A note from Austin.

A close family member of mine is a top-25-in-her-region real estate agent. She runs harder than anyone I've ever met. One Tuesday in 2025 I sat with her in the car between showings and watched her give up on her CRM by 2pm.

She had six rich, deal-shifting conversations that day — “husband hated the kitchen,” “needs to sell first,” “FHA cap,” “referral from Marcy” — and not one of them made it into FollowUpBoss that week.

Not because she's lazy. Because the ten-minute window between showings is for traffic, parking, and the next client. Not for tabbing into a CRM and typing six form fields.

Inman put a number on it in November 2025: 88% of agent conversations never make it to the CRM. In human terms, that means agents spend $100-400/mo on a CRM and feed it roughly 12% of what they actually know. The CRM is the asset they pay for, and the asset they consistently fail to use.

Brokernote is the line between the conversation and the CRM. One button: record. The structured update lands in the system you already pay for, with a draft follow-up email and text waiting for your tap.

Why I'm the right person to build this.

I'm a software engineer. I've shipped products before. The most recent one is Cup Chasers, a fantasy golf platform that runs live scoring, ML-powered auto-pick, and a DFS optimizer for thousands of users every tournament weekend. That codebase taught me how to build a small product that actually has to work on Sunday at 4pm with no excuses.

Brokernote is the same shape: a real user (an agent on a Tuesday morning) needs a real thing (their CRM updated) on a real deadline (before they forget). No demos, no theatre.

The stack, briefly.

For anyone evaluating us before partnering — yes, this is a real engineering effort. The Rails 7 API runs on Postgres with Sidekiq for background jobs and Lockbox for at-rest encryption of audio and transcripts. The iOS app is native Swift/SwiftUI (iOS 17+) with XcodeGen for deterministic project files and BackgroundTasks for upload-after-lock. Speech-to-text is Groq Whisper for sub-second transcription; structured extraction is Claude Sonnet with a versioned JSON schema (see changelog). CRM push is built on standard OAuth 2.0 + an events-first write pattern with idempotent dedupe by phone/email, so the same architecture extends across CRMs as we add them.

I'm building it slowly and on purpose. The first version ships to a small TestFlight cohort in the summer of 2026, anchored on our first CRM integration. If you're an agent and you'd use this on Tuesday morning — please join the waitlist. Or just email me. Replies go to a human.

Thanks for reading.
Austin McCombs
Founder, Brokernote · Dallas, TX