Less than a year after its iOS launch, French startup ten ten went viral with a walkie-talkie app that lets teenagers send voice messages to close friends — even when their phone is locked.
Whether you think this is a recipe for disaster or the coolest thing you’ve ever heard may depend on your age group, and teenagers obviously 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,” ten ten co-founder and CEO Jules Komar told TechCrunch in a written interview. He added that in CB codes, 1010 means “Transmission Complete, Ready”. According to Komar, this is just one of the “many meanings that are in line with our values and concept”. It seems to resonate; the app is free and quickly climbing the charts.
Ten Ten’s sudden rise is particularly noticeable in France, where it has been downloaded 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 changes along the way. The current UX offers 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 PINs on social media, so we are working on a better friend management system,” said Comar.
The PINs that Comar is referring to are the identifiers that users can use to find each other. The app also asks for access to the user’s contacts (but none are added without user action.) There’s inherent virality to this model, but that’s not the only driver of growth; TikTok “played an important role,” Komar said.
The number of downloads of Ten Ten undoubtedly continues to grow over the weekend: lately ten ten has been in the French media. Not always with a positive spin; The French newspaper Le Figaro, for example, called it “alarming”. “I was very surprised,” Komar said. “There’s nothing ‘dangerous’ about ten ten!”
These aren’t just articles that look at the app in a negative light; fake news is also circulating, Komar said. “There were some rumors that we were a Chinese app because of the name ‘ten ten’ and we were unfairly accused of ‘spying’ 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 worded, but mention that the team is in the process of writing better ones. More importantly, the startup’s privacy policy is emphatic about two points:
- All your conversations are ephemeral, we can’t listen to your conversation as we don’t even store them!
- We will never sell your data!!
Beyond this decision not to sell data, it’s unclear how ten ten 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 that later point.
Asked if his startup already has or is in the process of raising funding, Komar replied in the affirmative. But, he added with a smile, “we can’t really reveal how much [from] who else.”
In a response to TechCrunch, French VC Hugo Amsellem indicated 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 Amsellem, the common thread 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 with luxury devices.
It remains to be seen how long ten ten can keep his cool, but the CEO is aware that his current position is both privileged and fragile. Komar said:
It’s exciting, it’s a feeling that’s hard to describe, but a few lucky people have felt it, the feeling that everything is going so fast and so slow at the same time, adrenaline mixed with pride, gratitude and responsibilities, you feel big and small in same time — You can only feel this in consumer social networks 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, this is just the beginning, the hardest is yet to come.
Comar and ten ten co-founder and CTO Antoine Bachet has been sleeping very little lately. An automated email with a smiling reply warns that they are “having problems with our servers due to a huge number of users at the same time” and are “working on this day and night to fix it once and for all”.
Server issues aside, the generation gap is one obstacle TenTen will have to overcome smartly. More than privacy, the fact that ten ten is used 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 being distributed at school!” Komar said.
It’s easy to see why teachers are the first adults to notice the app. Since ten ten can bypass a lock screen to play a message out loud, this can be used for pranks and create minor disruptions in classrooms. But having to teach phone hygiene is nothing new, and kids are savvy enough to figure it out.
On the French subreddit for teachers, there was a discussion about whether members had problems with ten ten in classrooms. One participant noted that there have been no “major incidents so far,” although the app “gets a lot of attention” at their school. But that person added: “Please put your phones on airplane mode.” (We haven’t reached out to confirm that this person is a teacher, but his profile appears to confirm that he is.)
Rather than creating another moral panic, perhaps ten ten can be an opportunity for parents to marvel at the fact that some of our favorite cultural artifacts are making a comeback; whether it’s tapes, Dungeons & Dragons, or now walkie-talkies.
There’s only one small step from dated to retro, and the success of “Stranger Things” probably helped. But app-based walkie-talkies won’t gain real traction if there isn’t a real use case around them. Komar thinks there is, and that’s what inspired him.
“I’ve always had a group of close friends, we talk every day in different mediums, but I felt like they all had some kind of tension,” he said. “I wanted to be able to communicate as if we were always under the same roof, as roommates: you just walk into their room when you want to say something, if their door is closed, knock, if it’s open, just talk!” “
Hopefully in ten ten parents will also see the value in this. Who knows, maybe they can use it to say out loud that dinner is ready. That is if their teen accepts them as a contact.
