CAM HAZZARDGateway Growth sat down with me at a dunk event for a long, raw conversation. They titled it “Shaq found him on social media. Now he’s on TNT.” The hook is the DunkMan League selection. What we actually talked about underneath that hook was three things: standing out as a dunker when nobody is watching, staying authentic when the algorithm wants you to chase, and getting obsessed with the craft before the audience exists.
Standing out before anyone is watching
The conversation kept circling back to the years before anyone cared what I was posting. Every dunker who builds a real audience has those years. Standing out is not the same thing as being seen. You have to do the work in the empty room first.
For me that work was real. The dunks were already legit. What was missing was the commitment to treat posting itself as part of the job. When that flipped, the count moved. It did not move because the dunks got better. It moved because I was showing up daily.
Staying authentic when the algorithm wants you to chase
The second theme was authenticity. The internet rewards a lot of things that are not the underlying work. Funny captions, reaction-style edits, random viral hooks. Some of that is fine. The part that actually matters is that the craft has to be real, or none of the surface stuff sticks for long.
I have leaned into showing the actual dunks more than the captioned versions of them. The audience that came in for the goofy stuff often did not stay. The audience that came in for the dunks did. For a craft athlete trying to build a real following, that is the version of authenticity that matters most.
Obsessed with the craft
The third theme was obsession. Most of the work that got me to the DunkMan League spot is invisible from the outside. There are the injury years that almost derailed everything. There are the long gym sessions with nobody watching. There is the weight training I had to actually get over the embarrassment of doing. All of that gets covered in detail on the full Dunk Talk Podcast episode with Dylan Haugen. The Gateway Growth conversation skimmed the surface of it. The Dunk Talk article goes deep.
What I told Gateway Growth, and what I still believe, is that the visible end of the work (the followers, the league selection, the TNT moment) is downstream of the obsession part. The audience comes after the craft is real. It does not come before.
What I’d tell somebody trying to make the same jump
Two pieces. First, keep posting. The video that breaks your account is usually the one you did not think much about. Second, get so good at the craft that the audience eventually has no choice. The dunks I am hitting now I have been hitting for months. The recognition followed the work after the work was already there.
If you want the deeper, specific story straight from a podcast, the full Dunk Talk Podcast episode with Dylan Haugen goes into the timeline, the injuries, the 50 inch vertical test, and how the DunkMan League spot came together. The Align Volleyball Summit recap covers the marketing and AI side of how this site got built. The What People Are Saying page is where the public-facing reaction from the dunk community lives.