Beau Vallis always knew he wanted to pursue music.

The 32-year-old grew up in Norwood, New Jersey, the son of a wedding band drummer and a professional dancer. Around the time of his high school graduation in 2010, Vallis landed an internship at the Miami studio of producer and engineer Jimmy Douglass, who had worked with such icons as Aretha Franklin and Missy Elliott. Vallis ended up engineering former Destiny's Child member Kelly Rowland's music soon after starting his internship and became her go-to engineer going forward.

Vallis ultimately moved to LA and from 2011 to 2016 worked with Rowland and other artists like Future and Alessia Cara. He also worked on Pharrell Williams' album "Girl," which got nominated for the Album of the Year Grammy in 2015.

It was a dream career with one huge problem: "It wasn't sustainable," he says,

Vallis would charge around $500 to $750 per day, he says, invoicing the artists' labels for his pay. But regardless of project, "the label kind of chooses what they want to pay when they want to pay it," he says. He "never" knew when or even if he was getting paid, he says.

Vallis and his now-wife moved back to Miami in 2016 as a way to save money. After hearing about Fiverr from a fellow engineer, Vallis started trying to make some extra income on the site, ultimately carving out a niche for himself as a music engineer. He's been working full time on Fiverr since 2017.

To-date, Vallis has brought in more than $1.2 million from the site. In 2024, he brought in an average of $13,000 per month. Here's how he's built his Fiverr business.

'How can I actually make this person sound like they're a superstar?'

When he dove into Fiverr seriously in 2016, Vallis offered mixing and mastering services going for as little as $25.

His first gig was a simple one, "it was a $25 gig to do vocal tuning that took me hours" because he was a perfectionist, he says. But he enjoyed the challenge. "I love tasks and I love beating things and winning," he says. "And it was like, okay, how can I actually make this person sound like they're a superstar?"

Throughout 2016, he made just under $8,000 on the site. Then in August 2017, after getting some help from Fiverr in spreading the word about his profile, one day "I woke up with, like, 20 gigs," says Vallis.

'The formula works'

It's been pretty nonstop since.

He wakes up at 3 am. and hunkers down for a few hours of work. "I'll go to the gym at 6 a.m., back to the studio at like, 8:15 a.m." He'll have breakfast with his two daughters, 3 and 4 years old, take them to school, go back to the studio till dinner, then squeeze in a couple more hours of work before he goes to bed around 9 or 10 p.m.

Altogether, "I mix 30 to 40 songs a day," he says. He uses his own home studio or pops into Douglass'. He gets clients from all over the world: "Germany, Poland, Kazakhstan," he says.

He's kept his packages the same throughout the years. "The formula works," he says. And he wants his skillset to be accessible to anyone.

'I'm going to make the best product possible'

Vallis doesn't see himself stopping anytime soon. He enjoys being his own boss.

"I wake up when I'd like to wake up and see my kids when I want to see my kids," he says. "I'm not always on call for any larger artists. And I kind of pick and choose when I want to go to the studio now."

Vallis is developing other income streams like investments in cryptocurrency and real estate. But he's very happy to keep helping people achieve their music goals. "I'm going to make the best product possible," he says, "because you're going to show your family this. You're going to show your friends, and it'll be on the internet forever."

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