Season 1, Episode 12 – Get your birds’ eye view with Quivvy Tools

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to powered by Podio. Automation is everything. Super. Charge your business with podio. Get ready for another episode of supercharged with Jordan Samuel Fleming, your weekly dive into the awesome impact workflow and automation can have on your business when it’s powered by podio. Join US each week as we learn from the top podio partners in the world as we investigate system integrations and add ons and hear from real business owners who have implemented podio into their business. Now join your host, Jordan, Samuel Fleming, CEO of game changers for this week’s episode.

Speaker 2: 0:44

Hey everybody, and welcome to this episode of supercharged. I’m your host Jordan Samuel Fleming here to talk all about the power of we’re flowing. Automation in your business is powered by podio. Today’s guest is Mike from quippy tools, Hodo partner in the Benelux area.

Speaker 3: 0:59

They’ve got a brand new tool that they’ve been trialing it with people across podio the last couple of months and it’s now going to be rolling out live. I’m really excited to learn more about it. Mike, Welcome to the podcast. Introduce yourself to the audience.

Speaker 4: 1:12

Hi Shawn. Nice for having me on the podcast. Yes. So, uh, I’m Mike dementors from Belgium and together with Thomas we have, uh, uh, an extension develops called of tools. Before that we were already like four or five years doing normal consultancy, uh, also doing the other extensions, smartphone to stuff like that. Um, so basically, uh, head zone and to put your four for five years now, something like that. Yep.

Speaker 3: 1:45

Excellent. So five years. So, you know, before we dive deep into the, um, the new tools and I really do want to get into it and, uh, I want to get into that deeply because I think it’s a very cool tool that people need to learn about. And this podcast is perfect. It’s to get that out. But before we do that, let’s just dive quickly back to the start. Um, I always liked to find out from the partners how they got involved with Podio, how they found it, and you know, how they got to be a commercial, how they got podio to being a commercial part of their business. Can you give us a bit of background?

Speaker 4: 2:17

Yeah, sure. Um, so the thing was like my career spent maybe 20 years now and like the first 15 years of that I was actually an ecommerce consultants. So, uh, uh, something quite different than Portillos so to speak. And basically to manage my own company, I was looking for like cool tool to uh, to manage all things related to my company. And then I started googling and I got a shortlist of 10 tools. Uh, you know, the, the normal ones, like a sauna, podio was there, a couple of other ones. So 10 in total, I listed them besides a whole week off. I got into my mad case. They tested them for like a whole week after the week. I basically got to the conclusion that put your look the most promising because really of know we like to call it APP, Lego building blocks, principle of podio. And uh, I started just doing it for myself then and then basically a that went along really well and then doing some stuff for somebody in my neighborhoods and for our new hotels. Really like in love with podio and uh, yeah, I can gradually beauty the idea of um, yeah, why not make a business out of this? I think the world should know about podio. So I basically just took like three 63rd and in my career and just started doing podio one like 100% of the time as we speak now and 2019 so that was like a very nice, uh, journey and change of direction. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 4:08

And so how long ago, how long have you been sort of focused on podio is your main tool

Speaker 4: 4:14

that would be around four years now, roughly speaking. Yeah, before, like in the beginning it was a bit playing around with it. The idea of builds, like that’s duties as a professional, as a surface to the public. Uh, two other companies that have been 2015, 1929 was really rolling it out professionally to clients and searching for clients.

Speaker 3: 4:43

Sure, sure. And we, we met actually you and I met at that first European partner meeting if I would call. Um, and that was, I guess, three years ago now or something like that. We’d like to meet up and go back and take another maybe other places once in a while. Yeah. Well, I’ve just to say, I, I, uh, as a quick aside, you know, I’m, I’m just organizing this year’s meetups, so, uh, we’ll be able to, to get the 2019 one in the diary scene. Um, but in the last meetup you showed us, um, and you showed all the partners who were there, the new tool you guys have developed, um, the, the, the new tool query tools. So let’s really dive into that because I can see it as really valuable for partners, but also for just normal users who are building their own, you know, large scale podio systems. Um, I could see real value into it. So dive into me, give me a s, let’s start with the basics of what it does and then we’ll go into how you developed it. Um, what you’ve been seeing as you’ve been rolling it out and where you’re going with it. So let’s start with the basics. What does this do? What’s it focused on?

Speaker 4: 5:59

Yeah. All right. So, uh, basically we like to call it a quickie tool’s architecture. That’s our first extension we developed, uh, because we, we think about releasing more extensions in the future. So this one is called the architecture actually. Um, so, uh, what does it do? It basically gives you a 360 helicopter view of your podio and globiflow organization. I have to summarize it in one sentence. Uh, so basically, you know, if for people who do more stuff for you after a while you get to see how things are connected. If you’re the only person doing the development, you kind of know it in your head, but as you go long as it gets bigger and bigger, suppose you have other colleagues joining in and building also stuff in Podio, you start to lose the overheads. So, uh, the idea for architecture was basically to have a tool for myself to do the consultancy we do now for four years. It’s like I needed that kind of tool myself. So we just think like, Hey, I talked to my colleague and say, you can, can, can we do something like that? Can we build it? And kind of saw immediately that towards us actually not that easy to build. It’s quite complex the way it works. I think we developed almost six months, four months on it to build it. So it’s actually quite an advance to uh, yeah, it’s uh, yeah, it’s, it gives you the overhead, the how, how are things connected in your podio and globiflow that’s really a revolutionary thing we did there, I think to connect globally. Globiflow globiflow into the mix there as well. So just to give you an example, you can have, like I have a podium field and you say, how is this thing connected to the rest of my environment? So basically we give you the full overhead of the field is used in these global flows evening. Those bricks it’s used, it’s connected to relationships, to what put your apps and calculations, stuff like that. That’s, it’s basically in a nutshell.

Speaker 3: 8:23

Well, in a, yeah, the, I mean, that makes sense. But I think let’s, let’s, I want to dive into this a little because there’s, there’s a lot of uses for this from both a polio partner for one of you, but also like an architecture point of view. You know, the more you build, if you’ve got listeners, if you’ve got listeners out there who are kind of starting to do more a complex builds or, or even partners who are maybe starting to do more and more client builds, um, the, you know, the impact fields have on each other, um, cannot be, you can very easily break a system or make very bad decisions when your system start to get bigger. And what are things I really think, you know, what this tool really allows you to do is drill in to a, an area of your podio system and decide and be able to make informed decisions. Yes. As to what you can do. That’s one of the key things. So if you’re building, you’re able to go, okay, here’s the, I want to change this. If I change this field, what is impacted? Is there flows that are impacted? Could that break things? Are there relationships that the calculation fields are getting data from? I believe you do calculation fields too, right? Your agent sure. Efforting. Yeah. So I think that’s really a critical thing. Um, so, so what was like given, you know, you build stuff, I build stuff, my team builds stuff in podio. Um, you know, was this because you are getting more and more complexities and you needed a quicker way of making sure things were happening?

Speaker 4: 9:57

Yeah, sure. If it actually, like I said before, it’s, it’s really started all because I needed to tool myself. Uh, you build stuff, but then you say, yeah, this, this field, is it used or not? I want to delete it. And you don’t have a clue actually, because it’s maybe a year ago, since you built a system for this client and, uh, uh, you want to take informed decisions. Indeed. Uh, yeah. Yeah. So for instance, what we released now with, uh, we give you even an older head of fields that are, um, that, that actually produce in the system. Let’s say you have deleted the fields, but it’s actually connected to other things in your podio globiflow setup. We’ll, we’ll tell you nicely, just fix, uh, these flows, fix these calculations fields at your fund running again. So it’s fairly proactive. We just tell you basically if you want to clean up your system, that’s how we can do it.

Speaker 3: 10:56

Yeah, and I think, I mean, I think this is a really, really interesting tool for the people who are sitting there, you know, like if you, if you’re getting to build them a bigger system in podio. Um, one of the things that I find is that you got a lot of ability in podio if you’re not sure what you’re doing or if you’re, or if you’re not as maybe a comfortable with certain certain bits. Um, there’s a real opportunity to, um, get lost in a system and, you know, real option to get lost. And, and when you’re designing podio, these relationships, the power of Podio is about these relationships, but that also gives you an awful lot of, of, of failure points as well. Um, and so if I was a designer, if we, if we think about this tool from a, uh, sort of, uh, system architecture point of view, um, this tool is something that you could bring in to be able to sanity check any that you’re doing to your system and make sure that, uh, as you plan the system and you start to grow it, everything is, is tied in together. Is that, is that like how are you seeing people using it right now as you’ve been getting feedback? Yeah, basically

Speaker 4: 12:10

you can use the tool before you start building systems because we all know like it, it’s really easy to set up things and it’s, works just goes along. But as you, as you go along, it gets more complex and you have to refine your, your, uh, set up. Uh, you have to make some architectural decisions, uh, which you don’t have to take at the beginning. It’s like really, you don’t have to be a technical person to build a podio system, but I think you have to be kind of someone who really knows what she’s doing. If you want to maintain the system and make it grow and, and a good robust professional way, otherwise you will get, you know, uh, you get apps, different app to basically the same thing and stuff like that. You want to, if you’re a good architect, you want to avoid that and you want to have the, the full overview of your system. So basically the one point we’re seeing people using our tool is to basically proactively see what, uh, what system they want to build and build it in the most, the best way possible. Uh, the second use we see as basically, uh, after the case people have built a system and they want to know does it perform out? Does, is it all the dots connected here? Uh, uh, can I clean up? Can I, uh, can I, can I make it better? I want to have overview, which it’s like a couple of months ago there was a huge thing that the podio wanted to limit through the accounts to 500 items. And there was really a lot of people going on. How do I know how many put your items? I have in my system. Uh, basically that was the very first use that are, that our tool got used a lot. It’s basically just tell you, yeah, actually we got our first couple of hundred users from, uh, from people who just wanted to know how many items do I have in my organization. So they basically just find that with us, uh, and said, uh, we just give it to you in one page. We give you all the numbers, I suppose, basically one of the use cases.

Speaker 3: 14:21

That’s just, I mean, I, I mean, you know, like I will never understand the people who, who use the free version of podio without any automation or anything like that. I’ll never understand that one. And, um, you know, 500 items like, like I, I, I’m amazed that, that I really am amazed at that. I didn’t realize that you got a hundreds of, you know, you, you’ve more than a hundred people sign up just because of that. Um, presumably this was, uh, this, I guess this is their, their last ditch. You tend to stay on the free version of podio. Um, I don’t know why, uh, but okay, so that’s his ring. Now what about the podio partners? What is the, you know, from a podio partner point of view, um, is this something you see partners using just for themselves or is this something that the partners may be use and upsell to their clients? Um, as a, as a, you know, as, as a service that they can value add on onto that. I mean, how does the licensing work? If I’m a podio partner in my only using it on my organization, am I using it all my organizations?

Speaker 4: 15:30

Well, there’s basically two posts, a few [inaudible] can, you can think about having a, a partner trying to resell your tool to the client. And the second one is you can think about it as the giving the partner the freedom to use a tool for their partners. So basically the [inaudible] and that’s the last route is basically the way we’re thinking. Basically the client does not need to know that that consultant of the podio partner is using graffiti was extension. Basically the department will pay the fee to us and he probably will just calculate it in his hourly or daily rates to what’s the client. I think it does not make too much sense to try to sell quick tools to the end consumer. If your report, your partner, it’s basically two, you have to use the, built the system for years at clients. And so we basically built around that. So it going to actually we’re going to release the bait model. It’s still in Beta for the moment. It has been since end of November, uh, that we’re going to make it date as of the 1st of May. Uh, so we basically taught having given partners freedom just basically to a user tool safe for one month, two months, whatever you want, and then you can put it on balls. If you’re not going to work for this client at, they’d say after the holidays in September, you going to do against, do some work for the partner so we can enable your subscription for one month or two months, whatever you choose. Uh, so basically we’d like to give the parties full freedom there and say if you, if you’re using of tool, okay, we’d like to pay for it. If the next month you’re not going to use or to grow for this particular pliers of yours, you don’t have to pay. So that’s basically the model. Uh, we, uh, we have a daughter. Yep. Okay.

Speaker 3: 17:28

And, um, where, where you have a, will you have, um, sort of a pricing structure now, um, can you elaborate a bit more about what that pricing structure is for the, for the people out there who maybe haven’t tried it yet,

Speaker 4: 17:43

sort of like a set up till now till the end of the month of April is still free and better? Uh, the pricing structure is going to be, you can decide, I only want to have an overview of my podio. Uh, the older, uh, pricing plans will be, I want to have an overview of [inaudible] ads. Globiflow obviously package here is, has a lot more value since I think nobody yell. This has been able to to actually index what’s floppy flow is doing and how it’s connected in depth to your podio. So basically we’re going to have to a pricing plans. The one is just put, the other one is [inaudible] plus Globee flow and you can decide each month if you want to use it for this particular organization or not. That’s what we call a subscription. So say for company a or client a, you can have a subscription as a partner. For company B you have an subscription. The first one can be just put you over. The second one can be put your plus globiflow, whatever you want. Basically you just toy around with, it’s every month. It’s based on a credit system. So you’re basically prepay credits. It’s like really similar to how smart phone does it. You just have upload the prepaid balance and then you deduct it from the kind of subscription types you’re using.

Speaker 3: 19:09

Yup. So, so as a partner then you’re giving me the complete control to be able to say that. Right. I want to, I’m going to do a bit of work for a client a, so I’m going to activate this for a month. So that as we’re doing some maybe a redesign or doing some heavy maintenance on their system, I’ve got access. But when I’m done that maybe at the end of the month I can turn it off and, and not, you know, and then six months later I could activate it again for that client for months.

Speaker 4: 19:36

Yeah, exactly. That we were thinking like we got into that train of thought after awhile because we were thinking like, suppose you have a partner who has, you know, there’s 40 partners out there who have 50, 60 clients, you know, you just can’t make art of space for prolonged periods of time because their property, how so many clients that they work for this client for two months and then for half a year they don’t do anything for the clients and whatever. So basically, uh, we thought very, very flexible, uh, bottle out there, uh, to, to basically proficient partners with the cost effect way. So, uh, basically so, so we can earn bits obviously, but for the partners, it’s not like he has to pay an arm and a leg to do it to proficient his clients.

Speaker 3: 20:28

Well that takes a lot of sense. Actually. I got to say Mike, as a, as a fellow, I mean I say that selfishly as a fellow partner, um, obviously, but, but it also makes sense, but how we normally work with people like you, you know, you’ll, you’ll go through a heavy, uh, period of time where you are, you are developing for a company, um, where a tool like this could be very, very valuable, but then you may go through a seven month period of time where you really do nothing, will you just maybe supporting them in a little bit. So you, but you’re not really developing the system. And so to be able to turn it on and off as our development cycles are activated on organizations, um, makes a lot of sense. Uh, you know, from a partner point of view, that makes it a much more, uh, interesting tool, uh, as a pure partner tool.

Speaker 4: 21:16

Yeah. Besides, I want to mention as well, it’s not only for partners obviously, so a lot of fuse that if you just work in this one, uh, in, in your own company or to just one company and you need a tool, obviously you can do that as well. It’s definitely not only for partners that you can use a Wifi to was a architecture is basically if you’re serious about your show set up, they’re not thinkers to, it can be a real advantage to what you’re trying to do that.

Speaker 3: 21:48

Absolutely. And how does it work? If I’ve got multiple users in my organization or my team, uh, who are, or you know, is this a, is this like I, if I’m the, if I’ve, I’ve got a development team of seven people and I want to be able to let my team used this tool. Does that mean everybody has to have an individual subscription or can they all work off of mine? Well, it’s basically based

Speaker 4: 22:12

surround your podio login. So you probably know that kind of set up from water extensions. Basically you have to, once you have to connect your podio account to a your query tools account. So it’s basically use of based uh, yeah, at the use of can have one or more so scriptions so yeah. Uh, so basically, uh, it is for user, if you have a development team of six, seven people that would indeed required like seven 11 accounts with sex, obviously we can do something there. Uh, but you have to understand the way our tool works. Every user, it depends. Do you have administrative access to certain workspaces? So different users, even if their colleagues within the same company, they will have access to different work spaces. Meaning they will have a different query tools architecture by design. That’s quite logical. So, so it’s actually, we thought about it a lot, but I think for us it makes the most sense to have it user based because get used to different users seek different things even within the same company, unless everybody is an Admin, an older work spaces as you, if you get my drift.

Speaker 3: 23:28

No, that makes a lot of sense as well. Uh, that, that does make sense. And, uh, you know, it’s certainly, um, uh, there’s the actually that, that’s, that’s really interesting. One of the things that we’ve found is a podio partner because we’ve got so many clients now that, that, um, we finding it hugely frustrating to be in everybody’s workspace. So, um, but then so we created a master sort of game changes support user and we put them in that workspace. But that became just as equally as frustrating because if you’re logged in as a subpoint workspace, you still had hundreds of workspace organizations to deal with. So we ended up, I’m actually, each client of ours gets a unique user, a support user, so that we can quickly log into a client’s organization as, as, uh, you know, and only be in that organization and only that globe you flow. Um, so that we can refresh things quicker, et cetera. So this will be an, I’ll be fascinated to see exactly how I, uh, how I look at that in the future because that would mean it literally, we have hundreds of different users look at that. But that’s not my own personal thing. I mean, I think this tool is a really fascinating one. I liked it when you showed it to me. Um, I have played around with that occasionally myself. I’m going to, I’m going to do a bit more digging into it, but, but I can really see the value if you are someone who is new to La or not new, but if someone who is managing a complex polio organization, whether you’re trying to grow it from scratch or whether you’ve already gone it or if you’re a podio partner, this tool gives you a understanding of your organization and all of the connected elements that is vital to be able to, you know, not screw things up. I think we’ve all been to the situation where we’ve deleted a field and then gone. Um, you know, we’ve all done that. Uh, so I think this tool is fascinating. Um, and uh, you know, I think it’s, it’s, it’s, uh, I’m going to put a link obviously to your website in the podcast. I encourage everyone to go take a look at it. Um, after, after the May 1st, are you going to have any sort of a grace period? I couldn’t remember if he said that. Um, so if I was a new user and I found this podcast in May 15th, would I be able to log in and see what it does for free before I sign up? Or is it immediate signup? Yeah. Obviously we have a free trial of 50 days for every issue next year or the year after year you’ll get 15 days full access, uh, at you can, you could use it like fully functional for 60 days and after that it gets paid. Yep. Absolutely. And I think that’s great because it gives everybody an opportunity to, to see just how powerful that view is. And, and I really liked the fact that you can turn it on and off. Um, so from a development point of view, it makes complete sense to me as well. Um, uh, I like that. Um, so, so that’s, that’s fantastic. Um, Mike, thank you so much for your time today. I hope everybody has a chance to visit it. Um, what’s a good, just give everybody the contact details and with all the details of how to get in touch with you and the tool and I’ll post it in the podcast, uh, details as well.

Speaker 4: 26:46

Okay, cool. Yes. So, uh, you can reach us at [inaudible] dot com that’s where the two letters, the free signup, if you’re looking for a podio consultancy besides extension building, obviously like a saucy as well. So that’s just quirky dotcom. So basically that’s like brother and sister. Yeah. So, uh, yeah, if you want to mail me, just give me my unit at the restaurant we posted by Jordan, you might get a of [inaudible] dot com, uh, and you obviously can reach me through what your chats, uh, or the support help desk.

Speaker 3: 27:26

Yep. Excellent. Well, Mike, Thanks very much for your time. I look forward to diving deeper into query tools myself and I encourage everyone to take a take a look. If you build in Podio, if you’re managing a podio organization, this is a fantastic tool to give you that overview of what you’ve got and to make sure that you can make changes to your system without risking deleting foe fields or a, you know, impacting other parts, whether it’s globally floor or calculation fields or, or, uh, a relationship fields. So it’s definitely a tool that is great for partners and also for people who are in charge of their own party organizations. Mike, Thanks very much. And for everybody else, have a great week. Yeah. Okay. Thanks a lot children’s. I can see

Speaker 1: 28:12

you’ve been listening to supercharged with Jordan Jameel plumbing. Subscribe today on Itunes, Google play or Spotify for your weekly dive into how you can supercharge your business by making it powered by podio. Be sure to check out our website. We are game changers.com where you can learn more and arranger a 30 minute call with Jordan Day. I’ll be, you understand how podio supercharges you.