Teddy Solomon knew he was onto something when he showed up to a Palo Alto store to return his bike at the end of his Stanford University year. To his surprise, he was turned away after hoping to make a few bucks on his beat-up two-wheeler.
“They basically told me point-blank, ‘Sell your bike at Fizz,'” Solomon recalled. “You’ll get a better price for it. Everyone’s trying to sell their bikes, so we’re going to rip you off here,” they told him.
Unbeknownst to the bike shop staff, Solomon, a 22-year-old Stanford University dropout, was the co-founder of Fizz, an anonymous social media app for Gen Z that is used on 240 college campuses and 60 high schools. Created as a way for young people to exchange information about events and school culture, Fizz promised to be a common denominator for students trying to find their place on a new campus. The app, which is still evolving to meet the needs of its users, just recently introduced a marketplace feature. Since its launch in March and May, the marketplace feature has listed more than 50,000 products and generated more than 150,000 direct messages between users.
“After all, peer-to-peer commerce platforms have been around for a while,” Solomon told Fortune, “but in many ways they no longer exist on college campuses, and they no longer exist for Gen Z.”
College students and young professionals have certainly abandoned sites like Facebook, which has been overtaken by Instagram, TikTok and YouTube as Gen Z’s social media platform. But that doesn’t mean the platform is outdated. Facebook’s 40 million daily 18-29 year olds in the U.S. and Canada stay on the site, many of them to browse Marketplace. They’ve helped Facebook Marketplace grow its monthly users to four times that of Amazon, and it’s on track to overtake eBay for the top spot in U.S. resale ecommerce.
But Fizz isn’t trying to replicate Facebook’s massive numbers on its road to success. Rather, the site’s nascent marketplace asserts a new wave of social media beyond superficial likes and interactions. Solomon wants Fizz to be an online meeting place, a place where frat boys and dorm-bound students can find common ground over selling used textbooks — an oasis of community that’s as welcoming as it is functional. This may be as grandiose as the goals a young Mark Zuckerberg had for “TheFacebook” during his brief college stint.
“We’re unique,” Solomon said, “and we’re finding that these legacy platforms, including Facebook Marketplace, are really falling out of favor with Gen Z. They’re not trusted and they’re really a thing of the past.”
Emotional E-commerce
Solomon and co-founder Ashton Cofer founded Fizz in 2021 after a quickly outgrowing group chat for freshman at Stanford University. A casualty of pandemic-era remote learning, Solomon explained, the idea for the social media site was to build a platform for connection and combat the epidemic of loneliness among this generation. By promising anonymity between users, it would prevent cliques and remove the pressure students have to impress one another. Requiring users to log in with their academic email addresses, Fizz was a protected space for students only.
But the app also promises utility: It’s a one-stop shop for sharing information about classes and events, not just a place to post silly campus memes and broach chemistry lab romance. Come for the camaraderie, stay for the utility.
“We always knew this would be a place where there was more going on than just posting about parties and cracking jokes,” Solomon said.
By 2023, adults were starting to take Fizz seriously. The company had raised $41.5 million in funding and hired tech investor Rakesh Mathur as CEO. The app was on about a dozen college campuses in 2022, a number that has now grown 20-fold.
Promising both community and utility, at the heart of Fizz is a growing e-commerce platform. Until a few months ago, this platform was just part of the app’s main feed. Now, similar to Facebook Marketplace, Fizz users can upload images of items they want to sell, and interested users can message them through the app and purchase the items. Fizz has not yet monetized this feature.
Thrifty, eco-conscious and small-item-loving Gen Z favors secondhand resale platforms, and despite helping to fuel the rise of influencers, they’re a generation that eschews luxury items in favor of authenticity. Solomon said they’re part of a generation that wants sentimentality, or at least a good story, for their possessions, despite the growth of e-commerce platforms like TikTok Shop.
“I’ve spoken to a lot of college students over the past few years and I’ve found that they really value the peer-to-peer element, meaning that the items they have have sentimental value, but they’re willing to part with them,” he said.
Charles Lindsay, an associate professor of marketing at the University at Buffalo’s School of Business, believes that this nuanced emotional inclination towards the platform is what differentiates Fizz from other e-commerce competitors: Meaningful connections are key to keeping people loyal to online communities, which will help Fizz retain and grow its strong user base.
“We have our own independent, built-in, passionate group of advocates who emotionally and socially interact with us and relate to us,” Lindsay told Fortune. “Our social media platform is uniquely different from other social media platforms, and that’s why they use us.”
“Anti-Facebook”
A social media site aimed solely at college students? A promise to connect diverse academic communities? Fizz sounds a lot like another platform founded 20 years ago with the same mission, Lindsay says. Facebook’s initial momentum took it to 1 million users in its first year, but it now has 3 billion monthly active users, which has both contributed greatly to its success and moved it further away from its original goal.
“It’s just so big, and I think people take advantage of it because it’s so big,” Lindsay says, “and there’s not really a social-emotional connection to it anymore.”
But Fizz’s success as a startup and fast-growing e-commerce platform suggests that you don’t necessarily need to emulate Facebook’s rapid growth if you want to be successful, Lindsay argues. “In some ways, Fizz is 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 still delivering on that promise,” Lindsay said.
Fizz has experienced growing pains that have diluted its promise of building healthy communities. Last month, it caused uproar at a Vermont high school after students used the app to mock students with disabilities and make speculations about teachers’ personal lives. The president of the University of North Carolina plans to ban the app and similar up-and-coming social media sites over concerns about cyberbullying.
Solomon said the University of North Carolina’s 16-school system never had Fizz on its campus, and the Vermont high school was one of two of the 300 communities the company had to close due to behavioral concerns.To combat bullying and harassment, Fizz has AI that removes 75% of content that violates its community guidelines, and 4,000 volunteer moderators.
While the app risks becoming an echo chamber for abuse, Solomon argues that its intimate environment with only other students makes users feel safer than buying from strangers on other peer-to-peer platforms. Not only does the app hope to be a beacon of safety for the community, its future ultimately depends on it.
“People want efficiency,” Solomon said, “and they want to buy and sell from people they can trust.”
