When Fizz quietly debuted in Saudi Arabia in the middle of March, founder and CEO Teddy Solomon wasn’t expecting the app to catch on like it did. Within 48 hours, the app hit No. 1 overall on the App Store charts, and users in the country have since sent more than 1 million messages. For an anonymous social app that started on college campuses, it was a surprising debut.
Solomon and his co-founder, Ashton Cofer, started Fizz in 2022 while they were students at Stanford, before dropping out. After raising $40 million and launching on 700 campuses, the app has been pushing beyond its college roots with Fizz Feed, a feature that opens the platform to non-students through location-based communities. Think of it as similar to Reddit, but without the ability to create or join topic-specific communities. Saudi Arabia — where Fizz currently holds the No. 1 spot in the news category — is its first overseas test of that ambition.
“We’ve always known that our big goal is to be a generational social product, rather than a college social app, and now we’re finally executing on it,” Solomon said.
Fizz has not previously spoken about its international expansion.
Solomon said that when he attended a conference in Dubai, he saw the potential for Fizz’s expansion into the Middle East. Soon after, Fizz marketing analyst Michael Fonseca moved to Saudi Arabia to make connections in the area and better understand the culture, which paved the way for Fizz’s international launch.
“Mike was really welcomed with open arms,” Solomon said. “I think [Saudi Arabia] changed quite a bit in recent years.” The country is “jumping right now,” said Solomon. “Business is booming. The social scene and social landscape is booming. Snapchat’s …