This was my first sit-down interview with the full camera kit, and it showed. One of the wireless mics wouldn't turn on, so Steve and Noah sat holding their microphones while I reset it, apologized, and reset it again, and they were very patient about the whole thing. Partway through, a chair broke out in the main room, where the agents meetup was getting started. The person sitting in it was fine. Steve looked over, called it "well and truly broken", and we kept going.
I met the two founders the week before at Waterloo Agentic's night at Builders Club, where Steve answered half the room's questions about AI, and that night we talked about doing an interview. When I found out they were in the YC sprint, we set it up for the day of the next agents meetup, in a side room at Builders Club.
10 sfor the demo to fill in a listing
~100boxes in an MLS listing
1 monthto rebuild the app from scratch
39years Steve has been writing code
Who they are
Steve Hanov has been coding since he was eight. He started the Square Wave comic at UW in 2001 as a way to procrastinate before exams, went on to Research In Motion, and has also worked at Corel and Microsoft. He runs a few small software businesses of his own, including websequencediagrams.com, which a lot of developers have used to turn a few lines of text into a diagram. Before he met Noah, Steve had spent almost a year looking for his next project. He told me he felt like he could build anything, and that deciding what to build was the hard part.
Noah Deskin came from the other side. He used to build golf clubs by hand, and a putter head he modified went on to help Bryson DeChambeau win two U.S. Opens. Then he spent a year inside a real estate brokerage, watching great agents get buried in admin. He started Dispatch and built its first version himself. He wanted a co-founder to build the other half, so he started going to tech events in Waterloo and to Builders Club, and that is where he met Steve.
The tedious part of a realtor's job
Steve and Noah at the table during the interview
Steve and Noah are building Dispatch, an assistant for real estate agents. Noah described the goal as keeping agents on their phones and laptops as little as possible, so most of the design work goes into speed. In the demo he showed me before we started recording, the app filled in a listing in about ten seconds.
Steve explained why that matters to an agent. A brokerage office is empty most of the day, because the agents are out driving to showings and meeting clients. The work that pulls them back to a laptop is the clicking: sending DocuSigns, filling in listings, and entering around 100 fields in the MLS, all of which have to be exactly right, because a mistake can mean a big fine. "It's enough to drive someone crazy," he said.
Noah likes building tools that feel like an extension of the person using them, the way a good putter does. Once he saw that a lot of realtors' frustration came down to bad software design, he was hooked. Steve thinks realtors are also why the industry works so well for a startup. If you want to build for airline pilots, he said, you can't walk into a cockpit and start asking questions, but realtors live on their phones, want to talk to everyone, and say "sure" when two strangers ask for ten minutes of their time.
Working from inside a brokerage
Noah and Steve partnered with one brokerage because it runs differently from the others Noah had visited. Its admin team has written procedures for almost everything, and the brokerage's whole approach is to take as much paperwork off its agents as it can. Everyone there talks over Slack. When Noah first saw how it worked, he thought every brokerage should run like this, and that AI could finally make that possible for the ones that can't afford an admin team.
They asked the owner to join them, and he is now their design partner and their first customer. Most weeks, Steve and Noah work out of the brokerage itself. When they have a question, someone down the hall can answer it, and Noah said they learn more there than anywhere else.
“
Our success is his success too.
Noah Deskin
How Steve and Noah found each other
Noah and Steve's first conversation didn't lead anywhere. "I invited you to the brokerage, and then you blew me off," Noah told Steve jokingly, with Steve sitting right beside him. A few months later the two of them got on a video call for one reason or another, and Noah came away thinking Steve was the opposite of him in all the ways a co-founder should be. Noah called him afterward to ask if he wanted to build the company together, and Steve said yes.
At the time, Steve had been networking on purpose, setting up video calls with anyone he found interesting, much like I was doing with them. Noah has rubbed off on him since. Realtors call people all day, and Noah calls Steve about five times a day, so now Steve picks up the phone too.
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Don't ask permission. Just call people. And it works.
Steve Hanov
His other piece of advice for anyone looking for a co-founder was to find someone you can be friends with.
Rebuilding the app
When Steve joined, the two of them spent a while improving the code Noah had already written. Then one evening at the brokerage, after everyone else had gone home, they looked at each other and asked whether they should rebuild the whole thing.
Steve likes to plan a system and understand every part of it before he builds on it. He called Noah "a brilliant genius" who can make beautiful things with Claude Code, but Steve couldn't keep a picture of the old app in his head, and he needs that picture to work well. Noah had also learned better ways to build the iPhone side in SwiftUI since he first wrote it.
So they started over. It took them about a month to get back to where they had been, and they have been building on the new version since.
Steve still plans before he builds. The day before our interview, he spent two hours planning a tool that runs a swarm of browsers, left it building overnight, and found only one simple bug when he checked it in the morning. "It could be a startup today," he said, though for now it is just one part of their app.
The YC sprint
Steve and Noah are in the Y Combinator sprint at Builders Club, a two-week push to get applications ready, and they were three days in when we talked. Steve said the application is one small page where every word matters, plus a one-minute video. Noah said the sprint didn't change much for them, because they have been working at that pace for four months.
Steve spent a co-op term in the Valley years ago and still remembers that every billboard was about tech. Noah put it this way: Builders Club is great, but it's one place, and in the Valley there are a thousand places like it, so you never know who you'll run into. Steve said they would go for the people and the chance to learn, not for the funding. Noah added, with a straight face, "and the funding".
Steve and Noah have gone back and forth on whether to build for teams of agents or for solo agents, and they keep coming back to solo agents. Noah thinks a lot of founders build the product first and look for a customer afterward, and he wanted to start with the customer instead.
What I took away
I expected to spend most of the interview on AI. What stayed with me was the brokerage: two founders who sit inside their customer's office and keep asking questions until it is obvious what to build next.
Since we talked, they have named the app Dispatch. I'll update this story when I hear how their YC application went.
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