Teddy Solomon knew he was onto something when he visited a Palo Alto shop to return his bike at the end of a school year at Stanford. Trying to make a couple bucks off his beat-up two-wheeler, Solomon was surprisingly turned away from the shop. “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 told him. Unbeknownst to the bike-shop worker, Solomon, 22, and a Stanford dropout, had cofounded Fizz, an anonymous social media app for Gen Zers that is active across 240 college campuses and 60 high schools.
Built as a way for young people to exchange information about events and school culture, Fizz promised to be the common denominator among students finding their footing on a new campus. The app, still evolving to meet the needs of its audience, just rolled out a marketplace feature. Since the marketplace’s March to May rollout, the feature has over 50,000 item listings, which has generated over 150,000 direct messages across users.
“It all boils back to the fact that there were peer-to-peer commerce platforms before,” Solomon told Fortune . “They no longer really exist on college campuses in a lot of ways, and they no longer exist within Gen Z.” That generation of college students and young professionals have certainly abandoned sites like Facebook, which has been outranked by Instagram, TikTok, a.
