ABOUT UPPERHAND

A creative studio
run by founders.

We've spent decades starting, running, and selling companies, and building the brands and products inside them. Now we do that work for ambitious brands we believe in, from the first strategy conversation through design and build, with the two of us in the room the whole way.

CO-FOUNDER

John
Williamson

John Williamson on stage with a microphone, in black and white with a pink stage light behind him

I've sat on your side of the table most of my career. I've hired agencies. I've fired agencies. I've paid for promised outcomes that never turned into anything of value.

I've also spent three decades starting and running companies. Music, food, consumer brands, software, sports. Some I sold. One I still run. I dropped out of college because I was learning more by doing, and I never went back. Every skill I have came from the job, playing every role in every company I've been part of, from CEO to answering customer emails to mopping the floor.

That's what lets me walk into someone else's business, see what's really going on, and change it. And it's the part of the work I love most: getting into the weeds with a brand, finding the real problem, and then taking a big idea all the way from the first sketch to the day it ships.

I still talk to customers every day, and I think by doing. If something can ship today, it ships today. Greg and I started Upperhand because the best help either of us ever got came from people who'd run something themselves, and we wanted to be that for brands we believe in.

Every job in every company,
CEO to mopping the floor.
CO-FOUNDER

Greg
McDonald

Greg McDonald in black and white with a cobalt light behind him

Before I built software, I built shows. Artist management with Audacia Studios. Concert promotion and booking with Fun House Entertainment, over 350 shows a year across the country. Festival runs through SXSW, production stages at Lollapalooza with C3. That world teaches you the one deadline that cannot move: doors.

John and I met at Music Dealers, where I worked A&R. We teamed up again at Songfinch and spent over half a decade building the company into a working machine. I run creative production there. Every song the company delivers moves through the system my team runs: real songwriters, real recordings, a few days from a stranger's story to a finished song. More than 375,000 songs and counting. Quincy Jones, The Weeknd, and Doja Cat put money behind that machine.

Something that personal at that volume is a production problem, and we solved it by building tools instead of adding bodies. That's where I started building for a living. Gemfinder screens and qualifies new artists for Songfinch A&R, so scouting starts from a shortlist instead of a pile. Front Row maps where an artist's real fans actually live and turns that into tour routing. I designed them. I wrote them. I shipped them. I run them.

I've never stopped making things with my own name on them. Records as LOW SOL. Visual work as Sundrown Studio. Videography as Strange Terrain. The medium rotates. The making doesn't stop.

So that's the split. John has started, grown, and sold the companies. I make sure the thing we promised you gets built, works, and keeps working. You get both.

The medium rotates. The making doesn't stop.

The habit compounds. I mined 10,770 customer reviews and turned how customers actually talk into the language the brand writes from. More than twenty tools I've built are live in production right now. Upperhand runs on the same rule: when we tell you we'll build the fix, I'm the person who builds it.

WHY WE STARTED THIS

The best hires either of us ever made were people who'd already run something. Most owners can't afford one of those. So we made ourselves hireable by the problem instead of by the year.

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