Audio Transcript
Announcer: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Tom’s Tips Podcast, your place for obscure movie references, cat facts, and everything MagHub related, and now your host, MagHub Product Manager, Tom Bellen.
Tom Bellen: Hello, everyone, and welcome to MagHub release 7.1 podcast. I am your host Tom Bellen, Product Manager. I am here with our Marketing Director Zach Gilbert, Zach, how are you today?
Zach Gilbert: Good, Tom. How are you?
Tom Bellen: And special guest, bringing in the big dog here, Rudy Pataro, our CEO. Rudy, how are you doing this day?
Rudy Pataro: I’m doing great, Tom. Thank you.
Tom Bellen: So I know, Rudy, you do all the work for launching the release. How’d that go? Was your night successful in getting everything out?
Rudy Pataro: It was great. Release went really well.
Tom Bellen: Alright, and we’ve been very busy with, not just the release, but all of us actually just finishing up our recent user forum, which happened just a few weeks ago, and was a rousing success. We think so. We’ve actually already planned the next Forum, which we’re going to be launching next August, a little bit earlier based on some feedback, so we’re already planning that. If you are interested, we’re going to be sending out more information about that, but hopefully we get more attendees to the forum. Just out of you guys, Zach, Rudy, how do you feel the Forum went? Anyone?
Rudy Pataro: I thought it was great. I thought it was rousing, like you said. I thought that was an appropriate word. I thought it was awesome. The feedback from the customers was super. The number of people that really felt like they got a great deal out of it was very large. So, we all walked away feeling very positive about it
Tom Bellen: So, Zach, what was your favorite part about the Forum?
Zach Gilbert: I really liked the Feature Freak Out, not gonna lie.
Tom Bellen: What was the name of that talk?
Zach Gilbert: Tom’s Feature Freak Out.
Tom Bellen: Tom’s Feature Freak Out.
Zach Gilbert: Yeah, there you go. I also liked, the location was really nice. I think it worked out really well. I know next year we’re planning Detroit, just so everybody knows. That’ll be kind of fun, kind of a new take to it. But no, I think overall it went really well. The workshops were good. I think just being able to talk to people, and dinner, and I really liked the U of M Stadium tour. That was pretty awesome, and then having the brewery to ourselves in the backroom, you can take tours by yourself. It was pretty cool.
Tom Bellen: Thank you Zach for setting all that stuff up. You could set up all the fun pieces the day before.
Zach Gilbert: I think the Freak Out needed some music. Some background music would’ve been awesome during the Freak Out.
Tom Bellen: Now I did play Party Mode up there at one point. It might not have done very well because the speakers were not planned out. But, yes, there could be music next time. Again, this was the first-time we ran through that. So I’m glad that the Freak Out was good and actually following out with that, so the Feature Freak Out for those who were not there, was just having everyone kind of get into the separate groups, sales, production, finance and just kind of split all ideas between the others and then I was up there and they would pitch essentially their top three. These are the three things if you do this would be great. And of course, I had put my own spin on there and say, “Well, at this point you can only pick one.” So, you know it’s always a fun role of prioritization, anything you could want the system, but you can only do so much with time and resources. But what we’re gonna do is we are actually going to be sending it on the survey, coming next week, where we took all those top items and we are going to send it to all of our customers. So, they can also vote on it. So if you weren’t there, you will be able to see what the other customers were looking for and you can connect give your feedback to us.
Tom Bellen: So, with that, we are also excited about launching a Slack Community Channel, because that was a big thing from the Forum. Being able to communicate with more users. So being able to hop on Slack and talk to all other customers how are you doing things. So, we are trying to create more interaction between the customers in terms of our surveys and other community pieces. Trying to think of other exciting things, you guys want to follow up on the Forum, besides with the communities, survey features, other things we discussed on top of your head?
Tom Bellen: And we also did a Roadmap that we’re gonna share, so can’t forgot about that. So, our kind of a plan for the next six, nine months, a big part of that being the release of re-doing our Orders. So, we show some of what we plan to do for that. It’s gonna be a really big undertaking that our team started to work on. So that will be fun.
Tom Bellen: We will talk about adding some e-commerce consumer functionality, that came up as well. So, many exciting things got talked about at the Forum. But that’s down the road. So, what happened in 7.1 Release? With 7.1 Release what we are really trying to do is kind of tie together some of the things that we are working on for a while. If you have ever been on our release notes, it’s a running thing that you’ve heard the name “Mandrill” a lot. We are always talking about “Mandrill”, we talked about emails, sent mails, about validating your domains, making sure the emails go well, that they can track the opens and clicks. So what we have been able to tie in to Mandrill is what we added to our Dock, where you can click on that and then you can quickly see all emails that you’ve sent from the system, such as invoices, payment reminder orders, and see did someone open that, was it rejected, was it unopened? And even being able to send yourself notifications based on those action.
Tom Bellen: So again, try to strengthen our connection between the Mandrill interface and if you are also leveraging our automation module, you can actually quickly send a direct email to any contact in the system. Also get a notification of, “Hey, they opened that.” So again, trying to build on some other things that we already have with the platform. Also, updated our invoices templates. So if you’ve been doing group orders and group order display, you can now show your customers exactly what is on the contract if they are getting the invoice from the exact same thing. No need to treat gain’y things in terms of hiding dollars amount. Whatever is on the computer, is on the invoice, that’s up there as well as an update to a couple of reports and built out the query tool for the Data Warehouse. Now Rudy is here, he is a huge Data Warehouse fan, just like me. We are Data Warehouse fanboys giving people the opportunity to directly query off the database right from their instance without having to connect to a bunch of other things.
Tom Bellen: Any other comments from anybody of the release? Rudy do you have your favorite part of Release 7.1?
Rudy Pataro: Well knowing how much I love the warehouse. So, I love all the warehouse features. I think it is an awesome tool.
Tom Bellen: Data Warehouse solves all problems. That’s the motto of the model around here. But the most exciting thing in this release was that I didn’t know who David Pumpkins is. So, I’m going to have Zach, can you give a little context David Pumpkins?
Zach Gilbert: Sure, it’s played by Tom Hanks. He is a pretty famous actor. It was on Saturday Night Live and it is a hilarious Halloween skit, and it had it a few spin-offs. I know they’re making an animation of it. I think it is hilarious and it really surprised me that Tom didn’t know what it was, with all of his random knowledge.
Tom Bellen: I don’t stay up that late because I need to go bed by 8. So, it was on way too late. So again, I have to go to bed earlier on Saturday. But that does let me think that we need to get our cat fact in, and we need to get our movie or other questionnaire in. So, Halloween is coming up, we are not gonna have another podcast until then. So thinking about cats and why black cats, I have a black cat named George, why are they so unlucky. And the reason is not too surprising they are tied to witches. People thought witches, and black cats are unlucky. And I get read some stories the other day that alley cats were taken care of by poor old women. So that kind of ties to the witches but there is this story where this father and son. Now these are not good people. They saw an alley cat and they threw something at it and they hit it and it ran into this woman’s house. And they hit the cat. The next day, the woman came out of the house limping and they took that to imply that the woman turns herself into a cat. So, when she was a cat, it got hit by the rock. Very Money Python’ish. So anyway, that’s what I read about why black cats are tied with witches.
Tom Bellen: Anyway, crazy things. So that’s the cat fact of the day. But thinking about the questions and I’ve heard that my questions can be pretty, I don’t know what’s the word for exact as far as my trivia questions?
Zach Gilbert: Unique.
Tom Bellen: Okay that’s good. That’s complementary I think. So, I’m gonna tie in the SNL, I’m going to kind of think of Jeopardy. The Jeopardy stuff, if you’ve ever watch Celebrity Jeopardy on SNL. Pretty basic question should be able to get those. So, this week’s trivia question. If you answer it, you just have to send this to our Twitter account @MagHub with the answer. What day of the week, and there are only two answers, what day of the week is SNL on? Is SNL on Monday? Is SNL on Tuesday? Is it on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday? I don’t know. So what day of the week does SNL show up. If you can send that to @MagHub you can win a prize. Hopefully that’s not that complicated as some of my other questions, we’ll see how it goes and build up from there. So, that kind of wrapped it up. Any other final thoughts, the 7.1 Release, Forum? Anything else? Gentlemen?
Rudy Pataro: No, just we’re looking forward to next year. Looking forward to the Forum next year. I think it’ll be awesome.
Tom Bellen: Always been. Thank you Rudy for joining the podcast as a guest today. And thank you again Zach, has always moderating and hopefully has fun with the 7.1 Release. And Happy Halloween.
Zach Gilbert: Thank you.
