Audio Transcript
ANNOUNCER: Hey everyone, welcome to Tom’s Tips Podcast, your place for obscure movie references, cat facts, and everything MagHub related, and now your host, MagHub, product manager, Tom Bellen.
TOM: Hello everyone and welcome to the Tom’s Tips, 7.4 release podcast and uh, first of 2019. So starting off 2019 right with some cat facts, movie trivia and MagHub features. Uh today I’m joined by Marketing Director Zach Gilbert. Zach, how are you?
ZACH: Good Tom, how are you?
TOM: I’m doing all right. And also our director of sales, Nick Pataro, back off of his van trip all over the country. Nick, how are you?
NICK: I’m doing great. Thanks for having me today.
TOM: You are welcome and I’m glad you could join. So Nick, um again, give a little background on that. You’ve spent the last, how, how long has it been traveling around the country?
NICK: It’s been ten weeks.
TOM: So about ten weeks, driving in a van and where, what types of places where you going to?
NICK: So, uh, over the course of the ten weeks we wanted to hit as many national parks as possible and we ended up hitting about 24 parks.
TOM: Over ten weeks. So I’m trying to do quick math. That’s like two a week?
NICK: Yeah.
TOM: Roughly?
NICK: That’s about right.
TOM: Okay. What was the, uh, the best national park that you went to?
NICK: Oh, that’s so tough because they’re all so unique. Um, I would probably say my favorite area, I’m going to answer this a little bit indirectly. My favorite area was Moab.
TOM: Moab?
NICK: Which is right in between uh, Canyon Lands and Arches in Utah.
TOM: So, so why would you consider that one your favorite? What was so cool about that one?
NICK: So what was really tough for our trip was that we have a dog and dogs aren’t really allowed in national parks, they kind of are…
TOM: Dog fact.
NICK: Slightly frowned on. Yeah. Um, so in Moab there’s tons of really cool area around those parks that’s not protected. So you can bring your dog along with you and nobody frowns on you.
TOM: So the, see, it’s like anything with pets, like pets rule your lives, just like kids. So the fact your favorite area was because it was the best for your dog, see that’s about being caring, a caring person. So now what was the worst national park or just the worst experience that you had at one of the National Parks?
NICK: Oh, that’s a, that’s another great question. Um, probably, um, Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado, now there’s nothing wrong with the park. It’s great. Um really just surprising how cool it is. The problem is that they don’t really have many facilities up there, so you’re in the middle of nowhere and well, they have vault toilets if you know what that means. And …
TOM: I don’t and I don’t need to know what that means.
NICK: And so, basically, uh, my wonderful wife did not want to use these vault toilets and it was an interesting day.
TOM: All right. We will leave it there to keep this, our rating on Spotify, whatever the ratings and everything might be. So we’ll stop there. So that’s interesting. I think the, I haven’t been to many national parks. I went to Katiya. That’s in Maine, right?
NICK: Yeah.
TOM: Cause I went to a national park in Maine.Like, did you go to that one by chance?
NICK: No, we, uh, we stayed west of the Mississippi pretty much.
TOM: Okay.
NICK: So we drove from, from Michigan out to North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah …
TOM: Oh …
NICK: and then kind of circle back up to the south west.
TOM: So now you’re going to do the east coast trip next year?
NICK: Yeah, maybe next year, we’ll see. We decided that ten weeks was too long to live in a van.
TOM: I think any period of time is too long to live in a van. But I, kind of, on that note, I’m speaking of not living in van, Maghub release, that was the worst transition yet. I couldn’t really think, do anything but uh, so since you’ve been traveling the country, our dev team has been busy creating some new features uh and we’ll talk a little about 7.3 and 7.4 because they’re related. Uh, some of the biggest things we’ve been working on in the system has related to orders, whether that be your sales rep entering orders or even your customers buying and creating an order directly through our E-Commerce modules.
TOM: So a lot of work has been work uh, been going on in terms of building those out. So in 7.4, we are putting out the first version of our Beta orders. It’s been in QA for awhile too. Some people have played with it, but now we’re going to give to all of our users to leverage, uh again just we talked about this before, but the goal for this is going to have this Beta version and the current order version in the system for about the next two months, so we need to get feedback on orders because we know it’s a huge part of the system, want to make sure that it’s working correctly uh, and we’re adding some additional features to it. So we’ll about two months of that before we cut over.
TOM: So again, if you, definitely please use it, let us know. Uh but if you are ever having ever issues with the Beta orders, you know our fixes might not go in right away, or changes. So we have that old orders as a, as a backer. So that’s going to be in there. Uh we’re adding some features that people have been asking us for in terms of being able to do bulk rate card and and ad size changes, bulk changes on discounting and trying to maybe streamline the workflow. Again, displaying the pdf of the contract instead of the html, which can sometimes show you some things that aren’t exactly accurate.
TOM: We’ve also been building out more of our E-Commerce capabilities, giving users a lot more control over what the storefront is, so if you do want to use our storefront, you know, link to that from your webpage and go right to this storefront where again, your customers can log in or register with account. You can put your logos, change the colors. Again, if you’re using a different store front, we’re looking in the future to build mechanisms to import orders. So again, if you’re using something like Woo Commerce or Shopify can export orders out in the future will import those orders in uh, so again, we’re continuing to work on that platform.
TOM: You could do things in terms of setup things like back issues and sell those or you know, create an order that you would then email uh, something to like a downloadable product or you can sell ads, hats, whatever you think of. So again, if there is interest in that, that is a, a newer feature. So please contact us if you’d like to learn more and see how we can maybe work with your current system or if you want to sell things online for the first time ever, we’re happy to help. Uh, those are really, again, the two big areas that we’re pushing uh, starting in the next release, we’re also going to be doing a lot more work on our vendor management purchase order part of the system. Again, we’d have some capabilities, but we’re really excited about expanding on that.
TOM: And then along the way, you know, always those tweaks and fixes, making sure things are working 100%. We’ll get those in as quickly as we can and just adding those little little bits of improvements to make sure the system is working great. So I don’t know, Nick, a thing about this, I don’t know, of 2018 you, can you think of your most favorite change that was made, you know, getting into New Year?
NICK: I would say the, that my favorite new feature, and well it’s kind of been a work in progress over the course of the year is the automation module because it’s become so much more robust and you can actually, I mean when it first started, you could use it in a very select environment. Uh, for a few very specific functions and now it’s just expanded so much that the email marketing automation piece and the tagging to do’s and call lists, for the sales team. It’s incredible.
TOM: And then uh, thinking along the lines, what are you as far as 2019, I guess, is there something looking forward to the most of uh what we’re trying to do or anything you know …
NICK: I know this is short sighted and also kind of selfish. Um …
TOM: Alright.
NICK: I’m looking forward to the orders redo which is coming soon.
TOM: Right. And there’s a lot of other things we’re going to do with that. I mean one of the things of, of uh, adding to the orders is it gives us more flexibility to do things and you know, in the future. So I’m building a new foundation so we can build upon that. So Zach, what about you? Do you have anything exciting in 2018 with Maghub as we look back on this year that, that you really liked or enjoyed? Got the most out of?
ZACH: Yeah, I think the automation, I agree with that as well. I really liked specifically the Mailchimp integration is a lot of that data getting passed back and forth. I also liked the direct email function right from the dashboard. Like that works really well and I’ve used it quite a bit, especially with the auto response where it shows like, this person opened your email. Uh, I found that to be really helpful and then, I’d say for next year I’m most excited for the E-Commerce slash event marketing just because our forum, will be using it. So I am very excited for that.
TOM: That is true. So for those people who are selling tickets, um pretty soon you’ll be able to buy a ticket through the storefront that we are using. We are eating our own dog food, cat food, whatever, I don’t know what you like.
ZACH: Sure.
TOM: And that will actually go into our system. So if you like that experience of purchasing a ticket and you also sell tickets, you can use our system. So again, look forward to that. Uh, I’m surprised. I mean, it’s shocking. You guys didn’t talk about the you know, new, some of the GL export changes. I really thought that was, been up your alley. Those are really, really exciting for me.
ZACH: My 2nd choice.
TOM: Oh yeah. Okay. Your second choice. Uh, so all right, so that’s kind of a recap of your bit. So now we get to what everyone really wants to know, our cat facts movie trivia. So guest cat fact, Nick has a, he brought it up, he has a cat fact. So this is our first ever guest cat fact. Nick, what is your cat fact?
NICK: Alright so this is a little bit of homework for everyone. Um on Netflix, you can watch a show called Amazing Interiors. On the, meh, I think it’s the third or the fourth episode, there’s a gentleman who lives in California and he built his entire house around the 15 cats that he’s adopted. Um, and he spent approximately $100000 on catwalks all throughout his house. Twenty two litter boxes all vented to the outside, 15 cats all running around his house. And um, yeah, that’s the cat fact.
TOM: You know, some people, their devotion animals is, is pretty, pretty amazing. I want to create a catwalk to get my cats to walk out of my house and to not come back, um, but my wife wouldn’t be very happy about that. That’s crazy. Some of the things that people do, um, I could use that money way better in my opinion. All right. Uh, and one of those things I could do way better is the fact that right now I’ve been teaching myself piano, which leads to, I’m trying to learn Queen songs which gets to the movie trivia have recently Golden Globes happen and the best picture in the drama category and also won best actor was the movie Bohemian Rhapsody, which I’m trying to learn on piano. It’s very difficult. So, so that, that’s hard.
TOM: So there’s two answers that can get you a prize in this question. The first one times the keyboard piano is who was queens keyboardist, and then the other one is the, the winner of the best actor Rami Malik was also in a very famous TV show that relates also gotten many awards that relates to what we do here in software, so if you can reply with what is the name of that show or whoever the keyboard is for Queen is you will win the first prize from Tom’s Tips 2019 podcast. So with that I thank everyone for listening. Thank you Nick, thank you Zach for joining. Uh we’re excited for all the things we have planned and when we launch our ticket mechanism, please buy a ticket to come to our forum. Have a great 2019 everyone.
ZACH: Thank you everyone.
