Josh (00:00):
So welcome to Friday forum, the last of July 2023. Get right into the recent achievements. All right, so this week on the growth front, and this is so far, so I want to caveat these numbers because we still have the rest of today and through the weekend, but right now we’re looking up modestly. So about +15% week over week, which is good. We had a down week last week as a reminder. +6% month over month and we had a down month in June. So we need to be cautiously optimistic here, but also continue doing the things we’re doing. These are good trends. Let’s make sure that they not only hold, but that we exceed them in the future. We had a couple good experiments running on the growth front. The membership price increase, the objective here was to create a separation between the CGM cost and the membership cost.
(00:46):
Those have been the exact same price line item and it’s really confusing for people. They think they’re buying something twice. So this experiment went out alongside the ongoing abandoned cart campaign. Both of these were collecting data on the membership price increase. It looks like we’re super sensitive to membership price, which is a really good learning. So it’s not looking like that is going to be something we’re going to stick with, but great intel for us to be able to use as we consider pricing and positioning in the future. And then the abandoned cart campaign is looking good. So more to come as we finish those validations. Referral awareness emails are out to remind people about our referral program and I think we’re seeing a huge increase in referral links being generated.
(01:26):
We had the Austin growth meetup this past week. Ben’s going to do a little readout on that, but that was a really good experiment, a lot of takeaways there. And then looking ahead, we’re going to be unifying the homepage. So this project has been sort of on ice for a few weeks and we’re now just about ready to start building that. And then we have an update coming to the growth roadmap, which will essentially ground all of our projects in an ROI calculation. We’re going to do something similar on product as well, but the goal is to make sure that we’re prioritizing based on some shared metric across all projects. On the product front, so Costum has been doing a lot of work, some awesome work on bringing our app engagement metrics into PostHog so she can do a readout on a weekly basis of engagement on the core features.
(02:10):
We have a New Today page that is in internal testing, you can see this over here. It’s like a unification from the My Data to the New Today page. We have now calendar access directly at the top again and a couple roll-up metrics. Overall simplified but really need people to jump in and start testing this. This is in internal testing right now, looking good. We had a monthly reports generated for seven of the 11 internal testers. So this is really exciting. Definitely some huge opportunity to make monthly reports a way of reminding people of all the value they’re generating through their consistent behaviors and activities inside of the app and eventually to pull in not just CGM data but expand that into the blood work that we’re doing as well. Some work on shaping a global metabolic score as well. Nothing much to talk about just yet, but something that we can show people in at least those reports.
(03:01):
And then Braden is taking on a non-engineering focused labs iteration. So the goal is to improve process, improve scalability, and really figure out whether this is something that is going to be a meaningful growth lever for us and something that our members are going to be able to turn into a bit of a health flywheel. So excited for that. And then coming up next on the app side, so fixing jank, community user research, so figuring out what community features people are looking for, and then accountability 1.0 is the next big effort. On the eng front, so we validated and shipped the BYO project, so bring your own device. That went through internal and external testing. We’re closing that for now to focus on some other integration opportunities that we have. It’s a little bit of a complex pathway and certainly not ready for primetime just yet, but the underlying wiring is there and tested, which is great.
(03:47):
App surface area reduction shipped on the mobile side, and then on the backend a lot of code reduction happening. I think something like 5 to 6,000 lines of code have been reduced on the backend, so a lot of work going on there. And then we’re focusing on boosting the signup flow performance right now and that’s in validation.
(04:02):
Let’s see, on content, so we have this ultimate guide email capture landing page now. So the goal is like when you’re coming through multimedia channels, it’s a little bit of a shock to land right on the signup flow. People still don’t quite understand Levels just yet necessarily, and so we have them on this email capture lander, which allows you to get the ultimate guide to glucose in PDF form if you add your email. So we think this is kind of a nice nurture campaign. We’re going to be testing this and seeing how that lander does. Bringing in an email agency to help us continue to double down on email. This is a huge vector for us. We have a very engaged email audience and so this agency specializes here.
(04:36):
And then we did some experiments on TikTok, which are performing well and I’m excited about this recording between Rob and Casey, which will be on whole new level about GLP1 agonists, the new Ozempic craze. On Meta on the performance front, so we are down weekly, but we are up monthly quite a bit and we have new Sharma creative, so the agency we’re working with on performance marketing has generated a ton of new creative including landing pages and a lot of ad sets, which you can see some of those here. So the ad sets have themes, they pair with landing pages, so the optimizer persona for example will land on an optimizer landing page. So this stuff is going live. It’s going to be a really big press on performance to see how this does and where we can iterate. I’m excited to see that.
(05:19):
And then we kicked off our first creative work. This is going to be targeted creative towards women’s health. There’s a huge opportunity here to help women in particular understand metabolic health and its relationship to a lot of women’s health issues and so we’re going to see if we can start to raise some more awareness about that. And then Sam was invited on Tim Ferriss’s show, so this is TBD when this recording is going to go down, but this is exciting. It’s kind of a long tail effect of Sam doing some pretty unbelievable work on productivity. Tim Ferriss wrote The 4-Hour Workweek, as a reminder, and Sam was giving him productivity insights that Tim loved and turned back and asked him to come on the show to talk about it, so that’ll be great.
(05:56):
And then we’ve got new affiliates and creators, many of these names are certainly well-known to me and I think for many people in our community, so Nick Bare, Marcus Filly, Ben Bergeron, and Dr. Mindy Pelz. So a lot of great stuff coming. And then, yeah, you can see a couple of things we’ve got going on. We’ve been talking to additional hardware companies that are thinking about expanding into international spaces, so a lot of good conversations. I was on the Terra API podcast with Kyriakos, who’s a long-term Levels member and deep in this space, and lots of recordings from Casey that will be going live in the very near future.
(06:33):
All right, with that I want to welcome one of our awesome Levels partners, Dr. Becky Gillaspy. She is an author, well Levels partner obviously, but college instructor, nutritionist, she’s a health coach, and her YouTube channels in particular bring healthy weight loss programs to thousands and thousands of people. She’s written several books, many of which are helping people every single day improve their metabolic health for their goals of weight loss and more. Becky, your work has been amazing. People absolutely love it. The Levels community is resonating strongly with it. And so thank you first of all for taking the time to come and join us and for working with us as a partner. I’d love to hear from your perspective, you’ve been at this for a very long time, what you’re most excited about in metabolic health and maybe a little bit about your personal journey.
Dr. Becky Gillaspy (07:18):
Yeah, well thank you for having me. Yeah, Levels has been a great partnership for me for my YouTube channel, which is where I do most of my teaching. And metabolic health is the basis of everything. So I talk a lot about diet and nutrition, a lot of them the low-carb, keto range of things, and of course blood sugar is paramount to that. And the problem with the world today and the social media world is that there’s so much information being bombarded at you and it’s often conflicting. So Levels allows you to cut through all of that because you can actually present the actual data. I can hold up my phone and say, this is what happened to me. Obviously it might not be the same for you depending, but I can then explain why that is.
(08:11):
So it really brings a whole new level of understanding to people. That they feel like they can take this home and they actually have a coach looking over their shoulder so that they’re not making mistakes when they go to a restaurant or they think that they’re eating something that should be a blood sugar stabilizing food, but in reality it’s not.
Josh (08:38):
Yeah, I think that that is one of the most impressive effects of it for me is just it’s almost instantaneous behavior change when I have it on. All of a sudden I have a partner in crime helping me stay focused. With that said, I think we’re all very focused right now at Levels on how we can improve. We’ve been at this for several years and we know there are some major hurdles like price point, which are just going to limit accessibility. But with your experience so far and with your audience in particular, I’d love to hear just kind of what you’d like to see Levels do differently, whether that’s an improvement, something we haven’t focused on just yet that we should be? Where are we missing that we should really start to pay attention?
Dr. Becky Gillaspy (09:19):
Yeah, well CGMs are what CGMs are. It’s nice that we’re able to offer them to people that aren’t already in type two diabetes, so that is an advantage of it, but of course then there is the price point. There’s also what I found some confusion between, so now I get this CGM and the app for that, and now I have the Levels app, and that’s a very confusing first step. Because anytime you start something new, as simple as it could be, anytime you’re starting something new, if there’s that one moment of confusion, your brain goes into haywire mode. So I would say that initial baby stepping people through this is where you sign up for that, then you do this. So just really focusing on the ABCs of getting started so that you cut down on that initial frustration.
Josh (10:24):
Yeah, it’s a really good reminder of onboarding is a lot of us are very familiar with the tools and devices so far and basically any data access is a huge breakthrough for those of us that have been trying for a while, but for people who are new to the space and new to the technology, it’s really confusing. And we see a consistent trend where there’s a pretty large contingent of people who end up buying Levels who actually never activate the Levels app and we’re quite confident that’s because of confusion or just an overwhelm. So yeah, this is a really great reminder and solid feedback. Thank you for that. Anything else that you’d like to see us do differently or focus specifically on as, like I said, we’re in feedback collection mode right now.
Dr. Becky Gillaspy (11:05):
Yeah, I’ll tell you my audience is my age and older, so we’re kind of the menopause age, so we do need simplicity when it comes to technology, which I already covered. There’s some interesting things around that too that you might want to focus on with blood sugar. We grew up in an era when foods were much more natural. It wasn’t 60% ultra processed and things like that.
(11:33):
So I do think when I do a video, if I do a comparison, like one of my first I did was just four different snacks to compare them and I did dark chocolate and I did hard-boiled eggs and I did what else? I can’t quite remember off the top of my head what I did, but it was interesting for people to see how different those types of foods were and they all kind of had that idea of healthy, right? The eggs, there was dark chocolate, I did popcorn and something else, but they all have that idea around them of being healthy, but yet obviously they were much, much different blood sugar. So it was a real aha moment for people. So I think people really like the comparisons of things that are touted as healthy, but then in reality when they get in your body, what are they doing?
Josh (12:34):
Another great reminder. I think early on comparisons were one of the most shared examples of using Levels, and so I think, yeah, it’d be great to make that a little bit more available and easier to access so that people can kind of see how yesterday compares to today and specific meals and events and activities couple. So yeah, all great stuff and things that we are thinking a lot about in our accountability project, which is going to be kind of the next major push in our app product development. So I’m really excited to get those into your hands and have you be able to continue to help translate into the audience that you’re building. Dr. Becky, thank you so much for taking time to hang out with us and specifically for sharing the message about Levels and making the incredible content that you do. I think this is going to be a really awesome and long-term partnership, so yeah, thank you.
Dr. Becky Gillaspy (13:22):
Appreciate it. Thanks, Josh.
Josh (13:24):
And if you’d like to hang around, I know you’re super busy, but if you’d like to hang around, please feel free. We’ve got a full meeting here, but otherwise on behalf of the team, yeah, thanks again for sharing your Friday.
Dr. Becky Gillaspy (13:33):
All right, thanks so much Josh.
Josh (13:34):
All right, talk soon.
Dr. Becky Gillaspy (13:34):
Bye-bye.
Josh (13:36):
Okay, jumping straight ahead. So I want to welcome back, I think this is our first welcome back to Braden McCarthy. So this is a reintroduction for a lot of people who may already have worked with Braden in the past here at Levels, but for those of you that haven’t, I’m going to just hand it over to Braden. He was here several years ago, worked with us for some time, went out and broadened his horizons a bit and is now back to take on many Ops projects and more here at Levels.
Braden McCarthy (14:01):
Yeah, thanks Josh. I’m really excited to be here. This is awesome. It’s kind of surreal to be back on the other side of the forum. I know most of you, but I was previously with Levels through last September. And after stepping back, I spent several months thinking hard about what I wanted next and was really drawn back to the Levels culture, mission, and this new exciting phase of the company that we’re in. So starting this week in Austin was super energizing. It was a great way to get up to speed on everything and I’m really excited to dive into the Labs project and everything else in the Ops world. So yeah, thank you everyone for the warm welcome. I’m looking forward to working with all of you again.
Josh (14:41):
Love it. Nothing more to say. Yeah, it’s going to be great to be back at it with Braden. All right, culture and kudos. So Mercy is hitting three years already this past week, which is pretty unbelievable. So congratulations Mercy. It was a lot of fun to, at the Growth Meetup this week, get to kind of come together as a group and kind of work with Mercy directly for the first time in a really long time. Obviously we know each other well but we haven’t worked much together so that was a lot of fun. And then to Lynette, I want to just highlight Lynette sets a really strong and high standard for alpha testing. She’s straight into the new features immediately and she’s meticulous about helping to explain her feedback and connect it directly to members and what members are asking for as well as raise her own perspective and requests for the app. It’s a really great combination. She is prolific. I think we can all appreciate it and I definitely, I know that the engineering team and the product team really appreciate seeing the rapid feedback like this. It’s super helpful.
(15:41):
And then finally shout out to John. John is the one man team on comms right now. This is our main communication tool as we all know and a lot of performance issues and search have been kind of attacking John from all sides over the past few weeks, but he’s done a huge job on improving many of these. I personally have seen a huge improvement in performance on comms lately, so I just want to thank John for sticking to it and being very just calm in his demeanor as we’re all throwing issues at him in Comms Meta, the channel where we surface all the issues. I personally couldn’t do it without comms and am excited to get that next email integration going, so thanks, John.
(16:22):
All right, with that something bittersweet. So we’ve got a little something right after this one, but I just want to share that David’s last day with us after four pretty unbelievable years from the very earliest moments of Levels is this week. So I think it’s actually Monday, but this is going to be the forum and so this is just a smattering of pictures I pulled from my personal camera role. This is by no means representative of everything that David’s done for the team, but you can see from the bottom right corner, this is like the LA Meetup in July of 2019 and then Stacie and David throughout the early brand development and sort of the very initial positioning of Levels. I think this is the first photo. This is David taking the photo that was our very first website, my brother Rodney. And then out in Central Park and just throughout the years building the brand and the visuals that are Levels and then of course the product, that goes without saying.
(17:20):
So I just want to say on behalf of the whole team, thank you to David, thank you to Stacie. It’s been an incredible opportunity to work with both of you and I’m really, really excited to see where you go from here. We’ve got a little something right after this which I will jump into and play and then I’ll ask David to say a couple words, so hopefully this plays for me.
Video (17:43):
Hey everyone, happy Friday and greetings from Vermont. We launched the Monthly Report, woo-hoo. It’s been a long time coming and this is one of the best things about the early beta. Launched scan reminders. One of the first things we’ve done to be proactive towards helping you become educated about the space, understand where you’re at, help you proactively identify improvement areas.
(18:03):
Now I just want to capture the moment for where we are today and all of the people that have contributed to our progress.
(18:10):
I’m just generally really excited about this. It’s something that we can only augment from here. You can imagine if we were scoring, if we were labeling all the different entries in the backend through Mechanical Turk or categories like is this a vegetable, is this a fruit, or things like that, then someone could come in here and also type in fruits and that’ll probably be launched tomorrow for customers. This is just a snippet of some of the awesome stuff going on on the content. There’s a whole bunch of other really exciting terms that we just don’t have the ability to put onto this short summary. You heard a bunch about how we’re seeing enormous growth and we’ve got some ambitious company goals to unlock some of our wait list customers.
(18:44):
Let’s go ahead and just add our first meal, a Clif Bar. Great. Call it a Clif Bar. Save. We’re about to roll out a major update to the app that makes it really lightning fast on iOS, so test it out, if you enjoy it, it’s a big improvement.
(18:59):
Is that your data?
(19:00):
Yeah.
(19:00):
It’s so good.
(19:00):
Yeah, I haven’t even been eating really keto, I’ve been eating bad things. This week we released a couple features. On the left you’ll see swipe to change day. You can even create a link that will go to your activity catalog, filter for avocado, and sort it by descending so you can see all of your best scored of the avocado. No, that’s me. Sorry, let me see if I can quit Slack. That’s all of our automated system that Andrew built shipping all of our orders to Truepill.
(19:27):
We like that sound.
(19:31):
That should be a cha-ching noise. We need to fix that.
(19:34):
So I was talking with Xinlu and John and Andrew this morning and I think we can say that the Cards Framework is officially going to launch this week. Graph mode is a surface that we’re envisioning that you can reach from an insight card or as a standalone module where if you just want to dive into the data, you can do that. You can add a food now without opening up the Levels app or at least kick that process off.
(19:52):
I had my first event detection happen where I forgot to log a meal and then it prompted me and then I added it. It was pretty cool.
(20:00):
Yeah, that’s a good omen for other customers. I think these timely based cards are really resonating. I had pancakes and pasta for breakfast. This was for the Levels photo shoot. And then I was like, oh crap, I have to go for a really brisk walk. So as soon as I did that, I went for a walk and you can see that as I was walking, my heart rate was elevated, my glucose was dropping as I was using that energy. This is going to be really good for providing context on how people’s actions affect their glucose response. Pretty soon you’ll be able to go into the app, grab a code, and just send that out to your friends. We have now a really nice welcome screen.
(20:31):
Now when we detect events, we’re improving the accuracy for all the meaty education articles we have in Levels. We’ll be able to add audio files for them so that people can listen to it at the most convenient time for them. And you can see on the right here, this is the in progress change from last week, so it’s loading live data. These beautiful gradients that just naturally flow. The tick marks are custom. You can change them. Subtle details, but very, very put together and if we want to be a consumer app that scales up to 800 million people or something like that, these things matter.
(21:01):
The new add log flow is ready for testing. Very excited to see that go live. What we’re hearing from our members is that they really want to know, hey, this is surprising me. What was it in my meal that I should look to first to optimize and swap out? We are nearing design completion on the initial setup for what we think is the foundation for the core looping that you’ll go through day by day, that we think is going to be the foundation for how you form a better relationship with Levels. So it was a strong week for the now project. We did a lot of rapid testing on the new UI. You can see the background is sort of animating there and that’s done programmatically, which is a really cool foundation if we can nail this for other delightful moments throughout the experience in the future.
(21:40):
This is a really exciting get together of a ton of people. Rob there in the back not eating pizza, which is amazing.
(21:47):
We’re also launching a full screen explainer that people will see in context. When they have questions about the scores, now they can tap a little icon next to the score and get a simple understanding of what it is. An interactive glucose learning game. And you can’t actually unlock and see the glucose graph until you put food on it and you see how it reacts. All the things that we want to teach, we’re going to teach it interactively.
(22:06):
Yeah, this is blowing my mind.
(22:08):
Scoring v2 effort is the stability ring here, the glucose state that helps you understand how your current glucose is trending, and then annotating spikes on the chart so you know which areas are informing your unstable portions of the day.
(22:18):
David, Karen, and Stacie hanging out for a pint and Thai food in London, which I’m very jealous of. The scoring v2 launched, woo-hoo. Next step is the important part though, the learnings and takeaways and retrospective. Some more fun, playful, animated emojis that will be going along with your glucose state. This is the first experience for recipes within the app. This week we launched multi-part stories. Now there’s three different progress bars so you can attach multiple assets to the same video. Guides are these relatable, knowledgeable, and engaging people that Maureen would relate to and they would help her navigate what to do and to help her achieve her health goals.
(22:53):
The thing that I wanted to mention was just how much an honor it has been to work alongside all of you specifically on something that I just know is going to make it. There’s two criteria why I would jump ship and start a company. One is for the strength of the team and how awesome it is, and the second one is for something that I know is just going to work and I happen to be part of it and I’ve never been more confident that Levels is still going to crush it. And it’s been an honor and a privilege, so thank you all and I’m going to be cheering from the sidelines not too long from now and it’s going to be great, so keep up the good work.
Josh (23:35):
I’m just going to jump in real quick and just say, as you can see, David has been the innovator and, for most of the history of Levels, the sole person shaping the product that tens of thousands of people have used and experienced life changes with. So David, didn’t want to have you speak for yourself there at the end of the video, but love to hand it over to you for a minute.
David Flinner (23:57):
Yeah, actually, thanks for putting me in there because that was very touching and I think having my previous self speak for myself in this moment was probably better. So yeah, wow, that was very moving and the last four years have just been the best of my life and it’s been such an honor to work alongside all of you. That was a lot of features and that wasn’t, I think, all of the things that you could hear in the audio. If you actually read the text, I think most of the slides said 10 times the amount of features or experience in the text. So man, the team has really just been cranking for the last four years and I stand by those words at the end. I think the team and the idea and I think you’re pointing in the right direction right now, it’s going to keep killing it. And man, I’m definitely going to miss everyone here. I’m not going too far. I’ll always be around and can’t wait to use it as a user from the outside. I hope you keep my internal account activated so I can shake for in instant bug reports for feedback.
(24:50):
I don’t know what else? That was really touching, thank you. I think maybe one thing moving forward, throughout my side the entire time has been Stacie who’s been kind of our first designer alongside myself, and because she and I were the only in-person coworkers at Levels for the longest time, you may not have seen all of it, but she was the eye behind a lot of the design and a lot of those original app features as well. So when we started Levels, I told Stacie, we’re not going to make much money now because this company doesn’t do anything yet, so you have to be the breadwinner while I just go work for Levels. And she built her own company while we were starting Levels with her design business and whatnot with that, so four years later, I’m excited, just wanted to share that I’m going to be working full-time with Stacie and helping her amplify her business and we’re going to do that together and try to take it to the next level. So that’s what’s next for me. And yeah, I’m just touched, so thank you much.
Josh (26:03):
So awesome to hear and exciting to hear about the combined effort going forward. You guys are a dynamite team. I’ve had the opportunity to see you both in action. Stacey, anything to add? I want to make sure.
Stacie Flinner (26:19):
Sure. So I think one of the most exciting things that has come out of Levels for us, sorry, very surprising, just this journey of our personal health. We’ve learned so much and the way that I ate before we started Levels was so different than the way that we think about it now. I know that that’s going to pay very long-term dividends for the rest of our lives, which I’m excited about. It’s changing the way our families think about food, slowly. But yeah, I think that this work is so hugely important and the little role that we’ve been able to play in this process has been an honor. And even just sharing what I’ve learned through the little close friends Instagram group at the beginning of this year, like women are still DMing me saying, “My doctor’s amazed. I’m 65, my labs all look incredible. They’ve never seen numbers like this,” and it’s because of the tips that you shared. And so this stuff is super powerful and not everyone is ready to receive it, but those that do, it’s just, it’s transformative.
(27:39):
I’m so surprised at this. So one thing that is also a bit of a personal update and exciting thing is we are pregnant and we are having a baby at the end of the year, which is maybe why I’m crying, but getting healthy was such a huge part of that. It took us a long time to get pregnant, but I think we only are able to be pregnant now because of all of the healthy tips that we’ve learned through Levels, how important lifestyle is, how important our diets are, exercise, even morning sunlight. We never would’ve been exposed to this had we not been steeped in all of this amazing information through Levels. All of the incredible guidance of the advisors, just being able to see data in real time. Happy to share details with anyone if you’re curious about what that process was like. But yeah, this work is very transformative and it’s been very important for us personally, and so yeah, just very grateful to have been a part of this and love the team and love the company and just look forward to you guys making an even bigger impact in the future.
Josh (29:13):
Well, that’s as amazing as it gets. Yeah, thanks to both of you, sincerely from the bottom of my heart, it’s been awesome to work together and cannot wait to see your family grow and move ahead and do some amazing things for the world as you have done here. So yeah, stay in touch with everyone. I’m sure we’ll send around contact information for everybody here to keep in touch with the Flinners and of course they’ll be reporting all the bugs because they’re the best at it.
David Flinner (29:41):
Thanks everyone.
Josh (29:44):
All right, there we go. Okay, going to repeat the prayer here. The main thing we’re all reminding ourselves of is does this get us to 10% month over month? And that’s our objective and our priority as we seek to make an impact on metabolic health crisis by increased accessibility and scale. I’m going to hand it over to Miz, who’s going to do a recap on the culture survey.
Michael Mizrahi (30:08):
Great. Yeah, this is going to be a quick recap, but what it’s not is a deep dive into the survey results themselves. So I didn’t pull any quotes here. I don’t have any of the themes fully captured, but I think it’s just important to give a high level overview and we have a Monday fireside scheduled to go deeper into the results, talk about action items and spend some more time there. So if you haven’t looked through the results yet, take some time to do it. It’s really, really interesting to see where we’re at. I think my sentiment following up the David/Stacie segment there is the culture here is really, really something special.
(30:40):
And this is not a typical company culture. I think it’s really propelled us forward in very interesting ways, we’ve learned a ton from it, and there’s a lot of nitty-gritty in the survey, but there’s also the high level realization that when you zoom out and look at the team, look at our sentiment towards the company, look at how we relate to each other, the focus on the values, and just the overall absolute scores on the culture survey are incredibly high. Our sentiment and our happiness level is just really top of the line. We’re in the 4, 5, 4, 6, 4, 7 range, and that’s just heartening to see. But of course there’s always a lot to work on and that’s the purpose of running these quarterly surveys.
(31:17):
So next slide here, Josh. Just a reminder, the point of these surveys is to see how we’re doing, understand what the themes are, collect feedback, kind of capture the moment, analyze those themes, but most importantly, which is really true to our culture, it’s the closed loop to actually do something about it. A lot of times you can take these surveys in companies or environments and you never really know what happens from it. You just kind of like do it as bureaucracy and there’s no feedback system. And so we need to do a good job of closing the loop, reporting what we’re going to do, calling our shots, doing it, and then reporting back.
(31:50):
So next slide here. I just want to rewind a little bit to Q1, which was January through March. Where we were, we were about 60 people. We were just about in the middle of that product strategy to do the final guides experiments on Instagram, but we hadn’t yet brought it into the app. On the people side, we had levels and roles and perf cycles all rolling out, but that was all relatively new and we were going through the whole releveling and calibration process. But the primary company focus was find product-market fit with this new product. We felt like we had really strong mission, clear priorities. We were making progress towards that new direction. And the mindset was pretty positive at the time that we were going to hit those goals and we absolutely did. Let’s be honest, we hit the goals that we set to hit in terms of execution.
(32:35):
There was a lot of comments in that survey about us being more sync than async. So if you can remember where we were at the time, there was a lot of different teams coming together, were working really hard, pulling together content, engineering, product, just ops, cross-functionally a lot of Athena work. So there was this really a lot of momentum around us being more sync than async. In the results, we had a drop in autonomy and trust and the burnout risk was the highest it had ever been. It was anywhere’s around a four three, but the highest it had been in our surveys to date. The action items that we said we were going to take at the time.
(33:09):
One was that we were going to lean into sync for the moment. We had just reintroduced Slack. We understood that to get this effort out the door, we would have to take it seriously and kind of change the way we were working with all the different inputs. And so the plan was after GA in July, when we got there, we were going to take inventory of the tools and collaboration and take a step back and revisit how we’re doing as a team because there was a lot of worry about how this would be sustainable beyond that few month sprint. Of course, a lot of things changed and so we didn’t get around to this because that reality didn’t come to fruition with our change in strategy. So that action item didn’t really pull through.
(33:43):
The second one was around talent density, burnout, intensity. Nicole and the people side did a lot of work with managers one-on-one to follow up with people, check in with people, have performance conversations. And so that I would put as a success. That was something that came out of that survey and that was a theme through the end of last year and early this year and so a lot of work happened there. A theme that’s consistent with this quarter was volume of comms, triaging comms. We felt like there was an overload with a lot of those projects running. And so we didn’t quite solve that problem. I think we leaned into it, but that is something that continues to be a theme. And finally, we wanted to improve the performance reviews and pure feedback system and that rolled out. We ran that relatively thorough process that we did this last cycle and this was the first time we had done that. We planned to run a poll survey on that, but with a lot of the team changes, we didn’t follow through on that one.
(34:37):
So that was Q1, and then I’ll do a very quick Q2. Where we are now is 40 people. This includes April, May, and June, and so this included our final push on betas and guides, the updates to company strategy, and the core member persona changed and the focus changed there. What we’re focused on now, nailing the basics, fixing the janks, sustainable growth trajectory. Everyone was super clear on that. Leaning into eng ownership, company metrics, getting results, there’s some themes around slipping documentation and kind of the split between comms and notion and where things go and making sure people can still operate autonomously. And there’s a lot of focus on solving the bottlenecks and challenges that are affecting us from the hardware side, positioning, costs. Those are the themes that came out this quarter.
(35:25):
So we’ll chat about all these action items on Monday. These are proposed and suggested, but encourage you over the weekend to look into these, see if you have other action items that you’d recommend and let’s try and get really, really specific about what those actions can be. But the themes generally are around feedback and we have an updated process coming imminently on that. Iterating on the meetup format, which Ben is going to talk about in a minute, documentation, comms, features and comms, coordination costs and making sure we can move quickly. And finally R&D connection to members needs and wants. This was a theme that came out that the R&D team is the least connected to our members, understandably. They’re furthest from the business, but that’s something we might want to focus on. So see you on Monday, definitely take a read through and one-on-one chats if you’d like about this with myself, with your manager, with whoever, with a peer. It’s really, there’s some really interesting things in there, so I’ll leave it there.
Josh (36:17):
Awesome. I really appreciate the depth and intentionality that Miz in particular goes to to get these culture surveys consistently high participation and then to do the readouts and then to close the loop on these things. It’s a hard problem, but I think it is a core part of our ability to keep the culture where it is. So thanks everybody for participating and please join the discussion on Monday. All right, now over to Ben for a readout on Austin.
Ben Grynol (36:48):
All right, so this is going to be just a quick overview, recap, sort of what we did, how we approached it, and some of the learnings and takeaways. So next slide please. So we’ll call this project 150. I guess it was last Friday there was the bat signal went out and a few texts came in. Miz, Braden, Matt, people said booked a flight, I’ll be there. And we didn’t know what this would look like, but the goal was to see if we could test new channels, execute tactics that could be completed quickly, and then really the goal being to drive near term conversions to close out July and get a push from June so that we are back on track. So next slide please.
(37:33):
So Stripe was their source of truth. There’s lots of data flowing and lots of merit in having lots of data, but sometimes the best insights come from the simplest form. So we put up the Stripe dashboard of real time transactions coming in, everything from donuts on the board, so you’d see the zero come up when it was an abandoned cart, and you’d also see things like interesting patterns where there’d be three people with the same last name checking out within minutes of each other, which means that it’s probably a family that’s going through the experience together. So we had this going and we were thinking through tactics as we did that. And then we would see when we had tested things, you could see like if hypothetically we send an email, you can see if there’s a transaction that comes up pretty quickly. So next slide please.
(38:17):
So the approach, how did we decide what to work on? We sat, quickly we listed out some ideas independently as a starting point, and then we used qualitative and quantitative insights to guide these tactics and the decision making. So what that looked like qualitatively, Mercy was in HelpScout and she would say, hey, we’ve got this many tickets either tagged this way or generally in this category. So quantitatively we knew, let’s say it was family discounts or app only, that we had a big enough lead pool to start thinking through like if we were to do any tactics, what would we do and how would we approach that?
(38:53):
We were pretty certain not to be married to any idea and ready to pivot at any time, which ended up happening. And then the goal was to be realistic about what we could achieve. So no matter how much we talked about things, we would say like, let’s do these three ideas, let’s do these five, and then we pared it back, pared back till we’re doing one thing. And that ended up being what worked is to say, hey, we’re all working on the same thing and then we could add onto it as opposed to say, hey, we tried a bunch of things but didn’t do a whole lot of any one of them. Next slide please. So HelpScout was our friend. We talked a little bit about that. That’s everyone sitting around, you’ve got the Stripe dashboard up. Next slide please.
(39:35):
Some of the ideas that were surfacing, so we’re, again, this was sort of like what could be executed in the near term. Josh had thrown out an idea around what does it look like if we went to a pickleball court and had a cooler full of drinks brought to you by Levels and there’s a QR code? What does it look like if we went for guerrilla visibility and started stickering the town? What would it look like if we had gym affiliation? Could we start getting conversions there consistently? How do we approach those conversations? And so we all felt pretty strongly about going deeper into gym affiliation and this is tied to not being married to any one idea. So next slide please.
(40:14):
So some of the outcomes, we ended up adding roughly 50 extra conversions this week and we still have a little bit of time to go in the month. So we got early traction with some of the HelpScout leads that were interested in app-only. So that was, again, just seeing full margin transactions come in for other $200 or $220 because of the price test going on, which is pretty cool. We started generating conversions in new geos, so Arizona and Nevada and Hawaii were geographies that we opened up, and even though the checkout flow is still pretty high friction, we were seeing transactions there. So there’s potential opportunity to think through how do we want to improve the flow and expand access.
(40:58):
One of the things that we did learn is that discounts are not a huge incentive, whether it’s current state or whether it’s something that’s happening more in the category of metabolic health. We had pursued HealthPro, so physicians we offered a discount, we pursued friends and family, offered a discount, and then we had an exploding partner with offers for Sinclair and Huberman and every single one of these buckets generated pretty low conversions. What we’re seeing is that people are probably becoming a bit desensitized and when competitors are offering $100 off discounts as well, it means that it’s not a tactic that we should think through as a strategy for driving growth. So we have to think through what are new channels and where are new pools of people that we can start digging into.
(41:46):
The last thing was there was a Facebook group response that Lynette had posted about the friends and family discount and I think that the comment was pretty indicative of the sentiment around discounts where people are saying, “Well wait till Black Friday,” or, I can’t remember what the other comment was, but it was basically just saying I’m not that interested in 20% off. So next slide please.
(42:07):
So learnings and next steps. We’ll do more sessions and plan ahead of time with a problem to tackle and a tactical outcome. We’ll timebox it to a specific number of days and then probably do this with three or four people chipping away at one initiative together. So accountants love to hear this and so do engineers. We would love to have an engineer there. That would’ve really helped us, I think, even think through what we would’ve executed because there were certain constraints we had just being non-technical that some of the things weren’t even on the table to execute. So I’m going to do a retro with some deeper thoughts and a recap and think about when we want to test this again and how we will go about doing it. So that is an update. Anyone has questions, pop me a note and we can carry on the convo.
Josh (42:54):
Yeah, I’ll just jump in and say it was really cool to see, I mean, we had Mercy and Ben taking live calls from people basically closing sales in real time that were confused about this or that or had just done an abandoned cart process and we were able to get them on the phone right away. The app-only thing I think is…