On this episode of DTC Pod, Ben joins Blaine & Ramon to talk about the importance of experimentation in growth for startups. They talk about demand gen, building a waitlist, content production, GTM strategy, marketing personas, educational marketing, UGC, in-house content programming, and much more.

8:10 Great Products Make A Statement
We call it levels in the wild. Someone sees the patch on someone else and you give the like head nod, you're like, Hey, you're one of us, right? Because you feel like you're part of this club and it still happens to this day. And so there was a lot of UGC and a lot of earned media that we would get out of that where people just wanted to show others like, I'm trying to take agency over my own health and like here's what I'm doing about it.

9:10 Fill Your Funnel First 🚰
And we grew at roughly 7% month over month over the course of two years. So when we launched, like our wait list was at 265,000 people, it's like that's a significant number of people if they're actually engaged. It's not about trying to target them for conversions. It's about how can we start to educate them about metabolic health so that they can change their behavior without needing to buy levels to feel like they're, they're making behavior changes in their life.

11:00 Let Your Process Compound 💰
But he ran this ninja process of we're gonna get the founders on every podcast possible and ramp up to be higher and higher tiers. Like would the material they talk about, would the education they provide be interesting enough for someone like Tim Ferris to say, Hey, come on my podcast. If you start to do that, you get the right partners on board. Now Tim is a partner of ours where he's got the levels out link slash Tim Reads, right? And that's an amazing thing.

22:00 Every Partnership Needs THIS ✨
So with thought leaders, they all work on social proof, right? It's like who else is showing up to the party? No one wants to be the first of the party, but if they know that, like if, what's the probability that somebody that would be at Tim Ferris's level is also interested? If Tim is interested and their friends well, a lot higher than if Tim feels like he's on an island by himself and he is like, none of my friends are at this party, right?

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Ben Grynol - Head of Growth at Levels
Ramon Berrios - CEO of Trend.io
Blaine Bolus - Co-Founder of Seated