Teddy Solomon recently moved to a new home in Palo Alto, so he turned to the Stanford community in Phys to furnish his room.
“Every time I go to buy something from someone, I ask them questions about the market, because I’m really curious about their experience,” Solomon, the Fizz co-founder, told TechCrunch. He’s particularly happy with the TV he got for $100 from a graduate student who was about to move out for the summer.
“Did you tell him who you are?” asked Rakesh Mathur, the businessman and investor whom Suleiman brought on to be CEO of Phas.
“Yes, because I asked him about 100 questions about the market,” Suleiman said with a blank face.
When TechCrunch first met the Stanford dropout founders of Fizz in 2022, the anonymous social media platform — which has separate communities for individual campuses — was only available at about a dozen colleges. Now, the app is on 240 campuses and 60 high schools, and the team has grown to 30 full-time employees and 4,000 volunteer moderators across all schools. Fizz has raised $41.5 million across multiple funding rounds, further cementing the app’s growing presence in campus culture.
Even in those early conversations, Solomon mentioned Viz’s plans to open a marketplace, where students could buy and sell things like clothes, textbooks, bikes, and more. College students often do this kind of transaction because they move between dorms every year, and perhaps want to get some money back for that calculus book they used a little bit.
Suleiman believes the market is wide open for a local buy-and-sell platform that focuses on Gen Z.
“There’s a kind of stigma, like if I sell something on Craigslist, I might get kidnapped,” Solomon said. “And the Facebook market… Gen Z doesn’t use Facebook.”
His hunch seems to be correct. The marketplace feature was rolled out to hundreds of Fizz branches between March and May this year, in preparation for the expected end-of-term rush. Fizz has 50,000 listings posted on the platform, with 150,000 direct messages sent about items, Suleiman said. The most popular category is clothing, which makes up about 25% of listings.
But Facebook’s market won’t be an easy contender to beat. Some younger Facebook users say they Just go to the platform to the market. Although The number of Generation Z users on Facebook has become lessMeta is working on Recovery This generation’s interest.
Payments aren’t yet integrated into Fizz, so users are responsible for managing their own sales. Soliman said Fizz may build a payment structure to make the marketplace more user-friendly, but he’s not looking to make a profit yet. While Fizz may be rich with venture funding, this classic Silicon Valley move of prioritizing growth over profit isn’t applicable to the next generation of social media.
The Fizz app is completely anonymous, even in the marketplace. But to get into the school Fizz community in the first place, you have to verify your school email account. So while there’s always a risk of meeting a stranger — even if they go to your school — users seem less hesitant to buy from their classmates.
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“One statistic we really liked and were looking at the other day is that on average, two people contact each seller before they sell,” Suleiman said. “If you know they live next door to you, you have no reason to know if they’re legitimate or not. It’s very easy.”
But as with the anonymous social platforms before it, Fizz has struggled to maintain a safe environment across its branches. In one notable case, a Fizz community shut down its website. Wrecked a high schoolwhere students hid behind their identities to discredit and harass other students and faculty.
“We voluntarily shut down two communities just because we got feedback from parents and administrators,” Suleiman said. Since then, Fizz has refocused its commitment to content moderation. In the past, Fizz paid part-time student moderators to monitor its communities. Now, the company has dedicated staff working on trust and safety, and it’s using OpenAI technology to make its automated moderation more robust.
But these efforts may not be enough to ease concerns. When it comes to anonymous apps, school administrators have seen nightmare scenarios before — remember YikYak? The president of the University of North Carolina, which has 16 campuses, recently announced plans to ban anonymous apps like Fizz, Whisper, and Sidechat from the school. That means those students won’t be able to buy used textbooks on the Fizz marketplace.
“We are very aware that as an anonymous platform for Gen Z, moderation has to be at the core of our business,” Mathur told TechCrunch.
TechCrunch gained access to a university’s Fizz community. Students posted about sex and drugs — topics that are allowed on Fizz — but they didn’t bully each other or spark harmful conversations. But that’s just one community among hundreds. And while Fizz’s momentum in growing its content moderation team is promising, even the largest and most resourced social platforms still struggle with toxicity.
Viz’s argument for the platform’s anonymous nature is that it encourages students to be open and express their true feelings — when a student sees posts about how others might be stressed about an exam or struggling socially, they’ll realize they’re not alone in these experiences. On the bright side, users might find some great campus memes. Or, now that there’s a marketplace, they might be able to score a great deal on TV.
Updated July 3, 2024, 4:17 p.m. ET: Clothing makes up 25% of Fizz’s listings.