TikTok star Halite Hunter was mentored by one of the best YouTubers in the business and has created a budding social media empire. Now, he’s going back to his roots in streaming, which he opened up about in Dexerto’s Rising Stars series.
25-year-old Hunter boasts over 1 million followers on TikTok, where he uploads a variety of different videos with topics like ‘I Finally Answered A No Caller ID Call’ or trying every single pumpkin spice coffee he can find. Usually, Hunter’s videos are centered around his own personal experiences, made all the more relatable by his self-deprecating sense of humor and comedic writing.
While Hunter’s social media presence is starting to bear some serious fruit in fall 2024, it’s been years in the making — and it certainly wasn’t something he ever imagined himself doing as a full-time career.
Hunter hails from Norman, Oklahoma, home of the OU Sooners, tornadoes, and miles of flat land. Growing up in the country, there weren’t many influencers around, and Hunter initially had dreams of being a sports broadcast journalist. He was the youngest of five children raised by two military veterans who impressed the importance of employment and education on him.
Ditching the 9-5 grind
However, after graduating, he began to realize that the 9-5 grind just wasn’t for him. He’d grown to love watching content from massive YouTubers like PewDiePie, whose horror gameplay and vlogs traveling the globe with then-fiance Marzia intrigued him.
“The thought of doing this professionally never crossed my mind until I went and worked in a workplace, and I just didn’t fit in,” he told us. “It quickly became my dream to do this full-time, because I love entertaining people.”
He presented his parents with his conundrum — and despite working hard to ensure that he got into college, they were surprisingly accepting of his unorthodox dream. He credits this support in part due to a PowerPoint presentation he made and an earnest plea to their parenting skills.
“You guys have worked your entire lives to give me a chance to change the outlook of our family,” he told his folks. “I think it would be a tragedy for me to go and pursue money instead of pursuing happiness because you gave me the opportunity to do so.”
Although he says his parents “still don’t get” what he does for a living, they’re pleased that he’s happy — and thanks to his passing score on the LSAT, he still has the opportunity to go to law school to pursue other avenues of employment if he so chooses.
Having made content creation his main focus, Hunter packed up his life and went on a road trip from Oklahoma to Pennsylvania, where he lived with his friend (now agent) and worked in a restaurant owned by his buddy’s father.
“I drove all the way across the country,” he recalled. “I told my friends and family, ‘I’m gonna pursue this thing.’ That’s kind of how I’ve gotten to where I’m at. I was like, ‘I’m just gonna blindly run at this.'”
Learning from the best
Hunter started his content creation journey streaming Warzone in 2019. He stuck to a schedule for his broadcasts, and popped off temporarily during the pandemic. He says his channel was stagnant for about a year until he started variety streaming and came upon a video from YouTube star Ludwig called, ‘Don’t start streaming before watching this.’
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This video would change the trajectory of Hunter’s career in a massive way. He undertook a challenge to stream like Ludwig for thirty days and shared his results on YouTube, successfully catching Ludwig’s attention.
“Ludwig wound up seeing that and reached out to me to basically consult with me for 30 days and help me learn how to stream,” Hunter explained. “That turned into a six months to a year thing, where he was helping me make content.”
Since then, Hunter has moved around the United States several times, expressing an urge to experience different cultures and locales before settling down to start a family. Similarly, he’s also taken notes from Hollywood on writing and directing, implementing them into his own content to “level up” his videos, as he calls it.
In fact, Hunter even created an hierarchy of needs for creators, which he shared with us at Dexerto to show the steps he was taking to improve his content.
Going back to his roots
Having amassed over one million followers on both TikTok and YouTube, Hunter wants to return to his roots as a streamer, feeling indebted to the community he built at the genesis of his content creation journey.
“I feel bad about not streaming for two years because I had a very dedicated community,” he admitted. “And now my mods are like, ‘Yeah, we’ll come back. No worries.’ …I really wanna do a good job of building a community and making sure that my number one priority is entertaining them and not, ‘We’re gonna run this sh*t up.'”
Hunter made his comeback to live streaming via YouTube on Saturday, November 16, where he kept broadcasting until he completed a Lego replica of Hogwarts castle, complete with viewer integrations that will allowed fans to trip him up along the way to extend the stream.
Eventually, Hunter wants to start a family and move away from streaming to focus on raising his future children — but he still wants to entertain people and create media, saying he hopes to one day direct a movie and navigate into “more formal media” at some point.
That being said, Hunter made it very clear to us that he wants to turn his focus from channel growth to simply entertaining the audience he’s cultivated over the last five years, expressing gratitude toward those who take time out of their day to watch him
“My goal right now is very short-term, and it’s to enjoy entertaining people, and those people who choose to give me their time, really valuing their time,” he said. “Whenever I think about it like that, it’s very humbling to think about people giving me their time.
“I want to enjoy that more and not focus on being the next Christopher Nolan, because there’s already a Christopher Nolan, but there’s only one of me right now.”