What's up, DTC Pod? Today we're joined by Ben Grinnell, who is the head of growth at Levels. So, Ben, I'll let you kick it off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and the company that you're heading up growth for at Levels.

Yeah, so appreciate you having me here and really excited to dig into everything related to growth and experimentation and all the fun things we're doing. But been around startups basically my whole life, whether trying to throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks or having some traction with different DTC companies and different call it sort of like independent things. You just always test, you test, you test and you see what you can get traction with. And so prior to Levels was part of building an on demand food delivery company based out of Canada called Skip the Dishes. And we managed to scale to a pretty significant size over the course of five years and ended up going through an acquisition with a company called Just Eat based out of the UK. And then following that, a couple years later, there was a merger with a company called Takeaway. And so there were tons of learnings as far as what is it like to actually build a three sided marketplace in a very competitive space where you start to think about a pay to play opportunity, right? Everyone is shopping for food online based on price, what they get, it's less about, in some senses, the experience, and more just about retaining customers as best you can because they'll go to the next lowest price. And so it was a really fun game to play against Uber Eats and DoorDash and sort of be in that space, but lots of learnings.

And then I guess it was June of 2020, ended up moving on from Skip and just thought, I'm going to start something again and throw more spaghetti at the wall or I'll work on something that resonates. And the heuristic was it had to be something that was a global place so it would apply to anyone in the world. And it was something that I was deeply interested in and ended up getting intro to Levels from, ironically, someone based out of Winnipeg, Canada, and somebody that I went to high school with. And he was a seed investor in Levels around the first round. And so he made an intro to Sam Corkhos, one of the co founders and the CEO of the company. And we just started talking about growth. They were looking for somebody to come on board and lead growth and kick things off and really start to build out this infrastructure. So after a number of conversations, we thought, let's dig in together and sort of shook hands virtually on it and started with the team in January of 2021.

So it's been just an incredible learning opportunity to be surrounded by the smartest people that I've ever been around. And you feel absolutely humbled and look up with admiration to everyone you're working with and go, this is an incredible opportunity to just learn and really absorb things. So, yeah, it's been really fun.

So one thing I'm really curious about, Ben, is that kind of what you talked about is know, Levels had started, they were at the seed, you were introed from Mutuals that you knew and you came in. Right? And I think this is a pretty common stage for a lot of companies where maybe they've gotten some initial seed capital and they're really looking to start to accelerate their growth motion.

Right?

So what I'd love for us to chat a little bit about is.

At.

What stage was Levels out when you joined in terms of the growth and then when you came in, what was the first sort of strategy and what was like the inventory and the landscape looking like? So you were like, here are a couple of the first initiatives that we should kind of pursue.

Yeah, so it's funny because I love thinking about this and I'm the worst at answering this type of question. It comes up a lot with Skip stuff too, where it's like, oh, what was it like at this time? And you remember that you sort of remember these little stages like, oh yeah, remember when we were doing like 100 orders? Remember when we were doing like ten people a day were coming through the pipeline? And it's really easy to forget when things are moving so quickly. So I'm the worst at answering it because time moves so quickly. And so you have to almost like, it sounds ridiculous, but I take like, screenshots of my laptop sometimes. I'm like, oh yeah, this was this day. Because you look back, you're like, that was three weeks ago. But yeah, when I came on, growth was so I think there are five co founders of Levels. I think I was the twelveTH employee in addition.

So I think we would have been around 17 people when I joined. And we didn't have a lot of diligence around growth. It was more a matter of there was a private waitlist to get into the beta. There were some activities that were being done to call it Garden that waitlist and to keep people warm. But in general, we had a lot of lead capture, a lot of email sign ups, because we'd work with partners like podcasters or affiliates and influencers. So that the incentive was go to can or let's say a real person, Dave asprey Levels link slash Dave and you can get into the beta. And so that was enough incentive for people to sign up. But what that did is if they didn't actually convert, we got a lot of lead capture.

So over time, we grew our waitlist. When I joined, I think we were around, let's say it was around 30,000 people. It was still significant. There were still enough people. And this was shortly after the seed round was announced in the fall of 2020. Andreessen had led the round and there was a lot of awareness, sort of like in the tech nerd startup VC.

Space, because you hear that the product also has a word of mouth component to it. Because I hosted a Super Bowl party and one of your early adopters was there. His name is Justin Maris from Ketle and fire and perfect Keto. And he was wearing it, and so everyone was asking, what is that? And so I noticed it just spread around internally from that.

Yeah, I mean, that's like to digress a little bit. That's the nice piece of the flywheels. It's a new product, new experience, but there is some visual cue that gives the head nod of the Seth God. And people like us do things like this, where it's like, you're in the club, you know what's up? If you're wearing and I'm not saying it from a point of hubris, it's just sort of like that's what people think when they see someone else. We call it Levels in the wild. Someone sees the patch on someone else, you give the head nod, you're like, hey, you're one of us, right? Because you feel like you're part of this club, and it still happens to this day. And so there was a lot of UGC and a lot of earned media that we would get out of that where people just wanted to show others, like, I'm trying to take agency over my own health, and here's what I'm doing about it. But in doing so it's like I'm applying the CGM, I'm wearing a patch that gives me some branding or makes me part of a tribe.

And so we've thought a lot about that idea of tribalism, and that really is like, the key to building community back to everything about the waitlist. Like, where were we at when I started? We were at around, let's say, 30,000 people, and we ended up getting a lot of compounding growth on the waitlist over. We just launched in July of 2022. So it was a couple of years to get to that point. But we are growing our waitlist without trying to grow the waitlist, if that makes sense. We weren't undertaking I should maybe say it this way, we weren't undertaking arbitrary tactics to just drive traffic and get lead capture for the sake of it. These were people that had some purchase intent of some kind. And we grew at roughly 7% month over month over the course of two years.

So when we launched, like, our waitlist was at 265,000 people. That's a significant number of people if they're actually engaged. And so there have been tons of learnings just around how do we understand that those are people that care enough about their health and have some sense of, like, I want to learn more about this thing? It's not about trying to target them for conversions. It's about how can we start to educate them about metabolic health so that they can change their behavior without needing to buy levels to feel like they're making behavior changes in their life.

So that's the equivalent of product growth for you guys, right? Because it's sort of embedded into their lifestyle more so than an actual UI or UX that they're interacting with. What were some of the initial resources? That the number one first resource that you needed when you joined? Were you a team of one when you joined and what was the first resource that you required to have?

Yeah, so growth ended up being we identified it as these four pillars members, content, community, and partnerships. And before I joined Tom Griffin, he was one of the earliest employees and he leads partnerships. He was on board. And so we informally started. It was all part of this growth bucket. We didn't say like, now Tom is like, part of the growth team. It was just like, we all had shovels and we're all digging. So Tom was absolutely not just a lever.

Like, he's been a catalyst for this growth within the company because he is. And hat tip to Tom, everyone should go check out. He's got a first round piece around this podcast tour and some of the partnership initiatives that he's undertaken. But he ran this ninja process of we're going to get the founders on every podcast possible and ramp up to be higher and higher tiers. So eventually it's not at a question that could Casey Means or Josh Clementi two of the co founders could either of them get? And this hasn't happened yet, but maybe it will one day. But could they get on? Like, would the material they talk about, would the education they provide be interesting enough for someone like Tim Ferriss to say, hey, come on my podcast. If you start to do that, you get the right partners on board. Now Tim is a partner of ours where he's got the levels link slash Tim reads right, and that's an amazing thing.

But this was driven by Tom. So Tom was really like the first resource that not only was like conduit for growth to happen, but was also a lever. Like he was an IC individual contributor, just hammering work day in, day out. And this podcast tour that he ran is like a full playbook and that's why there's a first round piece about it. But between Tom and I, we were bouncing back and forth doing all different growth initiatives. So coming together and formulating some ideas around like what would we do functionally, what would our strategy be, how do we test some of our hypotheses? And then who would the first hires be? And the first people that we brought on board were just growth generalists who could do the same thing. Throw spaghetti at the wall, do a lot of experimentation, have some rigor around data, have some right brain thinking around like creative tests that we could do and just say, let's learn, let's learn. So that's really how we've thought about it as we've built out the function of growth.

Yeah, and it seems like it's still part of your culture. You're still doing a podcast, you're still experimenting with all this stuff. So you mentioned you were all digging and it know that like, hey Tom, you're going to do just this. But was there a common KPI or were you guys all going after one common KPI? Were KPIs spread out between teams or did you just scrap that all together? How do you look at KPIs in.

An early stage growth mean? That's an interesting question because the KPIs are always evolving. So there was a KPI, let's use a podcast tour. There was a KPI to get on n number of podcasts. That's the KPI, right? We know that by doing that, that's going to generate a ton of top of funnel awareness. And if we provide some type of link right, then that provides us more with bottom of funnel or at least lead capture. So always flexing, like not having such macro KPIs that we lose sight of what we're trying to do. The KPIs can be around like what are some of the other early ones we did? Why don't we talk about ignoring KPIs? Because I think that's also important, right? One of the things we did was around we started a podcast that was like one of the first things that we did when I joined in, the idea was, let's just tell our story as a company so that we can build more engagement in the community. Like, let people into the fold to know who we are so that it doesn't feel masked.

What ended up happening from that was something that none of us could have forecasted. So we thought our hypothesis was, hey, this is a great engagement mechanism. People will feel they know levels, they'll trust the brand, right? And it doesn't mean that hasn't happened. But what ended up happening, ironically, was that it's been a wild lever for attracting talent because people are like, oh, I know Ramon. I've heard him on five podcasts. I'd be hard pressed to think that's not really him, right? You guys do it day in, day out. You understand that. It's like when you're talking people, you're capturing an hour of attention or however long an episode ends up being of that person's engagement with what you're doing.

So people would reach out and they'd be like, hey, I want to work with your team, or I feel like I already understand. I know the team. And so it's been just like the coolest thing to go, well, we don't need to really worry about attracting talent from outbound marketing, like where we have, let's say, a recruiter, or we have somebody hitting people ops hard to get the right people in the door. It's been just amazing to feel that. That builds a lot of trust for our team from the first day somebody starts but back to KPIs. So what we did around that is we said, this is something we're going to ignore KPIs around. Because if we only look at the performance of episodes, inevitably we're a company that makes a product in the metabolic health space. And if people want to hear about metabolic health, we could have a derivative health and wellness podcast that is subpar to some of the top performing podcasts.

Initially, maybe we could get there one day, but initially that's what we'll be. Do we want that or do we just want to sort of like dance our dance and let things happen as they do and ignore the data based on that so we don't start manufacturing episodes that might not resonate with everyone. So we've gone to the furthest of the long tails to say what can we, if it's interesting to any team member, can host anyone, can do any episode about. I mean, we haven't quite gone to the edge of doing episodes about Dungeons and Dragons or anything like that, but we don't need to rationalize it. Is the takeaway by ignoring that KPI that's the mechanism that everyone goes like, I kind of trust you guys. So then we don't need to focus on the recruiting part. So it's a matter of like the KPIs around data are interesting because it's a matter of knowing when to double down and when to say, now, let's ignore mean we.

This reminds me of a talk that Blaine and I attended to of Keith Raboy. And he mentioned that he likes scrapping away KPIs because he says, I don't believe in them. Because you don't get ten X results, you're capping people to thinking a certain way. And a podcast is a good example that, well, if I have these numbers in front of me, I'm not going to do a podcast. So I kept pondering on this and thinking, well, how do I find the right balance between the two? And the thing that came to mind is separating short term goals versus long term goals. And so, okay, well then let's split up two strategies. Let's have our short term targets and then let's do the long term stuff that we're not seeking immediate returns for, but we know we're going to have huge impact over a longer period of time. Now, the thing that happens is, well, thinking through that is like, how do you operationally tackle that though, especially when you have limited resources and time in a small team.

Have you thought through that? Do you guys have long term, short term strategies and what tips do you have for potentially splitting the time between those?

Yeah, it's a good question because it's constant bayesian updating. So you kind of run an experiment, you see what the results are and if data is warranted in the experiment. Let's focus on again, don't take this as the gospel. This is a matter of the way we sort of think about it internally is something related to the funnel to conversions. Data is integral, it's super important. Like you got to understand all that stuff. But data, let's say data related to content, where we've got a product that has a very wide footprint, anyone in the world can use it. I'm not suggesting now anyone can use it.

There are lots of issues as far as price point and accessibility. Let's ignore that for a second. Just technically what the product does, the product can help people to get like that is objective. We all want that. And so if we started to go, oh, look, the data is like steering us to people who earn between X and Y and they all live in San Francisco or on the coast, they're all coastal, let's just double down. Sure, those are our early adopters, but if you hmm, metabolic health crisis, well, this is a global problem that affects billions of people. Like the people who actually need this product might not be able to afford it. So you're starting to just go down a path where what do you need to do to make that product accessible? And a lot of that comes down to infrastructure.

A lot of that comes down to things like price point, getting the product get more volume out in the market so that you can over time, start to have lower price points on the constraints that come with accessing it. So data can be super important, but it can also get you into some trouble. So we think short term, we think about how does when it comes to bayesian updating, it might be like, let's test this podcast thing, assume that we were going to look at a little bit of data and go, we're getting like three people listening and we're investing a whole bunch of time. We give ourselves some target date. If we don't see ten people listening by this date, let's reassess whether or not we want to do this right. Doesn't matter what the actual number is, the absolute number, but it's sort of, what is our target date to reassess? And just always questioning, should we be investing our time in this thing or should we invest in some other thing? And so never setting such a long term goal that it feels like, oh, we'll reassess whether or not this content is working in a year because it's just too long a horizon. The funnel is super short term. We're always looking at that like, where are people dropping off? Where is there friction? How can we fix that? That matters.

That matters a lot. That is going to help us. The lights are on or the lights are off in a company. But some of the longer term horizon things, especially around how do we make an impact to the metabolic health crisis globally? That's something that we're constantly looking at with a longer lens.

And I think one of the things that you're talking about there, like even your podcast initiative in terms of starting to scale that up, right? There's certain qualitative indicators that might be hard to pick up in the data. Like, for example, you're like, our ultimate goal is to be able to work with Tim Ferriss, right? But before getting on Tim's podcast, before working with him, you may have to start scaling up all these other podcasts, right? So if you're just looking at it in terms of a number quantifying, real influence, who's listening, distribution, all that becomes really tough. But from a qualitative side, you guys probably have a pretty good pulse on, oh, we just got on this podcast. This is going to allow us to get on the next one. And the next one, you kind of trade up the chain that way, right? And if you're just looking at data, that might be tougher to run an initiative like that, you kind of have to just trust your intuition on that and know what you're expecting in the short medium term to lead to that longer term outcome that you said is a core KPI.

That's exactly it. I mean, here's a great example of that. So with thought leaders, they all work on social proof, right? It's like, who else is showing up to the party? No one wants to be the first to the party, but if they know that, what's the probability that somebody that would be at Tim Ferriss's level is also interested? If Tim is interested and their friends? Well, a lot higher than if Tim feels like he's on an island by himself and he's like, none of my friends are at this party. Right? Like, either I'm ahead of the curve or they know something I don't, right? So it's like, yes, you do have to build it's all about building the trust and the social proof of what is being done in a genuine way. Like, you can't try to pull the wool over someone's eyes. That's just not going to work. People will figure it out pretty quickly, right? No partner wants to work with people or like, I don't really trust that brand. So, yes, that is entirely true.

Now, where data is very interesting, and this is where making media buys has to be driven on qualitative intuition, qualitative input, and quantitative data. Sorry, initial media buys as much as possible. Let's use partners as the example. If you're going to make a media buy, we can all have a hypothesis that Tim Ferriss is going to convert. And our hypothesis, maybe we'll disagree, maybe we'll agree, but let's assume for this example, the three of us agree and we're like, well, people know Tim. He's got a strong following. He's in our space, he's used the CGM before. Like, you've got all those qualitative data points, so then get a few more qualitative data points.

Well, let's talk with eight sleep. Let's talk with athletic greens. If they're willing to open the door and just say, like, yeah, we'll give you some insight into what it's been like as far as performance goes. This is still using others people's data. So where the intuition comes from is like, what data rabbit hole can you go down to not use intuition? You can't go much further than that. You don't have data. What you do with the Bayesian updating is like, if you get that partner on board, then you start to say from a data perspective, and this gets to be a slippery slope because of attribution all those other things. Let's divorce that from the conversation for now.

But you go, you make the buy. And so we've got this hypothesis that let's not use Tim anymore. Just like Jimmy, the podcaster is going to do really well, and it's like Jimmy versus Jane, and we all hypothesize, hey, Jimmy is a thought leader. What ends up happening is we're like, and I think Jimmy will do better than Jane. And Jane just starts performing at like ten X. How do you know until you know? And then you can start to make more informed data decisions around the actual performance. But making those initial buys can be so challenging. And that's where you got to use as much qualitative input and intuition to sometimes, just like sometimes you have to jump in and you have to figure it out.

And the key is to never give yourself so much exposure. That's like, oh, we're going to make a million dollar media buy and hope this one works out. Like cross your fingers. That's a bad strategy depending on budget size, right? But in general, let's assume that's a bad strategy. But what's not bad is like let's give this thing a test with a reasonable spend, reasonable allocation, reassess the performance, reassess whether or not that was worthwhile what was our CAC on that. And look at did we get a good return? So doing that, it tends to be something that we default to time and time again. Mostly because our paid like anything that we put any spend behind has to do with partnership strategy.

One other thing I wanted to mention. Just in terms of thinking like that and looking for those opportunities that are maybe on the forefront of where all the data points to immediately. It seems like there's so many brands that are built when there's a shift in the marketing landscape and there's a new channel and people can go in there. Right? When Facebook happened, there were a ton of brands that were built on the back of just being able to arbitrage the Facebook marketing. When TikTok started to blow up, there's so many brands that literally wouldn't have performed on Facebook that just went after TikTok. And even when podcasting first started to blow up, the brands that moved in first on podcasting and going after podcasts, I know a bunch in the D to C space even like you would mention athletic greens, they blew up entirely because of their podcast strategy. So I just also think it's really interesting and being able to kind of suss out what the forefront of these growth opportunities are. Because if you're a first mover in that class, you're able to pick up a massive tailwind and you're going to.

Lack a lot of data too if you're a first mover. It's funny enough, I think this also reminds me of influencer marketing and everything that within the chaos of all the data. Oftentimes you just look at the quality of the content and it's sometimes a better indicator than the data itself of like, are these just followers or real fans that these people have?

That's exactly it. And the key is not having over reliance on any single channel. I mean, it's not even like that's not an insightful thing to say at all. It's like of course that makes sense. Whether it's diversification and portfolio strategy and investing or whether it has to do with I mean, think about it that way. It's like investing your time in a diversified way, investing your capital as far as how much you have to spend from a marketing perspective, diversifying, that is key now. Yes. You don't want to be so loose that you're pursuing a whole bunch of channels and not doing a lot on any of them, but knowing that it is important.

To diversify. So that if there is a significant change, like iOS 14, right? And everyone goes like, uhoh, we got to figure this one out now that's a really bad feeling. Or you heard even Gosh, I'm going to forget the timeline because things just move so quickly. But was that Facebook outage last year? The facebook Instagram. It was last year sometime. But it was like any friends that I had that were pretty deeply invested in Meta as a platform and they're like, I'm dry, what's happening? Right? That was their acquisition channel where they were just so used to that you become so reliant on that where it just feels like the power is shut off and that's a really bad place to be. So the idea of diversifying these channels, sure, explore new channels like Go Frontier, but also don't get so overlined. Like where we would be in real trouble would be if we only relied on utilizing a partnership and a podcast strategy, not for paid, but for acquisition.

And we're like, hey, this thing worked really well for a waitlist and let's keep going. And we spent let's ignore the capital. We invested all our time. Because time equals learning, right? Like, how many validated learnings can you get from that's? What a startup is, is just a bunch of throwing spaghetti and validated learnings until you get to scale up and totally different game. But you invest all your time in this and then you're like, oh, we haven't learned anything about other channels. We really got to figure this one out. Things are dry. That's a very bad feeling because you feel like you're always so far behind versus things not working as well as it used to.

What if we just double down on that thing over there and start exploring some new land? It becomes just exploration. And that's the key is being so curious that you can go down all these different paths and then having enough resources and we'll say technical generalists that can sort of do the IC work and explore it at the same time.

Yeah, I think I want to use that as a segue to talk about what we were talking about offline ben of hiring the first marketer. And since you mentioned generalist, one thing I found I was recently going down this rabbit hole myself of finding our first director of marketing for trend. And there was great resources out there, but nothing was talking about the fact that a lot of people position themselves as professional marketers, but in reality, they are a master of one tool or one vertical. And I was looking at some resumes and everything. I'm like, you're more of an SEO expert than I, yet don't know what my channel is to hire in a specific vertical. And it can be detrimental to your business if you're like, oh yeah, he's a great marketer. He knows how to run ads. But for some companies, unit economics.

It's so early, you still don't know if those channels work for you. So what are some of the flags that you would look for for a marketer to not hire as your first initial sort of director of marketing hire or head of growth?

Yeah. If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Exactly.

And you might shift your entire business for that. And if you tie that to KPIs, you give him these KPIs, next thing you know, you're shifting your entire business model, your business, for this person to hit their KPIs with the hammer that they have.

Yeah. And the reason you hire someone is because you default to trusting. When you decide to form a professional relationship with someone, you're giving the nod that says, like, I trust you to make this decision. I'm defaulting to you to figure this one out or to provide the guidance. And so somebody said, hey, Ramon, we're going heavy and paid. It might not feel good, and you might express why it doesn't feel good, but if somebody said, no, we have to do it. And you're trusting that it's the right thing, but it's because they've got the hammer for paid. I don't want to say all they've ever done that's where they've spent like, 80 plus percent of their time is getting really good at that.

And like you said, at that point, you're hedging a lot of risk against that. And if it doesn't work, uhoh, what do you do? So to your question of, like, what are some flags, somebody might position themselves as a generalist, but you start to unpack some of the ways that they think around the work that they've done in the past. And so asking some of the questions we ask are, like, if you had a million bucks to deploy, what would you do? If somebody answers, I would do like, a million dollars worth of paid. It's like, would you do anything else? Right. If somebody said, I'd spend a million bucks on content, how do they think about paid? If somebody said, Well, I'd probably spend a good portion of it on content, I'd start to double down on some growth engineering stuff, and you start to tell me about that. What experiments have you done in the past that are growth engineering related? Just being fully curious, like, really wanting to learn. It's not a matter of, like it's a test, and you're testing them to give you the right answer. It's just like you work through some of these problems.

What are some things that we could do from a growth engine perspective right now and trying to solve these problems together? And you realize, oh, this person is it doesn't matter whether or not they've got the actual skill set or technical background. It's more a matter of, like, are they open minded enough to be curious to figure this thing out together and go, they're pretty curious person and they've done enough unrelated things. Having a lot of unrelated work experience, not like a linear trajectory too is interesting because they will think more open mindedly about this stuff. But those become flags when somebody sort of answers every single question with the same framework and they revert back to anything related to let's just use paid acquisition, like performance marketing stuff where you go, we're talking about building a podcast right now, and you're saying the way we're going to build the audience is to do paid ads. And you're like, this has nothing to do with that.

Even more so, I think another red flag I've seen is like, they may have never even interacted with the product themselves yet. I'm like, are you sure you don't want a demo and see the product before answering what our strategy should be? I know one of the resources you shared with me a while back, I think it was the person you were talking about from Uber who said one of the things to look out for in flags are, do they even ask how does the product work? Let me interact with it. A good marketer should really want to understand the product before diving into sort of, how are we going to even.

Tackle, like, another interesting way of framing it is somebody tests a product and they start giving a lot of product feedback. It has nothing to do with the growth or the marketing, but they're really dissecting, like, UX UI stuff. And it doesn't mean like, oh, we're looking for a product expert. It's just like, how curious are they about some of the things where you're like, man, have you thought about if somebody says something so granular? Like, have you thought about the radius of this button on the like, it's little things, and you're like, you're talking in interesting language. You are truly curious about all of these things. Why is that thing hidden in the hamburger menu? If somebody says that, you're just like, I actually don't know. I'm not sure I'm going to ask the product team. I didn't even think it's like, how curious can they make you curious? And you start to ping pong this stuff that gets really interesting.

One of the sort of unrelated to growth, just general hiring things that has worked well is asking not just it's like, tied into what you're saying about, has somebody tested the product? Asking one question, like, we've got so much content now saying like, hey, have you had a chance to check out our like, it would be mind boggling. I mean, it happens, but it would be mind boggling if somebody goes like, I couldn't find anything because there's like, the blog, the podcast, YouTube, like, you name it. There's like, a lot of information out there everywhere. This year alone, it's kind of comical. Just did looked into it because again, not anchoring on data for certain things. We decided to spend more time on growing YouTube this year. And so we didn't do anything. Like, last year.

We started I guess it was like August, and we just trickled in videos and we're like, yeah, January will hit the gas. So between August and January of 21 sorry, August and December of 21, we generated like 20,000 impressions, and we had, like 2000 subscribers sorry, 2000 views. 2000 views, maybe like 100 subscribers or something small like that. And then from January until now of 22, we've published 700 videos, generated 34 million impressions, 2 million views or something. It's just like the numbers are exponentially higher, but we're not anchoring on the data. It's all wrapped up in the whole idea of where to spend time, how to double down and going like, it's back to that. Hey, I couldn't find any content if somebody said, hey, no, I actually haven't had a chance to check out anything. The question is like, well, how invested are you in what we're doing? Because it's pretty easy to it's not like a single blog post that exists.

And you're like, well, yeah, I understand why you haven't found it. So that's one question. The second question is asking people, and this does tie into growth. Like, what are some things that we're not doing? Well, based on what you've seen and being transparent enough to go, this might not feel good, but I want you to dunk on us super hard. Like, we're doing a bunch of janky things. So framing it like, we know we're doing janky things. Just like, tell us all the stuff that you didn't like because it's kind of funny. There's a lot of jank and sometimes people might not feel comfortable.

But just doing that, if somebody starts to go like, yeah, it's like, look at your site. Our website right now is super janky and super broken. We know we have to fix it, but it's just like making a conscious choice to say, we'll deal with that later. So it's like, having those conversations is always fun.

So I want to dive into that. Like, doing that later, deciding when to attack initiatives, deciding how to run tests and projects. And I think one thing just for my time to shine and show you that I did consume the content that you've put before. You mentioned in one interview that the key thing to remember is that growth can't be extrapolated as a single playbook from sector to sector and type of company to type of company. So this is what you were mentioning earlier, that you cannot run a consumer tech company. Like, how you can run levels as a product. Has the principles of how you run tests, initiatives, initiative, handoffs. Has that all remained the same? Or, like, does the entire playbook change from company to company?

Two parts to the question. So, one is around the coordination in the way that we work as a company, does that hold the same. And I would say in general no, because every company is so different. So there are some general principles that people can follow that are helpful. Now everyone has to subscribe to that. That being like, we're pretty deep on Asynchronous communication. I won't even look at email or we use threads like instead of Slack yesterday, I don't even think I logged on until maybe 09:30 p.m. To be like, yeah, I'm going to look at what's happening there's no, like, where did the guy go? Right? No one thinks that.

So that helps people do. The reason I didn't was I was doing deep work. I was working on a memo. Because we do a lot of long form written communication. So the way we like it is different from company to company. There are some companies, GitLab being one of them. Darren Murph is good friend of Levels and he's head of remote at GitLab. But they've got a lot of these Async principles, so some of them are transferable.

But what happens is if somebody goes to a new company and they're like, hey, my hands in the air, let's do this thing. And everyone sort of nods and then they're like, man, where's Blaine? I haven't seen his green dot for at least eleven minutes. It's just like these weird things. It's like, that doesn't work. So it only works if everybody subscribes to it. And you have to reinforce these cultural things over and over. The question about the playbook, there are some general principles like hey using, I mean, you can use a bunch of different data analytics platforms, but whether you use Ga or whether you use post Hog, doesn't really matter what you're using. General principles like let's use data to look at the funnel.

That's a general principle. But the actual playbook of like, let's try to target people. Let's use Skip n Levels. Right now one of our biggest plays is around creating deeply researched scientific or editorial content, pillar content that is driven from blog posts, long form written content. Pretty academic, but it's amazing as far as driving traffic to our site. And there's a lot of considerations. Like people who read we've got Ultimate Guide to Metabolic Health and Ultimate Guide to Glucose and Omega three S and go on and on all these articles. People who read those spend a lot of time consuming that content.

The people who consume that content have a higher propensity to actually convert. We start to know all these things. Let's say we ran that playbook with Skip and we're like, hey guys, I got this idea and we start to like it's to that sound bite. We're not even sure what episode that's from, but you extrapolate that form, you're like, hey, this worked really well in the past. Let's spend a whole bunch of money and a whole bunch of time on creating long form content about on demand marketplaces or restaurants or whatever it is and it just falls flat. That's a really bad strategy because it's like, back to what you're saying is like, you trust the person and it's the hammer and the nail. It's like they just try to hammer the playbook. So what you got to do is adapt and say, content worked really well for us.

What type of content could work well for this other unrelated business? If we took one of the things that was a huge catalyst for awareness for us with Skip was like the window stickers, which everyone does those now, but we did those everywhere and there was a lot of brand. Recognition. So people would see in different markets and they'd be like, oh, clearly that restaurant has skip. And nodes in the network become pretty dense, pretty quick when you see those things everywhere. Could we ever, like, granted it's not a marketplace, but could we ever plaster a city with some out of home type media and go, hey, look, everyone knows levels and how they're converting. It's like, that just wouldn't work. So that's the key of having a book of plays and saying, like, we tried this thing. It kind of worked in this way.

What can we take from it and apply it to this new thing? And sometimes you do them. You steal man things yourself in your mind. Or you might check with Tom, right? Someone JM someone that you work with closely and go, like, seems ridiculous to me, but is there something here? And then people be like, Nah, that's like like, do not do that thing. Because you're just trying to hammer the same thing home all the time. So it's always taking a book of plays and say, what can we try? What can we extract? What can we remove? And test, test, test.

And then how do you go after handing off what does know? Something did work? Let's say Ben is a team of one. Ben is like throwing shit at the wall, seeing what sticks. Something stuck. But Ben is supposed to grow as a growth manager. He's not here to put stickers and be going around all the restaurants around us. So how do you hand off an initiative?

Yeah, love talking about this. We talk about it all the time because it is innate to our culture. And super important is the idea of we use the DRI directly responsible individual model so that it doesn't matter. Like, I'm DRI right now of these mission patches. Like, literally, literally these things. They are embroidered patches. For anyone who's listening to this, it is like an embroidered patch that says, Levels Team 2020. And we do them.

The insight came from Josh Clementi, who's one of the co founders, and he spent time at SpaceX. And so they would get them for all the different flights that they were on every time they would put something into the air. So we've taken that. So that is like an IC thing that I'm a DRI of. And I could also be a DRI of growth. Let's say I'm just using that as these loose examples. What we do as far as handoffs go is some things once you get things operationalized enough, or maybe it's no longer a good use of your time because there's someone who's better than you at that. Like you hire somebody that is better than you to come in and do that, that's a great handoff.

Or you become so bandwidth constrained, you either have to declare Project Debt and say like, we're retiring mission patches. We're not going to keep doing them in perpetuity. The opportunity cost of keeping this in my purview of needing to do it, is too high, given that I can't pay attention to the funnel. Now, are we all in agreement? Project Debt or if you can't hand off internally to someone else, say Ramon is now like the new DRI for Mission patches, then we've got a network of EAS that we work with. And everyone's got we've got roughly 15 I think we've got roughly 15 of them now. And everyone has their pool. So we have started to ramp up EAS in this could be a very long conversation, but I love it. We've ramped up EAS in ways that traditionally you wouldn't think to use an EA.

So an EA, the mental model is like, can you schedule my calendar meeting? We think of these transactional things. It's like constant experimentation. So we're like, what would it gotten so nerdy that keep pushing it. And this is like the non engineer person saying this. I'm like, can we teach the EA's to do pull requests? How does that look? Why don't we get to that point? So we've actually trained up. Like we've got a pool of EAS now that did not know how to edit podcasts and videos and all these things. We're getting them to cut derivative assets for us because we're like, hey, check out this video on how to rip videos in Premiere Pro. And they're like, okay.

And then they do something and it might be a little janky. And we're like, yeah, if you just tweak this, here's where to actually make the cut. Here are all the things. And we use loom. So we'll just record a loom of us doing the edits over it. They go back and back and back. We use it for everything. Like creating YouTube thumbnails.

Like name something derivative assets for like name any random thing. Podcast QA. And that is not the mental model of how to scale time. And EAS are all about scaling time. The mental model is like, well, we're going to have to hire someone. So pushing ourselves in the thinking of what would be possible and always assuming everything is until you're proven wrong. And so the key of your question around how to hand off knowing when to declare Project Debt, knowing when to do a handoff internally and knowing when to scale that time to an EA so that you can open up new bandwidth to just say, hey, I'm going to go Hammer. I'm going into unchartered territory.

I'm setting off to sail out to sea and we're going to see what happens here, I have no idea. But what you might find is that new channel back to what we were talking about before, frontier stuff. We're going to some new platform. I don't even know what's going to happen, but let's test it out and see. Let's revisit in a month. So it's super fun to do that.

Yeah. I love the EA stuff. I ran my previous business entirely off EA's, and the thing is, that what's it called. It implements this culture in the company of having to thoroughly document stuff and loom even makes it easier. Now, back then you used to have to document everything. Notion and loom make things so easy and that gets embedded into the culture. And so sometimes it could feel counterproductive for more junior people or something like that. But you crank out that deep work and just document that and hand it off, you're off to the races.

So I love that. It seems like you guys have really scaled that up.

Yeah. And reinforce it constantly. We've got even part of our we do Asynchronous updates for all hands every week. But the EAS, there is like a DRI of the EA's, like sort of the head of the EAS part of their team. And LJ she does an update of how many delegations our team has done and what are some interesting ones. So we're always trying to uncover what are ways within the team, what are things that you've done? And for people, one of the hard things actually is people come in and they're not used to delegating because either it can feel weird where you're like, I'm responsible for that. That can feel weird, or just not knowing what to do. So we encourage people.

We were talking last week, last week or two weeks ago, we had a session internally just about how to think about delegation. And we don't do a ton of synchronous stuff, but we have these cafes sometimes where we'll pick a topic and just say, like, let's talk about stuff to give people a chance to get together. Because for anyone who isn't familiar, we're an entirely remote company and distributed globally with people. Our teams at about 55 right now. But one of the things that came up in this delegation cafe was I don't know what to start with. And so the recommendation to Jason was the person who brought it up. It's like, ask an EA to see if there's a transcript for Star Wars. Like something that is personal and doesn't have to do with work.

Just think of things that are random. You're like, oh, I wonder if this exists, because what's going to happen is the unlock is as soon as you get into the habit of them being able to help you scale your time, then you start to think about like, what if I got them to check my spam folder? You sort of incrementally go wider to the point where you're like, everyone does my job for me. This is sweet. Now I can do different things. It's just an incredible resource, and we really drill down on it and encourage people to outsource and delegate things internally every single week.

And I think, Ben, what's so important about that is what it allows you to do is it allows you to kind of what you were saying earlier is throw the spaghetti at the wall, see what sticks, test iterate and find that product market fit in that little task or whatever your small objective is. And then once you do that, then the next objective is once you've found that it works and you're able to do it, is, okay, now can I hand this off to be able to scale my time and go find the next thing and the next opportunity to lean into. So I really love that in terms of a framework, it's something that we think a lot about Ramona and I talk about all the time and bring into our businesses as well. The next question I have in terms of how you guys have set everything up, so we said when you joined, you had kind of the inbound funnel set up. You ran the podcast sort of strategy to scale things up that way, and you spent a lot of time investing in content and developing process around EA's. I guess maybe kind of flipping the question around kind of what you were talking about in terms of an interview.

Right?

If you were to interview someone, you'd say, okay, you have a million dollars with your budget, what would you do?

Right.

So if I flip that question around on you and say, okay, we've done all these other things, what were some of the other channels for growth that you were looking to unlock and kind of looking to continue invest in for your guys'growth at that stage?

Is the question just reframing to make sure I don't go down? It's more some digression.

No, it's more just like saying that we've already had the inbound set up. You've invested in the podcast initiative, you've invested in content initiatives and process around EAS. What other channels were you in particular looking at in implementing as you were in that sort of growth mindset and as you continue to be.

I see. So you're saying when I first came on board and then how has that evolved to some of the exploration? Yeah, when I first came on board, the idea was all about infrastructure. We have to build out enough infra and test the hypothesis. It's always back to the hypothesis. So it was, hey, the pillars are members, content, community partnerships. Let's start throwing spaghetti at the wall against each one of those pillars. Partnerships. Like, Tom had that nailed.

It was fine, but what do we have to do in the other one? So, community, we tested a bunch of things. We tested the more mission patches. We did another random one, the Coke challenge. This was like community experiment to see what drinking a Coke does when you what it does to your glucose levels, when you pound it with and without exercise. Will people see a fluctuation? These are all community initiatives. The hypothesis is we do this thing, it'll engage people, we'll do it again. Let's say we did ten community tactics, calls and calls with founders and things like that. What we were trying to solve for was, is there enough interest here to bring somebody on to lead community? As opposed to making the assumption that there was, to just be like, I think community is important, we're going to hire someone.

It was like, what if you hired someone and nobody cared about community? It's like, well, it turns out people do because they're going through a health journey. So it was all about identifying the infrastructure, testing against it, and then we got to the point where we've got enough infrastructure laid. We know content is important. We know community is important. We're laying infrastructure within the infra. And so now it's about testing channels, right? Let's use content being one of them. Content. We had an audience on Instagram.

I think we're at like, I don't know, we're less maybe like 8000 people when I started. I think we're at 116,000 as of today. But we weren't active on LinkedIn, we weren't active on YouTube, we weren't active on certain platforms. And where it gets really dangerous is there's merit in all of them. There's merit in TikTok, there's merit in Pinterest, there's merit in you name it. But if you do all of them at once, you're going to do a whole bunch of nothing, because you're not really learning and testing. And you brought up that's the wide versus deep. Totally.

And the thing is, you want to go deep, but you also want to go wide. So right now we're deeper on Instagram. Like, it doesn't mean, oh my gosh, stop at 116,000. It's like, keep building an audience. But what happens if you shift some of that focus to less mature platforms like YouTube? We're at 26,000 subscribers as of, like, January. We might have been at whatever it was, it's like 100, I can't remember. December 31, 100. And then we're like, let's put fuel on the fire.

So we've grown to 25,000 over the past nine months, I guess. Nine months, yeah. And there's still so much upside. There's a long way to go. I mean, YouTube in itself, we could have a whole conversation about why it's a massive platform and super important, but it's testing these different platforms. And I. Think when you brought it up before around Product Market Fit and opening up bandwidth, like, we're talking about scaling time to be able to throw spaghetti at the wall and test and experiment and go, go, let's riff on this for a second. How many startups are one distraction away from Product Market Fit? Probably a lot.

And so what's one distraction? It's trying to test Pinterest at the same time that you're trying to test TikTok at the same time you're trying to test. And as opposed to just saying, like, what if you figured out, oh, my gosh, there's an audience on YouTube and you doubled down and you figured it out and you started to realize you're like, oh, that's the demo that really likes what we're doing. And the willingness to pay is high. You keep going down all these things. So when it comes to what we're focused on now is like flipping that question back of how would we deploy capital, how would we deploy resources moving forward? It is still around exploration, but it's about doubling down until we feel that we're at a point of diminishing returns on certain platforms so that you operationalize it. It works. It doesn't mean you stop experimenting. It means that you say, I'm consciously investing less time in that thing so I can open up more time to explore this other thing.

And it's constant. Doesn't matter what platform it is, but you got to do it.

And it's also really dependent on what's the rolodox of ideas the pipeline look like too, because you have to weigh out, well, let's weigh out how much deeper we can go on this versus what we think the potential is over here. Sometimes they're probably sometimes it could be the case that the ideas that are on the pipeline might not be as exciting, but then all of a sudden one shows up and that's when you're like, all right, I think. That one is probably going to have a lot more impact because we have this data point from this other one we did back in the day. Well, regardless, I think we could riff on this for days. This is super exciting stuff and we can go deep, obviously. But Ben, this was awesome to have you on and really appreciate you coming on, sharing your knowledge. I'm super excited for what you guys are going to build next. So what's your podcast? The levels.

Podcast. How can people keep up with you, continue to learn more from you, and stay up to date with whatever Levels is doing?

Yeah, so podcast is called a whole new level. If you search it on Spotify or Apple or your favorite podcast player, you'll find it, but everything related to startups, a little bit of metabolic health, and just a fun jammy podcast. If you're interested in some easy listening now and again, best way to keep up with levels is Levelshealth.com slash blog. That's where you're going to find all the info about metabolic health. And if there's one takeaway honestly, if people can do one thing is don't dig into what we're doing as a company. Don't necessarily dig into CGMs. Go and read The Ultimate Guide to Metabolic Health or The Ultimate Guide to Glucose to just understand we didn't even get into all the science stuff. There's a lot.

But just to start to open up. What exactly is metabolic health and why does it matter? It is a major health crisis around the world, and it's something that impacts us all. And so if you can start to make decisions for either yourself or those around you about the lifestyle choices we make with food, sleep, exercise, stress, environmental factors, all of these things that truly impact our metabolic health, it is impacting us from a health care perspective. Trillions of dollars per year. It's the leading cause of almost every major disease having poor metabolic health and metabolic syndrome. So if people can do one thing, is go read one of our blog posts to just learn more about it and to tell others, because that's the only way we're going to make change in the world is if people start to truly educate themselves. So levels link slash blog and we would be truly grateful to check out that content. Awesome.

Well, we'll make sure to link that in the podcast notes below. And Ben, just want to thank you for coming on. Really enjoyed the episode and look forward to seeing where you're able to take level the next level you're able to take level two.

Appreciate you having me. Thanks, Ben.