Elemental

Inspiration

We noticed how small teams often struggle with organizing incidents or unexpected issues — whether it's a bug, a customer problem, or an on-site emergency. Tools like Jira are too heavy, and spreadsheets get messy fast. So we asked: what if reporting an incident was as easy as sending a Slack message? That’s where BoltBoard was born — a lightweight, real-time dashboard built on Bolt.new for managing urgent tasks without process overload.

What it does

BoltBoard lets anyone on a team create a real-time incident card from common sources: Slack, email, or a mobile-friendly form. Each card includes a description, priority level, timestamp, and owner, and shows up immediately in a live dashboard. The board categorizes items into Critical, Active, and Resolved. Optional AI suggestions (via OpenAI) help summarize, prioritize, and recommend next steps.

How we built it

We used Bolt.new to manage the UI and backend logic with reactive cards and live state updates. A custom Slack bot parses incident messages and pushes structured data to Bolt via API. For natural language summarization and prioritization, we integrated OpenAI’s API. The email parser uses a Node.js microservice running on Vercel’s edge functions to extract incident metadata. Finally, we styled everything using Bolt's native components for consistency and speed.

Challenges we ran into

Slack's event flow was harder to manage than expected — rate limits and retries required edge caching.

Email parsing was messy, especially with forwarded chains or inconsistent formatting.

Card sync between the different sources and Bolt required deduplication logic to avoid duplicates.

Ensuring real-time updates without introducing state race conditions was tricky but solvable with Bolt's reactive system.

Accomplishments that we're proud of Fully functional prototype in under 48 hours.

Seamless Slack-to-Bolt integration.

AI-generated summaries that were surprisingly accurate for prioritizing issues.

Polished UI that makes incident tracking feel simple and clean.

What we learned

Bolt.new is surprisingly flexible — we expected to hit more roadblocks, but it handled real-time updates and complex logic very well.

Building useful tools doesn’t need to be complex — our MVP is just a smart interface to streamline what teams already do in Slack.

Microservices (like the email parser) are perfect when paired with Bolt’s internal logic layer.

What's next for Elemental

We want to add:

SMS alerts or voice escalation via Twilio

Timeline view for incident histories

Permission controls for teams with different levels of access

Mobile app wrapper for field use (e.g., in-person teams, events, construction, etc.)

Built With

• bolt.new
• gmail-api
• html/css
• javascript
• json
• node.js
• openai-api
• rest
• slack-api
• vercel-edge-functions
• webhook