Company in a box

Once you have a hosted site (see the Hosting guide), you can attach a company to it - a set of departments that keep the business running on their own: writing and publishing content, working a sales pipeline, answering customer questions, and keeping the books and paperwork current. Open the Company app and either start from a template (a local service business, a SaaS product, or an e-commerce store) or set it up yourself with a one-paragraph brief describing what the business sells, who it's for, and its tone.

Departments

A company has six departments, each with its own schedule:

• Engineering keeps the site itself current - fixing anything broken or stale and publishing updates. Before it builds a new design, it researches similar businesses the same way an initial build does (see the Researching your competitors guide); before it publishes anything, it reviews the result and fixes what it finds. It's included with Hosting on every plan.
• Marketing audits the site for basic SEO issues, writes new pages and posts, and can draft ad campaigns for Google or Meta. Ad drafts are always a dry run: no ad account is ever connected and nothing is ever spent - you get a ready-to-use campaign draft to review or hand to an ad platform yourself.
• Sales keeps a simple CRM: it pulls in new contact-form submissions, tracks each one through a pipeline (new, contacted, qualified, won, lost), and drafts follow-up emails.
• Customer service answers straightforward questions from your site's own content, and always hands off anything about a refund, a legal matter, or an upset customer to a person instead of guessing.
• Finance turns won deals into quotes and invoices, chases anything overdue, and sorts uploaded receipts. Before there is a first customer to bill, it puts together one starter quote so you have something ready to send.
• Legal drafts and reviews your contracts and other documents from a standard template library, tracks renewal dates, and makes sure your site has a privacy policy - drafting one first thing if it doesn't. Sending a document out for a real signature always needs your say-so.

Marketing, Sales, Customer service, and Finance need a Plus plan or above; Legal needs a Pro plan; Engineering works on Free with the Hosting add-on.

Which model departments use

Departments run in the background, on the server, with a provider key you keep in the encrypted background vault. Open Settings, then Privacy, then Background runs: turn background runs on, add a key for the provider you want to pay, and pick it under "Run background work with", along with the model. Nothing is picked for you, so a bill only ever lands on the provider you chose.

Until you have chosen one, a department does not run. The Company app tells you so on the department card and when you press Run now, with a shortcut to that setting. Run now works even while a department's schedule is paused: it is a one-off run you asked for.

The autonomy dial

Every department has three settings:

• Paused - it does nothing.
• Propose - it does the research, then writes up exactly what it would do for you to approve. Nothing goes out or gets published without you saying yes.
• Autonomous - it acts on its own and logs what it did.

A new company starts every department in Propose mode, so you can see what it would do a few times before switching it to Autonomous. Pending proposals show up right at the top of the company's dashboard and in your daily briefing - approving one either applies it right away, when that's possible, or records your decision for you to carry out yourself.

Budgets and activity

Each department has its own monthly spending cap - once it's reached, that department pauses until the next month (or you raise the cap). The dashboard shows each department's status, when it last ran, when it's due next, and an activity feed of what every department has actually done.

If a run fails, the department's card says exactly why - including when the problem is your account with the provider you chose, like running out of credit - and tells you what to do about it. From there you can try again immediately or open the run for the full detail.

Unsubscribing

Anyone who unsubscribes from a follow-up email is remembered - Sales and Customer service will not contact that address again, in either autonomy mode.