Less than a year after the launch of iOS, the French startup Ten Ten has gone viral with a walkie-talkie app that allows teens to send voice messages to their close friends, even when their phone is locked.
Whether you think it’s a recipe for disaster or the coolest thing you’ve ever heard may depend on your age group, and teenagers clearly heard about it long before us; although walkie talkies are clearly not a new concept, even in the form of an application. Ten Ten is doing the same, but in 2024.
“We are ephemeral by design,” ten ten co-founder and CEO Jule Comar said in a written interview with TechCrunch. He added that in CB codes, 1010 means “Transmission completed, on hold.” According to Comar, this is just one of “multiple meanings that align with our values and the concept.” It seems to be resonating; The app is free and quickly climbs the rankings.
Ten Ten’s sudden rise is particularly notable in France, where it has been downloaded 1 million times. Including on Android, where it was available a few weeks ago, the application has registered 6 million downloads since its launch, according to data shared by the market intelligence firm. Sensor tower with TechCrunch on Friday.
The concept could also receive tweaks along the way. The current UX suggests a limit of 9 friends, but that is not the case. “Ten ten is for close friends, but there is no friend limit. We are seeing people sharing their PINs on social media, so we are working on a better friend management system,” Comar said.
The PINs Comar is referring to are the IDs that users can use to find each other. The app also requests access to the user’s contacts (but no one is added without user action). There is an inherent virality to this model, but that is not the only driver of growth; Tik Tok “He played an important role,” Comar said.
Ten Ten’s download numbers have certainly continued to rise over the weekend: Ten Ten has been all over the French media lately. Not always with a positive spin; The French newspaper Le Figaro, for example, called it “worrying.” “I was very surprised,” Comar said. “There is nothing “dangerous” about ten tens!”
These aren’t just articles that view the app in a negative light; Fake news is also circulating, Comar said. “There were some rumors that we were a Chinese app because of the name “ten ten” and we were wrongly accused of “spying” and “stealing data”…”
But ten ten is not Chinese. The company has been duly registered in France, since 2021, which means it is also subject to the GDPR. your current Terms and Conditions They are formulas, but they mention that the team is in the process of writing better ones. More importantly, the startup Privacy Policy It is inflexible on two points:
- All your conversations are ephemeral, we can’t listen to them because we don’t even store them!
- We will never sell your data!!
In addition to that decision not to sell data, it’s unclear how ten ten will make money. “We have a lot of interesting ideas about how we could monetize down the road,” Comar said. There is no doubt that their current success will buy them time and help them raise venture capital to get to that point later.
When asked if his startup already had or was in the process of raising funds, Comar responded affirmatively. But, he added with a smile, “we really can’t reveal how much and [from] who yet.”
Responding to TechCrunch, French VC Hugo Amsellem indicated that while his company Intuition is not one of these sponsors, he sees ten ten as part of a broader trend among French startups.
For Amsellem, the common thread is that “France is the king in the status games.” Individuals seek to improve their social status and French businessmen will be happy to help them, whether in the field of software. BeReal, Yubo or Zenlyor on the hardware side with luxury devices.
It remains to be seen how long Ten Ten can retain its cool factor, but its CEO is aware that its current position is both privileged and fragile. Comar said:
It’s exhilarating, it’s a feeling that’s hard to describe but one that some lucky people have felt, it feels like everything is going so fast and so slow at the same time, adrenaline mixed with pride, gratitude and responsibility, you feel big and small. At the same time, this can only be felt on consumer social networks, because it can affect you when you least expect it and there is no limit. But we have to keep our heads on our shoulders, it’s just the beginning, the hardest part is yet to come.
Comar and ten ten co-founder and CTO Antoine Baché have been getting very little sleep lately. An automated email response full of smileys warns that they are “having issues with our servers due to a large number of users at the same time” and “working on it day and night to fix it once and for all.”
Server issues aside, the generation gap is an obstacle that ten ten will have to cleverly navigate. More than privacy, what is often discussed is the fact that ten ten is used by teenagers and in classrooms. “When you read these articles, it seems like they are talking about some kind of new drug circulating at school!” Comar said.
It’s easy to see why teachers were the first adults to notice the app. Since ten tens can bypass a lock screen to play a message out loud, they can be used for pranks and create small disruptions in classrooms. But having to teach phone hygiene isn’t new, and kids are smart enough to figure it out, too.
On a French subreddit for teachers, a discussion An inquiry was made as to whether members had had any problems with ten tens in the classrooms. One participant noted that “there have been no major incidents so far” despite the app “getting a lot of attention” at his school. But that person added: “I ask students to put their phones on airplane mode.” (We have not reached out to verify that this person is a teacher, but her profile seems to confirm that this is the case.)
Instead of starting a new moral panic, perhaps ten ten could be an opportunity for parents to marvel at the fact that some of our favorite cultural artifacts are making a comeback; whether it be cassettes, Dungeons & Dragons or, now, walkie talkies.
It’s just a small step from obsolete to vintage, and the success of ‘Strange things‘ probably helped. But app-based walkie talkies wouldn’t have any real success if there wasn’t a real use case around them. Comar thinks so, and that’s what inspired him.
“I’ve always had a group of close friends, we talk every day on multiple outlets, but I felt like everyone had some kind of friction,” he said. “I wanted us to be able to communicate as if we were always under the same roof, like roommates: you just walk into his room when you want to say something, if his door is closed you knock, if it’s open you just talk! “
Hopefully, over ten tens, parents will see the value in that too. Who knows, maybe they can use it to say out loud that dinner is ready. That is, if your teenager accepts them as a contact.