How GrowLocal works

GrowLocal brings your website and the tools that run your business together. Here’s the idea behind it, and how its features fit together.

The same building blocks, remixed for your business

Most businesses need the same underlying things: people, services, bookings, sales, messages and work to follow up. What changes is how those pieces fit together. A salon’s appointment requests and a contractor’s quote requests share many of the same building blocks, arranged for different kinds of work.

GrowLocal is built around that idea. Features and presets give you a starting point you can remix for your business, rather than making your business fit someone else’s workflow. If a missing feature would make GrowLocal work for you, tell us what you need.

Useful AI starts with your business context

We think the most useful AI will understand your business, not just answer isolated prompts. Your website is a natural core for that context: it brings together what you do, what you offer, the information customers need and the material you use to market your business.

Our goal is to turn that shared context into an engine for the rest of your business: helping your team and AI work together, and connecting intelligently with the other tools you use. Less repeating yourself, fewer disconnected copies of the same information, and tools that understand the business they serve.

Everything you use is a feature

A feature is a part of GrowLocal with a job to do. Data keeps your tables and records. Store sells what you offer. Email sends your email. Drive keeps your files. A quote-request table in the app and a form on your website are features too. Business tools live in your app sidebar; site content and page features live in the site editor.

To add a business tool, edit your sidebar and press Add. Site content is added in the site editor. Add and change features walks through it, and the Features page lists what you can add.

Features work together rather than each keeping its own copy of everything. A form on your website can collect a request into your Quote requests table, and another process can use that request to prepare a reply. The table stays the one place the request is stored, so every view of it shows the same records.

Each feature also keeps its own rules. When something asks Email to send a message, Email's permission and sending requirements still apply. Putting an action in an automation doesn't get around those checks.

Many features come in a few types

Many features come in a few types, so they fit how you work. Store, for example, comes as a service business store, a stocked retail store or a personalized maker store, among others. A form on your website can be a quote request form or a contact form.

A type decides how the feature is arranged for your kind of work: which lists and pages it has, which questions a form asks. You can change the type later. Add and change features explains what changes and what's kept.

Features do work for you

Features do work on their own. That's each feature's built-in automation: the steps the feature runs, which you can open and read in Automations.

Data's built-in automation, for example, starts the agent a row is assigned to, and archives cards that have sat in a Done column for the number of days you choose. Quote requests comes with a staff notification that emails your team the details of each new request. It starts paused, and does nothing until you choose who gets new requests and an approved sender is set up.

Where editing is allowed, you can change what a built-in automation does. You can also make your own automations, which are listed under Yours, next to the built-in ones. Built-in automations explains how to read one and what a change affects.

Not every feature needs one. Each feature's page in Help says whether it runs a built-in automation, and Help keeps a list of built-in automations.

Settings are for the simple things

Each feature has settings for the simple things: a value to fill in or an option to choose. A built-in automation is the process: the steps that carry the work out.

Consider archiving completed cards in Data. The table's column settings decide whether cards are archived and how long they wait. The built-in automation contains the process: wait until the card is due, then archive it if it still qualifies. Changing the waiting period is a settings change. Adding another action before archiving is a change to the process, where editing is allowed.

Not every change needs an automation. Showing your business address on your website uses the address you've already entered; nothing has to copy it across step by step. How a published page picks up a later change depends on the feature, so don't assume your website updates the moment the address does.

Know what a change affects

Where editing is allowed, publishing a change to a built-in automation changes the process the feature uses. That may affect more than the one table you were looking at: Data's archive process serves every table that uses it. Read the scope shown with the automation before publishing.

Some built-in automations are there to read but not to change. The ones for My Business and the shared Site builder are examples: seeing their steps doesn't give you a private copy you can edit.

You can also see a feature's steps before you've finished setting it up. That lets you read what it would do, but it doesn't mean the work has started or is allowed to run. Required connections, settings and access still matter.

When GrowLocal updates the steps a feature comes with, your changes aren't replaced automatically. Work that has already started keeps the version it started with, rather than changing halfway through.

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