Transcript

Announcer:

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Tom’s Tips podcast, your place for obscure movie references, catch backs, and everything MagHub related. And now your host, Mag Hub product manager, Tom Bellen.

Tom:

Hello, everybody. Welcome to Tom’s Tips Podcast, the first of 2021. It’s a new year. I am Tom Bellen, Project Manager for Aysling. Joined by always, our Marketing Director, Zach Gilbert. Say hello to the jugheads, Zach.

Zach:

Hello, jugheads.

Tom:

Yeah. All right. It is the new year and it’s our first podcast. This year, we’re going to do it right. I don’t know what that means, but we’re going to do it right. So Zach, it’s a new year. That means resolution time. Do you have any for this upcoming 2021 year?

Zach:

This year is going to be saving up money because my wife and I want to buy a house soon. We’re still trying to figure out where. But that is going to be our goal, is cutting down some debts, saving up some additional money, and, I guess, try to live healthier, but I tell myself that every year, so we’ll see.

Tom:

Nice. Living healthy. That’s just silliness.

Zach:

I know.

Tom:

I mean, what’s the point in living healthy if you’re not mentally healthy? It’s like, “What, I can’t…” That sounds like you’re eating broccoli all day. Terrible. Just terrible. I mean, saving money, that’s always a fun thing, which always leads to an expense. So is there a certain type of thing that you’re going to have to cut out expense-wise to save additional funds? It’s either you’re making more money on the side managing my podcast career or you’re probably going to have to cut something out. So what sacrifice there will you be making?

Zach:

I think my wife would probably say stop buying stuff that I don’t need. I’m a big collector of PC games and GameCube games and arcade machines, so she’ll probably tell me to stop buying those things. She’s got a point. So that’ll be my expenses. Stop buying stuff.

Tom:

Well, I can definitely agree on the GameCube games. That seems just excessive. Who collects GameCube game?

Zach:

I do.

Tom:

Does that go right next to your Sega Saturn game collection?

Zach:

I have a Sega Saturn game collection, thank you.

Tom:

Why? I mean, I love to play Saturn as well, but it’s one of those systems… Isn’t that one of those systems that you’re just like, “That happened, but…”

Zach:

So it’s a good point. It’s fair. I have this obsessive need of collecting all games. So I could choose N64 or those types of systems, but those games go for a ridiculous amount of money. GameCube games are actually relatively cheap. There’s only 500 or so games played. So I could actually theoretically collect all of them without going broke. You could still find time, people don’t really care about the discs as much, and there’s a lot of counterfeits for the cartridges. So a lot of Nintendo, N64, all those cartridges, a lot of those are repos, so you have to be careful not to buy some scam one. For the GameCube discs, since they’re mini, they use a different format, they’re a little bit harder to knock off. So that’s why.

Tom:

Interesting. I was thinking maybe it’s the Sega CD. That was the real bum of a system. Do you have one of those?

Zach:

I do not. I had one as a kid. I probably will never have another one.

Tom:

I think I rented it a few times, I remember, as a kid. Back when you would rent systems. I think there was some sewer game. That’s the only one I remember for Sega CD was there was some game where you’re in a sewer and you’re going through it. I think it was their flagship game and then I don’t know if they made anything else, but yeah. Yeah. No, I was always a Sega kid to and I know, because we’ve talked about I recently, for my Christmas gift to myself, was got a Sega Mini. So I’m getting ready to get some nostalgia on with some of my Sonic, my ToeJam & Earl. I’ve asked my wife to play ToeJam & Earl with me. I’ll have to figure out a time to do that. I don’t know if she’s emotionally prepared for what ToeJam & Earl is.

Tom:

It doesn’t make any sense, but it’s a great game. That dang Randomizer gave me fits as a child, so I can’t wait to have some flashback memories of just pure anger when I figured out all of my presents and then there he goes, the Randomizer. So I’m excited for that child rage to come back of just complete and utter frustration. I’m glad I did that for myself. That’s my New Year’s resolution, be angrier. So I’m working very well to get to that part.

Zach:

It’s a good goal.

Tom:

Yeah. I always think it’s healthy, to be angry. Especially when you’re still stuck at home with young kids around. Always a good idea to get angrier and that fun stuff.

Tom:

But it is a exciting new year. New things going on. 2021. Thinking already about the 2021 Forum, which we hope to do in-person. Speaking of that, that’s why we did some stuff with the event module and the release of 10.0. yeah. So the 10.0 release. Oh, boy, was it fun. It was a release that we pushed a bit because of some holiday stuff, some COVID stuff, all kinds of stuff. There’s a lot of things in here that we were trying to get in and wrap up and start off the year with quite a bit of stuff. One of the big things being events, which, again, hopefully we all get to go to in 2021. That will be a goal.

Tom:

So I know it seems odd. It’s starting off a time when events seem like you can’t go there to do stuff like that. But obviously I think we’re all hopeful that in the fall we can, so it’s helpful to have that stuff started now in the system so people can start playing with it, tweaking with it. But it’s something that people have asked for, we talked about different things, is there really should be an event button, so there is now. So that’ll change it. So never know. You might start seeing promotions for our Forum coming up soon using that same type of module. So we did that.

Tom:

Again, also, NS added a lot of different things for some stuff with credit card charging over the last few releases in terms of better management of errors that you get for credit card processing, which has always been a problem for a while, which we talked about at the last Forum. Being able to update cards in case it didn’t it didn’t get the off-code was added. We did that recently with the expiration emails and also added a option for surcharge. So there’s been a lot of stuff for payment processing we’ve put in place.

Tom:

Created a whole new way to bill through Projects. Projects is always something that’s very important to us as a business and we find more and more customers taking advantage of it when they’re working with customers for a long period of time, wanting to communicate with them over the project, and being able to maybe bill off of hours and bill off of when things are done within a project versus just random bill. I mean, there’s a lot of different ways to bill in the system. It’s quite a thing. So we did a lot of that type of stuff.

Tom:

We also, kind of like a side note almost, but a big item is we brought breadcrumbs back. I kind of almost forgot about that one because it’s kind of been going on for a while in testing. So we’ve started bringing those back. It kind of just slipped my mind until right before the release. It’s like, “Oh, yeah, those things are there.” So that was a technical item that we’ve added that, again, we can expand to in the future to help with the site navigation. So we can continue adding there, but I know that was a big item. So those little grayed out links, now you can see some links there, so that’s nice. Help you move around the system a little bit better.

Tom:

Then continued on with the HubSpot integration. I know your favorite. I don’t even have to ask you what your favorite is this release. But we’ve continued expanding there. We’ve got a lot of interest already from people within HubSpot wanting to learn more about HubSpot or connecting. What we’ve done now is being able to actually push contacts to HubSpot or, if they’re already in there, grab the ID so you can start seeing HubSpot information in your system even if they didn’t originally come from HubSpot. So we have some other things planned for that where hopefully if we get through this to the next release in February, we’re going to have a specific HubSpot field where you can see displayed HubSpot information and being able to push more context in bulk. So we’ll continue to expand on that and, again, get better with our partnership with HubSpot. Because again, we are one of those fun resellers of things.

Tom:

So yeah. There are just a lot of things and also a lot of bug cleanups. It’s just a lot. After the holidays and the beginning of this year, I’m just glad that 10.0 release is behind us. Moving on to the next thing. But I don’t know. Zach, besides HubSpot, or maybe it isn’t HubSpot, what’s your favorite thing about the 10.0 release?

Zach:

I’d probably have to say, I think, actually the event stuff is cool. Obviously we’ve done event stuff. We’ve used our event module a couple times here and there. There’s always some improvements that you could find. So I’m excited to see those improvements happening. I appreciate you mentioning, Tom, about the Fall Forum. We are looking for September. There is a lot of different pieces to manage that. In the past, we’ve done stuff like Eventbrite and that’s always frustrating. I am the one that manages the vendors and the catering, tickets, all that stuff. So just having a more conclusive system to do it all will be really helpful with us. So I’m excited for that. I will say, Brian, our developer, was very upset because during our internal release discussion yesterday, you had completely forgotten to mention breadcrumbs and he mentioned it in the chat box like three or four times. He was very disappointed in you, Tom.

Tom:

So did he message that directly? Oh, just in our GoToWebinar thing?

Zach:

Yeah.

Tom:

Yeah, so I don’t look at the chat box during webinars. That’s supposed to be you doing it in there. But yes, I totally forgot about breadcrumbs. No joke. I think I forgot to mention it on our webinar. I had mentioned it earlier because I knew when it was coming. Before the new year, I actually put it out as a teaser that we were bringing it back, but then when it came to the actual release, I was just like, “Oh.” I had no idea. I mean, I think it’s one of those things that hopefully people realize, “Oh, it’s just there. It’s helpful now,” and it does help them, but it’s not something… You probably forget. You’re probably just used to them being there. Yes. Brian didn’t even build that feature, so he’s upset for a different developer, but should have spoke up.

Zach:

He’s just that caring.

Tom:

Yeah. He’s just that caring about the breadcrumbs. Yes, I did forget about that.

Zach:

I will also say it’s not my job to manage your GoToMeeting chat box. It’s my job to manage your webinar chat box. Very different things.

Tom:

Yeah, well, I know. But I have to present and rant and do things and do all kinds of stuff. It’s hard enough organizing my life to try and worry about what people are saying in chat. He could just unmute himself.

Zach:

That’s true.

Tom:

He’s not going to listen to this podcast, so I’m just going to rail on him for a while. Let me tell you about his code. No. I’ll be attacked or he’ll never make another change for me again.

Tom:

Yeah, I mean, I think the event too, it ties to some general overall changes we might be looking into in some other parts of the site where we kind of built events a while ago or we built this other thing and it doesn’t get as much attention, so then we make updates to more of the core parts of the site. Then we find out events just does not work like anything else. There’s some additional features that we’ve added to events. Like there’s better inventory tracking, there’s ways to add to orders so you can invoice it. We modeled it a bit how customers currently use services to do events, so it should be familiar.

Tom:

But I think just having it behave more like every other part of the site and not having these pages that just don’t look the same, they behave differently, I think that just overall will make it easier for people. I think there will be some getting used to and definitely foresee other tweaks and things we could make to it. It’s definitely a starting spot. But by doing it this way and realizing let’s just make everything on the site work in one core way so that when you get to the page, you’re like, “Oh, yeah, that’s how this works because I know how it works other places.” We want to make it easier to use and also it gives it… easier for us to build and expand upon.

Tom:

So I will be interested to see how it goes and all that fun stuff with the tickets. Oh, boy. But yeah, it was a lot of fun things to release. I mean, this upcoming release, again, we’re going to do some more stuff with HubSpot. We know we have that planned. There’s some other UI/UX elements we want to do with persistent pages, which we added, which we’re going to finish. So just some other things that we just want to knock out and clean up some stuff starting out this year before we get into some other big, fun, new things.

Tom:

If you could go to any event starting next year, what event… Do you have something you want to do, Zach? Some event you’re hoping is open again or can do in the… Besides the Fall Forum, which is obviously number one.

Zach:

Yeah. That’s a good question. I’d probably say I’m looking forward to concerts again. I miss going to concerts. I mean, there’s a few that I would go to without a doubt. I definitely want to go to HubSpot’s INBOUND Conference. It’s been a couple years since I’ve gone to that. It’s a good time in Boston. Fun group of people. They always get amazing speakers. You learn a ton. You meet some cool people. It’s a really fun event. It’s massive, so it’ll be weird to see if that even happens this year because, like I said, last time I went there, it was like 25,000 attendees. So I don’t see it probably going back to that even this year. But it’d be cool to go to another one of them. But I think right now, I miss concerts and I miss going to the theater a lot.

Tom:

Yeah. Well, what concert? I don’t know if there’s anything planned already. If you could choose or you could create it, you’re going to this concert, you can make it happen, who would it be?

Zach:

So I do have two concerts I am signed up for, so we’ll see if it happens. One of them is in Los Angeles. It’s A-ha coming to the U.S. They canceled last year’s. My wife and I were supposed to go for our wedding gift to each other. So I wasn’t able to see them. They did postpone tickets, so we are hopefully going this summer to see them in Los Angeles. It’s a small venue, so it’s a better chance of that happening. Then Rammstein in Chicago. Yes, I understand there’s a core difference of music between A-ha from the ’80s and the heavy metal band Rammstein, but both of them, like I said, usually don’t tour the U.S., they both are, they both got canceled last year, so I’m looking forward to both of them.

Tom:

Hey, you got to mix it up. You have to have different kind of flavors to get in there. I think it’s good to expand it. I mean, learn new things, new music. I mean, so that’s Rammstein… Are those your two favorite bands or just the two random… I know you’re a love child of the ’80s, so A-ha might be your favorite band, but-

Zach:

A-ha’s probably one of my favorite. I mean, that was my wife’s wedding song. So I would pry say that’s probably up there. But I’d pry say my favorite concerts are Dirty Heads, it’s a reggae alternative band, kind of New Age Southern California. Think of Sublime. Then the Offspring, which is also kind of in a similar vein. Those are my two favorite bands of all time bar none. I’ve gone to every concert they’ve had in Michigan for the last decade. I cannot wait for them to come back.

Tom:

So somewhat similar to that of a random thing that happened the other day is, just I think of that timeline and bands of that, is Green Day. I play a lot of different music around my house. I try to get my kids into music and do all kinds of things. So one thing I’ve found is my son, my one son Peter, will be in the car and I’ll ask what song, so he always will say the Wheezer song because he likes Wheezer. So we play Hero by Wheezer. That’s what the Wheezer song means. Then the other day, we found out that Fred, who’s really into Green Day and just really likes Green Day songs, one of them being Good Riddance, which with the title everyone knows is whatever, it’s… I forget. It’s like Time of My Life. But anyway, so those are what my kids are always in there.

Tom:

Then Michael Jackson songs, which I think you’ll like this because it made me think of the show Psych, which you like, is when Peter wants to listen to Beat It by Michael Jackson, he calls it Shamoan. Which I don’t even know where he got that because I don’t even think it’s in the song. But he’s like, Shabone,” and I’m like, “Okay. All right.” So I try to mix that up.

Zach:

That’s amazing. They say it in Psych, so maybe that’s why.

Tom:

I know. That’s why I was like-

Zach:

Has he seen Psych?

Tom:

No. Well, if he has, I haven’t watched it with him. I just know that one scene and I was like, “That’s crazy.” So I’m going to have to show that to him, but… I’ll have to think about some new music to watch, or watch, listen to. As I’m trying to learn some new things this year, it’s my big thing. I’ve been doing a lot of MasterClasses on that channel. So I do my baking ones from Dominique Ansel, so he’s helping me learn croissants. Then doing some chess things. But one of the ones that I’ve been listening to is on Hans Zimmer, who, work day, there is a lot of soundtrack, that type of music. I listen to a lot Han Zimmer in the background or Mad Max, what is it, Fury Road soundtrack.

Zach:

Fury Road.

Tom:

I just listen to that on loop because it’s just good for work and it gets me angry. I need to be angry to get to all of this stuff. But anyway, I was watching the Hans Zimmer MasterClass and I thought it was very interesting because he starts so small. Like he’s like, “It just takes two notes.” It’s like, “I created the whole Inception soundtrack with two notes.” It’s like, “Oh, okay.” So it’s kind of crazy. I find all these people are simple. Like it always really is the most basic thing. They start from there and build.

Tom:

But so Hans Zimmer’s thing is interesting because, you get a little clue on this because I listen to the soundtrack a lot because of my kids, is the movie trivia question for this is Hans Zimmer has been nominated for like 1,000 Academy Awards. He’s actually only won one. When you think about Hans Zimmer, you probably won’t think of this, but what movie is the movie that Hans Zimmer won an Academy Award for? I think it was for original score. He’s only won once. So if you could tweet us the movie that Hans Zimmer won his Academy Award for, you can get a prize. Do you know what it is, Zach?

Zach:

I have guesses in my head, but I’m surprised it’s only been one. That’s so odd.

Tom:

It’s the only one of these… Yeah, I think it’s a thing. You could probably guess. There’s probably four or five you can think it could be any of those, so it’s interesting the one that it is, so it’s a little offbeat. But yeah, I know. It always reminds me of one of my greatest moments in my life’s history was related to this. It was playing a game of Trivial Pursuit. I know if it’s worthless knowledge, that will mean nothing to the greater good of society. I know it. So it got to a question. It was the final question, so that’s the one where your team gets to pick. No, the competitors get to pick who it is. My friends still… It’s the greatest thing I’ve ever done in my life. They’re still amazed by it.

Tom:

So they’re like, “Okay. We’re going to pick this question because it’s about daily,” or was it, “soap operas during the day.” They’re like, “What actress has been nominated for the most awards ever, but had never won? She’d been nominated for 20.” “Susan Lucci for the win.” I think she only won one, but she had been nominated like 30 times for the award. But for whatever reason, she never won. Susan Lucci. So similarly, there’s people you’ve not… I think maybe it’s because people are like, “Well, they’ll win, will obviously win.” You forget they keep getting nominated, but they give it to someone else. But it’s like you’ve never actually given them the award. So he got it really early and has not won since. So it’s weird. Actually his second film. That’s another clue. So yeah. That’s the question.

Tom:

Then cat fact for the day. This is really more of a cat… I don’t know. Well, it’s kind of a fact or story. I had mentioned on the last situation, one of my cats has diabetic problems, so my wife and I had kind of an emergency, but we brought our cat to the vet. As many people who listen to this podcast know, I have a very hatred for my cat. I want to say that I’m justified now for this because we had to bring our cat to the vet and it was there for a few days.

Tom:

The doctor came out to bring the cat and do the stuff. She says, “So next time you bring him or anywhere, call about getting this drug first to dope him up because he was the worst cat we have ever seen.” It was told to me by the vet that we literally have the worst cat. Some people think I’m awful and evil as hating animals. It’s not that I hate animals. It’s I have the worst cat in the world. I just want to make that aware to people. I know. I was kind of proud and justified in that case.

Zach:

It’s quite a story.

Tom:

My New Year’s resolution is to get rid of my cat. My wife just walked in the room and heard me. She’s upset. You want to say hi to the pod?

Tom’s Wife:

Hi, everybody. Happy New Year.

Tom:

There we go. That’s Ms. Product Manager on the podcast. But I don’t know if ewe have anything else. You want to say anything else, Zach? Wrap it up, plug some other fun things you’re doing so you can earn more money to buy that house?

Zach:

I’d pry say we do have a Feature Focus webinar next week. That’s the 28th… yeah, the 28th, for event management. So any of our current clients, keep an eye on your email because this was sent out. I’ll probably put it in an announcement within our MagHub Incidence as well, so you’ll get a notification there. So if you manage events, definitely watch it. Tom will go into further detail on how to actually do it and how we do it. So that’ll be a great webinar to check out. If you’re not able to make it, it will be posted on MagHub.com, so please go on there and watch the webinars. There’s a ton of them on there. They’re all free. You do have to sign up with your name and email address just so we know who actually watches them, so that way our sales team can reach out and talk to you about them or if you have questions, you can reach out to us. So all good stuff there. Obviously Fall Forum’s coming up in September. It should be a great time. I think that’s it.

Tom:

I think that’s it too, though Maggie did send a note. She wanted me to tell Zach, “I like his haircut.” So very visual podcast we have going on right now, so you can see that. I can see Zach, but he can’t see me. But yeah. That’s it.

Zach:

We’re going to change that as well. I think it’s going to be a new structure, is I’m going to get you a webcam because I think we should do this. So if any of our listeners are out there and you’d actually like to see a video of us chatting, kind of like a real interpersonal podcast, we could do that. Then I can rip apart the audio separate and put it into podcast format. So if you’re watching or listening to it on Spotify during your daily commute, if you have those anymore, who knows anymore, but you can still listen to us. But if you want to see us actually talking, that’s fine. You get to see me laugh all the time. That’s all I do.

Tom:

Yeah. That’s the only reason I still work at Aysling is for these webcams to see how many times I can get Zach to laugh during a meeting. That’s really my only purpose in life.

Zach:

It’s not even a challenge.

Tom:

I know.

Zach:

Not a challenge at all.

Tom:

But it’s really the count. It’s not about getting it to happen, it’s just the count of that. Yeah, maybe we’ll see how many people want to see my animated hand movements. I’m almost more animated in my hand movements than Gorman, who did the poet for the Inauguration. Her hands were all over the place. It’s almost even more intense. So good for her. I challenge her to a hand-off. On that weird note, thanks for listening and looking forward to seeing you on the Event Feature Focus. Bye, everybody.