I've never worked in a company
Tags: career, ios, webdev
Published: 2022-12-27 12:22:58

_Avoiding employment was not an explicit choice I made: it's just how things ended up as I followed my passions._

* * *

(Okay, I taught piano lessons in various music schools for a couple of years, and maybe did some odd jobs here and there, but not as a career.)

While studying music in university I started working on an iPhone app for learning songs from recordings, to help myself get into Jazz music but also as a tool for other musicians and music students to improve their playing. This was a collaboration with [Wil](http://www.flagpig.com) with various names that eventually became [AudioScrub](https://rosano.ca/audioscrub). Not so successful at launch, but after a year or so of more development and people starting to use it and share with friends, it became a meaningful amount—not a lot, but enough to pay my bills, stay independant, travel a little. I surprised myself by learning iPhone programming on the [sixth try](https://ephemerata.rosano.ca/01eyk3k2fazfza5rceyvbdb8n6). It was gratifying to finally make a 'real app' after a while of feeling 'restricted to web apps', and I felt good hearing the emotion in how [so many people describe](https://vimeo.com/784524865) that it's helpful it is to them.

And just after finishing my studies, I started a live music listings project called [note the sound](https://notethesound.com) to help promote local music concerts by smaller, often unknown artists: I worked with local venues like restaurants, bars, and art spaces, charging a fee per event and created a technology stack that helped with data entry, showing event details, automatically publishing to social media, and generating printable calendars; for some time I even experimented with my own system (inspired by [Amazon Mechanical Turk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Mechanical_Turk)) to pay people to help with micro tasks like finding artist information.

From 2009 to 2021, my income was 40% from iOS apps and 60% from note the sound, regularly working alone. COVID-19 wiped out live music for a while, and when it came back I didn't want to continue with the same structure—customers repeatedly asked me if I would restart as they were happy with the service, which I guess was a good sign; I hope to someday try again but with a different structure where I don't need to be so involved. The iOS apps became [less and less motivating](https://rosano.hmm.garden/01fmeehzvr3n9q0rkrnf7y2d5c) because of the amount of work as a one-person operation, so I ultimately stopped. Although I didn't yet replace any of those incomes with something stable, and it might sometimes feel like a [uphill battle](https://ephemerata.rosano.ca/01fra43ge7yaj2rgv2cya33q46) to do so, I would say 12 years is not a bad run and I'm proud of what I've done.

I've been experimenting with a [Fund button](https://rosano.ca/fund-button) integrated into my web apps (which for me are now 'real apps'), gathering support on [Open Collective](https://opencollective.com/rosano), and using [Ghost](https://ghost.org) to power memberships for [Strolling](https://strolling.rosano.ca). I've often said that my goal was "to get a thousand people to pay me ten bucks a year" as a metaphor for living from passive income—in practice most people want to give me more than than, so the numbers probably will be a bit different; this might sound like a meager sum for many people, but 1) I believe that to achieve this implies that there's probably _more_ than a thousand people and 2) I would be willing to sacrifice some comfort to [maintain my freedom](https://ephemerata.rosano.ca/01fsf9z4d1yq29sk00y32w1ynm) to spend my time on what excites me.

Obviously it can be fulfilling to be employed, have a salary, feel secure, work with a team of great people, and I respect the various reasons people pursue that path, but I'm clearly wired for something else and will exhaust all options before I go there.

* * *

Follow my journey on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/rosano) (or via the [mailing list](https://rosano.ca/list))

[Cover photo by Andrew Neel](https://unsplash.com/photos/cckf4TsHAuw)