• by Colin Kirkland , Yesterday

Teddy Solomon was a Stanford freshman when he and his classmate Ashton Cofer decided to build a social network dedicated to the 99% of things that are not seen on typical social media platforms. 

They envisioned something unlike a news service (Twitter, now X) or entertainment hub (such as TikTok or Instagram), and not an interest-based ecosystem (Reddit). Instead, they wanted their app to be practical, social in the truest sense, and built for Generation Z. 

What they came up with, and dropped out of college to pursue full-time in 2021, was Fizz: a hyperlocal app that college students can sign up for using their student emails that allows them to anonymously share thoughts with their fellow classmates.

Fizz became a sudden hit, fueling chitchat among peers about campus life. Users also had the ability to buy and sell goods using a Fizz marketplace. 

Solomon describes Fizz as “a bridge between anonymity and identity.” Regardless of whether “you’re the president of the top frat on campus, or if you are the person who never leaves your room, you have access to the same level of content creation,” he says. “You know where the party’s at; it’s all accessible to everybody.”

This strategy of democratizing content creation has resulted in 30% of Fizz’s weekly active users regularly creating content -- which is not an “incredible waterfall in Europe,” or a wayward post in a “1200 person group chat," he says. The app currently touts over 25 million posts with no creator incentivization. 

Since its launch in 2021, Fizz has spread to hundreds of college campuses in the U.S. and five months ago began testing a national, cross-campus product that connects students beyond their individual universities -- an update that has boosted the platform’s daily active users by 50%. 

Fizz recently began running native ads, but the company has zero marketing budget.

Marketing Daily News sat down with Solomon, the 23-year-old CEO, in his company’s new Soho offices to see how Fizz is approaching its ad business as the app continues to grow.  

“We’re attacking our ads business in a different way from all other social platforms,” Solomon says. Advised by people to wait to introduce ads until Fizz reached a certain number of active users, Solomon says he didn’t want to wait too long to monetize.

When the company began to experiment with ads about six months ago, Solomon embraced the challenge of using ads to enhance the user experience. 

“If we specifically work with companies, products and brands that are deeply synergistic with our base…we know we can give our users offerings on products they’re going to otherwise be getting, and introduce them to products that will make their lives easier,” he says.

Fizz has worked with AI search engine Perplexity and study tool Quizlet, which both ran ads offering students free premium services to use on their finals.

During March Madness, Fizz also ran ads for Kalshi, a betting platform that provided users with the ability to trade on the NCAA tournament in states where they would otherwise be unable to. 

Solomon did not see the point in waiting to monetize because of Fizz’s unmatched reach on college students across the country: “If you’re a company and you want to reach 95% of students at Stanford or Howard or Chapman or Tulane, SMU, Rice, Vanderbilt, Duke -– wherever it might be -- we already have all of them on the app.” 

Since these users would graduate and be gone in a few years, building an ad business as soon as possible made sense. Solomon says Fizz quickly built an extensive waitlist of potential brand partners -- “everything from pre-seed companies all the way up to a company worth $2 to $3 trillion.”

While Solomon was not able to name specific ad partners due to NDAs, he told MediaPost the company is currently working with brands across different industries, such as product and food delivery, creator and job recruitment, travel, financial trading, dating apps, academic tools and more. 

Regardless of the brand, Solomon says that every partner it has worked with so far has shared the same feedback with Fizz: “We’ve never had the ability to go and penetrate a college campus…[or] target in this capacity.”

Compared to running ads on other major social platforms like TikTok or Meta, where advertisers typically see between a .5% and 2% click-through-rate (CTR), Solomon says that on Fizz between 4% and 18% of unique users tend to click on the ad being delivered.

One brand in particular, a major delivery company, reported that about 25% of users who clicked its ad converted to actual sign ups, compared to the 1% it typically sees on Meta. 

As for appearance, Fizz ads are natively placed at the top of the main feed. The company now works with one brand per day, allowing the brand to choose how many and which types of schools it wants to target. Fizz’s current ad machine customizes each ad based on the school each user attends. 

To avoid overwhelming users with ads -- what Bluesky CEO Jay Graber has coined “enshitification” -- Fizz is moving slowly, collecting user feedback during campus visits and saving its Series B funding, 80% of which is still in the bank. Solomon and his team have visited hundreds of U.S. colleges in person since launching the company in 2021.

Solomon says the company has no sales team, and "no person that is full time dedicated to monetization or to ads." He adds: "We're just here basically figuring out how we can make the user experience better and how we can bring revenue into the company.” So far, he says, the revenue has been significant. 

Another strategic move Solomon recently made in an effort to build Fizz’s ad business involves moving his entire 23-person team from Palo Alto to New York in order to get closer to potential ad partners and to settle into an area with a high concentration of college campuses, young people, consumer talent and other consumer social startups such as Partiful and Posh. 

With the upcoming launch of “Global Fizz,” which will ultimately push the platform past college campuses and into a much larger pool of Gen Z users, Solomon wants to keep the expansion “as controlled as possible,” while keeping the app “as native as possible.” 

As Fizz prepares to go global, Solomon’s team will continue its efforts to add media types to ad placements and other logistics. 

“We believe we’ve built something that’s not just applicable to schools like Stanford…it’s an entire generation with way more in common than they realize,” says Solomon. “Nobody has solved this for Gen Z, and the big players will not.” 

In response to questions about whether he is concerned about Meta cloning Fizz, Solomon says: “Good luck…they can go try, but there’s zero chance of being able to do it.”