Teddy Solomon knew he was as much as something when he visited a Palo Alto shop to return his bicycle at the top of his freshman 12 months at Stanford. Solomon hoped to make a couple of dollars off his battered bike, but was unexpectedly turned away from the shop.
“They basically told me straight up, ‘Go to Fizz to sell your bike,'” Solomon recalled. “You’ll get a much better price for it. We’re going to scam you here because everyone is trying to sell their bikes,” they told him.
Without the bike shop worker knowing, Solomon, 22 and a Stanford dropout, Sparklingan anonymous social media app for Gen Z that operates on 240 college campuses and 60 high schools. Fizz was developed as a way for young people to share details about events and college culture, and promised to be the common denominator for college kids navigating a brand new campus. The app, which remains to be evolving to satisfy the needs of its target market, has just launched a marketplace feature. Since the marketplace launched in March-May, the feature has 50,000 item listings which have generated over 150,000 direct messages between users.
“It all boils down to the fact that peer-to-peer trading platforms existed before,” said Solomon Assets“In many ways, they are no longer present on college campuses, and they are no longer present in Generation Z.”
This generation of school students and young professionals has actually abandoned sites like Facebook, which been exceeded of Instagram, TikTok and YouTube as Generation Z’s preferred social media platforms. But that doesn’t mean the platform is outdated. Facebook’s 40 million every day young adult users ages 18 to 29 within the U.S. and Canada have stayed on the positioning, a lot of them for the sole purpose of browsing the marketplace. They have helped Facebook Marketplace have 4 times as many monthly users as Amazon, and it’s on course to overtake eBay in e-commerce resale. Top spot within the USA
But Fizz is not trying to duplicate Facebook’s record numbers on its path to success. Rather, the positioning’s burgeoning marketplace is making a case for a brand new wave of social media beyond superficial likes and interactions. Solomon wants Fizz to be a spot for online meetups, or where frat boys and couch potatoes can find common ground by selling a used textbook – an oasis of community that is as functional because it is helpful. It’s a goal perhaps as lofty because the one a young Mark Zuckerberg set for TheFacebook during his transient college profession.
“We’re our own company,” Solomon said. “And we’ve seen that all of these legacy platforms — including Facebook Marketplace — are really falling out of favor with Generation Z. They’re not trusted and they’re really a thing of the past.”
E-motional e-commerce
Solomon and co-founder Ashton Cofer — who met in a quickly abandoned group chat for Stanford freshmen — founded Fizz in 2021. A casualty of pandemic-era distance learning, the thought for the social media site was to create a platform for connection and combat the generational loneliness epidemic, Solomon explained. The promise of anonymity amongst users would prevent the formation of cliques and relieve pressure amongst students to impress one another. Because users had to enroll with an instructional email address, Fizz was a protected space for college kids only.
But the app also promised practical advantages: a central hub for sharing details about classes and events, and a spot to post frivolous, campus-specific memes or gush about your chemistry lab crush. Come for the camaraderie, stay for the sensible side.
“We always knew it would be a place where a lot more happens than just posting about parties and making jokes,” Solomon said.
From 2023, adults began to take Fizz seriously. The company collected 41.5 million US dollars in fundingand tech investor Rakesh Mathur took over the role of CEO. The app was on about a dozen university campuses in 2022, a number that has increased twentyfold so far.
At the center of Fizz’s promise of community and utility is its burgeoning e-commerce platform, which until months ago was just a part of the app’s fundamental feed. Today, like Facebook Marketplace, Fizz users can upload pictures of something they wish to sell, and interested parties can message them through the app to buy the item. Fizz hasn’t monetized the feature yet.
Generation Z – with a penchant for thrift, environmental awareness and knick-knacks – has Second-hand resale platforms. It is a generation that, despite contributing to the rise of influencers, has opted for authenticity and renounced luxury goods. It is an element of the generation that, despite the expansion of E-commerce platforms like TikTok Shopsearch for sentimentality behind their possessions – or at the very least a superb story, Solomon said.
“In talking to a lot of college students over the last few years, I’ve learned that they really care about the peer-to-peer aspect. That is, the things you own have an emotional value, but you’re willing to give them away,” he says.
Charles Lindsey, an associate professor of promoting on the University at Buffalo School of Management, believes this subtle emotional focus of the platform can set it aside from e-commerce competitors. Meaningful connections are key to keeping people loyal to the web community, which in turn helps Fizz maintain and grow a robust user base.
“We have our own independent, committed group of voters there who interact with us and identify with us emotionally and socially,” said Lindsey Assets“Because in some ways our social media platform is so different from the other social media platforms that they use us.”
The “Anti-Facebook”
A social media site tailored specifically to varsity students? The promise of connecting a various academic community? Fizz seems like terribly much like one other platform founded 20 years ago with the identical mission, Lindsey said. While Facebook’s initial traction allowed it to Reach 1 million users In its first 12 months, the corporate’s now 3 billion monthly energetic users clearly contributed to its success – while concurrently moving it away from its original goal.
“It’s just so big, and I think people use it because it’s so big,” Lindsey said. “And there’s not really that social emotional connection anymore.”
But if Fizz desires to succeed as a startup and emerging e-commerce platform, it doesn’t necessarily have to emulate Facebook’s meteoric rise, Lindsey argues. “In some ways, it’s the anti-Facebook,” he says.
“There’s definitely a tension between that value proposition and how a social media platform like Fizz can grow while also delivering on its promise,” Lindsey said.
Fizz has experienced growing pains that dilute its promise of healthy community constructing. Last month, Fizz a highschool in Vermont disrupted after students used the app to mock disabled students and speculate about teachers’ private lives. The president of the University of North Carolina plans to ban the app and similar emerging social media sites on account of concerns about cyberbullying.
Solomon said Fizz never rolled out across UNC’s 16 schools’ campuses, and that the Vermont highschool was certainly one of two out of 300 schools the corporate needed to close on account of behavioral issues. To combat bullying and harassment, Fizz has an AI that removes 75% of content that violates community guidelines, in addition to 4,000 volunteer moderators.
Although the app risks becoming an echo chamber for abuse, Solomon argues that users feel safer of their intimate environment amongst only other students than buying things from strangers on other peer-to-peer platforms. Not only does the app hope to be a beacon of community safety, its future will ultimately depend upon it.
“People want something efficient,” Solomon said. “And they want to buy and sell from people they trust.”
