Less than a year after launching iOS, French startup ten ten went viral by launching a walkie-talkie app that lets teens send voice messages to close friends even when their phones are locked.
Whether you think it's a recipe for disaster or the coolest thing you've ever heard can vary depending on your age, and teens have definitely heard about it long before the rest of us did. Even though walkie-talkie is in app form, it's certainly not a new concept. TenTen is doing the same thing, but in 2024.
“We are ephemeral by design,” Jule Comar, co-founder and CEO of Ten Ten, said in a written interview with TechCrunch. He added that in the CB code, 1010 means “Transfer completed, waiting.” According to Comar, this is just one of “a variety of meanings that are consistent with our values and concepts.” It seems to resonate. The app is free and will rise in the rankings quickly.
TenTen's rapid rise is especially noticeable in France, where the number of downloads has reached 1 million. The app, including on Android where it launched a few weeks ago, has had 6 million downloads since its launch, according to data shared with TechCrunch by market intelligence firm Sensor Tower on Friday.
This concept may be modified along the way. Currently, UX limits the maximum number of friends to 9, but this is not the case. “Tenten is for close friends, but there are no friend restrictions. We're developing a better friend management system because we're seeing people share their PINs on social media,” Comar said.
The PIN that Comar refers to is an ID 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 word of mouth inherent in this model, but it is not the only growth driver. TikTok “has played an important role,” Comar said.
Ten Ten's download numbers undoubtedly continued to grow over the weekend. Ten Ten has been all over the French media recently. It doesn't always work out in a positive direction. The French newspaper Le Figaro, for example, called it “worrying.” “I was very surprised,” Komar said. “There is nothing “dangerous” about 1010!”
This isn't just an article that puts the app in a negative light. Fake news is also circulating, Komar said. “The name ‘Tenten’ led to rumors that we were a Chinese app, and we were unfairly accused of ‘spying’ and ‘data theft’…”
But Tenten is not Chinese. The company has been officially registered in France since 2021, which means it is subject to GDPR. The current terms and conditions are official, but they mention that the team is in the process of writing better terms and conditions. More importantly, the startup's privacy policy is adamant about two things:
- All your conversations are temporary. We don't even save your conversations, so you won't be able to hear them!
- We never sell your data!!
Aside from the decision not to sell the data, it's unclear how TenTen will make money. “There are a lot of great ideas for how we can monetize it later,” Comar said. There's no doubt that success now will buy them time and help them secure venture capital to get to that point later.
When asked if his startup has already received funding or is in the process of raising funding, Comar said yes. However, he added with a smile, “I can’t reveal how much it is or who it is yet.”
In response to TechCrunch, French VC Hugo Amsellem said that while his company Intuition is not one of these backers, he sees Ten Ten as part of a larger trend among French startups.
What Amsellem has in common is that “France is the king of status game play.” Individuals are trying to increase their social status, and French entrepreneurs are happy to help, whether it's the software side from BeReal, Yubo or Zenly, or the hardware side, including high-end devices.
It remains to be seen how long TenTen can maintain its cool factor, but the CEO knows his current position is privileged and vulnerable. Komar said:
That's exciting. It's a feeling that's hard to explain, but some lucky people have felt it. It feels like everything is going too fast and yet too slow at the same time, adrenaline mixed with pride, gratitude and responsibility, big and small. At the same time — you can only feel this in consumer social. Because it can hit you when you least expect it and there is no upper limit. But we must pull our shoulders together. This is just the beginning and the hardest work is yet to come.
Comar and Ten Ten co-founder and CTO Antoine Baché have had very little sleep recently. An email auto-reply filled with smiley faces warns: “Due to the huge number of users at the same time, we are experiencing problems with our servers” and “We are working day and night to fully resolve this issue.”
Server issues aside, the generation gap is one obstacle that 1010 will have to address wisely. More important than privacy, the use of Ten Ten in classrooms with teens is often discussed. “Reading this article makes me feel like I’m talking about some kind of new drug that’s going around in schools!” Komar said.
It's easy to see why teachers are the first adults to discover this app. TenTen can play messages loudly, bypassing the lock screen, making it perfect for pranks and minor disruptions in the classroom. But having to teach phone hygiene is nothing new, and kids are good enough to figure it out.
On the French for Teachers subreddit, members debated whether there was a problem with 10-10 in the classroom. One participant noted that despite the app being 'getting a lot of attention' in schools, 'there haven't been any major incidents so far'. But the person added, “We ask students to put their phones on airplane mode.” (I have not contacted this person to confirm if he or she is a teacher, but their profile appears to confirm that they are a teacher.)
Instead of starting a new moral panic, perhaps 1010 can be an opportunity for parents to marvel at the fact that some of our favorite cultural artifacts are coming back. Whether it was cassettes, Dungeons & Dragons or now walkie-talkies.
There's only one small step from old-fashioned to vintage, and the success of 'Stranger Things' may have helped. But app-based walkie-talkies won't gain real traction if there aren't real use cases around them. Comar thinks it is and that's what inspired him.
“I’ve always had a close group of friends and we talked every day through different mediums, but I felt like they were all going through some kind of friction,” he said. “I wanted us to be able to communicate as if we were roommates and always under the same roof. When you want to talk, just go to that person's room, knock on the door if it's closed, and just talk if it's open! ”
I hope that in 100 years, parents will also know its value. Who knows? Maybe you could use it to loudly announce that dinner is ready. That is, if your teen accepts them as contacts.
