Solly Solomou
Key Views & Dialogues
Solly Solomou, Founder & CEO @ LADbible Group: From Penniless Shop Offices to Public Company | E1259
- 🗓️ Date：
2025-02-14｜ 🎙️ Show：20VC
Solly Solomou turned a “low thousands” Facebook-page acquisition into a profitable public company with 500 people, over 500 million followers and 3,000-plus views every second, while combining advertising with youth-culture consultancy. LADbible’s delayed US expansion, possible dual listing and TikTok Shop’s projected one trillion market frame the next growth phase, alongside unresolved questions around culture, AI discovery and platform competition.
View Dialogue Notes & Key Takeaways
The LADbible arc is a compounding lesson in bootstrapped media: Solly Solomou bought the original Facebook page from Alex Partridge in 2012 for “low thousands” — transferred from his mother’s bank account, burning 60-70% of his savings — and built it into a public company with 500 people, over 500 million followers and “over 3,000 views every second”, profitable from day one because “all I knew was I had to make more money than I spent.”
His biggest failure, stated flatly: not starting in the US — he cites a “$400 million” US market versus a “£70 billion” UK market, and separately compares 300m versus 70m populations. His honest first answer on whether he’d have won there: “I can win Europe. I don’t know if I can win the US” — before reversing to “I believe that we could,” crediting New York’s “straight to the hustle” culture versus a UK that’s “very conservative.”
His platform book: buy TikTok and Meta, short nothing — he talked himself out of shorting X because “it’d be hard not to back” Elon on AI. The structural call is TikTok Shop: social commerce is expected to be a one trillion market within five years or less, sold to consumers via creators and affiliates — “they want to be the next Amazon,” with a friend at Snap saying “those guys are two steps ahead.”
Legacy media’s collapse is treated as finished fact: traditional TV/newspapers/magazines have gone “from 70-80% of the market down to 20%,” connected TV (YouTube, Netflix, Prime) is the future, and magazines end up serving “the Boomers… the waiting rooms.”
On AI he’s an optimist against Harry’s concern that infinite content supply might reduce prices and make discovery more challenging: Sam Altman’s video-generation demo was “mind-blowing,” he imagines movies “25-30% AI generated or assisted,” and an AI Hindi dub of LADbible’s cricket show did 200,000+ views in a day. Meta’s ~$30bn AI investment is discussed alongside its metaverse bet; Harry calls the pivot “quite a smart idea actually.”
The durable business model is consultancy on youth culture alongside core-channel advertising: Nike, Vodafone, Unilever, P&G and Uber pay for authentic access to Millennials and Gen Z. Against the creator-economy threat, his counter is that 11% of the US population call themselves content creators and many fail — LADbible partners with the MrBeasts and gives content creators careers.
The culture disagreement is worth the listen: Harry’s tweet — “we all just chat s about culture…* I’ve never met a really successful company with a s* culture” (Revolut as exhibit) — against Solly’s mountain framing (Disney, Nike, Red Bull, Apple at the pinnacle) and his admitted repeated mistake of hiring fast on skill while ignoring cultural fit.
The London IPO raised “around 120 million” nearly three years ago — bell rung on his sofa over Zoom mid-pandemic — to fund the US push and the Betches acquisition; with over 100m US audience members already, “a dual listing might be the way to go” as the US business grows, and he backs LSE CEO Julia Hoggett’s plans to revitalize UK investment, including money in ISAs and low-return pension funds.
🔗 Original source & video: Solly Solomou, Founder & CEO @ LADbible Group: From Penniless Shop Offices to Public Company | E1259