Levels

Metabolism regulates our sleep, our appetite, our weight, and our energy levels. We give our Members unmatched insight into their metabolic health by pairing highly-researched wearables with an intuitive, informative app. 

So far, we have 15K+ lifetime beta users, a 155K+ person waitlist, nationwide press, partnerships with leading research institutions & manufacturers, and $12.5M in seed funding.

Our Long Game

Our current product is marketed towards a premium audience, but that isn't our endgame. Our mission is to solve the metabolic health crisis. The people most at risk of metabolic dysfunction cannot afford a $399 program, so we're working to get the price down as quickly as possible.

Our master plan is:

1. Build premium software to quantify the effect of diet on metabolic health.
2. Use that money to expand awareness & scientific understanding of metabolic health; build a more affordable product.
3. Use that money to build the most affordable product reversing metabolic dysfunction.

Why we're raising a community round

Transparency and openness are core to our company values and culture, but values don’t have meaning if they’re just slogans on the wall — you have to live them. We're committed to building in public. So, why shouldn't this apply to our funding model, too? Raising from our Members & community is the best way to live out our values.

Here are some highlights from 2021

Operations

Since our launch in the fall of 2019, we've had over 15K  Members go through various iterations of the Levels experience. In aggregate, these 14K lifetime Members have logged over 10M hours of glucose data.

Paired with our app, we have a dataset of 100M data points of glucose data, sleep logs, steps and activities, and heart rate measurements. This is the largest non-diabetic dataset of its kind and is being used to improve our product and contribute to research that leads to better health and wellness outcomes for our members.

To date, we've fulfilled 25,000 total orders (including subscribers) and shipped over 50,000 CGM (continuous glucose monitor) units – primarily the Abbott FreeStyle Libre 14-day sensor.

Our waitlist of 145,000 has grown steadily over the last year. We regularly engage this group with a twice monthly content newsletter as well as segmented conversion tests.

Product

We rolled out over 50 features in 2021 – here are a few highlights.

Research

Our positioning – at the intersection of scalable software, data-science, education/thought leadership, and brand recognition – makes us uniquely capable of influencing the direction of metabolic research and incorporating those findings back into our product experience.

This year, we've launched 9 sponsored research studies with leading academic and industry partners.

Content & Brand Awareness

In April 2021, we launched our own branded podcast: A Whole New Level. Within 6 months of launch, we've grown it to have consistent listenership that puts it in the top 5% of podcasts.

We've grown to over 45K followers on Instagram, and 17K on Twitter. Our founders were featured on 100+ podcasts in the second half of 2020 (plus another 62 in 2021).

Our blog has become the most trafficked part of our site, with nearly 1.5M page views since its launch in January 2020.

Growth & Partnerships

Influencer partners generated ~$1.8M in revenue in under 9 months (35% of total revenue during this time). This includes organic, affiliate, and paid promotions.

On average, we saw roughly a $100 CAC and 3-4x ROAS on paid marketing and affiliate initiatives

A few of our 2021 community initiatives include:

• Member Bookclubs on topics related to metabolic health and fitness, leveraging guest appearances from authors on our Advisory Board, like Dr. Robert Lustig (author, Metabolical)
• Surprise & delight swag shipments with high quality Levels-branded merchandise. These have often resulted in organic unboxing content on social media, and we've been excited to see such affinity for the Levels brand.
• Support of the Wearable Challenge (WC), a third-party community built atop the Levels platform that runs a wager-based weight-loss challenge using the Levels app and CGM. Over 10 cohorts have gone through the challenge, and WC has built an engaged and active community.

Legal

This year, we brought Legal in-house (hired our Head of Legal) to increase velocity, execute on IP strategy, provide regulatory guidance, and scale internationally. 

• We clarified our strong regulatory position as an FDA-exempt secondary-display device.
• We filed 5 trademark applications – domestically and internationally.
• We executed 40+ partnership agreements.

Team & Culture

This year, we doubled our team to 30 employees (including 6 engineers, a Head of Legal, Head of Design, Head of Growth).  We built out an Advisory Board with 9 industry leaders. More broadly, we established ourselves as a visible brand which attracts top-talent. Recent hires include Lauren Kelley-Chew, M.D. (Y Combinator, Verily Life Sciences, Caelum Health) and Taylor Sittler, M.D. (Color Genomics, IndieBio, The Cusp).

As our team grows, we've placed an outsized focus on building and reinforcing a strong asynchronous culture that prioritizes trust and autonomy, honesty and respect, experimentation, and velocity & scrappiness.

As mentioned earlier, we are building in public to inspire other asynchronous and remote companies. Additionally, all of our monthly investor updates and weekly team meetings are published retroactively on our website, and we share current memos and strategy documents with candidates, supporters, and our network.

Financials

We hit our first $1M in revenue in November of 2020 – shortly after our Seed round was announced. The short-term media attention wasn't a temporary inflection in growth. Rather, the amalgamation of initiatives across our blog, the "Podcast Tour," and user-generated content, amongst others, proved to be an ongoing flywheel for generating Awareness > Consideration > Conversion for members. As our revenue grew, so too did our waitlist.

As we approach the end of 2021, we're on track to hit $8M in revenue, while still in beta.

After raising our $12.5M seed round in October 2020, we've continued to deploy capital, mostly against team growth and research initiatives. We've deployed roughly $4.5M over the course of the past year (~35% of our raise).

Our seed round included participation from Marc Randolph (co-founder, Netflix), Esther Dyson, Dick Costolo (former CEO, Twitter), Michael Arrington (Founder, TechCrunch), Matt Dellavedova (NBA, Cleveland Cavaliers), and others.

We've maintained an average burn of ~$400K per month, since October 2020. Our average margins have been ~60%, and we've been distributing low volumes of hardware, (in the eyes of the hardware providers), so there is lots of value to be captured as we create and execute against the Levels ecosystem.

Left to right:

Sam Corcos, Josh Clemente, Casey Means, MD, David Flinner, Andrew Conner.

Want more? Check out our full 2021 update here, and a sample of the Stock Purchase Agreement here.