This month was big for shipping. Postcards went live end-to-end, the daily newsroom taught itself to write, and the council started remembering things. The biggest piece: community-2500 postcards are real now. You can design, order, and mail them. No more beta. Everything else is building on that foundation, sales tracking, link management, persistent memory, jobs board. The infrastructure is getting solid too. One login across apps. One gallery system. One way to do things. That matters when you're running a real shop.
The 6x11 community mailer works end to end. Order them, they arrive.
Adhere is our shared direct-mail postcard program for Coastal Bend businesses, one local pro per trade.
By The Shop · Dispatch from Alice
The community-2500 postcard is fully functional. You can design it, order it, and it ships. No more scaffolding or half-baked features.
This matters because direct mail actually works for local services. You pick a neighborhood, design a card about what you do, and people call. It's old school and it converts.
Adhere now has a sales engine and a route optimizer. Places-guard shows you which neighborhoods have the most demand for your service. The sales console lets you log a win when a postcard converts.
NPCLocal now has a jobs board. Anyone can post a job opening. It's free, moderated to keep scams out, and shows up in search. People looking for work in South Texas can find real openings.
The lead-network board now ranks slots by real outcomes. It's not just 'how many people are asking.' It's 'how many people called' and 'how many turned into leads.' Real conversion data.
NPCLocal episode links now support custom slugs. You can change the URL of an episode after you publish it. Old links still work, they redirect to the new one.
We like this one because it comes straight from the federal government and covers ransomware, phishing, and hacking in plain English with fact sheets, videos, and quizzes built for owners like us. No vendor upsell, no fine print, just solid free advice we can share with anyone on our team.
This free guide walks you through the 3-2-1 backup rule in plain English, tells you exactly what NAS does versus what cloud backup does, names the actual tools and what they cost, and calls out the mistakes most small businesses make when they think they are already covered. Down here on the Coastal Bend where a hurricane or a ransomware hit can wipe you out overnight, knowing your data is in three places on two different kinds of storage is worth an hour of your time right now.
We found a free 2026 YouTube walkthrough that shows you how to handle invoices, bills, and expenses in QuickBooks Online even if you have zero accounting background. If you have been winging your books or just getting started, this is a good Saturday morning video to sit down with.
We like this one because it tells you to run a quick walk test first so you know if you have a coverage problem or a backhaul problem before you spend a dime on new gear. It works the same way for a small shop or office as it does at home, and it is plain, step-by-step, and free to read.
Google put together a free hub of short tutorials, a real self-paced course, and live workshops built just for small business owners who want to use AI without needing a tech degree. We like it because it covers the practical stuff you actually lose time on every week, like customer support, marketing, and repetitive tasks, and it comes straight from a source you can trust.
We found a plain-English walkthrough that covers wind speed, wind direction, and sea state so you know what you are actually looking at before you back the boat down the ramp. If you fish the bays or run out past the jetties, this one will save you a bad day on the water.
