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.

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