Tom’s Tips Podcast: S2E6 – Godzilla Vendors

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, everybody, and welcome to the MagHub 7.9 Podcast. I’m your host, Tom Bellen, Product Manager. I’m joined by, always, Marketing Director Zach Gilbert. Zach, how are you doing today?

Zach:
I’m good. How are you?

Tom:
Are you as good as the 7.9 release?

Zach:
I don’t know if I’m that good.

Tom:
Oh, okay. Not that good? Well, that’s cool. Well, it was a very exciting release with a lot in there. But before we get to the excitement of 7.9, were just talking about before … There’s the excitement of summer is here, theoretically. Though, I was up north this weekend in 50 degrees and rain. So, I don’t know how that can be true. But thinking about summer plans, and thinking what are you up to? Do you have any exciting plans for the summer?

Zach:
So, if I say most of my exciting plans revolve around planning for our wedding … So, there will be a lot of time going up north. That’s where we’re getting married. At a zoo. So a lot of vendor visits and managing all that stuff. I think that’s pretty much most of it.

Tom:
Well, if you need to manage your vendors, you know that you can do that with the new features in the 7.9 MagHub release, but we’ll get to that. So, yeah! Wedding planning. So last summer of freedom.

Zach:
Yup.

Tom:
That’s exciting. I lost mine like … I better figure out that … It’s like four years ago. Upcoming. In that case. So, traveling up north. Any other things? Obviously wedding takes up most of those items, but any other small trips or other things planned, or just regular … Are you a regular cabin/cottage person in Michigan? That’s a cottage guy?

Zach:
Yeah, I think I fall under that regular cottage guy. So whenever I can go tubing … This is lazy tubing, not boat tubing. So, hop in a river and just tube down it for a few hours. Kayaking. Try to golf a little bit more. Stuff like that.

Tom:
Yeah. Well, I’m golf guy. So I’m the guy that golfs all summer… So, I’ve already been on one golf trip, and I’m actually going to a cabin for only Michigan Alumni, it’s very elitist, this upcoming week. So that’s going to be exciting. But, yeah, I’m golf guy. And trying to get you, Zach. Gave you some of my old clubs to use, to get more golf guys. Because I don’t have many. Right now it’s just me until my son grows up and becomes another golf guy.

Zach:
Sure.

Tom:
Do you know any places up north? I’ve actually never golfed up north Michigan, so I don’t know if you know of any good courses in the Traverse City area. I don’t know if that’s your home.

Zach:
No. Our Creative Director, Claire, would know though, since she is from Traverse City. I feel like if anyone’s going to know where to go, I would talk to Claire. It’s a good tip for future measures.

Tom:
Yes. See if she has info on the golf things. 

Zach:
Yeah.

Tom:
And the golf tournament I played in recently, I had a rough go of it. And I actually had a very bad moment where … And I haven’t done this in a very long time. I’m typically a pretty good golfer, relatively, objectively. I’m a good golfer. I shanked into someone’s tee-box and had to yell fore. In a tee-box. Because I shanked. I messed up my whole round, after that point. We actually won that match, but I shanked. But you know what did not shank?

Zach:
Hm?

Tom:
The 7.9 MagHub release.

Zach:
Smooth.

Tom:
Yeah, thank you very much for that. As always, the best transitions are the ones you reference and talk about, so another good transition there. So, yeah. The 7.9 release. There’s a lot of different things woth this part of the release, starting with two main features. Doing a lot over the last few months. One of them being E-commerce module which, again, it’s been a long project. As we started this, we knew there was always going to be a lot to that. In many ways we see the light at the end of the tunnel in ways, of having all the different features that we’ve wanted to get in over the course of these few months implemented.

Tom:
This recent one was, again, just building some of the initial reporting for E-commerce sales we know, like all things, which we’ll talk about in a minute. Reporting is a huge, huge pain point, and requests that we get, we need to start somewhere. So building those initial E-commerce reports, expanding the ability to get orders into our system, not just through the store front, but through our back office order entry system. So, for customers who are already using Shopify, you’re using WooCommerce, you’re using your own platform and you’re getting emailed and tracking all that stuff separately, you can now at least put those orders into our system to keep track of, and then that can tie into … We’ve had before with our shipping module, where you can actually create labels through our platform using your own EasyPost account.

Tom:
Building that part and, again, coming up soon, we’re going to be able to allow importing of it directly, as well. So, a lot of exciting things on the E-commerce side. Again, that too, the Pick, Pack, Ship. So, really flushing that part out. Again, we have some big items we want to accomplish over the next month or so, hopefully get that in for the next release, which will be 8.0. But, like I was saying, there are things on the E-commerce side.

Tom:
The other big area of the site that made a lot of changes with recently is with the vendor PO piece of this. So, again, we’ve added some additional capabilities with some of the AP/PO reports. So, now, again, we have four new reports to help manage all of that side of it, and also recording of vendor payments. So, before, you just have an invoice, can mark it as paid that came from the vendor, but now you can actually say, “Hey, it was paid by this account. Or paid by this account.” We are going to be able to support the ability to do third-party payments direct from accounts.

Tom:
So you’ll actually be able to go into our site, sync your ACH bank account, and if your vendors do the same thing, through the vendor portal, then you can pay them directly through the platform. We were hoping to get that out in this release. We have a lot of the structure built, but we’re going to be leveraging a third-party, our partner, to help with those transactions and we just have to go through a little bit more of a process with them before we can allow our users to do that. So, again, that’s something that we’re hoping to get locked up and will be, again, available this summer. Hoping the next release, 8.0. But, again, we have a lot of things built there for the vendor parts and, again, we have some more exciting things and how we want to sync all of the PO items with the items that you sell, and triggering things down the road and tracking more things with cost. So, again, really bundling all those items up.

Tom:
But those are some of the bigger projects that … Chugging along and moving along to new things, hopefully over the summer. Along with that, though, we did get to some other things that have been customer requests for a while, trying to knock those out. When we updated the multiselects a few releases ago, one of the big goals was that we can implement that multiselect to more places. The other one cost a lot of real estate, but since then we’ve added it to some of the main reports in the system, the consolidated and snap shot reports, which we know are heavily used, so making that easier to filter those reports through multiselects which can be helpful. Want to keep adding that to other reports and areas of the site in the future, kind of based on demand.

Tom:
Along with that, there was a new consolidated sales report. So that’s always been a big request of, “Hey, I want to find everything that a customer bought, period of time.” Whether it’s a digital ad, print ad, service ad, let me find all that information. So that report is now, again, available in the site for people to do it. You can run it by company, period of time, and it will show you what you need to see.

Tom:
Also, we’ve continued to expand some of the brand filtering and removing credits from reporting. So, again, just really trying to beef up the parts that we have instead of building all new reports out, just expanding what we currently support. And one of those things, too, with this release, we’re getting more and more things in a third-party reporting tool called Metabase. Some of our customers who leverage the datawarehouse have gained access to that. So it’s an open source tool that you can kind of tie into our data warehouse and build custom reports off of that.

Tom:
So we’ve been building a lot of very in-depth data tables where you can just point someone to it and ask it some basic questions like sum up reports for sales by company, but attribute. So we’re trying to build more of this ad-hoc reporting tool that you can use, as well. So, we’re trying to do a lot of things to improve the reporting capabilities that our customers would like.

Tom:
And then a couple other little things added in there was we added a new export size and orientation for the MagBuilder layout. We know that’s been a request for a while. We updated the activity tab which we know people spend a lot of time on to allow you to filter out activities to say, “Hey, I just want to find any notes or calls that I did for this current customer.” Because we knew that page can get a little cumbersome, and added some more details to it. And then expanded a bit on the ad-hoc group element which we’ve had a lot of people asking about, so we added some more fields that you can display there.

Tom:
That, among other little things, we punched those things out in the release. So it was definitely a busy release. Exciting one for 7.9 as we move to our upcoming 8.0 release, moving into that next group. But, I don’t know. Zach, did you have any favorite part of the 7.9 release?

Zach:
I’d have to say I think the E-commerce changes have been what I’ve been following a lot, just because we use a lot of that functionality currently, for us. So, the E-commerce for the shipping part of it, especially, is a cool thing because we’ll be mailing out our swag items and everything from our store front. So our socks, golf balls, coffee mugs, webcam hiders, all of the above. Basically anything that we give away at conferences like that, we’ll have available on our website, and also some other cool stuff. So, I think the E-commerce stuff is really cool. I think that’s my biggest one, yeah.

Tom:
All right. Yeah, yeah. I think hopefully we’ll start getting some of those swag orders in there, boxing things up. Getting our own little fulfillment system out there. Our own little warehouse out of our Aysling office. Yeah. Do you know, I was just thinking of this upcoming trip that I’m taking, and the fact that we’re going to be leaving our cats for a long period of time. And so, I was looking, thinking about the cats. What kind of stressor things that I have, the cats. And I found some stat about it was that … Did you know for today’s Cat Fact, this one that the emotional centers of our brain for humans and cats are basically the same? So when we think of cats as being standoffish and sometimes we don’t like them, they’re basically humans. So, we’re probably just as bad to the cats in that side. So, I wonder, when we leave my cats alone if they’ll be happy because I’m happy to leave my cats. So they’re probably also just happy that I’m leaving. They have the same emotional reaction.

Zach:
That sounds right.

Tom:
I do, with that piece. So, we’ll have to do that, leaving those cats for like a week. Hopefully, someone will take care of them and feed them, because … Yeah. And all that stuff. So that was my weird cat fact of the day. Yeah. Making sure they survive. But I know that recently you guys went to go see a movie, Godzilla. And I think some people from the office went. You got to go to that, right?

Zach:
I did.

Tom:
Did you go?

Zach:
Yeah.

Tom:
Did you enjoy that Godzilla film?

Zach:
I did. I did. So, I didn’t really follow Godzilla in the past. I watched the 1998 Matthew Broderick one, which I actually enjoyed because I was younger, and I was a kid, and it had giant dinosaurs. But I was never really a follower of any of the old black and white ones, the Japanese ones. I did finally watch the … I watched Kong, Skull Island, which is in the same universe, and that was good. And then I watched the newer Godzilla (2014) one, which is like the prequel to this one, and I thoroughly enjoyed that one, and I think this one was probably better than both of those movies put together. I thought this was an excellent movie this year. I was really happy with it.

Tom:
So you preferred … That was going to be my question, of all the Godzillas. Because I’ve seen all of them, pretty much, besides this newest one. Was of those, what was your favorite? So if you’d had the Matthew Broderick one, then the original Godzilla, the recent one, that led into this one. Of those three, which one is your favorite?

Zach:
Yeah, I think overall the newest one is probably my favorite. There are scenes, obviously, that I liked about all of them. The original Matthew Broderick, I liked Jean Reno. He’s one of my favorite actors. So having him in such a main lead makes me really happy. And then the last one, I’m a big fan of urban decay, so when they went back to the Japanese city after nature took over, I enjoyed that. But this movie overall, I think, it had a good pace. Good actors. Just a solid plot that kept moving. It wasn’t all purely battling, because I’m not a huge battle movie kind of guy. If there’s a movie that has a long car chase, I immediately lose interest. Or in Transformers where they’re always fighting each other, I just lose interest because, “Okay, go on to the next plot line.” And I feel like this one moved along pretty well considering what the whole purpose of the movie was about.

Tom:
Well, from the trailer it seems like it was all just battle, so that’s interesting. There’s more to it than the trailer stated.

Zach:
Yeah.

Tom:
Well, that was … You mentioned the 1998 one, because that was going to be my lead to my trivia question. Because thinking of Godzilla, I remember seeing that movie … I think I was … That was ’98, as you said, 14 when that came out. And I was always a big Simpsons fan, so it was interesting to see Hank Azaria was in that movie.

Zach:
Yup.

Tom:
But tying into the NBA, the finals for any of that, and that movie is thinking of just simple question, what was the name and where were those Godzilla eggs located in that film? Where maybe Kevin Durant may be limping around next season, to start? So real simple question, if you can name that from the basketball side, or if you have no idea anything about basketball but you love the 1998 Godzilla film with Matthew Broderick and Hank Azaria, and Jean Reno, who was in a movie from a previous Tom’s Tip question. Again, if you can name that, maybe get a separate prize, too, of what other movie he’s in that was a Tom’s Tip question before. This is multi-layer. Go from there. But, yeah, if you can name that location, where those eggs were from that 1998 Godzilla film, we will … And Tweet that @MagHub, we will send you a prize. Be the first to do that.

Tom:
So, Zach, I don’t know. Anything you want to talk about before we close up this 7.9?

Zach:
Sure, yeah. I think the biggest thing is right now is make sure everybody remembers that the MagHub Fall Forum is August 19th through the 22nd. That will be in Detroit, Michigan at the Greek Town Casino and Resort. Beautiful casino in a really nice location. All of the events that we’re having, because we do have about three separate events going on at the time, they are all within walking distance. So you really just need an Uber or bus, or anything else, just basically to get from the airport to Greek Town, and from there you’ll pretty much be set until you fly back home, or drive back home.

Zach:
Parking, if you do decide to drive, is free and Wifi is free. They have a really nice gym and recreational center that’s all free. The prices are severely discounted right now because we have a great booking link. That goes on until July, so make sure you get yours as soon as possible. Food will be catered. We will have karaoke, as we had mentioned, with Tom. We are going to do bowling, basically at the karaoke place. It’s a really cool local bar. And then, we are doing an Escape the Room, and we are doing a casino night, opening reception. So there’s a lot of events. Tickets are regularly $250 per person, but we do have a 20% discount right now, so you get it for $200 per person. And that, like I said, includes most of your meals, includes all events. You’ll be pretty good.

Zach:
Plus, if you’re a MagHub Champion, you will get invited to another dinner/lunch on Monday, and that will be at the Townhouse in downtown Detroit. So if anybody is familiar with downtown Detroit, it’s actually in the Detroit Ally One Building, which is the pinnacle looking building. So, great. Lots of fun stuff going on. There’s going to be about 12 workshops you can choose from. A lot of content.

Zach:
The biggest question that we’ve gotten is who should go, and I will say everybody should go. We do have people from sales executives going, to finance officers, to data people. We made this Forum specifically for every group. So that’s why the workshops are really tailored to those groups. So everybody is going to get something from this. So, we kind of recommend bringing more than just one person so that way you guys can split up and take notes and learn more together. We are also offering a 30 minute one-on-one meeting with members of our teams. So similar to you pay by the hour to work with us. We’re going to basically give you a half hour to meet with us.

Zach:
We’ll have a scheduler go out in July where you can schedule time with Tom, me, Rudy, Jeremy, Sheila, and anyone else from the team. And we are also all … Most of us are staying at the Greek Town as well, during that time. So there’s plenty of opportunities to meet with us, discuss MagHub, your business with us. If you have ideas, thoughts, feature requests; basically anything. It’s a lot of free time to talk with us, and all of our past attendees have always had a really great time networking with each other. You’re all MagHub users. There are no third-party groups, so you’re not getting sold to. This is basically just a get further in-depth with MagHub, share how you succeed, and share your tips with your peers, and it’s really a great opportunity for networking. So, that’s pretty much what I got.

Tom:
Yeah, it’s always a fun event and there was a lot of things we gathered from last year that we try to implement into the product this year, and there’s still some things that we still want to do from that Forum, so it’s a great time to get together and even just think about learning the system and then working together with everyone there. Our entire team is there to think about the next problems that we want to solve with the software. Yeah! Great recap. Hopefully everyone, or a lot of people, can make it. Summertime in Michigan, it’s the best.

Zach:
It is.

Tom:
All right. Well, thank you, Zach. Thank you everyone for listening, and we will see you at the 8.0 podcast.

Zach:
Thanks everyone.

Tom:
See you.