Jonathan Gulyak (Stern '26) and Julius Chu (Tisch '27) are building melodi, a release-planning tool that gives independent musicians a week-by-week campaign and industry-standard business guidance, so they can stay organized without losing the plot creatively. The two met through NYU's Product Management Club, and what started as a shared taste in R&B turned into Lemma Project, the parent company behind melodi. This summer, melodi is part of the 2026 NYU Summer Launchpad cohort.
Tell us about yourselves, apart from melodi.
Jonathan: I just graduated from Stern in finance, econ, and CS. I've bounced around a lot of internships, consulting, startups, product roles, trying to get a feel for how different parts of a company actually run. I always wanted to own something end to end, and outside of work I've been making music myself for about five years and play a few instruments.
Julius: I'm originally from Hong Kong, spent some time in England, and I'm settling into the US now. I go to NYU's Clive Davis Institute, which is a pretty selective program for artists, producers, and music managers, and that's given me a lot of access here in New York, from smaller record-label startups up to Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group. I'm also an independent artist myself, actively releasing music, so I'm building the product for a version of myself too.
Give us the pitch. Who's melodi for, and what does it actually do?
Julius: We're a music release management platform that helps you optimize your career for growth.
Jonathan: Independent musicians are basically running their own startup, whether they realize it or not. melodi handles the operations side, organizing your project, your assets, your promotion, so you can stay in the creative seat instead of accidentally becoming your own project manager.
What were musicians doing before melodi existed?
Jonathan: Everything, scattered everywhere. Voice memos, the Notes app, Google Drive, Dropbox, plus whatever DAW they're using, on top of figuring out where to keep cover art and promo content and how to actually get it in front of people. There's no connective tissue. Musicians end up writing their own promotional scripts in their free time and losing the good ideas in a notes app somewhere. Our whole mission is to simplify that so artists can stay creative. There's so much pulling at people's attention right now that it's gotten harder just to be creative, and that's the piece I care about most.
How did melodi come to be? Has the idea changed since you started?
Jonathan: The core mission has stayed the same the whole way through: build for independent musicians, simplify their life so they can focus on the creative side. We started meeting with one of the coaches at the eLab, Jonas Günther, back in March 2025, well before we went through Bootcamp that fall. We were called Mu for a while before we landed on melodi. Since then it's been Bootcamp, Leslie Founders, a Sprint in January 2026, and now SLP.
You've been through nearly every stage of the pipeline. Was there a moment that changed how you think about the business?
Julius: It's almost a coincidence, but the programs lined up with wherever we actually were as a company — Leslie Founders and Bootcamp while we were prepping to launch, the Sprint while we were validating pricing and time-to-value, and now Launchpad while we're refining the product. The bigger shift, though, was learning to actually listen. If you look back at our early customer interviews versus now, we were selling our idea instead of listening to people. You can't be in love with your own idea as a founder — you have to be willing to hear you're wrong. We're not serving ourselves, we're serving our community.
Jonathan: Fully agree. I've talked to more people in the past year than in my entire life before that, and a lot of that came from just being pushed to get out there over and over in a short window. We're the youngest team in this SLP cohort by a good margin, so we've had to compress a lot of that learning curve fast.
Who are you building for, specifically?
Julius: Genre-agnostic, but early-stage — developing artists who already have some kind of fan base but are still doing everything themselves. I go to NYU's Clive Davis Institute, which turned out to be the perfect place to start. I was literally stopping people in the hallway to ask for fifteen minutes. From there it grew into concerts, conferences, and shows around the city, talking to musicians with no connection to our circle at all.
What's the long-term vision for melodi?
Jonathan: Make independent music achievable. That's the line, and it's genuinely what we believe. We want an independent artist to be able to make a living doing this full-time and stay creative while they do it. Longer-term, we want melodi to be the go-to place for an artist's operations and admin, full stop. Our parent company, Lemma Project, is built around the idea that this same approach could eventually serve other kinds of creatives too, but music is where we're starting, because it's what we actually know and love.
Julius: One person we talked to put it well — the industry is set up to be as fragmented and isolating as possible, on purpose. Spotify isn't really a music company, it's a tech company. BMI and ASCAP aren't music companies either, they're more like admin and rights-management functions. That fragmentation protects everyone's own piece of the industry. The dream with melodi is to reconcile that and give independent artists an actual shot at building something themselves.
Quick hits — Spotify or Apple Music?
Jonathan: Spotify, easily.
Julis nods in agreement.
What instruments do you play?
Jonathan: Guitar and bass, mostly. I played violin as a kid and hated it.
Julius: Piano, self-taught guitar, a little bass, a failed attempt at drums. These days it's mostly my voice, as corny as that sounds.
How did you two actually meet?
Jonathan: We were both early members of NYU's Product Management Club. There was a retreat upstate where we realized we had almost identical music taste, a lot of Daniel Caesar, a lot of R&B, and just clicked from there. Eventually we were up late on an NYU boat one night and decided to build something together.
What do you like about being a founder? Anything you'd tell a student thinking about starting something?
Julius: You get to see the direct impact of your own decisions, for better or worse. In a corporate job, a lot of your ideas never see daylight because someone more senior decides. As a founder, you own your wins and your mistakes both, and you're the one who has to pick yourself back up.
Jonathan: There's something genuinely rewarding about watching something go from words on a page, written half-asleep between exams, into something real that people are getting value from. It should make anyone think twice about waiting to start.
Jonathan and Julius are spending the rest of the summer building out melodi with the 2026 Summer Launchpad cohort. Follow along at melodi.pro.
