Fizz, the anonymous social app for Gen Z, adds a marketplace for college students

Teddy Solomon had just moved into a new house in Palo Alto, so he turned to the Stanford community on Fizz to help furnish his room.

“Whenever I go in to buy something from someone, I ask them about the market because I’m really curious about their experience,” Solomon, the Fizz co-founder, told TechCrunch. He’s particularly excited about a $100 TV he got from a college student who was moving out for the summer.

“Did you tell him who you are?” asked Rakesh Mathur, a longtime entrepreneur and investor whom Solomon hired as Fizz’s CEO.

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

When TechCrunch first met Fizz’s Stanford co-founders in 2022, the anonymous social media platform—which has separate communities for individual school campuses—was only available on about a dozen colleges. Now, the app is on 240 college campuses and 60 high schools, and the team has expanded to 30 full-time employees and 4,000 volunteer moderators at schools. Fizz has raised $41.5 million across multiple funding rounds, fueling the app’s growing presence in campus culture.

In those earliest conversations, Solomon mentioned Fizz’s plans to open a marketplace where students could buy and sell clothes, textbooks, bikes, and more. College students often do this kind of business because they move between dorms each year and might want to get some money back for their gently used calculus textbook.

Solomon believes the market for a local buying and selling platform aimed at Gen Z is very open.

“There’s a certain stigma, like if I sell something on Craigslist, I could get kidnapped,” Solomon said. “And the Facebook marketplace… Generation Z doesn’t use Facebook.”

His hunch seems to be spot on. The marketplace feature was rolled out across hundreds of Fizz campuses between March and May of this year, in preparation for the predictable end-of-semester sales rush. Solomon said Fizz had 50,000 listings posted on the platform, with 150,000 private messages sent about the items. The most popular category is clothing, which accounts for about 25% of listings.

But Facebook’s marketplace won’t be an easy competitor to beat. Some younger Facebook users say they’re only on the platform because of the marketplace. Even though there are fewer Gen Z users on Facebook, Meta is working to win back the attention of this generation.

Payments aren’t yet integrated into Fizz, so users are responsible for navigating the sale. Solomon said Fizz may create a payment structure to make the marketplace more user-friendly, but he’s not yet thinking about monetization. While Fizz may be rich in venture capital funding, that classic Silicon Valley move of prioritizing growth over profit isn’t as feasible in the next generation of social media.

Fizz is completely anonymous, even on the marketplace. But to get into the school’s Fizz community, you first have to verify your school’s email account. So while there’s always the risk of meeting a stranger — even if they go to your school — users seem less hesitant about buying from their classmates.

“One of the stats that we really like and looked at recently is that on average, each seller has two people approaching them before they sell their property,” Solomon said. “If you know they’re living in the dorm next door, you don’t have any reason to wonder if they’re legit or not. It’s pretty simple.”

But like the anonymous social media platforms that came before it, Fizz has struggled to maintain a safe environment on all of its campuses. In one high-profile case, the Fizz community wreaked havoc at a high school when students hid behind anonymity to embarrass and bully other students and staff.

“We had two communities that we voluntarily closed down just because of feedback from parents and admins,” Solomon said. Since then, Fizz has refocused its efforts on content moderation. In the past, Fizz paid part-time student moderators to monitor their communities. Now, the company has a dedicated staff that works on trust and safety, and is using OpenAI technology to make its automated moderation more robust.

But those efforts may not be enough to assuage concerns. School administrators have seen scary scenarios before when it comes to anonymous apps — remember Yikes? The president of the University of North Carolina, which has 16 campuses, announced plans to ban anonymous apps like Fizz, Whisper, and Sidechat from the school. So those students won’t be able to buy used textbooks on the Fizz marketplace.

“We are fully aware that as an anonymous platform for Gen Z, moderation has to be our top priority,” Mathur told TechCrunch.

TechCrunch gained access to one university’s Fizz community. Students posted about sex and drugs—those topics are allowed on Fizz—but didn’t harass each other or spark harmful dialogue. But that’s just one community among hundreds. While Fizz’s momentum in growing its content moderation team is promising, even the largest, most resourceful social platforms still struggle with toxicity.

Fizz argues for the platform’s anonymity that it encourages students to open up about how they’re really feeling—when a student sees posts about how other people might be stressed about exams or struggling socially, they know they’re not alone in their experiences. On the brighter side, users can find great memes about a particular campus. Or, now that the market is up, they might be able to score a great deal on a TV.

Updated July 3, 2024, 4:17 PM ET: Clothing makes up 25% of Fizz’s offerings.