toptal

I’ve very rarely held down a 9-5 job. When I was a touring performer, it was simply impossible. But sometimes being on the road or at home in the studio doesn’t lead to enough money to sustain or grow. Sometimes it does, but it can be stressful to have to monetize every creative impulse.

So, for most of the 20 years I’ve been running NQuit Music, I’ve also been a freelancer. It makes perfect sense to sell the skillset I’ve been building working to build the dream of NQuit. It also makes sense that the most lucrative of those skills is software and web development. NQuit was one of the first labels to have an internet presence, starting when it was hosted at UNM as unm.edu/~murphurd. Over the years I’ve used NQuit as a platform for building a formidable development skillset, not only by doing projects for NQuit, but also by using that same business structure to hire myself out. Of course I’ve done plenty of audio and such, but the great thing about web dev is as long as I’ve got my laptop (now I actually use a PC-Powerful tablet), I can be on the road (or at a park or the zoo) and still work. It’s good to have this flexibility!

I used to rely on word of mouth and Craigslist searches, but those methods tend to dry up at times, and Craigslist has become overrun with scams and bad clients (clients who won’t pay, who don’t understand the value of the work, or who make helping them impossible). I started to grow very tired of small time, disorganized clientele a few years ago, so recently I thought I’d check out some freelancing sites like upwork.com, elance.com and freelance.com (among others). There’s still some small clients, but so far it seems promising.

Now I discovered an exclusive platform called Toptal, which has a thing called the Toptal PHP Freelancers Group and this seems extra promising. I’ve already noticed through upwork that this new environment causes me to try to deepen my knowledge and organize my pitch and portfolio better, so that’s a good thing, and it’s exciting to think I could find a platform that will really lead me to solid clients, and maybe even to some cool projects.

So, I’ll be getting all competitive about getting in with Toptal, and hopefully income can stabilize. Wish me luck!

**EDIT** Holy crap that was lame and hard but – since then I’ve learned some things. And I just want to say, grab some free music from me, ’cause that’s what I’m really doing dude: HERE aarontrumm.com