Fizz, the university's social app, is looking for ways to enhance and expand its platform. New employment these days is poised to promote these ambitions. The company previously served as Chiktok creator monetization director and served as Chiktok Shop product lead as Fizz's new product head.
With the help of Vazquez, Fizz plans to build a recommendation system, expand the market beyond peer-to-peer transactions with in-app payments, explore more video content, and open a platform for advertising and brand partnerships. It's there.
Vazquez met Fizz through her role as a startup advisor and was drawn to social apps because she focuses on authentic, community-based content. He was also impressed by the platform's high retention rate.
“You see a lot of social media apps that really know how to grow and get viral, but they don't know how to keep users,” Vazquez told TechCrunch. “It gave the people who Fizz is engaged to have the confidence that they are working on something special here.”
Vazquez says he's most excited about Fizz helping to build the recommended engine. One of the reasons why Tiktok is so successful is its ability to place the right content at the right time before the right users. Vazquez wants to help replicate it on Fizz, so the company is looking at ways to enhance its recommendations and personalize user content.
“Personalization is extremely important to us. As we grow our user base, we see trends on different types of topics,” Vazquez said. “So when you can raise a particular trend, or when you can personalize content based on what someone is involved in, if you're engaged in a lot of sports content, how do you make that type of content look like? Can we? We definitely want to diversify the content people are talking about and personalize it into the user's experience.”
Image credit: Fizz
Additionally, Vazquez uses the insights he learned from the scaling of the Tiktok shop, and particularly the insights that Gen Z learned about how to shop, to expand the recently launched Peer-to-Peer marketplace. We will focus on it. For example, he said Fizz could integrate payments into the platform and open a market for brands.
“The way today's users buy products from each other is purely via DMS,” Vazquez said. “There's a lot more we can do there. We can think about payments and let our users trade fizz too. And we start building in that direction and it's really interesting for us too. And. Thinking about brands, how to integrate e-commerce brands into the fizz marketplace allows people to not only buy peer-to-peer products, but also buy products from established brands. Can you integrate it into the market?”
Fizz is exploring more videos. One of the first changes Vazquez pushed with Fizz was to increase the maximum length of videos that users could share between 15 and 30 seconds. After that, the platform has increased the creation of video content on the platform by 350%.
The startup will continue to push the video given Gen Z's interest in this format. For now, Fizz will focus on short, engaging content and may increase its maximum limit to one minute at some point in the future.
The platform is now open to brand partnerships, attracting a lot of interest from generator AI companies considering advertising.
Fizz will be Strong in 2025. Everyday posts have increased by 245% since the beginning of the year. The platform has seen a 61% increase in daily active users (DAUs). Vazquez says that part of the growth may be attributed to uncertainty about Tiktok's future in the US. Fizz is not the only one. [around TikTok] It's profiting our business. ”
Founded in 2021, Fizz is currently available at over 300 universities, with over 18 million submissions on its platform. The startup has raised $41 million so far.