s this idea where they built user referrals to become a loop so people were incentivized to share with others, share the product with others so that they could get more storage space on their accounts. And that worked really well for them. There’s a ton of case studies about how they did this, and it’s not to say you can be only one or not another, but usually companies will have one primary thing. So we’re very much driven by content-led growth. We know that all of our own media, all of our earned media is what drives all of our traffic. We’ve also got a bit of community-led growth, that being earned media where people talk about us, they share the product, they share their experience.
(39:30):
But companies that are primarily driven by community-led growth or things like Notion or things like Figma where it’s this tribal movement from the ground up and people love sharing and talking about the product. And then you get marketing-led growth and this is something that happens, but you never want to be a company where your main pillar is marketing-led growth. That’s something like Casper, because it’s really easy to build a brand and really easy to pay to play, and then you get to scale and you get in deep trouble because your unit economics don’t look great. So what do we want to do? Well, we want to spend more time in all these buckets, but we want to know that content-led growth is something that’s very scalable and very controllable for us. Next slide please. So when we talk about the mechanics of growth, there are three mechanics that you can think about, loops, levers, and boosters.
(40:22):
So loops are, it’s very much like Dropbox and there’s an example on the right of one that Airbnb did for getting travel credits or incentivizing people for future trips, having a user referral or a sharing mechanism so that people can you build that into the product and you get a lot of scale and a lot of traction when you’ve got the right network effects in place. So they’re scalable, they increase with users, they’re more predictable in growth, and there’s an opportunity for us to build upon loops. We haven’t really doubled down on user referrals, but we know early on it was representing five to in some months, even 12% of revenue, which is pretty incredible while we are in beta. Levers are what you pull. So examples of levers are things like performance marketing. We do paid ads, paid ads with Huberman, Sinclair, you name it. They’re scalable and they’re usually fueled by capital.
(41:15):
So the more you pull on levers, the more it costs you, but you can get scale out of them. And then there’s boosters, which you don’t want to rely on. They’re really great, but they provide a temporary increase in awareness and you don’t really have control over them. So the podcast that Casey did with Bari Weiss, great initiative, provided a lot of awareness and a lot of traffic, but we don’t have control and they’re hard to scale consistently. So you have a pool of these boosters that you can explore, that being tier one press, that being tier one media and that gives you this inflection in traffic, but it’s not the sustainable way of growing. The key is to have all of them, but to just know which ones that you’re always working towards. So next slide please.
(42:00):
So what is the takeaway? Well, there is an opportunity to convert more of this traffic. We have a ton of traffic and we got to build more infrastructure around the mechanics of growth, these loops, levers and boosters. And in the good words of our friend, Cameron Hanes, we got to keep hammering, but to leave us with this, he’s always got a great mindset. So, “Obstacles can’t stop you. Weather can’t stop you. Heartbreak can’t stop you. Failure can’t stop you, only you can stop you.” So let’s keep hammering.
Josh Clemente (42:31):
Super informative, Ben, as always. Appreciate first of all the metaphor in relation to the campaign. It’s got a great book, highly recommend it, and also some good podcasts. But more importantly, I think the framework there is really approachable for those on the team who aren’t necessarily thinking growth things every day and just want to reinforce content is king. There’s one thing that Levels has built a competency in that will continue to deliver. It’s in developing content that helps people understand the need and how it relates to them. It’s really hard to do that. You can build a product, but to get distribution for people to understand, especially something so nuanced as metabolic health, which was not in the mainstream conversation just a few years ago. Leading with content has been a major, major component of putting Levels on the map. So to everyone who’s out there building content for us and with us and those on the team, thank you.
(43:21):
But also just for those of us on the team, it’s a really interesting way to think about it as an initiative that really delivers in the same way that performance marketing can for other teams, but it’s scalable. All right, quick hiring updates. So we’ve got three new folks coming in soon. On the engineering side, we’ve got Rafael and Juan both joining us in November the 7th and the 15th respectively. Super excited to have the two of them joining. And then we’ve got Adam coming in on the R&D side and he’ll be starting November 7th as well along with Rafael. So we’ll be putting some special things together for these folks. Keep your eyes on Threads for that and just super stoked to have the new additions. Open roles, continuing to hire on software engineering side, mobile and backend. Still continuing to hire on the R&D side. And then just generally, we have our open link at levels.link/careers.
(44:12):
If you or someone you know is a great fit for Levels, for the mission, for the culture, please reach out and looking forward to talk to you sometime soon. All right, made it through. We’ve got a couple minutes here for shares. I’m going to stop this. We do this by raising hands. We can hit the reactions button, raise your hand like this. I’ll kick off. On the personal side… Well, I guess I’ll go professional first. Really stoked about the in-app content stuff. I’ve been thinking a lot more about this over the past few weeks and having some great conversations and just thinking about the ways that we can weave content and personalities in a scalable way. The way that Austin is introducing these concepts in such an interesting, almost made for Vine or made for TikTok sort of way, but into a metabolic health platform.
(45:01):
It’s quite inspiring, I think the objective data that could ground that stuff. He could then show his Levels data to really ground it and reinforce that this is not just an opinion, this is evidence. And anyway, there’s a lot we’ve talked about for several years, but I think we’re at the point where the product is really ready for the introduction of these sorts of things. Now, on the personal side, I’m here looking pretty haggard because I’ve been helping the family move out of our childhood home this week in Virginia. We’re making the long slog out to Montana and it’s been fun, a little bittersweet, but good week. Ben.
Ben Grynol (45:39):
Professionally, welcome Farhan. On the professional work front, had an opportunity to record a podcast yesterday with Chris Palmer, Harvard psychiatrist, and it’s around his new book, Brain Energy. And Rob actually wrote, what do you call it? One of the anecdotes. One of the references. Oh, there you go. Unbelievable eyeopening book and it’s about the inextricable link between mental health and metabolic health. And he gets a lot into mitochondrial dysfunction and it’s one of those things that I read and I was like, oh my goodness. One, I’m way out of my league to be talking about this. Two, it really hit home in some of the stories he shares around how people have gone into remission with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder based on how they’ve made metabolic changes was just eyeopening. So very grateful to be able to do that. And then on the personal front, David Goggins has a new book coming out and very stoked for that.
Robert Lustig (46:37):
Ben, when is that Palmer thing going to show up online?
Ben Grynol (46:45):
Book drops November 15th and there’s an embargo, so we drop on November 15th.
Robert Lustig (46:51):
Perfect.
Josh Clemente (46:55):
Definitely excited for that. Ryley.
Ryley Walker (46:58):
Just huge kudos to Ben on that update. I really enjoyed the growth update and to put a little bit of a finance spin, finance lens on that. So kind of de-emphasizing where we are at relative to where we thought we might be or what our targets were, I think the important thing from a finance perspective is that we can show progression or trajectory that what we do in the future will generate results. So it’s about learning from these things and then having a short memory for failure. So resetting the target every month into a growth-minded focus for next month is really important. It’s not necessarily important looking historical and benchmarking against where we’re at. So just adding that finance lens for how to look at the targets and stuff.
Josh Clemente (47:54):
Yeah, I appreciate that. I think just reinforcing that we exited beta, which was a very controlled supply/demand dynamic and we’re now really learning real lessons and it’s only been a few months, so I appreciate the framework there Ryley and also Ben, just to put it in context with the historical life of the company. We set targets, they’re aspirational, we will hit them, but right now we’re definitely learning how to hit them. Hui.
Hui Lu (48:22):
First of all, I just want to second that. I really love Ben’s updates. It just helped me understand so much more about growth and also I guess it has all the different examples. It’s not just about our growth, but just give me a insight into the industry and things there. So that’s a great learning for myself. And secondly, definitely welcome Farhan and I’m so excited about the eng team side growth and looking forward to building more awesome product together.
Josh Clemente (48:56):
Yeah, and congrats. I had missed that, but we are done hiring mobile for right now, so I can take that down for next week. But congrats on hitting those targets and stoked for the new additions. Maz.
Maziar Brumand (49:08):
On the professional front, I’m really excited and I want to give a shout-out to a couple of teams that have been really, really been fantastic, cross-functional partners working with product and design. First of all, Taylor and Azure on the research side. I think we’ve seen a real increase in collaboration and really helping us think through some of the product aspects that are deeply rooted in science. So big thank you to the research team. Second is on the content front, there is a lot of thinking going on in product about content and Ben and his team have been a fantastic partner, Sissy, Sonia, Casey. And I just want to say a big thank you. I think it’s really, really starting to show up. And also Stacy for really being on the ball with some of the things like Austin. So I just want to say a big thank you on the content front.
(49:56):
It has been really, really fantastic to watch and see. And then lastly, I wanted to send a shout-out to the engineering and product team and design team that has been an incredible discipline on OKRs, updating them every week and making sure we’re on track, creating tools and giving async and sync updates on them. So I just wanted to say thank you to that team as well. So it’s just been fantastic to watch. If you look, our velocity is accelerating. If you look, how we work together is accelerating. So it’s just really, really great to see. Just wanted to say thank you.
Josh Clemente (50:30):
Love that. All right, anyone else want to share? Good to hear from multiple fronts and I think we saw that in the cultural survey this week as well. That was a main focus in Q2. A lot of themes cropped up there and it seems like the attention has shifted, which is great. Anyone else? Last thoughts? Rob’s excited for MetaBOOlical this weekend. Wish I was going to be there. Unfortunately, I’ll miss it. All right, well, with that, go enjoy your weekends. Those who are going to celebrate, have a good Halloween and thanks for all the great work this week. Enjoy.