Martin Slaney

Product @boltdotnew | Player-Coach type | Ex fintech founder, product leader, corporate venture builder & strategy consultant

[Martin Slaney @martinslaney]

Internal tools are the most underrated use case for AI building.

Everyone's showing you consumer apps and landing pages. Meanwhile the operators are quietly building the software that actually runs their companies.

11 internal tools real people are building right now that they could never have built themselves 12 months ago:

1. The CRM that fits the actual sales process. Not Salesforce bent into shape. The founder who lived in a colour-coded spreadsheet builds a pipeline with the exact five stages their deals really move through. The person who closes the deals designs the tool.

2. The inventory dashboard for the warehouse. Ops lead describes how stock actually flows, gets a live view of what's low and what's stuck, instead of a monthly stocktake nobody trusts.

3. The expense approval tool finance always wanted. Submit, route, approve, log. The workflow finance has run manually for years, finally automated by the finance team itself, not a six-month IT ticket.

4. The onboarding portal HR builds in an afternoon. New hire forms, leave requests, the document checklist. The person who runs onboarding builds the thing that runs onboarding.

5. The ops KPI dashboard that pulls the numbers nobody had time to pull. Daily metrics in one place, updating live, instead of someone rebuilding the same deck every Monday morning.

6. The support triage board for the team drowning in tickets. Incoming requests sorted, assigned, tracked. Built by the customer success lead who actually feels the queue.

7. The project board shaped like how the team really works. Not a generic Kanban template. Columns that match this team's actual handoffs.

8. The spreadsheet that finally became an app. The shared file with twelve tabs and three broken formulas turns into a live tool the whole team reads off. Everyone's secret first project.

9. The budget tracker for department managers. See the spend, approve the spend, no more emailing the finance team to ask where things stand.

10. The recruiting board for the hiring push. Candidates, stages, notes, all in one place, built by the person actually doing the hiring.

11. The field-capture form feeding a central dashboard. Team in the field logs data on their phone, it lands in one operations view back at HQ. Built by the ops person who knew exactly what was missing.

These aren't hypotheticals. They're patterns that show up over and over in @boltdotnew.

Notice what these have in common. None of them are flashy. None will trend. Every one of them is software somebody needs to work on Monday.

Software was never limited by who understood the problem. It was limited by who could build it, separated by a backlog and a two-quarter wait, or a new SaaS tool to add to the list.

That gap just closed. The operators (marketing, ops, PMs) who live inside a workflow can finally build the workflow themselves.

The person who understands the problem can now build the solution.

[Martin Slaney @martinslaney]

how to build internal tools that actually get used:

find the workflow everyone complains about but nobody owns → expense approvals, onboarding, inventory, reporting, support triage, sales handoffs →

talk to the person who does it every day → not the manager → the person living in the spreadsheet → ask where the work really happens → Slack, email, Airtable, Notion, random CSVs, someone’s desktop folder →

map the messy version → every step, every workaround, every “oh yeah, then I manually copy this bit over here” → that’s the product spec →

don’t start with the UI → start with the job → who submits what → who approves it → what happens when something is missing → what breaks at month-end → what needs an audit trail →

use Bolt to build the first version → Bolt with Fable means you can go bigger now → not just toy apps → proper workflows, dashboards, permissions, states, forms, tables, emails, admin views →

ship the ugly useful version first → if people still choose the spreadsheet, you built decoration → if they start using it before it’s polished, you found pain →

watch the edge cases → the rejected expense → the missing invoice → the supplier with two IDs → the new hire starting in a different country → internal tools are edge-case machines →

make the tool explain itself → plain language, empty states, helper copy, status badges → nobody wants to read a Notion doc just to submit a request →

give every workflow an owner → “who can fix this when it breaks?” matters more than “what stack is it built in?” → abandoned internal tools become worse than the spreadsheet they replaced →

add visibility → dashboards, queues, alerts, exports → most internal chaos comes from not knowing what’s stuck, who owns it or what changed →

then expand sideways → expense approvals become budget tracking → onboarding becomes access management → support triage becomes customer intelligence → one useful tool becomes an operating layer →

the best internal tools don’t feel like software projects

they feel like someone finally removed the annoying bit of your job

and for the first time, the person closest to the workflow can build the fix

i'm rooting for the spreadsheet killers

[Martin Slaney @martinslaney]

the @linear agent should be able to create custom dashboards from a prompt.

“Create a Growth PM dashboard with experiment progress, slipped work, blocked issues by owner, scope changes since last Monday and decisions needed from leadership.”

I built an internal version for Bolt using the Linear API, and this feels like a natural next layer for Linear. The source of truth is already there. The juice is letting every team shape it into the operating view they actually need.

[terminally onλine εngineer @tekbog]

understanding every PM ive ever interacted with right now

what is bro cooking
we need to ship

[Martin Slaney @martinslaney]

@jasonfried Is there an import to Basecamp feature?

[Martin Slaney @martinslaney]

Internal tools are the most underrated use case for AI building.

Everyone's showing you consumer apps and landing pages. Meanwhile the operators are quietly building the software that actually runs their companies.

11 internal tools real people are building right now that they could never have built themselves 12 months ago:

1. The CRM that fits the actual sales process. Not Salesforce bent into shape. The founder who lived in a colour-coded spreadsheet builds a pipeline with the exact five stages their deals really move through. The person who closes the deals designs the tool.

2. The inventory dashboard for the warehouse. Ops lead describes how stock actually flows, gets a live view of what's low and what's stuck, instead of a monthly stocktake nobody trusts.

3. The expense approval tool finance always wanted. Submit, route, approve, log. The workflow finance has run manually for years, finally automated by the finance team itself, not a six-month IT ticket.

4. The onboarding portal HR builds in an afternoon. New hire forms, leave requests, the document checklist. The person who runs onboarding builds the thing that runs onboarding.

5. The ops KPI dashboard that pulls the numbers nobody had time to pull. Daily metrics in one place, updating live, instead of someone rebuilding the same deck every Monday morning.

6. The support triage board for the team drowning in tickets. Incoming requests sorted, assigned, tracked. Built by the customer success lead who actually feels the queue.

7. The project board shaped like how the team really works. Not a generic Kanban template. Columns that match this team's actual handoffs.

8. The spreadsheet that finally became an app. The shared file with twelve tabs and three broken formulas turns into a live tool the whole team reads off. Everyone's secret first project.

9. The budget tracker for department managers. See the spend, approve the spend, no more emailing the finance team to ask where things stand.

10. The recruiting board for the hiring push. Candidates, stages, notes, all in one place, built by the person actually doing the hiring.

11. The field-capture form feeding a central dashboard. Team in the field logs data on their phone, it lands in one operations view back at HQ. Built by the ops person who knew exactly what was missing.

These aren't hypotheticals. They're patterns that show up over and over in @boltdotnew.

Notice what these have in common. None of them are flashy. None will trend. Every one of them is software somebody needs to work on Monday.

Software was never limited by who understood the problem. It was limited by who could build it, separated by a backlog and a two-quarter wait, or a new SaaS tool to add to the list.

That gap just closed. The operators (marketing, ops, PMs) who live inside a workflow can finally build the workflow themselves.

The person who understands the problem can now build the solution.

[Martin Slaney @martinslaney]

Everything may be possible. Not everything is worth building.

[Martin Slaney @martinslaney]

@MindtheProduct Thanks for publishing!

[Mind the Product @MindtheProduct]

Martin Slaney, Product Lead at https://t.co/9UUTN33NBM, breaks down the three early green flags for product-market fit that most teams miss because they’re not on the dashboard.

Read the full article 👉 https://t.co/s35aTJInzN

[Martin Slaney @martinslaney]

Flashback to 18 months ago:

I’ve built several fintechs with amazing teams, but some of the best lessons I’ve learned came from solo vibecoding a chrome extension.

One that blew up to 4k installs in 5 weeks, and ended up getting me hired for a dream job.

Build to learn.

[Martin Slaney @martinslaney]

8 lessons learned from vibecoding a high-growth chrome extension

I built @supercharge_ext, a free plug-in for @boltdotnew. In 3 weeks I have 1.2k users and the reviews have been incredible.

here’s what I learned - and what you need to know before building an extension 👇

1/ identify your audience first. make sure the Total Addressable Audience is meaningful enough to target.

niche is good but a big and growing niche is better.

I chose bolt users as there are 3 million, and I myself was a heavy user and early adopter - so the empathy and understanding for where to add value was implicit.

I also wanted to avoid the cold-start problem where I would have to educate people about why they need this product.

2/ research before building to pre-validate. find where your audience is active and note down all the relevant posts.

chuck them into chatgpt and identify painpoint categories, and narrow down the scope for your v1

I trawled reddit, X, discord and youtube and discovered some quick wins that would solve some painful issues people were having.

3/ study up on how chrome extensions are architected.

I asked chatgpt for a breakdown, and started Supercharge using Bolt, and knowing the basic schema to use from the outset saved a lot of time.

4/ take the time to plan first, and upload those docs to Bolt etc.

it honestly makes such a difference to get consistent results. you need a PRD, user flow, API docs, implementation guide at least.

doing this at the start must have saved me 50+ hours in bug fixing or re-architecting as the codebase grew.

especially important as this wasn’t a standard web (or mobile) app that Bolt is hard-wired to build.

5/ respect the mothership.

by which I mean, if you’re building a permissionless project like mine, whereby your product is directly dependent on another, this impacts your strategy and roadmap.

I call this “feature colinization”.

be prepared to iterate super fast and spread your bets on how your adding value. The Bolt team is amazing at shipping high quality features and updates at speed, so I have to account for that.

it means I don’t have complete control over my own roadmap, but it’s a trade off that pays off:

as Bolt improves their product, this should bring in more users to Supercharge too - so long as I’m thinking ahead.

6/ think about monetisation from the beginning, even if you launch as a free product.

I wanted Supercharge to always be free, as that’s how I can grow my customer base as quickly as possible in a fast-moving sector where anything can be copied.

there are costs I’ve chosen to incur, with APIs and Bolt and now Windsurf tokens.

but charging for features is tough when I don’t know which ones will still be exclusive to Supercharge and which ones will be shipped by Bolt.

I had some ideas on how to monetise, but brainstorming with @jrdnmix and his Startup Empire community has made me realise I wasn’t thinking big enough.

highly recommend joining (I can get you in if you DM me for a link)

7) community building is critical when you don’t have any email addresses

with chrome extensions, you don’t get any access from Google as to the details of your customers.

so I’ve made a deliberate effort here on X and in the Supercharge discord, to reach them that way

it’s so much harder than a typical SaaS but at the same time I feel I can get even closer, and discover who the super fans are.

8) get your ‘user permission’ reasons from the AI coding tool you use

the Chrome store requires every extension to submit reasons why they need particular data and access permissions. get these wrong and you might not get approved for weeks.

I asked Bolt + Windsurf for mine as they knew the product best. Supercharge was approved on first submission after just 4 days.

now I’m typically waiting 1 to 2 days for each new release to be approved. literally as a new version is released, I have the next one ready to submit.

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.

The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.

Access to all other Claude models is not affected.

We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible.

Read our full statement: https://t.co/bwn0sximKZ

[Martin Slaney @martinslaney]

how to build internal tools that actually get used:

find the workflow everyone complains about but nobody owns → expense approvals, onboarding, inventory, reporting, support triage, sales handoffs →

talk to the person who does it every day → not the manager → the person living in the spreadsheet → ask where the work really happens → Slack, email, Airtable, Notion, random CSVs, someone’s desktop folder →

map the messy version → every step, every workaround, every “oh yeah, then I manually copy this bit over here” → that’s the product spec →

don’t start with the UI → start with the job → who submits what → who approves it → what happens when something is missing → what breaks at month-end → what needs an audit trail →

use Bolt to build the first version → Bolt with Fable means you can go bigger now → not just toy apps → proper workflows, dashboards, permissions, states, forms, tables, emails, admin views →

ship the ugly useful version first → if people still choose the spreadsheet, you built decoration → if they start using it before it’s polished, you found pain →

watch the edge cases → the rejected expense → the missing invoice → the supplier with two IDs → the new hire starting in a different country → internal tools are edge-case machines →

make the tool explain itself → plain language, empty states, helper copy, status badges → nobody wants to read a Notion doc just to submit a request →

give every workflow an owner → “who can fix this when it breaks?” matters more than “what stack is it built in?” → abandoned internal tools become worse than the spreadsheet they replaced →

add visibility → dashboards, queues, alerts, exports → most internal chaos comes from not knowing what’s stuck, who owns it or what changed →

then expand sideways → expense approvals become budget tracking → onboarding becomes access management → support triage becomes customer intelligence → one useful tool becomes an operating layer →

the best internal tools don’t feel like software projects

they feel like someone finally removed the annoying bit of your job

and for the first time, the person closest to the workflow can build the fix

i'm rooting for the spreadsheet killers

[Martin Slaney @martinslaney]

99.9% of WhatsApp users never touch the status update feature.

Is my guess anyway. Yet the feature has been there for years. Why hasn’t it been pulled?

Because pulling it would hand Stories back to Instagram and Snap? Maybe that’s their angle.

Some features aren’t there to be used. They’re there so a competitor can’t own the behaviour.

[Martin Slaney @martinslaney]

Bolt + Fable smashed out a World Cup sweepstake app for the Slaney family in one prompt.

It syncs fixtures and results from the openfootball World Cup 2026 JSON feed, parses stages, scores and winners, includes an offline fallback and has manual admin overrides.

We just did the draw.

Family chaos loading ⚽️🏆🔥

[Martin Slaney @martinslaney]

me, a mate, Bolt and Claude spent 3 hours prompt jamming last night

came out with a working product

hoping to ship tomorrow!

[Martin Slaney @martinslaney]

Some days just feel dangerous in the best possible way.

Today’s one of them. Perfect day to build a new business with Bolt.

[bolt.new @boltdotnew]

Claude Fable 5 is now in Bolt.

The first ever Mythos-class model 🤯
Handles more complex problems with fewer tokens.

Now part of Bolt’s Max agent. Let’s cook!

[Martin Slaney @martinslaney]

@chsweb @boltdotnew really good point! What’s janky to one person may not be to another!

maybe we’ll see a new wave of designing for unique mental models

[Martin Slaney @martinslaney]

Internal tools are the most underrated use case for AI building.

Everyone's showing you consumer apps and landing pages. Meanwhile the operators are quietly building the software that actually runs their companies.

11 internal tools real people are building right now that they could never have built themselves 12 months ago:

1. The CRM that fits the actual sales process. Not Salesforce bent into shape. The founder who lived in a colour-coded spreadsheet builds a pipeline with the exact five stages their deals really move through. The person who closes the deals designs the tool.

2. The inventory dashboard for the warehouse. Ops lead describes how stock actually flows, gets a live view of what's low and what's stuck, instead of a monthly stocktake nobody trusts.

3. The expense approval tool finance always wanted. Submit, route, approve, log. The workflow finance has run manually for years, finally automated by the finance team itself, not a six-month IT ticket.

4. The onboarding portal HR builds in an afternoon. New hire forms, leave requests, the document checklist. The person who runs onboarding builds the thing that runs onboarding.

5. The ops KPI dashboard that pulls the numbers nobody had time to pull. Daily metrics in one place, updating live, instead of someone rebuilding the same deck every Monday morning.

6. The support triage board for the team drowning in tickets. Incoming requests sorted, assigned, tracked. Built by the customer success lead who actually feels the queue.

7. The project board shaped like how the team really works. Not a generic Kanban template. Columns that match this team's actual handoffs.

8. The spreadsheet that finally became an app. The shared file with twelve tabs and three broken formulas turns into a live tool the whole team reads off. Everyone's secret first project.

9. The budget tracker for department managers. See the spend, approve the spend, no more emailing the finance team to ask where things stand.

10. The recruiting board for the hiring push. Candidates, stages, notes, all in one place, built by the person actually doing the hiring.

11. The field-capture form feeding a central dashboard. Team in the field logs data on their phone, it lands in one operations view back at HQ. Built by the ops person who knew exactly what was missing.

These aren't hypotheticals. They're patterns that show up over and over in @boltdotnew.

Notice what these have in common. None of them are flashy. None will trend. Every one of them is software somebody needs to work on Monday.

Software was never limited by who understood the problem. It was limited by who could build it, separated by a backlog and a two-quarter wait, or a new SaaS tool to add to the list.

That gap just closed. The operators (marketing, ops, PMs) who live inside a workflow can finally build the workflow themselves.

The person who understands the problem can now build the solution.

[Martin Slaney @martinslaney]

@VirginRadioUK @andrewrsorkin good info! Love all Andrew's books, currently reading 1929 🔥

[Martin Slaney @martinslaney]

@theworkerbulls this is the way 🔥

[Martin Slaney @martinslaney]

@ChristenDellett disposable tools too - prompt, use, throw away