Getting Started

Surfboard connects to your existing systems and keeps everything current — without anyone having to maintain it. Everything links directly to its source — the specific message, email, or calendar event it came from.

Search

Find anything across every connected system — personal and team-wide — in a single query.

Tasks

One-off automation on demand: meeting briefs, call recaps, metric pulls, status drafts.

Flows

Repeat tasks that have multiple steps and run on a schedule or on demand, and build memory across runs.

Boards

Living, continuously updated summaries for any customer, deal, or project.

You can group related boards, sources, and team context into a project when an initiative needs its own home — see the Reference section for details.

Home

When you log in, you'll land on the home page — a greeting hero with a central chat input, plus two sections that update automatically as you work:

Jump back in — your most recent tasks across all workspaces, so you can pick up where you left off without searching
Recently updated — documents and boards that have changed recently, across all workspaces

From the workspace nav, you'll also see two tabs: Projects and Tasks. The Projects tab shows documents and boards organized by project. At the top of the Projects tab, two sections appear when populated:

Pinned — items the workspace owner has pinned for the whole team
Subscribed — documents and boards you've personally subscribed to

Below those sections is the full file browser. The Tasks tab is a searchable, filterable list of every task you've started. From the home chat input you can:

Search

Type what you want to find and Surfboard will pull it from your connected tools, offering to connect additional sources as needed.

Try these prompts:

"What emails came in from Acme Corp this week?"
"What did we decide in yesterday's standup?"
"Where are the slides from the Q3 planning meeting?"
"Which PRs are assigned to me?"

Tasks

Take action quickly, just by typing what you want:

Try these prompts:

"Draft a follow-up email to the Acme team after today's call"
"Summarize this week's activity in #product-launch"
"Build a prep brief for my 2pm meeting with Jane"
"Pull the latest pipeline numbers from Salesforce"

Flows

Flows automate frequent multi-step tasks. Surfboard runs them on demand or on a schedule, and remembers what it learned across runs. Examples:

Writing an investment proposal — research the company, pull in your notes, assemble a draft
Drafting a spec — start from a one-page description, research supporting customer context, scan the codebase, generate screenshots or wireframes
Researching a blog post — gather sources, propose topics, create an outline, review with you, publish

To start a flow, type ~ in the chat bar and pick from the list. Your flows also appear on your home page.

Boards

Living dashboards that refresh automatically and keep your team on the same page. Examples:

Account health trackers
Sprint progress views
Campaign performance summaries
Cross-functional initiative overviews

Boards pull from your connected sources on a schedule, so the data is current without anyone manually updating a spreadsheet.

Putting Surfboard to Work

The best way to get started is to put Surfboard to work — connect your sources, ask questions, and get the results you want.

Connect Sources

Connect the tools where your work lives. The more you connect, the richer your context becomes.

Common sources:

Gmail – emails and communication
Google Drive – documents and files
Slack – team conversations
Google Calendar – meetings and events
GitHub – code and pull requests
Microsoft 365 – Outlook email and OneDrive files
Google Meet – meeting recordings and transcripts

You can connect:

Multiple Gmail accounts (work + personal)
Multiple Microsoft 365 accounts
Multiple GitHub repositories
Private and shared sources

You can skip this step and connect sources later from Settings.

Ask Questions

Try asking Surfboard about your connected data. This helps you understand what it can do.

Try these prompts:

"What's on my calendar today?"
"Summarize emails from the last week"
"What's happening in #product-team on Slack?"
"Show me recent pull requests"

Create Your First Board

Describe what you need in chat, and Surfboard will create a board for you. Boards can be created independently — no project required — and moved between projects later as your work evolves. Some starting points:

A customer account health board
A sprint progress summary
A weekly status update for leadership
A campaign performance dashboard

Use the Board Panel's expand/collapse toggle to control how much of the board is visible while you work.

What's Next?

Once you're comfortable with the basics:

Explore integrations – Connect more sources to enrich your context
Create more boards – Build repeatable board types for your workflows
Try Flows – Automate a frequent multi-step task that runs on a schedule or on demand — see Flows in the Reference
Invite your team – Invite members via email or link from Workspace Settings
Set up a project – Group related boards, sources, and team context into a project
Share your work – Share boards or projects by email invite (with view or edit access) or via a public link - anyone with the link can view without signing in