The MxU Podcast

We have pretty massive news. Massive. About six months ago, I had a conversation.

We're like, hey, I think we have something kind of special on our hands that if we steward well together could be a game changer for the Worsham Tech community. After a few conversations, it really started to click. I think you probably already know by now if you're listening to this episode.

If you don't, the massive news is that I was going to make a comment about Dylan. I don't know what to say. Dylan's not here and he's not going to be here for a while.

So, but he's still around. We're still friends. Don't worry.

He's just some really serious stuff going on in his life that we can't talk about. And so he's not here. It's a joke.

But anyways, I think he's in Chicago or doing something. And Cody is here and we're going to do a few podcasts. But we have pretty massive news.

Massive. Massive. And I think you probably already know by now if you're listening to this episode.

If you don't, the massive news is that, well, MXU and ProdLink have joined forces. And you might be wondering, what's ProdLink? Or you may be wondering, what is MXU? And we can get into all of that. But Cody, founder, creator of ProdLink, and I over the past, I don't know, it's been six months now that we've been kind of working towards this.

About six months ago, I had a conversation. We're like, hey, we, I think we have something kind of special on our hands that if we steward well together could be a game changer for the WorshipInTech community. And here we are today.

Fast forward. But we're going to talk about the journey to getting there. And also help you understand what ProdLink is.

What it looks like now inside MXU. Talk about Cody, your journey creating ProdLink and all of that. So it's an exciting day.

Let's dive in though. Cody, if people don't know you, which most people do. Cody, you're kind of out there.

People see you. Rather influential guy. What do you do? And how long have you been doing it? And then we'll get into ProdLink and all that.

What do I do? I do the church. You do the church. He does church stuff.

Do church stuff. No, I've been in church ministry for all of my adult life. But grew up in the church.

And like my creative brain developed as a little kid in the church. And so like my love for music, my love for creativity. I went to a small Baptist church and we sang hymns.

Fundamental. No, just normal. Not a fundamental Baptist church, but it was a small Baptist church.

This is, I mean, you know, modern church with loud music. It hasn't been a thing forever. So going back to when I was like four years old.

I asked my mom, what are these things on this paper? And it was on a piano and it was sheet music on the piano. And she's like, those are music notes. And so she got me into piano lessons at four and a half years.

I took them for 12 years. And at five, gave my life to Jesus. And at the same time, our church started having a full band once a month.

And so she would take me out of kids ministry, put me into the full band thing. I loved that. Wow.

And so I gave my life to Jesus and started falling in love with the creative arts and music and stuff from a young age, all growing in the church. And so that's what I've been doing. And I've been a worship leader.

I've been in production, done communications marketing, mostly within the church, also a little bit outside the church, helping other organizations. But yeah. If you didn't know, Cody formerly was at Renewed Vision, pro presenter for quite a while.

He actually was our head of marketing here at MXU for a while. He had been around the block. And then he one day came to me and said, man, I just missed the local church way too much.

I need to go back into full-time ministry, which was one of the coolest things to hear. And also one of the most devastating things to hear. But anyways, we still rope around here.

So that's super helpful to know and hear. It's just cool to hear that you're kind of homegrown. And yeah, I want to talk about, let's talk about ProdLink.

What led you to build ProdLink? When did this start? And yeah, I think that'd be cool for people to hear. So let's go back to like spring of last year and AI sucked at doing anything. But I really wanted the ability to control my lyrics with someone just singing.

So like not like have a person operating it, right? Yeah. And so I was like, let me see if AI can do this. And it couldn't really.

But I remember seeing a video though, like you've gotten pretty close. In the fall. So in the spring, AI sucked.

By the fall, AI got much better at developing things for someone who didn't know how to develop. Yeah. And even then, like it still isn't at a spot where like, oh, you should use this at church service.

But it was just like a cool, like testing out what you could do with AI. And so as someone who, I don't know how to write a lick of code, but I have a lot of like passions and things that I see is like, hey, this isn't working well. I want a solution for this.

I was like, I wonder if I can use AI to make solutions for the things that don't have solutions for right now. So in the fall, I started... That's when it unlocked for you that you're unstoppable. You could do whatever you want with AI.

AI is my superpower. Yeah. It's my special unique superpower.

The... Yeah. Anyways. So going back to the fall, I was realizing I'm a producer at my church.

So Sunday mornings, I'm saying what's happening while it's happening. I'm talking about before service. Here's our order of service.

Here's where we're going today. Making sure everyone knows what's happening. During service, I'm calling the shots.

I'm just like the, I don't know, the thing that's there making everything run smoothly. And part of that is I have to have my planning center order of service printed out. I have to have my pastor's message notes because he's very specific.

I'm like, put the slide after I say this word. So we're very specific in that with our pastor. So I had to have those printed out.

I would have the ProPresenter remote iPad in front of me just in case the ProPresenter operator just needs some help. I would quickly remote in and do something. I have a multi-view in front of me.

I have a stream deck. I have all these different tools. And I'm like, there's got to be a better solution than this, than all of these things.

And then I was thinking, okay, well, my team, we use WhatsApp for messaging and it's great for the Europeans and the foreigners. The Europeans only. WhatsApp is only for the Europeans in case you were wondering.

It is a pretty massive messaging platform. Yeah, it is. But we actually, like we have a lot of internationals at our church and they were already using it.

I guess that's the one we'll use. And iMessage, I limited, like you can only have like 40 people in a group message or something like that. So we hit our limit.

Oh, I didn't know that actually. Yeah. So I had to move away from iMessage.

And so we went to WhatsApp. But then that was difficult because it was hard. Dude, a group chat of 40 people is insane.

Yeah, we don't tell them to chat all the time. It's more like an announcement thread. Yeah, we'll get to that.

Yeah. Okay, cool. So anyways, our volunteers had Planning Center download.

They had WhatsApp download. They had some other apps downloaded. I was like, there's got to be a better way so that they can have one central place to operate out of, that I could have one place to communicate from, one place to view the order of service, view my pastor's message notes and that sort of thing.

And started coming up with an idea. And I called that producer view, which was like, let me make this kind of dashboard-y thing where it's pulling in ProPresenter slides so I can see them. It's pulling in the Planning Center order of service.

I could put notes in there of what I need or what my pastor's message is. I can put those in there. Timers follow along all from one computer screen.

So I don't have to have all these printed out things. And then that turned into, okay, well, I can add messaging in here because then I can talk with my team and actually be able to talk from the platform I'm already on. And it just kept growing and growing into more things that I felt like, this makes sense for my team.

This makes sense for my church. And so it was all, I was just building this for my own church. That's really where ProdLink started.

Yeah, which I love. Like that's how, it's so funny because the first conversation you and I had about ProdLink was kind of on accident. I called you out of the blue.

We hadn't talked in months. And then you were like, I remember, well, you always answer the phone in a funny way. But I called you, I think I was at the gym and you just pick up and you're like, Spencer.

I was like, what's going on? And I was calling about something completely unrelated. And then you're like, I was like, hey, by the way, what's this Prod thing you got going on? But also you were literally working out while calling me. Yeah.

First time in like two years. I don't know. Is that insulting? I don't know.

I don't know. I just, I heard sweaty Spencer through the phone. Well, I, you know, I don't know what to say about that.

All that to say, you got me off track. Come on. No, but we were talking.

It really didn't make sense to me at first. It really didn't. Part of that is I actually haven't spent a lot of time as a producer, so I didn't understand that tension that you had expressed, which is why I love finding people like yourself.

Like in the church, we all are part of this conglomerate of worship and tech team, right? But there's so many different roles that go into that. Like I know the tensions of what it's like to drum or lead worship or mix audio, but like never ran lighting in my life, you know, so on and so forth. And so producers, one of those things that I was like, Oh, I don't know all that to say.

After a few conversations, it really started to click. And what was interesting is, you know, I'll speak from the MXU perspective. We've, if you weren't aware for five plus years now, we have had this training platform that we really died on the hill for of needing healthier teams.

Ultimately, that comes from better training for our volunteers, volunteers that stick around or volunteers that are trained, having systems to train and ultimately equip our volunteers to be successful on Sunday. That's like what we've been obsessing over. And it's still really, really very important initiative for us, right? And we do that with thousands of training videos, automated training pathways, quizzes, we introduce messaging into the platform, so on and so forth, if you weren't aware.

But there is this piece that kept coming up where the core tension, this is something we've really battled at MXU for a while is, it's just another tool. It's just like another thing I got to get my volunteers on. I got planning center to plan and execute.

And like you said, maybe WhatsApp to communicate and we're just all these fragmented tools. And there's this tension for churches of just another tool. And also, hey, I want to train my team.

That sounds nice. But there's these other things that are like non-negotiables that I need to get done. And I don't have a system to get those things done.

Like every week, we keep running up against issues with patching because nobody, we don't have a process for like patching the stage or we don't have documentation or we keep running up against visibility of our service, like how many people are on the stream or just all these operational jobs that we have that there was not really a consolidated tool to use. And we at MXU have felt that tension for a really long time. And so it was so interesting when you came to the scene where like, honestly, there was a bit of a competitive part of me that's like, we want to do some of that, right? Like, and then realizing, oh, let's do this together.

Yeah. Right. And so, man, that's so much of our passion right now is this, you're going to hear a lot of this from MXU in the coming season of one place, one place to do everything, right? Not eliminating your tools.

We don't want to eliminate some of these tools that we've come to know and love like Planning Center and you're probably using ProPresenter for presentation and so on and so forth. We want one tool that can rule them all, right? One tool that you can send your volunteers to for communication, for managing, you know, tasks and checklists on the weekend, planning initiatives, and then executing in dashboards to have visibility of our service and so on and so forth. So that's, yeah, that's kind of the, I don't know, that's what has gotten me excited in this partnership.

Yeah, I think one of the things with that is the goal isn't to eliminate other apps. Yeah. But it's to eliminate the confusion of where to go, when to do it, and how many apps does everybody need access to? Because, like, I think behind the scenes, especially church staff or key volunteer leaders know, hey, I'm going to have to have multiple tools.

And sometimes it takes setting up things for automations to work and other things, like we need those things. But can there be one place we can run all those tools out of instead of having to go to all those different tools all the time? I think that's where the convenience comes in of the one place. Yeah.

And where we are today in 2026, most tools can integrate with each other, right? And that's something that we've seen. It's a massive miss in our community. We're using all of these tools independent of each other.

And it's really exciting to see over even the next 10 years how tools are going to continue to be able to come together. And so I want to answer some questions that have come up. This episode coming out, we've been, for the last two weeks, we've been testing this new experience in MXU has been in beta with an early access group of, you know, we've got probably 100 churches by now that are using it, which is super exciting.

This just is very new. And we're in the midst of all this real time. But some questions that have come up.

One of the funniest questions, people are like, so Cody's not an engineer, but he built this app. And so does it work? Right. So let's address that for a second, because people are probably wondering, they see we around here, we call it AI slop, right? How much, how all the AI slop you see out there today, especially on Instagram, all the new tools that come to the marketplace, it's like, oh, I built this thing.

And all the marketing pages look the same. All the applications look the same. And they work 5% of the time, right? So how is this different? And I can help answer some of this too.

But like, this is something that over the past six months, we've been really working pretty hard to actually in partnership with you, Cody, because I think that you understand the use case for these needs better than just about anybody I've talked to. But then really kind of recreating what you built in ProdLink inside MXU. So a lot of people have asked like, okay, so do I need both apps? Do I need to download MXU? And like yesterday, I got an email from somebody.

They're like, I downloaded ProdLink and I'm like, how did you download ProdLink? First of all, I don't even know how that happened. But anyways, they're like, I got both tools. How do they work together? I'm like, no, it's one place.

Yeah. So all of this is inside MXU? Yep, all in MXU. And all the feature set of ProdLink, it's pretty much been brought over to MXU, right? Yeah.

So, and we've really spent the last six months, like, ultimately rebuilding feature by feature inside the MXU ecosystem. Yeah. So even if ProdLink had never been bought by MXU, I would have been pretty confident in its abilities because here's a big difference between me and a lot of the other people who have been developing AI apps.

Yeah. And what I would call a slop. This is where Cody gets defensive.

I've actually worked for engineering companies. Yeah. So like, I understand security.

I understand servers and backend and frontend. I understand the differences and all of that. Yeah.

Where a lot of people are just like, build me this thing. Yeah. And then you also look at it and they didn't even put enough, like, time into the UI to be like, that's not AI.

Yeah. So it's like, there's very obvious AI slop out there. Yeah.

But what I would say is at MXU, we have an actual engineering team. Yeah. So that's also the big difference here.

Yeah. Well, we, you know, humble brag here. We've scaled over the last five years to serve thousands of churches all over the world.

Like we have over 140,000 volunteers on the MXU platform. So like, that doesn't happen overnight. That happens through having the right people with the right experience to be able to manage such an application.

Right. Right. Before AI was developing apps, MXU already existed.

Exactly. Exactly. We've been a software company for a while now.

Yeah. And so, and we're really passionate about software and how it can ultimately, not just because it's software, but what it can solve for us, right? In the worship tech space. So yeah.

In case you were wondering, like, this wasn't like an acquisition bolt-on. Like, hey, let's take prod link and we'll just kind of stuff it inside MXU. No, like we embedded it.

We embedded it feature by feature inside MXU. Rebuilt it. Exactly.

Not like taking prod links existing. Yes. Yeah.

Like rebuilt and embedded that ideology and function into the MXU application. Yeah. And which is super exciting to us.

And okay, let's talk about prod link. What are we going to do with prod link? What are we going to do with prod link? I know, right? So this is something that people have brought up quite a bit. Is this prod link brought by MXU? Is this in something we've been intentional about communicating? Is obviously the prod link brand is strong.

For a product that hasn't been available over the last six months, it has quite the community around it. We are going to refer to all of these features, like what you referred to as producer view is dashboards inside MXU, right? Tasks and checklists. It's in the name.

You see those now in MXU. Messaging. It's now in MXU.

There is no prod link nav item inside MXU. There is no product or prod link feature, right? And so moving forward, we refer to this platform as we always have MXU. Internally, sometimes we say it's MXU 2.0. Like we're like, this is like the next generation of MXU.

You've probably seen that. We've been really quiet on social over the past few months. We restarted an Instagram account.

We really are headed in a new direction as a company in solving a much bigger problem that we are passionate about. But prod link, I also like the name, is going to live on. Let's talk about how we are going to steward that brand.

Sure. I mean, I can talk about it, Cody, but I'd love for you to share too what you get excited about for prod link. Yeah, I get excited about the opportunity to bring other tools that make sense for the church to the market in ways that people have never seen before or in ways that make it easier for them to do things.

And maybe that doesn't make sense within the MXU brand because we are going after a specific like, hey, this is the platform we're building, training content, building teams, running your service. But there may be other tools that we can build and others can help us build that still empower the church. Let's talk about drawing slides, for example, because that gives people a great example of tools that they can expect to see that kind of live under the prod link brand.

So beginning this year, we released a free tool called Drawing Slides. And it gives people the ability to pull in proprietary slides natively into this iPad app, draw on top of those slides, and that drawing show on top of their screens. And the whole reason that even came about was because my pastor came to me and said, here's this video I saw on Instagram of a pastor drawing on their slides.

Do you think this is something we could do? I looked at it. I'm like, yeah, I've seen that video. It trended for a while.

What video is that? And how are they doing it? Well, a chef did one at Elevation a long time ago. And they were, I think they were using some sort of telestrator device. And then Colby did one at his church.

But the way that they do it is a lot more convoluted. Like they're using an air server. No offense, Colby.

Yeah, I love Colby. We talk, we're good. They're using an air server because there wasn't a solution yet.

So he found a solution. So I love that. They're using an air server and they are using an iPad, but they're using Keynote.

And so they have to export their slides from whatever they're using, whether it's ProPresent or whatever, export them, bring them into Keynote on the iPad. And then they have to airplay, which isn't a reliable way of connecting to a device. And it's actually screen capturing that Keynote thing.

So it's also a lower resolution. And so that's all then going back to their video switcher and then going out to their screens. Cool solution.

It's just hard to set up. And so I'm like, how can we empower the 200 person church or the 2000 person church to do the same thing easier, pulling in their slides natively. And that's why we built Draw and Slides.

I really just built it again for my own church. And then I was like, oh wait, let's give you a free tool for other people. Yeah.

Yeah. So Draw and Slides is a great example, ProPresent or OperatorView. There's gonna be many other things that make their way to ProdLink.

And just so you understand like ProdLink will be that place that you can go to and expect for free tools from MXU. That's our plan right now. Like we want to be able to resource churches with free tools.

We know that not everybody has budget for something like MXU, but we still want to be a part of solving other areas of the ministry for you and with you. And ProdLink is where we plan to do that. And so it's also gonna be more production heavy.

It's in the name, ProdLink, right? So MXU, we serve worship and tech teams. We've got training for worship and tech teams. And creative.

And creative teams, right? Even now with being able to do file storage. We haven't even talked about that, but like file storage, you're like your weekend photos. Right now you're probably hosting them on Dropbox or some other sharing tool.

And then you got your drummer who's a social media influencer. And they're like, hey, can you send me that photo of me or whatever? It's a, I don't know why I said that. Anyways, it's not really a use case we're trying to solve for, but it came to my mind.

You can now store all of those assets on MXU within that weekend. No storage limits right now. Like all those people already in MXU then go and see that.

I mean, it's amazing. We're so excited about it. So anyways, I don't know how we got on that tangent.

Do you remember? ProdLink is serving production heavy tools. Oh, yeah, yeah. So like MXU obviously is a much wider umbrella that we're trying to solve for the worship technical and creative team.

But there are production intense tasks and production specific initiatives that we want to go after. And ProdLink is where we're going to house a lot of that. Right? Yeah, other questions.

So some people are still, still haven't fully connected the dots yet on dashboards. Right? Because they're like, okay, I get it. But like, what does this actually do? Because we, I always explain this around here.

Like if my mother-in-law can't figure it out, then we're not clear enough. Sure. Right? And so when we talk about, by the way, my mother-in-law is not in production or anything.

It's not that she just doesn't understand our world. But like people outside of our world should be able to understand generally what we're doing here. Right? And so when we talk about dashboards, let's dive into some of the like nitty gritties of what it can actually do.

Sure. Right? Because we have this concept of like, okay, I've got all these things in one place. What does that look like? Or like, why would I actually use it? Yeah, yeah.

So let's talk about like some of your favorite use cases for dashboards. Can I start with producer? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Because you once called it producer for you. That's exactly why.

So it originally started off as the idea of this is for a producer. Yeah. And then I realized it could be for so much more than just producer.

But I realized not every church has a producer role. And usually the larger the church gets, the more likely it's going to have one, whether it's volunteers or a staff member doing it. But our church, again, the producer is the one who's giving direction to the service.

Not always necessarily like in charge, but they're the ones communicating, hey, this is how it's going according to our plan. And so if you don't know what the plan is, it's hard to communicate that. So that's kind of why you would do producer dashboard.

Yeah. So like in my producer dashboard, I've got my proposal slides open in just one column, just so I could see what's coming next. I just want to see like, where is the purpose of a person in the right spot? So you're connecting.

I want to play dumb here a little bit because this is some of the questions I get. You're connecting MXU to your ProPresenter machine. Yes.

On your local network. Yes. Inside the MXU app, you can go to the ProPresenter integration and connect.

Okay. And then once you do that, you can add an object on your dashboard that is a ProPresenter slide or a timer. Yeah.

And so on my right side, I've got ProPresenter slides just showing. Okay. So I can see where we're at in service, make sure the ProPresenter person's in the right spot, and I can see what's coming up next.

So I can say, hey, take the next slide. Yeah. And that makes it easy for me as a producer.

Yeah. Because I actually know what the next slide is because I can see it. Yeah.

And it's snappy. No latency issues. No.

And what's actually really cool too, some people don't know this. You can also, if you wanted to, control ProPresenter from MXU. Yeah.

So you're not just like a slave reading what's happening, but you can actually, maybe you're in the lobby and you're like, oh, I need to remotely change this or that, or you're some remote location. You can do it from MXU if you needed to. Yeah.

Well, I mean, this is one of the use cases is you could be running a smaller, maybe you have YA, like young adults, and just in the lobby, and they're just doing worship in the lobby. You could literally have your TVs on in the lobby and be running that MXU app and be controlling your ProPresenter slides. Yeah.

So you don't have to be sitting in the auditorium or wherever your ProPresenter machine is. Or send a real long cable. Yeah.

Yeah, totally makes sense. Yeah. So there is control portions of it, but then there's also just the, I'm viewing it because that's all I need to do.

And so I'll have my planning center order of service in there as well. And so in the middle of my dashboard for producer, the planning center order of service is showing. And you can control that just like planning center has their planning center live functionality.

You can do that sort of thing in MXU. Yeah. And so during service, I'm doing that.

That way, anyone that opens up their phone can see where we're at in service. So if our host is in the lobby talking to people, but he knows he needs to go back on stage at some point to host, he can see where we're at in service because our order of service is following that. And the cool thing is you can actually link the ProPresenter presentations.

So it just automatically goes to the next item for you. If you use planning center live, you know that as you go through service, you're just clicking through your items. Yeah.

And something we thought like, okay, why can't that be a more automated process? Yeah. You thought it really, I won't take your idea. And so being able to take, you know, your first slide for the first song, drag that over in the UI, drag that over that first planning center service item as you're preparing for service.

The moment that that slide gets triggered automatically to that next plan item in your service. Yeah. Which is sick.

It's so cool. That's the power of connecting multiple tools together. You could never do that before because it was all separate tools.

Yes. So and then on my left side, I have my notes. And that's my pastor's message notes.

And sometimes I'll make notes in there of like things I need to make sure I can do for the next service or something that went wrong or misspelling or whatever, so that I can just be like, okay, I need to actually check that at the end of service and go back and fix that thing. And so notes is cool. You can also embed ProPresenter slides in notes.

Soon. Yes. Then you can do that.

No, you can do it now. You can do that now. Okay.

I know I knew it was coming. Sometimes I have a hard time keeping up around here. You can take your ProPresenter slide, drag it over message notes.

If maybe you want to operate from Planning Center and you're following along with your pastor and then you know, oh, slide goes at this point. Yeah. You're reading the message notes word for word.

So my pastor doesn't read his script. Yeah. But it is written now.

And it's memorized. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't know how. I can't memorize. Yeah.

I don't know how the man does.

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