How This Crazy Customer Development Strategy Can Help Your Product Score Raving Fans

You get to product-market fit by learning from your customers and building in that feedback. You don't get to product-market fit by scaling operations.

All right, everybody. Today we've got the co-founder and CEO, Sam Korkos, of Levels, which is a real-time dashboard for your body's metabolism, giving you personalized insights into how different foods affect your body and your health.

It's interesting in our case because the market is so large. Many people have totally different ways they want to use this tool. For some of them, we're solving a knowledge problem, which is they're— they have what they think is a very healthy diet. Maybe they do a green juice every morning and they don't realize that it's actually just like 50 grams of liquefied sugar, and it's actually the source of a lot of their lifestyle problems. And for other people, we're solving a discipline problem. Where this is a, this is a tool where we're measuring molecules in your body in real time. So whereas if you have a nutritionist and you're supposed to text them pictures of what you eat and you just don't text them that you ate a donut, they're never going to know. This removes that layer of plausible deniability and it keeps you accountable to your own goals. So different people of these 12 or so different major personas we have, each of them really does have a distinct Job that they want this product to solve for them. So just understanding that is important.

Got it. So what would be your question around understanding jobs to be done? Is it just— actually, I'm not gonna leave you with the question. You go.

Yeah, I think the— this is something that also just in project management is a good strategy of just success criteria. At the end of the month when the program ends, what would it look like for this to be successful for you?

How did you find out that it, it had to do with the Peloton bike and intermittent fasting? Like, how did you settle on those 2 points?

Well, we didn't settle on it. It just, it sort of organically emerged.

So one of the signals—

yeah, we kept seeing the signal, like the, the questions that we would ask. So the Peloton came up a lot in a willingness to pay discussion was like, what, What would something like this be worth to you? And people would say $50, or they'd say $2,000. And we would then dig into what is, what is your anchor point? And one that we heard all the time was, well, you know, I spent this amount on my Peloton. It's going to be a lot like that. Like, oh, okay. A lot of these people own Pelotons. That's interesting. And then we would just start asking them more directly, like, do you own a Peloton?

Yeah.

And we found that a large percentage of people did, or at least a measurable percentage. I wouldn't necessarily say a large percentage of people, but—

That's fascinating.

We just started seeing these patterns and the intermittent fasting one came up a lot in the, like, what, who do you follow in the space? What is a blog post that you'd want to see? They say, well, I'd love to know how this interacts with intermittent fasting, or I follow Kevin Rose and Peter Attia and I, I read a lot about intermittent fasting. So These things sort of emerge organically. And this is why in the process, I wouldn't say a framework for customer development, I really do think of it as a process. You have to adapt your process as you learn from your customers and try to get to an end state where you can take something actionable from it.

I want to talk about the SEO strategy because it sounds like you've been on top of it. You're the co-founder and CEO. You've been doing the customer development, but you're also handling the SEO side of things too. So what's going on there? I mean, it sounds like it's been working pretty well in addition to Twitter.

Yeah, so my co-founder, Dr. Casey Means, she's a functional medicine doctor from Stanford. She's been taking lead on most of our SEO strategy and writing a lot of the content. One of the books that I wouldn't necessarily recommend for everybody, but if this is a similar use case, the book They Ask, You Answer is a really great book on SEO strategy if the people that you're targeting are asking questions like ours are. They ask questions like, what is a normal glucose level? We are— we've only been actively pursuing a content strategy for a few months. We started seeing results almost immediately, within 2 months. Casey has been putting together really long-form, deep thought leadership pieces with 30 to 40 scientific references. We probably put $5,000 to $10,000 into each of these posts. And we started getting featured as the answer in Google snippets. If you search for skin and glucose, you're going to get Levels as our blog as the featured answer. We're now— we are the featured answer for many, many questions that we care about. And it's because we really put— we took the time to put together content that is really the best that exists. Our blog is becoming widely recognized from real thought leaders in metabolic health as the source of truth for this type of information.

Got it. So it's just to be clear, it sounds like maybe you are funneling the questions that you're getting on these customer development calls to your co-founder and she's writing everything. So you don't necessarily have a content team right now. It's just her.

Yeah, that's right. She is the content team. We do work with a number of doctors. One of the things that we found just from some people that we've spoken to who have done this very successfully is that having doctors writing these pieces, especially when it's medical, and having a set of doctors that review them, Really does increase Google's willingness to feature your articles as quality. So that's been really helpful. We have often multiple doctors review every post, and almost all of them are written by doctors. So the, the core piece of our content strategy has been really high-quality information. We've, we've tried outsourcing this to a number of firms. But it hasn't really worked. You really, you need to have the thought leaders actually writing the pieces and just, there's no shortcut to it. You really have to just invest in it.

If you look at January, basically 4 backlinks from 4 referring domains. Now you have about 250. So it's going up and to the right and it's exponential right now. So they're just going to continue to gain more and more traffic, which I think is amazing. So as she's your co-founder, I'm assuming she's busy doing other stuff. How much content is she cranking out per week just so people can get a sense?

Yeah, so she is— I think our target is something like 3 per week. And so one of them will be like a major thought leadership piece. I think our goal now is 3 pieces of thought leadership per month.

Got it.

And then 2 pieces of like customer testimonials and interviews and some other maybe shorter form, more easily digested specific piece of content.

And when you say you spend $5,000 to $10,000, maybe I heard that incorrectly. What are you spending on exactly for each post?

Yeah, that's just— those are for the thought leadership pieces. So that's just like cost of time in terms of Casey's time writing the post, getting the doctors who are reviewing it, quantifying their time, any of the research that goes into it beforehand. You really have to invest in these. It was a risk that we took and it's been paying off. And as I mentioned, it started paying off very quickly. I think within 2 months, we were starting to see— we went from roughly 0% of our traffic coming from organic to 20% within probably 3 months just from making the real investment.

Cool. Good deal. So what else are you doing that's been working from a growth/marketing standpoint?

Yeah. We don't have any marketing people on our team. Our whole team is technical. I think for a lot of this, you just have to— you have to roll with the punches. One of the things that we found early on is that people love sharing this information. And we didn't know that coming in. We don't, we don't push people to post stuff on social. Twitter is very active. Instagram is twice as active as Twitter. People love sharing this data. And so when we started seeing that, we just leaned in harder to how do we make the app more shareable? Instead of trying to force people to do it, we just saw what behavior was and we just leaned into different aspects of it.

So there's a FOMO aspect there, but there's a double FOMO aspect when you have a— you can't just go and get it, you have to apply. So what was the thinking behind that?

Honestly, that was just— that was a necessity. I, I'm a big believer that to get to product-market fit, you have to learn from your customers. We, we interview almost every customer at the midpoint when they're halfway through the program, and we interview them at the end of the program to get product feedback. We've, we've had 500, 600 version releases since January. We're iterating constantly, and you get to product-market fit by learning from your customers and building in that feedback. You don't get to product market fit by scaling operations and by investing engineering time into ops scalability. So we've, we've knowingly and intentionally underinvested in ops scalability. So it's not that we— It's not that we don't want to take on more customers. We really just can't. We don't have the ops capacity to onboard as many people as want to sign up. So we're gating this so that we can make sure that we're still handholding and we're learning from customers as much as we can. Once we aren't seeing as much value from that process, then we're going to start investing a lot more in operational scalability.

Got it. So it's more of a— instead of like an objective KPI, it's more so like a feeling that you're getting, right? Like this is actually starting to see diminishing returns. Let's start to move to scaling. Yeah.

Like I would say when we start— when all of the answers we get are the same as answers we've already heard. Like, we're, we're still getting a lot of new information.

This has been great, Sam. What's the best way for people to find you online?

I'm on Twitter @SamKorkos. That's the easiest way to get a hold of me.

Cool. Easy enough. Everyone go check out Levels. I'm excited to stick one on me today and see what happens. But that is it for today. We will see you all next one.