We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Cleo Carter a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Cleo, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your creative career sooner or later?

My creative career started during 2020 while we were in the pandemic. I remember finding out about the popular streaming platform Twitch and watching streams all day thinking to myself that I want to do that too. I ended up joining a community of streamers/aspiring streamers on Discord who made me want to chase that dream even stronger. While at the time I didn’t have a streaming setup, I did have a Dell laptop that I also used for my college coursework. I made due with what I had, setup my OBS scenes, made my own overlay on Canva and hit go live. While I couldn’t play any games, which at the time was discouraging for me because my laptop could barely handle streaming and running at the same time. I did connect with the community I came to know through just chatting streams, watching music videos requested from the viewers and reacting to various videos on Youtube. While the streams were fun and I would always feel proud of myself when ending, I soon ended up taking a hiatus due to feeling limited in my content with the resources I had. At the time, I didn’t understand the direction I wanted to go with my streams and I had so much fear in my dreams even though I knew it was something I wanted. I found myself in a cycle of trying again just to go on a hiatus after a couple months. I do feel as I started my content journey at the right time because of the period of time the world was facing. It was easy to get acclimated on the internet and connect with many people I would have never got to know if it wasn’t for being on lockdown. My only wish would be is to go back and stay consistent in my content journey. Instead of taking those hiatus’ because of fear, doubt, comparison and limited resources. Where I do believe everything happens for a reason. There were lessons I had to learn in believing in myself, finding the direction of content that felt true and authentic to me and also the ins and outs of social media and how to leverage those various platforms as a content creator. I do also know realistically that I would have been further in my dreams and goals that I had in 2020 considering how it’s about to be 2025. I give myself an abundant amount of grace though and strive to be better everyday to make my future self proud.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

As my tagline says, you’re going to love it here. I pride myself on creating a safe, fun, nurturing and relatable environment for my viewers. I strongly believe these days everyone is at least looking for one of those attributes when getting to know a creator. I remember growing up watching TV and barely seeing people who looked like me and having to relate to stars based off their personality or things they claimed to be interested in. That is why today I strive to be both. Someone who can represent for my demographic while at the same time, viewers watching will hear me say something and say back to themselves, “wow, that’s so me”. Something I usually share that shocks people is that I grew up with four brothers and I was the only girl. So, my house was always lively with action based fun and video games. It’s human nature to become a product of your environment, so I too became interested in video games and unruly fun. I started off playing games like, Megaman, Sonic, Crash Bandicoot, Mario, even sometimes Madden NFL. However, even though I grew up with all those brothers, I still would find myself creeping into my mom’s makeup drawers (when I wasn’t supposed to) and smearing all the red lipstick and mascara I could over my face. I would take her hair curlers and try to mimic how my mother would curl her hair. I even recall a time trying to shape my eyebrows like my mother’s in the fourth grade. I ended up shaving them all wrong and being devastated because I didn’t achieve the glamorous look my mother always exuded. To add insult to injury, I still had to go to school with practically no eyebrows. I say all that to say, I always knew beauty was something I loved and wanted to explore even while being in a male dominated household. I also believe I grew up in the perfect timeline of having that mixture of knowing what it is to play outside and not be so heavily interested in the internet, to then, being rapidly introduced to the internet and watching creators on various platforms and thinking back to myself I want to do that too. Creators I initially started watching via Twitch were “ImDontai” and “Berleezy” playing GTA RP numerous times over the pandemic. They inspired me in what it looks like to create a community, all while still enjoying yourself and doing what you love. Yet again, with the duality of my interests, I would watch beauty gurus on YouTube like “AlyssaForver”, “AlissaAshley”, “ArnellArmon”, “Patricia Bright” and so much more. They would mix beauty, fashion and insightful conversations in their videos and again, it inspired me and would make me think to myself, I would love to do that too. Fast forward to present day, I now am able to live stream on Twitch and upload videos on Youtube. On Twitch, I get to showcase my personality in real time, create a community with likeminded individuals with meaningful conversations and attempt to keep up with the games my chat may request or that I just want to play for the fun of it. While, on YouTube, my audience gets to see more of my lifestyle through vlogs and my inner most thoughts turned into mini talks and lastly, one of my first loves, beauty related content. I’m so proud of myself for taking the time to understand what I wanted to do with my content, how I wanted to present myself on social media and staying true to my authentic self. I know my younger self is somewhere cheering me on because that’s all she ever wanted.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

The most rewarding aspect of being a creative is the community you get to create. I love knowing that there are people who joined together and were able to meet because of something I initiated. People are able to make new friends, and learn more about familiar faces perhaps they never took the time to intimately get to know. I myself am able to get to know my viewers with each passing Twitch stream or YouTube video I upload. Even more recently, while I still have my individual brand, I have now expanded to an additional brand called FLVR, which is a girl group my best girl friends and I created because of the demand of our presence together in our separate, but meshed communities. That alone shows the power of listening to your community, because even though they are there for you, they also want to be heard and feel like their voice matters in your content decisions and actions. It has come to the point now that if I’m not present on social media for too long, members of my community will message me asking where I am and if I’m okay. The amount of support, love and care that is shown is always so heartwarming and touching. It genuinely makes me emotional to think about. As someone who deals with self doubt periodically, my community always uplifts me and reminds me that I am that girl. It has been amazing to come to see and know because I truly believe your community is a reflection of who you are and while there may be an outlier here or there looking to incite chaos, overall, my community is very solid. I am so proud of who they are and I’m very grateful they have trusted me with their leisure time to support the things I set out to do.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

A lesson I had to unlearn is that things will not happen overnight. It’s easy to aspire to want something similar for yourself in terms of being a creative when you see an established brand enjoying the perks of their labor. However, majority of the time, people forget about the hard work and obstacles it took those creators to get to where they are now. I am people. I had to unlearn that success doesn’t happen in a blink of an eye. While I may have an extremely supportive community and they can pinpoint my vision in where I want to go with my content. I still have to aggressively fight for my dreams and aspirations to come alive at a higher scale with each passing milestone. It’s easy to get discouraged when a piece of content doesn’t do as well as you perceived or when a stream doesn’t go as you planned because of technical difficulties or software issues. Life also still happens when trying to chase your dreams. When outside factors get in the way of creating content to upload or restrict the time you wanted to dedicate to pushing yourself forward, personally, it can be hard for me to build that momentum back up of getting back into the swing of things. However, you have to keep going, cause if you stop because of hardship and obstacles, did you really want success? The lesson and mantra I’m learning now is slow motion is better than no motion. Meaning, while I may not be mentioned among those who are “well known” or considered “one of the greats”, one day I will be because I will fight for that recognition through my hard work and dedication through this content creator journey.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://beacons.ai/cleoxcarter
• Instagram: @cleoxcarter
• Twitter: @cleoxcarter
• Youtube: @cleoxcarter
• Other: twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/cleoxcarter / @cleoxcarter