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TTP S2E8: This is the Podcast that Never Ends.

Written by Zach Gilbert

Published: 10/01/2019

Audio Transcript

Announcer:

Hey everyone! Welcome to Tom’s Tip’s Podcast. Your place for obscure movie references, cats facts, and everything MagHub related. And now your host MagHub Product Manager, Tom Bellen!

Tom Bellen:

Hello everybody, thank you for listening to the MagHub 8.2 and 8.3 release podcast. This is going to be a double dose because we had our forum recently, and we had to kind of wait to push this all together in one big podcast. And because it’s going to be such a large podcast filled with so much information, we brought in reinforcements. So, again, I am Tom Bellen the product manager. I’m joined by Zach Gilbert, as always, our marketing director and also this time Jeremy Lewis, our client engagement manager. Jeremy say hello to our podcasters.

Jeremy Lewis:

What’s going on everybody. Hello Tom and Zach. How you guys doing?

Tom Bellen:

I’m doing great. Zach is doing great. He’s working at home today apparently, so he’s living it up there. So again we had to delay our podcast because we had the forum, so I figured we’d start there talking about that. We had our forum in August, which was in Detroit, which was a lot of fun. I don’t know, Jeremy, Zach, what was your favorite part about this year’s Forum?

Jeremy Lewis:              

I really liked the attendance in general. I thought that it was cool to see more people coming this year. I like Detroit, I think Detroit is an awesome city, kind of under the radar. People don’t really think of Detroit as a cool city to come to, but hopefully people thought the same, but I enjoyed kind of most of it. I thought the breakout sessions were fun and then obviously the activities after the actual forum were really good, so hats off to Zach for planning all of those cool social events as well.

Tom Bellen:                 

Well, one quick thing on that. Yeah, the events were fun. One of those was my suggestion to do an escape the room, and I was made fun of by basically everyone in the office for wanting to do that. But in the end, I think most people who went were actually very happy with that. So, again, I just want to call out being called out for parading out such a great idea.

Jeremy Lewis:              

I don’t know that it was the greatest idea ever. I do think people did have more fun than we thought though in the escape the room. But it was fun. I had my doubts, no doubt, about an escape the room with our customers and people that we don’t know. It was kind of weird for me to not kind of be a jerk and be that jerk leader that sometimes maybe I am and don’t listen to other people. It was interesting to see people’s thought processes for sure. I think our group got the farthest though, so obviously my group was the greatest.

Tom Bellen:                 

Well, no one escaped the room. I think that’s a really a pass/fail situation. Actually, if you pass, you can judge by time, but if you don’t escape the room, you just fail. What about you, Zach, what did you enjoy the most about this year’s forum?

Zach Gilbert:                

So, I’m going to mirror what Jeremy said. The attendance was great. It grew up to about 75 people. So, next year we’re shooting for over a hundred. So look forward to that. It’ll be in Chicago next year, so we’re excited for that. I also did enjoy the events. The escape the room was fun, it was different than what I kind of expected it to be. I’ve never done one before and I feel like they did a really good job there. And I also enjoyed Punchbowl Social, kind of like the drinking and bowling and all that stuff, because we had a really good turnout. Pretty much everybody attended that one, which was really nice to see. And just like overall, just the amount of content we had, you know, we had a lot more panels, we had a lot more workshops, we had a larger audience. I feel like this year was better than last year and last year I had a lot of fun, so looking forward to where next year goes.

Jeremy Lewis:              

You drank at those events?

Tom Bellen:                 

You’re let go. We did not know that there was a no drinking policy at this.

Jeremy Lewis:              

What about Tom’s karaoke? Tom’s karaoke, it was pretty awesome, I thought.

Zach Gilbert:                

I thought it was great.

Jeremy Lewis:              

Barbie Girl was amazing.

Zach Gilbert:                

Slim Shady was my personal favorite,

Tom Bellen:                 

But I don’t think most people saw the Slim Shady, that’s going to end my presidential campaign, those videos are out there. So again, maybe we can have people pay to see those videos if they want. You know, we can put those up on our storefront and if people want to get that video, just pay a few dollars, I need help. I got a second kid coming, need to put it through some sort of college, I don’t know. So can we do that, can we post those videos on for selling or is that going to be a copyright problem because I’m singing Slim Shady? I don’t really know them and all that stuff.

Tom Bellen:                 

Yeah. But I thought obviously my singing was the best followed closely by my idea for escape the room. But otherwise I think the forum is great, getting a lot of more people. We had a lot of people come back from the previous year, which was good because obviously it’s showing the value of starting that. So they were really excited to come back, and we took their feedback and then a lot of new people as well, so we’re excited.

Tom Bellen:                 

We’re going to launch it even earlier this year to get more people going to the events, and part of being able to make that easier is having some of the changes that are going into the 8.2 and 8.3 release. Another perfect transition to talk about the releases, because we started last year with the forum was launching it through e-commerce and selling tickets directly through the storefront. And it was earlier on the process and Zach was our Guinea pig, and he definitely had some rough times through it. We worked through it and there was a lot of excitement at the forum too about the events and eCommerce and selling tickets.

Tom Bellen:                 

So we did try and push forward in the 8.2 release, and the 8.3 release, some different things to make that easier. Some of those things that we’ll be doing again is the zero dollar tickets, which I know was kind of an issue, so if there is a zero dollar item you can put that information into the system, and you don’t have to put in a credit cards. Also, tying along with that is we are going to be doing product-based promos. We’ve had order based, and some other buy one get ones, but there’ll be product-based promos that will be in the 8.3 release, so zero dollar items, product promos. So if you want to start selling tickets for X dollars, they can put in a promo code, get it for zero dollars, and we knew that like, bill me later with something a lot of people had. The way we were going to do that or can do that now is give a promo code to someone, bill later, make the ticket’s zero dollars, and you can always invoice them a special invoice outside the system.

Tom Bellen:                 

So we’re making that workflow work for Zack for this next forum. So that’s some exciting things again, in this 8.3 release, if we look back to 8.2 and a 8.3 is both had a lot of QuickBooks changes. So in 8.2 we introduced the idea of exporting our vendors into QuickBooks and QuickBooks online. Then also other, just a CSV so it doesn’t have to just be QuickBooks, but you can export vendor records from the system, you can also export basically a recorded vendor invoice which will become a bill in QuickBooks and those payments, again we did have a session on the payable section and got some good feedback about that. So that was in the 8.2 release coming up in 8.3 we’re going to continue on our QuickBooks integration. Really financial exports by adding subscribers, can be exported from the system along with subscription invoices and with subscription payments.

Tom Bellen:                 

So that will all go into, again, QuickBooks online automatically, but if you’re not using that you’re using desktop or another financial system, you will be able to get those exports out and import those into the platform. Along with that, I know the big change that we’re making with our exports in general, again, but you know talking about QuickBooks online is we’re creating a mapping area. So if you want to, you can go into this mapping page, you’ll see all your print and digital publications as well as services, and you can actually type in what product or item name that should be in your exports. So if you are using our CSV exports for orders or invoices, basically you can say that, Hey, anytime you sell this pub it should be listed as this, this item. So particularly for our QuickBooks online users or QuickBooks users, you can map that directly to a product and service that you want to go to.

Tom Bellen:                 

So if you’ve been using that before it would have said like print ads, sale, online ad sale, service sale, and there were some ways to tweak that, but now you can just go directly in and map it how you want. And again, if it’s online because you’re connected to your account, we can actually pull in your products and services from your online account. If you’re using a desktop, you’ll just have to type it in, but it will update all those exports, again, if you’re not using any of those, you can still take advantage of it.

Jeremy Lewis:              

I think that’s my favorite change for QuickBooks. I think that’s going to be huge. The mapper, it’s going to be so fun to use.

Tom Bellen:                 

Yeah, and I think you know the mapper, we talk a lot about the online. It can be used for other items and , in the future too, if we start to look about tying into other financial systems, they would use that same mapper.

Tom Bellen:                 

So I think that’ll make it a lot easier in explaining it and onboarding that online thing. And then a finance person can go to that. They don’t have to worry about, going all the other parts of the system to update it. That’s kind of like the finance person’s world. They can be the only ones and see and go from there. So that will be fun and exciting, and there’s still some other things that we’ll probably expand on that as far as mapping things like our products and subscriptions down the road. But that’s our starting point for the online. Other big changes that again have started in 8-2 and are continuing 8-3, is a proposal module. So we redid the whole layout for how to build proposal templates. We brought back in some of the different interactions of proposals, so getting notified when people are approving of items and viewing proposals.

Tom Bellen:                 

So that started in 8.2. Continuing in 8-3, we’re adding a backend, the analytics from the client’s interview so you can actually see what someone’s viewing within when they’re looking at the proposal, the different sections. And you can be notified when someone’s viewing it, so you can jump right in and have a discussion with them. And we’re also doing some things in locking the sections and making the terms and condition, or sorry, the title page, more editable and you can upload your own title page through a PDF. So again, continuing some other tweaks. The proposal module which is again something we’ve had for a while. Some people have dabbled in it, but we can see that there’s a lot more flexibility to really build kind of information about your brand around the line item. So works similar to orders but has a lot more fluff in there. So that’s going to be continuing on, started in 8-2 working in 8-3 and we have a couple other items we’ll probably get into the releases following as we get more and more feedback about using that within the system.

Tom Bellen:                 

So the other big item that’s going to go on in 8-3, which we did also again, start briefly at the end of 8-2 is a Gmail add on. So if anyone’s used our Outlook plugin before, it’s a way, if you’re in Outlook, you can go in see companies, contacts while you’re just right in Outlook. You don’t have to be in the system, and you can even record emails directly back into MagHub from within Outlook. So now we’re building that same capability in Gmail. So if you are a Gmail user, you can get the add in, you can sign in, you can then view information about a person right from in Gmail about that whatever you have MagHub.

Tom Bellen:                 

You can also take an email that you just got in your inbox and copy it right into MagHub. So now again, we’ll have that same capabilities in both platforms. Also, means that over the next few months for anyone who’s using that email client, one of the reasons we’re doing this is we want to deprecate that. For some reasons, it just doesn’t work great. There’s a lot of effort to try and keep that going. So we thought it better to provide those two options to be able to better record activities in the system. That’s another reason why we’ve also been updating our direct email mechanisms. So that’s been happening in 8.2 and some changes 8.3, so we’ve set it up now where everyone can use it and if you set up your email account in the system, you can actually send emails directly from our platform, and they will be recorded in your sent box as if you had just sent it from your Gmail or Outlook account and you can record those activities.

Tom Bellen:                 

So with the direct email and the add ins, it kind of makes that email client not really that useful, and you should be able to handle all your emails through those two mechanisms in this upcoming release, again, we will be adding ways to do more attachments to direct emails. So just continued improvements on some of those features as we chug right along. So those are getting some of the main items. We also got into some of the kind of smaller items that customers, especially at the forum asked about, we had recently updated the ability to send reminders to companies when they have an order that’s outstanding that they haven’t signed. So that was something that kind of came from the forum that we added into there. We’ve also been doing a lot of things with our meta based tool, data warehouse tool, putting more details in there.

Tom Bellen:                 

So now you have a lot more control of actually creating and embedding some of these graphs or special reports directly in MagHub, so you can share those with your user. We also got some more feedback about kind of the new menu that we’ve been working on and ways to improve that. And we’re going to be doing some changes to that, including adding major improvements to our global search, to be able to search by like category to make it easier to quickly find a company and go right there. We’re also adding, which we refer to, in house right now as the magic button. Just basically point all those add actions from the menu. So if you need to add like an invoice or a company or contact, you can just quickly go to this magic button which will show up everywhere and, and add those items to the system.

Tom Bellen:                 

So a lot of different things over these two releases. Again, those are some of the main items that we’re having, but along with that we have a lot of other just kind of little tickets and things that get in there. So always check out the release notes, make sure you don’t miss something. And then as we’re looking at 8-4 again, we’re going to start leading to doing a lot more things to help our sales people with new gadgets and dashboards and things like that. So that’s going to be a big push for the end of the year. But yeah, the big things that 8.2 and 8.3, Jeremy, Zack, I don’t know if there’s any things that you particularly liked or maybe in my rambling, something that I forgot that I should have mentioned. Anything you guys particularly like of 8.2 or what’s coming out in 8.3.

Jeremy Lewis:              

I like the direct email stuff a lot. I think some of the changes we made, I know that’s been more recent, not necessarily two and three but I think that’s pretty nice being able to use that stuff. I think, like I said already, the QuickBooks will help a lot of people, especially with subscription and vendor invoices going over there and PLs and things like that. And now also, I think that’ll make a big difference. And I think a selfishly during eight one, two, and three we’ve also done a lot more like support stuff too. So putting Pendo guides out and blasting people with popups all over the place, kind of like the NASCAR car, just to make sure that people know things are new so, we’re keep, we keep trying new things with each release. I think last time we put in like a little new icon next to stuff, and I think we’ll probably stick with that or something like that. But selfishly, I think we are improving in that fashion as well.

Tom Bellen:                 

I was going to say Zach, your favorite thing I totally forgot is the taxes, right? That we added taxes or was it something else?

Zach Gilbert:                

No, that’s my favorite thing. Absolutely. Taxes. Yeah, taxes, and I do like the magic button. I think it’s a cool little feature that follows you around. So I like that. And not only that, I like the name, ‘magic button’. It seems pretty cool. And I also like all changes to the events stuff because selfishly it will be very helpful for next year’s forum.

Tom Bellen:                 

Yeah. Which again, we’re going to be launching out there soon. So once those changes go in there, people can start buying tickets I think. I think that’s the plan is as soon as we get those things in there, people you can start buying some tickets.

Jeremy Lewis:              

Buy them early, get everyone there, get your whole team there. Let’s see if I can get one company to bring a representation from each division of the company or something. That would be awesome.

Tom Bellen:                 

Because the one thing too, I mean we do take the feedback very seriously on that side. Like I said, there’s a lot of the kind of smaller things or things that we’re planning on these next few releases that are coming directly from that forum. So again, it’s great to just talk to people and be face to face and see the things going through and doing that. It’s really helpful and, it’s come through with a feature freak out. Tom’s feature freak out, which you can get animated. It’s a good time.

Tom Bellen:                 

But speaking about magic button and just kind of weird things like I was getting to my fun cat and movie trivia stuff. I was watching a movie the other day, Midsommar, I don’t know if you guys have seen this thing. It’s a weird movie. Very kind of culty creepy. Not something to have the kids watch or anything like that. And it’s actually the second movie by this, by this director. So for the, the movie trivia, it should be simple. Again, Midsommar if you’ve seen or not seen it. He had a similar movie that came out a little while ago that was also critically acclaimed.

Tom Bellen:                 

If you can say what that movie is and tweet it to @MagHub, is that our Twitter handle? @MagHub you will get a prize. The director of Midsommar, what other movie did they make? It was their first feature film that was directed. And speaking about Detroit. One of the actors in Midsommar, Will Poulter, stared in the film Detroit, which I haven’t seen, but I heard was very, very good. I think it was Kathryn Bigelow who was the director who also won best director for Hurt Locker, which was a good movie.

Tom Bellen:                 

And now just to keep going. She was originally married to James Cameron and I think they’re releasing Avatar, the second avatar in like 40 years or is that actually coming out anytime soon? I think it’s 16 years now. And I got to say speaking to James Cameron, very excited. He’s back in the Terminator series releasing the new Terminator film with the Linda Hamilton, who starred once in a show, Beauty and a Beast a long time with Ron Perlman who starred as the beast and not the Beauty and the Beast movie. I haven’t seen too much, but my son has been watching a lot of movies recently. One of those was full, but I don’t know any comments about any of that little rant I went on. That was my mini.

Jeremy Lewis:              

Tom we should have to try to get you to do with six degrees of separation from yourself to somebody famous, to see if you can do it.

Tom Bellen:                 

Sure. I probably can. You can try right now, right after my cat trivia you see me do it because getting into the movie was Up. We’d been watching Bolt recently, has a little black cat in it. And then I was seeing something, I didn’t know this but in the movie there’s a scene where they have, this dog is begging for food and everyone loves the dog and they give them food and they have this cat tries it and everyone hates cats. And which I totally understand as a cat hater, who has them. Did. You guys didn’t even know that a cat has been to space.

Jeremy Lewis:              

A cat has been to space?

Tom Bellen:                 

A cat has been in space. First one in 1963 and guess what countries sent the cat to space. I don’t think this should be that surprising.

Tom Bellen:                 

Which country actually sent the kids to space, you guys know?

Jeremy Lewis:              

Russia.

Tom Bellen:                 

No, It was France. First of all, I didn’t know France had a space program and of course they were like we’ll send the cat. They sent a cat, and I think the cat’s name Félicette. So yeah, there’s been cat in space in 1963 and the cat’s name was Félicette. But yeah that is the cat fact in the movie trivia again, to get back after my rant, what was the first film directed by the director of Midsommar? But if you have a six degree of separation challenge, you can see if I can pull it off.

Jeremy Lewis:              

Zach, who do you think we should go with here?

Zach Gilbert:                

Oh, I don’t, I’m leaving that up to you.

Jeremy Lewis:              

Maybe let’s try like Clint Eastwood. You can try that one. That’s going to be a hard one. I think. Clint Eastwood.

Jeremy Lewis:              

See if you can connect yourself to Clint pal.

Tom Bellen:                 

Okay. So how does this work again? I just have to have known someone or met someone who met someone else, to get to Clint Eastwood.

Jeremy Lewis:              

Yeah, those have to be like six handshakes basically.

Tom Bellen:                 

It could be less? Well, I used to work, let’s go through this, I used to work for the Michigan football program back in the day of Lloyd Carr when we weren’t an embarrassment and Lloyd Carr. I definitely know met, it was at the game they destroyed Notre Dame and Russell Crowe came in to do that. He was actually at the game so that was at the Notre Dame. I think we won 38-nothing. Russell Crowe, and he cursed in the locker room. So now at this I’m at Russell Crowe, so now it’s just embarrassing. I just have to figure out how to get to Clint Eastwood from Russell Crowe. Shouldn’t be that hard. I’m just trying to think. So Russell Crowe, I’m just trying to think, I mean he was in, probably I don’t even know. I’m trying to think of Cinderella man. If he was in that trying to think of a movie, that Clint Eastwood was in. Oh man, this is bad.

Jeremy Lewis:              

Yes. I think I got him Zach.

Tom Bellen:                 

No, no. I mean, I can get there. There’s obviously a way to get from Russell Crowe to Clint Eastwood in less than whatever steps, so Russell Crowe, I’m just going to go, trying to think of all the silly Clint Eastwood. No, I’m not googling anything, I’m not going to cheat and say, Google anything. This is like everyone’s already probably there. Like Russell Crowe’s probably in a movie with Clint Eastwood.

Tom Bellen:                 

Oh man. So Zach already knows how to connect it and I’m failing on this.

Zach Gilbert:                

Well I mean I could’ve connected you like one step earlier because you could just say you met me, and I’ve met Clint Eastwood. Oh, I mean that would have made it so much easier.

Tom Bellen:                 

Well now I’m done on that point, I don’t even think there’s a point.

Jeremy Lewis:              

Minimal steps right there, skipped right over Russell Crowe.

Tom Bellen:                 

I really want to do Ron Howard do Cinderella man for some reason. But that’s, weird. I know he was also inside man I guess I would say the Inside Guy would probably be the best one because it has a bunch of people in it. Like I could probably because then I can go Russell Crowe to Al Pacino.

Tom Bellen:                 

Then once I’m at Al Pacino, I mean Al Pacino to get to Clint Eastwood. It’s just, I mean all those things. Or even now I’m thinking Russell Crowe was in the movie, “The Quick and the Dead”, which was written by Simon Moore who also at the same time it is writing a “Dollar’s Trilogy”, starring Clint Eastwood.

Tom Bellen:                 

I was thinking, okay, I knew you Wikipedia it, then you could say “The Quick and the Dead”. That was Leonardo DiCaprio. I don’t know, there’s all kinds of ways get to it. So that’s a good movie to get two through from there. Sharon Stone was in that.

Zach Gilbert:                

Gene Hackman and Owen Wilson when they are on the USS Carl Vinson. My brother was in the movie because he was in the Navy at the time and, we went to Seattle and they basically were giving tours and when they were giving tours, that’s when they were filming. So I got to meet Gene Hackman and Owen Wilson at the same time. And then later my brother got stationed in Texas and then we went there for that, and on base was Clint Eastwood so I got an autograph from that.

Tom Bellen:                 

Anyway, so that connection actually works. It’s “The Quick and the Dead”, Gene Hackman, and then Gene Hackman was also in, I think “Absolute Power”, and “Absolute Power” had Clint Eastwood in it.

Jeremy Lewis:              

Zach can we talk about your wedding? That was also in 8.2 and 8.3 great time. Had my all except for Tom. Tom was too cool to come to it, but you know, everyone else was cool enough to make it out there.

Zach Gilbert:                

Yeah, it was fun, it was a good time.

Jeremy Lewis:              

Yeah, it was in a tree house at a zoo. It was awesome.

Zach Gilbert:                

That is true. That is true. And it had a I little gondola that went up to it or a little funicular.

Jeremy Lewis:              

Yeah, you had to take like a little school train up this massive hill because no one could walk up that hill. It’s too steep. That was cool though, it was fun. Tom, what’d you think of Zach’s wedding?

Tom Bellen:                 

It was great. Well I would’ve gone, I was at a different wedding at the time, so I was in there, but I did actually do something first time at this wedding I went to, because my wife was in it. She was very busy throughout the day. So I actually went up North and I played golf and I played 36 holes in a little over four hours and, I needed to take an ice bath the next day because I walked the whole thing and it was terrible. It was a terrible idea.

Jeremy Lewis:              

That’s a bad injury there for sure.

Tom Bellen:                 

Yeah, I was, it was hip pain. I didn’t too play too badly though, so.

Jeremy Lewis:              

Oh, that’s good.

Tom Bellen:                 

Yeah, limping into the finish. All right this is definitely, I think, been the longest podcast yet, lot of information, a lot of off the rails things, a lot of movie trivia in general, I think people can pick up a lot of things there. So, I thank you for Zach and Jeremy for joining me on this podcast. And again, hopefully if you were at the forum this year, you’ll come back and if you haven’t, come on down to Chicago, Shy Town, “Untouchables”, that was a good movie. See everybody, have a good day. 

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