Teddy Solomon simply moved to a brand new home in Palo Alto, so he turned to the Stanford neighborhood on Fizz to furnish his room.
“Every time I show up to buy something from somebody, I grill them about the marketplace, because I’m really curious about their experience,” Solomon, a co-founder of Fizz, informed TechCrunch. He’s notably psyched concerning the $100 TV he acquired from a grad scholar who was about to maneuver out for the summer season.
“Did you tell him who you were?” requested Rakesh Mathur, the longtime entrepreneur and investor that Solomon introduced in to be CEO of Fizz.
“Yeah, because I asked him like, 100 questions about the marketplace,” Solomon deadpanned.
When TechCrunch first met Fizz’s Stanford dropout co-founders in 2022, the nameless social media platform – which has separate communities for particular person faculty campuses – was solely at a couple of dozen faculties. Now, the app is working on 240 faculty campuses and 60 excessive colleges, and the workforce has expanded to 30 full-time employees and 4,000 volunteer moderators throughout colleges. Fizz has raised $41.5 million throughout a number of funding rounds, powering the app’s rising presence in campus tradition.
Even in these earliest conversations, Solomon talked about Fizz’s plans to open a market, the place college students should purchase and promote issues like garments, textbooks, bikes and extra. Faculty college students are sometimes making these sorts of transactions since they’re shifting between dorms yearly, and perhaps they need some a reimbursement for his or her calmly used calculus textbook.
Solomon thinks that the marketplace for a neighborhood, Gen Z-focused shopping for and promoting platform is huge open.
“There’s that kind of stigma around, like, if I sell something on Craigslist, I might get kidnapped,” Solomon mentioned. “And Facebook marketplace… Gen Z is not using Facebook.”
His hunch appears to be correct. {The marketplace} function rolled out throughout Fizz’s lots of of campuses between March and Might of this 12 months, in preparation for the predictable end-of-semester rush to promote. Solomon mentioned Fizz has had 50,000 listings posted on the platform, with 150,000 DMs despatched round gadgets. The preferred class is ladies’s clothes, which quantities to about 75% of listings.
However Fb market received’t be a straightforward competitor to beat. Some younger Fb customers say they solely go on the platform for {the marketplace}. Though fewer Gen Z customers are on Fb, Meta is engaged on recapturing that era’s consideration.
Funds aren’t but built-in in Fizz, so customers are chargeable for navigating their gross sales. Solomon mentioned Fizz might construct out a cost construction to make {the marketplace} extra user-friendly, however he isn’t fascinated with monetization but. Whereas Fizz could also be wealthy in enterprise funding, this basic Silicon Valley transfer of prioritizing development over revenue isn’t as possible within the subsequent era of social media.
Fizz is totally nameless, even on {the marketplace}. However to get onto a college’s Fizz neighborhood within the first place, it is advisable to confirm a college e mail account. So, whereas there’s at all times a danger in assembly up with a stranger – even when they go to your faculty – customers appear much less hesitant about shopping for from their classmates.
“One of the statistics we really love that we were looking over the other day is that on average, every seller has two people reach out to them before they sell,” Solomon mentioned. “If you know they’re in the dorm next door to you, you don’t have any reason to figure out if they’re legitimate or not. It’s pretty easy.”
However as with the nameless social platforms which have come earlier than it, Fizz has struggled to keep up a protected setting on all of its campuses. In a single high-profile case, a Fizz neighborhood wreaked havoc on a highschool, as college students hid behind anonymity to disgrace and torment different college students and school.
“We’ve had two communities that we’ve voluntarily shut down just because of feedback from parents and administrators,” Solomon mentioned. Since then, Fizz has refocused its dedication on content material moderation. Previously, Fizz paid part-time scholar moderators to observe their communities. Now, the corporate has devoted employees that work on belief and security, and it’s utilizing know-how from OpenAI to make its automated moderation extra strong.
These efforts will not be sufficient to mitigate issues, although. On nameless apps, faculty directors have seen horrible eventualities play out earlier than – bear in mind YikYak? The president of the College of North Carolina, which has sixteen campuses, introduced plans to ban nameless apps like Fizz, Whisper and Sidechat from the varsity. So, these college students received’t have the ability to purchase pre-owned textbooks on Fizz’s market.
“We’re very aware that as an anonymous, Gen Z platform, moderation has to be our core,” Mathur informed TechCrunch.
TechCrunch accessed one college’s Fizz neighborhood. College students posted about intercourse and medicines – these matters are allowed on Fizz – however weren’t bullying one another or sparking dangerous dialogue. However this is only one neighborhood out of lots of. Whereas Fizz’s momentum in rising its content material moderation workforce is promising, even the biggest, most resourced social platforms nonetheless wrestle with toxicity.
Fizz’s argument in favor of the nameless nature of the platform is that it encourages college students to open up about how they’re actually feeling – when a scholar sees posts about how different folks could be stressing over an examination or struggling socially, they’ll know they aren’t alone in these experiences. On the brighter aspect, customers may discover some nice campus-specific memes. Or, now that there’s a market, they could have the ability to rating an amazing deal on a TV.
