Lavelle Dunn never dreamed of being on screen. In 2019, he moved from Chicago to Los Angeles with plans of working behind the scenes in Hollywood. He

The TikTok Ban Would Be Social Media’s First Extinction-Level Event

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2025-01-10 20:00:05

Lavelle Dunn never dreamed of being on screen. In 2019, he moved from Chicago to Los Angeles with plans of working behind the scenes in Hollywood. He made connections at networking events. He tried his hand at screenwriting. “I never accepted that I could be successful in front of the camera, and vulnerably so,” he says. But success quickly followed in 2021 when Dunn—like many people in need of an outlet during the first years of the pandemic—joined TikTok. In a post from that May, he reviewed watermelon jerky from Trader Joe’s. “I’m gonna give it a gah boom bam,” he says enthusiastically in the video, which netted 1 million views overnight (it was a hot-button snack, as it turns out). That’s the moment Dunn knew: TikTok was the key.

As @TheLavelleShow, Dunn specializes in lifestyle content—“tips and tricks that ultimately center around my life”—that now reaches some 730,000 people. In the last year he’s cashed in on brand partnerships with Whole Foods, Marriott, Taco Bell, and The Cheesecake Factory. He made “well over six figures” in 2024, he says—Dunn declined to share the exact amount—and was able to quit his full-time job as a hotel concierge. “It took me time to even accept like that’s what I am, and to publicly say, like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m an influencer,’” he tells me when we speak by Zoom. “I just never thought that’s where my career would ultimately take me.”