Ambreen's article about starting Reply Two covers the highlight reel. The neat, logical progression from customer success to founding an email marketing company.
What it doesn't cover is how she nearly didn't start it at all.
When patterns become obvious
I watched Ambreen's client roster grow for months. One client turned into three, then six. Each one coming to her with the same challenges. The pattern was obvious to everyone except her.
"You realize you're already running a company, right?" I asked.
"I'm just helping out," she insisted, troubleshooting a client's template that had mysteriously broken in one of the email clients.
She brushed it off, as she often does when an idea hasn't fully formed in her mind yet. But I could see the wheels turning.
Turning reluctance into action
"Six clients isn't 'helping out.' It's a business without a name. Name it and make it real. I'll help."
She ignored me for a while. Then one day, "I'm thinking about making it official."
From I'm to We're
Once Ambreen commits to something, she's all in. What started as "I'm thinking about starting an email marketing agency" quickly became "We need to define our service tiers" and "We need an onboarding process."
I created a GitHub project to track everything that needed doing:
- Tasks
- Milestones
- Issues
- Iterations and cycles
The whole project management setup that keeps businesses from imploding. Ambreen ignored 90% of it and cherry-picked the fun parts.
"You're overthinking this," she said, assigning herself the branding tasks and leaving the boring operational stuff untouched.
As the list grew, I started chipping away too. The big one was the tech stack.
I architected a boring but functional agency management app powered by Convex. But, I encouraged her to get started with a ready-to-use option, SPP.co.
"We need a proper website before anything else," she shot back.
Technical debt before we even started
Fine. I showed her how to download the licensed Radiant template from TailwindUI. I explained how easy it was to get started with our stack:
- Next.js for the framework
- TypeScript for type safety
- Turborepo cloned from Create-T3-Turbo for monorepo management
- Tailwind CSS for styling
- Sanity with Typegen for content management
She vibe coded her way through the initial setup. She installed the GitHub desktop client, set up Cursor for her IDE, and even got the local environment running. She added some placeholder text to the homepage, then got distracted by the need for a logo.
Then she sent me a Discord message: "I'm not comfortable with git commits yet. Can you help?". By the way, we sit across from each other on the same desk, so I knew I was in for it.
Yep, that was the beginning of the end of her technical involvement.
A week later, my Discord notifications blew up too. Ambreen had discovered conventional commit formats and was weaponizing them against me:
- "feat: animate logo"
- "fix: spacing on pricing page"
- "style: make hero text pop more"
- "refactor: entire homepage layout please"
Twenty-three messages in under an hour π . She'd gone from "I'm not comfortable with git" to mimicking git commit conventions in casual conversation like some deranged product manager.
Remember when I said I'd help? Apparently that translates to "Sam will handle everything technical while I bring in more clients."
Why it works anyway
These days, my role is clear. I do what Ambreen tells me to do for a change. Sometimes that's solving technical emergencies at unreasonable hours. Sometimes it's refining positioning language. Always it's in service of letting creators focus on creating rather than wrestling with email operations.
The truth is, I'm proud of what she's built. Not just because I encouraged her to build it, but because she's taken that initial nudge and created something genuinely valuable. Something neither of us could have built alone.
So while Ambreen's article tells the linear story of Reply Two's creation, the messy reality is what makes it work. Her vision, my technical support, and our shared belief that creators should be creating, not configuring DKIM records at 2 AM.
Just don't tell her I admitted any of this. I've got a cynical rep to maintain.
Drop a comment if you've ever accidentally started a business. Bonus points if you dragged someone else into your accidental venture. ππ½
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