Are you prepared for the next wave of retail disruption? The rules of commerce are being rewritten as you’re listening to this show even, and if you’re still relying on traditional platforms, you may be missing out on what’s next.
Today we’re exploring the future of retail with Teddy Solomon, Co-Founder and COO of Fizz. We’ll dive into the shifting retail habits of Gen Z, the rise of peer-to-peer marketplaces, and how Fizz is building a community-centered platform for this next generation of consumers.
About Teddy Solomon
Teddy Solomon is a Stanford dropout and the co-founder of Fizz, a Gen-Z platform fostering authentic connections on 240 college campuses. Fizz’s newest release, Fizz Marketplace, is satisfying Gen-Z’s hunger for peer-to-peer commerce, a space formerly occupied by eBay and Facebook Marketplace.
Resources
Fizz website: https://www.fizz.social
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Transcript
Greg Kihlstrom:
Are you prepared for the next wave of retail disruption? The rules of commerce are being rewritten as you’re listening to the show even, and if you’re still relying on traditional platforms, you may be missing out on what’s next. Today, we’re exploring the future of retail with Teddy Solomon, co-founder and COO of Fizz. We’re gonna dive into the shifting retail habits of Gen Z, the rise of peer-to-peer marketplaces, and how Fizz is building a community-centered platform for this next generation of consumers. Teddy, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Greg.
Teddy Solomon: Pleasure to be here.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you. I wanted to get started before we dive in here to the topics. If you don’t mind just giving a little background on yourself and your role at Fizz.
Teddy Solomon: Absolutely. My name is Teddy Solomon. I am one of the founders of Fizz. Background on me as I grew up in San Francisco in 2020 started at Stanford Which was in the middle of a global pandemic, obviously You can’t come to campus so I ended up on a zoom call with some incoming Stanford freshmen Met a guy named Ashton and together over the course of about two minutes in a breakout room on zoom we decided to We’re gonna move to Scottsdale, Arizona. There was really no rhyme or reason to doing that. But we convinced 25 Stanford freshmen to move to Scottsdale. And during our freshman year online quickly realized, you know, we’re on Instagram, where you post two highlight reels a year, maybe the 1% of your life. And we’re on a platform called group me in a 1200 person group chat where three people speak. Because the thing with our generation, with Gen Z, is we grew up on social media. You’re expected to present the most perfect version of yourself online. And there was no way to actually present the other 99% of your life, the real moments in your life. So we started to build a community platform called Fizz where you verify with your .edu email and once you’re in, you can post memes, polls, GIFs, links, videos, DM people, the whole nine yards. And with every post, you have the ability to be anonymous, where it removes that social anxiety that existed in that group chat and on Instagram. And over the course of the past many years, we’ve watched it blow up on college campuses. I dropped out of Stanford in late 2021, and here we are today.
Greg Kihlstrom: Wow. Yeah, that’s starting school at the beginning of the pandemic. Hopefully it’s a once in many years thing that will happen or not happen, depending on how you look at it. But no, it’s amazing that you made the most of that. that opportunity as well. So yeah, we’re going to talk about quite a few things related to what you’re doing at Fizz. I also want to start, maybe zoom out a little bit and just talk about the shifting retail habits among Gen Z. You kind of referred to some of the things as far as, you know, growing up on social media and just some of the behaviors. But You know, Gen Z is quickly moving away from platforms like Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, some of those kind of go to places previously. What do you think is driving the shift? And how does a platform like Fizz fit into this changing landscape?
Teddy Solomon: Well, there’s definitely a clear shift in the world of commerce for Gen Z. I think the movement away from platforms like Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace or eBay, it has to do with a couple main areas, one of which being privacy, another one being convenience, another one being safety. And Gen Z really values these things because when you go and buy and sell on Facebook Marketplace, for example, you’re going to be meeting a stranger. In one sense, that’s not private, because this could be somebody that shares no common experience with you. In another sense, it’s not convenient because they could be across the city from you. And it’s also not necessarily safe. You might be meeting somebody that could rob you or something worse than that. You just don’t know on a platform like Facebook Marketplace. And where Fizz jumps in is Fizz is providing people a platform where you know it’s students at your school. So what that ends up giving people is this sense of privacy. It’s just people who share a common experience with me, a sense of convenience, where you might just be going over to the door next door to you to buy and sell an item, and a sense of safety. Because when you know it’s only students at your school, you know you’re not meeting a stranger in real life. And that’s really essential. And Fizz Marketplace was born out of people buying and selling on a platform that was fundamentally a social platform for Gen Z, for college campuses. And what we saw was community is what sparked commerce on Fizz. And that’s why we implemented the Fizz marketplace just about a year ago onto the platform, because we saw such desire to buy and sell in a trusted community, in a private community of just students at your school.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, in maybe in general, then with with retail, what are some of the most notable differences that you’ve seen with with Gen Z? I mean, you know, we talked a little bit about Facebook marketplace and Craigslist, things like that. But, you know, maybe even just, you know, more broadly speaking.
Teddy Solomon: Absolutely. I’d say in terms of retail with Gen Z, there is a pretty strong movement towards peer-to-peer commerce. What we’re seeing is influencer marketing, as an example, it’s very aspirational. And what we see on Fizz Marketplace is people are buying and selling everything from clothing to textbooks to cars to bikes, everything in between. But on the clothing note, clothing makes up 25% of the items on Fizz Marketplace. People would traditionally think, well, I’m just buying clothing on Amazon from influencers that have millions of followers. Well, no, that’s not what we’re seeing. We’re seeing that this is the thrifting generation. We’re seeing that this is a generation of people who take after their peers. And that’s one of the big shifts that we’re seeing in Gen Z commerce.
Greg Kihlstrom: And so to build on that and talk more about peer-to-peer, what does this mean for those brands out there, those sellers out there that are used to doing things in the more traditional way?
Teddy Solomon: I’d say it means for the bigger brands there’s an opportunity here to move away from influencer marketing and really understand that peer-to-peer there’s a revolution around peer-to-peer commerce. But I think for individuals and for smaller brands and for sellers That’s where the real opportunity is here, in that there’s more of a niche market around peer-to-peer, in that there’s more access and convenience to items for smaller brands that don’t have to have a multi-million dollar marketing budget to be able to team up with influencers online. It’s a really great opportunity for your average seller that wants to sell to the person in the dorm next door to you. It is that convenience factor. It’s really important and something that other platforms just have not been able to capitalize on up to this point.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, and so Fizz Marketplace, as you mentioned, launched, and I know it has a lot of categories on it, but it seems like clothing and textbooks are some of the more popular features or categories on there. How do you see other industries adapting to this model? What do you see as kind of up-and-coming categories that might be popular or growing in popularity?
Teddy Solomon: Yeah, we’re actually seeing a lot of different categories of items that are listed. We’re seeing, interestingly enough, the cars are the most searched item for on Fizz Marketplace, which is a little bit counterintuitive on a platform where you’d expect sort of cheaper items to be sold of just your average person on campus. But we’re seeing everything from electronics to collectibles, to clothing, to cars, to bikes. and everything in between. So we’re already seeing that. I think there is a big opportunity here, though, for brands to hop in to Fizz Marketplace. And there’s some sort of B2C play here. Because your average student, they want ease, they want convenience, like I’ve been talking about quite a bit today. They want to be able to just go onto the platform, that they use every day, which is Fizz. They use it for parties, they use it for classes, they use it for anything that’s going on on campus, and be able to accomplish the other needs within their life, such as buying and selling. And the platform Fizz, it started out three years ago as, again, a community social platform. And it’s because we saw people buying and selling on there, it’s because I personally went to Stanford’s bike shop to try to sell my bike, and they told me to sell it on Fizz, that we actually put it into the product. because that was what our users told us to do.
Greg Kihlstrom: So I want to get back to the community and safety aspect, because you brought up some great points about some of those other platforms. There’s certainly been a lot of great experiences on them, but also there’s been some not-so-great experiences. in some ways, not set up really by design to be as safe and transparent and stuff as possible. So as you mentioned, you know, Fizz places a strong emphasis on these values. How does that influence the design and the functionality of the marketplace?
Teddy Solomon: It’s everything. The marketplace and the app on the whole, it’s all built around this idea of credentialed anonymity. It’s not traditional anonymity, but it’s credentialed. So if you’re a student at Stanford to even get into the community, you verify with your .edu email, the same is true at Yale and at Princeton and at Rice and at Howard and all these other schools around the country. And we have very specific community guidelines around our marketplace and the platform on the whole. We’re fortunate to have about 5,000 volunteer moderators across the country who are students at the school keeping our platform safe. And if you go to our website, you can also see that we have guidelines specifically made for our marketplace because our marketplace has to stay private and it has to stay safe. because that is why our users love it. They really, really trust Fizz. They trust that they are in a community with just students at their school. And we have to stay true to that mission and that vision that we had from the get-go, which is to create authentic, intimate communities for Gen Z.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, you mentioned that you’ve expanded quite a bit. You know, my numbers here have at least, you know, 240 college campuses, 50,000 plus listings, 150,000 plus direct messages. So, you know, lots of activity here. What do you attribute this growth and this engagement to?
Teddy Solomon: Yeah, I would definitely say that it has to do with that point of community driving commerce. When we first expanded Fizz to the 200 plus campuses that we’re on right now, we launched a product without a marketplace. And because people were buying and selling already so much on the platform, we then added a tab in. We didn’t do any marketing around it. We just threw a tab onto the platform and said, Hey, let’s see if people use it. And back in spring of this year, we saw that it took off, you know, almost a hundred thousand listings on the platform, hundreds of thousands of direct messages sent on there, uh, just in the marketplace itself. We’ve had 20 million posts made on the platform on the whole. And it really comes down to the fact that we walked right into a white space on campuses. an empty space where people are very disgruntled with the legacy platforms of the past. And when you walk into an empty space, and you are Gen Z, you’re building for Gen Z, and you’re listening to Gen Z, you can create something really special. And that is what I’ve been able to see firsthand on campuses. It’s that people really resonate with this product and what it is providing for our Gen Z users.
Greg Kihlstrom: how do you keep up with the, I mean, it sounds like there’s some experimentation involved, you know, you mentioned just kind of putting a button on to see if there’s some interest, is that one of the ways that you intend to keep, you know, staying in touch with what’s going on is, you know, continuous experimentation, you know, are there other ways that you intend to, you know, just try to keep up, because things move quickly, even with a single generation not only is there a lot of diversity within it, but things can change pretty quickly. So how do you try to stay up to speed with that?
Teddy Solomon: Absolutely. We like to use a phrase called following the breadcrumbs, where we follow the breadcrumbs. If our users are telling us they need something, and we hear this from not tens, not hundreds, not thousands, but tens of thousands of users across the country, which sometimes we do here, then it suggests to us that there is a distinct need here that we need to build towards. So by staying in touch with our users, by listening to our users, we’re able to move with the trends of Gen Z. You’re completely right that Gen Z is shifting quickly in its needs and wants, and we have to shift quickly with it. But as long as we are Gen Z, are building for Gen Z and are listening to Gen Z, we should be able to do just that. So I’m optimistic about our ability to continue to move quickly.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. And, you know, one more maybe, maybe this is a little more existential question, but there’s been other platforms in the past that have started off with, you know, best intentions and wanting some of these things that you’ve done a phenomenal job at doing, which is, you know, building in the right kind of transparency and the right kind of security and, and stuff. And then, you know, there’s that, there’s that continual temptation and kind of pressure to grow and expand and compromises start getting made. Right. And things like that. So, you know, how do you how do you look at, you know, staying true to the values, the vision and all that? And and still, I would imagine, you know, if there’s investors, if there’s stakeholders, shareholders, things like that, there’s always that pressure to grow. So, you know, how do you look at balancing that?
Teddy Solomon: We’re definitely going to continue to grow, but it’s always going to be users first, meaning we want to give users a product that truly changes their lives and helps their lives in a way that is really profound. And we are especially focused on this concept of controlled expansion. which from the get go, when we first started out just at Stanford, we said, we’re not going to go launch it every school around the country, because we want to give people the most utilitarian products we can possibly give them. Utility is a core component of fizz. It’s this idea that you’re not using the platform just to joke around. You’re using the platform because you need it for information on campus. You need it in your daily life. So we’re going to continue to listen to the users. We’re going to continue to do controlled expansion. We will continue to expand and we’re going to see where we go from there.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, love it. So certainly, we’ve we’ve talked quite a bit about Gen Z’s behaviors and how you’re keeping up with that. You know, as you’re looking out, you know, a few years down the road, you know, beyond some of the things that we’ve discussed, like, are you seeing other trends that are, you know, maybe they’re nascent now, but they’re, they’re evolving and things to keep an eye on? Like, what do you see down the road when when it comes to Gen Z’s retail habits?
Teddy Solomon: There’s definitely a clear movement towards intimate community. And generally in social, there’s a movement towards authenticity. We saw that with Be Real, which is not a durable product by any means, but it was a movement towards authenticity. And what we’re seeing with Fizz, which is a durable product, is that people want an opportunity to present the 99% of their lives that doesn’t exist on Instagram or TikTok. So we see that with commerce as well. This movement towards peer-to-peer, this movement towards a private community that you buy and sell with, this movement away from platforms like Facebook and eBay, the reason that there is this shift away is because of Gen Z gravitating towards community, gravitating towards intimacy, gravitating towards authenticity. And I think that will continue to grow. I think that shift will continue to become more large as time goes on in the coming years. And I’m watching it before my eyes. I’m 22 years old. I am part of Gen Z. I have friends in Gen Z. I am watching this generational shift happen right before me. And it’s pretty astounding to see it happen.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, one last thing. I know we talked about this a little bit earlier on, but, you know, we’ve got a lot of marketers at pretty large brands listening to the show. I’m sure there’s plenty of others listening as well. But, you know, what would your advice be to, you know, let’s say a marketer focused on e-commerce, on retail at a large brand? What would your advice be to them then, you know, in the months and years ahead to just stay ahead of these changing habits of Gen Z and others?
Teddy Solomon: I would say be as close to Gen Z as possible. That means bringing people who are Gen Z into your company to be able to provide those native insights as to how the generation is actually thinking. I would say that means talking to users, to customers as much as humanly possible to better understand how they are thinking about consumption. And it means staying in touch with the trends because Gen Z is a trendy generation. And we are trying to buy things that are cool. We are trying to sell conveniently. And these marketers from giant companies, they’re not going to be able to understand a generation that they’re not part of. But what they can do is they can surround themselves with people who understand it and they can listen as closely as possible. And when you listen, beautiful things happen. So listen to the stories of the people around you, the people in Gen Z, the people who are your customers, the people who are your sellers. That’s really important.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, love that. Well, one last question before we wrap up here. I like to ask this to all my guests. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do that consistently?
Teddy Solomon: I stay really close to the users. I have been on about 150 campuses around the US. I spend a lot of time at colleges. I’m 22 years old. I was 19 years old when I dropped out of Stanford. I like to joke that I’m one foot in the grave now. I like to stay really, really close to the users and I like to stay as in touch with college trends, with Gen Z, with what people actually want as possible. And it also means bringing great people into our company who are in touch with those same things. So to stay agile in my role, I’m in the weeds. I’m on campuses. I’m talking to people. I’m asking people their story. I’m telling them my story. It’s all about the people here. It’s all about the stories. It’s all about resonating with the Gen Z experience and never zooming out too much because you got to be in the weeds to make some magic happen.
