Better Product LAUNCH: LEON

Episode Transcription

Christian:

Welcome to this episode of Better Product LAUNCH where we're sitting down with a founder to give you an inside look into their new product launch.

Anna:

Today we're talking to Bryan Smith, Co-Founder of LEON, a corporate wellness platform that focuses on creating a world where work empowers a healthier life. Bryan, it's so awesome to have you with us today.

Bryan Smith:

Thank you so much. I'm excited.

Anna:

Cool. I guess just to start, we're going to be talking about LEON pretty much this whole episode. I don't want to spoil it for anyone, but I would love to hear a little bit about what is LEON? Give us somewhere to start.

Bryan Smith:

LEON at its heart is a data platform. What I mean by that is ... Are you guys familiar with your typical employee engagement platforms or companies like Culture Amp or 15Five or anything like that?

Christian:

Yeah.

Bryan Smith:

We look at companies like that as obviously having value, but if you look at the name of employee engagement, they don't necessarily engage the employee. They engage managers and leaders on how to potentially make better decisions and what not. So, we looked at the space as no one is really the advocate on the health or the wellness or the mentality of the employee themselves.

What we do is, we have a platform, which is pretty much integrate into every single thing you can imagine from pretty much every studio or gym within the country, your Headspaces, your Talkspaces of the world, bike shares, races, events, pretty much everything. Then what we do is we use surveys and engagement metrics to ultimately self-detect, early detect or mitigate things like burnout, mental health, performance decrements for employees themselves.

Christian:

It seems to me like, and you probably wouldn't speak negatively of competitors in the space, but it seems to me like what you're describing is like there's almost a table stake sort of employee engagement assessment that we have right now, which to your point really targets leaders and not necessarily the employees themselves. It's almost like when you talk about wellness, to me that's almost like the difference between talking about investing or I guess maybe saving money. It's something for the long-term. It's like, give a little now to get a big return later. It's like employee happiness is almost this overarching thing that's not as easy to measure through the tools that we are doing today, which is just surveys and 360 reviews and things like that.

Bryan Smith:

Totally. I mean, it's important to understand my background. I come from a sports science background. We use data analytics to both predict performance and injury in professional athletes. Stuff like mental health and burnout and stuff is all quantifiable, but companies aren't looking at it the right way, especially if you take the burnout. I'm assuming you guys have experienced burnout-

Christian:

Never. [crosstalk 00:02:51] Why? Do I look burnt out to you? I'm totally fine [crosstalk 00:02:55].

Bryan Smith:

[crosstalk 00:02:55] you guys do a week. It's one of these things where burnout stuff is a physiological process. You can't just manage your way out of burnout. To sort of wrap it all up in a bow for you, is we are looking to super power employees and optimize employees. We want to be the employee advocate. In doing that, we're making companies better. We're not necessarily trying to make managers better or leaders better. We want to make people better. Especially now if you look at the space that we're in from working from home and never ultimately going back to the office, the idea of company culture is almost dead to a certain extent. So, now we just need to create more resilient, more adaptive badass employees, to tell you the truth.

Christian:

Yeah. You brought up the times that we're in and the remote work and even burnout. I think I've been seeing a lot more lately about the criticism against the hustle culture, for example, like with founders, and just taking care of yourself even as a founder. So, it feels like not even just with founders but with employees having to juggle being at home with families and all of that, it almost seems like a lot of that stuff has come to the fore a lot more today than maybe even a year ago. Have you seen the impacts even as LEON as you guys have gone to market? As you're selling, have you noticed any shift in the sentiment around that topic?

Bryan Smith:

Yeah. Before COVID on average with our employee clients, we saw, I believe, it was about 34% rolling 90-day average on burnout or employees that would experience symptoms of burnout. Since COVID, that's jumped up to about 62%, which is pretty powerful. If you think about it, burnout is one of these where when I say it's physiological, it is 100% physiological meaning I can test burnout in blood testing. I can predict it. I can actually see it.

That's why managing a little less or taking a day off or giving your employee less responsibility, it's suddenly a fix for burnout. If you think about it, where burnout goes long-term, it leads to depression, it leads to alcoholism and it leads to high blood pressure. I mean, there's a lot of physiological factors that come into play with burnout, but no one is actually looking at it in a way that is detectable and that sort of thing. Ultimately, we just need better data, and that was the issue with companies as a whole.

Anna:

That's interesting to be able to see burnout that physically manifests. First of all, it has changed my entire perspective on burnout for sure. That's interesting. I kind of want to go back to the beginning of LEON. You mentioned you have a sports science background, that you were looking at performance potential for injury. How did you identify that this was ... what you were doing there had applications inside companies?

Bryan Smith:

Professional athlete and a person like you or I, although very different than someone who can run half a mile in a minute and 45 seconds, ultimately we're really the same. We still experience stress and mental health issues and performance decrements the same way as a professional athlete. The way that I looked at all of this is that if I can ultimately predict things like burnout or mental health issues or whatnot in a professional athlete, I should be able to do it to the same human being but just in a different space.

What's curious about the tech space, which is what we primarily work in, is that it's all about performance. You show up every single day and you try to scale your company at 10X. Just because you're not running or jumping while you're doing that doesn't mean that the cost, meaning from a physiological perspective, isn't the same. In a lot of ways it's sometimes greater, because at least those athletes have recovery built in and they have coaches that support them. It's much more understood rather than some sales manager who's beating you over the head trying to get those numbers up.

Christian:

I'm curious, when you talk about burnout, you're using AI, you say on the site, to do that. What type of things are you looking for in employees to detect burnout knowing that it's not a ... or maybe it is. I guess I imagine it's not like an instant thing like, "Oh, we can tell that person's burnt out today." It seems like something would build up over time. How have you engineered a product that looks more forward looking like that than just how somebody's doing right now?

Bryan Smith:

Our brand prediction index is most of the time done on a 90-day rolling average. Chris, you are right, there's too much noise in the data on a monthly basis to really get any quantifiable metric. We're ultimately collecting data pretty consistently. We roll out monthly surveys within the product, which are more employer driven, but we also have pulse surveys that are rolled out when an employee accesses certain discounts within the product or whatnot. We ultimately have a continuous [inaudible 00:07:37] survey data coming in.

Luckily with burnout, and mental health especially in tech, there's a ton of proxy data that we've been able to model off of. That being said, our company has been around for roughly about four years. We started off as a sort of traditional corporate wellness product using our integrations to allow companies to subsidize spend and whatnot within our platform for different services. The great part about that is that whole entire time, we were collecting data back. That allowed us to understand how often someone went to the gym, how many miles they were on a city bike or a bike share, how many classes they take. Then you correlate that back with sleep data, activity data, survey data, and we could eventually find the signal that we're looking for.

Christian:

It sounds like you used proxy data to start, you got in enough places to be able to generate your own data sources, and now it looks like you're productizing almost the data that you have available. So, at that stage, at the stage you're at now, catching us up to the present, how are you making product decisions? From the data that you've gathered, the insight you've gleaned, how are making that leap going to product and deciding what's going into the product and how you're going to market?

Bryan Smith:

The product is interesting because there's two different aspects of it. There's a consumer product and then there's an employer product. Even though we do provide metrics and reporting and all these other things back to companies, ultimately we have to be able to get employees to engage within the product. Essentially what happens is on a monthly basis, our system kicks out what we call playbooks. Within those playbooks, you're going to have a curated services, which we've modeled against, meaning if we see that someone is burnt out or has mental health issues or whatever have you, we've used data to understand what services they're most likely to engage with.

Again, that is a Headspace, that is virtual therapy or yoga or meditation or even blood testing to a certain extent if we get to clinical testing. Then what we also do is we curate specific learning modules and content for the employee so they can understand exactly what burn out is, how it happened, how to prevent it and how to get rid of it. Then also to it, it creates an environment where they're actually owning their health, which is so important because that's what we're trying to do in every day health. In medicine, we want to create ownership. So, that's exactly what we're trying to do on the employee level. Then we also automate a series of popup events, virtual events, live events, yearly events that these employees can engage with other similar people that might be going through the same problem.

Anna:

Obviously LEON is very data driven. It's getting a sense for people. It's really focused on the person. Is that how you would consider your solution different from the general employee engagement tools?

Bryan Smith:

Yeah, there's two different things that really differentiate us. One is that we're human focused or employee focused. In a lot of ways, we remove any of the friction points that HR usually has when trying to implement either wellness products or engagement products or even [inaudible 00:10:41]. If you think about it, most of the time these HR managers, they're just buying whatever sells them the best and sort of throwing it at the wall to see what works. As human beings, we're very subjective. The way that I engage in my health might be completely different than what you engage in your health to where everybody gave more optionality.

On the other part of it, and we haven't got into this, what we actually do as well is we're working towards or in the process of tying those metrics back to performance. Say a company's trying to close a series A. Now, closing a series A or scaling to 10X or pushing out a product in record time usually has a cost, meaning there are a people cost of doing business. What is that usually? That is burnout. That is morale issues, whatever have you. What we do within the platform and what we're data testing right now is the ability to overlay those product push outs on a timeline basis and then layering those metrics that we see during that time.

We can tell a company what was the people cost of doing business of pushing out that product. The company that wins is ultimately the company that can repeat performance over and over and over again. It's like a wide receiver in the NFL. It's not the fastest wide receiver. It's the receiver who can continuously run fast enough to beat his competition. Companies are the same way is that you have to be able to repeat performance over and over again, but if you burnout your team in your first product push, how are you going to be able to do it again?

Christian:

We talked a little bit about how the product has evolved. I'd love to shift to your website. When we talk about better product, we talk about it being almost like a triangle or intersecting Venn diagrams of marketability, usability and value, being valuable, all of those things. We talked a little bit about the value part. When I look at the page on your site, that was the first thing I saw before we ever got scheduled to talk.

What stood out to me with your site is the way that you're talking on the site. We've had this conversation right now, and you're very open and direct about things. That completely comes through on the site. Right at the very top, you say, "Your employees hate their job," but you don't actually stop there. You actually have a state, which actually has a link to click to, which I just have to applaud you as someone who went to grad school and had to cite my sources, clearly you did too because it's coming through on the site. Anyway, I give you kudos there.

Really the site, it's interesting because it feels like it's just a blog post ultimately. You have a screenshot at the top, but then as you scroll down, it's just kind of one long blog post that's sort of ... I won't read the whole thing for people. It's fairly short, but it's sort of like reading a journal entry from the future and how they got there. I'd love to hear the decision behind that, because this is a fairly unique approach to all of the dozens of product sites that I see every day.

Bryan Smith:

Yeah, so I'll start with the 85% of employees hate their job. There was a marketing decision that we had to make is that, first off, every HR tech product you ever see is me help your employees love their job more or everything is so soft. That's not business, and that's not how the world works. The truth be told, the majority of people don't like their job. Tech has this amazing bubble where everybody swears up and down that they love their job and it's the greatest thing in the whole entire world. If you go to the Midwest or whatever, or not even the Midwest, just really anywhere, if you go in retail or McDonalds, most people are going to say they love the job. Quite honestly, I love my company, but I would much rather be with my kids right now.

We've created this situation where we try to make our employees build their life around their job. No one likes that. You should be at the point where you can build your job around your life. So, there was a point there just being different when I said that 85% of employees hate their job. So, we knew we had to standout. That being said, the reason we went copy forward was because, for us, we look at ourselves as a category creator to a certain extent. It's very important for us to define the problem.

If I were just to put a bunch of screen images of what the product looks like and how it works and whatnot, does that really define the problem? Ultimately, what's going to happen is, they're just going to lump us into the same group as any other employee tech space. If I, god forbid, mention the word surveys, I'm automatically an employee engagement company. For me, it was more important to define the problem, what we need to solve. Quite honestly, we're going to stay with that.

I was talking to someone today actually [inaudible 00:15:21] from Gong who's a director of marketing over there. I asked him the simple question, I was like, "At what point do you stop the finding the problem and start talking about how you're going to fix the problem?" For us, I think it's more important to talk about the problem right now in the most fun, honest, eloquent way as possible. Then once we have enough signal to understand that people get the problem, then we can start talking about the product.

Anna:

Have you found that to resonate with your buyers? Are they just like, "I'm sick of the pastels. I'm sick of the touchy-feelyness."?

Bryan Smith:

Yeah. That was the amazing part about it. I'll go over some stats with you. When we launched, we roughly had close to 125,000 hits to the website in 48 hours. We generated within a week 4,000 inbound leads for early access. For a SaaS product with a 30 to $40,000 AR, that's a pretty good thing. The most interesting part about it is, I had close to 400 direct messages both telling me how much they hated me and how much they loved me. As far as I'm concerned, if that's the response that we get ... Truth be told, I'd never experienced that before. So, there was a little depression there for a little bit, because I don't have much of a social presence. It's not like I'm an influencer, so I don't know how to handle that process.

It resonated with people to the point where I think that we'll probably move to starting some sort of community off of it, because employees and managers and whatnot were highly engaged by it. Founders got a little bit mad, to tell you the truth. You know founders, it's like we live and die in this culture thing. So, they got a little offended, but it was a really, really good response.

Christian:

Our head of brand, and maybe you've heard this, he talks a lot about people like hot tea or cold tea. Nobody like warm tea. Yeah, people are going to love it or hate it, but that's where you want to be. You don't want to be in the middle of the road. It's got to be hard though to get, from the personal side, to get messages where people are vehemently opposed to it. As you mentioned, I would even say our sales building a company, I think it's easy to be in denial about it too and just get really emotional or react against something so in your face as well.

Bryan Smith:

There was a time where there was constant second-guessing, and to the point where our advisors, our investors, they still question it. I posted something on LinkedIn the other day and it was like good and bad company wellness ideas. There was an image where it was like microdosing on shrooms. We were completely tongue-in-cheek, but this is a complete bad idea. You shouldn't microdose on shrooms, but there's actually company that have done that to their company culture, specifically a certain company that did summer camps on a regular basis. That's the type of stuff. We want to be direct and we want to be honest with our people.

On the product side, it's been a really tough part for me, because how do you portray that in product? How do you portray that honesty in that way, especially within a SaaS product? That's something we're still trying to figure out.

Christian:

I love the approach. I want to ask one maybe challenging question. LEON today versus LEON in five years, if you succeed, you getting all these leads, you start converting these and you get larger as a product, at some point you probably outgrow a little of the style, maybe even a copy forward. Maybe the product grows in a way where you do show it off more. Have you thought about what success looks like and how you might be able to carry forward the approaches you have today into the future?

Bryan Smith:

Yes, as long as we're honest about who we are as a company. That honesty also can change us, because our insight changes and the problems we're trying to fix changes. I'm okay with our tone and our voice right now is indicative of the space that we live in. That idea is that employees hate their jobs, and we need to do something about it because that's not okay. That's our mission right now.

Now, as more data comes in as we have more integrations, as the signal changes for us, then maybe it does pivot to more of a product that is trying to solve different questions and that is solving the diabetes issues or helping employees really understand what health is and how to drive that. As long as the mission is always about making human beings better, I think we can go any route. It doesn't matter.

Christian:

I kind of just want to end with what's next for LEON. Where is LEON right now? What does the next maybe six to 12 months look like for you guys?

Bryan Smith:

Sure. The product is ... There's some manual applications that we're doing in the product right now. So, it is going to be finalizing a lot of the bills within the product. The most important thing for us I think moving forward is to help companies understand the cost of doing business like I mentioned before, because we can't help employees and we can't help human beings until we can help companies make better decisions on how they treat their people. So, I think that's going to be our main focus moving forward is that we have a lot of brand partnerships. The product on the employee side is there, but now we need to get to a point where we can help companies make better decisions regarding their people. So, that's the focus for us moving forward.

Christian:

If people want to find out more about LEON, what would be the best way for them to find out?

Bryan Smith:

Go to myleon.co and sign up for early access. At this point, we're having conversations with everybody, because the conversation about how you can help people should never stop changing. It should be an ever evolving process, much like we are as biological human beings. So, go there. We'll set up a conversation. We'll talk about it and see how we can help your company.

Anna:

Christian, what did you take from that interview? I feel like you're a big fan and now an even bigger fan.

Christian:

Yeah. I liked the website, which obviously he dug into, which is what attracted us to him in the first place, because it was really honest. Then I felt like he was very honest. Very high energy. Love hearing founders and products that come out of ... I don't think it's fair to say sports science is a niche. I don't know what the right word is. I think against the grain, not just typical office software. There's a lot of employee engagement software. A lot of it comes out of the HR, people with HR experience. It was nice to see applying a different lens to a preexisting problem. I think you could really hear and you can see it on the page on the website. You can hear it in him, the subtle shift and focus that their product has on really being an advocate.

He said they wanted to be an employee advocate, and I really like that. He mentioned sports medicine. We talk a lot these days about wellness and fitness or preventative medicine, that sort of thing, getting in shape to avoid going on blood pressure medicine, things like that. He seems to be applying the same sort of mindset to the workplace, which seemed very genuine and honest. I think that was what really stood out to me.

Anna:

Yeah, I expected this conversation to be much more data driven, especially knowing he had a sports science background. I'm thinking about the Moneyball thing where it's not about the players necessarily, it's like, "Let's get this right combination of variables together and make sure that we're doing this thing. I mean, I think for a product that is so data driven, he even said it himself, humans are subjective and we have to understand people subjectively. The way he talks about it and his brand are so human focused and so different and just not what you would expect from a company that's so data driven.

Christian:

Yeah, I agree. I think even seeing the word, or whatever, acronym, AI, you just have something in your mind. You're like, "All right, here's another engineer that's engineering people to do these things." He is to some degree, but it's all with a human side in mind. So, I definitely agree that that was surprising. I think even as I think on the website, it starts out with AI at the top. Then you scroll down and it's almost like a memo, copy forward as he put it, is definitely different.

Another thing that stood out related to this was when we talked about how he sees LEON growing. It was sort of the perspective in the way they're talking right now will probably have to evolve, but what his answer was was really saying, "As long as we're being honest about it, we can grow up with the problem space. Maybe we're focusing on diabetes in the future," that sort of thing. I thought that was a really good takeaway. I think for anybody listening to this, the value of just being honest through your product, through the way that you talk, as long as you do that, you won't paint yourself into a corner. You can grow up with the times as long as you stay honest.

Anna:

Yeah. It's almost that commitment to authenticity, that things may change and that you don't know everything or that platitude of, "We know exactly what we're doing, and this is the road map for the next 10 years." Having that vision but understanding that the path may be windy to get where you're going to be. It sounds like they are kind of strong in what they want to do, and they understand what they want to do but not sure exactly how that may manifest in different ways.

Christian:

Yeah. It's almost like something everybody's having to do this year with coronavirus changing so many things. It's a healthy attitude to have.

Anna:

He was talking about the things you recommend to people to help them overcome burnout. He's like, "Maybe it's meditation. Maybe it's yoga. Maybe it's whatever, bike riding or something." He's like, "But people are subjective." For me, what I took from that, I was like, "You identify that people are subjective, yet you're building an AI product to recommend things to people." So, how do you do both of those things? How do you build algorithms to support people's subjectivity? It almost feels like an oxymoron in some way.

I think it just goes back to this idea that for such data driven product, it's so human oriented. Maybe that's why they're brand is the way it is is because they have to exist in this really weird space between both of those things. So, they can't follow traditional HR wording and verbiage and language, and they can't fall in that traditional AI attributes and matrix and falling numbers. They do have to sit between those two things. Because they are somewhat opposing ideas, this flipping everything on its head is the best way for them to approach the space.

Christian:

Maybe this is really the model that AI starts to take, less of the rigid box that they're creating and more learning, machine learning. Even if you think of health and wellness, what we thought was right 20, 30 years ago evolves. Yet, some of it's driven by big companies pushing an agenda like against sugar, against fat. Even if you look at the science, it just evolves. It's funny, we're in 2020 right now, there's no telling what we're going to learn in 2025 that might say, "Hey, we thought this was good."

I think it's almost like that, people being subjective, they change, they evolve. Even the things. I mean, Headspace wasn't even available seven years ago. So, there's an example if they're going to recommend it today, what doesn't exist today that they might be recommending in several years. It will be some mix of Pilates while kayaking or something. I don't know. There's going to be some new craze that we have no idea what it is yet.

Anna:

Yeah. I think he's right about the tech lash. I think people are thinking about big tech in different ways and seeing the effect of it and seeing how our brains are changed by social media, and how a lot of the social issues were struggling within the world are a lot of a direct result of the recommendations of algorithms of only showing you content that you have clicked on before. By almost stepping back from that and being like, "Yes, we are AI, but we're a learning AI. We understand that people are different," maybe they're trying to separate themselves from that, like the scary AI or the scary big data.

Christian:

Yeah. No, I think that's totally appropriate for what they're doing. All right. Well, that was a great interview with Bryan. I thought he was extremely charismatic, a lot of fun. This was our first installment of a new repeated format we're doing called The Better Product Spotlight where we feature really compelling products and founders as they sort of talk about it from the lens of all things product. As usual, I'm Christian.

Anna:

And I'm Anna, and you're listening to Better Product.

Thanks for listening to the show this week. If you're looking for more resources on how to design, build, market and sell better products, then head over to betterproduct.community to join, well, the community. As always, we're curious, what does Better Product mean to you? Shoot us an email at podcast@innovatemap.com.