Less than a year after its iOS launch, French startup Ten Ten has gone viral with a walkie-talkie app that allows teenagers to send voice messages to their closest friends — even if their phone is locked.
Whether you think it’s a recipe for disaster or the coolest thing you’ve heard may depend on your age group, and teenagers clearly heard about it before we did; However, walkie talkies are clearly not a new concept, even in app form. Ten Ten is doing the same, but in 2024.
“We’re transient by design,” Ten Ten co-founder and CEO Jules Comer said in a written interview with TechCrunch. He added that in the CB code, 1010 means “transmission completed, standing by.” According to Comer, this is “one of the many meanings that align with our values and perception.” It seems to resonate; The app is free and increases the ranking quickly.
Ten Ten’s sudden rise is particularly noticeable in France, where it has been downloaded over 1 million times. Including Android, where it became available a few weeks ago, the app has seen 6 million downloads since its launch, according to data shared by market intelligence firm Sensor Tower with TechCrunch on Friday.
The concept may also get tweaks along the way. Current UX suggests a 9-friend cap, but that’s not the case. “Ten Ten is for close friends but no friend limit, we’re seeing people share their pins on social media so we’re working on a better friend management system,” Comer said.
PIN codes refer to IDs that users can use to locate each other. The app also asks for access to the user’s contacts (but none are added without user action.) This model has inherent virality, but it’s not the only growth driver; TikTok “played an important role,” Comer said.
Ten Ten download numbers have undoubtedly continued to rise over the weekend: Ten Ten has been all over French media lately. Not always with a positive spin; For instance, the French newspaper Le Figaro called it “alarming”. “I was very surprised,” Comer said. “There is nothing “dangerous” about ten ten!”
Articles aren’t the only ones looking at the app in a negative light; Fake news also circulates, Comer said. There were some rumors that we were a Chinese app because of the name “Ten Ten” and we were falsely accused of “spying” and “stealing data”…”
Ten Ten is not Chinese, though. The company has been registered in France since 2021, meaning it is also subject to GDPR. Its current terms and conditions are formulaic, but mention that the team is in the process of writing better ones. More importantly, the startup’s privacy policy is adamant about two points:
- All your conversations are ephemeral, we can’t listen to your conversations because we don’t even store them!
- We will never sell your data!!
Beyond the decision not to sell data, it’s unclear how TenTen will make money. “We have a lot of great ideas about how we can monetize at a later stage,” Komar said. No doubt their current success will buy them time — and help them secure venture capital to get to the next point.
Asked whether his startup already has a fundraising process or is in the process, Kumar replied in the affirmative. But, he added with a smiley, “We can’t really reveal how much and (from whom) yet.”
In a response to TechCrunch, French VC Hugo Amselem indicated that although his firm Intuition is not one of these backers, he sees TenTen as part of a larger trend among French startups.
For Amselem, the common thread is that “France is king in status game play.” Individuals want to raise their social status, and French entrepreneurs are happy to help, whether on the software side with BeReal, Yubo or Zenly, or on the hardware side with luxury devices.
It remains to be seen how long Tan Tan can maintain its cool factor, but its CEO is aware that its current position is both privileged and fragile. Comer said:
It’s exhilarating, it’s a feeling that’s hard to describe but that few lucky people have experienced, it feels like everything is happening so fast and so slow at the same time, adrenaline mixed with pride, gratitude and responsibilities, You feel big and small. At the same time — you can only experience this in consumer social, because it can hit you when you least expect it and it has no ceiling. But we have to keep our heads on our shoulders, it’s just the beginning, the hardest is yet to come.
Comer and TenTen co-founder and CTO Antoine Bach have been sleeping very little lately. A smiley email auto-reply warns that they are “experiencing problems with our servers due to the large number of simultaneous users” and are “working day and night to fix it once and for all.”
Server pain aside, the generational gap is an obstacle that Ten Ten will have to navigate smartly. More than privacy, it’s often the fact that Ten Ten is used by teenagers and in classrooms that is being discussed. “When you read these articles it’s like they’re talking about some kind of new drug at school!” Comer said.
It’s easy to see why teachers were the first adults to consider the app. Ten Ten can bypass the lock screen to play a message out loud, so it can be used for pranks and cause minor disruptions in classrooms. But teaching phone hygiene is nothing new, and even kids are smart enough to understand it.
In a French subreddit for teachers, there was a discussion about whether members had a problem with ten tens in classrooms. One participant noted that the app was “attracting a lot of attention” at his school, yet “no big event has happened so far”. But, the person added, “I tell students to put their phones on airplane mode.” (We haven’t reached out to verify that this person is a teacher, but their profile seems to confirm the case.)
Instead of starting a new moral panic, maybe ten ten is an opportunity for parents to marvel at the fact that some of our favorite cultural artifacts are making a comeback; Be it cassettes, dungeons and dragons or now walkie talkies.
It’s only a short step from obsolete to vintage, and the success of ‘Stranger Things’ probably helped. But app-based walkie talkies won’t get any real traction if there’s no real use case around them. Comer thinks there is, and that’s what motivates him.
“I’ve always had a close group of friends, we talk on multiple mediums everyday, but I felt like there was some kind of friction between them all,” he said. “I wanted if we were always under the same roof, like roommates: you pop into their room when you want to say something, if their door is closed you knock, if it’s open you just talk! “
Hopefully for Ten Ten, parents will see value in that as well. Who knows, maybe they can use it to say out loud that dinner is ready. That is, if their teenager accepts them as contacts.