Syncly

🧠 Inspiration

How can teams stay emotionally connected and strategically aligned — without adding more meetings?

Throughout my career, I’ve had the honor of working with many outstanding leaders — people with vision, strong strategy, and advanced leadership skills. But only once did something truly remarkable happen.

Back in 2021, I was working remotely for a major retailer during the peak of the pandemic — a time when global stress and uncertainty were sky-high. Like many, we had weekly check-ins to stay aligned. They were helpful, but still felt like just another box to tick.

Then something shifted.

Our team leader redesigned the meetings — moving from a transactional format to a connected and energized ritual. We began each session with a check-in: How are you arriving today? That simple gesture changed everything.

We moved from status updates to something powerful.
During that period:

• 🔁 Collaboration jumped by 5x
• 💬 Morale skyrocketed
• 🚀 We became a 10x more productive team
  But more importantly — we became a team that knew and trusted each other.

Today, many teams across the world still face:

• 😞 Low morale
  
• ❓ Unclear priorities
  
• 🧊 Lack of recognition
  

Especially in hybrid and remote environments — though even in-office teams aren’t immune.

As we dug deeper, we found that burnout is rising fast across the globe. And it’s no longer just a well-being issue — it’s a business crisis:

• 🔥 82% of employees globally are at risk of burnout, a sharp increase from previous years
  
• 🔁 Burnout is responsible for 20–50% of all workforce turnover
  
• 💸 It costs businesses an estimated $322 billion annually in lost productivity
  
• 🌍 And more broadly, low engagement linked to burnout drains $8.8 trillion from the global economy — nearly 9% of global GDP

Clearly, traditional alignment rituals aren’t working — or worse, they’re missing entirely.

That’s why we built Syncly:
To turn routine meetings into weekly rituals that drive alignment and spark connection, recognition, and energy — all in just a few minutes.

💼 What it does

Syncly is a lightweight web platform that helps teams run meaningful weekly rituals to stay connected, aligned, and energized — without adding complexity to their workflow.

While Syncly supports asynchronous preparation, the real magic happens during the live team session — whether your team is meeting in-person, hybrid, or fully remote. Syncly enhances your existing meetings by bringing structure, clarity, and emotional connection into one shared space.

✨ Key Features

• Dashboard for rituals: A centralized view where teams can see everyone's highlights, mood check-ins, celebrations, time off, and upcoming events. It’s the go-to space to moderate and guide the weekly ritual.
• Team mood check-in: Capture how team members are feeling each week and track trends over time.
• Voice-based highlights (async): Team members can record their weekly highlights using voice. Syncly uses AI to structure and summarize their input into clear status updates — making it easier to prepare before the meeting and contribute confidently during the session.
• Recognitions & birthdays: Build a culture of appreciation by making it easy to give kudos, celebrate birthdays, and acknowledge contributions.
• Vacations & availability: Quickly visualize team members’ upcoming time off.
• Events & announcements: Share and review relevant team events or organizational updates directly in the ritual dashboard.

👥 Role-Based Experience

• Team Members record their weekly highlights asynchronously and use the dashboard during the live ritual to stay engaged and recognize peers.
• Team Leads manage team composition and also participate in rituals using the same dashboard — creating transparency and shared ownership.

Both roles have access to the same dynamic dashboard, designed to guide rituals that are short, impactful, and energizing.

🧩 Why Syncly is Different

In many teams today, important updates are scattered across group chats, email threads, or shared documents — making it hard to stay truly aligned. Recognition and emotional check-ins often get skipped altogether.

Syncly centralizes all of this into one simple, focused interface.
It’s not just another tool — it’s a purpose-built space that helps teams:

• Prepare asynchronously, contribute confidently
• Stay emotionally connected and seen
• Align without wasting time
• Celebrate each other regularly

No more juggling apps or missing moments that matter — Syncly makes team rituals simple, human, and powerful.

🛠️ How we built it

Syncly was built entirely using Bolt.new as our fullstack development environment, enabling fast iteration and clean deployment — while relying on a modular set of tools for scalability and AI integration.

⚙️ Stack & Tools

• Bolt.new – The primary platform used to build and deploy the app’s frontend and orchestration logic.
• Supabase – Backend-as-a-service providing authentication, PostgreSQL database, role-based access control, and edge functions.
• React + TypeScript – For a fast, responsive, and modular user interface. It comes from bolt.new
• ElevenLabs (demo) – To convert user voice recordings into natural audio narration.
• Groq + LLaMA 3 70B – For fast and professional AI summarization of voice transcriptions into structured highlights.
• ChatGPT – Used as a secondary prompt assistant to validate and refine summarization prompts.
• Entri – Used to secure our custom domain and manage subdomains with ease. We deployed a marketing landing page at https://getsyncly.site and hosted the app itself under the subdomain https://app.getsyncly.site.
• Brevo – Email provider used for transactional messages and team invites.
• Netlify – Infrastructure and hosting provider used to deploy and serve both the landing page and app with global availability.

🧪 Product Architecture

• Authentication & roles: Supabase Auth handles sign-up and sign-in. Team Leads manage team members using role-based permissions.
• Audio flow: Team Members record a voice update. ElevenLabs transcribes it. Then Groq (with LLaMA 3 70B) summarizes the content into a structured format with titles, tags, and progress status.
• Weekly ritual dashboard: All highlights, mood check-ins, birthdays, recognitions, vacations, and announcements are visualized in a single, unified dashboard — used live during weekly team rituals.
• Edge functions: Used to trigger secure workflows for email sending, and automated processing of highlights.

🧗 Challenges we ran into

Building Syncly in just a few weeks pushed us to solve complex challenges — both technical and product-related — while maintaining our focus on delivering a simple, human experience.

👥 Multi-user session complexity

Given Syncly’s multi-user nature (Team Leads and Team Members), managing session states across roles, tabs, and devices was not straightforward. We encountered edge cases with token refreshes and role resolution. By following best practices shared by Bolt.new, we were able to overcome these issues and stabilize session behavior.

🔍 Troubleshooting at scale

Due to the app’s cross-cutting functionality — combining AI, audio, dashboards, mood tracking, and user management — troubleshooting became a central part of our development flow.
We relied on:

• Bolt.new’s discussion mode for real-time debugging and community guidance
• ChatGPT for second-opinion prompting and logic refinement
  This combination helped us maintain flow and solve blockers faster during the vibe coding process.

🗃️ Custom database modeling with Supabase

Syncly required a flexible data structure to support rituals, voice highlights, mood check-ins, recognitions, and team events. Modeling this complexity on Supabase introduced a learning curve — especially around relational logic, access control, and edge function orchestration.

🎙️ Voice-to-highlight processing

Another challenge was designing an audio experience that felt effortless. Team members needed to record short voice updates and trust that Syncly would process them into clear, structured highlights. We iterated multiple times on:

• Prompt design for Groq’s LLaMA 3 70B model to generate usable, professional summaries
• Audio recording UX with real-time visual feedback
• File conversion and latency issues when sending audio for transcription

📦 MVP scope & token cost

Even though Syncly is currently an MVP, the project scope grew quickly. Balancing multiple features — roles, voice handling, rituals, and database sync — impacted the vibe coding rhythm and led to increased token consumption when testing AI components. We had to be intentional in optimizing prompt calls and scope boundaries to stay focused.

🏆 Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite building Syncly in under a month, we achieved several milestones that pushed us beyond just shipping code — we delivered a product with purpose, polish, and potential.

🚀 Built a real, working MVP

We didn’t just design a prototype — we shipped a fully functional MVP that supports:

• Authentication and team role management
• AI-powered voice highlight processing
• A structured ritual dashboard with real-time visibility into team health, recognitions, and events

🎨 Designed a ritual-first user experience

From voice recording to live meeting dashboards, we focused on keeping the experience lightweight, clear, and emotionally engaging — so teams could feel the value from day one.

🔗 Shipped on custom domain infrastructure

We deployed Syncly under our own domain structure:

• Marketing page: https://getsyncly.site
• App interface: https://app.getsyncly.site

🤖 Connected AI to real workflows

We integrated ElevenLabs, Groq (LLaMA 3 70B), and ChatGPT into a seamless voice-to-summary pipeline — turning voice input into structured team highlights in a way that’s fast, usable, and practical for weekly rituals.

📚 What we learned

Building Syncly wasn’t just about shipping features — it was a deep learning experience across product thinking, AI integration, and user-centered design.

🔁 AI is powerful — but only with the right prompts

We learned that the quality of AI output is highly dependent on clarity, structure, and intent behind each prompt. Iterating on prompts with real use cases made us more intentional in how we used AI as a teammate, not just a tool.

🎙️ Voice matters, but UX matters more

It’s easy to let AI or audio processing become the focus, but what truly makes it work is the UX that wraps around it. We spent time making the voice experience feel trustworthy and frictionless — because adoption depends on confidence, not just capability.

🧩 Simplicity is hard

Keeping the product light, clear, and usable — while juggling multiple roles, real-time flows, and edge cases — was one of the biggest product challenges. We learned that reducing cognitive load for users takes far more effort than adding features.

🧪 Troubleshooting is part of the creative process

From token errors to data modeling bugs, debugging became a core creative activity. Using tools like Bolt.new’s discussion mode, rollback feature and ChatGPT for logic validation helped us move forward without getting stuck.

🌐 Community events accelerated our build

The events organized by Bolt.new and partner providers gave us focused opportunities to go beyond what we originally envisioned. Live demos, workshops, and challenges helped us push the product further, faster.

What's next for Syncly

We’ve already started conversations with teams interested in piloting Syncly as part of their weekly operating rhythm. The product is in a stable state, and we’re excited to move into testing and feedback loops.

Built With

• bolt.new
• brevo
• chatgpt
• elevenlabs
• entri
• groq
• netlify
• supabase