In an era where social media influence can make or break brands, Kit Childers and Iyrah Williams have mastered the digital landscape. The young British entrepreneurs, who started posting football memes as teenagers, have built Pubity Group into the world’s largest Gen Z focused social publishers, reaching billions of views per month across their network of accounts.
Their story offers a masterclass in identifying trends, understanding algorithms, and building engaged online communities – all started while juggling homework and exams.
Humble Beginnings
The journey began in 2014 when a 14-year-old Kit Childers, sidelined from playing football due to an injury, decided to channel his passion for the sport into creating social media content.
“I was in school at the time, a big football fan, and I got injured,” Childers recalls. “It was the same time as the 2014 World Cup was going on. I’d seen all these different pages on social media beginning to pop up, and I realized – why don’t I just give this a go?”
What started as a way to pass the time quickly became an obsession. Childers found himself posting 10-20 times a day, studying engagement metrics, and forming relationships with other young content creators around the world.
“It just felt like a game,” he explains. “You can get more and more likes the more you post. At that point, I was probably five to 10,000 followers in, and you sort of became addicted.”
Childers soon recruited his best friend, Iyrah Williams, to join the venture. While Childers focused on football news, Williams created a page dedicated to football memes. Through relentless posting and data-driven optimization, both accounts grew rapidly.
“We grew those to about a million followers each by 2016,” says Williams. “We had multiple other pages and brands that we were trying to grow on Instagram too.”
Catching the Eye of a Media Giant
The teens’ success didn’t go unnoticed. In 2016, while Childers and Williams were still in the midst of their GCSE exams, they received a surprising message from media company LAD Bible.
“We were contacted by LAD Bible through DMs,” Childers remembers. “They didn’t really realize that we were 16 at the time, in school, doing our GCSEs.”
After convincing their initially skeptical parents, the pair visited LAD Bible’s Manchester offices and were offered positions with the company. At just 16 years old, they made the bold decision to move 2.5 hours away from home to pursue their passion full-time.
“We decided to take the leap as soon as we left school at 16,” says Childers. “Just move sort of two and a half hours away from home and live up in Manchester, working for them.”
The LAD Bible experience proved invaluable, teaching the young entrepreneurs about brand safety, monetization strategies, and the potential to turn social media audiences into sustainable businesses.
Building an Empire
After about 18 months at LAD Bible, Childers and Williams struck out on their own, founding what would become Pubity Group. They applied the lessons learned to rapidly grow multiple accounts across various niches.
“We were growing the pages. We eventually started to hire our friends and people we knew,” Williams explains. “We just wanted people we trusted to be around us.”
Their approach centered on building genuine connections with audiences and prioritizing long-term growth over short-term profits. “We pride ourselves on delayed gratification,” says Williams. “If I can grow this audience really quickly… I know I could build something where I’m going to have an audience that’s going to last for years.”
This strategy paid off. Today, Pubity Group encompasses 20 different pages spanning genres from pop culture and entertainment to AI and dad jokes. Their flagship accounts, Pubity and Memes, have become go-to sources for Gen Z content consumers.
Partnering with Major Brands
Pubity Group caught the attention of major brands looking to connect with younger audiences. The company has worked with household names like Subway, GymShark, and Hinge on innovative campaigns that feel authentic to their audience.
“We’ve really shifted from doing low amplification level stuff through to this high-tier, big budget content,” Childers notes. “The big thing that always stayed true to us is posting content that’s authentic to our audience.”
This commitment to authenticity has led to long-lasting brand partnerships. Williams cites their work with dating app Hinge as a particular success: “We’ve worked with them now since 2019, so over five years consistently, every single month.”
For Childers, sportswear brand GymShark stands out as a favorite collaborator. “Anytime we work with GymShark, we know that it’s going to be something that’s fun, that is actually going to be insightful for our audience, but also pretty interesting and out of the box,” he says.
The Secret Sauce: Data and Community
At the heart of Pubity Group’s success is a relentless focus on data and community engagement. The founders and their team meticulously analyze metrics and, crucially, spend time reading and responding to comments on every post.
“We are always in the comments every post, all the time, pretty much every single day,” Williams emphasizes. This hands-on approach allows them to gauge audience sentiment in real-time and adjust their content strategy accordingly.
Looking to the Future
With a predominantly US-based audience, Childers and Williams have their sights set on expanding their physical presence in America. They aim to build out teams on the ground, deepen relationships with US-based clients, and create more original content.
“For us, it’s taking that content from being static and reporting-led through to original content, being able to interview them, build out our own formats,” Childers explains.
As they prepare for this next chapter, the young founders reflect on the unconventional path that led them here. Their advice for aspiring content creators?
“Choose a niche of something that you actually do enjoy,” Childers advises. “We saw a lot of people who had so much potential, but they were choosing different areas that they didn’t really want to be a part of.”
Williams adds a final crucial point: “Even before making any money on any of our pages, they were running for like six months, to a year, probably even longer on some of them. It’s just being consistent and trusting the process, really.”
From teenage football fans to leaders of a global media company, Kit Childers and Iyrah Williams have proven that with passion, perseverance, and a keen understanding of social media dynamics, it’s possible to build a Gen Z publishing empire – all before your 25th birthday.
