Twit­ter may now be feel­ing dis­tinct­ly ner­vous about the rise of a new kid on the increas­ing­ly crowd­ed social media block: Pheed.

With major suc­cess­es like Face­book, Twit­ter, Tum­blr, Insta­gram and Vine dom­i­nat­ing the social net­work­ing space, many con­tent man­agers, com­mu­ni­ty man­agers and social media man­agers feel that the indus­try sim­ply isn’t open to any sig­nif­i­cant dis­rup­tions. But Pheed’s mete­oric rise rather qual­i­fies this assumption.

A rock­et­ing start

After launch­ing its iPhone app just a few months ago in Novem­ber 2012, it rock­et­ed into Apple’s Top Charts with­in weeks and com­fort­ably entered the top 100 apps in more than 30 coun­tries. It now has over 100 mil­lion users and is prov­ing very pop­u­lar amongst cre­atives, includ­ing actors, film-mak­ers, musi­cians, pho­tog­ra­phers and artists. And it’s def­i­nite­ly been a big hit in the high school demo­graph­ic: amongst this age group, it’s top banana in Apple’s Free Apps chart for social net­work­ing apps, beat­ing leviathans like Twit­ter and Facebook.

The surge appears to have been dri­ven by a num­ber of pop­u­lar teens with big fol­low­ings on Insta­gram and Twit­ter; they came across the Pheed app, began tweet­ing and by the fol­low­ing day, youth­ful fol­low­ers across the States were open­ing Pheed chan­nels. One of the most influ­en­tial was Aca­cia Brin­ley – when she tweet­ed “”@Pheed sick­est app”, thou­sands of fel­low teens opened Pheed chan­nels with­in minutes.

Youth: a force to be reck­oned with

Pheed’s co-founder and CEO OD Kobo seemed a lit­tle bewil­dered by his company’s explo­sive suc­cess amongst kids. He said:

“I feel like the only metaphor that describes accu­rate­ly how I feel is the lit­tle engine that could, as it’s against all odds… we’re this self-fund­ed start­up with no VC fund­ing… while our com­peti­tors raise tens of mil­lions, we’re just this small team of peo­ple, and Pheed is being accept­ed by the com­mu­ni­ty. All I can say is we are hap­py that peo­ple are being so accept­ing. It means a great deal!”

The sto­ry under­scores just how potent a force the youth sec­tor can be in pow­er­ing a startup’s growth. Justin Bieber is known to have more Twit­ter fol­low­ers than Barack Oba­ma. His age group maybe needs a lit­tle more busi­ness atten­tion; they’ve seen to it that this mod­est start­up is here for the duration.