Achieving the top 1 in the category in two years, Shenzhen Dashao "bravely enters" the red ocean market

If we count the many cross-border sellers in China, most of them rely on strong supply chains to make their products stand out, while there are very few cross-border companies that truly rely on hard-core technology to go overseas. However, Timekettle, a hot-selling product in Shenzhen, undoubtedly belongs to the latter.

Timekettle founder Leal Tian believes that Timekettle is a company dedicated to solving human cross-language barriers. It combines software and hardware through AI technology, allowing people to deal with language problems calmly.

Relying on technology to go global, Timekettle enters the red ocean market

In the 3C electronic product category, earphones have long been a fiercely competitive red ocean market, but this Shenzhen startup cleverly entered the AI ​​smart translation market segment and quickly found its place in the market.

Timekettle was founded in Shenzhen University Town in 2016. Founder and CEO Leal Tian once mentioned in a talk show that the reason for choosing to make translation headphones was partly due to an "accident".

At that time, his parents were traveling abroad, but the existing translation tools were very inconvenient to use. The translation APP downloaded on the mobile phone needed to be passed back and forth between the parents, which was indeed a bit embarrassing in actual use.

Based on this, Leal's entrepreneurial direction gradually took shape: to create an immersive communication experience for people with different language backgrounds.

As the first stop, Timekettle chose the United States, a market with a multicultural and multilingual background. From the beginning, Timekettle focused on creating a good product. Leal believes that a good product should take precedence over a good brand.

In the early stages of their business, Leal and his founding team chose to first obtain user feedback through the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform, and then decide whether this thing was feasible based on user feedback.

Fortunately, Timekettle's crowdfunding journey did not take any detours, and the market feedback on the product was good. Leal believes that whether a product is good or not must be tested in the target market, otherwise it will be impossible to make a breakthrough by focusing on making cars.

After successfully breaking out of the circle, Timekettle's overseas expansion accelerated: it expanded into Amazon, set up an independent website, placed FB ads, and even accepted reports from local media. Timekettle's name became well-known overseas.

Two years after its founding, its products topped the Amazon US site

According to information on Timekettle's official website, in 2018, the company received millions of dollars in angel round financing. In the same year, the simultaneous interpretation headset WT2 Plus was officially mass-produced. It is in the leading position in the industry in communication, voice and other technologies, has obtained international patents, and has become the top-selling product in the Amazon category in the United States.

It should be noted that it has only been two years since Timekettle was founded. Such a fast development speed is really astonishing. In 2020, its products WT2, ZERO, and M2 jointly ranked in the top three of the category list of Amazon US , achieving a dimensionality reduction attack on similar competing products .

After searching on Amazon, I found that Timekettle's latest travel translation earphones M3 have also been officially launched and have achieved good results. From the picture, we can see that the price of the M3 translation earphones is about US$150. The latest monthly sales have reached 700+ and have accumulated 619 reviews. It can be said that the results are quite good.

(Image from Amazon search page)

Compared with several other similar products, Timekettle's overall sales volume and number of product reviews are a level higher. I believe this is the result of consumers voting with real money. The original intention of making good products with care is "feeding back" to Timekettle's brand image in a subtle way.

(Image from Amazon search page)

Clicking into Timekettle’s Amazon store, you can see that a lot of effort has been put into the store decoration. The navigation bar is clearly divided, and the main picture is a promotional picture full of Christmas atmosphere, setting the mood for the upcoming Christmas .

(Picture from Timekettle Amazon store homepage)

In the Comparison section, Timekettle lists its three current flagship products and compares them in terms of price, usage scenarios, supported languages, and whether simultaneous interpretation is supported, so that consumers can quickly choose the product that suits them according to their needs.

In addition to Amazon, independent websites are also an important channel for Timekettle. It is worth noting that a video introducing the product is directly inserted at the top of the About Us page of its official website, and the speaker is the founder Leal.

In fact, many cross-border brands would like to appear more like a Western local company when introducing themselves , but Timekettle obviously does not have such concerns. The reason is probably because it is highly confident in its own technical level and does not care that Westerners will look at it with tinted glasses just because it is an Eastern company.

According to Google Trends, the search volume for the keyword Timekettle on Google has remained at a good level for many years, and there was another small peak in search volume from the end of June to the beginning of July this year. This shows that the brand name Timekettle has a considerable influence in the West, and many consumers place orders by directly searching for keywords.

Of course, in addition to word-of-mouth communication, Timekettle has not ignored the power of social media. Not only did it establish a good cooperative relationship with overseas KOLs in the early stages, it also worked hard to operate its own accounts on overseas social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.

With excellent products and rich overseas marketing strategies, it is no wonder that Timekettle has achieved today's results in its own field.

The market potential is huge, and translation equipment still has great potential in the future

According to Market.us, the global language translation equipment market size is expected to reach US$1.332 billion in 2023, and its market size is expected to reach US$3.166 billion by 2032.

That is to say, from 2023 to 2032, the market size of the language translation equipment industry will flourish at a compound annual growth rate of 10.4%. It has to be said that this growth rate will indeed make sellers in other categories jealous.

(Photo from Globalnewswire)

From a regional perspective, North America remains the main consumer market for translation equipment. Data shows that it accounts for 36.9% of global consumption of related products in 2022, which coincides with Timekettle's development focus.

As the translation equipment market continues to develop, North America is expected to continue to lead the way in consumption, but other regions such as Europe and Latin America will see varying degrees of market share increases.

(Photo from Globalnewswire)

In addition, the generative artificial intelligence Chat GPT, which has become popular this year, will also bring more opportunities and challenges to the industry. Leal believes that as a company highly related to artificial intelligence, it will definitely try to see if these new technologies can be combined with existing tools to better serve cross-language communication services.

As a company that values ​​technology so much, I believe it will continue to widen its brand moat in the future and move to the next stage on its overseas expansion.

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