What if your weekend hobby turned into a million-dollar business?
Edward Southall was a corporate lawyer in London when he decided to launch a side project, FixTheMusic, an online marketplace where people could book wedding bands and DJs across Europe.
Driven by a deep love for music and a growing unease with corporate life, Ed poured his evenings into building the platform. He combined his legal skills with his musician’s sensibility to bring in and sign contracts with musicians around the UK, specifically in the wedding industry to his platform. Within months, bookings began trickling in.
By 2018, just three years in, FixTheMusic was profitable with no office and no outside capital. Just Ed, his brother, a part-time developer, and a freelance contractor.
A decade on, that side hustle now pulls in over $1 million a year with corporate clients including Google, Ferrari, UNESCO, and the British Army and books hundreds of gigs every month. Ed has never taken a cent of external funding and runs FixtheMusic lean, with just one full-time employee.
Read on to learn how Ed scaled his business with SEO and automation, his advice on the pitfalls of partnering with friends, and why he’s in no rush to sell, even after ten profitable years.
More Music, Less Corporate
Ed’s childhood was much more influenced by the world of music than entrepreneurship.
Growing up, he played the piano, cello, and trumpet. In 2005, he studied composition at the prestigious Royal College of Music. Some of his early compositions were even performed by ensembles at venues including Steinway Hall in London and Juilliard in New York.
After university, Ed decided to follow a more traditional path completing the postgraduate law conversion and the Legal Practice Course with Distinction at BPP Law School. Over the next three years, he worked in London and Hong Kong on infrastructure, energy, and intellectual property cases, before moving to Brecher in late 2014.
Despite the prestige, the long hours and lack of autonomy soon wore on him, prompting thoughts of a more self-directed future. He remembered envying young fathers who could make it home in time for bath time with their kids, a luxury missing in his world.
“There were many aspects of working as a lawyer that I liked,” he says. “But, over time, I started looking at my more senior colleagues and thinking, I don’t want to be doing that in ten years. I could see how so many of them just got stuck on that track.”
But alongside billable hours, Ed had kept music in his life, playing piano at weddings and accompanying ballet classes for five-year-olds to top up his income. This was where he knew he wanted to be: more in the music and less in the office.
A Family Affair
In 2015, Ed founded FixTheMusic with his older brother Adam, his longtime collaborator and fellow musician. They grew up inseparable, only two years apart, creating projects together since childhood.
“We once turned Adam’s bedroom into a dinosaur museum and charged our grandma £1 to enter,” Ed recalls
Adam brought his own background in music to the table, having studied at Christ’s College, Cambridge and performed with orchestras and choirs across Europe. He’d also previously cofounded a niche ecommerce site for string musicians. While Ed handled the legal and operational side, Adam focused on artist outreach and support.
The original idea was to create an Airbnb-style model for live music bookings.
“It was the era where there was an Airbnb for everything,” says Ed. “I thought, why not one for bands?”
FixTheMusic’s first year was modest. The site made under £8,000 in revenue, “not enough to support three guys living in London”, Edrecalls, but it had lots of potential.
How Ed Populated His Marketplace
From the beginning, Ed and his cofounders kept a narrow focus. They did weddings, private events, and corporate functions.
There was a clear market for their service – plenty of events were looking for performers and plenty of freelance musicians were looking for events. There was also an easy gap in the market they could address: clients wanted direct access to performers, not layers of intermediaries. The boutique agency model wasn’t very popular and needed an update.
In the early days, Ed spent hours embedded in UK wedding planner Facebook groups. These were hyperlocal, niche communities like “Getting Married in Scotland”, where thousands of couples exchanged recommendations and planned every detail of their big day.
He would jump into comment sections, pitch his site, and encourage people to submit inquiries even if FixTheMusic didn’t yet have the right act.
If a request came in for a type of musician that wasn’t on the platform, they’d hop in other Facebook groups for UK freelance musicians. Ed and his team would vet them, build out their profiles, and loop them into the booking pipeline.
This demand-first, client-pull strategy became a repeatable playbook, and it’s one of the reasons they could scale the platform without paid ads.
Over time, they migrated from manual outreach to SEO-driven growth. By mid-2021, FixTheMusic had dozens of landing pages, such as “wedding bands in Italy” and “jazz trios in Florence”. They also created a content-rich blog, targeting both long-tail search traffic and planner interests.
This shift powered the majority of new inquiries requiring less and less manual Facebook outreach.
By 2023, Ed started pivoting the now-active platform back into the agency space by adding new team members to manage several of FixTheMusic’s top acts.
Despite a huge drop in profits during the pandemic, FixTheMusic today now fully supports Ed, his brother, and a small team of contractors. And they’ve done it all while maintaining zero upfront costs for clients, earning only through commissions from musicians. If that isn’t a Bootstrappers success story we don’t know what is.
Be Selective of Your Cofounders
When asked about his biggest failure in the FixTheMusic journey, Ed believes he had to learn two major lessons:
Early on, he tried to build a large team of friends as cofounders working loosely together. He wouldn’t recommend it to others.
“I thought, let’s just get this massive team together of all my friends who do different things. But then I realized, it’s going to be difficult and it’s going to take a long time”.
The lack of full commitment made progress slow and led to arguments over equity. He learned that for a startup to succeed, everyone involved must be fully committed and more than 100% in on it. Treating the project like a serious business, rather than a casual hobby, was essential.
The second major challenge was work-life balance. At FixTheMusic’s peak, Ed worked almost nonstop, often spending every waking hour on the business.
“I’d wake up, I’d get to work in my bedroom and just work on it pretty much all the time,” he says.
While intense dedication was necessary, it also caused other parts of his life to suffer. Having a family now has helped him find better boundaries, but this is a struggle many entrepreneurs face.
However, Ed doesn’t think entrepreneurs should shy away from periods of intense work.
“If you want to get really good at something you’ve got to really dedicate yourself to it and pretty much do it all the time, obsess over it. That’s how you’ll become better than most other people who might try something but aren’t willing to dedicate so much time to it.”
Ed also challenges the common myth that entrepreneurship means freedom. Instead, he points out, especially in the early days, it often means less freedom and long hours behind a desk rather than Instagram-perfect travel.
