Editor’s note: This article was first published in July 2011, and all its figures are from that month: Skype’s 600 million users, Tango’s 17 million users after nine months, its 56 employees and its goal of 100 million users next year. Skype was later bought by Microsoft and has since been discontinued.
Skype currently has 600 million users worldwide, so you could say it’s one of those giants that are hard to overshadow. That hasn’t stopped a number of entrepreneurs from creating a similar platform built around Skype’s “gaps”. Nine months ago a company called Tango appeared. Nobody was betting on it, since it was entering a saturated business, and few investors thought it could be profitable while competing against the giant.
Today TechCrunch published the first statistics after nine months, and they clearly show that Tango has 17 million users, 8 million more than Skype managed in its first year.
Tango has studied the market very carefully and currently has a staff of 56. Its strategy has been very simple. Although it will probably launch premium services at some point in the future, for now Tango is completely free.
Another important part of its strategy has been its focus on mobile: it hasn’t even built a desktop version yet. Tango is among the most downloaded free iPhone apps, and it works on both iOS and Android, so its growth is expected to continue over the next few years.
Among Tango’s goals is reaching 100 million users by next year, and it now has the backing of outside investors.
Tango is an example of two entrepreneurs who copy an idea, improve it, take it to new devices and build a profitable business around something a tech giant had already invented. On top of that, they’ve managed to make the giant nervous as it watches new competition closing in fast in the rearview mirror.
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Featured image: EU-Ukraine Cooperation, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr.
