Built to answer one question: did the lender actually read it?

I didn't spend my days putting deal briefs together. The people I worked with did. They'd put real effort into each one: the terms, the collateral, the structure a lender needed to say yes. Then it would go out, and they'd wait.

The question came up constantly: did the lender actually read it? Not just open the email, but actually read it, get to the details, spend time on the parts that mattered. There was no way to know. A slow reply didn't mean disinterest, and a fast one didn't mean they'd read past page one. The team was flying blind on every single brief they sent out.

From a recurring question to a working product in 14 hours

Watching that same question get asked over and over (did they actually read it?) was the whole idea for Replay Docs. So I built it. The first working version, which let you upload a PDF, generate a trackable link, and see engagement come back in real time, went from idea to a working product in about 14 hours. Not a mockup, not a slide deck pitching the idea: an actual tool the team could use on a real deal brief immediately.

That speed wasn't really about me. It's about where software development is right now. Tools like Claude have changed the unit economics of building software: the distance between “I have a problem” and “I have a working tool that solves it” has collapsed from weeks to hours. Scaffolding an app, wiring up a database, building a PDF viewer that tracks scroll position and dwell time per page, shipping an authentication flow: the kind of work that used to take a small team a sprint or two is now something one person can do in an evening with the right tools and a clear problem to solve.

That's not a small shift. It means the bottleneck on building software isn't engineering capacity anymore. It's having a sharp enough problem worth solving. I had one, because I'd heard it asked out loud enough times to know it was real.

From one team's question to Replay Docs

Once the first version worked, the team started using it on every brief they sent, and it kept paying off. Knowing a lender had spent four minutes re-reading the collateral section told them exactly what to bring up on the follow-up call. Knowing a brief had gone completely unopened after three days told them to pick up the phone instead of waiting on an email reply.

It was a short step from “this answers our question” to “this would answer the same question for anyone who sends important documents and has no idea what happens after send.” That's Replay Docs today: full session replay, per-page attention, and AI-based intent scoring for proposals, decks, and, still very much including, deal briefs sent out to lenders.