French startup Ten Ten enjoys viral success and sparks controversy by reinventing walkie-talkies.
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 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 app form. Ten ten does the same, but in 2024.
“We are ephemeral by design,” said Jule Comar, co-founder and CEO of Ten Ten, in a written interview with TechCrunch. He added that in CB codes, 1010 means “Transmission Completed, Waiting”. According to Comar, it is just one of “multiple meanings that correspond to our values and the concept”. This seems to resonate; the app is free and quickly climbs the rankings.
The rise of Ten Ten is particularly noticeable in France, where it has been downloaded 1 million times. Including on Android, where it has been available for a few weeks, the app has been downloaded 6 million times since its launch, according to data shared Friday by market information company Sensor Tower with TechCrunch.
The concept could also receive changes down the road. The current UX suggests a limit of 9 friends, but this is not the case. “Dix ten is for close friends, but there is no friend limit, we see people sharing their PINs on social media, so we are working on a better friend management system,” said Comar.
The PINs that Comar refers to are the identifiers 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 growth; TikTok “played a big role,” Comar said.
Ten ten downloads undoubtedly continued to increase over the weekend: ten ten has been making the rounds in the French media lately. Not always with a positive spin; The French newspaper Le Figaro, for example, called this “worrying.” “I was very surprised,” Comar said. “There is nothing “dangerous” at ten to ten!
These aren’t just articles portraying 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 wrongly 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. Its current terms and conditions are formal, but mention that the team is drafting better ones. More importantly, the startup’s privacy policy is categorical on two points:
- All your conversations are ephemeral, we can’t listen to your conversation because we don’t even store them!
- We will never sell your data!!
Besides this decision not to sell data, it’s unclear how ten ten will make money. “We have a lot of interesting ideas for how we could monetize down the road,” Comar said. There is no doubt that their current success will buy them time and help them obtain venture capital to achieve this later.
When asked if his startup had already raised or was in the process of raising funds, Comar responded in the affirmative. But, he added with a smile, “we can’t really disclose how many and (from) whom yet.”
In response to TechCrunch, French VC Hugo Amsellem noted that while his company Intuition is not one of these backers, he sees the dix dix as part of a broader trend among French startups.
For Amsellem, the common thread is that “France is queen of status games”. Individuals are looking to increase their social status, and French entrepreneurs are happy to help them, whether on the software side of BeReal, Yubo or Zenly, or on the hardware side with luxury devices.
How long Ten Ten can maintain its cool remains to be seen, 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 a lucky few 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 — You can only feel this in consumer social media because it can hit you when you least expect it and there is no ceiling. But you have to keep your head on your shoulders, this is only the beginning, the hardest part is yet to come.
Comar and Ten Ten, co-founder and CTO Antoine Baché, sleep very little these days. An automatic email reply with smiley faces warns that they are “experiencing problems with our servers due to a large number of users at the same time” and are “working on it day and night to resolve it once and for all” .
Server issues aside, the generation gap is an obstacle that ten ten will have to overcome intelligently. More than private life, it is often the fact that ten ten is used by adolescents and in classrooms that is often mentioned. “When you read these articles, you get the impression that they are talking about some kind of new drug circulating at school! » said Comar.
It’s easy to see why teachers were the first adults to notice the app. Since ten ten can bypass a lock screen to broadcast a message out loud, it can be used for pranks and create small disruptions in classrooms. But having to teach phone hygiene is nothing new, and kids are smart enough to understand it too.
In a French subreddit aimed at teachers, a discussion arose about whether members had had problems with dix dix in classrooms. One participant noted that there had been “no major incidents so far,” although the app was “getting a lot of attention” at his school. But this person added: “I ask students to put their phones on airplane mode. » (We have not verified that this person is a teacher, but their profile seems to confirm that is the case.)
Instead of sparking 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’s cassette tapes, Dungeons & Dragons, or now walkie talkies.
It’s a small step from obsolete to vintage, and the success of “Stranger 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 close group of friends, we talk every day across multiple mediums, but I felt like they all had some kind of friction,” he said. “I wanted us to be able to communicate as if we were still under the same roof, like roommates: we enter their room when we want to say something, if their door is closed we knock, if it is open we talk! »
Hopefully, for ten ten years, parents will see the value in it too. Who knows, maybe they can use it to say out loud that dinner is ready. In other words, if their teenager accepts them as a contact.
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