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 Tom’s Tips Podcast 10.10 edition. I’m your host Tom Bellen product manager for Aysling and joined by always our marketing guru, Zach Gilbert. Zach say hello to everyone one, please.

Zach:

Hello everyone.

Tom:

Oh, now he listens to me. So I will say this is our second attempt to do this. We had a great podcast going and then technology got the better of us. So welcome to the second take, I hope it’s as good as the first. And we were in a midst of a very interesting Christmas conversation before the whole thing crashed and really what it came down to is we are transitioning. I mean, we’re in the middle of fall. We just got Halloween passed and now we are moving to Thanksgiving and Christmas. And it’s about what is the socially acceptable time to start your Christmas decorations and music listening?

Tom:

And I was saying that my wife, Maggie used to listen to Christmas carols all the time, but her friends put a rule in place and said, “You can only start listening to it I think in November 1st,” and Zach, as we were discussing, it seems like you also have a rule in place on your Christmas decoration abilities.

Zach:

I do. I do. My wife will not, it’s not she won’t, she would, but she prefers that I do not put up any decorations until after November 3rd, her birthday. So, that is my gift to her every year it is the cheapest gift ever because I just have to wait until 12:01 AM on November or fourth. And yeah, and that’s when I have to put my decorations up.

Tom:

Now, as I think about this a little bit more. Was there a situation where you put them up in July or something where then she had to put this rule in place? When did she realize I need to ask for this gift?

Zach:

Yeah, I think it was probably during one of the earlier years of her and I dating that I probably wanted to put it up in October, probably at some time. I never had Halloween decorations. I lived in the countryside. The nearest neighbors were five miles away, on a gravel road. There was no trick or treaters coming to our house if there was, that’d just be insanity to me. So we’ve never had Halloween decorations my entire life we’ve always had Christmas decorations. So for me, I always put those up earlier. Christmas decorations are a huge investment, so I always like to get my investment out and put them up longer.

Zach:

And then also the last thing is we always go to family members’ houses for Thanksgiving. So that’s why we don’t have Thanksgiving decorations because we go places, but we do always have Christmas parties and we like to have people over at our house for Christmas. So for us, logistically it just made more sense this way. So she compromised because her family doesn’t put up Christmas decorations until after Thanksgiving.

Tom:

Interesting. And I assumed that my invitations in the mail for the Christmas party.

Zach:

Yeah.

Tom:

Okay. Just want to… Obviously in that particular case. Yeah. So my wife has a tradition where I think it’s around Thanksgiving we go to a local tree farm. We all go out there with the car, you bring a saw very much what’s that, Christmas Vacation style, getting a tree with a lot of sap, cut it down and bring it there. And then that’s when they do the initial decoration of the real tree at her parents’ house. And we do that, get food. And then I have to go down to the basement and I drag up the artificial tree because we have one of those.

Tom:

I don’t know you if you have a stance on that artificial versus natural, if you’re like, “It has to be…”

Zach:

I have artificial.

Tom:

That looks real. That looks real.

Zach:

Well. Thank you.

Tom:

Well again, I just want to be clear here everyone that Zach on a podcast is referencing his screen share that we have going on. So, to explain the situation his hand was moving up and back down in the call referencing this tree. So he has a tree.

Tom:

Do you get a real tree though?

Zach:

No, we have multiple artificial trees just because, I don’t know they worked for us. There was really no reason why that is we had real trees were when I was a child because we lived on a pine tree farm. So it made sense that I would have them. But yes, here we’ve always had fake. Also we live in a apartment slash/condo association. They would not allow us to have real ones to dispose of them. So that’s why I have fake ones. We have two fake ones, quite large ones.

Tom:

Two fake, well that’s nice. So we have the one, and it is much easier to get it out there even though I never, every year I’m too lazy when I put it away and I don’t organize it. And then I open and I’m like, “Man, this year I got to put it away, more organized.” But the thing is, I also kind of like mixing and matching it so then it looks more like a real tree instead of a perfect tree. So every once in a while there’s a branch that’s too long because I grab the one that should have been few rows below. And so it makes it more…

Zach:

Oh yeah, our artificial trees are not like that. They basically are two segments, you put them in together and all the lights are on it and the branches are already pre fluff. We don’t do anything.

Tom:

We got a gift from someone else and it’s a chore to get that thing up and running, but it looks good. So it looks good. But you know what looks even better? The MagHub 10.10 release.

Zach:

That’s great.

Tom:

That was a much better transition than our first attempt.

Zach:

Really good.

Tom:

So there is nothing artificial about 10.10. It is exciting because this is 10 10, that’s cool. It is also our penultimate release before we get to 10 11, which we’re scheduling for December and then we’re going to the 11.0. And if anyone knows in the company, I’m a big Spinal Tap fan, so there’s probably going to be so many Spinal Tap jokes in the 11 release notes, just prepare yourself. So if you want to get my release note jokes in a few months, watch Spinal Tap. Otherwise you’ll miss everything. All the changes will be documented in Spinal Tap references, so you won’t even be able to understand it unless you’ve watched Spinal Tap.

Tom:

But it is an exciting release. So there’s a ton of stuff in here. This is also a release where we’ve been working with customers, we’ve done this promotion at the end of the year where it’s, “Hey, look, if you really want motivated to get a feature in before the end of the year, we’ll work with you.” And discounting some of our fees to get that done, again most all of our development work is based on the total number of requests we get to do something and what we view as strategic for our project. But there are times where people say, “Hey, we would really like to have this in here sooner rather than later.” So we work with them and there sometimes is a cost to do that, to promote it. And then we have back and forth with them on how we scope it out. And we do our custom development projects to make sure it’s the were as expected. So thank you to all the customers who really helped to bolster parts of this release. And it was great working with them to make sure that we’re building it to their desired scope.

Tom:

So with that, one of probably I think the more popular features, especially for us internally that’s in this release is the ultimate power megasaurus user. That’s what I wanted to call it, but we just call it switch users. I think that was a mistake. I think the marketing guru would agree. What this switch user does is this new permission, you have to give it to yourself, we would expect that only one, maybe two people at a company would have this. And so just thinking about it as your sales rep or somebody’s having an issue and they can’t figure it out or they want you to look at something, you can actually switch to them, you’ll be logged in as them. You’ll have the same permission, exact same view as them and be able to make a change for them or do something.

Tom:

Or maybe someone’s out on vacation and you need to pick up their tickets. You could just switch to that person to help with that. All of our support users now too automatically have that built in. So a lot of times, if you put in a support ticket, be like, “Can you send us a screenshot, what page?” Or what we didn’t like is people would send us their passwords to look at it. We can quickly switch to you and provide better support with it. I think it’ll help, obviously not only our customers who have that power user, but also I think it’ll really help our support team provide better support.

Zach:

That’s so cool.

Tom:

Yeah. Well look at that. So another one that I think will be cool or more on Zach, because he loves HubSpot is we did expand our HubSpot integration a bit too where now, and actually it’s a marriage of Zach’s love and my love. My love is the data warehouse and data and building reports off of all that data. And so now what you can do is you can actually pull in some campaigns stats directly into your data warehouse. So you can combine that with all your other data. And we’ve actually done this before with Pendo, which is a tool that we use. So we can combine our user’s Pendo information, which is site usage with their customer names and usage. And now we can actually tie in our HubSpot campaigns.

Tom:

So it’s again, Metabase for our data warehouse is kind of that core and you can build customer ports off of multiple platforms. And we’re looking into other ways to do this with other third party softwares that people use. I know a big one we talk about now is Google. So we have our Google ad manager integration. So what could we pull in for your Google account that could be mapped with your customer data? I love data. So that’s in there as well.

Tom:

There’s also a change that is here to help with customer notifications. So, before we had a more of a blunt object on who could receive additional emails. So it was either you receive all artwork emails or you don’t. But as we know, customers have more specific products and who is responsible for a print item is different from at digital. You can now separate it at that level and also to the publication level. So if you have a contact that needs to receive invoices for certain brands, then they can be CC’d on all that. Or if you need someone who needs to be CC’d on all digital media for certain brands, you can do that as well. And we can also now trigger annotation emails to anyone in the system. So if someone makes a notice on a proof request and you want to make sure you witness it, see that that is in there too. So that’s very exciting.

Tom:

And along with that again, in the reporting realm, we’ve made some changes to some of our core reports, the consolidated snapshot sales report to now export only what’s in your display fields. We’ve added some other filters there. Again, what we’re trying to do is reduce the number of our reports and really beef up our core ones. So the consolidated snapshot sales, and now the new updated product year over year should have all the data you need in one spot. We understand there may be a filter too, or something that is missing from maybe some of the more specific reports and we’ll try and address those as best we can. But we have seen that users have been moving over to these other reports which have a lot more capabilities and functionality. And again, our plan is to, once we get to those reports that high level and we have much lower usage on the other report, we’re going to deprecate those. So I think that’ll help just for navigation purposes and just to have overall a better reporting experience.

Tom:

So that’s all very exciting as well. And if you’re into the projects world, which I know that Zach, you may notice some of this stuff now is in the projects section, we’ve improved on our discussion notifications. So when you’re a vendor or contact working on a project or you’re inside the system and you’re leveraging our discuss tool, you’ll actually get more alerts that there’s a new discussion to review instead of having to click in to see if there’s in there. So just some usability things on the projects, making those more beefed up. We have some other things that we want to do again, continuing on the projects and the service type work that we do. We notice more of our customers are taking advantage of. So we’ve revamped that stuff a little bit as well.

Tom:

And those are some of the biggest items, obviously in the release. And there were a lot of it, probably missed something that was really amazing and I forgot about it, but that release is just behind us and I’m already having to plan for the next one and we have some other exciting customer driven changes to be in place. So I don’t know Zach of all those, what is your favorite?

Zach:

That’s a good question. Well, I would probably say discussions in the project stuff just because I get to use it quite a bit. Downside is though, is that requires Jeremy, often my project manager actually respond to my stuff so that doesn’t really work for me at all, there is that. There’s also no GIPHY integration with the project discussions yet, so I’m really waiting for that one so I can send GIPHYs during my professional business time. Just saying. But I would say I think the coolest thing is the switch user functionality, or megasaurus, whatever you want to call it. I think that part’s really cool. The screenshot thing I often had to deal with, with setting up email campaigns and automation workflows with clients where they would look for one thing and they couldn’t find or something like that. And I’d like to be able to see inside their accounts. So I think that’s a really cool feature that I think people will find a lot of use for and will definitely get a lot of help with.

Tom:

Yeah. I think that hopefully again, I mean not to be too much. It works in two ways for our support team. One, obviously they can switch in there and two, hopefully it means that they’ll get fewer tickets because a lot of the support tickets we get actually are from just a handful of the users at the account. So basically what I hear experience is, someone has a problem with the site, they go talk to whoever the super MagHub user their company is, yell at them and then if they need to they send a support ticket to us. So that might actually help some internal back and forth. Because a lot of times we do get tickets that are very process specific and we don’t have the inside knowledge of all the processes that people set up. So I think that’ll help internally for a lot of people’s day to day jobs to be improved because it should help them solve some of their own problems.

Tom:

A little less work for the support team. So the support team’s going to be free to do all kinds of fun, crazy stuff that they haven’t had time to do before. Like, I don’t know. I don’t know what people do.

Tom:

You know what I’m going to do though tonight? I’m very excited about is I haven’t been to any type of performance concert in I don’t know, 75 years. Mix of kids and COVID stuff. But tonight I get to go see one of my favorite comedians at Fox Theater Detroit, Bill Burr. So I don’t know if you’re a Bill Burr fan, Zach or even know who that is.

Zach:

I do. He was in The Mandalorian.

Tom:

Well that’s why you know who he is.

Zach:

I knew about him before, he was also in New Girl.

Tom:

Oh my God.

Zach:

So I’m just-

Tom:

So you’ve never heard his comedy.

Zach:

I have heard some of his comedies and I’ve seen some of his interviews where he is on Conan and Jimmy Fallon. So I’ve seen a little bit, I have never sat down and just watched a full one of his comedy skits though. No.

Tom:

You are just not a good person.

Zach:

I like comedians.

Tom:

Oh well. So the reason I really like him. So it’s actually, there’s a few reasons, but it’s interesting too as a comedian of somewhat similar ages is I’ve noticed him as he’s kind of grown up and his routine fits to my life. There’s another person I really like, Birbiglia who his comedy routines are a little bit different and it talks about like different phases in his life. One is about how… The whole thing is about how it led to him never wanting to be married to him getting married. And I think actually Mike Birbiglia was the last comedy series I saw. And the one we saw was about him never wanting to have kids and how it ended up with him having kids. And this was right at the same time I was having a first kid.

Tom:

So it’s almost like I’m growing up with the Bill Burr, he was a situation similar didn’t want to get married now he’s married and the different stuff. And another thing I’ll share with you, because I know you’re a baking person. So if you haven’t watched it, is there is a, ‘Bill Burr Bakes a Pie,’ because he’s also a baker and it’s him talking about how to bake a pie. And I think it’d be very similar to if I were to make a tutorial on baking. So if you haven’t watched it, I recommend Bill Burr baking a pie.

Zach:

I thought you were going to spoil a Great British Bake Off episode that airs today. And I’d have been very upset.

Tom:

Oh gee why? Is he on it? No, I would never do that. I’m not a monster.

Zach:

No, not that part just in general, the baking comment. I was waiting to hear who get voted off and I’ve been very good about not going on Instagram.

Tom:

I work during the day on unlike marketing people. So I can’t go and watch TV and check Instagram or TikTok or MySpace or whatever it is you people do. I’m busy doing very important work. But anyway, I’m excited to see Bill Burr. So if you don’t like comedy series is there any comedian you like standup ever? Or you just don’t enjoy fun?

Zach:

Yeah. Thanks for that a nice little jab there. No, actually I do like UK based standup comedians. So Aisling Bea. Oh my gosh, who else? Obviously Noel Fielding, Richard Ayoade when he does standup was cool. So I’ve been doing a lot of the annual quiz show I think is (actually The Big Fat Quiz Of The Year)… Something that’s like something the greatest quiz show ever and anyone that has not watched it is hilarious. It is such great content. But Aisling Bea I think is probably one of my favorite standup communities I think she’s wonderful.

Tom:

Okay. That’s fine. So I had a dream as a child. I did stand up or I didn’t stand up I did improv a little bit with people who actually became somewhat… We’re on 30 rocks, so with stars. And I was doing it in college a little bit, but then I quit because I had anxiety problems. But anyway I did improv. I always thought about doing standup.

Tom:

The original standup special that I thought was great and it is someone from the UK since you love that place, is Eddie Izzard, back in the nineties. Dress to Kill was probably one of the best standup. And I definitely took a lot of my comedy timing from that special. He doesn’t do as much stuff now, but if you haven’t watched Dress to Kill, I think it’s one of the best standups ever. And one of the reason is because it talks so much about how facial expression and just that is so important to it. Because there’s at one point where he comes on to do an encore and he basically redoes a joke that he did earlier, but he does it all in French because he has to do French shows and stuff and he does the same thing and it’s even funnier almost. And you have no idea what he’s saying and he kind of breaks the fourth wall sometimes when he does it. So anyway, I would watch Dress to Kill it’s fantastic.

Tom:

But related to Bill Burr, since we have to have a trivia question and you did mention some of the things he was in, is what was the first film that Bill Burr ever made an appearance? And it was a very small role, very small role, but it was his first actual film it was in 2001. I don’t really have any other things to it. So really all you have to do is Google this and then reply your answer to @MagHub and then you get a prize. So Bill Burr’s first credited film role. There was a TV film role where his credit is being himself, that doesn’t count because it was like a documentary, but whatever that part was. And so yeah, if you get that, you there and again watch his baking a pie. It’s great timing because obviously Bill Burr’s funny and for Thanksgiving you probably need to bake a pie. Someone has to bake a pumpkin pie.

Tom:

And as someone who is a baker one, I don’t like to make pumpkin pies because frankly it’s too easy. I’m too good. But for those of you who are out there and are going to buy a pumpkin pie, shame on you, watch it, learn how to make a pie dough that’s what it’s about. You can do it, make your own pumpkin pie. The filling is extremely easy. You can roast your own sugar pumpkins by the way, you don’t have to buy pumpkin. You can just get a sugar pumpkin that’s different than a jack-o’-lantern pumpkin. It’s different, smaller. You could roast it, make a homemade pumpkin pie. And if you do that, you should also send that @MagHub baking a pie, send us your thanksgiving pies, make a pie. You could do pecan pie too. Also easy. Still requires a pie dough, just make the pie dough. Pecan pie, it’s basically just pecans and you poured some goo just, that’s what I ask, is you make a pie.

Zach:

That’s nice.

Tom:

Can you make a pie? Are you going to make a pie? Heck or are you just going to…

Zach:

I am, my wife and I are going to make apple pie, a pecan pie and a pumpkin pie. So, yeah there you go.

Tom:

Okay. Are you going to make your own pie dough?

Zach:

We do make our own pie dough, it is a family tradition of Emily’s grandmother.

Tom:

Okay. And if people have suggestions, I try to bake different things depending on… If someone has suggestions on what Tom should bake for Thanksgiving please also send to @MagHub, just blow up our Twitter. I want to know what you want to challenge me to bake. I’ll share with it. I get bored. I was making some gingerbread the other day, some more French-style gingerbread for my daycare teachers because they’re the greatest people in the world and save my life. And everyone’s like, “Oh just bake your cookies.” And no, I want to be challenged, okay. I made lemon bars with… Not like lemon bars like most people do it where they just bake the whole thing. I had to make the shortbread, then I had to make a meringue. Then I did a lemon curd, so challenge me people. Challenge me in the baking world and we’ll share that stuff with you. So very excited about that, but real quick, because I know the only thing people care about here is cat trivia or cat facts.

Zach:

Cat facts.

Tom:

So I have to get that in it’s legally if I don’t, I get fired. And so I’ll somewhat relate this to Halloween. We’ve talked about this before the black cat. I have a black cat, we adopted part of the reasons because people don’t adopt black cats because they’re viewed as bad and evil. And I was trying to you some research, it’s not really clear why there’s a lot of different stories of it. But in doing that, I did find out that there is a very famous, the original cat hater apparently was Pope Gregory IX, who in 1232 A.D. that was the first time they officially the church document that condemns the black cat as being an incarnation of Satan. Yeah. So that Pope really hated black cat. I wonder what it did. I mean, I get it. I think that my cat Bentley should be condemned by the church as an incarnation of Satan. George, my black cat’s totally fine. I’m out to call the Pope and talk to him about it and see that is.

Tom:

There’s a bunch of misses why the black cat is considered bad, but the Pope really did not like black cats for whatever reason.

Zach:

Interesting.

Tom:

I know, the things that cats do to us and all that stuff. So, before we get going, I don’t know if there’s anything you want to plug, Zach? Anything you got going on, are you doing anything cool soon?

Zach:

I am taking a train to go see my brother in Seattle for Thanksgiving. So my wife and I are going to do that, which will be interesting. I think that’s pretty much it. It’s pretty low key over here until next year and such. It’s pretty calm. What about Thanksgiving for you, Tom? What are you doing for Thanksgiving?

Tom:

Well, we’ll see if someone challenges, it’s actually somewhat of an interesting thing. So a lot of times Thanksgiving has been at my wife’s family’s house. We’ve done on that for a lot of the last few years, but my mom and I don’t remember the last time we did Thanksgiving anywhere, my moms house. She wants to host it this year, so we’ll be going to her house to do it. She’s setting up a play area for my boys to run around. There’s a lot more space there, there’s this battle though that happens in here. And I don’t know if you deal with this family stuff, so to make your own food or to not. And for whatever reason, it’s getting to the point of my mother-in-law and my mother both are of the purchase of just buying this stuff, which I get. They’ve probably been making Thanksgiving dinner for so long and it’s exhausting.

Tom:

So there that battle. So we are going to get a lot of it from a local place, local restaurant. But I demand that I will do all the cooking because they’re going to get… they’re going to buy a pumpkin pie, which again, upsets me obviously. When you have someone as talented as me, to not release the Kraken it’s just insanity.

Tom:

So yeah, I have to think of some things to bake. It will be different. And so that’s the plan for Thanksgiving and then watch the Lions lose.

Zach:

Of course.

Tom:

Tradition.

Zach:

Tradition.

Tom:

Tradition like any other the Lions are terrible at football. And I enjoy that.

Zach:

That’s fair.

Tom:

So yeah, that’s it. But I think the next time we’ll talk and do this podcast will be after Thanksgiving so we can talk about all the delicious baked things we did and then get ready for end of the year. So thank you all for listening and have a great rest of your day.