Season 5 Episode 3 - The episode where the Podio geeks are set loose! - Supercharged! with Jordan Samuel Fleming

Episode Transcript
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Narrator (00:01):
You're watching another supercharged masterclass
with Jordan Samuel Fleming youropportunity to learn the ins and
outs of Podio design anddevelopment from one of the top
Podio partners in the world.

Jordan Fleming (00:14):
Hey, everybody, and welcome to this week's
episode of supercharge. I'm yourhost, Jordan Samuel Fleming,
here to talk all about the powerof workflow and automation, when
your business is powered byPodio. Well, in episode three,
we've got to be honest, it's abit of a geek squad moment, I
have on this episode threeguests. Number one, Seth

(00:36):
Harrison. He's the CEO of thatapp.io and tech, ego, long,
longtime pull your partner and areally technically proficient
company, right, it's companythat really goes into the deep
stuff, we're going to bereviewing some of his extensions
on the Wii or game changes.comsite fairly soon. I've also got

(01:00):
Damien Ruggeri. Damien is theCEO of REI solutions. And
they've got a real estatewholesale custom system in Podio
that they sell called deal Pro.
And he'll Damien has a lot ofexpertise of building things in
and out of Podio and linkingthem together. And then of

(01:21):
course, we've got AndrewCranston, who, at the time of
recording, this was the CEO ofgame changers, and is now the
CEO of his own Podio consultancythat's grown from Game Changers
called synchrony. And which, ofcourse, all the links will be in
the podcast descriptions. Thisis a bit of a geek squad moment,
I'll be honest, you get thesethree talking. And you get in

(01:45):
very deeply into technicalthings. But it's also really
interesting. And there's somereally interesting nuggets here.
That will expand if you're atall technical, if you're kind of
moving your Podio developmentinto a more technical range.
There's a lot in here that willgive you some really good ideas
and information. This isdefinitely one of those you want

(02:06):
to look at on YouTube, as well,because they're all they do
share their screens and showsome things, which are really
very cool. And, you know, asalways, when these three gets
together, I'm sort of you know,I sit there a curse in the
background occasionally, becausethese guys know far more
technical stuff. For me, it'sfascinating chance to listen to

(02:28):
three amazing Podio partners.
Deep Dive into some moretechnical things you can do
around Podio. Let's have alisten.
Though last season, the podcast.
We the Podio was launched a fewthings. Let's start off. I'll be
introducing you guys on theintro to the podcast anyway. But

(02:53):
very, very quickly before welaunch into it. Can I get
everybody to give a 10 secondintroduction, starting with
Damian.

Damien (03:06):
Yep, so my name is Damian Ruggieri. I am the owner
of REI solutions, we make reallyawesome CRMs for Podio and Podio
users.

Andrew Cranston (03:16):
Pretty good, Andrew. I am Andrew Cranston.
I'm the CEO of game changers,and we do Podio work for people
all over the planet.

And Seth?

Seth Helgeson (03:28):
Yes, I am Seth Helgeson. With check ego, the
CEO of check ego, and we doworkflow automations. And we
also have some extensions calledthe print, sync and Eva, that we
help build out these customPodio systems for clients.

Absolutely. So today's episode kicking off this
season, it's a bit of a partnerroundtable. And we're going to
start out by talking a littlebit about some of the changes
since the last that havehappened in Podio since the last
season of the podcast, namely,I'm going to start out with the
new UI. So it launched a bigfair fanfare naturally. I was
really unconvinced. I gotta say,though, just to their credit,

(04:09):
every time I switch back to theold UI now, I twitch and I'm
like, oh, god, look at thisfucking thing. So it's sort of
one now am I happy that theyhaven't done more? Like I wanted
more substantive things in termsof the platform? Yes, I'm not
happy about that. But in termsof new i I'm kind of there now.
What does everybody think?

Yeah, at first I was I was kind of going what is
going on? Are we jumping back tothe 70s the seafoam blue I mean,
could we not have gottensomething better? I mean, I you
know, good hack, and then theycame out with I think was
Andreas Hunter ash came out witha Chrome extension that kind of
like muted some of the coloursand made it a bit better. And

(04:55):
and then one profile had it theother profile didn't and so
switching between In the PTU,all of a sudden now I've become
climatized to it. I love thefont. The colour is not as
aggressive as it was in thebeginning. And I guess that's
okay.

Damien (05:16):
Yeah, that the Podio the super menu extension that this
will you're talking about it, itsaved definitely makes it
viewable, I would say was whenit first came out. For me it was
almost like mess terrible. Ican't, can't focus with with how
this colour scheme is. But nowit's kind of same thing is
everyone else has grown on mejust kind of,

well, it hasn't grown on you because you have to
not make it grow on you. So Idon't actually use under I did I
tried undresses thing. But I'llbe honest, I've gotten very used
to the UI, the new UI. And I'mfine with it. Like I mean, I'm
not in love with the the teal orwithin whatever that sky kind of
weird. Aqua, sky blue. But Butin general, now that I go when I

(06:03):
go back to the old system to theold UI, I'm kind of like, Oh,
God, this looks horrible. Thisis like so. So they kind of won
me over with it. Andrew, what doyou think,

would be a significant switch going from
back from New if you're in Newfor a while going back to old is
kind of funky. I mean, to be notjust like, three out of four
recommend. It's just for me thatI fell in love with this CSS

(06:34):
hack through a Chrome extensioncalled stylish that we turned a
bunch of people on, mostlybecause the markdown tables that
you build in calculation fieldslook kind of cool with it. And
it's weird because I use sessionbox also. And sometimes I'm in
other systems. And it's likethis CSS hack is superimposed

(06:58):
somehow over the new UI. Andthere there truly looks
terrible. Like sometimes, and Ijust haven't bothered to go in
and reconfigure. But sometimesit looks terrible. But in my
Podio, my own pure Podioregardless of the new UI, I've
it remains looking the same. SoI haven't I haven't moved from
I'm quite comfortable with theway my Podio looks right now. I

(07:20):
don't I don't want tonecessarily use me why I thought
I had to I thought there was apoint where I was going to have
no choice. But fingers crossed.
It seems like

Damien (07:31):
I think there is there will be but yeah, sure

it'll happen at some point. Yeah, delay.

I thought it already came out. It was already
forced upon

us. Me too. I thought, yeah. Grandfather, I
have the link that says switchto new look. Yeah, I still have
the option to go back and forth.
So maybe that's because of date.
We're beta users? I don't know.

I think it's grandfathered. I think I
suspect. I suspect they've donewhat we've done in smartphone a
couple of times, which is ifyou're already existing, we'll
give you the option for a littlewhile. But all new accounts, go
straight to the new thing. I youknow, that would that would make
sense. Because otherwise you'dbe going to new accounts in a

(08:10):
very jarring way and being likegetting and and before they even
used to put you that you'dswitch that overlap. So it's
probably grandfathered. I mean,I

do like it though. I think it's I think
it's nice. I just I'm used tothe way I use it now. But the
blue Andreas is blue. Definitelymakes a huge difference for me
personally, but other than that,I guess I like the views. I do
like the fonts if I have toagree with you there.

It's just it's just feels a little. It just
feels Yeah, just feels a littlefresher. Now. They've also let's
just quickly go over I mean,since we didn't last season,
they have done you know, it doesfeel as critical as I often am
of Podio and Citrix. It doesfeel like they're at least

(08:56):
actually moving for the firsttime.

Damien (08:59):
Right let me actually doing something. Yeah, look at
some of those. The boards arethings are eight, nine years
old, like holy shit, we stillhaven't done this.

Yes, yes. There's there's huge improvements. I
think in that regard. I've beenso happy to see calc
improvements have beennoticeable. There's been I mean,
I don't trust that when they sayhey, we're going down for
maintenance that to me, my guttells me Well, I guess the next
day is going to be sucky. Yeah,I know the next day is still

(09:31):
going to suck if for whateverreason they don't tell us tell
us what they're going to bedoing but for some reason that
it creates a cluster F of ofepic proportions that
reverberate through the system.

Damien (09:42):
Yeah, I definitely agree with you man. Like it's almost
like they do the down formaintenance and and that's like
when they're testing it out.
There's no, there was no pretest of the push that they're
doing. So I think that wasrelevant for everybody in the
last couple of weeks as we'veseen some down for maintenance
and then like you're saying, sobackup, and it's like, oh, man,
now all this doesn't work.

Yeah, yeah, it's been, it's been rather
frustrating in that respect.

Calculation fields have gotten better on the
whole overall. In recent past,there's some instances and God
bless that red dot and

that, that I feel things always on. God bless
the red dot, it's like, well,

I suppose it's too much to ask that Citrix
personnel would be using betterSuperman, you just see that red
dog, but at least it raises theoverall ire of the Podio
ecosystem, and its users to tryto, you know, they probably get
a lot of support and a lot moresupport tickets now than they
ever did, I hope they get moresupport tickets than they ever
do based on that red light. Butcalculate, I mean, personally,

(10:53):
and professionally. I've kind ofdivorced myself from calculation
fields altogether. You know, Isort of tell people, they're
there for convenience purposes.
But, but you know, obviously, ina situation where you've got,
you know, you've got sync, andyou've got Eva, and you've got
solutions that can gather datatogether. Most of the time
calculator, if you think aboutthe ways people are using

(11:16):
calculation, Fields marked downtables, fine. But the bottom,
the related items at the bottomare not terrible. It's just it's
it's convenience, right, butthey're there. For convenience.
If you're in one of these raresituations where the fields are
not producing, you could stillget to the right answer. But
people who put their life inreporting and financial
calculations and things forcalculation fields have to be

(11:39):
correct. There's better ways togather that data, either to
display to the user or foradditional workflows. And I, I
don't I don't Well, let'scalculation fields at all.

Let's follow that rabbit hole, actually.
Because I mean, I would agreewith you in the sense that let's
talk about what happens or whatwould we say as partners is the
best message method to work withthings like, you know, let's say
financial reporting, where youhave to have accurate fucking

(12:13):
data, right? I mean, where it issimply just not acceptable to
oops, we've, you know, thesetransactions aren't showing
because the calculation fielddidn't resolve like that. That's
just like, that's probably thegovernment does have their
books, but it's not how weshould do our books. So, you
know, what are the options thatpeople would be looking at? What

(12:34):
are the best options to makesure that is that that they can
get around the time whencalculations do go down? Are we
calling that like, just purenumber fields, and then popping
in our data through somethinglike globey flow? Or either,
Hey, are you using Podio tomanage your real estate
investment business Wait, clickthe link to find out why 1000s

(12:55):
of real estate investmentprofessionals are using Podio
plus smartphone to make morecalls, send more text, and close
more deals, click the link,

I find it I find it. I know some partners,
like we have these monthlypartner meetings, and we talk
about strategies and things. AndI know, I know, there are
partners who are relying on theidea of updating an item every
day using globey flow just topush out fields, I personally
find that to be a very hackysolution, and not something that

(13:27):
I would stake my life on, andcertainly not non financial
records. It's funny because Ihave a client too, we, we
discovered a calculation fieldthat somebody programmed in the
current date, expecting thecalculation field to always know
what the current date is. But weall know that that's not the
reality or how the fields work.
So So I mean, I can you know,Seth can maybe pick this up, but

(13:50):
again, like using SQL or usingEva and gather sync, and then
gathering data from Eva, it'sjust it's all JSON anyway, most
people are getting Podio viewsand creating their own groups of
data. Or they're calling JSONendpoints, you know, to get
their own data. So

well, that's a that's a very technical like,
like, if we were going to talkabout a I'm using Podio. What
are my options? I don't thinkdon't average Podio user goes,
Oh, it's all just JSON.

Don't aggregate your data in Podio. use other
tools to aggregate it? That's

exactly exactly.
Yeah, yeah, we've we've come upwith trying to do something
similar, because with SYNC, webackup all the data, we've got
all the relationships and we'rerolling out the new relationship
values, you could pull an APIcall from globey flow, and pull
over 1000 or 2000, or howevermany items you've got for those
relationships. But since we'vegot all those calc

(14:48):
relationships, we've been tryingto look at can we build a
function that can take that rawJSON data in a MongoDB database
and Run those scalps again,right and run those calcs and
update the value in MongoDB.
Because you know, Podio doesn'tdo those push notifications.

(15:11):
And, you know, we just haven'thad the time and and resources
or even the interest becauseit's not something that
customers going, Hey, my calcdata is wrong. Well, sure, we
could, we could correct it inMongoDB. But we can't correct it
in Podio. Right, we can't pushthose updates that we see if we
see that we're actually okaywith correct in sync and

(15:33):
MongoDB. But we push it into putwe can't we can't push it.
Right. We can't push

it aside template add a space safe.
There. Yeah. That's pray.

Unknown (15:43):
That's not a solution.
Exactly. It's

still the only way you can Yeah, the

only way to trigger updates and calculation
fields and save them or changeone of the fields that relate to
them.

Oh, yeah. And, and one thing that we've looked
at is, you know, if a customerdoes say, Hey, we're going to
run our portal on top of sync,and we need these callbacks to
be accurate, then yeah, we wewould build that function to

reporting or somebody was using, like
Klipfolio, or a Google DataStudio, or overview, anybody
who's looking for advancedreporting, or just gathering
that it's either technicalgathered the data specifically
for further use, or it'saggregating the data. Either
way, you know, the, the event,the overall basic solution of

(16:30):
using like a mumps app andgathering everything through
relationships in Podio. Andusing calculation fields. I'm
here to tell you that I startedthere myself, and it went
really, really bad, like threeyears in, so

but what about like, what if what if you've got
a like, say, you've got acampaign app, and you're
pushing, and you're linking, Imean, we all have worked with
real estate in the past, orcontinue to work with real
estate investors. And so a lotof people will have a properties
app and dispositions app or, youknow, a buying and selling app,
etc, where you're essentiallylinking both sides of a thing of

(17:06):
a deal to a one campaign,including maybe all the offers
you send as well, in order tocalculate up the requisite
information. Now, historically,most people would just
immediately put a calculationfield and do a sum of or, you
know, whatever that average ofor whatever, and then hope that

(17:30):
it all works. Your options, ifyou do want to do that kind of
app are essentially either, ifI'm correct, and are essentially
either you replace calculationfields with number of fields,
and let something else populatethem, that is more reliable than
a calculation field. So you'reessentially, every time you

(17:52):
know, this, something'shappened. We're refreshing that
data manually dropping in or notmanually, but some other
systems, whether it's globey,flow, or Eva, is dropping those
that data in instead ofcalculating up is that correct?

Yeah, but by getting rid of those calc
fields, we for enterprise levelsystems for those big financial
reporting systems, and and whenyou're sending out client
invoices and and build billiondollar companies are saying,
well, we need these invoices tobe 100% accurate, and, and all
these calculations to becorrect. And when there is a
slowdown, and it's a mess up andbusiness has to continue on, you

(18:33):
know, we're seeing a lot morecustomers leaving workflow
automation and starting toconvert the stuff over David,
because it's not affected by thedown, you know, those those kind
of bog downs. But we're startingto replace those calc fields
with actual text and then doingthose calculations externally.
And then putting those valuesinto hidden fields that are then

(18:53):
pulled into calc tables that areshown and displayed.

But the actual math is being done somewhere
reliable. Yeah. Exactly. To makesure that it's drawing the right
data, it's doing the rightcalculations, and it's dropping
the right.

Oh, and it's mission critical enterprise
level stuff. You mean you haveto you have to have a backup for
that. And I mean, you can stillhave the calc field, but it's
it's good to know, you couldhave the calc field but then you
still have the manual processingof that the math to as a litmus.

Interesting, but But I mean, from a calculus from
going back to I started, we haveseen improvements on the
calculation font.

And, and just to just to add one more flavour
to this, really the issues thatwe're talking about are issues
of scale, not to not to scareoff small Podio users. I think
people who have smaller chainsof related items will find Rate
success in whatever they dousing calculation fields, or or

(20:04):
using them at times when you'reaggregating data, but then the
aggregation stumps, sometimesfields that are constantly
working to gather the data. Youknow, if you do a report and you
create a bunch of items to countfield cap, and on a good day,
the calc field captures theanswer. And then the answer
static for life, those are allstill good situations. Really, I
think we're looking atbusinesses we're using Podio at

(20:25):
scale. And, you know, and oneother, like people who have
chains of data where one itemlike a project or a campaign,
perhaps are gathering, perhaps,you know, 1000s of items and
relating themselves to them. Andthen the person saying, Well, I
want to run KPIs on these 1000sof related items. These are

(20:45):
things when you really need tolook outside the box.

Damien (20:49):
Yeah, same as if you're doing that kind of reporting,
like in the real estate realm,when you've got clients that
have multispace setups, to tryto rely on something that's
updating calc field from fromthat kind of setup. It's just
I've tried it, it doesn't work.
Well, it it's always disaster.

(21:09):
So just do external stuff. LikeAndrew. And so I've been saying
you can't, can't do it based onan Account field, it's just not
going to work out. But at scale.
Yeah. at scale. And scale is thekey. Yes, scale is the key term
there.

Yeah. One other thing that I've have noticed
that it does affect the calcfields, and there's a lot of
people don't think it helps. ButI've actually found that there's
a good reason to use it. Andthat that is clean up deleted
that clean up button, you'reunder the Modify template. A lot
of people are like, Oh, itdoesn't, doesn't really work.
But those big apps, they getreally, really big. You know,

(21:47):
I've noticed that when I'mpulling down, trying to pull
down, I used to have issueswhere we couldn't pull down more
than 10,000 records. And I putthis in employee chat or in our
partner bar Chat, where youcouldn't pull down 10,000 items.
And without it saying 504gateway or, and then suddenly,
with all these updates andimprovements. Now all of a

(22:09):
sudden, we're able to pull downso much more data. But sometimes
we'll come across these appsthat still get these gateway
errors, and these apps up 400Plus fields in it and doing that
clean up, I found that it doesclean up the deleted fields, it
does clean up the values, itwipes out all these empty values

(22:29):
that still exist. And suddenlycalc start processing a lot
faster. And it's like it does arefresh for the system. And I've
recommended to Podio in thepast, like, would we hit that
cleanup button? Can we just do afull Refresh and Reset all the
external IDs to the currentlabels, right? Whether the
current label is instead of at vdash two dash six or bash, you

(22:54):
know, and all this misspellingsCan we read? Can we just do that
kind of a refresh on the apptoo, but no days on that front.
But that Clean Up button reallyis another option, when you have
apps that are completely boggeddown with old junk.

It's like a weight loss. It does. It does
clean the house on the appactually pretty well. And I
don't think a lot of people knowit exists. I think an awful lot
of people don't realise thatthat that little button exists.
And if you've gone through,particularly if you're new to
Podio. And you've done one ofthese building apps, where you

(23:31):
add fields minus field, subtractfields, add fields, you know, if
you're if you're relatively newto Podio, I remember when I
first started out, this is along not as long as you said
Seth, but longer than I suspectanybody else here when you're
first starting to learn Podioand you're like, ooh, and then
you build all this cool

Damien (23:48):
stuff.

And you're like, oh, no, this is you know, you do
all that. I found that, youknow, the you know, that little
button of just clear that shitout, please. And it really does.
It is a kind of a secret weaponthat very few people will I
think know.

Yeah, and that's another thing is you people
don't realise that you can stilllike your automations if you
delete a field that has containsvalues and say yes, delete all
existing values in that field.
Sure, it says it's deleting itall but your automations if you
don't have your update yourautomations it's, it's still
going to write data to a deletedfield and it will still show up
and yet in the app, but youcan't edit it. But and same

(24:32):
thing with category fields, youstart making all these changes
to category fields and messingaround with that. And the whole
system is just a disaster. Butthis one app that I was having
troubles with it had 300,000items in it. I have a saved view
of rolling seven basicallyanything that's updated created
or edited and seven days in thepast seven days that's what I

(24:54):
pull and I sink you know forsome some customer data on it.
And and when I clicked thatcleanup button and ended up
editing 58,000 records of300,000 records in the app, and
you're going, Whoa, holy cow,this. And sure enough, one of
their automations was writing azero value to a deleted field,

Damien (25:21):
like categories or get that ghost category to show up
some random option that youhaven't had in two months. Yeah,

absolutely, yeah.
So I'd be interested to see ifanybody, if you guys have
problem maps, hit that cleanupbutton to see if that helps to
plan things out.

I mean, calculations take for me, I just
find it takes time. So like youexpect it to happen right away.
But the bigger the app, thelonger it takes, it does work
for me, most of the time, I'vehad a couple of instances where
it doesn't, but it's mostly thetime it takes to do it.

Damien (25:54):
Yep. For for anybody that's new with with the Podio
setup that that's going to be upto go click the little wrench on
the app, that's where you canget to a lot of the different
things. If you're new navigatingPodio, there's just as clean up,
delete values and click it. Andthen again, like everything else
with Podio, you got to type itin there clean up, you know,

(26:15):
confirm that you want to cleanup the app.

But when you hit that button, you'll see just how
many values you're cleaning up.
Yeah. And sometimes it'sshocking. Sometimes you're like,
Oh, I love this app go. Yeah,

yeah, part of those other parts of those other
maintenance, things you mightwant to look at for for users
that are out there that mighthave those bigger apps, as you
know, we try extensions, like welog in, we try this or we'll try
this extension, try thisextension. And we don't realise
how many web hooks get installedon our apps, and actually going

(26:49):
to the developer tab and saying,Okay, I don't need these web
hooks, and actually deletingthem. One of the features in
sync is when you backup yourdata, you can actually go and
say okay, here, we have all ofyour hooks, and we have hook
that we call it hook or killer.
But the hook killer, you canactually take a URL, and it will
go through every app and everyfield as well and actually

(27:13):
delete all the web hooks fromyour system that match that
criteria. So it's those type ofmaintenance things under audit,
might be able to help as wellclean up some of those, because
every time you do an update orcreate, you're gonna have maybe
six, six or seven differentextensions coming in and
grabbing items and pulling themout.

I don't think that necessarily like if you had
100 web hooks on an app, I don'tthink that influences how the
app works, does it?

Not? My OCD tells me it does.

Because I'm curious. It's a good question,
though. I'm curious if you didhave 100. I mean, certainly for
that to work. But if you had 100web focus on an app doesn't I'm
curious as just Podio fire themin order to they kind of all go
once to they get queued. Youknow, like, if you had web hooks
that were more important to younear the bottom, more recently
added web hooks do they gettreated? No, no, I've never seen

(28:08):
more than like 20. Now, and mostof them are the result of
extensions. Like you said thatyou instal. But. But still, it's
an interesting question. I don'tknow the answer.

And lastly, one thing I don't think a lot of
people know about is that youcan actually trigger automations
off of calc field changes. Inthe workflow tool, did you guys
know that? I came across acustomer yesterday that he was
like, had no idea. If youactually go into any app, and

(28:42):
you click on not the workflowautomation button, but the
workflows button, and click onapp update. Or like, for
example, update, you can selecta field and you actually can
select a calc field in there.
And if the value changes, or ifit goes from nothing to
something like for example, Iset up an email like, if this

(29:05):
customer hasn't been seen in 15days, just send an email with
this text. And if that calcul isan appears with that, then it
triggers and then sets, I haveit set setting a Category field
that then triggers the app ortriggers the workflow. So that
workflow tool is one way to alsotrack if caps are updating

(29:31):
inside of your system.

I've never in geez, let's call it seven years,
almost seven years of doingPodio I've never once heard
someone recommend or describe ause for the Podio workflow tool.
That's a record. That's amazing.

Really. No, I use it all the time.

No way. Yeah.
So what are other ways? Wellfirst, so what you're saying is
If you programme a workflow inPodio, which again is on the
wrench for those of you who areinterested, and you say if a
calculation field just ischanges, it sets off that
workflow.

Yeah, so when that calc field changes, and,
and it, I have it set as a, forexample, and a user hasn't been
seen in 60 days there, they wantan email going out to that user
saying, hey, please log back in,or we're going to remove you
from this workspace. And so Iset up a calc field that says,
Okay, if the date is 60, soevery day it updates and says,

(30:36):
Okay, as you know, the now date,and when it hits 60 or above
the, this text field then showsup saying, Okay, now, now send
this text. And once thatcalculation field appears, it
changes. Then this workflowtriggers based on the calc field

(30:57):
change. And I have at updating abutton that basically says
trigger email. And that emailthen triggers Eva that then goes
and says, Oh, I'm gonna go sendthis email, go get the item. Now
what what email, am I sendinglog into space, blah, blah,
blah, and it sends it and thencomes back and sets it down. So
it's just a way to have a calcfield triggered, triggering

(31:20):
workflows.

And I am just, I just, suddenly, I just opened up
the workflow, because I haven'topened that thing up in. I can't
tell you how long I have.
dialogue. And, and yeah, geez,son,

I use this.
It's like, the filters are verylimiting. Looks like you can if
statements, category fields, itseems like

Damien (31:43):
to me, I think that most don't don't use it, though,
because it's just there's somany, there's better tools out
there. Exactly.

I use it, I use it to set item ID fields. Like
if I needed an item ID setinside of the app, I just I'll
set up a workflow real quick.
And say whenever a new item iscreated, create a you know set
the item ID inside this field,instead of setting up something
else, because then I'm justusing free Podio resources
instead of me actually having toset up these stupid automations

I used to use this back in the day when globey
flow limited the amount offlows, you were allowed to have
Citrix Podio, workflow, automatewhatever fucking flow the flow,
there used to be that your tearthat you were on before Citrix
bought, it would determine howmany flows not only how many

(32:29):
actions you allowed, per month,but how many flows you are
allowed to have in your systemas well. And at that point, with
some of our current more costconscious clients, and you were
on a tear that only allowed youI think, like 100 flows or
something, it suddenly becameany flow that just doesn't
Update Item ID, or, you know, doyou know update this one, like

(32:53):
daily easy thing is actuallyvaluable? You know, it was like,
am I going to waste one of myfew fucking flows. So I used to
use this workflow, the workflowtool to do those really simple
things, because it can't doanything more than simple
things. But it was really goodat just like the you know, if

(33:15):
this happens, create a task forso and so. Out. It was really
good at that. It's funny,because I asked Sarah once on, I
think on a podcast about aboutthe that kind of inbuilt
workflow, and I was like, whythe fuck is that? They're, like,
I sort of was like, why is this?
Why why is this actually like?

(33:37):
And I think the answer was,well, we were working on our
own, and then Andre has globeyflow. And we were like, dammit,
this is much better.

Yeah, I really hope that they never get rid of
that, because that's one thingthat that is just such a huge
benefit. For me. I mean, it's,it's so huge of a benefit in
that respect, because you'reable to control so many of your
calcs. And you can set up somepretty great flows in that
respect to, to trigger Yes,calculated on an item, right? So
that's another option. You canset an audit, you know, set, set

(34:11):
that up that when this fieldupdates, simply update this
category field to processedright or something of that
nature. If you're going to bedoing a massive update on an
app, and you want to put in acategory field there to say
okay, I'm going to be processingthis update, but I need to know
where it stopped dat, or if itstopped now I can actually

(34:32):
create a filter and, you know,make some adjustments to that
then and reprocess. reprocessfrom there and you've got some
additional leverage and optionsto do something like that.

Hmm. Well, where are we? Oh, that's everyday
school day.

Damien (34:51):
Waiting for me. Can't say that. I'm gonna gonna jump
in and use that though. Butyeah, cool, cool trick to learn,
you know,

But but but going back again to try to close
that loop two weeks ago, ormaybe it was three weeks ago
now, we had, obviously asignificant event on on web, in
general. And again, I don't careabout calculation fields, but I
do care about web books. Andother than that event, and a

(35:21):
couple of other events that arevery small in number, thank God.
Over the past 14 months, I haveseen literally no, and maybe
Seth can even speak to thisbecause he sees on a much larger
scale, but I've seen nointerruption in webhooks, even
while globey flow was slow, evenwhile calc fields for slow hooks
are still chugging along. I'vehad very few errors when it

(35:43):
comes to receiving andprocessing hooks from Podio.
Overall. And as long as thatcontinues in that fashion, I'll
deal with UI problems. I'll dealwith health problems, like if as
long as the API is doing itsjob, you know, you get a random
500 error. And you have to askwhy. But but other than that,
like that's, that's the partthat I feel really good about,

(36:04):
as opposed to developer over thepast year. Yeah. Yeah.

You've definitely seen a marked
improvement over the last inwebhook.

Efficacy and speed. Yes. 1%. Yeah. Yep. Other
than four straight days

in a row? Well, yeah. But sometimes shipped
three years ago, probably wentdown for 48 hours. No, we all
had a harder, we all had a heartattack until those clicks
started happening again. Iremember when that audio click
went back, and I was like, Oh,God, my baby.

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp can go
down for six hours straight.
There, everyone has everyone isis nobody safe, you know?

Well, the web hook thing. I mean, on a
smartphone from a smartphone hadthe web thing bucks us. When
that happens. I mean, slow downsof the web hooks is just a
disaster speed socks, for sure.
Yes, a disaster, when the webhooks, the slowdown or something
of that, because then everybody,everybody complains that x isn't
happening, you're like, Well,don't tell you

Damien (37:08):
trying to get people to understand that, you know, from
from just like a general userperspective, when you try to
like I have clients that way,you know, this isn't happening,
you know, I click the button 20minutes ago, like a man like,
here's the status page, here'sthe big error they have, like,
I, I can't make it work, can'tmake it can't make it do it.

(37:29):
Until you know, the Podio gradscome down and say all right,
where books are bad.

People, people can save an enormous amount of
money in development and anoverhead costs by adopting Podio
is their system, they can savean enormous amount of overhead
costs by adopting Asana as theirsystem Trello any of these other
systems, you know, Podio isobviously the best solution for
the pod most possible number ofpermutations you could use it

(37:57):
for, but you're still puttingyour life in a SaaS system and
you have to accept that as a,you know, you

don't have the infrastructure, you're not gonna
be able to escape it. I'm

sure Salesforce goes down on occasion, as well.

No, fucking Twilio does Twilio, which is
worth I don't know how much atthis point. You know? Yeah, I
mean, Twilio, Twilio will godown. And you know, calling or
texting will go down, it will godown. And there is literally
nothing we can do about it. Andso the our our entire system

(38:30):
essentially halts, and there isnothing we can do about it. And
there's no way of letting peopleunderstand it's not our fault,
because of course, we're thepoint of where they you know,
they bought us didn't buyTwilio, Twilio is so any SAS
system can can go down. But thebenefit, you know, I mean, that

(38:52):
how often that really happenswhen you think about it. When
you think about all thesesystems and all these servers,
and all these connections andall these processes, and all the
things that happen on a secondby second basis. It's actually
remarkable that the cloudinfrastructure deals with the
shitter deals on a daily daily,minute, minute second Senator

(39:12):
can bases like it's actuallyremarkable. Okay, hands up who's
using Podio for real estate, andthey don't want more Leads.
Nobody. You want more Leadsclosed? Well check out
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(39:35):
more calls, love to Podio sendmore texts, love to Podio and
close more deals all log to yourPodio CRM, click the link. Check
it out and not to

9.9 not 100 But it's pretty damn good. You know,
it's pretty damn good. You saidbefore like globey flow gave you
100 flows, which is actually youknow, pretty mind bending when
you think about it to go back inthe day, but also like 2020 like
5000 actions a month, and you'relike, oh my god, what am I gonna
do these 5000 actions. And nowit's the wild wild west to the

(40:07):
tune of billions, they said theB word billions of actions per
month, being run through globeyflow. And you know, it's not
necessarily a great thing,because we can see some, you
know, some evidence of it notbeing a super great thing. But
it's, it is amazing, you know,even at 99.9%, how globey flow
just doesn't bark on a moreregular basis, the fact that it

(40:28):
only barfs, when it does istruly a miracle.

Yeah, and one thing that I wish that they
would implement and actuallyteach people about is if they
could implement field levelhooks to cut down on number of
web hooks that they receive, andhave to process that would
lighten the load so much,because then it gives the user
control to say I only trigger anupdate to all these flows when

(40:52):
this category field or when thisvalue changes in this field
period. Like don't look at thewhole thing. Yeah, yeah, don't,
every time I update somethingdon't trigger a globey flow. So
I have to have a sanity checkand 15 different, you know, 15,
different flows. Yeah, well,just

just just doing a select statement, asking for a
podium item, but only give meXYZ fields, right, because
they're saving on bandwidth,we're getting items by the built
by the hundreds 1000s thatcontain markdown tables, and
section headers and navigationcalculation fields, and
everything else that I don'tcare about, that's just making

(41:30):
it more difficult for me togather what I need. So field
level hooks, but also, you know,give me the ID, you're still
gonna get the item, you're gonnaget the hook for this item, you
have the item ID, your next callyour next as a dead dead, you're
probably next call is to is toget the item. But if you're, if
you're doing that a lot, likelike Ava, or like a sink is and

(41:51):
these other tools, you know,being able to cut down on some
shit that, you know, I don'tknow, if there's any like field
specific could sink, go in andsay I don't care about fields x,
y, and z, just sink, ABC.

Now we get the whole collection. But back in
the day, and the beginning thereis there was documentation in
the API of how you could whattype of response you want to
get, and there's the micro, andit gives you reduced, and then
you can actually, in the getitem filter call. And I was

(42:26):
actually gonna ask your help forthis in a moment, actually,
after this call Andrew. Butthere's a there's a get item
filter call, where you're ableto define the fields you want
and and return it in the microformat. And it removes out all
the created by it removes outall the JSON and all this stuff.
And I have that formatting. Butthey did remove all that

(42:48):
documentation of how tostructure those queries to get
that micro formatting of theAPI.

I'm not a fan of the micro formatting because
like, oh, so relationship field,for example, you have a
relationship field, and you setthe layout so that it shows what
it shows could be the top fieldof the next of that related app,
it could be any other field orsome combination. So when you
get the sample, and when you getthe reduced version of the item,

(43:15):
you get the name, you get thatname that the person would see,
you don't get the item ID or theitem IDs, which as developers
what I really want. So so Idon't find a lot of benefit in
getting the reduced item. Butwhat I'm trying to do here is
actually just look at I knowwhat you're talking about, there
is a call in the Podio API, justmarket share my screen here, a

(43:37):
call in the Podio API calledfilter items. That's really your
best bet for getting items outof an app. Other than get Podio
view, or search, which islimiting, right. So I use this
for import purposes, where I canbasically import 500 items at a
time in a big app. Now I do allI have some limit some

(44:00):
automation here. But even evenin my sort of like manual API,
where I can get 500 items at atime we keep fiddling with the
offset 05 100,000 1500 to cyclethrough all the items. It works
great. I get them all apps witha lot of fields take forever.
Right? So I don't I don't likethis is the only call that I'm

(44:23):
aware of other than views andsearching that where you can get
large groups of Podio items outof an app. But I don't see any
options. Like I don't know thatthere's anything here that
allows you to

Yeah, so I just posted in the chat, a query that
I was using yesterday. And it'sfor that view if you want to
share that that chat screensince you've already got a pull
up, you can display the chat.

I got to display the chat but I can do
this while I'm sharing myscreen. Oh, yeah. So

yeah, perfect. So yeah,

so that's the call To filter,

and that's Items view micro micro. Okay. And then
the

field see the documentation didn't say
anything about

exactly, exactly.
It doesn't show micro or inmini, there's micro mini and
full. And

okay, look at that. So you're only getting a
certain group of fields. Andyou're choosing on a field by
field basis, which one comesback as micro, and it comes back
as.

Okay, that suddenly tells you after this,
there'll be a little bit of moretech. Yeah.

So what was interesting. What was
interesting, though, is when Itried to run this, I have my
developer and in England, he wasable to pull this and he was
able to run it, even using mycredentials. Or you start using
his credentials. When I try torun this query via API. Via

(45:56):
postman, it airs on me It tellsme I'm unauthorised. Am I going
WTF? Why? Why is that? So I wasgoing to actually have see if
you could help me if it airs onyou as well. And it

Damien (46:06):
might be might be, you know, the big Podio thing with
the trust levels, the random,random things that you can't
pull back with, without havingthe level two can't get out
books or any of that kind ofstuff. So, yeah, so that

may be worth that may be worth doing a little
post on somewhere to let peopleknow, like, let the developer
community know about that. Imean, I don't think if you
didn't know about Andrew, I suredidn't know about its I don't
build anything in Podio anymore.
But I mean, so yeah, Seth

is building a query that includes a key value
pair called fields. But thedocumentation would not have you
believe that you could pass anarray called fields, because
it's not in the workingdocumentation. So yeah, exactly.

I mean, they're taking it out completely, like,
as if any update, by the way onthe has we heard anything from
Citrix? About the change they'retrying to make to the external
link?

Damien (47:03):
No, no, I think she did post Sarah did post something
about that, that she, they'regoing to, they're going to allow
people that already have it, tocontinue to use it right. And
you just have to give peoplethat little notice that this
could be unsecure.

Yeah, I do have to rebuild all that shit across
all systems, I think. Yeah,

the old flows still work. But the new when you
go into create an external linkflow, the URL is formatted in
the new fashion. So actually,what I didn't try is just
whether or not I could create anew external link flow would
feed it an old URL parameter.
That's what that's what thebasics before, I should test
that and see, because I stillneed to be able to use it from a
new sure my old stuff worksfine. But I want to keep using

(47:49):
the same process that I'm usingfor the future, as well. Right,
so.

So just guys, just to round the podcast,
because I like to keep theserelatively short so that people
don't, you know, it's not amatter of Marathon. I mean,
we're going to do another, Iwouldn't just for some people
listening, we're going to doanother group podcast in the
first sort of five episodes ofthis season. Again, another
group partner podcast, but we'regoing to focus on the sort of

(48:18):
getting started tips and tricks,kind of the the new ideas that
we've got for when when we'rehelping we get off the ground.
This one is fun, because it's,it's a chance for these three
guys to geek out with me tolisten. But but but because this
is, you know, because we havetalked about kind of the
development of, of Citrix, youknow, and what they've managed

(48:41):
to put in. I'm in two mindsright now. And I'm curious to
finish this podcast hear fromyou guys. On the one hand, I
believe Podio is now back on theCitrix product page, I believe,
which is like why the fuck itwasn't there? I don't know. But
that's good. And we've seendevelopment of the platform,
again, whether we like all thethings they've developed or not,

(49:04):
we've seen development on theplatform again, and we've seen
an increase on the team,including on support, like, you
know, again, whether we'vealways had 100% successful
interactions or not. We haveseen that development. We've
seen movement in Citrix, which Ithink is hugely positive. On the
flip side, we've got a newinvestor group coming in and

(49:25):
taking it private. So and thisis, you know, for those of you,
you know, we're recording thison the eighth of February 2022.
That happened about a week agois yeah, just came out. Yeah.
So, I mean, I see positivesright now. Then we also have
this what's the what's, what'sthe gut feeling in the room

(49:46):
here? Just out of curiosity.

My first initial reaction was the TIBCO software
is heavy heavy automation,enterprise level automation and
data science reporting. very,very big on that, in that realm,
the right play will play intothat that quite nicely, I still

(50:10):
see that Podio will continue togrow as this custom niche where,
where bright doesn't fit or thisdoesn't fit, I think that it
will continue to fit here. But Ican see a time where an investor
groups gonna look at it saying,look, let's just start. Let's
start using these, let's startconsolidating these automation

(50:31):
programmes, right, let's, let'sstart, we've got this tip code
that is the best of the best,let's, let's start merging these
two together. However, thebeauty of that I think, not the
beauty. I think while the flowcarries so much weight, and so
many actions, they know,investor groups, you're gonna
know that that's not somethingthat's gonna be easily replaced.

(50:54):
So they may continue to keepthis separate. And if it's that
big of a thing, like we can'teven we can't integrate Podio
with this stuff we can'tcontinue to integrate. There's
no way for us to do that, thenthey may maybe they'll spin it
off. But who knows?

Damien (51:15):
mean, I've kind of in the same boat? It's like, on the
one hand, you know, it does,it's we are seeing a lot of
recent improvements. I don'tknow that was just because all
the like the talks andeverything we're doing on long
before the actual acquisition,but it is nice to see some some

(51:36):
things actually happening. Butlike Seth saying, you know,
like, it's, it's kind of anunknown right now, are they
going to continue to allow us todo these things? Or is it going
to be like, hey, consolidate allyour stuff. You know, like, now
we're going this this route. So

I can't see them just, I mean, I can't see a
situation in the next five yearswhere Citrix just kills Podio
off. Doesn't make sense. I well,but it would be a brand, it
would be a from a brand. Publicpublicity point of view, you've
got I don't know how manymillions of people use Podio.
Now, but they're really intoglobey flow actions. Yeah, and

(52:15):
the one the revenue that therevenue that that Podio makes
you a couple of years ago wasmaking around 28 million a year.
I gotta believe it's making morethan that. Now, I gotta believe
it's making, you know, and therelative cost of what podium
costs and Citrix is, it's got tobe a pretty profitable exercise,

(52:37):
because they don't have thatmany people involved with it.
And so,

in 2014, they were only making about $700,000
a month. So they've had thishuge growth spike, it's, it's a
beautiful story of why to keepit going. I do hope that they,
they do try to keep it more ofan enterprise level thing. But
my gut kind of tells me I don'tknow if workflow, or not

(53:03):
workflow automation, but I don'tknow if what they've been
creating workspace is, issomething that's going to be
around for a really long time,because it's still so new. And
it's so difficult to integratewith, I don't know that that's
something that's going to beadopted or

are using Podio.
With call rail. There's a betterway, click the link, find out
why hundreds of businesses havemoved over to using smartphone,
the only phone system built forPodio. Make more calls, send
more texts and close more deals.

Narrator (53:36):
Click Link.

I'm not sure I it does seem like at the same
time workspace. I mean, it doesseem at the same time to be
Citrix is the hottest card intheir hand. But also the best
kept secret in terms of how itcan be developed, right? Because
I think we all have theperspective that Podio by itself

(53:58):
without globey flow without thatautomation engine that is within
arm's reach for most people todo basic core automations we
obviously hack the shit out ofglobey flow to make it do a lot
of things that perhaps it wasn'treally meant to do upfront, but
it can do them. That's the magicof the application that Andre
has originally built. But Butwithout that, it's just a static

(54:22):
database. Right? We thought wetalked to the partner meeting
about this other app that thatthis gentleman came to be from,
it's called tape. He pretends tobe the next Podio right that's
that's the first thing you seewhen you go to his website. So
I'm like all the best to you.
But at the same time without anAPI without that piece without
the way to automate anything,it's already dead in the water.

(54:42):
So So I have high hopes for forthat team to to look at those
shortcomings. And and withoutglobey flow involved Podio would
would disappear. And the thingabout workspaces is like they
put so much stock into it, eventhough With limited people who
are developing with it, if Podiowas meant to be a system of just

(55:04):
source of truth for workspace,and why not because they, they
would speak quite well to eachother the bowl Citrix products,
there's an opportunity forbilling on both fronts for
Citrix use Podio. I've heardnothing but conversation about
how workspaces is, you know,supposed to work well with
Podio. But if Podio continues todo what it's doing, then why

(55:25):
would they put themselves in theposition of taking their star
pupil and putting it on top ofsomething that's just not ready
for it. So I want to believethat means that podium is there
for the long term, and they havehigh hopes and keeping it
running well, and making it runbetter. So that workspace can
survive. This is the first timeI've actually heard word spoken
that maybe workspace is not whatthey expect it to be. Maybe it

(55:48):
was just a marketing thing. Idon't know

the uptake, from what I understand the uptake on
workspace has been not what theyhad hoped and what they had
expected. I think partiallythat's down to is to, you know,
they launched it and some of themore advanced capabilities
weren't live. So essentially,you are by it, you were spending
money on something, which reallydidn't do much. You know, like

(56:13):
we combative. We didn't do much.
You know, I think I mean, theone positive as well, I would
say, you know, I mean, I thinkwe all believe and hope that
Podio will continue to thrive, Icertainly believe it's in its
best position. It's been for awhile now. And I will tell you,
I got I had reached out bysomeone, one of the sales guys
in Citrix, who I used to do alot of work with, he got he

(56:37):
along with everybody else gottaken off of selling Podio they
Citrix basically took theirentire sales teams and stopped
selling Podio and had put it tojust one salesperson, who we all
know who that is, and, and buthe contacted me that day and
said, hey, guess what? We'regonna be starting to sell Podio.

(56:59):
Again, that's fantastic. And Iwas not expecting that. And he
reached out and said that. So Imean, I think I think the future
is I think the future isrelatively good right now. And
if they can continue barring anymassive fuckup, because when
something like this happens withthe acquisition, you know, they
may have their own ideas, ifthey're, and if they're a

(57:19):
massive and activist investortype. You know, they've got
ideas to chop it up and sell offthe parts, or something. I don't
know what they just died of,there could be an unknown with
the investor group. But fromwhat for where Podio is right
now, it seems to be in a youknow, in a relatively decent
position, and we're actuallyseeing movement again, which I

(57:40):
think is great.

Yeah, I totally hear that.

We'll see.
Alright, guys, well, listen,thank you. As always, it's a
pleasure to speak, have apartner get together and get
back into the podcast we'll bedoing. This will be one of the
first podcasts, we launchedseason five. There'll be some
new ones coming up, including Ithink Damien's coming on by
himself with one of hiscustomers to talk more about his

(58:08):
ecosystem. Seth is going to comealong to talk about some of
these products and update us onwhere they are. Because these
are all amazing kind of productsthat if you're using pota you
need to look at and an ecosystemyou need to live in. So we'll be
seeing these guys and Andrew,I'm sure again, very soon. And
thank you guys for joining me onthis week's episode of soup

(58:31):
judge.

Thanks for having us. Thank you.

Narrator (58:38):
You've been listening to another awesome episode of
supercharged with Jordan SamuelFleming. Don't forget to hit the
subscribe button on our YouTubechannel to be notified of new
podcast episodes Podiomasterclasses and in depth Podio
extension reviews if you'veenjoyed this podcast, please
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Season 5 Episode 3 - The episode where the Podio geeks are set loose!

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Season 5 Episode 3 - The episode where the Podio geeks are set loose!