Fizz

3 years ago, Pepperdine security chased me out of Malibu for sneaking 2 thousand donuts onto campus. Now, Fizz, which is used by nearly every student at Pepperdine, is building community when it matters most. Check it out ?? https://lnkd.in/gn5SKFfp

Excited to share that I’ve joined a #Stanford family gym plan with Teddy Solomon and Ashton Cofer…and that I’ve joined Fizz as Head of Product! ???? Over the past few years, I’ve had the privilege of advising companies across social, commerce, and AI—constantly searching for products that truly resonate. Thanks to an intro from Owl Ventures, I got to know the Fizz team and was immediately blown away by their engagement metrics across hundreds of college campuses. Many social platforms know how to hack growth, but few can retain a deeply engaged community. Fizz is different. The passion and authenticity of our users set it apart, and I’m beyond excited to help shape the next chapter—making Fizz the go-to platform for the next generation. At TikTok, I saw firsthand how to build authentic communities, and Fizz is taking that to the next level. College & Gen-Z culture starts on Fizz. If you're a brand looking to connect with this audience, let’s talk.??

Here's a little untold secret about me. For the past few months, I've been fortunate to be on a family gym plan at Stanford. I pay $34/month, and am of course listed as a dependent of 33-year-old David Vasquez. David is the former Head of Creator Monetization at TikTok. He's a Stanford GSB alum. He's the most connected person I've ever met. He's one of the smartest people I've had the pleasure of meeting. He bleeds passion for bringing people together and building meaningful products. And as TechCrunch told the world this morning, he's our new Head of Product. LFG. Check out the feature ?? ?? https://lnkd.in/ggcRAJkY

When I hopped on the phone with Weee! CEO Larry Liu in September, I didn’t quite know what I was getting myself into. After being introduced by the brilliant Jeff Wilke, Larry and I were set to discuss how Fizz could help Weee! grow its college base, through the limited advertising campaigns we were offering companies with exceptional synergy with our users. What I didn’t know coming into the call was how freaking cool the Weee! product and team are. After working with Larry, Zheng Shen, and Rafael Sanches on pilots across a few of our campuses, it became clear that our users loved the viral snacks and deals Weee! could offer them. And our team (Ty Scearce, Kristine T.) couldn't get enough of Zheng, Larry, and Rafa. They're epic. So, for Weee!, it was a no-brainer to run a national paid advertising campaign on Fizz. We're proud to have launched this campaign nationwide today, and the results have been electric. Imagine hundreds of thousands of college students across America talking about your brand. In just hours, Fizz has the potential to make any brand a national phenomenon on college campuses. If your company wants to reach college students, look no further. Join our partnerships waitlist (we're booking into March already!) and our team will be in touch ?? ?? ?? https://lnkd.in/gA5AZvig

I've been fortunate to step foot on 200+ college campuses across the US in my journey building Fizz. I live for it—I love hearing people's stories, talking to users, and immersing myself in the college experience. You'll rarely find me on TV shows or podcasts; I would much rather be talking to Fizz users at the dining hall at Langston University or the student center at Eastern Kentucky University. But, when Solé Stewart, a recent Pace University graduate, reached out asking me to be a guest on her new podcast, The Curious Experience, my interest was piqued. She mentioned how Fizz helped to transform her college life, and how her podcast was in many ways inspired by Fizz's mission. It was a no-brainer—I had to say yes. Sometimes the media gets too caught up on growth and forgets about impact. It was a pleasure to chat with Solé about the impact Fizz has had on her life, and why it has been such an impactful platform for students on nearly 400 college campuses. Check out the full podcast below ?? ?? https://lnkd.in/g7uJqrGW

2024 was a pivotal year at Fizz. It wasn't easy, but we're all sitting here astonished by how far we've come. Not exhaustive but... -We are now at over 300 colleges (and counting) -We launched a new product that our users love and has exploded our metrics -We are less than 90 days from moving beyond colleges -We rebuilt all of our internal tooling and external growth mechanisms -We successfully launched a peer-to-peer marketplace that has the legacy players justifiably nervous -We rebuilt our moderation stack from the ground up and our users are safer than ever -We have gained hundreds of thousands of followers across our social channels -We have started to run successful campaigns with advertisers, and our waitlist is too big to handle -We are growing our engineering/product teams (dm me) -We still have almost all of our Series B raise in the bank -We are having the time of our lives As our team likes to say, "Snowball starts the avalanche." Here's to a great 2025 ??. Energy's electric.

This week has been a consumer social founder's dream. Everything is breaking, our user base is flying, our advertiser waitlist is exploding (https://lnkd.in/gA5AZvig), and our engagement metrics are through the roof. Most importantly, our new product rollout was a huge success. The Fizz team is absolutely stoked. And...we're hiring for some important roles to keep up with the momentum. These roles include: -Product Designer -Strategy & Partnerships Lead -Product Engineer Please DM me if you know someone who might be a fit for these roles. The energy's electric. Maybe too electric. That's why we need people.

On Tuesday, we launched a new product experience connecting ~70 of our Fizz college communities. The result? An initial 10x increase in posts, comments, DMs, and new downloads in these schools on day 1, which has sustained at over 5x normal levels and rising on days 2-3. Given that we normally see 500+ posts per day in each campus, we’ve been up all night trying to optimize the user experience with the increased volume (we need more people!). ?? In my opinion, moments like these are what make building in consumer social so rewarding and greatly outweigh the inevitable troughs of the startup journey (we’ve had a ton of failed experiments prior to this that we don’t typically publicize). The bottom line is we urgently need more product-minded people who are hungry to build and scale novel consumer products from 1-10 (most notably product designers and product engineers). If this is you, please DM me!

Yesterday we broke down the walls of 71 of our colleges and unleashed a new version of the Fizz product. Our users loved it. This one’s big. More soon.

We’re 2 months into running limited advertisements on Fizz, and the results have been nothing short of ELECTRIC. In a recent campaign, Sidney Marsh, a recent Dartmouth College grad, hoped to penetrate college campuses with her growing dating startup, Red Cup. She turned to Fizz, an app she and everyone at Dartmouth used daily. We picked a diverse range of schools for the campaign, and the results were astounding: 17.18% CTR. When you give Gen Z a product they resonate with on a platform they can’t live without, the opportunities are limitless. I’m confident no recent social platform has replicated this sort of engagement for advertisers. Fizz is the most trusted and engaging US college social platform of our time, and I can’t wait to be able to open up to more advertisers soon. We’re super energized by the early results. If you want to run an advertisement on Fizz, join our waitlist now ?? https://lnkd.in/gA5AZvig