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. And welcome to Tom’s Tips 9.9 release podcast. Welcome all you loyal jugheads. My name’s Tom Bellen. I’m the product manager for Aysling, joined by always as from MagHub, our marketing director, Zach Gilbert. Couldn’t think of a cool nickname in time. Say hello to the jugheads, Zach.
Zach:
Hello, jugheads.
Tom:
Yeah. Welcome. See, I got the holiday on the brain. I’m already checking out. Everyone’s taken off the next two weeks. Most people have been taken off for this past month. Yeah, it’s one of those. They’re just winding down, get done with this year. I’m already broken.
Tom:
But you know? We are in the midst of the holiday season, and we’ve passed Halloween and Thanksgiving, getting to the Triple Crown coming up here. How was your Thanksgiving, Zach?
Zach:
It was good. It was digital, obviously. So we just hung around the house, and some of our family members made Thanksgiving dinner and they did porch drops, which was very nice of them. So I still get to have turkey, which is my favorite meal. Basically, it’s my favorite meal, hands down. And I don’t get Turkey because my wife doesn’t like turkey. So this was a great kind of escape from reality.
Tom:
So you say “digital,” I was wondering, did you eat like digital food, where you were like hanging out in Minecraft or Animal Crossing, eating fake food? So at least you ate real food.
Zach:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Tom:
So that’s good. Yeah, so similar. We have family nearby, and you know we break all the rules. So we just see them, so we had a very small get together.
Tom:
I do find it funny about turkey though. It’s like this unwritten rule that like you can only have Turkey once a year. Like why is that a thing? You can roast chicken all the time, but it’s like roasting the turkey… Like if I was going to say in the middle of June, “I’m going to make some, roast some turkey,” people would probably give me a weird look. What’s up with that?
Zach:
So it’s interesting that you say that. So my brother agrees with you, and my brother’s wife always used to cook Thanksgiving for our family until they moved to Seattle. But my brother’s birthday present, the only one he gets every year, is she will make him a full thanksgiving dinner for his birthday in September just so he gets it two times a year. So he’s very lucky.
Tom:
Well, it’s like my mom wants to do it, so we’re doing a Christmas Eve thing. And my wife works nights, so she’s going to make like a turkey dinner for us for Christmas, too. Because I think you can do it on Christmas, too. So you get away with on Christmas. I just find it always weird. It’s like, why is it, “Oh, we get turkey and stuffing”? There’s no law that says you can have turkey and stuffing multiple times. But it’s just maybe I guess if you that, then Thanksgiving wouldn’t mean anything. Thanksgiving’s a weird holiday for that. It’s like the only time we can ever hang out with friends and family in one area and eat turkey is on Thanksgiving. It’s very odd. I mean, putting a Christmas tree or something up in your house multiple times a year, I get that. That would be very bizarre. But I don’t know. Just always one of those things I think about. It’s like I want stuffing more often.
Zach:
Everybody has chicken all the time, but just saying.
Tom:
Yeah… what food is like once a year food and all this stuff.
Zach:
Just Turkey.
Tom:
Just Turkey. And just to be about turkey, another great thing about turkey. I don’t know if you watch game show bloopers. I’m a big game show blooper fan. Have you ever watched some good, old-fashioned game show bloopers?
Zach:
Never once.
Tom:
Okay. If you haven’t, I’m going to introduce you to the best one possible. I won’t spoil it. We can talk about it next podcast. Look up turkey, and look up Family Feud. Should be this old British time thing. It involves the final round of Family Feud. You know, where they have to give five answers in like 30 seconds?
Zach:
Never saw it.
Tom:
It’s a very- Huh?
Zach:
I never saw Family Feud, I’m sorry.
Tom:
Well, look it up, YouTube it. Family feud, turkey answer. You don’t need to have any context for it. It’s amazing. My friends always make fun of it as far as turkey. So I’m probably watching. I should watch right now. It’s amazing. So that’s a gift to you, podcasters, jugheads, whatever you’re called nowadays, is that side of it.
Tom:
But that’s not the only gift. We have the gift of the 9.9 release. So that actually, we’re after the release. That was last week. I mean, the big part of this release, obviously, is HubSpot, AKA Zach’s favorite thing in the world. I make jokes about Zach’s love for HubSpot of all time. But it is a very exciting tool. It’s something we’ve talked about integrating with for two years. I think when Zach first started working here, we were already mapping that out. So it’s finally here.
Tom:
It also means that our company is moving to be a HubSpot person. I basically have been inundated with all this stuff. But it’s very simple integration. You know? HubSpot’s great, my market leader in marketing tools. So it’s really that hey, you know we’re putting this on our website, tracking those analytics, and now all that can flow right into our system. You don’t have to create a bunch of zaps, and spend all the money for that. It just goes in there.
Tom:
And we are a solutions partner, app partner. We’re not just some person who just plugged in there. They know who we are, which is nice. We are listed on the site. So we work closely with HubSpot on this, and just working with them. So everyone on our team is going to know how that system works, and we’re going to get to the point that we can onboard.
Tom:
And normally, I’d finish the rest of my release schpiel, but I think I’ll stop here to let Zach talk about it. Because again, it is his favorite thing. So Zach, is there anything you want to talk about on HubSpot? Did you write like a poem about it?
Zach:
Should I just say no, just to completely throw you off? Could you assume that I’m just going to like love it so much?
Tom:
I guess.
Zach:
Anyway, so it’s actually been four years. Because January will be my fourth year at [ESI 00:06:01], so that’s crazy to think about.
Tom:
Oh, my God.
Zach:
I know. But no, as Tom mentioned, we are a solutions specialist, and that basically means we’re an agency that can help you with onboarding, implementing, and best practices. So we do work directly with them, so you can buy it directly from us. HubSpot does have onboarding fees and all those type of things, just like any other large enterprise software has. So you actually would purchase it all through us, which is very effective because we can give you some good rates.
Zach:
And also, through that onboarding process, not only are we going to be onboarding HubSpot, we’ll also be onboarding MagHub and Aysling products as well, and connecting the dots. So that way from initial website traffic and lead generation, through the order management within our systems, through the projects and the onboarding experience, all the way through billing and billing enabled a lot of stuff. So it does connect all the dots into one kind of large ERP ecosystem at a fraction of the cost of what like Net Suite or any of those platforms would offer.
Zach:
So it is a really cool platform. I am really excited to kind of be able to offer this to our clients. We’ve seen a lot of interest very fast. In fact, we joke about it daily, because us, ourselves have a six-month onboarding period through HubSpot to make sure that we are accurate and we’re good at being partners with HubSpot, rightfully so. It’s kind of our vetting process. But within the first month, we’ve brought about five or six groups to HubSpot already because they’re very interested in HubSpot and us kind of helping them with that process.
Zach:
So it’s very exciting time. I’m glad that everybody is really ramping up with this one. I think it’s going to work really well. HubSpot is a big platform. I’ve worked with them most of my life. So I’m very excited to see where this all goes. And everybody’s been working very hard. So by all means, please reach out if you are interested in HubSpot and our platform.
Tom:
Yeah. And in this first month, we’re looking to get feedback on it. But we already do. Like right now, it’s about pulling the data in. That’s phase one. When we wrote this up, the really, we have initially three phases to get through. The next one for us is to make kind of more of a HubSpot section on the contact page. Right now, it’s a lot of through your own attributes. But we want to kind of make some more set fields, and then that can be more synced in with our automation stuff. So imagining people come to the site, certain things get set, that sets up the automation in our systems. So your salespeople can stay there separate from the marketing people, so they don’t fight each other. And then we’re going to start pushing stuff to HubSpot. So if you want people to be on some cool workflows and sending all that, and then pull that information back in. That’s just part of where we’re trying to go with it.
Tom:
So very exciting. But that wasn’t the only exciting thing done. We did add a couple of other features along the way with this. One that had been talked about a lot since we added the dashboard, and from our digital forum was something that was voted on a lot, was about sharing dashboards, so being able to share that information quickly. I know that we have a lot of users who log in as their sales team, create dashboards for them. I think we have one of those salespeople ourselves that we do that for. So that can help full streamline that, and just being able to do that like you can with reports. So just a thing I think will help a lot.
Tom:
We’ve also been working with some customers on some specific features. One, again, in helping to manage your database with unique e-mails and what can be entered and what can’t be, more approval processes within that. We did start work, and it’s going to be coming.
Tom:
We have a few little special holiday gifts that are also going to be coming out that took a little bit longer. We are going to have a new report for all electronic transactions, so you can see what’s went through, whether that ACH or credit card. Or what failed, more importantly, so you can go correct that. So we had to pull that back a bit, but we’re hoping to have that in time for the holiday break.
Tom:
And then one thing that I was really excited about, as well, is stuff with projects. We use projects a lot. We just did a project webinar. The task view have is something that we knew was kind of problematic. All of our users who’ve used it just didn’t have that kind of nice look to it you’d expect out of it. And so when we went and start looking at redoing some things in projects in terms of things like the resource allocation, the task view, updating those items, we kind of are thinking about it not just from what we did to the projects, and the slide-outs, and not having to scroll down a whole page, that you can kind of go in and out and see what you need. Not just for the project side, but like build something that we thought could be useful in other places at these sites.
Tom:
So when we went and built it, it wasn’t just, “Oh, this can only work projects.” We did think about it as like kind of paradigm for future areas of the site, in how things are edited, and more in bulk, and so you don’t have to go through as many steps to edit something or change something. You can do more things in one spot, and just the overall visual appeal of it.
Tom:
So excited for two reasons. One, as a heavy project user, getting that in there. But also, thinking downstream what we can do in other areas of the site to make the user experience better.
Tom:
Any other things, comments, feelings about this release, Zach?
Zach:
Yeah. I think another thing that might be a small change, but it is beneficial, and it definitely helps our team out is we did create a refer and earn button on our top navigation bar. And for anyone that’s not aware, essentially, if you refer MagHub to another media publisher similar to yourself, you can earn. We’ll demo. We’ll be very discreet. We’ll be very professional, obviously as our sales team always is. So we will be reaching out to those individuals, kind of demo them MagHub, and be like, “Hey. You know? You were referred by this party. They think that you’d be a really good fit for MagHub.” So we won’t be overly salesy. We won’t be aggressive. We won’t be doing anything like that.
Zach:
But the benefit is is you will save large discounts on your MagHub user fees. So the benefit is if you’re a smaller group or maybe you have less users and you refer to a large group, then you will earn basically a large portion of what they pay, not what you pay. So it’ll actually give you a large discount on your fees. We also send, obviously, e-gift cards and other gifts.
Zach:
So it is a really great kind of product process. We are upgrading our process in the future. But for right now, essentially all you do is you share a link to them and they fill out the web form themselves. So you can maybe put in an e-mail, maybe a social media post. Most people that we’ve seen just do e-mail, where it’s like, “Hey. You know? You should really check out MagHub. I’m really liking it. Here’s a link. Just fill this out.” And then essentially, we’ll be able to track it all from within our system, see that you referred somebody, and we’ll let you know kind of through the entire sales process of like, “Oh, this is where they’re at. Oh, hey, they signed.” We’ve had one group specifically that has referred four different groups, and every single year they earn massive discounts on their MagHub, So they’re paying very little for than what they normally would be paying just because they referred a lot of groups. So it really helps us out. It helps them out.
Zach:
It’s a very easy process. You don’t have to do anything crazy. So I definitely recommend checking out refer to earn right at the very top of MagHub. No matter which page you’re on, you’ll see it. And all the instructions are there, all the terms and conditions, disclaimers, anything like that. But we are very transparent about what you get and when you get it. So we really would appreciate it.
Tom:
Yeah. I think, what? You theoretically could pay zero then if you do enough. I think.
Zach:
Yes.
Tom:
But we’ll never actually pay you at this point. I remember talking about this long time ago.
Tom:
Like what if somebody did a bunch of things? So you could get to net zero?
Zach:
Well, and remember, if they refer a lot of people along those lines. Say, if they refer a large group every single month, they would pay nothing. But say they referred 12 groups, they would get 12 e-gift cards. So we actually would pay them.
Tom:
Oh.
Zach:
So they actually would make money and not pay anything for MagHub. So it is definitely possible.
Tom:
So your entire business life could just be referring MagHub. Okay. That works.
Tom:
Yeah. You know? As a side note, the other thing I like about it is it got rid of another menu page. One thing I’m like trying to do is this is consolidate the system so there’s fewer spots to go. So now you don’t have to go to home, click on that, and see the page. So for me, one other thing out of the menu.
Zach:
Hm.
Tom:
Small, small achievements. Small achievements.
Tom:
But yeah, we’re getting ready for Christmas now. While I’m doing that, all fun thing and other holidays. I’ve done all my shopping. Zach, have you done your shopping?
Zach:
Yes. I did mine very early. There’s not a lot this year, which is kind of nice. Because there’s no parties, so we can avoid most of it.
Tom:
Well, I have children who are now like old enough to know that there’s this Santa guy around. He is a big into, he’ll probably like the nerd stuff, Batman stuff. So I bought him a Batman. Hopefully, he doesn’t listen to this podcast. Otherwise, he’ll know it’s me, and I’ll ruin Santa and all his gifts. So we got to make sure Peter doesn’t hear this podcast. I got him Batman outfit. I also got Fred, to go along with it, a Robin outfit, and a Batman Duplo set. So you know? All in your realm, nerdy world. And Legos.
Zach:
Yeah.
Tom:
So hopefully you approve.
Zach:
I do. That’s very nice.
Tom:
Yeah.
Zach:
Very, very, very good tips. And I like how you themed it all together for both children. That’s nice.
Tom:
I did. I also have a very cool Harry Potter gift I’m giving, involving… Because his aunt is big into Harry Potter. She just wants us to like get him to watch Harry Potter. And she’s always like, “Do you want to watch Harry Potter?” And he’s like, “No,” and it breaks her heart.
Tom:
So yeah. I’m very Warner Brothers forward in my gift giving right now. And I just got HBO Max, because I have Roku. Oh. It’s all coming up Millhouse.
Tom:
Yeah. Because I realize you hate all people who played Batman. We had a conversation. You hate Christian Bale. You hate Robert Pattinson. Why do you hate Batman and those who play him? Do you hate Will Arnett because of Lego Batman?
Zach:
I’m not a big fan of Will Arnett. There’s nothing against Will Arnett.
Tom:
Oh, my God! It’s true. It’s a Batman thing.
Zach:
No, it’s not a Batman thing. Because I love Michael Keaton, and I do love Val Kilmer, and I love George Clooney. So I’m sorry. I don’t like the traditional. And I like Adam West. So no, I like older Batman one.
Tom:
You like Adam West?
Zach:
Well, I will say the reason I like Adam West, and this is a very short story. But my college professor that got me into advertising in the first place had looked the exact same as Adam West, like identical to Adam West. And he also has the exact voice as Adam West to a T, like freakishly so. So every time I went to class, which I did every one of his because he’s amazing, it’d basically be like Batman is teaching me, which was the most fun. And he was very expressive like Adam West was. So he’d be like, “Welcome, everybody. We are here today to learn about advertising.” And it was like, “Ooh.” It was so great. So yes, I do like Adam West, thank you.
Tom:
Here’s a nerd test. Do you like Kevin Conroy?
Zach:
I do. Yes. So, I did get that reference, thank you.
Tom:
Yeah. You’re welcome. Well, because I’ve been talking about this Batman stuff, so I don’t play video games. Another video game thing here, because I’ve been playing an old, old video game I bought and never played, was Arkham Asylum, Batman: Arkham Asylum. It’s like every like year I play video games for like two weeks and then never play again. So that’s why I’ve got that reference, so I thought I’d bring that in there.
Zach:
Oh. Arkham Asylum, first of all, it’s not an old game. So that’s just hilarious.
Tom:
Isn’t it like 2010, 2009?
Zach:
Well, yes, no. But I mean in reference to old.
Tom:
Right. Yes. But you know nowadays everything moves quickly. But I had one video game complaint, and you’re a video game person. And I find this interesting. You know we always get the complaint that there’s too many clicks everywhere, too many clicks. And I don’t play too many video games. But I remember this in God of War and this game, every time I have to remove a grate, I have to tap X multiple times to remove the grate. Why is that acceptable in video games, where I just want to press one…? What’s the point? I mean, tapping that a bunch of times to move the grate. I don’t get it.
Zach:
Yeah. I agree. I am not a fan. I was playing a Uncharted 4 just yesterday and I had to like lift up with a heavy door, and it’s like button mash, triangle. And it’s like, no, I don’t want to. I want to hold it down and that’s it. I don’t want him to tap it multiple times. So I agree. It’s not acceptable. I don’t like it. It needs to be replaced.
Tom:
Yeah. I don’t understand. I mean, I do like the one part. Like I remember I used to play the original Batman Genesis game. I remember playing that game, and it made me think about that because I used to play it all the time. And I think of this Batman game, and like you die in this Batman game, they bring you right back to where you were. Or if you used to die, back in the day, the old, old games, like you started over. Kids these days, no commitment. Ooh. I remember having to start over in video games all the time, and there would be some anger moments.
Zach:
Yeah.
Tom:
Some pure anger moments. Maybe that’s why they got rid of it. Created an angry, angry world.
Zach:
Well, I would argue that. I mean, I think the big difference between games, not to go too far down this rant, is that games in the past were meant to be built around games. There was less of storyline. And games nowadays are built purely around storylines. Like you can’t say Arkham Asylum does not have a far greater storyline than the Sega Genesis Batman side scrolling game. They are in entirely different ballparks. Like you couldn’t even tell me what the storyline was of the Genesis Batman.
Tom:
Well, I mean, I just know that it was built off the movie to go fight The Joker at the end. And just for whatever reason, there was a museum you’re in that has falling heavy objects in the middle of it. Whoever made that museum made zero sense to me. But that’s a whole other different, different thing.
Tom:
But so getting into the fun part of trivia stuff. So cat fact today, I’ll actually switch it up. Not really a cat fact, but Catwoman to Batman related. Speaking of Michael Keaton since you like him, I was doing trivia recently and I was looking up some potential trivia questions. Do you know what Michael Keaton’s original, his real name is?
Zach:
No.
Tom:
So this is interesting. His real name, and then when I say you’ll probably realize why he changed it, was Michael Douglas.
Zach:
Yes, I could see why he changed it.
Tom:
So he obviously knew he couldn’t stay Michael Douglas with another famous actor as Michael Douglas.
Zach:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). That’s interesting. I never would’ve guessed that.
Tom:
Yeah. Well, and then I was looking at another one. Alfred, or Michael Caine, was Maurice Micklewhite. There’s some weird names out there, man.
Zach:
What?
Tom:
But the Michael Douglas one I just thought funny. It’s like well, that’s actually a solid name. Too bad it’s taken. So he had to change it to Michael Keaton from that side of it.
Tom:
But you know? We got into our Christian Bale, your hatred of Christian Bale and everything he does because we were talking about that. And obviously, he’s going to be in the new Thor movie, which I was excited about. And then you went on a rant about he’s the worst person ever. I don’t remember all the details, it was terrible. And then I was saying he was a very good actor. And one of the reasons was like I think it was his first movie was Empire of the Sun, which he was in. He was fantastic. Stephen Spielberg film. Then obviously, of course he made Newsies.
Tom:
Then you countered with something about Kevin Bacon being the greatest actor of all time and you love Kevin bacon. So two things on here is one, the trivia question is what was Kevin Bacon’s first film? What was his first feature film? What was he in? It was a very big hit. He was a very small part of it, but it was a very big hit. I think a lot of people might think that it was the… Oh, breaking on it. The horror film which he was in, Friday the 13th. Not his first film, but he was in that. But what was Kevin Bacon’s first film? That is the question. And just answer however you want. We usually say on Twitter. But if you want to send us an envelope. You want to submit a support request ticket. You want to go on our website live chat and just say, “Hey, I know the trivia.” Boom. Let us know in any message you want and we will gladly, gladly award you the honor of knowing that. So Kevin Bacon’s first film.
Tom:
And to leave it on, thinking of Kevin Bacon. With the six degrees of Kevin Bacon, I was doing this the other day, and I think I got to him in four. I think it’s four. So Kevin Bacon was in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles with Steve Martin. Steve Martin was in Bowfinger with Eddie Murphy. Eddie Murphy was in Metro with a bunch of other people. But my cousins actually are in that Hollywood world. They’re camera people, and they filmed it. And I remember they talked about him because he was in that movie. They had a picture of him with it. So they know him. So you can guess either one of those cousins. I’ve met the cousins. So that’s how I get to Kevin Bacon very quickly. Under six through that of Steve Martin to Eddie Murphy to my cousins. So Zach, could you get to Kevin Bacon faster than I did?
Zach:
I don’t know. Has Kevin Bacon ever been in a movie with like Gene Hackman or Owen Wilson? Because I can probably say if he has, then yes. It’d be my brother and I met Gene Hackman and Owen Wilson. And if they ever, ever are around Kevin Bacon.
Tom:
Well, I think the whole point of Kevin Bacon is that he probably was, or at least close enough. So they were probably in the same one he was. If he wasn’t in a movie with them directly, I’m sure he was in a movie with someone who was eventually in a movie with them.
Zach:
Sure.
Tom:
Actually, I think I can think of one. Because I thought… Well, maybe he wasn’t. I thought that Kevin Bacon was in Outsiders, but I don’t know if he was in Outsiders. If he was in Outsiders, that’s with Tom Cruise, who was with Gene Hackman in The firm. So you could do that way. But there’s no doubt in my mind that you could easily find a Kevin Bacon to one of those two actors directly to there. So we’re probably in the same level.
Zach:
Sure.
Tom:
So for this holiday season, figure out how close you are to Kevin Bacon. If you want to send us your Kevin Bacon connections and how close you are, please feel free to do that, too, along with the answer for his first film.
Tom:
So I don’t have anything else. Zach, do you have anything else to tell our jugheads before they all take off for two weeks?
Zach:
Can I just mention that so I immediately Googled six degrees. Or like I just I typed Gene Hackman and Kevin Bacon movie. And then the very first thing is six degrees of Kevin bacon, from between Kevin Bacon to Gene Hackman there’s a forum park article where someone actually wrote this all out. So I can confirm that there is six degrees with this, with Kevin Bacon and Gene Hackman very easily. Because people have literally already searched for this. This is amazing.
Tom:
So yeah. I mean, I think there used to be a Google search with that where you can do it. And apparently, in somewhat of the research because I was looking at this to make sure I confirmed Kevin Bacon’s first film to make sure I was right. I guess he didn’t appreciate this very much, the six degrees stuff at first. But then it took off, and now he’s actually turned it into a charitable organization. So good for him.
Zach:
Yeah. Well done.
Tom:
Yeah.
Zach:
But other than that, nope. There is nothing new here.
Tom:
All right. Well, this will be the last podcast of 2020. One of the best years of all time. So we’re looking forward to an even better 2021. So we’ll talk to you all then. Have a great end to 2020.
