It’s almost impossible to scroll through a social media site in 2025 without seeing content from LADbible.

Over its variety of platforms, which includes SPORTbible, FOODbible and UNILAD, the group has a global audience of 500m and generates 10 billion views a month.

But the rapid rise to success for the global company hasn’t all been plain sailing.

LADbible founder and CEO, Solly Solomou, lifted the lid on the 20VC podcast about how the business went from an office in Leeds which ‘looked like a prison because it had bars across it’ to a global giant.

“I probably (invested) about £3,000 to £4,000 and decided to get an office space straight away,” he told podcast host Harry Stebbings. “I didn’t understand the concept of getting investment.”

All I knew was that I had to make more money than I spent and that was my mindset from the off so from day one, we were profitable.”

The University of Leeds graduate was spurred on to start the company by his professor, Nigel Lockett, who wanted to give students a chance to start their own business and wanted Solomou to be his ‘guinea pig’.

The university supported him with mentorship and funding in the early stages of the business.

However, being a first-time business owner isn’t an easy task.

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Solomou, who was included in BusinessCloud’s Northern Leaders list in 2024,  recalled: “It was so raw. I was trying to figure out – how do you start a business?

“I remember sitting there thinking – ‘what do I do?’ with a whiteboard out, trying to work out – ‘what is a business plan?’ ‘How do I write this thing?’ ‘How am I going to get that traffic?’ ‘How am I going to get this advertisement money?’”

Solomou bought the LADbible Facebook page in 2012 for a sum ‘in the low thousands’ from its creator Alex Partridge after seeing that the page had 500,000 visitors.

Partridge founded UNILAD in 2010 when at university, and started LADbible in 2011, selling to Solomou the following year.

In December 2021, the group behind LADbible and UNILAD, completed a £360m float on the London Stock Exchange’s AIM.

“I came to Facebook and everyone was following this page – it had half a million people on it,” Solomou recalled.

“I thought it was interesting because it was mainly based around students and it had half a million people there so it could be a really interesting angle to market this website over here.

“Fair play to my mum because I used her bank account as I couldn’t transfer that amount of money from my bank.

“I had to explain this to her. She was like, ‘what is Facebook? What is this thing?’ I said, ‘don’t worry about it, it’s all good.’ So she transferred the money.

“I remember just laying there on my bed thinking, ‘what the hell have I just done?’ What the hell have I just done? I’ve just spent a huge amount of money, maybe, 60 or 70 per cent of the money that I had saved up from previous endeavours.

“I remember sitting there thinking – I’ve really got to make this work. I don’t know how I’m going to make this work, but I need to make this work.”

And make it work he did.

The company now employs over 400 people and has a market cap of £220m.

A big breakthrough for LADbible came in early 2016 when it teamed up with three huge celebrities, which triggered a domino effect.

Solomou explained: “We managed to get Ice Cube, Kevin Hart and Stormzy, who was not big at the time, in a hotel room doing a rap battle.

“We had Kevin Hart and Stormzy doing a rap battle governed by the one and only Ice Cube, and it absolutely went off.

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“I think it’s on like 10 million views, but this was before Stormzy was big.

“For me, that moment, being sat there in a hotel in Manchester, getting two huge names in a room, having a rap battle with this up-and-coming UK star, and doing it for LAbible, was a big moment.

“After that, we started to really build out the portfolio. We built out SPORTbible and we built out GAMINGbible.

“We didn’t realise it at the time, but we were on this cusp of a massive wave that was forming.

“The emergence of these platforms – Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube – we understood better than anyone how to interact with audiences at the time.”

Solomou later revealed that ‘operating with excellence’ is key for the brand which gains 3,000 views every second and is consumed by over two-thirds of 18-30-year-olds in the UK.