Dear friends, 

In JC’s Newsletter, I share the articles, documentaries, and books that I enjoyed the most in the last week, with some comments on how we relate to them at Alan. I do not endorse all the articles I share, they are up for debate. 

I’m doing it because a) I love reading, it is the way that I get most of my ideas, b) I’m already sharing those ideas with my team, and c) I would love to get your perspective on those. 

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💡Must-read

👉 Levels: A Cultural Anomaly (The Generalist)

Product:

• Levels integrates with pre-existing device makers, bringing the data they collect into its app.

• Right now, Levels only measures blood sugar.

➡️ Leveraging existing hardware.

• Via the Levels interface, you can log your food, run "challenges" (e.g., Try eating brown and white rice to see how your body reacts differently), and receive recommendations. Levels' software helps identify which foods may spike your blood sugar and how you might alter your habits to improve your health. It also provides an "overall" daily score of your metabolic health.

➡️ It would be interesting to see how they push to log food and how it creates a toothbrush effect. 

• There's a satisfyingly visual "cause-and-effect" that encourages better decision-making.

• Users can now connect with a curated supply of nutritionists via the app. It is also rolling out blood testing kits that give users even more information about their bodies, helping them understand their cholesterol.

NPS benchmarks:

• Foley's slide showed that Nike had an NPS of 30, about average. Spotify did better at 46, while Netflix posted a solid 54. Apple's NPS was an impressive 66. Only three companies achieved a score above 90: Warby Parker (91), Peloton (91), and Tesla (97).

Brand:

• The second pivotal part of Levels' strategy is to "create a movement" around metabolic health.

• To change that thinking and popularise its message, Levels seeks to foster a global discussion. It's doing that by winning over influencers and investing in content.

• Look at Levels' advisors and supporters, and you'll find a collection of luminaries from the world of modern fitness and wellness. Dave Asprey of Bulletproof Coffee is a Levels fan; so too, business and marketing guru Seth Godin. Scroll Levels' blog, and you'll find many more from YouTubers to podcasters to writers to doctors — all with large audiences. Many are also Levels advisors.

• Corcos had explicitly outlined a plan to win over the space's most powerful influencers.

• The company devotes real resources and time to the content it produces. Across an abundance of pieces, Levels unpacks metabolic health, highlights member impact stories, and talks through its progress.

➡️ Good inspiration about our strategy to build a movement.

Culture:

Radical transparency:

• Levels does not just build in public, it shares everything. Really. The company's "Secret Master Plan" is open for anyone to see. Even weekly team forums are posted on YouTube, publicly available to view.

➡️ Should we be even more transparent externally?

Asynchronous:

• Asynchronous by default: "Principles of Effective Communication." / Part 2

• With no expectation to respond immediately, team members can afford to turn on "Do Not Disturb" and focus without fear of impeding progress.

• Levels favors tools that are naturally asynchronous and guards against those that lead to rapid back-and-forth.

➡️ How can we improve even more on async? 

🏯 Building a company

 👉 Daniel Ek - Enabling Creators Everywhere (Join Colossus)

• So we spend a lot of time debating is this the right thing to do? And we spend a lot of time teaching people how to think about making decisions in order to do that. And I think some of the greatest cultures that we have today are ones that have created the great decision culture that both allows people to make mistakes, but also improves the decision-making drastically so that those mistakes don't need to risk the entire business as you're doing it.

➡️ I think we are fairly good at making decisions, I’d like us to go faster on some decisions by being more conclusive (see below). 

• And so what I typically end up doing is I invert down to the minimal amount of variables that you can imagine. So just remove the other ones and make numbers up, even if they're not true, just to make the problem a lot simpler. And I say, "Well, if it was this, what would the decision be? And if it was this or these two other variables, what would the decision be?"

➡️ Making the problem simpler, focusing on being conclusive. 

👉 Dan Rose: Time with Steve Jobs... (PingThread)

• Steve came to our office a few months before launching the App Store to pitch us on building a native Facebook app for iOS. I asked for marketing in return for our engineering investment, which Steve flatly rejected. But he did agree to have us on stage at their launch event…

• Our best mobile engineer spent several months building an app to be ready for Apple's big reveal. The week prior to launch, Apple asked guest speakers to perform a dry run, after which Steve summarily cancelled our appearance. He didn't like our presentation, and that was that.

➡️ How to be decisive.

• Our goal in that meeting was to convince Apple to let us build an HTML5 platform inside our app (this is still being discussed!). Zuck pitched hard for 30 minutes, after which Steve just looked at him and said "No, we won't allow you to build a platform on top of our platform."

👉 Internal game at Shopify… (Ping Thread)

• We built an internal game at Shopify to make virtual hangouts more fun.

• It’s entirely browser based. Each game is designed to let people hop in & out at any time, and to encourage free play over specific rules.

• It's made in Unity + WebGL, with the amazing Normcore.io... library powering all the networking functionality. The core experience was built over 3 months by @byrondelgado and myself.

➡️ I love the idea of easily building some games for your team.

🗞 In the news

📱Technology

👉 Facebook owner Meta targets finance with ‘Zuck Bucks’ and creator coins (Financial Times)

• Facebook’s financial arm, Meta Financial Technologies, has been exploring the creation of a virtual currency for the metaverse,

• This is unlikely to be a cryptocurrency based on the blockchain, some of the people said. Instead, Meta is leaning towards introducing in-app tokens that would be centrally controlled by the company, similar to those used in gaming apps such as the Robux currency in popular children’s game Roblox.

• Meta is also looking into the creation of “social tokens” or “reputation tokens”, which could be issued as rewards for meaningful contributions in Facebook groups, for example. Another effort is to make “creator coins” that might be associated with particular influencers on its photo-sharing app Instagram.

• It would not be the first time Facebook has introduced such a currency to its ecosystem. It launched Facebook Credits in 2009, a virtual currency that enabled users to make in-app purchases, typically in games such as FarmVille. This represented 16 per cent of revenues at the time of its initial public offering in 2012, according to Barclays, but was shut down in 2013 because it was too costly to maintain.

👉 Spotify’s Earnings; Spotify’s Podcast Payoff; Universal, Taylor Swift, and Internet Power (Stratchery)

• We started our journey three years ago in podcasting with a catalog of about 185,000 podcasts. And we were really nowhere compared to the largest players in the industry. Today, we have 3.2 million podcasts on the platform, a growth rate of over 1,500%. But despite the fact that we’re still a relatively new entrants, previous data indicated we have become the top platform for podcast consumption in 60-plus countries. And now, according to Edison research and our own internal sources, we recently became the number one podcast platform US listeners use the most.

➡️ Starting small and having ambition :) 

• We’ve seen a number of partners, who have seen performance go really well and have given us incremental inventory throughout the quarter, because of performance that we’re giving them is higher and they could see other places and in some cases, higher than they’re getting in their own direct sales force.

➡️ It will be interesting to assess the return on investment of podcasts.

🏥 Healthcare

👉 Weekly Health Tech Reads 5/1 (Health Tech Nerds)

• Teladoc's stock plummeted 40% as its earnings announcement underwhelmed, with Teladoc revising its 2022 guidance downwards. 

  • The D2C mental health market and challenging employer sales cycles were the primary culprits here. 

  • As we discuss for HTN members, the D2C mental health market appears to have turned very quickly for Teladoc. Link (transcript)

➡️ I feel it is confirming our strategy of being the one stop partner, leveraging insurance as a wedge, and having a B2B approach for mental health.

• Accolade's stock plummeted 50% as its earnings announcement underwhelmed, with Accolade announcing that its largest customer, Comcast, is ending their contract as of December 2022. 

  • Accolade also saw a general softening of the employer market and not surprisingly is shifting its focus toward profitability vs growth. Link (call).

➡️ Good product marketing on their website though.

• Cerebral again finds itself in hot water this week, this time as a former VP makes some serious allegations against the company. 

  • In addition to the issues we've heard raised previously about leadership valuing growth over all else, this alleges that Cerebral did nothing about a data breach for tens of thousands of patients and knew about thousands of duplicate mailing addresses, a sign of prescription fraud. 

  • At the very least, something seems fundamentally broken within the culture of this company. 

  • Even investors appear to be distancing themselves here - as discussed in Slack, Oak HC/FT, a noted healthcare investor that led Cerebral's Series A round in late 2020, has removed Cerebral from its list of active investments on its website in the past few months (it was listed as an active investment as recently as January 2022). Link / Link (case)

👉 The Soft Sell The health-care brand Hims wants to leverage young men’s anxiety over erections and hair loss into a multibillion-dollar empire. (NY Mag)

Target & hidden opportunities:

• He was typical of the new minoxidil customer: a man who wouldn’t walk out of a drugstore with a Rogaine bottle but was willing to buy it on an app.

• Hims set out to chase a younger demographic.

• Most of the customers were men in their 20s or 30s, and they were spending most of their money on sildenafil.

• There are now almost half a million Hims customers.

➡️ What are the hidden opportunities? 

• Roman pursued a broader strategy, offering so many different medications and supplements — smoking-cessation aids, vitamins — that sildenafil comprised a minority of its revenue. Its average customer was 46 years old.

• In addition to sildenafil and finasteride, the brand has expanded to virtual visits with therapists, access to psychiatrists who can prescribe antidepressants, beta-blockers for anxiety, aerosolized lidocaine that is sprayed beneath the penis to delay ejaculation, skin creams, cosmetics, sex toys, a limited form of primary care, and birth-control pills for women (having launched a women’s brand in 2018, the company is now known as Hims & Hers).

Brand:

• Anthony Sperduti, co-founder of the branding shop Partners & Spade. Sperduti had helped conjure the personalities of Warby Parker, Harry’s, and Shinola.

• Dudum hired a second agency, Gin Lane, to build the website and make the ads. Gin Lane was associated with the same kinds of millennial proper nouns as Sperduti: Sweetgreen, Warby Parker. A partner there, Dan Kenger, came up with the ads that got Hims the most attention in the early days: pictures of plump cacti with slogans about ED plastered across New York City subway cars.

• Dan Kenger, the cactus-ad visionary who had left Gin Lane and become Hims & Hers’ chief designer,

​​➡️ In the US, they are very good at investing marketing in health.

Product elements:

• Every time I get an email from Hims, there’s a slogan at the bottom of the message: “Future you thanks you.” I click SEX at the top of the homepage and am directed to the intake form for sildenafil. A 17-question survey confronts me. The survey includes a modified version of the so-called “Erection Hardness Score,” which was developed during Viagra’s clinical trials.

• My case is assigned to a doctor who reviews my virtual visit.

• Forty-five minutes after submitting the form, I get an email telling me my prescription was approved, and I am charged $36 for six pills.

• Dudum said that 20 percent of men in their 20s and 30 percent of men in their 30s experienced ED.

• Other urologists I interviewed said Dudum’s numbers sounded slightly exaggerated.

​​➡️ Erectile Dysfunction seems to be a lot bigger than I thought it would be. 

💚 Alan

👉 Alan raises Series E (TechCrunch, WSJ, LesEchos, BusinessInsider, Forbes France)

• We are very happy to announce that we have raised €183 million in our Series E funding round with our valuation reaching €2.7 billion. We are incredibly grateful to all our members, Alaners and partners for their trust and support. It is only the beginning!

• We are building on the trust of 300k members and our ambition is to fulfil 3 million members by 2025, while staying true to our mission “Make personal, proactive and holistic health part of people’s daily lives, striving to be the world’s most member-centric healthcare company”.

• We are at the very beginning of our story. It is a first baby step and everything is still ahead of us.

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