Why I built True Identity (and why I sold it)

This month I handed over the keys to True Identity, the booking agency and label I'd co-founded four years ago. It now belongs to Raymond Mahieu, who previously ran Triple 6 Agency, and who is giving it the full-time focus the rest of us couldn't, because we were all juggling other things on the side. The harder-styles label side is going to The Music Company, which most people in the scene know as the team behind Scantraxx. Both homes are the right ones, and I want to write down how this all came to be, because the honest story is a long loop that started more than a decade ago with a booking agency that doesn't exist anymore.

Back when I ran VOID

Between 2012 and 2016 I ran VOID Agency, a booking agency for DJs in the Netherlands. It was my first real operation in the music industry, and it taught me in the hardest possible way that the software available to booking agents at the time was either terrible or nonexistent. I used spreadsheets for everything. I kept artist availability in my head. I wrote contracts in Word and hoped nobody asked me to produce a clean revision history. I invoiced from a tool that didn't understand tax in Germany. I learned which tools didn't work by running them in anger until they failed, which is an unreasonable way to learn but is also the only way you ever properly learn anything about a tool.

Somewhere in that period I started a running mental list of 'what would this actually need to work'. That list sat in my head for years. I didn't build it at the time because I was too busy running the agency, and then I got distracted by starting Pixelstart, which is a different story I've written about before. By the time I sold Pixelstart, the list in my head was long, specific, and still accurate, because nobody in the music industry had fixed any of it.

Starting Stagent, and the test-case problem

I started Stagent because the best software for booking agencies didn't exist and it was obvious to me what it should look like. That's the polite version. The real version is that I'd been silently grinding on the design of it for years without realising I was grinding on it, and the moment I sold Pixelstart and had time to think, the whole thing fell out of my head fully formed.

But building a booking platform for agencies has a specific curse. You can build the product in six months. You cannot find real customers running it in anger in six months, because music industry operators are busy, suspicious of new tools, loyal to whatever spreadsheet they've been using for a decade, and absolutely not going to risk a real artist's booking on software that hasn't been tested. I could build the features. I couldn't get them tested. Every demo I did ended in 'looks great, I'll try it when it's ready', which was industry code for 'call me when someone else has stress-tested it for a year'.

So Diederik and I made a decision. Diederik had joined Stagent early and knew the product inside out. We needed a real customer, and the fastest way to get one was to become one. We started True Identity.

What True Identity became

The idea was modest at the start. Spin up a small booking operation inside the harder-styles scene, sign a few artists, run the entire operation on Stagent, and use our own pain as the roadmap. My own DJ act, Break of Dawn, was the first name on the roster. A handful of other harder-styles talents joined not long after. The first year was pure dogfooding. Every time we hit a rough edge inside Stagent, we fixed it on Monday and used the fix on Tuesday. That tight feedback loop did more for the product than any customer interview ever could have.

What we didn't plan for was how fast it would stop being a test harness and start being a real business.

Bookings turned into more bookings. The roster grew. Alan Mandel came on and we launched a label, because the artists we were booking were also artists who wanted a release home, and a label felt like the natural completion of the operation. Not long after, Alex, who most people in the scene know as Envine, joined the label as our A&R. The label grew fast, faster than the booking side. We set up a publishing fund together with Marc Zwart from Blue Skies Publishing, because publishing was one more piece of an artist's career we wanted to handle inside the house. We hosted our own True Identity event because events are both a marketing engine for an agency and a revenue line in their own right. And somewhere along the way Decibel Festival, one of the biggest harder-styles festivals in the world, asked us to host a True Identity stage on their lineup, which is not the kind of invitation you get unless the artists you're booking belong there. By the time we looked up, we had close to twenty artists on the roster, some of them with real names in the harder-styles scene, and the thing that had started as a way to put Stagent through its paces had turned into a proper multi-headed operation.

This wasn't scope creep dressed up as ambition. We wanted to support our artists at every stage of their careers and walk them through every part of the process, because that was the kind of dedicated support I'd had to stitch together for myself. When Break of Dawn first signed to a label years earlier, I had great friends in the scene who helped me figure things out, and I leaned on that network hard. But the help was piecemeal and depended entirely on who I happened to know. Nobody's job was to walk me through publishing, or to sit me down and explain what a decent deal looked like at my level. I found my answers the scrappy way and got lucky with the people around me. True Identity was an attempt to build the dedicated version of that support for the artists on our roster, so they wouldn't need the same luck.

I am, for the record, enormously proud of how that happened. Diederik, Alan, Alex, the artists we signed, and the team that formed around all of it. None of it was what any of us had planned going in, and all of it was better than what we'd planned. The reason I'm writing about selling it is not that it went wrong. It's that it went too right to keep running on the side.

The side-project ceiling

The honest problem was simple. Stagent was a full-time job I was already doing. True Identity had become an operation that needed more of my attention than I could give it while running Stagent, even with a capable team around me doing their share. I'd also signed the Stagent-Artwin joint venture a year earlier, which meant the Stagent side of my day was getting more complicated, not less. I was stretched across four operations at once and doing all of them at about 70% of what they needed from me.

The part of this I want future-me to remember is that it wasn't obvious when the line got crossed. There was no single week where I said 'I can't run both anymore'. There was a slow drift, a string of mornings where I'd wake up to emails from True Identity artists needing answers I didn't have time to give well, or from Stagent customers reporting bugs I should have caught the week before. Each individual moment was survivable. The accumulation was not. Eventually I stopped pretending it was sustainable and started asking whether the right answer might be handing True Identity to someone who could give it the attention it deserved.

Finding Raymond

The thing that made the exit possible was finding the right operator. True Identity isn't a piece of software you can transfer with a database dump. It's artists, relationships, a reputation inside a specific scene, a label catalog, a booking calendar that half the promoters in the harder-styles circuit already trust, and a brand that lives and dies on taste. You can't sell any of that to a random buyer. You can only hand it to someone who already belongs in the scene and who has the operator instinct to run it properly.

Raymond Mahieu had been running Triple 6 Agency for years. I knew his work. He knew ours. We started talking late in 2024 about what a clean handover would look like. It turned out the conversation was short, because we agreed on almost everything that mattered: keep the artists whole, keep the brand intact, make the transition invisible to the people who book us, and don't break anything that was already working. Raymond is the kind of operator True Identity needed from the start and couldn't have, because the rest of us were always going to be partial attention while we were running other things on the side.

The handover covered the booking agency and the operational side. The label side went to The Music Company, the team behind Scantraxx, which is the natural home for harder-styles releases in a way we could never have replicated while running the label part-time. Both transfers happened in the same window. Both felt like the thing they should have been all along.

What happened after

I'll let the numbers carry the rest of the story. Under Raymond, True Identity has already grown past 600 bookings a year, which is more than we ever did with it and is going to keep climbing. The label under Scantraxx is being run by a team who live and breathe the genre. The artists are getting better attention than we could give them while running everything on the side, because the new owners are full-time where we were always part-time.

I could not be happier about any of this. A founder writing about a company they sold is supposed to be a little wistful, and I keep waiting for the wistfulness to arrive, and it hasn't. What I feel instead is relief, plus a specific kind of pride that's hard to describe. The thing we built ended up in the right hands. The artists ended up with an operator whose full day is theirs. The label ended up with a team that lives and breathes the genre. That's not losing. That's the best possible outcome for a business that had outgrown the schedule we could give it.

The loop closing

I want to end by noting the shape of the loop, because it's the part that I think about most now. I started a booking agency in 2012. I grumbled for years about the software that should have existed. I built the software. Then I realised the software needed a real customer, so Diederik and I started another booking agency specifically to be the customer. The second agency outgrew our capacity to run it on the side. We handed it to someone who could. The software I started all of this for is still running, and it's now being used by agencies well beyond True Identity, which is the thing it was always meant to do.

The test case proved the thesis. The thesis outgrew the test case. The test case found a better home. The thesis keeps growing. That's a better ending than I had any right to expect when Diederik and I first talked about spinning up a tiny booking operation to see whether Stagent could survive contact with real users.

I'd build it the same way again. I'd also sell it at the same point, possibly a little earlier. Running a booking agency and a label on the side is a respectable way to feel tired for three years in a row. Letting them go when the right operator appears is a respectable way to stop.