Founder Of The Week: Matt McLuckie

• Matt McLuckie is a music producer, songwriter and tech entrepreneur who moved from LA and London to Seoul before founding music royalty startup handa with co-founder Kosi.
• He founded handa after discovering inconsistencies in his own royalty statements and realising that songwriters, catalogue owners and publishers were missing out on money they were owed.
• After initially building a file storage platform for music producers, Matt pivoted handa towards identifying and recovering unclaimed royalties. The company has found money waiting in 83% of the thousands of catalogues it has checked.
• Matt is focused on using technology and AI to improve royalty data accuracy, expand handa’s global reach and help ensure creators are paid fairly. His approach to entrepreneurship centres on learning from customers, embracing progress over perfection and enjoying the process of building a business.

Tell Me About Yourself and handa

I’m a music nerd, tech nerd and royalty data monomaniac. I started in the music industry as a producer and songwriter, back and forth between LA and London doing writing sessions and working with many artists before signing a publishing deal with Kobalt Music Group. After travelling to Seoul multiple times, I ended up moving here, and began diving into my interest in the royalty and music rights infrastructure, leading to building handa.

My co-founder Kosi and I built it to help songwriters, catalogue owners, and publishers find royalties they’re owed but were never paid.

What Inspired You To Start handa, and What Problem Were You Trying To Solve?

My own royalty statements. I have hundreds of millions of streams across my music and my statements always seemed like they just didn’t add up. So after going down some rabbit holes and eventually learning how to fix it for myself, I started posting some content to help other writers do the same. Nearly everyone I spoke with felt the same way and were also missing money.

Usually, it’s a song that nobody registered, or a share with no name on it. In a lot of countries that money doesn’t disappear, it sits with the collecting society, often earning interest just waiting to be claimed. Of the thousands of catalogues we’ve checked since launching, 83% have had money waiting.

What Has Been Your Biggest Challenge So Far, and How Did You Overcome It?

Being exactly right. Telling a writer “you’re owed money” is easy. Being accurate is the hard part. The royalty data is enormous and messy. The same song could be registered twice, writers appear under several spellings of their own name, a catalogue could be split between different identities in the dataset. We checked the first version against a group of writers’ statements, with their consent. Now every estimate is compared with the actual money that we recover. When we’re off, we work out which part of the equation was wrong and fix that.

Can You Describe a Pivotal Moment That Significantly Shaped the Direction of handa?

Changing what handa was. When we joined Antler Korea, handa was a file storage platform for music producers. It was useful, but every conversation with writers ended up in the same place: they already had a setup they were happy with, and the money they’d earned but never seen was the issue. That was the problem I’d been making content about for years, and it was much bigger. So we rebuilt handa around it. It really clicked this August. The first royalties we’d recovered for writers landed, some of it unclaimed for years, and we sent out their first statements. That was a wonderful moment that let us know we’re really making an impact.

How Do You Define Success?

For your business: Making a big dent in reducing the amount of money that falls into the black box of where uncollected royalties live. There are hundreds of millions piled up already with more getting added every year, so we want to get this money back to where it belongs and stop it from getting there in the first place. Our endgame goal is making sure every writer is paid for every play of their music.

As a founder: Being a better version of myself and just enjoying doing this thing. Running handa has shown me every weakness I had, haha, so being able to reflect and grow in those areas is a blessing. Also enjoying the whole process; I see a lot of founders and CEOs who are stressed and fall out with their business partners or family members. For myself and Kosi, we genuinely love this work, we make sure we enjoy every moment, the little wins and big ones.

What Advice Would You Give To Someone Thinking About Launching Their Own Startup?

I would say really get out there and speak to your target customers or whoever you’re building this thing for. Don’t build in the dark and hope that when you’re ready people will be queueing up outside for it. The hypothesis and feedback loop is one of the most important phases for a startup, it helps you learn about yourself and any weaknesses you might have, as well as where the actual value is in your idea.

What’s Next for handa? Any Exciting Developments We Should Watch Out For?

A few things!

We’re rolling out our white label service. handa running behind other platforms’ brands, so their artists can register songs and get paid without leaving the platform they already use. Our first partner launches soon. We’re expanding more globally, we started in the US because it’s the biggest dataset. Now we’re moving with societies outside the US, as well as moving from simply mechanical streaming royalties to performance and YouTube.

We’re also training our own active learning model which we hope can serve as a baseline for collection societies to implement in their own systems to reduce uncollected money as well as the fragmented and messy data.

Want to be featured as TechRound’s Founder of the Week? Find out more about this weekly feature and how to get involved here.

Founder’s 5 with Matt McLuckie

We wanted to know a bit more about the man behind handa, so we’ve put together the exclusive Founders’ 5 with Matt McLuckie.

Favourite business tool

The multi-clock widget on my iPhone is goated. Between myself being in South Korea, my co-founder Kosi being in Ireland, and meetings happening from all different time zones – I I’ve definitely got a hell of a lot of mileage out of it when i’m booking meetings.

One lesson you learned the hard way?

Perfection really is the enemy of progress. In the early days I didn’t want to put out a shitty looking MVP or roll out something new that wasn’t polished. Learning to let go of this and just keep moving just helps you grow and learn, the finesse can come later.

One future trend you’re watching?

AI music. Nearly 50 million new recordings hit streaming every year and a growing share are AI-generated. More of these tracks getting streamed could mean less money into real creators’ pockets. Very interesting to see how the industry is dealing with this.

One quote you live by

“Shy bairns get nowt!” – Translates to ‘if you don’t ask you don’t get’.

One book/podcast you recommend

I like Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin. Not so much a startup or founder space, but I like the philosophical and personal side to it; I think it’s just as important to listen and learn from others in a completely different ecosystem and space as people in the startup or business side.

Want to be featured as TechRound’s Founder of the Week? Know someone who deserves to be recognised as a founder making waves in the startup landscape? Find out more about this weekly feature and how to get involved here.