It’s been an eventful four years for Kind of a Big Deal, the online comedy duo of Otago alumni Ryan Forlong and Bryn Fredheim.

From busy stints generating videos for brands, to time spent selling olives and being recognised in the middle of nowhere, the pair have never lost sight of their goal – to earn a living from performing original comedy.

The pair met at Tauranga Boys’ College.

“We were placed in the same class on the first day, and sort of just gravitated to the back corner and sat together and became best mates,” Forlong said.

They both lived at Cumberland College during their first year at Otago University in 2018, and both studied towards Bachelor of Commerce degrees - Forlong majoring in Marketing and Management, and Fredheim, Economics and Accounting.

Forlong said during Covid they saw Australian comedians The Inspired Unemployed “blowing up” and wondered if they could make a name for themselves doing something similar.

“The Inspired Unemployed sort of paved the way, for people in NZ and AUS at least, in terms of turning content, like Instagram, TikTok videos, into businesses and full time work,” Fredheim said.

“So they were the blueprint.”

It was, however, an assignment for the 300-level Creative Marketing Communication paper that got the ball rolling when Forlong made a video for a local business - The Port Chalmers Farmers Market.

“That was the first video I’d ever edited properly, it was very basic,” he said.

Bryn Fredheim, second from left, and Ryan Forlong, far right, pictured on their first day at Cumberland College with some of their mates from Tauranga. Photo / Supplied / University of Otago

Forlong and Fredheim’s mates who had recently started The Flatpack Company saw it.

“And he said ‘Oh, you can make a video, you guys like to joke around all the time’… he asked us to make a video for a giveaway, and that sort of led into everything,” Forlong said.

“It went really well, helped them sell lots of beds, and create lots of brand awareness so we thought let’s just keep doing that for a bit.”

By the end of 2021, their last year at university, Forlong and Fredheim had several companies asking them to make branded content just as they had completed their degrees.

“We just thought we should ride the wave and see if we can make something out of this, so we started our own page called Kind of a Big Deal,” Forlong said.

Their name, Kind of a Big Deal, is a nod to one of their favourite movies, Anchorman.

“We absolutely love Anchorman and Will Ferrell,” Forlong said.

“Kind of a Big Deal is a quote from the movie, and we love to carry that sort of vibe.”

Fredheim said the film is about a group of men who are “dressed up and looking serious but acting unserious”.

To begin with, the pair were loading their content onto Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, but really found their footing with Instagram and TikTok.

They were busy putting all of their time into brand content to pay the bills, and not really putting any time into their own comedy skits, Fredheim said, when a comment from a hiker put it all in perspective.

“I was going for a hike at the very top of the North Island, middle of nowhere, and I haven’t walked past anyone for hours,” Fredheim said.

Eventually, he passed a group of young men.

“We give each other the classic nod, as you do when you’re hiking, and then carried on walking another 100 metres. Then a guy turned around, he was like ‘are you the oat guy?’.

“We were making videos for an oat company at the time, and he was right, I, well we, we were the oat guys, but I said ‘Yeah, I am the oat guy’.”

Bryn Fredheim, left, and Ryan Forlong celebrating hitting 2000 followers for Kind of a Big Deal. Photo / Supplied / University of Otago

When Fredheim returned from his hike he told Forlong “we’re now ‘the oat guys’.”

“We talked, and we’re like, whilst that’s cool, that we’re being recognised, we’d probably rather be recognised for our own style, our own sort of humour that we laugh about with our mates, as opposed to brand focused recognition.

“So that’s what kick started our focus into growing Kind of a Big Deal properly.”

Rather than doing things ‘traditionally’ – having a regular fulltime job and chipping away at making comedy content in their spare time, they “did it in reverse”, Forlong said.

“We just made making brand content our fulltime job.”

By 2023, they were ready for a change of scenery and made the move to Sydney.

“One thing we’ve always sort of thought is, we know it’ll work out somehow.

“So whatever it takes to get there, we’ll do it. And the first thing we got to in Sydney was selling olives,” Forlong said.

In their limited spare time, they would whip up a video.

Fredheim said while they have had some “questionable jobs” to pay the bills over the years, “we never lost faith”.

“We convinced our employer not only to hire the both of us at the same marketing agency, but to give us every second Friday off to make videos for ourselves, and did that for about a year.

“It was enough to maintain our following. We weren’t gaining, we weren’t losing. It was just enough.”

After a year at the marketing agency fulltime, they moved into freelancing.

“We did marketing for a couple of brands, which replaced the same amount of income, but gave us five times more free time to make videos,” Fredheim said.

“We spent that time investing into our page and saw rewards.”

Unfortunately, when they returned from a well-earned six-week long trip in Europe, they found both of their clients wanted to put their contracts on pause.

“So that was a bit of a push off the cliff to go fulltime with our page,” Forlong said.

They’ve gone from finishing university and making just branded content, to working fulltime selling olives, to gradually investing more time into their comedy content and then back to making branded content they’re proud of while making original comedy content at the same time.

“When those contracts paused, we were like crap. If we say yes to more deals that were coming through our page and we nail them and they’re on brand, no one can look at us and say ‘they are sellouts’,” Forlong said.

Bryn Fredheim, left, and Ryan Forlong, centre, taking a looking around the Harraways Oats site. Harraways Oats was one of their first clients. Photo / Supplied / University of Otago

Do the pair think they’ll ever take their show live onstage?

“It’s on our list of goals,” Forlong said.

“It’s something that scares us both, the prospect of doing a live performance. We’re not exactly sure the contents of it yet, but it’d be awesome to say that we’ve done it.”

While it is nice being recognised by members of the public, reading the comments people leave on their videos, and having people tell them “I love your work”, seeing it land in person “would be a different sort of buzz”, Forlong said.

“With the videos we make, we don’t often get to witness people’s live reactions to it,” Fredheim said.

When it comes to making successful content, Forlong said it’s a matter of “trial and error and just giving things a crack”.

“We have tried over 100 things, and five things have worked, and then doing those five things well, has sort of been our recipe.”

The pair are inspired by other content creators and everyday interactions.

“You’re inspired by other people doing things. But in terms of our ideas and how we come up with them, I think the more we just keep busy, and go do things, something funny will happen, and you’ll think ‘that could be a video’,” Forlong said.

“But if we sit in a room, trying to force it, it very rarely happens.”

Fredheim agrees.

“If you just let life happen, the ideas come. But you need to be on the ball when it comes to writing it down, when the ideas pop up, when the moments occur. Our Notes [apps] are pretty, pretty filled up.”

- Content supplied by Koren Allpress, internal communications adviser/University of Otago