Fizz, the anonymous Gen Z social app, offers a marketplace for school nerds

Teddy Solomon just moved into an unused area in Palo Alto, so he turns to the Stanford family on Fizz to decorate their room.

“Whenever I approach someone to buy something, I ask them about the marketplace, because I’m really curious about their experience,” Solomon, co-founder of Fizz, told TechCrunch. He is especially concerned about a $100 TV he got from a graduate student who was about to leave for the summer.

“Did you tell him who you are?” Rakesh Mathur, a longtime entrepreneur and investor, requested that Solomon make him CEO of Fizz.

“Yeah, because I asked him 100 questions about the market,” Solomon shrugged.

When TechCrunch first met the Stanford dropout co-founders of Fizz in 2022, the anonymous social media platform — which has separate communities for individual university campuses — was at the top of some accumulation schools. Now, the app is operating on 240 college campuses and 60 advanced colleges, and the workforce has expanded to 30 full-time employees and 4,000 volunteer mediators in schools. Fizz has raised $41.5 million across multiple investment rounds, bolstering the app’s growing presence on campus.

Also in the initial conversation, Solomon discussed Fizz’s plan for a marketplace where students could buy and sell things like clothes, textbooks, motorcycles, and more. School students are constantly making most of these transactions as they move between dorms at every pace, and they probably want some reimbursement for their equally worn-out calculus textbook.

Solomon believes there is a huge market potential for a regional, Gen Z-focused shopping and promotions platform.

“There’s kind of that stigma around, like, if I sell something on Craigslist, I could get kidnapped,” Solomon said. “And Facebook Marketplace… Gen Z is not using Facebook.”

His bowing seems correct. The quality of the market at many of Fizz’s campuses began at a pace between March and May, allowing for rapid sales to be expected at the end of the semester. Solomon said Fizz has posted 50,000 listings on the platform, with 150,000 sent in DM round pieces. Probably the most common division is clothing, which accounts for about 25% of the inventory.

However, overcoming Facebook Market will not be so easy. Some young Facebook users say they stay on the platform just to market. Although there are fewer Gen Z customers on Facebook, Meta is working on reclaiming that idea of ​​the week.

Billing in Fizz is not yet integrated, so customers are responsible for controlling their own gross sales. Solomon said Fizz could potentially develop a payment structure to make the marketplace more user-friendly, but he is not interested in monetization yet. Past Fizz is also quite rich in investing, this old Silicon Valley progress of prioritizing expansion over profit is not possible within the then-wealth of social media.

Fizz is also completely anonymous in the market. However, to first access a faculty’s Fizz family in the playground, you must ensure a faculty electronic mail account. So, while there’s always the chance of meeting a stranger in the future – even if they go to your college – customers appear to be less ambivalent about purchasing from their classmates.

“One statistic we really liked that we’ve been seeing lately is that on average, every seller has two people reach out to them before they sell,” Solomon said. “If you know they’re in the dorm next to yours, you have no reason to find out if they’re legit or not. It’s very simple.”

However, unlike the anonymous social platforms that follow it, Fizz has struggled to maintain a cover status on all of its premises. In one high-profile case, a Fitz family wreaked havoc on a high school as the scholars hid behind anonymity to humiliate and torment alternative scholars and the school.

“We have two communities that we have voluntarily closed due to the response from parents and administrators,” Solomon said. Since then, Fizz has refocused its efforts on content moderation. Within months, Fizz paid for part-time student mediators to observe their communities. Now, the company has a dedicated group of employees who work on compromise and security, and it is using the next generation of OpenAI to make its automated moderation more powerful.

However, these efforts are probably not enough to reduce the views. On anonymous apps, college administrators are exposed to clearly serious game-playing situations – remember YikYak? The president of North Carolina College, which has 16 campuses, introduced a plan to ban anonymous apps like Fizz, Mumble and SideChat from the college. Therefore, those students will not be able to purchase pre-owned textbooks from Fizz’s marketplace.

“We are very aware that as an anonymous, Gen Z platform, moderation must be at our core,” Mathur told TechCrunch.

TechCrunch reached out to the Fizz family of a college student. Scholars posted about sex and therapy — these topics are allowed on Fizz — but they weren’t threatening every option or promoting harmful discussion. However this is only one family out of the load. Fizz’s pace in growing its content moderation workforce is promising, as even the largest, most resourceful social platforms still struggle with toxicity.

Fizz’s argument in favor of the anonymous nature of the platform is that it encourages scholars to understand how they are really feeling – when a student sees a post about how another society treats an exam. If someone is stressed or socially victimized, they will do so. Know that they are not alone in their studies. The upside is that subscribers will probably find some great campus-specific memes. Or, now that there is a market, they could possibly rate a great business on TV.

UPDATE, 7/3/24, 4:17PM ET: Dresses are 25% off Fizz listings.