Teddy Solomon knew he was onto one thing when he visited a Palo Alto store to return his bike on the finish of a faculty yr at Stanford. Attempting to make a pair bucks off his beat-up two-wheeler, Solomon was surprisingly turned away from the store.
“They basically told me straight up, ‘Go onto Fizz to sell your bike,’” Solomon recalled. “You’re gonna get a much better value for it. We will scam you here because everyone is trying to sell their bikes,” they informed him.
Unbeknownst to the bike-shop employee, Solomon, 22, and a Stanford dropout, had cofounded Fizz, an nameless social media app for Gen Zers that’s lively throughout 240 faculty campuses and 60 excessive faculties. Constructed as a method for younger individuals to trade details about occasions and faculty tradition, Fizz promised to be the frequent denominator amongst college students discovering their footing on a brand new campus. The app, nonetheless evolving to satisfy the wants of its viewers, simply rolled out a market characteristic. For the reason that market’s March to Could rollout, the characteristic has over 50,000 merchandise listings, which has generated over 150,000 direct messages throughout customers.
“It all boils back to the fact that there were peer-to-peer commerce platforms before,” Solomon informed Fortune. “They no longer really exist on college campuses in a lot of ways, and they no longer exist within Gen Z.”
That era of school college students and younger professionals have actually deserted websites like Fb, which has been outranked by Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube as Gen Z’s social media platforms of alternative. However that doesn’t imply that the platform is out of date. Fb’s 40 million day by day younger grownup customers ages 18 to 29 within the U.S. and Canada have lingered on the location, many for the sole goal of looking {the marketplace}. They’ve helped enhance Fb Market to 4 occasions the month-to-month customers as Amazon, and it’s on its option to surpassing eBay for resale e-commerce’s high spot within the U.S.
However Fizz isn’t attempting to duplicate Fb’s bumper numbers on its option to success. As a substitute, the location’s budding market makes the argument for a brand new wave of social media past superficial “likes” and interactions. Solomon needs Fizz to be a spot for a web based meet-cute or the place frat boys and dorm shut-ins discover frequent floor by way of the sale of a used textbook—an oasis for group that’s as purposeful as it’s feel-good. It’s a objective that is likely to be as lofty because the one a younger Mark Zuckerberg made for “TheFacebook” in his personal transient faculty profession.
“We’re our own entity,” Solomon stated. “And we’ve seen that all of these legacy platforms—Facebook Marketplace included—are really falling out of favor with Gen 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 rapidly deserted group chat for Stanford freshman—created Fizz in 2021. Victims of pandemic-era distant studying, the thought for the social media website was to construct a platform for connection and combat the era’s loneliness epidemic, Solomon defined. The promise of anonymity amongst its customers would forestall cliques from forming and dissolve the stress amongst college students to impress each other. Requiring customers to login with an educational e-mail handle, Fizz was a protected house for simply college students.
However the app additionally promised utility: a one-stop store to trade details about courses and occasions on high of being a spot to slap frivolous campus-specific memes or gush a few chemistry lab crush. Come for the comradery, keep for the practicality.
“We always knew it was going to be a place where a lot more than just posting about parties and cracking jokes happened,” Solomon stated.
By 2023, grown-ups began to take Fizz significantly. The corporate raised $41.5 million in funding, and tech investor Rakesh Mathur stepped in as CEO. The app was on about a dozen faculty campuses in 2022, a determine that has elevated 20-fold right now.
On the nexus of Fizz’s promise of each group and utility is its budding e-commerce platform, which, till months in the past, was simply a part of the app’s principal feed. Now, like Fb Market, Fizz customers can add photographs of one thing they need to promote, and events can message them by way of the app to buy the merchandise. Fizz has not but monetized the characteristic.
Gen Z—with a love of thrifting, environmental consciousness, and knickknacks—has embraced second-hand resale platforms. It’s a era that, regardless of contributing to the rise of influencers, has opted for authenticity and eschewed luxurious items. It’s part of the era that, regardless of the expansion of e-commerce platforms like TikTok Store, are in search of sentimentality—or no less than story—behind their belongings, Solomon stated.
“Through talking to a lot of college students over the past couple of years, what I found from them is they really value the peer-to-peer component, meaning there is an emotional value to the items that you have, but you are willing to give them up,” he stated.
It’s this refined emotional bent to the platform that Charles Lindsey, affiliate professor of promoting at College at Buffalo Faculty of Administration, believes can separate it from e-commerce opponents. Significant connections are the important thing to retaining individuals loyal to the net group, which, in flip, helps Fizz retain and develop a robust base of customers.
“We have our own standalone, dedicated built-in constituency group there that are interacting with us and identify with us emotionally and socially,” Lindsey informed Fortune. “Because something about our social media platform is differentiated enough from the other social media platforms that they use us.”
The ‘anti-Facebook’
A social media website tailor-made only for faculty college students? The promise of connecting a disparate tutorial group? Fizz sounds an terrible lot like one other platform based 20 years in the past with the identical mission, Lindsey stated. Whereas Fb’s preliminary traction allowed it to attain 1 million customers in its first yr, its now 3 billion month-to-month lively person base has each clearly contributed to its success—and introduced it farther away from its authentic objective.
“It’s just so big, and people, I think, use it because it’s so big,” Lindsey stated. “And there’s not quite the social emotional attachment anymore.”
However Fizz’s success as a startup and a burgeoning e-commerce platform shouldn’t essentially mimic Fb’s meteoric rise if it needs to seek out success, Lindsey argued. “It’s the anti-Facebook in a way,” he stated.
“There is definitely a tension between that value proposition, and how does a social media platform like Fizz grow while still keeping its promise,” Lindsey stated.
Fizz has skilled rising pains that dilute its promise of healthful group constructing. Final month, Fizz disrupted a Vermont highschool after college students used the app to mock disabled college students and speculate on academics’ personal lives. College of North Carolina’s president plans to ban the app and related budding social media websites over cyberbullying issues.
Solomon stated UNC’s 16-school system by no means had Fizz on its campuses to start with, and the Vermont highschool was certainly one of two communities out of 300 the corporate has needed to shut down over conduct issues. To deal with bullying and harassment, Fizz has AI that removes 75% of content material that violates group pointers, in addition to 4,000 volunteer moderators.
Although the app dangers turning into an echo chamber for mistreatment, Solomon argues its intimate setting amongst solely different college students makes customers really feel safer than shopping for objects from strangers on different peer-to-peer platforms. The app not solely hopes to be a beacon of group safety, its future will in the end depend on it.
“People want something efficient,” Solomon stated. “And people want to buy and sell from people that they trust.”
