Metabolic Mojo: How Levels turned a medical device into a cult movement.
Building a 200K person pre-launch waitlist
It Started in 2019
The Levels founders—Josh Clemente and Dr. Casey Means—asked a simple question: Why can’t non-diabetics see real-time glucose data?
They created a CGM + App positioned for everyone - giving users a glucose reading every 5 minutes.
Levels baked that instant feedback into the UX so someone can drink Coke, watch their curve spike, and get a behavioral nudge = don't drink Coke!
With this instant feedback, not only did stickiness soar, but screenshots of the data were addictively shareable on social media
By June 2020
~14,000 people were already queued for a private beta.
Given the share-ability of the data, Levels went after influencers
Early on, Influencer Ali Spagnola (2.5 M followers) started posting her “glucose spike” experiments, calling the content “so easy with what you guys are doing, the content writes itself.” Each post sent a rush of new beta requests.
Founder Podcast Blitz
During the closed beta, Sam and Casey completed 100 podcast appearances in six months, driving both backlinks and wait-list conversions while spending virtually $0 on ads.
Organic FOMO at scale
Instead of treating sign-ups like a static email list, Levels sent “Friday Forum” behind-the-scenes videos, shared internal metrics...
and dropped skip-the-line codes for influencers to spark viral loops. Result: organic FOMO at scale.
- Sept 2020: the waitlist hit 31K—then 50K three months later.
- Apr 2022: it topped 200K.
Community-Powered Capital
Turning customers into shareholders aligned incentives (raise awareness → grow personal equity) and de-risked future rounds.
- Seed Round (2020): $12M led by a16z.
- Series A (2021): $38M—$5M of that filled by members in six hours.
- Extension (2024): another $10M with $3M from 2K community investors.
Content Engine > Ad Budget
2M annual blog visits; the Ultimate Guide to Glucose nets ~33% alone and they use it for the majority of their lead generation
- YouTube playlists showing real customer glucose experiments
Proof in the P&L
Current Growth Signals
Here are the three Meta Ads that Levels health had running on Feb 2025 and they were the same 3 ads when I checked periodically over a couple of months. These ads had been running since Sep 2024, indicating this was a successful campaign.
The ads linked to the Ultimate Guide to Glucose blog post, helping build their mailing list of 436K active members.
However, now when you look – their ads are turned off
Is this a sign of the changing digital landscape putting a business at risk? Watch this space!
Over the coming weeks, we're continuing our growth teardown series on Health companies
✅ Week 1: Levels — turning a medical device into a cult movement
✅ Week 2: WHOOP — the growth path from niche to $3.6B valuation
☑️ Week 3: AG1 — building a whole category on the back of paid acquisition
☑️ Week 4: Parsley Health — functional medicine turned scalable care
BONUS: 10 Headlines Click-Test Results
We click-tested this post's headlines to see which angle really grabs founders’ attention and here are the results:
My 2 cents on the data:
- The top headline is not surprising - people love scaling up FAST so going from '44K-200K in 18 Months' gets the clicks. I didn't choose this one because our article is more about the 0-44K than 44K+ so it didn't feel authentic.
- People also love X-Step (Playbooks, Systems, Formulas) which ranked #2. Again I wasn't feeling it for this post.
- I chose #3 because it felt the most authentic to the content.