Solly Solomou on Building LADbible, Social Media and Expanding to the US

LADbible Group founder and CEO Solly Solomou joins Harry Stebbings to discuss building a digital media company, hiring, expansion, social platforms and public markets. His audience and business figures are presented as the company leader’s account.

Solomou recalls selling sweets and clothes when he was young. At university he expected to pursue a conventional business career, but a placement-year program gave him mentorship, some funding and the chance to try building a company.

His first idea was an online student community recommending bars, clubs and cafés. Solomou says the university support offered a safety net: if the business failed, he could return to his studies.

He invested savings and university support, spending a few thousand pounds on initial costs including accommodation and a small office above a printer shop. He says he understood the need to earn more than he spent before he understood the venture funding model.

The student site faced a two-sided problem: it needed an audience to attract advertisers and advertisers to fund the business. He distributed printed bags and flyers and sold advertising to local establishments.

Searching for affordable marketing, he found a Facebook page called LADbible with about half a million followers. He contacted its creator, Alex Partridge, and purchased the page for a sum he describes as in the low thousands.

The purchase consumed a large share of his available savings and funding. Solomou remembers lying on his bed wondering how he would make it work, but the page became the gateway to a larger media business.

He believes constraints can encourage entrepreneurial creativity, while acknowledging that the university’s support helped him take the first step. His preference for pressure is a personal view, not evidence that every founder performs better without a safety net.

A year or so later the Facebook page disappeared, threatening a business that depended on the platform. Solomou says the team reached a Facebook executive and resolved a verification issue after about a week.

To grow the audience and build a website, he recruited university students for work experience and connected with people who had created social accounts themselves. He describes a small early team learning how to handle traffic and develop a recognizable brand.

The first revenue streams included consulting for companies that wanted help growing Facebook audiences and advertising on the site. Solomou says profitability mattered from the start, a characterization of the business’s early finances rather than independently verified accounts.

Stebbings asks whether consulting distracted from building LADbible’s own audience. Solomou says helping brands understand and reach younger audiences remains part of the business, now alongside sponsorships and original entertainment formats.

He recalls early campaigns for large advertisers that needed something other than simply reposting a television commercial. LADbible adapted the creative to the social platform and audience, he says, which helped it build repeat relationships.

Many early hires came from a community of people who already ran social accounts while working other jobs. Solomou says bringing them together gave them a career applying skills that were not yet widely recognized by traditional employers.

As independent creators gained ways to make money themselves, hiring became harder. The company’s challenge is to give talented people opportunities, resources and a reason to build with a team rather than only on their own.

He recalls a video featuring Kevin Hart, Ice Cube and Stormzy as a moment when the company’s reach became tangible. He says the piece attracted around ten million views; the number is his recollection, not a current audited audience figure.

The company expanded into areas such as sport and gaming as audiences moved toward social platforms. Solomou believes its understanding of younger audiences and platform culture helped it adapt, a claim made from the perspective of the company’s founder.

New verticals required time, investment and people who understood the subject and the audience. Solomou says LADbible combined creative judgment with early investment in technology, analytics and tools that let teams learn which presentations worked.

He describes Betches as an example of a brand with a strong connection to millennial and Gen Z women in the United States. LADbible’s ownership interest matters to his positive assessment of that audience relationship.

Asked about mistakes, Solomou says he would have entered the US sooner and might have started the company there. He sees the larger market as a major opportunity, while acknowledging LADbible built a significant UK business first.

He says the US is not one uniform audience: regional and cultural differences matter, and a niche can still be very large. The UK approach cannot simply be copied without learning from local teams and brands such as Betches.

Another mistake was hiring too quickly and focusing on technical experience without enough attention to how people would work together. Solomou says a talented individual can help, but a team needs trust and compatible ways of collaborating.

He recalls rapid hiring during the pandemic and the challenge of integrating teams after the UNILAD acquisition. He treats culture as an ongoing effort rather than something completed when a set of values is written down.

For Solomou, culture includes ambition, growth and the ability to rely on colleagues. As the company expanded and became public, he says his own job changed repeatedly, and he looks for people willing to develop with the organization.

He values open feedback and high standards, including the ability to address problems directly. He argues that those standards apply both to the audience receiving content and to advertising clients.

Solomou cites more than 500 million followers across platforms and large UK audience reach. These are company-reported figures at the time of the interview; followers across services are not necessarily unique individuals.

The guests compare highly produced content with an individual creator filming on a phone. Solomou says different formats meet different needs: a fast social clip may work with minimal production, while a longer documentary or television advertisement may require more resources.

He expects AI tools to help with research, editing, translation and other production tasks. His vision of partially AI-assisted films is a possibility for the future, not a claim about the cost or quality of a completed production.

Stebbings worries that an abundance of AI-generated content will make discovery harder. Solomou is more optimistic that teams able to adapt can use the tools to create and distribute content more effectively.

He describes an experiment dubbing a sports show into Hindi that he says received more than 200,000 views in a day. This is one company-reported example, not a general forecast of results from translation.

Solomou predicts that wearables could eventually make phones feel cumbersome, perhaps over a decade or more. The timeline and adoption are speculative; he also recognizes that new technology brings risks as well as opportunities.

On deepfakes, he says regulation and platform practices will need to catch up with the ability to misuse synthetic media. He does not claim that the appropriate rules or their enforcement have already been settled.

LADbible chose to go public in London to gain capital, acquisition currency and greater capacity to expand, especially in the US. Solomou recalls a pandemic-era remote bell-ringing ceremony and says the company raised around £120 million in total in the IPO.

He says a US dual listing might make more sense if the American business grows further, but presents it as a possible future option rather than an announced plan. Being public also required learning to communicate with a new set of stakeholders.

Solomou supports efforts to encourage more UK investment and innovation. His views about pension funds and market reform reflect the perspective of a London-listed business leader, not a guaranteed investment return.

He sees advantages in both the UK and the US: the latter offers greater scale, while the UK has experienced entrepreneurs and mentors. Stebbings questions whether the best founders still want to build in London, and Solomou argues that the environment can improve.

Solomou expects connected television and streaming to grow as viewing habits change, while people increasingly use a second screen. His descriptions of advertising shifts are broad observations rather than a verified breakdown for every market.

Asked whether TikTok should be banned, he praises its product and social-commerce features, but says he lacks the information to judge questions about data misuse. LADbible uses social platforms and is exploring TikTok Shop, giving the company a commercial interest in its continued operation.

Discussing children and social media, he recognizes both benefits and risks such as bullying. His belief that parents and platforms should manage the environment is a personal view, not a finding that different platforms or generations carry identical risks.

He sees Snapchat as important to younger users because of messaging, disappearing content and maps, while acknowledging competition from larger platforms. His expectations for its future are opinions, not guarantees.

In quick-fire questions, Solomou calls himself optimistic and says the CEO role changes as the business grows. He prefers to make and revisit decisions rather than let the search for perfection create paralysis.

He discusses brands he admires, including Apple and Disney, and says LADbible works with Nike. That client relationship is relevant to his assessment of Nike’s brand and future.

Solomou says becoming a father changed how he thinks about risk and being a role model. He now considers how his actions might appear to his children as well as what they mean for the business.