Tom’s Tips Podcast: S2E5 – John Wick Endgame

Audio Transcript

Announcer:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to Tom’s Tip’s podcast, your place for obscure movie references, cat facts, and everything MagHub related. And now your host, MagHub product manager, Tom Bellen.

Tom Bellen:
Hello everyone, and welcome to Tom’s Tip’s Podcast, version 7.8. I am MagHub Product Manager, Tom Bellen, I am here with Zach Gilbert, Marketing Director. Say, “Hello” to the podcasters, Zach.

Zach Gilbert:
Hello, podcasters.

Tom Bellen:
That’s a new name. Or should call them, like MagCasters or something.

Zach Gilbert:
Oh, MagCasters, yeah, let’s go with that.

Tom Bellen:
All right, welcome all you MagCasters. Kind of sounds like a cockney insult or something. Cockney is that is? Anyway some sort of weird British-y old timer insult, but I like it anyways. We’ll go with MagCasters.

Tom Bellen:
But our group didn’t come here to get insulted by the random terms we came up with. They came here to talk about 7.8 and all the exciting things going on here at Aysling.

Tom Bellen:
But before we get to the features, we actually just had a MagHub U recently, which Zach you were bit of a part of. We had dinner last night which I think MagHub U went well. I don’t think you had any impressions or talking to MagHub U people, getting feedback Zach of how it went.

Zach Gilbert:
Yeah, it was good, I didn’t do as much this time. Jeremy pretty much led it, I did most of the set up part of it, so make sure everybody got their swag and make sure the offices were picked up and everything along those lines. But everybody I talked to, because we go to dinner one of the nights, and it was good. It was nice to be able to chat with everybody and all three of the attenders this time, so we do it every two months, but all three of them that attended this time were from different publications, all various sizes and types of publications, and everybody seemed to really get along. I saw, are actually read a few comments already on social media from the attendees sharing their happiness with the event, so it was good.

Tom Bellen:
Awesome. Yeah, Jeremy does the bulk of that. I always come in and do a couple little sessions, mainly on reporting, and I bore everyone’s mind. It’s usually MagHub U and me talking about reports for about two hours. And then everyone’s ready to leave, so it’s a good way to finish. They just want to leave as soon as they hear me talk about report. Yeah, it was good. A nice group, mix of different publications and learn. And I know they’re keeping in contact, too, so learn together, together.

Tom Bellen:
But one of the things that came up is at dinner we were talking about was TV shows. I mentioned some things with Black Mirror because I’m a big fan, and the shows that I’m watching. Apparently, I watch shows that are just depressing and people are telling me not to do that. I’m trying to figure out some other shows, so I don’t know if you have any shows, again, that you recommend that are not shows that make me like Chernobyl, started watching that on HBO. That’s a positive show, and obviously, Black Mirror‘s always fun. So just trying to get any recommendations for the MagCasters or for me of TV shows that you’re watching that are more, I don’t know, lighthearted.

Zach Gilbert:
Yeah.

Tom Bellen:
Ah, so.

Zach Gilbert:
I would definitely say I watch more TV shows then I do movies. I do not watch new TV shows. It’s kind of a joke around our house is that my fiance, Emily, and I, with got into TV shows after they’ve already been canceled. Usually the reason they get canceled is because they don’t have enough followings, so it kind of stinks because we’re not part of it when it’s actually trying to support it, when they actually need support. I will say if you’re looking for a sci-fi, I’m always a fan of Lost, which I still think is a pretty cool show, positive show. Stargate, all of them; SG-1, Atlantis, Universe. Eureka is my all time favorite show, just so everybody knows, Eureka is by far one of the best shows in the world, hand down. Psych is also one of my favorite shows just because it’s kind of a funny drama, murder show, which is really good.

Zach Gilbert:
And if you’re looking for funny, I am a huge fan of Rules of Engagement. It was an Adam Sandler directed show, and it’s got David Spade in it. It’s pretty hilarious. Big fan of Parks and Recreation and The Office, obviously. Everybody is. And New Girl is also one of those funny, light hearted shows that I recommend. So those are all my show recommendations.

Tom Bellen:
I’ve watched most of those to a point, like Lost, but I don’t plan on ever watching that again. One was enough for me, me to go back there. I tried out Eureka at one point, and it was interesting. I just didn’t get that into it. SG-1, I don’t know. I’m not as into that world of stuff.

Tom Bellen:
Right now, actually, again, I’m watching … so maybe, I’m trying to think. I’ll probably try Eureka again, seeing that seemed like a positive one of all the ones that you have mentioned because I think we’ve seen most of those.

Zach Gilbert:
Yeah.

Tom Bellen:
Because right now, I’m watching Deadwood, which, again, just immediately sounds super positive, which is HBO show. They’re making a movie version of it coming out, and it’s about … it’s a true story, kind of historical fiction of something that actually happens in South Dakota in the Wild West, which I don’t know too much about. I don’t really know too much about the Wild West, so I’m going through that. Obviously, Game of Thrones, I have to have finished that, so that’s obviously super positive, too. I think I’m starting to realize that I just … I need to bring positive things to my life. Maybe Eureka. It’s the Eureka moment will have for that.

Zach Gilbert:
I think you’ll enjoy it.

Tom Bellen:
Yeah, and you know, people have other eureka moments when they start using some of the features released in 7.8, another fantastic transition there. So yeah, the 7.8 release. Loud, new, kind of exciting things with this. One of the bigger parts, again, we’ve been doing it for the last couple of releases is just redoing all of our payables vendors side. Again, it hasn’t been something we touched for a while, so in the last three releases, we’ve updated how … purchase order templates and entering purchase orders, being able to set up items specifically for purchase orders to help tracking expenses.

Tom Bellen:
Now, in this release, we’ve gone back into Vendor Center, which we’ve had for a while, but it’s still the old stylings of what Client Center forever used to have, so we’d updated that. Now, even if you’ve been using Vendor Center up to this point, that’ll have a whole new look and feel, and so lot of same functionality for the most part. We’ve also added ability to associate vendors to projects. And where this can be very helpful is if you have someone that you need to book. Maybe you’re doing a custom publication, a photo shoot, video work, whatever that may be, you can sell that as a project to a customer, and then you decide to create that project. And you basically want to associate, hey, I need you to put your time towards this project. You can create that as a vendor record. You can write them a PO with an hourly rate, and they can then start putting their time towards that, and you keep track of it.

Tom Bellen:
You can even go through now with time approval of then they submit their time sheet at the end of the week and be, “That’s good.” Or say, “No, you can’t possibly spend 30 hours on a Monday, so that’s wrong,” and reject it. But, again, getting that control. Again, just doing more connections with pulling the vendors into the other parts of the systems, so we have some exciting things thinking about that in the future. Of, hey, if you sell something that needs to be triggered a PO, then trigger the PO and send that out. As we go through this again in another release cycle where we want to add more features doing things such as the payouts and some more reporting on that piece of it.

Tom Bellen:
So, we’re excited about that. We’ve also, as we’re going through the ecommerce, the other items, a big part of that is generating shipping costs and shipping labels, and with that, using some of those services, we’re able to put in some address verification mechanisms into the platform. If you go to a lot of places, you know finding address verification, there’s kind of a cost per address. A similar model, where if you do want to verify contact address, subscriber address or through the form work, and again, as we do it through our storefront, you can link into us to help do that, to help clean up some of the items. Right now it’s a one-to-one. In the future, if we want to do some things with bulk cleaning of addresses, we can do that as well.

Tom Bellen:
We’ve also continued again, and one of the ongoing battles we’ve had is just getting permissions for certain reports, so we’ve locked that in. So now every report will have a permission. So if you do have problems with some people, users, being able to see certain data, you can now lock that down as well as, we’ve updated some of our selections, pretty large, take up a lot of space, it’s growing. We’ve changed that a bit, which might be something takes time to get used to, but it allows us a lot of flexibility to add more of those items in the reports in the future.

Tom Bellen:
And those are really kind of some of the main items that we’re going to put into this release, along with some of the general fixes, and tweaks, and other items that we’ll have in there as well. I think in total, that will be in all the released things, there’s about 90 different tasked things that got done in this particular release. So it’s very big one, excited about. Again, that is going to be going out next week, and it will be hopefully well received, and you know Zach you’ve had too much chance a lot of stuff is in QA right now. Any thoughts, what you see coming out of the pipe that you’re excited about for this release?

Zach Gilbert:
Yeah, so I think there’s two big things, and I’m not sure I’m supposed to share it, but I’m going to share it. The Zapier integration, I absolutely – I think it’s fun. I’d probably say the biggest reason is, you know people are like “Oh, we can connect to HubSpot now”, which is true, you can. It’s just all the different things that you can create, so you can get a little creative with it. It’s kind of like a workflow, you know you might now have a cut and dry work flow to create something in the automation part of MagHub. But, as our users have been playing around with the automation, there’s a lot of stuff you can do, for a lot of different reasons. So I think Zapier follows that kind of route of, there’s just so much you can do.

Zach Gilbert:
And then the other stuff that I know, there’s a new InDesign integration, that we’re working with, and I think that’s pretty cool. I get to see parts of it here and there, which I thought looked really nice. So those are my two things.

Tom Bellen:
Yeah, I know that we’ve kind of had those out as beta releases for people to start playing with. And then, it’s just a matter of working out some of the kinks and things that were bad with it. And getting more feedback. I know on the Zapier one that we’ve had, you know it’s really – what else can we do with it? We’ve created some of those initial connections so you can do things with the contacts within our contacts. That’s, kind of subscribers, or working with projects and tickets, and we’re kind of gonna get that out to our customers and be like, “What else are you trying to do with it?”, because there is so much you can do. What other information do you want to be able to pull from our system and input to another one, or trigger with our platforms?

Tom Bellen:
So we will be a lot on our customers to kind of drive us home, and what are all the thing else that we can, but it is a nice way to basically say we can integrate pretty much anything out there in some form or fashion. Yeah, so it’s a lot of exciting things going on, getting ready for the summer.

Tom Bellen:
Which reminds me about getting into what people really come for – cat facts. Reminds me of – it was about this time, I think it was two years ago, when I had – I think I’ve shared this story before, where I volunteered at a place called Tiny Lions, which was a cat café. Which was run by the Humane Society, which is always a good thing to support, and I did some volunteer work there.

Tom Bellen:
It’s always interesting, it was a cat café, Ann Arbor, you can go there, drink a coffee, play with a cat and then leave, which is great, because what I had to do was I had to go home, and take care of a cat and then I leave. So really, he takes over my home and I come back and he’s still there tormenting me. So the cat café’s a way to have a cat for just a couple moments without dealing with all the chaos that is a cat. Joking aside, the first cat café of all – ever, was actually called Cat Flower Garden, and it was in Taiwan, a lot of the reasons is, you just don’t have space as much to be able to have an animal or relations, so they built these places so people could go, hang out with an animal and then go home.

Tom Bellen:
So that is cat fact, is that the first cat café ever was the Cat Flower Garden. So that’s – did you know that Zach?

Zach Gilbert:
No, I didn’t, are there dog cafés?

Tom Bellen:
I’m sure there’s a puppy café of some kind, even though I just imagine that’s be difficult, just because they’re just going to run everywhere. See the cats at the cat café just don’t care, and they just sit there and do nothing. You have a bunch of dogs running around, they’re going to be fighting each other, going nuts. I don’t know if it would work. Might be like a rabbit café, that’d be a nice one.

Zach Gilbert:
Oh, that’d be a good one.

Tom Bellen:
Stuffed animals and things and things like that.

Zach Gilbert:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Tom Bellen:
But you know what’s not soft and fluffy, as we get into the trivia questions – I’m very excited, obviously Avengers Endgame came out, everyone’s all like, “Ohhhh, Avengers”. And I get it, I saw it. I get it. But you know what, you know who could take down all the Avengers?

Zach Gilbert:
Who?

Tom Bellen:
Everyone, “Thanos“. John Wick. And John Wick is coming out soon, and honestly I think that should be in there. That’s how – spoiler alert, this is not how Avengers ended, that’s how it should, John Wick should just come and just wipe everyone out. Probably like, that just shows that John Wick, well I won’t, kind of spoiling. If you haven’t seen John Wick 1 at this point, what are you waiting for? Spoiler Alert. It all starts with a puppy. Don’t mess with the man’s puppy.

Tom Bellen:
So John Wick’s coming out, and that’s exciting, and as I was watching Deadwood, there’s actually an actor who was in both John Wick and he is in Deadwood, he’s a main character. I’m going to get two trivia questions, so again you answer either one of these, and you get a prize, is – again, what character is this actor, who is in both of these, his name is Ian McShane, just to make it easier- what was his character’s name in Deadwood, or what was the facility that he ran in the show Deadwood?

Tom Bellen:
So if you can answer that, again, who did the character he played in Deadwood, Ian McShane, he was is John Wick and Deadwood – what was his name? Who is based on a real person. So with that, we’ll leave that you just tweet that at MagHub, you get a prize, I say, Zach, is there anything else you want talk to our MagCasters about today?

Zach Gilbert:
I do have two ideas that I think would be good. First of all, not all of our listeners have Twitter. So I think we should open this up to Facebook and LinkedIn. Which, this is shared on both those platforms, so if you do know the answers, please message us, or actually – make it social so everybody can see your answers, so that way everyone knows that you won. And then also, we usually give out gift cards – I think it makes way more sense, especially with your, kind of earlier, if you have not seen John Wick number 1, you should. So I think what we should do for this prize, is we’re going to provide whoever wins, John Wick number 1.

Zach Gilbert:
Because I think it is a disservice if you have not seen it yet. So, that’s what I have.

Tom Bellen:
All right. It is a good one. I’m going to have to – hopefully there’s a trilogy. Maybe I’ll go watch it, they should show them all, all in a row, because I’m pretty excited.

Tom Bellen:
All right, well thank you everyone for joining to this Tom’s Tips 7.8 Podcast, and enjoy the release.

Zach Gilbert:
Thanks everyone.