By Chris Slater
For Ryan Williams it was one of the most surreal nights of his life. It was Halloween and his two daughters walked in dressed as witches and asked if they could go trick or treating. It was a much-needed reality check for then 33 year-old Ryan, from Oldham , who had just sold his stake in the hugely successful social media company he co-founded, for a seven figure sum. “It was the most stressful day, mixed with the happiest” he said. He had spent hours on the phone to fraud experts, lawyers and banks to dot the i’s and cross the t’s of the ‘life-changing’ deal which he said ‘felt like a lottery win.’ “I always joke I was probably whiter than the zombies that night” he said. It was the culmination of an incredible journey that all started with a tweet. Ryan, from Chadderton , went to North Chadderton School and North Chadderton Sixth Form. His his first job was at a firm called Byrom Plc before he landed a job working in the IT department of Manchester Metropolitan Univeristy (MMU). But it was one night in 2013 whilst Oldham Athletic fan Ryan was feeding his new born daughter who had an undiagnosed milk allergy and as a result wasn’t sleeping, that his life would change forever. “I was doing a lot of long nights, me and the wife were tag-teaming after four, five hours sleep. It was in the days before Netflix so I was channel surfing. “I just came across a Sky Sports memory programme and it was showing all the Premier League goals, but then in-between that it said ‘on this day in 1996 Alan Shearer signed for Newcastle for a record £15 million.’ “I had one of those lightbulb moments where I thought ‘imagine if Twitter existed back then. I’d seen the rise of the parody accounts, there was one for Mario Balotelli, one for John Terry” Ryan had tried to set up a few himself without success but that night set up one called Slow Sports News, which posted old football stories, as if they were new, in the style of Sky Sports. “I found all the original headlines, quickly edited it put it on Twitter and people started to follow it. So I did a few more. I would get celebrities following me and it quickly shot to 40,000 followers. “I was in this world then.” Ryan said he became part of a ‘Twitter mafia’ where pages would agree to retweet each other. “It was the start of influencing really” he said. He went on to set up a page called ‘Deluded Brendan’ based on the-then Liverpool manager Brendan Rodgers. It didn’t take long for the page to rack up a whopping 300,000 fans “That was a massive eureka moment” Ryan says. “I just did one tweet and it just exploded. The tweets were getting thousands of retweets.” Ryan built up a ‘network’ of accounts that began to bring in cash from monetisation on social media sites and tie-ups with firms such as betting companies. However he said doing it on top of his 9-5 job at MMU meant it began to consume his life. “It was too much at times” he says. “But it was just this dopamine hit that I was absolutely loving.” It was at that point Ryan says he was approached by Dragons Den star, and then budding tech entrepreneur Steven Bartlett and his Social Chain business partner Dominic McGregor. “They said ‘why don’t you come and join us.’ They wanted me to bring the accounts over to them and they’d pay me to work on them. I’d heard lots about them, the slide in the office and that kind of stuff. “But I was doing well in the IT job, I was earning a good salary. This was just a hobby. I thought ‘why are these people setting up businesses around social media, that’s not going to last.’ I thought they were mad.” He said he also had a similar approach from Sportbible and other firms. However he was worried about losing accounts and then losing his job a few months later. “Even my friends didn’t know I was doing this world, it was like a secret underground thing”, he said. However he was unmasked as the man behind the Deluded Brendan account after ex-football player Stan Collymore tweeted a picture with him at awards ceremony for football vloggers. “It was a blessing in disguise really as I got loads of messages afterwards” he said. It was at this point he met his former business partners, Matthew Thomas and Andrew Trotman, who also had viral Twitter accounts. “We met up and we said ‘Ladbible, Social Chain, what’s stopping us doing the same and being equal partners?” he said. They launched their firm, then called It’s Gone Viral , bringing together their skills at developing viral accounts. They also moved into Facebook, with their general viral account ‘taking off.’ Now called IGV, it still boasts 11 million followers. “I don’t profess we were doing anything that reinvented the wheel, but we were using our inventive tools to further that reach” he said. Ryan said it got to a point where he ‘couldn’t do everything’, and he gave up his 9-5 job at MMU in January 2016. “I gave myself a year and said ‘if this doesn’t work, after a year I’ll go back into IT and log out of all the Twitter accounts. But I’d backed myself so far in my career and was sure I could readjust. That was one of those moments of never looking back.” The company got an office in Arrow Mill in Rochdale in 2017 and began hiring staff. “That was a real ‘oh s***t we’ve made it moment” he said. They also launched specific pages for things like pets, gaming and nostalgia. “Facebook had a real big turning point where they brought in advertising in your videos like YouTube. When that happened, we had like 45 million followers” he said. “So every page was just earning hundreds of dollars a day.” The Greggs afternoon tea platter and chicken nugget bauble tree were among their whacky ideas that turned into hit viral clips. They later moved to bigger offices in Ancoats, shortly before the pandemic hit. He said that was the beginning of his ‘exit journey.’ By the time he left the firm, then rebranded the KOMI Group, it had 88 staff. “It went from being a hobby, lifestyle business, to this huge mega runaway train” he said. By the time the prospect of his share being bought out emerged, he said he ‘wasn’t enjoying the day-to-day any more.’ “You go from spending your time making funny videos, to spending all your time in board meetings, KPI (key performance indicators) meetings and disciplinaries” he said adding he was ready to ‘cut and run.’ He stepped back from the business prior to his exit formally going through in October that year. Ryan hasn’t revealed the exact amount but said he was paid seven figures for his share in the business. “It definitely felt like a lottery winning moment” he said. However he said he found it hard to deal with, suffering with ‘imposter syndrome.’ “I always used to see when people won the lottery they would speak to psychologists and psychiatrists. I always wondered why and thought ‘you’ve just won money that’s great.’ But I get why they do it now. It’s coming up to three years and it’s still a weird feeling. “It’s such an amazing thing, but you suddenly lose structure. You can do whatever you want, and sometimes when you can do whatever you want, you do the wrong thing. You invest in the wrong things.” “I completely lost my identity” he continued. “I worked in IT, then I was the Twitter guy, I was Deluded Brendan, I was It’s Gone Viral. But then suddenly I was Ryan, I was just me. It was a strange feeling.” Despite suddenly coming into the huge amount of money, he said he didn’t want to live like a millionaire. “I’m a bit too normal and northern” he said. “I’m quite down to earth, I’ll still do normal things. There’s people driving Ferraris and living in mansions, they’ve got swimming pools but that’s not me. “What I do like is my holidays. But other than that, I still live in the same house, I still drive the same car.” They remanined in their three-bedroom house in Chadderton, though they bought next door for his mother-in-law to live in and joined the gardens. He said he and his wife had taken their kids, now aged eight and 12, on some ‘mega holidays’ to Lapland and Florida and trying to ‘make a life for them’- but otherwise life had continued as normal. Ryan said he soon ‘got the urge to work again.'”I just didn’t feel ready to go and play golf and go fishing at the age of 33 and do nothing” he said. He said he has done public speaking, and campaigning work around online safety. He has also written a book with his wife on his business journey and has started mentoring local youngsters. “I actually got a D in Business Studies at sixth form and hated business, but ended up being a successful businessman so I’d like to work with people with business ideas they want to drive forward” he said.