Tom’s Tips Podcast: S2E7 – Would Have Been ‘Stranger’ If It Was Episode 8

Audio Transcript

Tom Bellen:
Hello, all MagHub podcast listeners. Welcome to MagHub’s Tom’s Tips Podcast 8.0. I am Tom Bellen, Product Manager for MagHub. I am joined as always by our Marketing Director, Zach Gilbert. Say hello to the pod listeners, Zach.

Zach Gilbert:
Hey, everybody.

Tom Bellen:
All right. So Zach, we’ve had an argument in the office the last couple of days about Netflix streaming services involving Stranger Things, and I thought we could get the pod listeners involved. Maybe they can tell us how… their thoughts on it. So as you know, Stranger Things came out. I binge watched it. You binge watched it. We had a few people in the office who’ve started it and haven’t finished it, and it leads down to the questions of spoilers. So I think we’re having a bit of an argument of how much time do you give someone in today’s age of binge watching before you start openly talking about it? I know you were animated about this. Can you give the pod listeners a little bit of a feeling on what … how you view … what is a spoiler timeframe for somebody in binge watching?

Zach Gilbert:
Sure. I think it depends heavily on how long the show it. Stranger Things is eight 45-minute shows. I think the last one is an hour and 15 minutes. So don’t get me wrong, it’s a chunk of time, but it’s not binge watching Game of Thrones, Season One. It’s a little bit of a longer time commitment. So I would say I’m pretty harsh on this, just because I like Stranger Things so much and I want to talk about it. But I give somebody a week. If they don’t watch it in a week, that’s on them. Then I’m going to talk about it freely unless I specifically know they haven’t watched it. Then I’ll try to avoid them. But I think a week is more than enough time.

Zach Gilbert:
I was reading online that 40.8 million people started watching it, and 18.2 million finished it within the first 24 hours. So I think that says something… like you should finish it.

Tom Bellen:
Well, I guess it’s a question. Should you get a full week or is it a timeframe since when you started watching it? Because I don’t know if something happened, you were out of town, but if you’ve… I view it as hey, I started watching it on Wednesday. Maybe they should get a week after the point of when they started it. I don’t know. I also think it depends a little bit on who you are, because I would say if you come in the office and say I haven’t watched it yet, then I think at that point, from the point someone uses that phrase “I haven’t watched it yet,” they get a day.

Tom Bellen:
Well, for instance, we have… it’s our intern, and they haven’t watched it. He has nothing to do. He can go home and watch it right away. So if at this point we want to start talking about it and you haven’t watched it, if you’re young and don’t have kids, you have until tomorrow to catch up, otherwise we freely talk about it.

Zach Gilbert:
Wow.

Tom Bellen:
I think if it’s someone… has a wife or kids or something, you should give them three days.

Zach Gilbert:
Sure.

Tom Bellen:
Because that’s what it took for me, is you can get through three hours there. But I think maybe that’s how I would handle it, is once you’ve set the precedence of we’re talking about the show at this point, no one has watched it, they get an extra day or so. So at this point, I think we can openly talk about it because it’s just our intern who hasn’t watched it yet.

Zach Gilbert:
Well there were a few others anyways.

Tom Bellen:
Someone else hasn’t watched it? Well, I mean, our CEO I think has only watched a couple of them.

Zach Gilbert:
Yeah.

Tom Bellen:
Our Creative Director only watched a few of them. All right. So they’re both on the day. I think actually, definitely by next week, I think that that’s on them at that point, for sure.

Zach Gilbert:
I would agree.

Tom Bellen:
I think there’s a level of responsibility that determines, but if you do not have a wife, you do not have kids, then you should be able to watch eight hours of television in one night. I don’t see why that’s such a problem anymore.

Tom Bellen:
But maybe the reason they weren’t able to watch it was because they were so busy working on the 8.0 Release, which went out obviously a little later than normal because we were binge watching Stranger Things, obviously, so we didn’t get finished. No, no, that’s not it. It was with the holiday season. A couple of days off, we had to push the release off. So the release went out just this week, actually. Today is the day we’re recording it (Friday). A lot of exciting things because we moved on from the 7.0 Series to the Eights, which is eights are great. So it’s an exciting time.

Tom Bellen:
We’re actually sending out a blog post covering all the things we did in 7.0, which was a lot. But in the 8.0 Release, we’ve introduced the new menu structures. We moved to the left hand menu. Pretty much you’ll see left hand menus, a lot of monitored sites, gives you easier ways to help with the navigation side of it, looks a lot better. So we’ve released that to beta so people can start playing with it to get feedback. We know that the MagHub menu can be quite intimidating at times, so we hoping the way we reorganized it is helpful. We’d love to get feedback and some other ways that we can improve it. We’ve already had some thoughts about that so might make some additional tweaks.

Tom Bellen:
Again, for now, you will have to enable it by clicking on the toggle at the top right of your page to view the menu structure at some point. If we feel that it’s good and we get a lot of positive feedback, we’ll flip it on and be the main menu. But right now, if you have a chance, take a look at it. Let us know your thoughts, feelings about it. Would be great.

Tom Bellen:
Along with that, we’ve continued again on our push to expand out some of the eCommerce capabilities. We’ve been working on this for a while. We know there’s a lot of… just not as many open items to get done. One of the big ones was adding the importer because we’ve had the storefront so people can do small orders. If you don’t have a storefront, you’ve been able to use that. But if you do have a Woocommerce or a Shopify, a big commerce or Wix storefront and you want to get the orders into our system, you can use our importer now to do that. You can bring things in as fully paid, fully shipped. So maybe you’re using other shipping services than ours, but you want all the money and the tracking within one system. You can do that.

Tom Bellen:
Or you can just bring in the orders and use our creation we have with EasyPost to be able to do shipments from our system. So we have that importer. Also being able to do more on the back office side as far as finding contacts, associating with promo codes, free shopping promo codes has all been expanded as well as updating some of the reports about our filtering on that as well.

Tom Bellen:
Another one of the initiatives we’ve been working on for the last few months is with the vendors, is we’re just finishing up some of the odds and ends there of introducing the ability for vendors to approve or reject a purchase order. We’ve had that ability on the editorial side, but this allows a vendor … So if you’re submitting something for your printer and you want to start keeping track of costs there or other suppliers, you can do that. Again, they can accept or reject the purchase order, which they couldn’t do before. We keep track of all that record, and as well as updating some of the email capabilities there too.

Tom Bellen:
For the subscription side, being able to now bundle subscriptions. So if you sell print and digital or newsletter, you want to offer all that in one nice package for the customer to purchase, they can purchase it that way. But behind the scenes we will break out all the individual subscriptions that they have so you can do fulfillment on those. So very common, if hey, you subscribe here for $20 you get both the print and the digital subscription in one instead of having to buy both. So I think that will help customers greater reduce the hassle of entering two subscriptions, because now you just enter it as one and have all that record in their system to keep track of. Those are some of the bigger ticket items that we’ve added.

Tom Bellen:
We’ve also given users the ability to quickly add information about an advertiser, company or contact using a quick fill action based on the website URL, on the company. Or the email domain of the user. Again, you’ll get a popup of hey, this is what we know about the person. You can choose to use that and populate the system to make it quickly… way to add companies and contacts, or modify the data. You always want to just be careful with that because obviously the data that you’re getting from may be yours. Maybe you just talked to the person and they just moved, and the software doesn’t know that quite yet. So you always want to just be careful before you do that, but hopefully it will help out … As well as showing the company logo on the homepage and linking directly to their site. We think that will be a nice little feature for people to start using.

Tom Bellen:
Also just added, again as usual, some additional updates and new filters to things like our consolidated sales report, which we had to… with recent releases. More filters with that, being able to add more colors in MagBuilder. Again, added some additional currencies. So a lot of different things that we do. Again, with some of the main features that we wanted to update, the eCommerce, the payables, our menu structure, as long as it was with some of the improvements that we gather from feature requests to get into the system as well. Then with all the fixes.

Tom Bellen:
So I think overall there were about 80 different tasks that went into this release, so I think it actually was 80. 80, 8.0, that just hit me. That is amazing. So with that, Zach, I don’t know if there’s anything in particular in this release that really stands out that gets you excited for the 8.0 series?

Zach Gilbert:
Two things. I love the left hand nav. It was definitely the first, original top bar worked really well, but left hand nav just seems a little bit sleeker. Putting everything into alphabetical order seems to be a pretty easy process to find what you’re looking for. There are a few changes that I’m still getting used to, and obviously providing feedback here and then when I come across it. But overall I think it looks really nice. It’s a really clean system.

Zach Gilbert:
I would also say the quick fill stuff is really cool. I know we get it from a third party vendor, which is… sometimes it’s not always the most accurate, but I’ve been playing around with a lot of different contacts and most of it’s been pretty accurate overall. So that’s been a pretty cool experience, especially since it’s FREE. That’s a pretty cool addition as well. So those are my two biggest things I’ve liked.

Tom Bellen:
Yeah. I really think that information, again, is going to be really helpful. It’s always nice to see the logo of the company, too, in that side. Yeah, I think the left hand menu, as you get used to it, is still… I think there’s a little bit of muscle memory for me of what? Oh, yeah. A little different. But it’s definitely helpful, and I just… it improves the look of the screen. So I’m excited for that change as well.

Tom Bellen:
But I was thinking as we’re going through this, about Stranger Things a little bit. Did you like the Stranger Things Season Three, Zach?

Zach Gilbert:
I did.

Tom Bellen:
Were you a fan? Okay.

Zach Gilbert:
Yeah. I’m big into the ’80s thing. ’80s bands have been my favorite bands since birth, so I don’t think Stranger Things… To be honest, Stranger Things could have a terrible plot and I probably would still like it just because the soundtracks always get to me. So I’m not unbiased about it, unfortunately. But I did think the storyline in season three was much better than season two. I thought it moved along at a better progression, which I enjoyed. Season one will obviously always be my favorite. It reminded me most of the Goonies, which was really nice. But no, I enjoyed season three extensively.

Tom Bellen:
So that’s interesting that you mentioned Goonies, because that’s how I was going to transition into both the-

Zach Gilbert:
I knew it.

Tom Bellen:
Cat fact and the movie question day. Trying to keep it simple there. So when we were watching Stranger Things, my wife was … well, she’s expecting our next child, and it was one of those time where … It hasn’t happened often. The stereotypical pregnancy craving. I had to stop the show and run and get ice cream for her to eat.

Tom Bellen:
So tying into the Goonies feel, because everyone ties that in, you’ve got Sean Astin, who was in the second season, is what is quite simply the famous… What is the type of ice cream that Goonies made so famous with Chunk and all those guys? So if you can just give us that ice cream flavor, you will win the prize. Just Tweet that @MagHub to win your prize. Again, what is the ice cream flavor when you think of Goonies? What do you think of? I think should be pretty obvious if you’re a Goonies fan. Based on Zach’s little sniffle, I think he knows the answer already.

Tom Bellen:
But that also lets to some of the cat fact, which essentially is when we eat ice cream, our cats are ridiculous. They need the ice cream, they need to put their paws in the ice cream and grab it. The reason why that’s just interesting is … two things, actually. Is one, it can’t be because of the sweetness because a cats actually sense of taste, they don’t really have the sweet component. They can’t taste sweet things. So maybe it’s something to do with the fat, or you think about the classic thing of cats with milk.

Tom Bellen:
Well, it actually … cats drinking milk is just a myth. They’re lactose intolerant. So the question really is why is our cats so obsessed to eat ice cream when they can’t taste the sweetness and it’s going to make them sick? The only thing I can always do is that the cat just knows that it’s annoying and that’s why it does it, because that’s why cats do anything. But anyway, that is the cat fact today of lactose tolerant and they can’t taste anything that’s sweet, which means what? Why they’re so mean all the time.

Tom Bellen:
But that is it for the 8.0 podcast. Again, very exciting release. Psyched for it. Next release will be coming out soon again, in a month, in August. But anything you want to say, Zach, before we wrap up this podcast?

Zach Gilbert:
Just that next month also marks our MagHub Fall Forum, so get your tickets while you still can. We’ve added about eight new groups now in this last week alone, so it’ll be a really diverse group of publishers of all types, B2B, B2C, Niche, etc. It’ll be a really good get-together. It’ll be our biggest one yet. We have more signups this year than last year, and it should be good.

Tom Bellen:
Yeah, and it will be exciting time to… We’re going to go over in some different sessions some of those… the bigger initiatives we have been doing over the last few months. So I know a lot of times the releases come quick, people are busy, they can’t catch up on those things. So if that is something that’s been interesting, you want to get into the payable side, or more on the eCommerce side, or some of the other features that we’ve released but we haven’t had time to do, we are going to have special sections on each… a lot of different components of the system. So we’ll give you the time to sit down with us, meet with us, and maybe try and get some of those things going for the fall.

Tom Bellen:
So we’re excited. Sign up for the forum. Yeah, everyone have a great day. Thank you, as always, Zach.

Zach Gilbert:
Thank you.