Teddy Solomon, founder of Fizz, is a creator visibly proud of the application he created. The platform connects university students by allowing them to share experiences, ask questions or share photos. He says he has brought the “social” component back to social media.
“Facebook is already dead to Generation Z [jovens nascidos entre 1996 e 2012] and it is no longer what it was originally supposed to be. Instagram and TikTok became entertainment-oriented platforms, dedicated to short videos, without sociability. And Generation Z is basically saying that they want an authentic space where they can connect”, says the founder and CEO.
Teddy was born in Scottsdale, in the US state of Arizona, and when he was in high school, he dreamed of being a sports journalist, more specifically to cover college basketball. When it was time to go to university, he chose Stanfordone of the most prestigious. However, like many other young people, Teddy, aged 18 at the time, ended up not experiencing the university experience in person, due to the coronavirus pandemic. covid-19.
Fizz was launched four years ago
Piaras Ó Mòdeach / Web Summit / Sportsfile
“We were told we couldn’t go to campus because of the pandemic, so I met a guy named Ashton, joined a Zoom call with him and 25 others and convinced them to move to Scottsdale. And that’s how Fizz was born, which is a private space for college students to connect,” he explains.
Referring to the TikTok e Instagramwhich Teddy points out have lost the function of a ‘social’ network by favoring entertainment (in the form of videos) instead of interaction between users who know each other, the young man points out that “previously, the majority of content presented by these platforms came from friends, but now only 7% of the content comes from friends, the remaining 93% comes from people or pages we don’t even know”. Furthermore, only 1% of users actively create content on these platforms, compared to the 35% who do so on Fizz.
“So what Fizz did was jump in the direction of what we think is a truly social network, and we believe that shared experience is the way to achieve that”, he indicates. “If you are a student at Stanford, you know that you will connect with other Stanford students that you see in the hallways, in class, at a party… and the beauty of this is that you can be the most popular student or never leave your room and have access to the same information.”
Fizz
Developers have been expanding the scope of Fizz, so that it goes beyond campus university students and can be useful to other people (with Fizz Global). However, the application was designed by students and for students, so the email used to create a new account is, for students, university studentsthe institutional email, guaranteeing other users that this account – usually presented anonymously – belongs to another student from the same institution.
“We were 19 years old and we were building a platform for our friends, not trying to build a company, and effectively what we created was almost a reincarnation of Facebook 20 years later”
In order to make his product known to students, Teddy visited 260 universities with donuts. “I made friends with a security guard on a Pepperdine University campus and sneaked in with a thousand donuts inside. They weren’t happy about it.”
“Then I met with around 40 people and asked them to distribute the donuts and tell the story of the application”, he reports. “Within just three hours the app had already taken over Pepperdine and the police were chasing me around campus. And by giving donuts to college students we became the biggest college social network.”
In fact, it was the innovative model advertisingalso focused on the interests of younger people, which surprised brands by increasing the number of clicks on their advertisements from 0.5% to 2% – common values on other platforms – to 4% to 18% on Fizz. “One company even reported a conversion rate of 25%, compared to the normal 1% Target”, he points out.
“We want to make sure that we work with brands that are synergistic with our users. Firstly because if the PerplexityFor example, if you’re offering Perplexity Pro to students for free, they’ll click. Because it is synergistic with your experience. And second, we help brands write the ad in a way that students understand, because they’re often so far removed from Gen Z that they can’t do it that way.”
Fizz
This year, the application surpassed the Reddit on the App Store. Teddy attributes the success to the team’s youthfulness. “We surpassed Reddit in tops from the App Store this fall and a big reason for that is the fact that they are building for Millennials (1980-1995) and generations above. They are building communities based on interests that say nothing to this new generation that has grown up online”.
“If you like the Taylor Swift You can join a subreddit about Taylor Swift, but that’s not what we’re building. If you’re a student at Babson College and you come to college not knowing anyone, not knowing what’s going on, well, you use Fizz to connect with people, make friends, build relationships and find out what’s going on on campus.”
The CEO reveals that it is necessary to have Generation Z DNA in order to reach them. “Half of our company is Gen Z, I would say, and we built for our generation. You have to have Gen Z DNA and you have to meet consumers where they are, meet them. Because Gen Z is diverse, but they face similar problems.”
Text written by André Sousa and edited by Pedro Miguel Coelho