Audio Transcript
Announcer: Hey everyone! Welcome to Tom’s Tips Podcast. Your place for obscure movie references, cat facts, and everything MagHub related. Now, your host, MagHub product manager, Tom Bellen.
Tom: Hello everyone and welcome to MagHub 7.6 released podcast. I am your host, Tom Bellen; project manager for MagHub. I’m here with Zach Gilbert, our Marketing Director. Hello, Zach. How are you today?
Zach: Good.
Tom: Fantastic. We’re here to talk about the 7.6 release MagHub and also the exciting things that are going on around here in starting of March. It is the Ides of March today, which is not a good day if your name is Julius or if you an emperor of any particular thing. I always love it, ’cause I was a Latin student. I took Latin in college because I was afraid to talk in class. So I was very into Latin. I don’t know. You into any of the Roman Colosseum type of stuff? Zach, at all into that?
Zach: Not so much.
Tom: Oh, why not? It’s just not … what language did you take? Did you take a foreign language?
Zach: I did. I took Italian.
Tom: Italian? Why?
Tom: What a second. So you took Italian and you have no interest in like …
Zach: To be fair, it was business Italian.
Tom: What is business Italian?
Zach: So the only words you learn are business oriented and not so much like “Oh, where’s the bathroom?” and “Where’s the beach?” and all that stuff. It’s more like proposals and writing and documents and blogging and websites and all the terminology that would be approached in a business environment ’cause basically meant for if you’re traveling internationally to Italy, then you’ll have those types of discussions. You probably won’t be doing much sightseeing.
Tom: You should still know how to ask where the bathroom is.
Zach: I agree.
Tom: If you’re in the middle of a business presentation and you can’t ask where the bathroom is and then some accident happens ’cause you didn’t know what to say then who cares how well you spoke.
Zach: The class name was literally Italian for Business.
Tom: Italian for Business.
Zach: And it was in the college of business.
Tom: That might be as worthless as learning Latin.
Zach: Might be.
Tom: But you know what, I loved learning Latin. It’s always very, very interesting.
Zach: Sure.
Tom: With that and March is an exciting month. We were just talking about this before. March is kind of that month where things actually start to happen; good things around Michigan. There’s a saying. It’s in like a lion, out like a lamb or in like a lamb, out like a lion. Essentially, you never know what weather you’re gonna get. It’s a joke. So if it was really terrible to start in March then we’re gonna have a great end to March. If it’s a really easy start to March, like really nice weather, then it goes and it goes and it’s terrible ’cause sometimes you get a blizzard in March. Disclaimer: That evening we were placed in a tornado warning, and today is 30 degrees.
Zach: It’s true.
Tom: Sometimes you don’t. So just like poor Julius Caesar, you never know what you’re gonna get. All of a sudden, someone just comes from behind and takes you down.
Tom: Also have … we’re talking about Basketball starting up. This is exciting. I’m a big Basketball fan. For that, I don’t know if you care.
Zach: Oh yeah.
Tom: What type … NBA, college?
Zach: I like more college just ’cause I enjoy the brackets like that. That’s the first thing that really got me into any type of sport was creating brackets ’cause you get to work out the history and the logistics and all that type of stuff. So someone like me who does not enjoy sports at all; it lets me get into it.
Tom: So a few years ago, I don’t know if we’ll ever do it again, we actually had a MagHub bracket.
Zach: We should.
Tom: For the entire user base. So we can try and do that again.
Zach: Yeah.
Tom: So whose…
Zach: Launch it in Pendo.
Tom: Launch it in Pendo; everyone is in love with the Pendo stuff. So who is your early Final Four? Do you have a thought on that?
Zach: Absolutely not.
Tom: No thought at all?
Zach: No. I did not even start looking at it until they allowed me to open up my bracket stuff. So I have no idea. I don’t even follow it at all. I only follow it when the madness starts.
Tom: Oh, okay. We’ll see. You know, part of me.. Take Virginia ’cause they lost last year. There’s a fact; first one seat ever to lose in the first round, Virginia. It’s like “trust them again” I don’t know. They’re obviously the best team. They also lose so early! As a Michigan fan – disappointed in this season but we’ll see how that goes. But you know what’s not disappointing? The 7.6 release! That’s right. So that just kind of went out a few days before. Our lovely Ides of March in that case. You know this release and a lot of the releases coming up are really about trying to take some of our… kind of… refreshments to the system. Whether it be in orders, what we’re doing payables, E-commerce. These big projects and really trying to flush them out and kind of finish that.
Tom: You know, with a lot of this time and being at MagHub, we’ve kind of added little things. Incremental changes to the site and some of the times that leaves things feelings a bit, sometimes, unfinished. So, really just kind of excited as we’ve taken a new approach into with things were doing, development of like, let’s take this area of the system. Let’s kind of flush this out; go through the whole process. Spend more time getting more feedback as were going through from customers. Thinking about the orders or some additional features we want to go in there. We know there’s still some thing we need to tweak, or some of the little odds and ends that end up rebuilding something that we need to fix. We’re trying to address those as quickly as we can. Again, we’re planning on keeping new orders around. Keeping new orders, and old orders until probably May, maybe June, depending on how those things go. There’s a couple things we want to add to it as well. And again, rebuilding it gives us a lot of flexibility in the future.
Tom: Now the payables module, that’s something that since I’ve been here about five years, we really haven’t spent that much time on. Little things here and there but it’s an area site we’re getting a lot more customers talking about. Doing third party transactions of “Hey, we sell this on behalf of them, so we need to pay them out for something” or being able to track your freelancer costs. Or just any costs in general. So being able to look at that again. Getting to touch that part of the site that hasn’t really been touched much and just kind of give it a complete overhaul and really just adding a new module for customers to use that is going to bring something else… to just think about, leveraging the system for. Getting more of the business in there. So that’s going to be another couple months that we really want to flush out. And that piece, we redid the payables, doing some items. Multi-line items.
Tom: Upcoming next will be invoicing and eventually doing the payouts to the vendor. And you know, once we get all those things in place, down the stream, thinking of how we want to interact that with quickbooks online. So, a lot of these bigger ticket items going through there. And then again, the E-commerce. Which is such a big task of all the things we want to do. We continue to expand on that to now support subscriptions and shipping. But for customers that just want to do an ad sale and subscription sale through an E-commerce store front instead of just the web form. If you’re looking for just that, you don’t really care too much about the shipping needs. You could leverage that right away and just throw an ad up. It only has to be one type of ad. Put that on the site. Maybe you send a trip campaign (which we also update in the site) to your customer base, who says “hey, we have this ad available. It’s for this many dollars, just go and buy it.” You can do that right through the store. So it doesn’t have to be super overly complicated. But, we’re going to continue finishing that up. We have some more exciting plans for that the next few months as well!
Tom: And then as usual, just kind of making some of the improvements that we’ve had. We’ve done a lot more with Pendo, as Zach mentioned. So trying to consolidate our help center and guides all into one area; they were separate for a while. And we made a couple changes to the layouts for MagBuilder. That’s also tying into the fact that in testing right now, is our next version of the in-design plugin for Creative Cloud 2019, 18 and 17. So that was not part of this release but should be coming shortly. That is going to again, allow people to bulk upload old PDF’s from one in-design file to MagHub. Be able to upload and manage assets from within in-design. As well as there’s some capabilities to actually auto Paginate your in-design document based on your MagBuilder layout. So again, doing the last few things on some MagBuilder pieces. So that, some of the main items we did in this release. Again, we still have more to flush out with that and then we have an exciting summer plan of some other major kind of overhauls of parts of the system that we haven’t done too much with in a while. Get us through March, getting through this time. Getting ready for the beautiful Hopes Springs Eternal in Spring and doing all of that fun stuff.
Tom: So, I don’t know, Zach. If you’ve played with anything in the release. Anything you’re particularly excited about, s’got you going “Woohoo!”.
Zach: I’d say, I’ve enjoyed the Pendo changes. The search engine in Pendo is nice for the Help Venter. The guides and walkthroughs are nice. I like videos but having guides, actually kind of pointing me where I need to go and pick-out what I need to really helps. Launching surveys and everything through Pendo, also gets some better feedback that SurveyMonkey sometimes. So I like just utilizing that. But I also like, in the automation campaign that the fact that I can direct push campaigns now, rather than have to wait a certain time period. So if I launch an email campaign, as soon as I publish it, it goes and there’s no more waiting. So, it’s kind of nice that way.
Tom: So, if you do we want to tie in E-commerce. You could launch a trip in male campaign, put in an email link to the store and say “Hey, buy this ad” and once you’re done with the ad, pull it off the store. So again, you can do that. Quick with advertisers that limit the access and just have them buy that. Especially if you do any remnant space and you want to just say “Hey everyone, this ad is available through this one time fee”. So again, those are some things you can do to combined those work flows together.
Zach: Yeah.
Tom: So exciting. You know what was exciting… I didn’t get to go to this leading into my next transition of uh, my question is: You went to go see Captain Marvel last week with some people from the office?
Zach: I did. Sure did.
Tom: I was invited but unfortunately, due to the fact that you can’t leave a one and a half year old at home alone, I could not go.
Zach: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Tom: And my mommy was unwilling to babysit because it was too late because you guys went at 8 PM.
Zach: Yup.
Tom: So did you enjoy the Captain Marvel film?
Zach: No. I LOVED that movie. I’m not even going to go into it because I would spend an hour just talking about Captain Marvel and then this would just be a nerd podcast and it would have nothing to do with MagHub.
Tom: I think it’s already a nerd podcast.
Zach: Yeah. I feel like it’d get worse though.
Tom: Yeah. Oh, okay.
Zach: Yeah, I think it’d get worse. So, but not it’s probably without a doubt, one of my favorite Marvel movies. And I’ve seen them all. I’m not heavy into the comic books but I am heavier into the movies and I highly recommend to anybody who is on the fence. You don’t have to be super nerd to enjoy and get into it and the soundtrack was phenomenal.
Tom: ‘Cause it takes place in like the early 90’s, right?
Zach: You got it. So yeah, early-mid into late 90’s. It kind of just the whole 90’s scene, but I mean a lot of references. There’s like BlockBuster references everywhere. Just terrific job. Really captured the 90’s, I feel and that’s just BlockBuster.
Tom: I feel like the last BlockBuster just closed.
Zach: It did.
Tom: Wow.
Zach: Just did. Yeah.
Tom: Wow, man. The jockstrap from the… if anyone watches, oh man, blanking on it. Last Week Tonight that didn’t save it. Did you ever hear that story?
Zach: No.
Tom: So, oh man. So, John Oliver did this auction and he bought, oh! Cinderella Man, the guy who played Cinderella Man… Russell Crowe!
Zach: Ohhh, okay.
Tom: Russell Crowe, had the word that he bought a bunch of stuff from Russell Crowe including the jockstrap from Cinderella Man. And he gave it to the last BlockBuster to try and keep it open to promote it. But I guess that didn’t save it.
Zach: No. There’s a Twitter account which is like called “The Last BlockBuster“. It’s actually not owned by BlockBuster. It’s just some random people and it’s just nothing but funny kind of tweets all day. So, if you ever need a break from Twitter, just go to “The Last BlockBuster” Twitter, ’cause it is hilarious. All of their references are just really kind of sad and it’s just making fun of BlockBuster. So I recommend it; it’s good.
Tom: Man, I remember when they had their discs ending services trying to compete with Netflix. It did not work
Zach: Yeah!
Tom: It did not work
Zach: They were one of the firsts though.
Tom: They were. Anyway, we came here for questions. So speaking of BlockBusters and Captain Marvel and leading into some cat trivia, there actually is a cat in that film. I did not see it but like anything, cats — well I didn’t see the film
Zach: Oh.
Tom: Cats take over, you know, all parts of pop culture. Anytime there is a cat, the world shuts down. So, the fact of this, is just a simple thing; that cat, in the movie. Well, you should know the name of the cat. What was the name of the cat in the movie? Did they tell you that? No?
Zach: I don’t remember.
Tom: I think it’s “Goose”.
Zach: It is Goose.
Tom: Yeah see, I look that up, I mean, cats everywhere. So that’s the trivia but then leading to what the question is, is it’s not actually a cat. So… what is the creature? What is the name of that type of creature that is not a cat. If you can answer that and tweet that at MagHub, you will be eligible to win the prize!. We’ll send all that stuff out. You can do that, obviously if you’re following that, you’ll also hear more things about the forum. I know we just recently sent out a promotion about the forum.
Zach: Yup.
Tom: What promotion is it now, we have?
Zach: So, we have two promotions for the Forum. The first one is: if you buy four or more tickets, because we want more people to come, we use the code “FOURINAROW” (all caps) and that will give you 20% off your entire ticket order. Or, you can use the code “BILLMELATER” and basically what that does is, you won’t be charged absolutely anything at checkout. And then we’ll create this special invoice for you in mid June and you’ll have 30 days to pay it off. You can always pay it off early, anything along those lines. It’s basically just to reserve your spot. So, we’re staying at the Greektown for the actual Forum, so space is limited! And then also, we are doing three separate events, which includes a bar, karaoke takeover, which Tom is singing. We’re also doing an opening reception at the casino, with an open bar and all that good stuff. And then we’re also doing “Escape the Room” which Tom also organized that one. So it will be a lot of stuff that also includes food, beverages. Pretty much everything for four days straight. The ticket prices are cheaper than last year by far. You get more and you’re going to be there longer, so you’re stranded with us for longer.
Tom: Oh yeah.
Zach: But yeah, so those are the two codes. You can go on MagHub.com and see everything. We’ll still tweet about it quite a bit. Those are the last two promo codes that we’ll be running for this event. There isn’t anything more. So, we’re not doing any BOGO’s or you know, 50% off, just because they’re already really cheap. So yeah, that’s it.
Tom: Alright. So maybe we should do a pull of requests for me to sing.
Zach: Yeah.
Tom: Karaoke side.
Zach: We should. We could launch that through Pendo.
Tom: Oh.
Zach: Sorry – sorry for everybody that’s getting flustered with all of the Pendo stuff. We’re trying to wrangle it in a little bit better, so that way we’re not spamming you. But we’re trying to make sure that you guys are aware of everything that we’re doing and we’re getting the hang of it.
Tom: Yup, and if there are other things people, guides or other items, we’re creating those. But if there’s certain things you think will be helpful; there’s other stuff too about Pendo that, there’s opportunities where if you want to create your own custom guides, if you want to talk to us about that. That could be arranged. Alright, well thank you everyone for joining the Podcast. Hopefully everyone has a great March, exciting March madness and thank you, Zach and have a great day.
Zach: Thanks everyone.
