Fizz, a social app designed for college students, has made a significant hire to drive its expansion and monetization efforts. The company has brought on David Vasquez, who previously served as TikTok's head of creator monetization and product lead for TikTok Shop, as its new head of product. Vasquez's expertise in building and scaling successful social media platforms is expected to play a crucial role in Fizz's growth strategy.

Vasquez was drawn to Fizz because of its focus on authentic, community-based content and its 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."

With Vasquez at the helm, Fizz plans to build out its recommendation system, expand its marketplace beyond peer-to-peer transactions, and explore video content further. The company is also opening up its platform to advertising and brand partnerships. Vasquez is particularly excited about developing Fizz's recommendation engine, citing TikTok's success in putting the right content in front of the right user at the right time.

"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 to personalization, Vasquez plans to focus on expanding Fizz's recently launched peer-to-peer marketplace using insights he learned from scaling TikTok Shop. This may involve integrating payments into the platform and opening up the marketplace to brands. "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."

Fizz is also further exploring video content, having recently increased the maximum length of videos that users can share from 15 seconds to 30 seconds. This change has resulted in 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, with a potential expansion of the maximum limit to a minute in the future.

The platform is now open to brand partnerships and is seeing significant interest from generative AI companies looking to advertise. Fizz has seen a 245% increase in daily posts since the start of the year and a 61% increase in daily active users (DAUs). Vasquez attributes some of this growth to the uncertainty around TikTok's future in the U.S., which is also benefiting other social media platforms like Snap.

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. With Vasquez's expertise and Fizz's strong user engagement, the company is poised for significant growth and expansion in 2025.