Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Interviews with world-class startup founders about their unique paths to uncover tactical insights they've learned about how to fundraise, grow, validate, hire, scale, and lead teams while building your startup.
Get full access to detailed takeaways on each episode, additional case studies, and more at join.foundingjourney.com
If someone gave you a $1,000,000, could you get to a 1000000 followers? Sam Okorko has raised $67,000,000 for his startup, Levels, and decided to turn his cofounder into a creator.
Sam Corcos:This was her full time role for years. But it wasn't just about getting any followers. It had to be people who become Level's customers in order to justify the cost. They put a lot of work, 1,000, sometimes tens of 1,000 of dollars of research into some of these pieces.
Michael Houck:They learned who that was along the way.
Sam Corcos:People who own a Peloton and practice intermittent fasting have a 100% conversion rate into Level's customers.
Michael Houck:But to reach a $300,000,000 valuation and bring
Sam Corcos:on investors like Andreessen Horowitz, they had to master a lot more than just social media. You can see our SEO strategy evolve from day 1. We would celebrate when we would get 4 or 500 views on an article, or we're getting millions of views.
Michael Houck:In our wide ranging tactical conversation, Sam told me his exact process for identifying and analyzing growth channels. Also, why organic growth might not be as valuable as you think and why his old YC backed startup actually failed. This is Sam Khorkos' founding journey.
Michael Houck:So, Sam, good to have you here, man. Good to see you again. And I think let's go way back to start. Right? When you were in college, you almost never became a founder in the 1st place.
Michael Houck:Obviously, you've built some incredible companies since then. But I think if memory serves, you went down sort of the science and finance routes before you ended up going into entrepreneurship, founder life, and and all that. So first of all, I'm personally glad neither of those things happened.
Sam Corcos:But, you
Michael Houck:know, what made you change your mind and kinda shift towards startups?
Sam Corcos:I spent a lot of time thinking I was gonna be a scientist. I really enjoyed biology. That was my favorite class growing up, and I worked at an oncology research lab out of UC Davis, which was a lot of fun. But I I got pretty frustrated by the pace of academic science. I'm, in many ways, glad that I learned that lesson early.
Sam Corcos:I have many friends who went down the PhD route and only learned that lesson 10 years in, and, just how frustratingly slow it is and how you spend basically all your time begging for money and grants and not doing anything that is as interesting as you would like to do. So once I sort of gave up on that path, I almost ended up going down the finance route. I went to Claremont McKenna, which at the time pretty much everybody went into finance after graduating. And I almost went down that default path, and I was doing interviews for banks and realized how many of my friends had gone down that path and how they really did not like what they did every day and decided that maybe maybe that's not for me. So I ended up going into, I guess, what eventually became the the startup founder path problem with authority and knowing that I'm I I would not make a very good employee.
Sam Corcos:Yeah. I kept my burn really low and focused on ways that I could add value. And so that sort of became some early companies and kinda led me to where I am today.
Michael Houck:Yeah. I mean, going into finance, that can be draining. You know, your the hours are crazy and the work is hard, but startups aren't easy either. Any regrets?
Michael Houck:1st, let's talk about how a founder's life is endlessly chaotic. There's always a million things to do but the thing is, a lot of those tasks are actually pretty low leverage and they end up slowing your startup down. Thankfully there's a way you can save up to 20 hours a week just like I do: hiring an Athena's helped me and thousands of other founders and leaders backed by YC, Sequoia or working at great places like OpenAI and Airbnb become better delegators and build leverage by bringing on a trained assistant. Less than 1% of their applicants pass their 6 step assistant screening process, and they're trained on the tools you're already using, even AI ones. The best part though is that they'll train you too.
Michael Houck:They have over a 100 playbooks on how to be a more effective delegate. The result is that you wake up to inbox 0 every day and save hours to spend on the work that you uniquely are able to do. Go to athena.com/hauk and save $1500 on signing.
Sam Corcos:No. Definitely not. I mean, it's ever been a a matter of hours. I think that's it's a bit of a misconception on the hours being the thing that leads to burnout. I I think that they're maybe correlated at best, but it's certainly not causal.
Sam Corcos:In my experience, it's the I would say from the people that I know who have really burnt themselves out, some of them are only working 20 hours a week. They just hate their jobs. So if you wake up every day dreading what you're gonna have to do all day, it's pretty easy to burn out. If you wake up every morning excited, you can work 80, 90, 100 hours a week, and it feels like you're on vacation. So I think that's a bigger part of it.
Sam Corcos:It's just, if you're working in finance and you hate your job and you don't feel like you're really adding value to the world, it can be pretty soul crushing.
Michael Houck:Yeah. I definitely empathize with that. I don't think I'd be a very good employee either, and I I wasn't a very good employee at times. Okay. So then, obviously, Levels has become this incredible company over the last few years, but you had a YC back company, Kardash, before this, and I think there were a few other companies along the way as well.
Michael Houck:Yeah. Tell tell me about that.
Sam Corcos:Yeah. The first couple were Bootstrapped. Started with me and friends of mine that I knew from before. One was a high school friend, one was a college friend. I was the technical co founder of those companies.
Sam Corcos:They did some revenue, but never really hit a meaningful trajectory. So just kinda moved on, tried the next thing. Was doing a lot of software consulting during that time as well. That was mostly what was paying the bills. I found that the, the best way to enable a that that freedom to operate was just keeping burn really low.
Sam Corcos:For a big chunk of that time, I was, what I think is now called a digital nomad. I would, like, live with friends. I would kinda bounce around, and I would try to keep my burns super low. And that enables a lot of flexibility. If you have a lot of responsibility, if you have a car, if you have a mortgage, if you have expensive rent, you're really limiting the number of choices that you can make in your life.
Sam Corcos:You have to pick a job that makes a certain amount of salary. It really reduces your risk tolerance as well. There's only so much risk that you can take when you have obligations that are piling up. So that was a really fun time and allowed for a lot of exploration. Kardash was a couple years, went through Y Combinator.
Sam Corcos:Similarly, we hit a pretty big growth deflection point that got us through YC, and then it sort of leveled out. And so we we realized that it wasn't gonna be a venture outcome, so we sold most of the assets, part of an acquisition, and then moved on to took about a year off after that company, and then spent a lot of time thinking about what I wanted to do next. And that's eventually what brought me to levels.
Michael Houck:Yeah. When I was looking into Cardash and also just from our conversations, you guys hit what? Like, with 1,000,000 in revenue in a few months? You did YC. You started scaling fast.
Michael Houck:You sort of hired a team to support that growth. Like, check, check, check, check, check. Right? Everything kinda getting checked off. And then the organic growth kinda slowed, and you were in the position where you sort of didn't really yet know all of the growth levers for the business.
Michael Houck:And then that sounds like a really challenging situation because you sort of built this to get to a certain point, and then things slowly. You're like, oh, what what are those actual levers for me to pull? How did you how do you manage that?
Sam Corcos:Yeah. Well, it was interesting because the whole time that growth was happening, it was all, as you mentioned, it was all organic. And we were talking internally, this feels good. Everyone says you want organic growth, but we don't really know why it's happening, and maybe that's okay. I don't know.
Sam Corcos:And so we just sort of said, let's just roll with it. And then when it slowed down, we didn't really know why because we didn't know why it had picked up in the first place. And when we started to run different experiments to try to get our growth numbers back on track. So when growth eventually hit a plateau and slowed down, we didn't know why, and we didn't know what levers to pull to try to get growth to start working again. So that's, that was definitely a lesson in making sure you understand your channels and making sure those channels are repeatable.
Sam Corcos:Sometimes you can just get lucky with organic growth and that lasts forever, but it's way better to understand your channels. So we spend a lot of time thinking about that at levels, and it's been really it's a helpful and, expensive lesson learned.
Michael Houck:Yeah. I guess, like, contrast it for me. Right? Like, what have you done with Levels versus what did you do in that situation once you realized it at, Kardash?
Sam Corcos:Yeah. I think it's at Kardash, it was we didn't really think about evergreen channels
Michael Houck:like
Sam Corcos:SEO or partnerships or things that give you lasting long tail impact. I think where where a lot of people get stuck is they get stuck in this treadmill where they're constantly trying to find these quick hits is like one off things to juice their growth, but they're not thinking about the long term. Whenever I look at our growth trend, I'm always looking for what is that long tail when I see these little tiny the the one time spikes in traffic. I don't really pay attention to those so much because you can't repeat those indefinitely. You really need to figure out what is that that long term trends that's growing sustainably, and repeatably when you end up spending all of your resourcing on Facebook, Instagram, Google Ads.
Sam Corcos:The problem with those channels is that your your cost to acquire customers never goes down, really only ever increases with time. And so you're left chasing your tail, trying to find more ways to juice your sales. As the cost of those sales is going up, you end up on a really bad spot. So thinking a lot about how you can get your cost to acquire customers down, how you can do that sustainably is it's a really important part of our growth strategy. I think something in the range of, what is it, 80% of our acquisition comes through these organic channels.
Sam Corcos:It's a pretty pretty large number.
Michael Houck:Yeah. I mean, you talk about those little spikes of growth. It takes me to the idea of, like, PR as a strategy. Right? I think you see even if you're just watching, like, Shark Tank or something like that, these these come on there, and they're like, we've had all these PR articles, like, right away so quick, and it doesn't really set you up for something that's that that's repeatable.
Sam Corcos:Yeah. Definitely. Would you say that,
Michael Houck:you know, would you say that there is kind of still a place for PR in early stage startup strategy? Because I think it used to be the case where you could getting an article in TechCrunch about your fundraisers was, like, the biggest thing. And now you can sort of build your own direct channels. Right? Totally.
Sam Corcos:I think there's still value there. I would say almost all of them are gonna be hard to specifically quantify, but they do exist. For example, there are some degree of credibility that you get when you're covered in every major publication. It's just a thing. We've run this experiment.
Sam Corcos:I know other people who have run this experiment. There's a subtle uplift in conversion when people see that you've been covered in Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The Economist, all of the major credible publications. There's a subtle uplift when you have those links on your website. They don't even necessarily click on them. They're just having that credibility by association is a subtle indicator of trust.
Sam Corcos:I think another one that's very subtle, but is especially important for maybe first time founders and entrepreneurs is that credibility that you get from being covered in major publications. It might sound silly, but it is often it is it can often be important for people's parents to believe that they have a real company. And so it's like giving credibility that's more to, like, their parents and their friends to see, like, oh, this is a real company, or say, employees on a team feeling like they work for a real business, not some fly by night operation. So those are some of the subtle reasons why press is important, but I think at different stages, press is more or less important. Right now, it's not a huge part of our strategy.
Sam Corcos:It's possible that it will be again in the future, but right now it's not, it's not driving a lot of sales or any of the things that are on our road map.
Michael Houck:Yeah. I mean, I definitely felt that subtle uplift when we did Launch House because it was we had a New York Times article that actually before the company was even incorporated. Mhmm. And so there was definitely that air of, oh, like, something's happening here. You know, that's kind of a stamp of of approval to some degree.
Michael Houck:But, yeah, I'd imagine that strategy wise, founders' time early on is so valuable. It's like, how much time do you really wanna put into that right away? Yeah. For sure. What would you recommend founders should do if they do see that kind of really organic growth early on?
Michael Houck:See those spikes coming in, but, you know, they don't necessarily understand why it's working or how repeatable it is. But what should they do?
Sam Corcos:The simplest thing is you gotta talk to more of your customers. Figure out who they are, why they're signing up, where they're coming from, what their motivations are. That was something we did a lot more of at levels than I have in previous companies. I've actually made a a meme. Do you know the mid whip meme?
Michael Houck:Yes. My favorite. It applies to absolute Yeah. It applies
Sam Corcos:to a lot of things. I've made that for our team. So it's I made it at some point in the past, but, on both the Left, the dumb guy, and the Jedi just say talk to customers. And the guy in the middle is like scalable AB testing, performance marketing something framework. But if you're not talking to customers, you're really missing the point.
Sam Corcos:You should just talk to customers. And when you talk to customers, you find out who are they? Why are they signing up for your service? What problem do you actually solve for them? How do you find those people repeatedly?
Sam Corcos:I I get I get a lot of calls from other founders and friends of mine who are talking about marketing strategy. They ask, hey. I noticed you guys have a really successful SEO effort with editorial. How did you guys do that, and how do we do it? And the first thing I tell them is, maybe you shouldn't.
Sam Corcos:It depends a lot on who your customers are and how you expect they're gonna find you. We started with SEO and content because we knew that it would be successful before we even started. And the reason why we knew is because we talked to lots of customers. I interviewed hundreds of people in the 1st year of operation. And when you talk to them, you just find out who they are.
Sam Corcos:What are they interested in? And in health and wellness, something that we found is people spend a lot of time reading about this topic. They do a lot of googling. They follow people on Instagram. They follow people in newsletters.
Sam Corcos:They listen to lots of podcasts. It's one of the most popular podcast categories is health and wellness. And so our entire marketing strategy was really downstream of what we learned from talking to people. So we kinda knew in advance. Alright.
Sam Corcos:These are the 10 podcasts we need to get on. These are the newsletters we need to get involved with. These are the things that people are googling already, and they're just not finding the information they need to find. The strategy that we had was really downstream of everything that we learned just from talking to people.
Michael Houck:Yeah. I mean, it's so simple but so smart that perfectly encapsulates the the way it took me. I always think it's it's shocking, you know, when you talk to a founder and they're saying, oh, you're like, we're building this incredible thing. And then you're like, alright. Well, you know, what have your customers told you?
Michael Houck:And it's very clear they don't even understand who their customer is in some cases.
Sam Corcos:No. Yeah. Like, I I would say that this is a a frequent experience that I have, which is there's a a problem with bike shedding. It's common in programming, but the bike shedding came from a guy who I think he was investigating something he was an economist looking at decision making processes for how local governments make decisions, and there was a a city that was deciding whether or not to build a nuclear power plant in town. Pretty big decision.
Sam Corcos:It's a big deal? Big deal. And when he was looking at what everyone talked about, they spent almost the entire time talking about what color the bike shed should be. Not about should we build a nuclear power plant. And the reason is because everyone understands colors.
Sam Corcos:It's like, I like green, I like blue, and you can argue about that all day. But most people can't think about the implications of these really important things. So people tend to fixate on what is trivial or easy or something that they understand. So all of that to say, when it comes to putting something in front of customers, it's really when you're a software developer it's really easy to build software. And so you tend to fixate on, I'm just gonna build stuff.
Sam Corcos:And it's like, look, you can show all your friends, look at this cool thing I made. Because you know how to do it, you can do it consistently, you don't know what's gonna happen when you put it in front of customers. Usually they're not gonna like your thing, and that feels really bad, and so people tend to avoid it. And so I I always try and tell people, you've gotta start you've gotta put it in front of customers as fast as possible and get those feedback loops quickly. Because most of the time people don't want the thing that you're building, and that's okay.
Sam Corcos:This is just the normal path of how products go. So you have to get those feedback loops quickly. Those, I can't tell you the number of times I have friends who start, like, a marketplace company, a 2 sided marketplace. And it is usually the case that one side of the marketplace is really easy. It's usually the supply side because your pitch to them is, hey.
Sam Corcos:Sign up for my thing, and I'll give you extra money. Like, great. Yeah. I'm happy to make extra money. And it's usually hard to build the other side, which is the demand side.
Sam Corcos:And the number of friends of mine who spend all of their time fixated on building the supply because they can and they win and every time they sign up a new whatever it is, they count it as like a huge win. We built a platform for these people to do this thing and it's like, great, how many customers do you have? Like, oh tons. It's like, no, no, no. Those are not your customers.
Sam Corcos:The people giving you money are customers. It's like, oh well that's we're gonna do that eventually once we've built out the supply. It just doesn't work that way, you're wasting your time. If people are not willing to give you money, you have not validated that this adds value to anybody. All you're doing is wasting time.
Sam Corcos:So it's really important to stay focused on what is the hard thing and what is the easy thing. And most people try to avoid the hard thing as long as possible, usually to their detriment.
Michael Houck:Avoid bike shedding at all costs, basically. Yep. Definitely. Do you think that there's any limit to what founders should go to their customers
Sam Corcos:about? What do you mean?
Michael Houck:Like, for example, you know, if you're are there any questions, types of questions you wouldn't wanna ask customers? You want to rely on your own sort of, like, founder intuition rather than just hearing it right from right from your customers.
Sam Corcos:I think you should pretty much always get as much information as you can from them. Their experience and their opinion is always valid, even if it's not necessarily how would I describe it? It might not necessarily be specifically correct, but it is always directionally correct. So what I mean by that is somebody might give you the feedback of, hey, your app should do your app here should do this. That might not be specifically correct, but what they're actually telling you is they're having a really hard time navigating, and your app is really confusing.
Sam Corcos:I can actually give you a very specific example. When somebody gave us feedback on one of the parts of our app. They said, I wish that there was this, like, red flashing lights that said, like, this thing is bad. Which is it's not correct specifically because if you did that it would freak people out. Maybe not this specific person because they understand that in context, but most people don't.
Sam Corcos:But what they are saying is they don't really have a good way of differentiating between good and bad. And so it would be nice if we made that a little bit more clear, which things are good, which things are bad, and give a little bit more guidance. So we've made a bunch of improvements related to that kind of feedback. So I would say the more information you get from them, the better. It's not necessarily specifically correct, but it is it is almost always directionally correct.
Michael Houck:How often should founders, like, incorporate this into their sort of day to day? Right? Because they're the ones who are responsible for this. The shortest information feedback loop is just them direct to the customer. Should this be something they're doing every day, every week?
Michael Houck:Like, can I design that that flow, that process for me?
Sam Corcos:It's kinda it's gonna depend on the type of product that you have, but I think part of the answer is often. In the simplest way of describing it, I would say almost all founders that I know do not spend enough time talking to customers. So most people are indexed way too far in the opposite direction. We have a rule internally levels which we keep track of everybody at our company, no matter their role. Engineering, support, operations, whatever their function is, everybody needs to talk to a customer at least once a month.
Sam Corcos:Talk to somebody either 1 on 1 or in one of our community calls. Everybody needs to have direct exposure to how people are experiencing our product. There's no there's no shortcut to just talking to people. There might be some resistance. Engineer saying, like, I need to just focus on this, talking to customers is not that useful, it's distracting.
Sam Corcos:And then they do it, and you'll talk to a customer and they're like, Why does it do this here? And the engineer is like, that's a great question. I'm actually I'm just gonna fix that right now. There's no reason for that to be there. That is such a great point.
Sam Corcos:That's the thing. Somehow, it never occurred to me, and the engineer can just directly fix it. There's no shortcut. You're just talking to people. You can have your theories on how things should work, but until the rubber meets the road and people are actually using your product, you really have no idea how people are going to experience it.
Sam Corcos:So that's been really important. And as I was mentioning before around not enough people are talking to customers, a very frequent thing that will happen is there are a lot of friends of mine that I usually informally advise, and they'll tell me how great things are going. Everyone always says how great things are going and, like, how great their product is and how they've made all these improvements. And I'll say, cool. What are your customers saying?
Sam Corcos:Like, oh, customers are saying it's great. It's like, cool. And you specifically talked to them, and they told you that. It's like, oh, yeah. I talk to customers all the time.
Sam Corcos:Like, cool. How many did you talk to this week? It's like, well, not this week. I I was really busy this week. It's like, okay.
Sam Corcos:How about last week? It's like, well, last week I was also really busy. Okay. How about in the last month? How many did you talk to?
Sam Corcos:It's like, well, not in the last month, I was really busy. Okay. When is the last time you actually talked to a customer? And if you pin it down, like, 6 months ago, if that, you've gotta just have direct communication with customers. There's no shortcut to that.
Sam Corcos:You have to see how people are experiencing. You have to learn from them.
Michael Houck:I love that you have everyone on the team do it too. And I think that that kind of approach I mean, obviously, led by the founder, but that that approach in general, that's the type of thing that really builds superfans. That's the type of thing where people are like, oh, this company cares about me. They care about my problems. They're actually trying to solve them.
Michael Houck:Have you guys seen that at levels?
Sam Corcos:Oh, yeah. For sure. We get feedback all the time from people who they they say, I've never had a company reach out to me before and ask me for my feedback, which is weird because people interact with a lot of products, and we ask for feedback constantly, and we take it seriously, and we very often implement those things. Some of this, I remember my brother was early at Notion, and I I remember seeing the magic of closing the loop with people where they would direct people to ask their questions when they see a bug or when they experience an issue and they have feedback to just post it on Twitter. And then often within, like, one day, they'll they'll reply to them on their tweet publicly saying, hey, we fixed it.
Sam Corcos:Here's the link. And it's a pretty magical thing when somebody posts something on the Internet and says, hey, I ran into this bug. And then like 24 hours later, an engineer saw that, fixed it, and then replied to that person letting them know that their voice was heard and that they fixed that problem. So building that feedback loop really builds a lot of trust with the people who use your product.
Michael Houck:Yeah. I mean, it builds a sense of community around it. Right? Yeah. Especially if you give your users places and spaces to kinda interact with each other too.
Michael Houck:Mhmm. You build that affinity one level deeper. You know, someone got a launch house tattoo when we were Oh, wow. Right? So how do you guys think about kinda bringing it to that level of community, and has that been a part of the strategy?
Michael Houck:And kind of what are the pros and cons you've seen with that?
Sam Corcos:Community is a challenging term just because everyone everyone I've talked to seems to have a different definition of what that term means. I think for us, we do regular community calls where everyone can ask questions. Often, we'll have an expert involved. We try to just get feedback as much as we can. We've had different initiatives in the past where we try to do more just direct member to member interactions within bubbles, and I don't think we've cracked the code on it yet, but it does feel like there's really something there.
Sam Corcos:I think it's especially important when you have a mission driven company like we do on solving the metabolic health crisis. This is a huge a huge problem that's global in scale. And so having people who understand that, who are bought in, I think is is really important to being able to deliver on the goal.
Michael Houck:Yeah. I mean, you guys have a very visible sort of piece of, like, hardware, really, that is is a product. It's not just an app. Right? Mhmm.
Michael Houck:Like, do you think that makes it sort of easier or or harder? Are there other challenges that come up around around bringing people in that close and and creating that sense of community around the product?
Sam Corcos:It makes it harder in as much as it's less accessible because it's a physical good that is somewhat expensive. That's just the nature of the the state of the technology today. We're working on ways to lower that barrier to entry to get more people involved, to help people understand how food affects their health. I think that's probably gonna be the biggest lever, getting more people involved is just to get the cost down. I think it's, it helps in as much as because it's a physical product, people see you wearing it and they wanna know what it is.
Sam Corcos:It's pretty novel. So I think that that adds a lot to the the virality factor.
Michael Houck:Yeah. I mean, do so one thing that I've I've seen a lot of companies try to do is they try to build the sense of community, whether they're hardware or just flat software. I almost feel like there's a sense of community fatigue that's happening right now, or it's like everyone's trying to do community. It's a buzzword. It hasn't been for a couple years now.
Michael Houck:Like, I don't know. Do do you see that? Do you have an opinion on that? Is it kind of worth for early stage founders to use community as a growth strategy in 2024?
Sam Corcos:I think this this maybe ties back to our earlier conversation, which is you should talk to your customers and find out what they wanna do. I think in certain products, community will be a great growth lever because that's what people wanna do. That's how people wanna engage. I think a lot of people try to shim what they've read about that other companies have done successfully, and they try to force that into their own product. And I just don't think that's very successful.
Sam Corcos:It's like the what we're talking about earlier where people say, how do we make SEO successful? Like, you have a boring b to b SaaS tool. Nobody is looking for this. Like, this is this is not going to work for you. You can spend $10,000,000 on SEO, and you're not going to see ROI from that because peep this is not a thing that people are searching for.
Sam Corcos:So the strategy needs to be downstream from who your customers are and how you access them.
Michael Houck:I mean okay. Let's talk about SEO a little bit. I think a lot of people beginning of this year or even last year were saying they were kinda rushing to say almost that SEO is dead and the Internet's gonna be flooded by a bunch of AI generated articles, and everyone's gonna get all their information from LLMs and ChatGPT. But, you know, now OpenAI has even launched a search engine. Right?
Michael Houck:A slightly different one than ThinkGoogle, but it's a search engine. And I think there's a whole sort of class of new companies that are helping people build AI optimized sort of SEO strategies, not just creating the articles with AI, but actually, like, tailoring your SEO strategy to show up in chatbot result chatbot responses. I feel like that probably means that building authority is actually more important now than it was before. What what are your thoughts on that and sort of have you guys, dove into that at all? I think the
Sam Corcos:the part of our strategy for SEO that's been the most successful, as our editorial director Mike Caney likes to say is, how do we add value to the Internet? So focusing on what are the topics that are insufficiently covered. People really do engage with our content. I think our our average read time is something like 4 minutes, which is just unheard of for this type of content because people, if you write content that people want to read, then they will read it. It's kind of as simple as that.
Sam Corcos:If you make garbage content, people won't read it. They'll click on your stuff, and you can have all these vanity metrics of, like, look look at how many people clicked on it. But then you look at the read time, and it's about 15 seconds. They get to it. They're like, oh, this is garbage AI generated stuff, and then they leave.
Sam Corcos:And you can say, yeah, but we got 8,000 clicks on that article. But that means nothing. Google knows what good content looks like. And so you end up ranking pretty highly for things when you have really good content. So it takes a real investment, and it takes a long time for it to pay off.
Sam Corcos:You can actually track a lot of this because we publish all of our investor updates publicly from day 1 of the company. You can go to our website, levels.com. Go to the very bottom in our footer. All of our investor updates from day 1 are public. So you can you can see our SEO strategy evolve from day 1.
Sam Corcos:And what you'll see is for the first, I don't know, 6 to 12 months, we would celebrate when we would get 4 or 500 views on an article. And over time, that started to grow. And as the quality continued to increase, the that's that long tail to the point where we're getting millions of views now. So it takes a long if you have confidence that that strategy is gonna work for you, it does take a while before you start seeing results, but it really does compound in a really positive way.
Michael Houck:You guys have put out content across tons of different channels, you know, not just the articles, but the podcast appearances, YouTube channel, Instagram. How have you guys thought about sort of allocating time and attention and budget across the different channels at different kind of stages of the company's growth?
Sam Corcos:The simplest answer on where you focus your effort is where you're seeing the most ROI. And the changes at different points in time for the company, like, early on, we put very little effort into email. Because when you have a 1,000 people that are subscribed to your email, your newsletter, it just doesn't matter. You can put as much effort as you want into it, and nothing's gonna happen. At a certain point, we got to like 50,000, a 100,000, 200,000 people receiving our newsletter.
Sam Corcos:I think we're now at like a half a 1000000. And at a certain point, you start to do the math. Like, well, if we get a 1% conversion rate on these newsletter campaigns, suddenly that's a material amount of money. So what if we did a nurture campaign, which is pretty standard in the industry? What if we built in all these different email life cycle campaigns?
Sam Corcos:Suddenly, those become ROI positive. So I think it's you have to do the math on where you're getting leverage and where ultimately you're gonna see that return on investment. In the early days for us, podcasts were a huge thing. We got a lot of leverage from podcasts. And then at some point, we started seeing less leverage from podcasts.
Sam Corcos:So we switched to email life cycle. Then at some point, we kind of maxed out the ROI from spending time there, and you start investigating other things. So I think that's kind of the answer is you've gotta you gotta do the math on where you get leverage and focus on those things.
Michael Houck:I think another benefit with sort of having that many services and being in front of people in all these different places is is that content, good content at least, can help with recruiting too.
Sam Corcos:You know,
Michael Houck:I've hired a bunch of people from Twitter. People responded to my newsletter that we've ended up working together. How do you see that playing out for you guys, or how have you seen that playing out for you guys? And does the quality of candidates differ based on different channels?
Sam Corcos:We publish a lot more content than is typical. As I mentioned, all of our investor updates are public. Up until recently, all of our team all hands were even public. Those are also just in the footer of our website. You can basically see what it's like working here before even working here.
Sam Corcos:We have an internal company podcast. It's just teammates talking to other teammates about things within the company. Some of it's company history, some of it's cultural values, some of it's just like a debate on different topics. So I think that's something that is really what I've noticed over time is the people who apply for jobs at levels, every person that we have hired in the last 5 years is more bought in and more values aligned than the people we have before. Because there's so much more information available that people know what they're signing up for.
Sam Corcos:People opt in. In network theory, they call this preferential attachment, where you get the right kinds of people who are seeking you out. It's why there's this compounding effect for VC firms like Sequoia or Andreessen, where they're no longer grinding it out trying to find the right companies because those companies are seeking them out. It makes your job a lot easier when you don't have to do the heavy lifting.
Michael Houck:Yeah. I mean, do you think you can get that to a place where, as a early stage new founder, you shouldn't even really think about hiring recruiters or working with external recruiting firms? Can you hack that basically right away, or is that something that only comes into play a couple years in?
Sam Corcos:It's not that it comes into play a couple years in. I think it does compound. So the more of it you do, the more of it you'll get. I did a little bit of analysis on where our first 50 employees came from. The plurality came from just my own network.
Sam Corcos:People that I reached out to, people that I've worked with in the past, just talking to people and trying to get people to join. I think one of the things that is often missed in a lot of these things is that it's okay to hire somebody who was the right fit for 2, 3, 4 years, and then they're not the right fit later. And that's okay. This is not like a failure of them or you. It's just different people at different stages.
Sam Corcos:I think it's it's often the case for first time founders where they don't totally understand or appreciate that, and it feels like a personal failure or some sort of a bad thing that's happening, but it's okay. This is the this is just the nature of building companies. Think of the first 4 or 5 engineers that we've hired, only one of them is still with the company. And so it's okay. As as the team grows, as the needs change, it's okay to make changes there.
Michael Houck:Okay. I wanna talk about one of my favorite things that you guys have done. We talked a little bit about this before, but, basically, you decided to turn your cofounder into an influencer. It was, like, a conscious decision that you made. Yep.
Michael Houck:And then you actually pulled it off, and, like, it worked. You know, I've seen startups sort of bring in established creators as, like, pseudo cofounders later on. But it's really rare to see someone sort of intentionally build one of their cofounders up into an influencer and then actually have the content, like, chops, I guess, to to make that happen. So why'd you know so early on that that was gonna be something that you wanted to do and also that you could do with the limited resources that an early stage start up has?
Sam Corcos:The first the chance of the first question of how do we know something that we wanted to do, it was just we knew that this was achievable in our category. So within the context of health and wellness, this is a thing that already has a pretty established pattern for people who are influential, who are trusted, who people follow, and who people listen to. We're not trying to invent a new category. This is already a very large category with a lot of people who have done this very successfully. So that was a useful indication.
Sam Corcos:I think another was my cofounder, Casey. She also really wanted to do it, and she was very good at it. So you you have to have somebody who enjoys a as a sort of an an aside here, almost everybody we talked to said when we do podcasts or media or anything external, I have to be the one to do it because I'm the CEO. And I said, well, I don't enjoy it, so I'm not gonna do it. That's pretty much it.
Sam Corcos:So either we're not gonna do them or somebody else is gonna do it. And so Casey happens to enjoy it, and she's really good at it. So she started doing it. She got a lot of practice in. Eventually, she just became absolutely exceptional at it.
Sam Corcos:And so we put more resourcing into it, building up her personal brand, building in that distribution, and it worked really well. But the question of how did we know that we could do it with a limited resourcing that we had, The answer is you never actually know. You just have to give it a try. I think, oftentimes people give up on these things too early. The goal was to do something like a 100 podcasts.
Sam Corcos:For Kasia, do like a 100 podcasts in the 1st year, and I think she ended up doing somewhere between 102100. She did a lot of podcasts, and she got really, really good at it. So you just have to get the reps in sometimes. When I yeah. Like I talk to other friends and founders who say, like, fundraising is so hard.
Sam Corcos:It's like how many pitches have you done? Like, 0. Like, well, you're probably not gonna get very good at it. I've pitched 100 and 100 of times. So it's not like I have some magical ability.
Sam Corcos:I've just done it so many times that I know what to look for, and I know how to do it.
Michael Houck:I guess saying the goal is a 100, that's a big goal. Right? That's a that's a time consuming goal. I imagine that you guys did some check-in sort of along the way to see, oh, is this actually driving ROI? What what was that like?
Michael Houck:What do you look for? I mean, you can say it's
Sam Corcos:a big goal, but the math doesn't actually pan out that way. Like, if you assume let's say a founder of a company is working, we'll we'll round down. We'll say 50 hours a week. Right? You're a tech founder.
Sam Corcos:If you're working 50 hours a week, like, you're on the low end of how many hours people are working. But let's just use that number because it's like an easy round number. And let's say you're doing podcasts. Right? Let's say it takes 2 hours to record each one, and let's say it takes 3 hours to prep for every podcast.
Sam Corcos:Right? If all you're doing is podcasts, that means you're doing 10 podcasts a week. 5 hours, that's 3 plus 2, that's 5 that's 10 podcasts a week. That's pretty achievable to do a 100. If that's your full time job, that's not even a full quarter of work.
Sam Corcos:It's just like, just do this for this quarter. That's your goal, to do a 100 podcasts. The reality is as you start doing more of them, that 3 hours of prep starts to crunch down into, like, sometimes 0 hours of prep. So, really, you can probably do that within a month or 2 if you're really diligent about it. Those are an infinite number of podcasts out there.
Sam Corcos:Like some random person in their basement, if all if your goal is just to get reps in, there are really an infinite number of podcasts, especially in the health and wellness category. So just getting reps is really a good way to go about it and just it's not that time consuming. If you were to tell one person on your team, this is your only goal for the next 2 months is do a 100 podcasts, you can absolutely do it.
Michael Houck:Maybe where I get tripped up there is saying that one person on the cofounding team's only goal is podcasts, like, especially early on. That sounds like a big a big decision. Right? Because every founder's time is so so valuable. So I guess what made it clear that it kept being worth it to keep investing that time in in podcast for you guys?
Sam Corcos:You can say it's a big investment, but most people spend a lot of their time just wasting it on things that are really not directed towards anything that delivers value. So I think being really clear about where what your strategy is and trying to deliver against something. If it's really obvious that it's not working, then you move on. But you've gotta give it a fair shake. And spending spending it's like, oh, you had one podcast that has a 100 listeners, and it didn't drive your growth numbers.
Sam Corcos:It's like, well, obviously, it takes a long time to do these things. So we knew that we needed to get practice. We needed to get reps so that eventually we can get on these much larger podcasts. And that eventually did happen. So it takes a lot of practice to get to the point where you can confidently go on to some of these really large podcasts and deliver value for their audiences.
Sam Corcos:Okay. Let's talk about sourcing the podcast then.
Michael Houck:Because I think you mentioned there's so many different podcasts, tiny ones, 100 listeners. Right? I guess first question is, how do you pick which of the small ones to get reps with? And then the second question is, once you do that, how do you break in and actually get on the larger ones?
Sam Corcos:Well, the first one, you it starts again with your what are your goals? If your goals are just to get reps in, it really doesn't matter. Do any podcast that we'll have you on. That's where you should start. We we separate out our podcasts from internally, we have 3 different tiers.
Sam Corcos:A tier 1 podcast is, like, somebody who shows up in the iTunes store as, like, a top recommended podcast. It's like Peter Attia's podcast, doctor Jaime's podcast. There's a lot of these tier 1 podcasts. A tier 2 podcast is one that is usually smaller audience, but generally a really engaged audience on a specific topic. So it's not like a mainstream podcast, but they're they're they're credible and they have an engaged audience.
Sam Corcos:And then a tier 3 podcast is like a new podcast or something where it's just it's somebody's hobby project. It's not something that has a huge audience, but if we have capacity, if we want some practice, those are really good podcasts to do. So start anywhere is really what I would say. Your first several podcasts are probably gonna be terrible. And the the interesting thing is, like, nobody's gonna listen to it.
Sam Corcos:Nobody cares. So people are always afraid if I do a really bad job on this one podcast, it's gonna be like this horrible shameful thing. The reality is nobody cares about you or your message or your podcast. Nobody cares. The one of the things that we see a lot when when people from larger companies come to start ups, they're always definitely afraid to release things that are too early or not finished enough or not polished enough.
Sam Corcos:And I remember having a conversation with somebody on our team where I I wanted to ship an early version of the product way before it was good. It was actually really terrible. And he said, what if the New York Times sees this and runs a thing about how bad this product is?
Michael Houck:I
Sam Corcos:was like, if you can pull that if you can make a product that is so bad that the New York Times decides to cover it, I will give you a $1,000,000. The odds of that happening is so infinitesimally small that I'm willing to give major odds that this is not going to happen because nobody cares. So same thing with these podcasts. If you do a tiny podcast that nobody listens to, nobody cares. So getting reps, that's the first thing you gotta do until you're good at it.
Sam Corcos:And then over time, you can work towards bigger podcasts. People wanna know that you're credible. If you can say, look, I did these 3 podcasts, and they can listen to them and say, oh, this person is really articulate and interesting, and I think they could add some value to our audience. I think where people often get mixed up in this, if they say, oh, well, I've already said this content one time on the Internet, so nobody will ever want to hear it again. It's like, yeah, 90 people in the world listen to that.
Sam Corcos:That that podcast has no distribution. Nobody has actually heard this before. There's, like, this egocentrism where people say, like, they they go on some podcast, like, everyone that I know must have listened to this. Nobody has listened to it. Even if you do the biggest podcast in the world, most people will not listen to it.
Sam Corcos:So you have to do a lot of reps. And so how do you end up getting on those larger podcasts? Is you just work your way up. A lot of times they'll hear about you. You'll do a tier 2 podcast, and then somebody from a tier 1 podcast hears that episode, and they say, wow.
Sam Corcos:You know, this person might actually be really good. Sometimes they'll reach out to you. Sometimes you reach out to them. You meet them at a conference. You talk to them about it.
Sam Corcos:They say, you know, it might be interesting to have you on our podcast. I would say one of the things that's also really important is to really focus on what value you can bring to their audience. The podcast host is always thinking about topic audience fit. How do you make sure that the the topic that you want to talk about or that you're qualifying to talk about or you can speak about articulately will resonate with the audience? So can give a specific example.
Sam Corcos:I was invited on a podcast recently. It's actually quite a large podcast, and I was talking to the host about it and they said, look, you have a really great podcast, but I usually talk about corporate knowledge systems and startup team communication and nerdy startup stuff. And what your podcast talks about is completely different than that. Nobody is coming on to your podcast to hear me talk about start up stuff. So somebody who might be more relevant is Casey or Josh on our team.
Sam Corcos:So different people have a different match with those audiences. So I think that's something to really keep in mind. And if you write up a Notion doc of here's what I think we should talk about, and you send that to them proactively, do the work. That goes a really long way. When they know who their audience is, what will resonate with them, and you're willing to do the work for them, it really makes a big difference.
Michael Houck:Yeah. I think before we chatted, you sent over so many materials that you guys have done before, and we used that as part of our research for for the episode. So it makes total sense. Made my job easy. Let's think about the audience then.
Michael Houck:Right? Let's say a founder is listening to this, goes and and takes this strategy and starts doing these podcasts. What's the next step? Because I think you get on a podcast. Great.
Michael Houck:You talk about your message. Great. Maybe some people find your app or your website, your product, or whatever. But what's the funnel? Right?
Michael Houck:Where where do
Sam Corcos:you want people to go? It'll depend a lot on the podcast. Some of the podcasts that we do, the intent is to get new candidates for recruiting. I did a podcast on the Tim Ferriss Show, and the topic was on delegation. And the whole reason for that podcast was to get TypeScript engineers to apply for jobs at levels.
Sam Corcos:Did it work? Oh, yeah. We got a ton of people apply. So we it was very successful in that regard. Doing recruiting is really expensive and tedious and time consuming, and every time you get a lead who deeply understands your company and culture before even applying is really it saves you a lot of effort.
Sam Corcos:This is the preferential attachment note from earlier. So other times when my cofounder, Casey, goes on a really big tier one health podcast, the goal is to get those people to convert into customers. And so you you just there is one other interesting thing about podcast ads and other podcast related metrics is you have to when you're calculating your customer acquisition cost, you have to use some sort of a a weighted hack because your attribution for podcasts is not a 100%. You're gonna get a lot more people sign up who will say, like, oh, I heard about you from this podcast. And sometimes it's a podcast they heard like 6 months ago, so they're not gonna click on the link.
Sam Corcos:And so whenever you're doing the math on that, you gotta weight your cat. Sometimes it's a 2 x, sometimes it's a 3 x. You kinda have to use some judgment on what you're weighting is there. Similarly, if you're using meta ads or Google ads, they will aggressively over attribute. Anybody who has seen anything in the last year related to your content, they will claim that as a conversion.
Sam Corcos:And so when they say, yeah, this one's one of ours, you have to weigh that like 0.2. Like any anything that they say was an actual conversion, you gotta weigh that in the opposite direction. So you you've gotta figure out where these numbers are. There's a I I never really liked the saying it's an art, not a science because it's usually, in my experience, just an excuse for lazy thinking. But there is a degree of of judgment that is required to be able to make good decisions around these types of attribution.
Michael Houck:So it's usually a science, but in this case, it actually is kind of a little bit of an art.
Sam Corcos:Well, I I think it's still a science. It's just a science that is not it's not a particularly precise science. So it requires some judgment, and over time, you can get better at making those hypotheses and seeing if your judgments are correct. If you're constantly over or under attributing over time, you eventually figure that out. So I think there's there's a degree of judgment that's required to make good decisions.
Michael Houck:I think that judgment was also probably super important. That same type of judgment is super important when you guys were first setting things up for Casey. Right? Because Yep. You mentioned how there's oh, it's been proven that people can become large creators in this niche.
Michael Houck:There's an appetite for it. You can see what content formats are maybe working for them. But if a niche is crowded and there's a lot of people in it, like, how do you know you can carve out sort of a new place for for someone new to come into it? So I guess just, like, walk me through how you identified that gap
Sam Corcos:for her specifically. You can always convince yourself not to do something. Like, you can you can lead with, oh, it's too crowded, so it's not worth doing. Or you can say, nobody has really done this before. There's no evidence that there's a market here, so we just shouldn't do it.
Sam Corcos:So you can always convince yourself that it's not gonna work. I think it comes back to talking to customers, using some judgment. I would interview somebody, and I'd hear their backstory. Why are they interested in health? Where do they get their information from on these topics?
Sam Corcos:And they would say, oh, I follow x person on Instagram, and I listen to these 8 podcasts. It's a pretty good sign. Like, what if that x person on Instagram was one of our people? And what if we went on all 8 of those podcasts? We're gonna capture a lot of that same kind of person who would convert into a Levels customer.
Sam Corcos:So finding those people and I think this was an interesting, maybe, anecdote from the early days of Levels when we'd ask people questions like, what are products that you view as similar to Levels? What are other health related practices that you have? Just trying to learn as much as we can about people. And something that we found that was true in the early days, I'm sure it's not true anymore, but we found that people who own a Peloton and practice intermittent fasting have a 100% conversion rate into levels customers. For some reason, those two things, our our guess was they've displayed a willingness to spend $2,000 and they're up to speed on what people are paying attention to in health.
Sam Corcos:And the combination of those two means this is a product that they will buy. So the only way that you find out that stuff is just by talking to people, sending out surveys, whatever it is, you're not gonna get that information. It's it's all qualitative, and you start picking up these trends. It's like, oh, I've noticed these 5 podcasts come up over and over and over again. And, like, they really it seems like there's a trend here where a lot of people are following these folks on Instagram.
Sam Corcos:So you just have to display some judgment and be able to think strategically about how to execute on that.
Michael Houck:Okay. So then you've kinda figured out, hey. Maybe this will work. Maybe you're seeing some early signs that it will. Casey has tons and tons of followers now.
Michael Houck:Her account's huge. What did you sort of do along the way to to keep that growth going? So I think that anyone can get a couple 1,000 followers or something like that. How how do you get
Michael Houck:to the level she's at now?
Sam Corcos:A lot of it is just dedicated effort. I mean, this was her full time role for years. So her primary role was externally facing. So getting those reps, we she had a chief of staff. She had admin support.
Sam Corcos:She had the whole growth team behind her. She had a multimedia team helping her make assets. So it takes real effort to build these things. Like, we probably put in the range of 1,000,000 of dollars building that. Over time as you're seeing traction, you just you see what's working and you can commit resources to it, but it, yeah, it was it was a big lift.
Michael Houck:So I think the sort of other way to approach it is just partnering with existing creators who have these audiences and those niches. Obviously, you know, you gain more leverage by kind of owning that yourself with someone on your team and, you know, you have more control. If you were starting from scratch, like the founder listing that's starting from scratch, how would you think about the trade offs between those two routes?
Sam Corcos:We never really considered bringing someone on externally who already had an audience because it's usually much cheaper to just work with them as affiliates or partners. So, yeah, it's not really something that we had considered, but I guess this may be the short answer.
Michael Houck:Did you consider partnering with them as affiliates kind of ads? Oh, yeah.
Sam Corcos:We already do. Yeah. We we work with a lot of people in this category as medical advisors, as affiliates, as sponsors, as partners. There's a lot of different ways that you can instruct for those. Bringing on somebody as a cofounder needs to be more than just basically a sales relationship.
Sam Corcos:You need to be able to add value in a lot of different places.
Michael Houck:What should what should founders know if they'd ever done those creator partnership affiliate type deals before? What should they know about kind of entering into that world?
Sam Corcos:There's a lot of variability. I think that's one. It's just it comes with the territory. Like, some of the affiliate deals that we thought would be like a slam dunk just did not perform at all. But sometimes they didn't perform at all for, like, months, and then all of a sudden they start seeing traction, and you have no idea why.
Sam Corcos:Other times the, like, tiny niche creators end up being super high ROI. Even a a company like ours with a lot of experience doing this, our ability to predict which of these will be successful is surprisingly limited. So I think it just takes takes a lot of shots on goal.
Michael Houck:Yeah. I mean, this is another case of those spikes. Right? It's kind of a different kind of spike because you have kind of more control, more shots on gold than you get. But, you know, just talking about virality, the vast majority of any account's followers are gonna come from those spikes.
Michael Houck:Right? You're gonna build your audience through those moments that break through into the zeitgeist. How do you increase your hit rate on those as much as you possibly can?
Sam Corcos:It again kinda comes down to judgment. Once you've been doing it for a while, I definitely recommend if you're in growth, in partnerships, talking to other people in the category because you can get a lot of intel. And you can also share a lot of intel. So some of our best affiliates came from other companies that are in our category that we've talked to. Let's say they're adjacent to our category.
Sam Corcos:They're selling health and wellness, but not competitive in any way, and we would share like, hey, these are the 5 creators that are working really well for us. And they'll say, oh, these are the 5 that are working really well for us. And then you can you can cross pollinate, and you can see how those perform. Some of those have performed extremely well. Some of those completely fell flat.
Sam Corcos:And so there's, it's not always super explainable why that's the case, but it is one of those things that you just you've got to experiment. One of the other challenges is we we had one specific example recently where a partner that we expected to perform really well just didn't. And sometimes you just pull the plug on it, but we had this intuition, like this should be performing better. So we continued to work with that person. And then a couple cycles later, it really started to pick up and started converting.
Sam Corcos:Why? Don't really know. Not really a lot had changed. It's just sometimes it takes 3 or 4 exposures, and then people start to really convert. It's unclear.
Sam Corcos:So if you have a strong intuition, it's useful sometimes to just keep pushing and see what happens. Other times other times you gotta pull the plug early and make changes.
Michael Houck:I think another thing that happens when that happens is that it can be totally disruptive to your day. Right? Like, if you have one of these posts that goes crazy viral, millions of impressions, If it's on your own content or your co founder's content, in your case, notification is blowing up all day. It just it sucks you in. It takes up that time.
Michael Houck:And if it's from another source, all these new customers, many of them might be having problems kind of onboarding, figuring things out. How do you kinda, like, stay focused and not let that sort of just, like, totally derail your day, or should you just lean into it?
Sam Corcos:I think it kinda depends. So I think for the vast majority of your team, you should not. You should be really clear on what your priorities are and not let recency determine your priorities. If your goal is to be externally facing and to be responsive to these things, then that's what you should do. So Casey spent a lot of her time responding to people on Instagram, being super responsive with her DMs, building this zeitgeist, building this movement, because that was a big part of the role.
Sam Corcos:So I think it can suck up a lot of energy from people who really have other things that they should be focusing on. So just, I guess, being really clear on what your priorities are and then do those things.
Michael Houck:Okay. So let's talk about this as, like, a a broader strategy. Right? We talked earlier that spiky growth, non repeatable growth on, like, the PR side, not necessarily as appealing. Spiky growth where it maybe is a little more controllable, but there's still these unknowns on the content side.
Michael Houck:Like, do you feel like aiming for that with your content, like, going after virality specifically is a good strategy? Or do you think it's better to maybe put out less content, but have it be extremely high quality, well produced content?
Sam Corcos:I think it'll depend a lot on what your business is. In our case in health and wellness, people are looking for credible high quality content. People have a hard time trusting different sources. So if you look at a lot of our ultimate guides on our blog, they have 30, 40, 50 scientific references. We put a lot of work, 1,000, sometimes tens of 1,000 of dollars of research into some of these pieces.
Sam Corcos:We wanna make, like, the ultimate resource on the Internet for this topic. So in our case, building the really high quality material is way more important than building catchy viral content because there's already a lot of that and it already undermines enough trust. So getting views and impressions is not really the goal. If your company is like the Dollar Shave Club or the Squatty Potty or like these other these other consumer companies where virality is really the most important thing, then that's what you should optimize for. And building a building a high quality, 50 scientific references, editorial team around razor blades, probably a complete and utter waste of time.
Sam Corcos:So I think knowing who your audience is and how you engage with them is really gonna determine how you approach that.
Michael Houck:A hot topic right now is the importance of followers. I think we've seen the shift to algorithmic feeds kind of across the board. You know, TikTok has pushed us heavily. Other platforms have adopt and adopted it. Do you think algorithms are at a point where they're good enough where your follower count or the follower count of the creators you partner with maybe doesn't matter as much and it's more just about the content itself?
Michael Houck:Or do you think that there still is a purpose of, like, building that follower base on on a platform?
Sam Corcos:Well, I think this this ties back again to what the goals are, your customers. In health, trust and credibility is extra important because it's already hard enough to know what is true or healthy. So having an individual who you trust that you follow, I think is a lot more important for us than it would be for other people. So I think it's really, again, comes back to what are your customers looking for. If they're looking for amusement, if they're looking for, something that's like an impulse purchase, then you probably don't need deep trust and credibility with your audience.
Sam Corcos:You just need something that captures their attention. If a lot of people who purchase our product have been following us and reading our newsletter for 6 months before they finally make a purchase, I think the median time to purchase is like 3 to 6 months. So that means there's a lot of education, there's a lot of trust building that happens there. So it's not like somebody sees an ad and like, oh, that looks cool. I'll just buy that right now.
Sam Corcos:It's it's much less common for us than it would be for other types of businesses.
Michael Houck:When you have a product that is creating a new category like you guys have done, I think a lot of startups end up spending even the majority of their time early on in sort of just generating awareness rather than kind of doing direct sales. But you guys started selling, I think, while it was still in closed beta before the product was even, like, fully available to folks. What why did you decide to to focus on that so early?
Sam Corcos:The ultimate proof of product market fit is that people are willing to give you money for your thing. That's it. I had a conversation with somebody recently who she said, we have product market fit. People just aren't buying it. It's like, okay.
Sam Corcos:What does that mean? Like, well, we get great feedback. We built this amazing product, and everyone tells us how great it is, but people just aren't buying it. It's it's an interesting definition of product market fit. I think what she's saying is people are qualitatively telling us that they like our product, but but we don't have product market.
Sam Corcos:It's there's a reason why they call it product market fit. If if there's no market, people are not willing to pay you money, you don't have a you don't have product market set. Right? You just have something. So I think I really wanted to validate that people were willing to pay money for this thing before we even started the company.
Sam Corcos:I think a lot of our early customers just sent me money on Venmo. That was enough validation for me. Like, wow, if we if we can get 20, 50, a 100 people to go through this janky process with a really terrible product because we solve a large enough problem for them, it's a really good sign. So I think you've got to collect money. You have to prove that people want your thing early.
Michael Houck:Yeah. I mean, the market in product market, it's an economic activity. Right? A market is an economic thing. You can't just sort of expect it to be field of dreams where people start showing up just because.
Michael Houck:Right? That's not the real world.
Sam Corcos:For sure. And as I as I often tell first time founders in particular, it's not if you build it they will come. In software, it's really the opposite, which is if they come, you will build it.
Michael Houck:Right?
Sam Corcos:Because you can build pretty much anything in software and it's actually not that hard. Finding a market where people are willing to pay you money to solve a problem is a lot harder than building software.
Michael Houck:Yeah. You get such a good sense of sort of who your ICP is that you whittle down the amount of uncertainty that exists with the startup as much as you can, as quickly as you can. I guess, how did you guys see that play out with the hardware product, though? Because you you had to invest in in actually building that side of things too.
Sam Corcos:Yeah. We don't make the hardware. So Abbott and Dexcom are the 2 manufacturers of the of the sensors. So for us, it was really it's a novel application of existing technology that people were generally not familiar with. So we knew that the education burden would be significant.
Sam Corcos:We'd have to teach people about this whole new category of things. If you're if you're selling something, like, I don't know, shoes, you're selling something that people are already seeking, it can be your your cost to acquire customers can be relatively low. If you have to educate people about a new market and a new product that they've never even thought about before, it can take months of education to get people to the point where they understand what it is and they're willing to purchase it. You have to know early on what type of problem are you gonna solve and how do you how do you intercept those people. And if you know that this is something that's novel and new for people, how do you teach them what it is and generate that demand?
Michael Houck:Yeah. I think I mean, you guys obviously did a very good job of this. Maybe I'm too close to the the target market here, but I felt like I was seeing tons of my friends wearing the patch basically right away as soon as I heard about you guys a few years ago. So I guess yeah. How did you sort of pull that off so quickly, get over that challenge?
Sam Corcos:I think the nice thing about having a physical product is that people see it. So it's way more visible. There are, I'm sure, many, many software products that had much more rapid penetration than we did, but you would have never known about it because it's not physically on their body. Like, it's like if you're selling a hat, people are literally wearing it on their head, and you can just see it. There it is.
Sam Corcos:That's a a major advantage that we have in terms of virality and word-of-mouth. So I so I have still today a pretty significant percentage. I think it's 20, 30 percent of our inbound comes from referrals from friends because people see it and they ask, what is that? It's a novel thing. And then people explain it, and then they wanna see for themselves.
Sam Corcos:So it has definitely has some virality factor there.
Michael Houck:Kind of a common thread throughout this conversation has been the, you know, sort of the the value you get from investing in putting yourself out there and through your own channels and sort of building up a broader network around your product, right, and the awareness of your product. Obviously, very important for you guys early on. Did it very well. How much time should a founder be spending on sort of building up that broader network around the product, not just maybe for customers, but also for, as we mentioned, hiring, and you guys even did it for for investors really well too.
Sam Corcos:This is another one of those things that sort of a lazy answer, but depends depends on what your goals are. I think it's really helpful to have somebody who's really well connected in the investor base. Be able to get if you're one degree separated from any investor that you'd wanna talk to, really helps to have that credibility where people are comfortable and confident introducing you to people that you wanna talk to. When it comes to hiring your first set of people on your team, knowing the people that either are the people you wanna hire or are one degree separated from those people is also really important. This ties into this broader concept of network theory called eigenvector centrality.
Sam Corcos:It's one of the types of one of the types of connectedness within a network, which is it's the number of people that you know, but it's also one degree beyond that. It's actually n degrees beyond that, which is how many people do all of those people know? So it's one thing to be very well connected in a small network of people, but if you're connected to all of those super connected people in their networks, that's really, really high leverage. So I think that's that's something that's really underappreciated is the the larger the network that you have access to and the the trust that you build in those groups, the more reach it gives you across all different categories of people. So it's, the question of how much time should people be spending on it, I think it kind of depends, of course, on what your goal is.
Sam Corcos:But what I found is people are usually a lot less intentional about what it means to to, like, finger quotes network. It's like the other the number of times I've been at these conferences where I, like, meet random people and they give me their business card and scurry off. It's like, does that person think that he just networked? Like, what are we doing here? That was really weird.
Sam Corcos:So I think it's about being really intentional with what your goals are and building genuine relationships. A lot of my most important connections in work and in life were not they were not people that I sought out. They were not things that they were not things that I I had any sort of goal beyond just this is an interesting person, and I'm gonna spend time with them. In other work contexts, it can get really easy to be just sucked into, oh, I'm going to another tech conference. I'm gonna meet more tech people.
Sam Corcos:But there is a point of diminishing returns. If you work in venture, does knowing another person in venture really help you build your network? Probably not. If you work in finance, does knowing another person in finance really help you? If you're a lawyer meeting the, like, 2000th lawyer, does that really help you expand your network?
Sam Corcos:Probably not. But meeting somebody that's in a totally different network who has access to a lot of different information is probably a lot more useful. You guys applied that that theory really well to to fundraising. Right?
Michael Houck:I think you had something like a 150 people. A lot
Sam Corcos:of them were,
Michael Houck:like, pretty unrelated to each other, on the cap table early on. And was that important for distribution? Like, how did that help?
Sam Corcos:It really helped across the board. It helped in distribution. It helped especially in the early days when you kinda have no idea what you're doing. If you have questions on regulatory, if you have questions on marketing strategy, if you have questions on editorial, if you have questions on certain product decisions, if you have questions on how to get in touch with certain people, having a really large network of people who have experience in these things can help you a lot. The difference between trying to figure it out yourself and having a 30 minute conversation with somebody who just knows the answer can save you a lot of pain.
Sam Corcos:So we've gotten a lot of value from that expansive network of investors and advisors that we have.
Michael Houck:So for somebody who, maybe first time founder, they don't have those connections with, you know, influential people, investors, even creators, what should they be doing? Should they be even going after starting a a venture backed company right now, or should they just focus on sort of building up the nodes in that network early on in an authentic way? You can start
Sam Corcos:a venture backed company with no connections. It's just a lot harder, kinda at some point, sir. So you can kinda do it however you wanna do it. It's having knowing all the people that you're gonna hire for your initial team and building that trust over 5 or 10 years to a point where they want to join your company. It makes it a lot easier.
Sam Corcos:But there were lots of people who have done it without having those connections. So I don't think it's a requirement. It's more like it it will it will definitely accelerate the process.
Michael Houck:The founders that I see doing really well with content and kinda succeeding with it, like you guys have done, is that they build repeatable systems. Right? They invest in not just going out and creating one piece of content, but building a a system sort of like how you're talking about you did around Casey, right, with these other resources. I imagine the delegation plays into that quite a lot. You know, you have this incredible first round review piece that I totally recommend everyone go read about how you have, like, a a team of assistants helping out with various things across the business and and for you personally.
Michael Houck:What's been the value of that? Is that something you'd recommend people to invest in early on, and and kinda how does that work?
Sam Corcos:Yeah. I think support staff is generally undervalued and underappreciated. I think people can get a tremendous amount of leverage from relatively inexpensive labor helping them with tasks. When I say relative, I mean it specifically, which is your time relative to the time of your admin Freeing up your time to do other things that are higher leverage is worth a lot more than the cost of hiring that support person. So we have 40 people on our team.
Sam Corcos:I think we have 20 20 admins that are supporting. So we get quite a lot of leverage from from that team. They do everything from managing a big chunk of our legal function, to our finance function, to our HR function, to helping keep on top of how people are posting about us on social. They they really across the entire company, we're able to get leverage there so that our people on our core team can really focus on the highest value things.
Michael Houck:Yeah. Building that leverage, that's how you accelerate. That's how you kind of get out of the the rut, of of early stage startups often. Yep. Cool.
Sam Corcos:Okay.
Michael Houck:We have, like, a little rapid fire outro that
Sam Corcos:you'd like
Michael Houck:to do.
Sam Corcos:Let's do it. Four quick questions.
Michael Houck:Okay. So name one investor who other founders should take capital from and and why.
Sam Corcos:I mean, this is not gonna be a particularly obscure answer, but I think Andreessen Horowitz has been a great partner. If you pay attention and you're willing to put in some work yourself, they have a lot of resources at their disposal that you can leverage to do a lot, more than any other firm I've ever seen. So if you're willing to put in the work, you can get
Michael Houck:a lot out of it. Yeah. That was my experience as well. They went above and beyond time and time again, and they have so much that they can offer. Okay.
Michael Houck:What's one thing it's gonna be broad.
Sam Corcos:One thing that you'd change about the start up world? I'm not sure how to change this, but I think the risk tolerance of venture has decreased substantially over the last 10 or 20 years. Think venture historically has been people who take a lot of risk on very early bets for potentially world changing technology, and it seems like a lot more of venture today is just basically just replacing price to earnings ratios with LTV to CAC ratios or, like, revenue multiples. It seems like there's been a lot of it's just been a blending of what venture used to mean of what private equity means now. So I think I would probably say I would like to see more more risk tolerance for I was talking to somebody about this not too long ago.
Sam Corcos:I think the incredible returns and risk profile, meaning extremely low risk of b two b SaaS has sort of broken what venture even means. So I wish there was more risk tolerance for some of these bigger bets.
Michael Houck:Yeah. I totally agree. And that's that's sort of grown in in tandem with just the proliferation of new managers and new funds trying to make sort of a name for them themselves. Yeah. Okay.
Michael Houck:Next one. What's your number one piece of advice for a brand new first time founder? Talk to customers. Done. Check.
Michael Houck:And then what's something this is Peter Thiel 1. What's something you believe that most people disagree with you about?
Sam Corcos:I have a lot of those, so I'm trying to pick which one would make the most sense. Pick your favorite. I think one that we've seen a lot of benefit from is I think there is this assumption of how a manager direct report relationship should operate. I have, I think, 20 direct reports, and I spend very little of my time on 1 on ones, and it works extremely well. And I think there's this default of 1 manager per 8 direct reports, and you just like cookie cutter that.
Sam Corcos:I'm not a big believer in having a manager class at all. I actually don't think it should exist. I think, one of our cultural values which we we stole from Airbnb is leaders are in the details. People need to know how their function works. So people might have direct reports, but they're not a manager.
Sam Corcos:They are a person who delivers value and they have people who report to them, and that relationship doesn't have to be the personal therapist of everyone on their team. I think you can have a different style of relationship if that's what you're optimizing for. I think having more direct reports with a different set of expectations can solve problems much more quickly. It reduces many, many layers of that game of telephone or decisions to get made. You can make decisions a lot faster.
Sam Corcos:So I think taking making fewer assumptions about how you have to do things is, is a big one when it comes to that type of relationship.
Michael Houck:Basically, you're in founder mode.
Sam Corcos:Yeah. For sure.
Michael Houck:Cool. Well, Sam, thanks so much, man. This was great. Where can folks find you? Where should folks go to learn more about Levels?
Sam Corcos:I'm, levels is just levels.com. That's easy to find us there, and I'm on Twitter or x just at Sam Corcos.
Michael Houck:Cool. Thanks, man.
Sam Corcos:Sure thing.
Michael Houck:Thanks for listening. I write up my main takeaways from every conversation and make them available to all of our members at foundingjourney.com, along with a bunch of other perks and more content. If you found this conversation valuable, subscribe to Founding Journey on Spotify, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or whenever your favorite podcast app is. I post a new episode every Thursday. Also, consider leaving us a rating or a review.
Michael Houck:As a brand new podcast, this is the best way for us to get out there and founders to find us. See you next time.