Behind the scenes: How Reply Two accidentally came to life

My wife Ambreen, published her origin story about starting Reply Two a while back. It's a clean, inspiring narrative about recognizing market needs and building a solution. Her version is neat, logical, and makes perfect sense.

This is the messier version. The one where she almost didn't start the company at all.

The reluctant founder syndrome

I watched it happen in real-time. Ambreen's side gig helping newsletter creators with their email operations gradually expanded. One client became two, then four, then six.

Each new client came with identical problems:

"My emails are landing in spam"
"My templates look broken in Outlook"
"I have no idea what these metrics mean"

The pattern was obvious to everyone except her.

"You know you're basically running a company already, right?" I told her.

"No, I'm just helping some people out," she replied.

I let it drop. That's how Ambreen works. She needs to process big ideas at her own pace. But I knew the seed was planted.

From side hustle to startup

Three weeks later, I tried again. "Six newsletter clients isn't 'helping out' anymore. It's a business without a name. Just name it and make it real. I'll help with the tech side."

She ignored me completely. Classic.

Then one morning, completely unprompted: "I'm ready."

That's Ambreen, she needs to arrive at ideas in her own time, on her own terms.

The invasion of 'we'

Once she commits, there's no half-measures. Suddenly, "I'm thinking about starting an email marketing agency" became "We need service tiers" and "We should create an onboarding process."

I set up a GitHub project with:

Structured tasks
Realistic milestones
Issue tracking
Sprint planning

You know, the boring $#it that helps us get organized and stay on track. Ambreen promptly ignored about 90% of it and cherry-picked only the exciting parts.

"You're overthinking this," she said, assigning herself the branding tasks while the operational items gathered digital dust.

Meanwhile, I started chipping away at the technical foundation. I defined the architecture for a bespoke agency management app for her, powered by Convex. It came with a caveat. Start with SPP.co to get moving quickly and we’ll “validate” needs once you get some serious usage.

"We need a proper website first," was her only response.

Tech debt from day zero

So I helped her download the Radiant template from TailwindUI and showed her our development stack:

Next.js for the framework
TypeScript for type safety
Create-T3-Turbo monorepo
Tailwind CSS for styling
Sanity with Typegen for content

She seemed genuinely interested and rolled-up her sleevs. She installed GitHub Desktop, set up Cursor as her IDE, and even got the local environment running. She added placeholder text to the homepage and seemed proud of herself.

Then came the Discord message: "I'm not comfortable with git commits yet. Can you help?"

We sit across from each other at the same desk. The message translated to: "This is now your problem."

That was the end of her coding career. A week later, my Discord notifications exploded with twenty-three messages in under an hour:

"feat: animate logo"
"fix: spacing on pricing page"
"style: make hero text pop more"
"refactor: entire homepage layout please"

She'd gone from "git is confusing" to weaponizing commit conventions like some product management savant. My offer to "help" had somehow morphed into "Sam will handle everything technical while I bring in more clients."

Why the chaos works

These days, my role is clear. I implement Ambreen's vision. Sometimes that's fixing technical emergencies at ungodly hours. Other times it's tweaking positioning language. Always, it's about building systems that let newsletter creators focus on creating content instead of wrestling with email technical operations.

The truth is, I'm impressed with what she's built. Not just because I nudged her to build it, but because she took that nudge and created something genuinely valuable. Something neither of us could have created alone.

So while her article tells the polished story of her email marketing company Reply Two's creation, the messy reality is what actually makes it work. Her vision, my technical implementation, and our shared belief that creators should spend their time creating, not configuring DKIM records at 2 AM.

Have you ever accidentally started a business? Or been dragged into someone else's "side project" that took over your life? Share your story in the comments.