Podcast

NPS Unicorn

Episode introduction

Episode Transcript

Mike Haney: It’s a really interesting point of using the notion of customer satisfaction as a sort of tool to drive these non-revenue goals. So when I look at, again, if we use those other three unicorn companies as benchmarks, what’s interesting about those is, they’re all trying to disrupt pretty established industries. Tesla’s coming into a crowded and established field of automobiles right now, not electric necessarily, or Warby Parker came in to disrupt a very established field of how one purchases classes. We’re in a little bit of a different situation, like you said, in which we’re essentially creating a new space.

Ben Grynol: I’m Ben Grynol, part of the early startup team here at Levels. We’re building tech that helps people to understand their metabolic health and this is your front row seat to everything we do. This is A Whole New Level.

Ben Grynol: I sat down with Mike Haney, head of content at Levels. Haney, as he’s referred to internally, he’s one of the three Mikes on our team. Haney had this idea called everyone on content and the idea was that he wanted us internally to become the media. We could contribute to the blog in a meaningful way, whether it’s talking about product, business model, ideas around metabolic health, or even what it’s like to work with Levels every single day.

Ben Grynol: So Haney was interested in digging into this concept of NPS Unicorn, net promoter score. NPS is something that we’ve rallied around as a team where we focus on member experience and member feedback to keep making things better. So what better way to do this piece of everyone on content than to record a podcast and turn it into a blog post? You got to go for that derivative content for the win.

Ben Grynol: Anyway, we sat down and we talked about all of these factors of how we’re going to focus on member experience and scale that. How do we scale it from beta until we’re impacting a billion people in the world? Very hard problem to solve, very hard thing to do as we build out this movement, but it’s something that we’re focused on every single day with Levels

Mike Haney: So I think probably the good place to start is to kind of level set. I think it’s possible that somebody could hear the term NPS Unicorn and not know what either of those words means. So let’s just unpack them. What is NPS?

Ben Grynol: So NPS is net promoter score, and it’s a score that is used based on customer. We’ll say customer, because internally we refer to our customers as members, but customer feedback. So you can have car companies that have an NPS score. You can have Starbucks, Apple, or Levels, and a pretty typical metric that a lot of companies track for how happy people are with the company and the products they produce.

Mike Haney: That’s collected in a kind of standardized format. The idea is to standardize that customer satisfaction rating.

Ben Grynol: Exactly, and the question that is asked is very simple. It’s how likely are you to recommend X to a friend or to another person?

Mike Haney: Right.

Ben Grynol: So by asking that like of Starbucks or of Tesla or over Levels, it creates consistency so that as a benchmark across multiple categories and industries, you can say, “Oh, yes, we do have the same approach that we’re taking to get this feedback from people.”

Mike Haney: Then on the Unicorn side, I assumed that that term came from … The use of that term or the inclusion of that term in our phrase, NPS Unicorn came from unicorn, meaning a billion dollar company.

Ben Grynol: Yeah. So that’s like a very interesting backstory because I think unicorns are synonymous with technology now. If you are in the tech and startup world, a person would know of unicorns. It’s not some term that is underground, especially not in that world. So in 2013, Aileen Lee, she used to be a partner at Kleiner Perkins, and she moved on and started her own fund called Cowboy Ventures.

Ben Grynol: She wrote this piece, I think it was like November 2nd. November 2nd, 2013 and she wrote this piece called Welcome to the Unicorn Club and it was for TechCrunch. She was a guest, what would you call it? A guest editor, a guest storyteller, but yeah, a guess post. So she and her colleagues at the fund, they looked at what they call like 39 companies that had reached a billion dollars or more in valuation.

Ben Grynol: The idea was like, what can we learn from these companies? Was it something different that these companies had done that allowed them to get to this point? Was it the school they went to? Was it the geography they were in? Was it the amount of funding they had and in a colloquial fashion, she loosely, like this was not the point of the article.

Ben Grynol: She just said, “We’ll just call them the unicorn club,” and kept referring to them … It’s not even referenced that many times in the article, the word unicorn, but for whatever reason, that article amongst all the other TechCrunch articles that were out that day, week, month, everybody rallied around this and it just really picked up steam and caught wildfire. All of a sudden, everyone started referring to tech companies that had reached this billion plus valuation as unicorns.

Ben Grynol: Now, that word is everywhere. It’s just synonymous with tech. So it’s pretty cool backstory of how that got woven into the, we’ll call it the cultural landscape of tech.

Mike Haney: Yeah, and it’s evolved a bit as well in that, at that point in 2013, I think unicorn made sense because there was still an idea that a billion dollar valuation was relatively rare and a bit of a milestone. Whereas now it’s not nothing to be worth a billion dollars, but it’s much more common. I’ve seen chatter that perhaps we should redefine unicorn in terms of evaluation to be 10 billion or perhaps higher.

Ben Grynol: You hear that, like you’ll hear of people in the funding landscape or ecosystem that refer to deca-corns, which is a $10 billion company. It’s just going to keep going. Senta-corns. We’ll have all of these denominations of, or derivative uses of the word unicorn, but like 39 companies at that time and this was based out of the US. 39 tech companies at that time, it made sense to call them a unicorn, but now unicorns are born and bred in some of them a year.

Ben Grynol: Some companies will go from zero … Let’s look at Clubhouse. Great example. So Clubhouse was founded in May of … What year are we? 21? So May, of 2020, and it’s May, of 2021 and they’re already at a $4 billion valuation and they’ve had … I think they’re on their third round of financing. It’s a major leap, it’s aggressive growth, aggressive funding, but in the startup world, no one’s really blinking an eye at it. It’s just like, well, yeah, that’s just what you do. It’s very interesting how the approach has changed.

Mike Haney: So let’s get back to using unicorn then in a customer satisfaction. What do you think defines … Is there a numerical value, like the billion dollar valuation that you think defines an NPS Unicorn?

Ben Grynol: Yeah. So that, maybe we should pair the two words together and how that came about as a piece of, I guess, our reference to it. As a team, we’ve somewhat rallied around this idea of an NPS Unicorn. I started having conversations with Sam and Josh and a number of the Levels team members before I’d come on board. I guess there was a lot of documentation that was done, just thoughts on the company and a few technical exercises. I guess, as I was thinking about metabolic health and the space and the opportunity in the world, I was like, wow, this is a pretty big problem. Simultaneously, I had seen this piece of content that John Foley, the CEO of Peloton had done, and I think it was from 2017.

Ben Grynol: It was a Recode piece. It was their conference, Code Commerce, and he was just talking about building community at Peloton and how important customers were. He had this slide that came up and it showed the NPS scores of top companies. So we’re talking Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Tesla, Peloton, Warby Parker, Starbucks, you name it.

Ben Grynol: Surprisingly, a company like Netflix has, or at that time had an NPS score of 54, which was amazing. Apple might’ve been like 63 or 68 and there were these three companies that had a score of 90 and above. The first was Tesla. The second was Peloton and the third was Warby Parker and then there’s a big drop. It was down to like 75. I was sitting there thinking, I’m like, man, there are not a ton of companies that … These are major, major companies and they’re not even coming close to hitting a 90 score.

Ben Grynol: How could Levels become this NPS Unicorn? How could Levels get into the club where there’s so much customer appreciation and love for what is being done that we fall into that category of being in the 90 and above club? Peloton, like John Foley said, “I want to get to 100. I want to be the first company to get to 100,” but how could Levels do that? I don’t know what it was, but I’m just like, I guess that’s like an NPS Unicorn club.

Ben Grynol: I just thought about it and wrote it down in this documentation and now we’re using it internally, which is pretty funny, but when thinking about it, I was like, oh, well, this exists for sure and Googled it and couldn’t find anything. So I don’t know if we can officially coin the term as a company, but it’s pretty fun to rally around it as a team internally.

Mike Haney: It definitely gives a very clear directive. You understand what that means, and I think all that it implies, and I’m glad you mentioned those other three companies because those are all companies, I think we can anecdotally all … I don’t think any of those companies surprise us as being NPS unicorns. When you say those three, I go, okay. People seem to generally like those, people seem to be pretty into it. You’re pretty excited if you get a Tesla, everybody we know who gets a Peloton gets really excited.

Mike Haney: Warby Parker I think has lasted and survived a lot of other upstarts and that must be doing parts of their customer experience, but to get out a little bit of why we think that might be valuable for us, if you look at somebody like Apple, nobody would argue Apple’s not successful. Top capitalized company in history, but they’ve managed to do it with a much lower NPS score.

Mike Haney: So why do you think that’s a goal that’s worth achieving beyond … In a practical business sense or in a practical growth sense. Of course, we all want to make our customers happy. I think most businesses would say they want happy customers, but every business has to think about what an acceptable NPS target would be. What’s the value of getting to a 90 or above in your mind?

Ben Grynol: It’s a tough question because one, you can’t put a price on health nor should you. I think that’s something we all feel strongly about internally is we’re incentivized in this space that we’re in. We’re in a space that is starting to surface, but still somewhat underground in the sense that globally, I think on average people don’t understand the implications of this epidemic, that being the metabolic health crisis.

Ben Grynol: If we’re set out to solve the metabolic health crisis, then it’s a big problem to undertake. It means that we have to do what it’s going to take to impact more than a billion people in the world. If the lens becomes, how do we do it in a way that people are A, getting healthier and B, like the experience. Health is a sensitive subject for many different reasons and especially metabolic health, which is very upstream of … It’s tied to so many things like Alzheimer’s, or it’s tied to fatty liver disease.

Ben Grynol: It’s tied to diabetes, it’s tied to all of these different illnesses. So I think that if we are incentivized to only create the best possible experience for members, and we’re not incentivized to drive revenue in order to achieve growth so that we can hit a number of impacting a billion people, I think that the dynamic changes. So you think about, we’ve got these goals to create a movement. So that’s built around community, to create an NPS Unicorn, to have a company that is stand out in the way that people think about it and the experience that they get from it and to impact more than a billion people.

Ben Grynol: Pretty lofty goals and hard to achieve, but if we’re only driven by economic incentives, then I think we’ll probably be misaligned in achieving all of our goals simultaneously.

Mike Haney: That’s a really interesting point of using the notion of customer satisfaction as a sort of tool to drive these non-revenue goals. So when I look at, again, if we use those other three unicorn companies as benchmarks, what’s interesting about those is, they’re all trying to disrupt pretty established industries. Tesla’s coming into a crowded and established field of automobiles. Not electric necessarily, or Warby Parker came into disrupt a very established field of how one purchases, glasses.

Mike Haney: We’re in a little bit of a different situation, like you said, in which we’re essentially creating a new space. We’re not trying to disrupt an existing infrastructure and consumer experience of measuring metabolic health or tracking blood glucose, but what we are perhaps fighting against, or one of the challenges we have is it’s a relatively high friction experience, both in terms of, at least in the current user experience in that you have to apply a CGM, you have to track your food, you have to pay some attention to it.

Mike Haney: It’s not as easy as just strapping on a Fitbit and looking at a step count at the end of the day. You have to even upstream from that, understand what metabolic health is and why it’s important to do so. So what I’m hearing you say is that the customer satisfaction side, if we create that movement, which is downstream of customer satisfaction, if we impact a lot of people, which is downstream of customer satisfaction, if we assume that there’s a network effect to this, the more people are happy, the more people have an amazing experience, the more they tell other people that customer satisfaction is essentially a tool to overcome some of the friction that we might encounter on trying to achieve these very lofty goals.

Ben Grynol: I think also one thing that we’ve been asked about and it’s worth tying in is, well, what happens when … Is there a day where the Apple watch can track glucose through photons as opposed to a current CGM tracks glucose by being a little sensor and the sensor has a filament and that filament measures the glucose levels based on being embedded or just below the skin in your interstitial fluid.

Ben Grynol: So people think like, oh, would that be disruptive to have another company do that? It’s no, that opens up even more access to remove those friction points. If the friction is having to apply a sensor and having to change behavior, having to educate people and create enough awareness about what a CGM is and what the benefits are and why a person might want to use it, if you take existing infrastructure, so that being like the Apple watch, and you can build a software layer on top of it, well, that opens up a ton of access where we are removing that friction point and we’re enabling this experience to be better and better.

Ben Grynol: Sure we don’t control the hardware, but technically we don’t control the hardware right now. We’re not a hardware manufacturer and we’re building a software layer on top of other company’s existing CGM hardware. So I think that the more that we can lay the rails, the more that we can use the rails that exist for infrastructure, the more that we can remove the friction to get to market so that we really can impact as many people in the world as possible.

Ben Grynol: Think about it from the lens of how do we create the best possible customer-centric experience, bottom line. It just becomes a lens where it’s like, well, what would … I know Brian Chesky from Airbnb talks about this very often. How do you create a 12 out a 10 experience? Start there and pull it back. Pull it back to reality, pull it out of the clouds, but when you think about that as opposed to doing this bottom up experience, much different lens than just saying like, oh, well, we’ll just make something that feels pretty good. No, make it feel amazing, like something that nobody has ever experienced before and we’ll all be surprised what happens.

Mike Haney: So putting on the lens of the cynical existing business owner, or old school way of thinking is going to hear this and go, “That’s great. You guys are a very small well-funded startup. You’re pre-launch, you have a very small handful of customers. You can absolutely prioritize. You can make it a company priority to make sure every customer’s having a fantastic experience,” but how do you scale that and we can set aside that the companies, we just mentioned that are NPS unicorns have done this at scale, but again, fairly different industries. So how do you think about keeping that level of customer satisfaction and focus on customer experience when it’s not 1,000 users, it’s a million users?

Ben Grynol: It’s a good question because I think what happens with scale is when a company scales, so let’s say a company is making widgets and the goal is to scale widget production. Well, you want to optimize operational efficiency. That’s the goal of scaling. Minimize the marginal cost of production and maximize efficiency so you get the greatest return. If we look at something from the scaling perspective, when we say we’re only ever going to do what is right.

Ben Grynol: We’re only ever going to do it as right for the customer so that they feel … And I know Amazon does a very good job of this. Whether or not somebody has a different viewpoint, Amazon has done an incredible job over the past 20 X years, I guess it would be what? 23, 24 years. Amazon’s done this incredible job of always putting the customer first.

Ben Grynol: So there’s a story from this book working backwards that recently came out about how Amazon thinks about customer experience and when designing Prime or what was the first iteration of Prime, there were all these thoughts around, well, maybe we can just have some DVD burner show up at a person’s doorstep and they can burn DVDs and it will take four hours.

Ben Grynol: The lens was like, well, that’s not very customer-centric. That’s a waste of their time. So if we can always have this lens of we’re going to do what is right in putting the member, Levels member first, I think we’ll achieve a lot more by always approaching a problem with that lens or through that lens, as opposed to saying we’re building a feature and hopefully it provides a good experience.

Ben Grynol: We’ll say, what does the experience need to be, and then build around that. So a lot different, and that’s again, a business model from a content standpoint. I think if we always have that lens of building with the customer first, I think that that becomes scalable and that’s something that you can always build tooling and tech to reduce the amount of overhead required for human resources, but there are certain things where taking member experience into account and really building around that, I think that’s what you learn to scale as you grow and grow.

Mike Haney: I know you’ve been doing a lot of work in community and community as a input to growth, and as an input, I would think to this kind of a target metric. Community as a driver of customer satisfaction. What are you learning through community and how do those two areas overlap? Community and customer satisfaction. How important is having a very active community as an input to this?

Ben Grynol: It’s immensely valuable and it’s also not valuable for some people. That’s the short answer. So it’s immensely valuable to us as a company because it creates a platform for members to connect with each other and members to connect with our team, and we can glean a lot of insights from these communities. The reason why I say that it’s both valuable and not valuable to some people is there are groups of people who don’t want to participate in public forums and that’s completely fine, but what we do find is that they want micro-communities. So a micro-community can be two people, can be two people who are friends. It can be two people who know each other through a shared experience. That being, let’s say a Levels ambassador who is a coach or a reference point to somebody who’s new that’s going through the experience.

Ben Grynol: That’s a micro community versus the macro where it’s mini members who get to interact with each other and they get to learn from each other. Community is integral for what we’re building, but it’s not something that we can define and say, community is only this. Community is a platform. It’s like, community is not just a platform. Community is what we do to send flowers to somebody to say, thank you for something nice that they did for us.

Ben Grynol: Maybe it was a piece of feedback they gave. So community is immensely valuable, but it’s not one of those things that we can define the value, if that makes sense. We can’t tell people what community should mean to them. We have to say, it’s a blend of all these different inputs that make the experience special and great for individual members.

Mike Haney: I’m glad you mentioned that notion of making the experience special, because that feels to me like it’s a key component to this notion of achieving this consistent high customer satisfaction that you, in the way that if you get a Tesla, because they’ve been relatively scarce, they’re relatively expensive. There is some friction in owning one in terms of having charging and you’re using an infrastructure that’s not as built out as the gasoline infrastructure.

Mike Haney: So there’s a little bit of a special feeling in being a Tesla owner, and I suspect that that contributes to their high NPS score. Similar with Warby Parker. You have the try at-home feature, which was their unique thing, which makes it a little bit of a special personal kind of thing. You get these glasses in your home to try them on as opposed to having to go to a glasses store.

Mike Haney: How do you think about what we can do to create that special experience and how big a role does that play and not just customer satisfaction in that I solved your problem, which we do really well and we really prioritize support and make sure that when somebody has an issue, that’s addressed. That seems almost baseline for achieving this kind of stellar, consistent customer satisfaction but it seems like it requires going beyond that and being almost proactive in the way that you create the entire experience. That there’s some kind of a feeling of, oh, I’m participating in something really cool here. I feel special for having been a part of this.

Ben Grynol: I think the primal feeling of communities is tribalism, being part of a tribe. So there is a reason why Corvette owners wave at other Corvette owners. Like a Corvette is not a unique car. I mean, it is and it isn’t. There are lots of them. There’s a reason why people who wear Harley bandanas give each other the nod when they walk by. They’re part of the same tribe. That exists with Peloton, that exists with … Warby is a little bit harder to tell, because you don’t always know … It’s hard to look at somebody’s glasses and be like, those are Warby, but Tesla, you’re wearing the brand on your sleeve.

Ben Grynol: Peloton, you’re wearing the brand on your sleeve. You know when you meet other Peloton owners, it’s a shared experience that you can rally around. I think we have the opportunity to do that, where you can take people from all different walks of life and bring them together around a shared experience, which is something that we can create as a company where Levels members want to give other Levels members the “wave.” The wave, “Hey, we’re part of the same tribe. We’re part of something.”

Ben Grynol: It’s not that we want to make health feel cool, it’s that we want to make health accessible and we want to make it something that … Health should feel like something that is a good experience. Because I think a lot of times we think about health as … The idea of health is there’s a lot of negative connotations with health. We don’t really talk about being in good health. We talk about poor health.

Ben Grynol: Like, oh, I heard somebody is not doing well. They’re in poor health. I don’t think the world has got to a point where optimal health is the nature of the conversation. Maybe in micro communities, like the ones that are focused on health. That being the health and wellness communities or the biohacking communities, but those are still very long tail as compared to the majority of the world.

Ben Grynol: So if we can standardize that optimal health is something that … Everybody wants to achieve optimal health, but I think that there’s so much learning that needs to be done so that people can understand how does one even achieve this thing called optimal health? What we know from a company is that a lot of health is so far upstream that it really starts with the inputs and with metabolic health. So I think that’s really, our goal is to make it feel like this community or this tribe of optimal health and having good metabolic health is synonymous with Levels.

Mike Haney: It’s a good point about the … I think you hit on something there, the notion of the almost optimistic take on health because you’re right. So often it’s not that, and maybe in some of the fitness brands, like at Peloton, it’s a more optimistic take. I’m using this product to get more healthy, to make myself feel better, to make myself stronger, but certainly within this world of measuring things, it’s that we are often trying to diagnose a problem or trying to fix a problem.

Mike Haney: I think that is one of the unique things about Levels is that even within the world of nutrition, which can feel very restrictive, we’re trying to take a very encouraging and optimistic approach. This isn’t about telling you don’t eat this, don’t eat that. This is about finding things that you can eat and lifestyle decisions that will just help you feel better all the time and perhaps starting from that optimistic standpoint, starting from that positive outlook is important to again, achieving this elusive or potentially elusive customer satisfaction score.

Mike Haney: If people are coming to your product from a negative place or that the context of your product is one that is negative, even if it’s necessary or helpful, but it’s not about making things better or making things optimal or feeling better. It’s probably harder to get to that score, but if everybody who’s coming in is encountering this optimistic, empowering kind of environment, you’re probably more inclined to say like, ‘I like those guys. they made me feel good.”

Ben Grynol: The interesting thing that we know based on … It is May 7th, 2021, and we’re still in beta. So we’ve got feedback from, I guess we’ve got roughly six and a half thousand people who’ve been through the beta to date. We know that some of the members who’ve come through the program have felt like they’ve tried so many things and haven’t seen the results or the success they’d hoped to achieve whatever their goal is because people do have different goals in using Levels.

Ben Grynol: It’s something we’re still exploring and understanding better and better with every member that we talk to and get feedback from, but a member who has, let’s say a goal of optimizing diet for performance, that person might’ve tried many different things as far as diet goes. They’ve said, “Oh, I can’t seem to … Let’s take somebody who is into fitness and into maintaining a certain level of muscle mass for competition.

Ben Grynol: “I’ve tried so many different things and I can’t ever figure out how to put on weight or shed weight according to being in a fitness competition,” and Levels helps them actually get data or insight to say, here is where you should fuel. Objectively, you should fuel here and these types of fuel help you to achieve that goal that you want to achieve. That gives them a new source of insight. So they go, “Wow, all these other things I’ve been trying haven’t actually been working as well as I had hoped.”

Ben Grynol: You find the same thing. It’s analogous with somebody who comes in with a lens of wanting to lose weight. So somebody might have tried different diets or different fitness programs, some of which can be great, but they might not have worked for them in their lifestyle. So when they use Levels, they feel like it’s unlocking something new for them, and that’s a really interesting lens where they say, “Wow, this is a key to the lock that I’ve been trying to get into for a really long time.” That’s an interesting perspective that helps us to paint this picture of an NPS Unicorn.

Mike Haney: I have two more questions about this. One is to sort of stress test this idea a little bit further. Can you imagine a scenario or a set of circumstances in which it would be beneficial to abandon this as a goal in which something else might become more important or in which we would say, you know what, this isn’t actually what we should be aiming for.

Ben Grynol: So the thought exercise. So the thought exercise is we’ve been anchored on this idea of creating an optimal member experience, and we’ve been doing all of the things that it takes to do that. So a scenario might be, we do this and we allocate lots of capital to always creating these amazing experiences. Whether it’s through swag drops, whether it’s through sending flowers, whether it’s through going to meet people in person, whatever it might be.

Ben Grynol: We go, okay, an economic lens, like let’s put on our VC hat or capitalist hat and say, are we getting a good return on our investment? On the capital allocated, what is the return? If the IRR, like the internal rate of return on that investment is not looking great, that might be a lens where we go, this hypothetical scenario of building an NPS Unicorn is actually not providing us … We sort of have two obligations as a company.

Ben Grynol: We have a responsibility to our investors to provide them with a return. That’s one thing we are responsible for and another is to build a great company for members and the two ideas … It’s funny you ask this because these ideas of building customer-centered companies and building companies that provide great returns are at odds with each other if you look at them on paper.

Ben Grynol: So we do have these, it’s the dichotomy of two different goals. Our hypothesis is that if we build a company that is focused on a great experience, the returns will come, but to your point, there might be a scenario in the future playing devil’s advocate, where we look at it and we go, wow, being this customer-centric … Maybe we need to pull it back a bit because being this customer-centric isn’t providing investors with the longterm returns that they had hoped for when they invested in us.

Ben Grynol: It’s a scenario, whether or not it’s true or could come to fruition is so hard to say, but I think that’s one where we look at it and have to say, what’s the rational perspective from a business standpoint here?

Mike Haney: The other, I could imagine is potentially scale because I think that’s the other really interesting goal we have. That we want to impact. We informally say we want to impact a billion people, and the company mission is reverse the metabolic health crisis, which affects nearly everybody on earth. So it’s a potentially huge impact, and you could imagine a world maybe in which we said, look, to affect as many people as we can, and to get the kind of scale and reach as many people, we’re not going to be able to make everybody happy.

Mike Haney: There’s just going to be 30% of people who don’t like the experience, who don’t want to think about this, who, whatever the sort of product experiences, whether it’s a CGM or some other measuring device, they’re just not comfortable with it. We can’t practically make those people happy, but we need to keep pushing this out as widely as we can to have the biggest impact that we possibly can, knowing that it might be a 60 NPS. We might be in an Apple scenario, where to reach that broad of an audience that they do, you’re just not going to make everyone happy.

Ben Grynol: It is true that with scale comes diversity and thought diversity and opinion diversity, and experience. There are many, many things that come with scale. It’s a reason why you look at a company like Amazon and Amazon has doubtlessly impacted more than a billion people around the world. Amazon might be at 63, somewhere between 60 and 70 today. So you’re right, that there will be people that don’t care for the experience that is created for them, but if you can still manage to create a meaningful experience at scale, I think that’s really the goal.

Ben Grynol: So the goal is Tesla continues to scale and they continue to maintain a high NPS score. Peloton, in light of what has happened in recent media with their treadmill recalls, there will definitely be a hit to their NPS score, but Peloton has scaled and has maintained a very strong position as a company with a high NPS.

Ben Grynol: So I think that we will have to be diligent about it because experience does change. It’s not possible to scale to a point where you can send free swag or free flowers to a billion people. That doesn’t become an economic reality, but I think there are other things that we can do in light of that, that still provides a great experience. If we can create a health platform that is meaningful to people and that they understand the value of it, and they understand why they’re a member of Levels, they understand the point that Levels isn’t something they ever think about canceling a subscription, because the value is just so high that they don’t want to cancel it.

Ben Grynol: We’re providing more value than we are capturing. I think that’s the goal to really scaling what is a meaningful experience. To wrap on it, Amazon has done it pretty well in the sense that I don’t know what their churn would be on people who are prime members, but I’ll bet that the LTV, like the lifetime value of Prime subscriptions is pretty high because people say, for $100 a year, I guess it’s probably less than … It’s $100 in Canada.

Ben Grynol: It’s probably what, 60 or 70 bucks in the US a year for free shipping and access to video content and all these other ancillary streams. People don’t even think about canceling it because Amazon is giving them more value than … It’s creating more value than capturing more value from those subscriptions. So I think that’s really the approach to scale is, how do you do something where you’re not ever focused on value capture. It’s always just value creation.

Mike Haney: That’s a really good point. So my last question for you is what do you still need to learn to make this goal happen? What are your big questions about how to achieve this?

Ben Grynol: That’s a good question. I think the interesting thing about learning is it is never ending. So you don’t know what you don’t know. We don’t know what we don’t know about the future of hardware. We don’t know what we don’t know about what’s going to work in community. We don’t know what we don’t know about what could happen with the way people perceive CGM at launch. We don’t know what other revenue streams or we’ll call it, business model features people would like that we don’t currently have.

Ben Grynol: There’s so much to learn around achieving this goal that I think it’s one of those things where every day you’re figuring out what is and isn’t working. The hypothesis that community is important is simply a hypothesis. Intuitively, it seems to make sense, but it’s a hypothesis. So there’s so much learning to do around all of these data points to say, what do we have to do to get to the goals that we’ve set out and knowing that we can’t be anchored in our boots on any one of them.

Ben Grynol: If we find community is just not resonating with Levels members, it’s not something we should force. It’s something we should adapt to and say, what is resonating with members, and then build against that and just keep experimenting over and over. So the experiments are the learning and you run them off of these micro hypothesis and just test, test, test. It’s the advantage that we have right now as a small team, small scrappy team is we have the ability to be malleable in the way that we approach all these problems and the way we learn every day.

Mike Haney: I think that’s a good note to end it on. We’ll leave it there.

Ben Grynol: Good. Man, this is fun.

Mike Haney: Yeah, this is great. I miss podcasting.