Fizz, the college social app, is looking for ways to enhance and expand its platform, and a recent new hire is poised to help drive these ambitions. The company has brought on David Vasquez, who previously served as TikTok’s head of creator monetization and a product lead for TikTok Shop, as Fizz’s new head of product.
With Vasquez’s help, Fizz plans to build out its recommendation system, look at expanding its marketplace beyond peer-to-peer transactions with in-app payments, explore video content further, and open up its platform to advertising and brand partnerships.
Vasquez came across Fizz through his role as startup adviser and was drawn to the social app because of its focus 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 know how to grow really quickly and go viral, but they don’t know how to retain their users,” Vasquez told TechCrunch. “Seeing that Fizz had people that were that engaged gave me a lot of confidence that they were on to something special here.”
Vasquez says he’s most excited about helping Fizz build out its recommendation engine, noting that one of the reasons TikTok is so successful is because of its ability to put the right content in front of the right user at the right time. Vasquez wants to help replicate that at Fizz, so the company is looking at ways to enhance recommendations and personalize content for users.
“Personalization is really important to us, and as we scale our user base, we see trends around different types of topics,” Vasquez said. “So, when we can elevate certain trends, or we can personalize content based on what somebody is engaging with, if you’re engaging a lot with sports content, how can we show you more of that type of content? We definitely want to diversify the content that people talk about and also personalize it to users’ experiences.”
In addition, Vasquez plans to focus on expanding Fizz’s recently launched peer-to-peer marketplace using insights he learned from scaling TikTok Shop, specifically around how Gen Z likes to shop. For example, Fizz might integrate payments into its platform and also open up its marketplace to brands, he said.
“The way that users buy products from each other today is purely via DMs,” Vasquez said. “There’s a lot more we could do there. We could think about payments and allowing users to transact on Fizz as well. And so, starting to build in that direction, I think is really interesting for us, too. And then, thinking about brands as well, like, how can we integrate e-commerce brands into the Fizz marketplace such that people not only are buying peer-to-peer products, but maybe they can even buy products from established brands as well.”
Fizz is also further exploring video; one of the first changes Vasquez pushed for at Fizz was to increase the maximum length of videos that users could share from 15 seconds to 30 seconds. After doing so, the platform has seen a 350% increase in video content creation on the platform.
The startup plans to continue to push into video given Gen Z’s interest in the format. For now, Fizz is going to focus on short, engaging content and may expand the maximum limit to a minute at some point in the future.
The platform is now also open to brand partnerships and is seeing a lot of interest from generative AI companies looking to advertise.
Fizz is going into 2025 strong: It has seen a 245% increase in daily posts since the start of the year. The platform has also seen a 61% increase in daily active users (DAUs). Vasquez says some of the growth can be attributed to the uncertainty around TikTok’s future in the U.S. And Fizz isn’t the only one: During Snap’s earnings call on Tuesday, CEO Evan Spiegel said “the overall environment of uncertainty [around TikTok] is benefiting our business.”
Founded in 2021, Fizz is now available at more than 300 colleges and universities and has more than 18 million posts on its platform. The startup has raised $41 million in funding to date.
