Less than a year after launching on iOS, French startup Ten Ten has gone viral with a walkie-talkie app that lets teens send voice messages to their close friends — even when their phone is locked.
Whether you think this is a recipe for disaster or the best thing you’ve heard may depend on your age group, and teenagers clearly heard about it long before we did; although walkie talkies are clearly not a new concept, even in app form. Ten is doing the same, but in 2024.
“We are ephemeral by design,” said ten ten co-founder and CEO, Jule Comar in a written interview with TechCrunch. He added that in CB codes, 1010 means “Transfer complete, ready”. According to Comar, this is just one of “several meanings that align with our values ​​and concept.” It seems to resonate; the app is free and is quickly rising in the rankings.
Ten Ten’s sudden rise is particularly noticeable in France, where it has been downloaded 1 million times. Including Android, where it was available a few weeks ago, the app has seen 6 million downloads since its launch, according to data shared by Sensor Tower and TechCrunch on Friday.
The concept could also be improved. The current UX suggests a limit of 9 friends, but this is not the case. “Ten ten is for close friends, but there is no limit to the number of friends, we see people sharing their PIN on social media, so we are working on a better friend management system,” said Comar.
The PINs that Comar refers to are 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 intervention.) This model has its own virality, but that’s not the only driver of growth; TikTok “played an important role,” Comar said.
The number of ten ten downloads has undoubtedly continued to grow over the weekend: ten ten has recently appeared in all French media. Not always with a positive spin; For example, the French newspaper Le Figaro called it “disturbing”. “I was very surprised,” Comar said. “There’s nothing ‘dangerous’ about ten ten!”
It’s not just the articles that look at the app in a negative light; fake news is also circulating, Comar said. “There were rumors that we were a Chinese app because of the name ‘ten ten’ and we were falsely accused of ‘espionage’ and ‘data theft’…”
However, ten ten is not Chinese. The company has been duly registered in France since 2021, which means it is also subject to GDPR. His current conditions are formulaic, but let’s mention that the team is preparing better ones. More importantly, the startup’s privacy policy is adamant on two points:
- All your conversations are ephemeral, we can’t listen to your conversation because we don’t even save them!
- We will never sell your data!!
Aside from the decision not to sell data, it’s not clear how ten ten will make money. “We have a lot of great ideas to monetize later,” Comar said. No doubt their current success will buy them time – and help them secure venture capital to get to a later point.
When asked if his startup already had or was in the process of raising funds, Comar answered in the affirmative. But he added with a smiley face: “We can’t reveal how many and how many [from] who else.”
Responding to TechCrunch, French VC Hugo Amsellem said that while his firm Intuition is not one of those backers, he sees ten ten as part of a larger trend among French startups.
For Amsell, the common theme is that “France is king in status games”. Individuals are looking to raise their social status, and French entrepreneurs are happy to help, whether it’s on the software side of BeReal, Yubo or Zenly, or on the hardware side of luxury devices.
It remains to be seen how long ten ten can maintain its cool factor, but its CEO is aware that its current position is both privileged and fragile. Comar said:
It’s exciting, it’s a feeling that’s hard to describe but that a lucky few have felt, it’s a feeling 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 time — You can only feel it in a consumerist social environment because it can hit you when you least expect it and there is no ceiling. But we have to keep our heads on our shoulders, it’s just the beginning, the hardest part is yet to come.
Comar and co-founder and CTO Antoine Baché have been getting very little sleep lately. The smiley email auto-reply warns that they are having “problems with our servers due to the large number of users at the same time” and are “working day and night to fix this once and for all”.
Server pain aside, the generation gap is one of the hurdles the 10s will have to navigate smartly. More than privacy, the use of ten ten by teenagers and in classrooms is often discussed. “When you read these articles, you feel like they’re talking about some new drug that’s going around the school!” Comar said.
It’s easy to see why teachers were the first adults to notice the app. Since ten ten can bypass the lock screen and play the message out loud, it can be used for pranks and cause minor disruptions in classrooms. But the need to teach phone hygiene is nothing new, and kids are savvy enough to figure it out too.
In the French subreddit for teachers, there was a discussion about whether members had any problems with tens in classrooms. One participant noted that “there have been no major incidents so far” despite the app “getting a lot of attention” at their school. But the person added, “I’m asking students to put their phones on airplane mode.” (We have not reached out to verify that this person is a teacher, but their profile appears to confirm that they are.)
Instead of starting a new moral panic, maybe ten ten could be an opportunity for parents to marvel that some of our favorite cultural artifacts are making a comeback; be it tapes, Dungeons & Dragons, or now, radios.
It’s only a small step from outdated to vintage, and the success of ‘Stranger Things’ probably helped. But app-based radios would have no real traction if there was no real use case around them. Comar thinks there is, and that’s what inspired him.
“I always had a group of close friends, we talked every day on different media, but I felt like there was some friction between them,” he said. “I wanted us to be able to communicate as if we were always under the same roof, like roommates: if you want to say something, you just walk into their room, if their door is closed, knock, if it’s open, you just talk! “
Hopefully in ten ten the parents will see the value in it too. Who knows, maybe they will be able to say out loud that dinner is ready. That is, if their teen accepts them as a contact.