Metabolic Mojo: How levels turned a medical device into a cult movement.
Building a 200K person pre-launch waitlist
It Started in 2019 With a Laser-Focused Problem
The Levels founders—Josh Clemente and Dr. Casey Means—asked a simple question: Why can’t non-diabetics see real-time glucose data? They saw a double-whammy opportunity: exploding consumer interest in wearables and a looming metabolic-health crisis.
By positioning their CGM-powered app as “biological observability for everyone,” Levels carved out a niche big enough to scale yet narrow enough to own.
Fast Feedback Loops = Stickier Product & Social Media Gold
A CGM gives users a glucose reading every 5 minutes. Levels baked that “instant consequence” into the UX: drink Coke, watch your curve spike, get a behavioral nudge. The loop became: data → habit tweak → visible improvement → deeper engagement.
Not only did stickiness soar, driving 90-day retention far beyond typical health-app norms. Screenshots of the data were addictively shareable on social media
Turning a Waitlist Into a Movement
- June 2020: ~1400 people were already queued for a private beta.
Precision Influencer Seeding
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 next 3 weeks, we're continuing our growth teardown series on Health companies
✅ Week 1: Levels Health
☑️ Week 2: WHOOP — wearables + membership flywheel
☑️ 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.