With 10M users in just four months, Tinder-esque app BeeTalk is buzzing throughout Asia

A few months ago, Tech in Asia wrote a piece about BeeTalk, a little-known social app that took Snapchat, Tinder, Line, and WeChat and rolled them all into one. Like Snapchat, users could send disappearing texts and photos. Like Tinder, users could flip through photos of nearby users to initiate friendships (or something more). Like WeChat, users could shake their devices and match up with other users shaking their phones at the same time. And like Line, BeeTalk is sticker-tastic.

The piece drew a lot of interest from our readers, but BeeTalk didn’t immediately strike us as an app worth watching, and we quickly forgot about it.

Fast forward two months later, and the the entire city of Taipei is plastered with ads for BeeTalk. Much like how Naver made sure that Line’s mascots appeared in subway stations and convenience stores all over Taiwan, the BeeTalk team has made sure that seemingly every street corner and subway station features a billboard print of BeeTalk’s titular insect and some extremely attractive users.

So who are these guys? Where did BeeTalk get the money for this massive marketing campaign? And is this company crazy to think that there’s room for yet another chat app in Asia?

Sean Yang, BeeTalk’s head of regional marketing, explains that BeeTalk aims to be the cool social app that your parents aren’t using.

“Line and WeChat are helping you communicate with people that you already know,” says Yang, who hails from Taiwan but works from BeeTalk’s base in Singapore. “You use it with your mom and your grandparents. The age of those apps’ average users keeps getting higher and higher. We’re trying to help you make friends with people you don’t already know.”

That’s a pitch that will sound familiar to anyone who’s been following the mobile messaging space, or the evolution of social networks in general. Adoption starts with teenagers, but once Aunt Susie gets on board, the cool factor disappears, and apps like Snapchat emerge from the fold to reclaim the youth demographic.

Luckily for Garena, BeeTalk’s parent company, Snapchat hasn’t yet taken over Asia. Keen to fill this market void, BeeTalk has carved out a marketing formula of celebrity partnerships, print advertisements, television coverage, and extensive media outreach in an effort to make sure that users flock to the app – either for the disappearing messages, or the thrill of “hot or not”-esque photo-flipping.

So far, Garena has managed to find some success for BeeTalk in Thailand and Taiwan, two markets where BeeTalk has fully launched (it’s currently in a “soft launch” phase in Thailand, Vietnam, and Singapore). To date, the app has racked up 10 million users across Asia. Taiwan marks its strongest growing market, where it accumulated two million users in just six weeks.

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