Gen Z is done curating perfect lives for Instagram and TikTok. Fizz is betting on it.
What started as a pandemic-era group chat frustration has turned into the dominant social platform on college campuses across the U.S., according to TechCrunch’s coverage of the company. The app focuses on what co-founder and CEO Teddy Solomon calls the “99% of life that doesn’t make it into a highlight reel.”
Fizz’s pitch is simple: social media stopped feeling social. The company thinks the fix is a mix of anonymity and extreme local focus.
A hybrid anonymous network for one campus at a time
Fizz doesn’t position itself as another global feed competing with Instagram or TikTok. Instead, it builds hyperlocal communities around individual colleges. Students open the app to see posts from people on their own campus, not from a worldwide firehose.
Crucially, Fizz runs on a hybrid anonymous model. The company isn’t promoting raw, consequence-free anonymity. But it also isn’t forcing everyone to post under their real names with follower counts and public clout as the main metric.
That middle ground appears to be resonating with a demographic that grew up on public, performative feeds. TechCrunch notes that Fizz has become the dominant social platform on U.S. college campuses, and Solomon goes further, describing it as “the biggest college social app since Facebook.”
Why ‘performative’ feeds are losing their grip
Onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, Equity co-host Dominic Madori Davis sat down with Solomon to dig into a simple but loaded question: why did social media stop being social?
The conversation, featured on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, centers on how Gen Z uses social apps differently from the platforms they inherited:
- Traditional feeds reward the most polished, viral-friendly content.
- Everyday thoughts, doubts and in-between moments rarely surface.
- That leaves a gap for tools that feel more like real campus life, not edited highlight reels.
Fizz is trying to fill that gap with a product designed for:
- Ephemeral, in-the-moment posts instead of permanent personal brands.
- Campus-only conversations that mirror dorm hallways and dining halls.
- Anonymity for expression, without turning into a free-for-all.
From niche frustration to campus default
Fizz grew out of the specific pain of the pandemic era, when students were stuck behind screens and group chats carried the weight of entire social lives. That frustration evolved into a platform that now sits squarely in the middle of campus culture.
By targeting the parts of student life that never show up on Instagram Stories or TikTok videos, Fizz is explicitly not chasing the same use cases as the incumbent giants. It’s aiming at everything those apps miss.
Whether that model can scale beyond college campuses is an open question. For now, Fizz is leaning hard into the spaces where Gen Z spends most of its offline time: classrooms, dorms and quads.
Watch the full conversation
The full interview with Teddy Solomon is part of Equity, TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo.
You can watch or listen to the episode on:
- YouTube
- Apple Podcasts
- Overcast
- Spotify
- Or any major podcast app, by searching for “Equity”
Equity is also on X and Threads at @EquityPod.
