Levels Health sells a continuous glucose monitor paired with an app that turns the readings into feedback about food, sleep and exercise. What makes it unusual for a database like this one is not the product. It is that Sam Corcos, the co-founder and chief executive, publishes the company's monthly investor updates in public on a twelve month delay, going back to the second month of the company's existence. Revenue, burn, cash and the goals the team missed are all there, in his own words, month by month.

That means the early numbers can be read rather than reconstructed. In a June 2021 post explaining the decision, Corcos wrote that Levels incorporated on 25 June 2019 and that the published updates start with August 2019, "which was the second month of the company's existence". Every day count below is measured from that incorporation date.

The first published update covers August 2019 and describes a closed beta priced at $389. "We are charging $389 for our beta and we've been happy with the number of people that have signed up," Corcos wrote, before adding that the team meant to hold revenue near $5,000 a month because it did not have the capacity to onboard more people while the product was still changing every week. August 2019 revenue came in at $6,774 against a burn of $106,000. Paying customers therefore existed inside the first ten weeks: 67 days from incorporation to the close of that first documented month.

What happened next is the part most launch stories skip. September 2019 revenue fell to $4,507. October recovered to $7,221, and Corcos noted that all revenue to date had been generated without any direct marketing spend. For November the team set a goal of 30 percent month over month growth, got roughly 80 percent instead, and closed the month at $12,482. That is 158 days after incorporation and the first month in the published series above $10,000.

Beating the goal cost them. The December update says the overshoot strained an operations process that was still almost entirely manual, and that David, the head of product, spent most of the month supporting fulfilment rather than building. Members at that stage had a phone number to text their questions to, and a person answered. Corcos deliberately set no revenue target for December and expected somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000. December landed at $8,100. January 2020 was $10,802 against a $10,000 target, February 2020 was $11,438, and the target for March stayed at $10,000 on purpose so the team could keep building.

The restraint held for most of 2020, and then the base the team had been building started to compound. By August 2020 monthly revenue was $87,689 and the waitlist had passed 28,600 signups on weekly ad spend of under $2,000. By December 2020 the picture had changed shape entirely. Total revenue for the month was $504,338, of which $92,923 came from subscriptions. The update's prose names $491,601 and its metrics table $504,338, a discrepancy Corcos left in rather than tidied out. Subscribers reached 422 after 170 new sign ups, 1,882 kits shipped, and the waitlist ended the year at 67,800. Corcos was still describing the company as in beta: "we are still in beta and very much focused on product development and likely will be until this summer."

The channel story shifted underneath those numbers. Word of mouth from beta members, who kept posting their own glucose charts on Twitter and Instagram, carried the first year with no marketing budget behind it. The written content only paid off later. In the December 2020 update Corcos reports that organic search had overtaken direct traffic as the biggest source of visitors, that blog pageviews grew 40 percent in a month to 81,858, that the site held 74 featured snippets in Google, and that 241 new domains had linked to it during December alone. Average search position moved from 13.4 in September to 10.9 in December. That is slow work made visible only because someone wrote it down every month.

The transparency was not incidental. Corcos argued that publishing forces rigor: "We publish our investor updates every month on the 15th, no exceptions. Sometimes there's good news, sometimes bad news, but we always ship it." The archive now runs from August 2019 through 2024, and the June 2024 edition reports recognized revenue of $1,756,677 for the month of May 2024, split across CGM hardware, wellness software and labs.

Two things are worth taking from the record. The first is that Levels charged real money from month two, at a price point most consumer products would consider unreasonable, while onboarding was still being done by hand. The revenue line was never a growth target in those years. It was a willingness to pay signal, and Corcos said so explicitly each month. The second is how uneven it looked up close. Five consecutive published months read $6,774, $4,507, $7,221, $12,482, $8,100. Anyone reading only the December 2020 half million dollar month would never guess the shape of the line that got there.