Beau Vallis started his music career young.
The 32-year-old got an internship at legendary music engineer Jimmy Douglass’ studio in Miami when he was just 18. It was there he met former Destiny’s Child member Kelly Rowland, for whom he became the go-to music engineer, and ultimately worked with such modern icons as Sia and Sean Paul. He also worked on Pharrell Williams’ album “Girl,” which got nominated for the Album of the Year Grammy in 2015.
Despite this major success so early on in his career, Vallis had a hard time making a living. “The label kind of chooses what they want to pay, when they want to pay it,” he says. There were days when he simply wouldn’t get paid for his work.
After hearing about Fiverr as a possible source of income for musicians, Vallis created a couple of music engineering gigs going for as little as $25 each in 2016. That year, he made a few thousand dollars. With the help of people from the site, however, by 2017, he was able to make a living working full-time on Fiverr.
Vallis has made more than $1.2 million on the site since, with an average of $13,000 per month in 2024. His advice for others who want to follow suit: Customer service is “absolutely key,” he says.
‘I call it the Amazon Prime of Fiverr’
First, Vallis is super responsive. “I’m answering you at all hours of the day,” he says.
He also finishes clients’ “revisions extremely fast,” he says. “People are blown away hourly by how fast I get them something.” That’s both because he’s gotten very good at his job — he mixes “30, 40 songs a day,” he says — and because he finds that, as a seller, it can be easy to prioritize other things before you get to your orders. But you have to put them first.
“I call it the Amazon Prime of Fiverr,” he says. “You want it now. That’s the world that we live in. So if I can’t provide that for you, you’re going to go to the next guy who can get it faster.”
‘Ask them certain things about their day’
There’s also an element of personal touch he likes to emphasize. “Get to know people,” he says. “Ask them certain things about their day.”
If he finds out a client is going to the doctor when they put in their order, when Vallis delivers he’ll say, “I know you went to the doctor because your shoulder was hurting, so how was that?” This helps the experience be more human and “not so monotonous and robotic,” he says. It shows he genuinely cares about them.
“There’s people out there that can probably do what I do, maybe better,” says Vallis about engineering, “but they can’t beat me on customer service. And I feel like that’s the most important thing on Fiverr.”
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