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Intellectual Property Breakdown: How to Protect Your Brand BEFORE You Launch Your Product · Pitch to Product

• Attorney Podcast: All right, today we're gonna be talking about a topic that everyone is always asking us for since we're not attorneys. I love having you guys on. That is going to be trademarks and the importance of branding. I think it is the most underestimated part of bringing a new product to market. So thank you, gentlemen, for joining us. I wanna ask what motivated you guys to fly in from Knoxville to Nashville to come to our little town of Bramingham. And get on a podcast. Brandy. We love talking about trademarks, ⁓ branding, intellectual property generally. ⁓ I'm a true believer in the value of trademarks in particular. I think that there are very few things that for for the cost of registering a federal trademark, for example, have the same return on investment. And ⁓ an example I like to give is sometimes I like to talk about Google in in in this context. You know. Tomorrow I bought every patent Google owns and I hired every engineer they had and I had their search algorithm and I launched my own search engine and I called it 52 Launch. How many people would come and run a search there? Right. How many? But if tomorrow I were to buy Very few. And and and then you'd be competing with Google for the cost of customer acquisition, right? But if tomorrow I were to buy Google's trademark portfolio and their top level domain name, I could build an inferior search engine behind that. And guess what? Every day still's coming. Because that name. That's the value. It's the only way to make tangible the intangible goodwill of your business. So we're really passionate about it. And we really believe that it's something that every every brand should be doing is protecting those trademarks. Well, look at you're you're ⁓ you're preaching to someone who has learned this the hard way by not doing it early on. In fact, look, I I've come full circle on my belief. ⁓ in my world it always comes down to if you can't afford them both, what do you do buy the product that you can go sell or buy the protection that you need to then go and make a product that like I can't sell protection, I can't sell that kind of stuff, right? So what I've learned along the way is when you're a true entrepreneur, you need it all. It's just a matter of how do you put it all into one place. So look at this is just I'm gonna take a teachable moment. The reason why you guys are here is because that is exactly what you need to do, right? There's a method in which you can find the real estate space that you're looking for. I call real estate trademark. It's a great way of looking at it. Right. Like I need to be where people are gonna find me, but I can't afford to be like how many times do you look on a ⁓ GoDaddy or some sort of domain platform? And the name you love is there, but it's like 40 grand. Yep. Right. Like, guess what? It'll be there in a little bit down the road. So what can I our our full our belief has always been, how do I do something at the lowest cost to get started? And then when revenue comes in, start the building. So help me unpack that because what you just said is sounds like real estate that me maybe even we're not looking at properly. Like to me, I looked at, okay, if it's available as a dot com, no dashes, no weird stuff, like just straight dot com, and I can use that. Same handle on every social media platform, the chances are someone else hasn't gotten yet. That's probably not exactly true, but it's closer than it's close enough for you guys to start doing your work. Tell me how it should work. Well, say ⁓ the analogy I always tell my clients, chase the green grass. ⁓ you know, you can come up with whatever name you want, and as long as you're not butting up against somebody else, like if what you're doing is creating a good product or you're providing a good service, people are gonna know the name, but they're gonna think about the quality of what you have put out there. ⁓ You know, it's certainly just not a situation where I would say, if you've got to have that name, you know, let's go ahead and just bet the farm on the name alone. You know, so we we help clients navigate that question. Ultimately, it's on a spectrum. So a lot of clients will say, Well, I'm the Knoxville lawyer, you know, I'm gonna call it the Knoxville law firm, and maybe that's great. Maybe there's an SEO strategy behind it. ⁓ but I might do myself some favors by saying I can come up with a name that's totally unique, like trust true. It doesn't immediately describe what I'm doing, it doesn't talk about the services that I'm providing. Right. And inherently I'm separating myself and create. Actorate grass. So we have clients navigate that because ultimately they have to like the name, right? ⁓ they have to do something that they're they're proud of and they want to get behind. But ultimately, chase that freedom, try to find some way to separate yourself from your vendors and build yourself a favor from day one, and it costs nothing to just come up with a unique name. Yeah, so Derek, you use something that I use all the time, and that is well, first of all, it's something I teach everybody that calls us with a name. I'm like, every two word has been taken since 1998. So ⁓ you know, obviously that's probably like a I don't remember. Law firms for whatever reason would be the people that bought every domain that they could, but two names have been taken since 1998. That means you use trust tree. The two names that make no sense together sometimes. Some of those are available, right? That that's that's good real estate to look at. ⁓ so when you have that, tell me what you guys do next. Well, I I have a little bit of a counterintuitive approach to this. I I start with with the name. And not necessarily with the domain name. I do think that it's smart to go and see does anybody have this domain? If they do, what are they using it for? Right? Is it the same as what I'm doing or is it distinct from what I'm doing? Because there's a little bit of a common misconception that when you own a trademark, you have the unfettered right to use that trademark for all things. But that's not the case. Your rights are limited to the goods or services you provide under that trademark, or goods or services. as a consumer might think a business like yours would provide them with that trademark. So if you'll indulge me for a second. So from a 40,000 foot view, what makes a trademark a trademark is that it's source identified. Okay. So people use the words patent copyright and trademark interchangeably, but they protect very different things. Right. Patents protect emergents. Copyrights protect creative links. Trademarks protect source identifiers. So typically it's gonna be a brand name, a logo, or a slogan. Okay. So starting there, think Delta. Delta Airlines, Delta Faucet, same trademark. It's Delta. But because their goods and services are sufficiently distinct, there's no likelihood that consumers would confuse the source of one's goods or services as the source of the other. Right? So they can both have that trademark. So when it comes to finding a name, you may not be able to find one. It's very hard to find. Then nobody's using it for anything, let alone a domain that's widely available. So I think starting by looking at domains, starting by looking at social media handles, it's a great place to start. Yeah. If you don't see somebody using that name though for what you're doing, that that's greengrass to me because I also feel this way about domain names. Yeah, no, I look at that's and I I think this conversation's about where our clients align, right? And then that's ⁓ and I'm sure there's a bigger topic like Again, knock school attorneys have already got their service business. I I particularly deal in products, right? So products, when someone comes to us with a with a name, ⁓ I would say it has never been the source or the case that we haven't run into trouble with something that someone thought they would have. So I like the analogy that we can look at something like ⁓ or again, the two delta examples are perfect. Well and and think about This is what I think though. I know how I search for things on the internet. Yeah. Most domain browsers now, or most browsers, when you when you go to enter the domain name, right? You don't have to enter trusttree.com. No. I could type in trust space tree enter. And then what am I gonna get? Whatever my default search engine is, it's gonna pull up related names, right? That's how most people are doing it now. Young people. My son's seven. He's learning how to use internet. I promise you he's never typing in 52launch.com. He put in 52 launch. So it doesn't matter if you own 52launch.com because if you own 52 hyphen launch, as long as your SEO is good, or if he types in whatever it may be that would be associated with brain scan five, I type in Delta Airlines. I'm gonna find Delta the airline, not Delta Faucet. So I think people put sometimes too much stock into I have to get this domain. We also know. There are all these available domain ⁓ top level domain names, you know, and and and you don't have to have the dot-com anymore. You can do all sorts of things. So to me, let's unpack that. Find that strong brand name. I I I have a question or a com again, just a a question. Like for me, the fear would be it's not it's not that someone else is using the name, it's just that I am gonna be on page six, which is where you can hide. So how do I how do I get there? How do I use a name that's familiar or currently in there? Someone types it, you know, I always look for the clean real estate again that like nothing else is there. So help me understand the top sheet the the the what you just unpacked about GTL leaks. GTL leaks, yes. Well I I think it's evolving, first of all. Okay, it used to be uh.co, dot I agree with everyone Kevin said, Yeah, it'll help me understand how to unpack the GTL Ease. Yeah, yeah. So ⁓ basically whatever comes after the dot, right? ⁓ and actually it's it's just opened up not too long ago, you can submit from new GTLD approval. ⁓ so it's going to continue to become more and more dispersed. ⁓ I think we'll only see more de evolution from dot com as being the predominant. You know, I think it'll always be front and center. But I think the broader points that Kevin's making, if people associate your brand with that quality of the product we were talking about earlier, I think the find you whether it's a dot com or a dot net or a dot tree or a dot whatever comes out in the future. I think it pairs with socials. I think it pairs with your SEO campaign. But ultimately again it kind of goes back to what I said previously which is what are we doing with this name in comparison to what other people are doing. Similar names that are out there. And whenever we get involved, that's really what we look for. ⁓ how similar is your trademark to another market that's already out there? How related are your products or your services to the products or services that are offered under that trademark? And if there's enough gap there, then we feel like we actually have a pretty good chance of helping you not only secure trademark protection, but you know, carve yourself out in an SEO game as well. And you're not gonna end up on page six if you have good SEO, you're not gonna be on page six if you have a lot of followers to your social media. I mean, all of these things are taken into account now for how. Rate. And moreover, increasingly, we're going to see people using tools like ChatGPT and Claude to go search for things. Again. Type it the idea of having to have your name identically match the dot com because that's the only way people are gonna be able to find your website. I just think that that is an an older school way of thinking it the idea of having to have your name identically match the dot com because that's the only way people are gonna be able to find your website. I just think that that is an an older school way of thinking that that doesn't reflect how young people and and and when I say young people, I don't mean young like you know, I might consider myself and I'm in my 40s or Derek might consider himself, he's in his 30s. I'm talking about a teenager right now. And this is what I like to think about when we started our our firm, which provides online legal services. When we started this, people thought we were a little bit out there. But I kept thinking, well, what's somebody who's, you know, I I was ⁓ in my twenties at the time. I was like, well, let's somebody 10 years younger than me, but in 10 years, what are they gonna want to do? Are they gonna want to feel like they have to like put on a suit and drive downtown to come meet me in my office to ⁓ so I can apply for a trademark for them, which is something I'm gonna do through the internet anyway? Or am I gonna meet them wherever they're at? And I so I think getting back to the the initial thing we were talking about, it's so hard to find a name where the domain name is available and all the social media handles. And if you allow that to deter you, you might never find one unless you are completely inventing something, which which is a common way of creating a trademark. But you know, the strongest trademarks in the world, many of them are what we call arbitrary marks, Apple. Apple is a generic name for a fruit. And if Apple sold apples, they could not register that as a trademark. But for a technology company, that's what we call an arbitrary mark. They've given it new meaning. But I hear a conversation and I hear the word apple, I don't think people are talking about fruit. That's a powerful trademark. Right? So it can be as simple as that. Because you give it the meaning. Sometimes I talk about trademarks and in this ⁓ this this sort of ⁓ dynamic. ⁓ your brand is your personality, your trademark is your name. So like if somebody sees the name Covenantly and they've interacted with me, they what what when they see that name, but they think of me. They're gonna be like, ⁓ yeah, that's that you know, energetic Reddit guy, or then the intense guy, you know, the guy who loves talking about theater, ⁓ because that's what I really love talking about. But but they're gonna think those things, right? So when somebody sees 52 launch, What you want is for them to think about those things. What is fifty too much? What is it? I love about it, right? That's the same thing with Apple. When you hear the word, you think about what you associate with that brand. That's part of why trademarks are so valuable. They capture that goodwill. Absolutely. Absolutely. Look, I ⁓ I'm I'm egging you on a little I'm playing the devil's advocate for my audience because everybody in the entrepreneur, first of all, there's levels, right? I have inventors who have no concept of the fact that they actually have to take their product, make it, and then sell it over and over. That's that's an inventor way of thinking. They think someone else is gonna buy their idea and make them millions of dollars. It's not even close to the truth. Or it's not a truth that I've seen in the 15 years I've been doing this. Then you have the inventor that turns into an entrepreneur and just wants to get their product built, doesn't, and thinks they can go and hustle themselves themselves, and they totally miss the branding and marketing side. What you guys are is what I would call my progressive trademark guys. Because you understand that with the trademark is part of the balance of going to market. You do use the word without SEO, does your trademark will someone find you in a GTL V? Right? Is someone going to find you if you're not putting some money into Meta? Is someone going to find you? So the importance of marketing. And then the discovery of what you find behind that marketing has to be consistent, which is your brand. So the trademark protects the person. What advice do you guys have about the brand? Like give me give me the full circle of what I need to do or what my clients need to do when they are thinking about specifically a product or even a business. I have no problem with expanding that out there for you guys. But tell me what we need to really be thinking, that we need to do so that I can be successful at creating that culture, that brand is. Again, I know it's the brand, and there's usually a brand, the person behind the brand. So we'll unpack that next. Yeah. Well, I'll say number one, you have to kind of be true to whatever your your mission is, right? ⁓ but beyond that, I I think finding out who your your demographic is, like who do you want to market your services to your products to? ⁓ and I think it starts with the name. I you know, Kevin mentioned arbitrary trademarks. ⁓ my favorite are suggested trademarks. Like you hear the word copper tone, you think about it for a second, you're like, ⁓ I get it. You know, now I understand what this product is and what it does, but it doesn't immediately convey to you what it is, so that it's on that descriptive weaker end of the spectrum. ⁓ you know, so like figuring out how to promote your product from the very first second that somebody gets a chance to interact with, that's a huge first impression, right? You want to lay a strong out of the gate there. ⁓ but beyond that, I again I think that's where the creative aspects kick in that you guys can help out with quite a bit. ⁓ you know, I'm certainly not the marketing guru, I'm not the branding guru, but you I can help spot check the legal aspects as you're unpacking, you know, the ways to promote it and secure that. So your your plan is based on someone's marketing ability to go with the trademark, correct? Well I mean maybe not your plans, like your support is somewhere in that realm. Yeah, so yeah, we we start by identifying what's protectable. ⁓ I guess to zoom out a little bit, maybe there's an invention that is subject to patent protection. Maybe we talk about design patents before we hit the market because you actually lose the ability to do that every time. On the trademark side, it actually has multiple different levels. We might be talking about you know the name right out of the gate to lock down the word mark, have all fonts, all color schemes, whatever you want to do, but you know, maybe you find out that your demographic is really drawn to a certain style of packaging. Protect trade dress, really, the unique bottle that you use to sell your product formulation. So the more that the brand kind of finds its own identity. The more that's where an ongoing conversation with good IP council can really help you just kind of constantly be reassessing like, am I doing as much as I can to secure all the rights I possibly can for my brand as it continues to evolve? So when we think about the strength of a trademark, there is a spectrum we look at. We call it the distinctiveness spectrum. The more distinctive your trademark is, the stronger it is. So I'll I'll walk through this quickly using gas stations as examples. So we start with generic gas stations. Okay. You cannot name a gas station, gas station, and protect it in any meaningful way, right? That would have a chilling effect on commerce if only one gas station could call itself a gas station. So there are no rights in that. Now you can open a bar and call it the gas station because you're not selling gas. You know, that's what we talked about earlier. Okay. The next level up from there are what we call descriptive marks. ⁓ that would be like travel centers of America, right? It tells you exactly what it is. It's a travel center, it's in America, but it's not really distinctive. ⁓ over time, descriptive marks can become distinctive. Because going back to something I said earlier, it's about source identification. The day that a consumer recognizes that as a source of ⁓ you know gas, then that's taken on a new meaning. ⁓ in Kentucky fried chicken. That's a trademark that's become very strong. But there was a time that we might be hanging out in Kentucky, I'd be hey, you want to go get some Kentucky fried chicken? And you might say, Me, where? I think about this a lot, being from Nashville, Nashville hot chickles. Look, that that's not an idea anybody can own at this point because so many people it became the it became the name for the product, right? Buffalo. Absolutely, it's that it's the same thing. So after descriptive marks, so there's this big bright line of demarcation. And every other type of trademark we talked about is what we call inherently distinctive. The next level, Derek just mentioned, suggestive marks. So for a gas station, that'd be like mobile, right? It tells you something about what the service is going to allow you to do, what the product's going to allow you to do. And then the next level, but I just talked about Apple, arbitrary marks. So for a gas station, that'd be like Shell, right? We know what shells are, you know, but when you use that as the name of your gas station, it becomes something new. And then the highest level, we call them fanciful marks. I don't always love them. Sometimes I call them scary robot names. These are invented words. So like Exxon for a gas station. When you invent the name, you're the only one who gives a meaning. It only exists as a trademark, right? So To to I think answer the question you asked earlier though, when when I talk to a client, if we get them early. Now look, some people come to us, they already have a name, and they love them. Yeah. Another thing I tell people is, if you love your name, I promise you you can get it. We'll find a way. There's always a way. It may be money. Money may be the way. But there's a way. Now otherwise, if you're still in the in the name development phase, this is this is what I suggest. Because it goes back to us talking about personality. I say, okay, what you really want to think about is what are the feelings you want people to have when they engage with your brand. Make a list of those feelings. Then make a list of words that make you have those feelings that you associate with those feelings. And then I just start working through those lists of words, thinking about can I put these in combinations? Is there one that stands out to me that I love, or maybe I could I can push these together? into what we sometimes call a telescope work where you where you take two two words that exist and and push them into one. Yeah, we could have done that with trust tree and had the the T share, but it was it was already really close to trustee. And ⁓ we get a lot of requests for trust work, even though what we do are trademarks. But but again and then to your point, just to to to be clear that the we practice what we preach here when we started, we we get When we started this firm, it was a completely different radical idea. ⁓ the founding partners and I, when we started it, ⁓ we worked at a big firm. We we were doing something completely different with this, and we saw like like your Quiet C and like all the entrepreneurs and small businesses we work at work with, see, it's death by a thousand cuts. And so domain names can be one of them. We purchased TrustHyphenTree.com and Trusttreetrademarks.com. I reached out to try to buy Trusttree.com. And the number was too big for my taste at that time. And it wasn't until five years later that we acquired Trust Tree.com. But no, we ultimately did. So I do want to be clear. I do see value in getting it. Absolutely. Absolutely. But you you've got to make smart decisions as you're growing your brand. It's deputy by a thousand cuts. And to me, so long as nobody's sitting on your domain offering services or goods that are similar to the ones you intend to offer, you are already operating from a safe space as far as potentially protecting that as a trademark and moving forward with that as your brand name. Yeah. So I'll give you a couple of curve not curve balls but like ⁓ things that I I've learned so everything you said I I totally 100% buy in down the road first of all we did a lot of that right the dot you know the the extension abbreviations, whatever at the end. I'm not sure. ⁓ my gut tells me that Google still does f will still favor a dot com over a a any other dot at the end of the the the business. The challenge I have is when you see something that's similar that already has like a good amount of content in, so I kind of avoid that. But let's say we get past those two things. The punch in the face for an entrepreneur bringing a product to market is when they go stand in front of a buyer or someone one of the female people on Shark Tank has a rule Okay. ⁓ bring her names in you know she's the blonde very successful but you know her rule is that like I need to I need to tell me what the product does in the name and like the dumbing it down for the consumer where it also fits in with the two cool words like that's where and again I want the right thing but I'm also trying to avoid that inventor or entrepreneur who stands in front of the opportunity and they gets punched in the face because they're told the name doesn't tell the person what it does. So finding that kind of that that's To me, the the full circle. Well, we have that. That's why the naming for us is not the most difficult thing, it's the first thing because if we get that wrong. It's gotta move forward. Once we have that right it well, it it's hard to encompass everything that we just talked about, but I think this is why we're having this conversation is to find when's the right time, what's the right way to do it, how do we do it for the end result that I need, I agree. We can buy a domain in five years from now, we're selling a ton of product and the the revenues there. Can I switch a trademark midway through or in five years? I I know that with a patent, I can't the minute I just d ⁓ disclose it. I can't I can't register it as a ⁓ or or file a patent. But trademarks, help understand that part. When what's the flexibility there? What's the rules that I need to understand in trademarks so people can can navigate that properly, then we can make decisions to go faster. Yeah, so I'll say there's a a nuance it's a rule called tacking, ⁓ where eventually over time you can picture certain logos and look, you know, they might think there's a sugar brand. ⁓ Since the 1920s, and slowly but surely the fashion, the wardrobe has been updated. It's still the same trademark, even though it's slowly changed. You can look at Apple. Yeah, Apple. They slowly but surely changed over time. So I would say if if people think about it as you know, somewhat of a bullseye, if you have your epicenter and you just slowly and gradually change a little bit, but you still retain that gravity, I think that you're probably okay to say that your brand is still wholly true with its roots. If you were to totally rebrand and you go in a totally different direction. That has totally different elements. ⁓ Theoretically, your data first use is tied to whatever the trademark was. So if Nike on day one sold their products as Nike products, day two, they sold them, you know, under the slogan just do it. Day three, they rolled out the swoosh. Theoretically, those would be three different dates of first use. ⁓ You know, so they might have to consider whether or not other people are doing something similar on each day that those were rolled out. ⁓ You know, but I do think it goes back to what you were saying before. You know, what is what is our core message that we want to relay? to our customers and how can we add layers to our brand that over time only add value. And that's that's really one of the truest perks of Dreammarks. They don't expire. They only get stronger over time. And the more you build out that brand, More the the hooks in people's brains get deeper and deeper. Yeah. I do want to circle back to your your kind of shark tank example because I've heard that on there before. And it's not that I disagree, it's that I think people need to know what their goals are and know what it takes to get there. So when you use a descriptive trademark, like that person might suggest some people need to do something that describes the product or service. Again, pink Kentucky fried chicken. And again, I'll point back to Nashville hot chicken. There were a couple early purveyors. You know, this place Princes is kind of credited as the place where it originated. There's another place, Bolton's, they might have something to say about that. But if you look nationwide at what's happening, there's this other brand called Hattie Bees that might be the most well known at point. And that's because neither of those initial businesses set out to make national hot chicken their name. Right. Like ⁓ The colonel did ultimately with Kentucky Fried Chicken because that was not the name of this establishment at first. They just sold Kentucky Fried Chicken. Somebody there realized this opportunity that this is what everybody's calling this anyway. Let's grab hold of it, right? Now, if you do that though, say somebody had wanted to make Nashville Hot Chicken their trademark, when you have something descriptive, you have to police your rights. You have to be very careful because if you let people start using the same name, you can't roll that back. Like what's happening with National Hot Chicken, right? So that's why I'm I'm always hesitant to tell a client to use a descriptive trademark unless you know that you you are kind of the first to use it. You're going to be using it ⁓ in the way she's going to, which is like I'm going on national TV and I'm trying to sell a million units. Well, once you do that, you've got an argument that you've acquired distinctiveness. Okay. And you've got stronger rights in your trademark once you acquire distinctiveness in it. But until then. I still disagree. You know, there are kind of two schools of thoughts about I love your disagree because look at all I'm trying to avoid is the person that's invested money in us, invested money in you, invested money along the way, and then one person says you did it all wrong. Right. And and so that's the conversation I'm trying to since you guys are the experts, I am not. Total agreement with everything you're saying until we get in front of that person that says, no, this is wrong. This is what we do. So I I I do I agree. If you're gonna go for it, go for it. Do distinctive. I love the list that you guys gave everybody. Let's let's figure out what that emotion is. Let's do what that is, let's own that real estate. And run through that. It does take a while to build your brand. And I understand for retail purposes or maybe on a shelf, people want to look at a box and see what it does. There's there's ways of packaging. Can do that. So let's let's use the name first then. Absolutely. I like to use Apple to talk about this. Here's why. So there are two schools of thought out there about how to use how certain brands roll out new products. ⁓ One school of thought is we're gonna name every new product we roll out something new. And the cost to get consumers to recognize that new name as this product can be high. So think Apple. There was a time when they named every new product. The iMac, the MacBook, the iPhone, iTunes. Of course, they used this III strategy for a while. And ultimately, Apple, one of the most valuable trademarks in the world, somebody there, I don't know who, but but but somebody there made a really smart decision, which is they said, we're Apple. Why would we name every new product? Let's just use the generic name after Apple. Apple TV, Apple Music, Apple Vision Pro. Everything is now. Doing what Shark Tank would say, tell me what it is, but you're putting Apple in front of it. And you can do that. You know that. That's right, because that's where so much value is. And and and people know, ⁓ it's Apple, Apple Watch. I love Apple, I want that watch, right? Instead of giving it a new name. So you can still really have it both ways. You can have your distinctive name. And use the generic product name in combination with that. Yeah. And solve the problems. That's great strategy. At the end of the day, we're in in my space, dealing with entrepreneurs, small business owners, like no one with a Rockefeller name calls us to get a product to market. So we're we're working on very limited budgets to do a lot of development research product ⁓ design trademarks, ⁓ you know, the the list can go on and on. This could be a very expensive venture. Our our goal is to say how do we break it down so that it could be fit. And to me the goal is always I want to get revenue as quick as I can. So get the minimal viable product out there that is somewhere between that and a two point ⁓ like we want to break Iterate, but when do I need to pro when do I need to put a patent in? And what's the process of that patent so I can collect myself? And when do I need to trademark? Because one of the questions that's coming up here is going to be about you know, when is an entrepreneur in what order do they need be begin fouling all this stuff? Yeah, yeah. So I'll say ⁓ in terms of timelines, your trademark rights can actually start to accrue the moment. You start putting your product or service out there under whatever name you choose. Okay. There's a dual system called common law rights, and then the system that we advise people to consider would be federal protection by going through the USB TO, filing a trademark application, getting it registered. If you go the latter route, you get presumption of nationwide use as of the filing date for most applications. On the other hand, you have patent protection, which is actually barred if you don't play your cards right. So the moment that you have started selling a product, if you put it out there and it's become public knowledge based on you just Disclosing it without adequate protections in place, you start your own clock for one, and in some countries you actually barred yourself completely from securing patent protection. They have this concept called absolute novelty. ⁓ So the moment that you think that you have something that's patent eligible, I would begin a conversation with an attorney. Just start exploring whether or not you Get a provisional in place. It's a one-year placeholder that allows you to go and kind of refine it, like you were saying, and then still claim that priority date, you know, looking backwards to whatever ⁓ subject matter was disclosed in that provisional application. Well, this is where we align. So for and I also where the alignments are, right? Because at the end of the day, this is a duality process. I can't control there's two schools of thought. Someone wakes up in the morning and says I need to protect this, and the other half wake up in the morning and say, I need to do this. This is where they converge for the first time. Yeah. Right? Someone hands me a patent that's four. Written and it's based on thought without conceptually working through some of these flaws is something I can't make a product that someone patent without understanding how a product is made. So I'm usually now having to re what was the word like I have to revision the patent process or the product. To me, the optimal point is let us do the sketch, let us do the design, let's eliminate the under non-disclosure with our clients. So no one knows this, we're not disclosing a ticket. But now we've kind of worked out, we've eliminated. Nine thousand seven hundred and seventy the different ways to make this to focus on the sixty or seventy ways. It can be designed, sketch it out. By design review, too, we are at the one or two ways that this is going to be made, and we kind of a pretty good idea of what could be patentable in this process. Sometimes it's the way we're making a mechanism to put things together and ⁓ It per it's it's usually it it co it coincides with our lowest point of cost. Sure. Meaning no one thought about how to do this the way we just did, and that's saving us a ton of money in the production cycle. And so can patent that item? Sometimes it's a general, can we do it all? A lot of times it's design, but that's usually the first moment that we can then utilize the trade the the the patent office and actually go with a a provisional patent which gives you a year, correct? Correct. Derek's point, I think with patents in particular, when you have the idea, especially if you're going to disclose it to anybody, that that is the time. You need to call the attorney because you have one year from disclosure in the United States to file either a provisional or a full ⁓ patent application. If you file the provisional, then you get an additional year to convert that to your full utility patent application. Trademarks on the other hand. not clear in the that I live in. That that's an absolute bar. And that's just your own car. I agree. Well it's always in talking in the context of enforcement, right? Right. Okay. So just like certain pitch competitions will tell you I want a name that describes everything. Well Good luck going in and forcing your rights when you have a merely descriptive mark. So you you're saying that if I went and pitched the idea to somebody okay, let's use me as an example, someone pitches me their idea, yeah, you're telling me that that combination of conversation, that person now only has a year to go in Moment they make public disclosure of something, and that again is your own novelty bar. So that's when you put the information out there yourself. If you don't put it out there yourself and somebody files a patent application the day after, you come up with the idea that's first to file at the USPTO. So they beat you, and just because you came up with the first does not mean that it's your idea that you can now lock down. But that's on the patent front. I do want to talk about trademark shit. We're we're going there next. So last thing I just want to unpack there. So basically the risk here, and again, I I'd say in in all ⁓ candidness right this isn't because we I know this most people when they call with the initial idea don't know and they're looking for validation. Yeah. So they are disclosing this to a lot of people in conversation until they realize ⁓ I might want to stop doing that and then put a the ⁓ on the very first page of our website you guys can take a look not on our website on the form that we get to fill out everything. Very first thing I do is acknowledge I'm not here to steal ideas. I I I wanna acknowledge right now that by filling up the form I protect you and then I will send a non-disclosure because I want to have this conversation fast, but I was unaware that that can trigger. Well, I I think you did it the right way. ⁓ so number one, you wouldn't be in this business if you're stealing people's ideas. Right, yeah. ⁓ so number two, the fact that it is a confidential conversation, you can have certain things that don't trigger that date that I was talking about. Okay. I think we do, but we'll we'll off offline we'll we'll learn those and we'll we'll put more of that protection in place 'cause at the end of the day, I understand that I understand the person, the intent or the And that's the stage, right? Like an inventor needs to turn into an entrepreneur or an entrepreneur that needs to learn how to run a business. And without those three things, the business part is the trademark for me in my world and help me and like me. Because for me, the reason why I look to get everyone a trademark is because one of the biggest marketplaces today is this little thing called Amazon. They used to sell books, and now they sell everything. In order to be on Amazon and get all the bells and whistles without going through the two-year probationary period. You overcome that with a trademark. You you so what what what Peter's talking about is to get on the Amazon brand register, yes, that's you have to have a federally registered trademark. Not only that, it must be distinctive. You cannot have a descriptive mark and get it registered on the principal register, which is what is required. So if you choose a descriptive mark. You cannot get on the Amazon brand registry. Despite what people I think we're doing it right. We see we a trademark and we get a trademark. And then so but but let's clarify wrong several times a bit. Okay, okay, so this is something very few people know. There there is a principal register of trademarks with the federal government, but there is also a supplemental register of trademarks. But These are all held in the same database. And there's only one little place where you'll look and you'll see register, and it might say principal or supplemental. Most people wouldn't even look there. You get a registration certificate. People might think it's the same thing, but it's not. The principal register is for distinctive marks. The supplemental register is for descriptive or ornamental marks. ⁓ which is where just using something. If everyone here that's listening to this podcast is learning, sure. Break that down into something like So a descriptive mark again would be like Kentucky fried chicken. Right. It's it's merely descriptive. Yeah. Hundred years later, people know it as a source of data. Right. And that transition is what we're talking about for the principal version of And so it is just like national chicken. National hot chicken. So the fact That they didn't take the extra steps to turn it into a federally recognized trade. Well, it's it's because they didn't really use it as a trademark itself. They used it to describe the product that the business was selling rather than use it as a source identifier for a whole class of products or services. ⁓ Well, ⁓ what's a Big Mac? If I if I just said Big Mac to you, you wouldn't think that that's a burger. So that's a distinctive mark. But if I say Kentucky Fried Chicken, what are you gonna think of? They're selling. Yeah. Right? So that makes it descriptive. So when your mark is descriptive though, you can register it on this supplemental register. And over time it can acquire distinctiveness. Once it acquires distinctiveness, you can then go back to the trademark office, apply again for the principal register. And argue that our descriptive mark is now require distinctiveness. And I'll tell you briefly what the requirement generally looks like. Five years of continuous use without evidence of any other party using the same name for the same products or services. That is sort of the bare minimum. But the truth is, early in my career, I saw the USPTO often approving people who came back after five years on the supplemental register. And apply for registration on the principal register, but I have not seen that in years. In years now, I have not seen them grant one just on that. Now you have 20 years to use, 30 years to use, 40 years to use, register is that would be KFC or I check it out. Before it acquires distinctiveness. But though the I want to get back to the Amazon book. Yeah. Because I'm just really kind of taking some shots back at what we were saying. Why there are reasons you want to be very careful about choosing a descriptive mark. Now, look, if you have an investor willing to give you millions of dollars if you have a descriptive mark, I'd say go for it, go right ahead. That's enough money to invest. Also, because the way we prove acquired distinctiveness is not just based on the amount of time it's used, but it really is based on how ⁓ recognized it is as source identifying of a particular brand, right? And so once it becomes a source identifier, ⁓ you can argue of acquired distinctness. And the way we prove that is amount of revenue. Or about amount of money spent on advertising marketing, unsolicited third-party recognition, in addition to the number of years of use. But so so the brand registry is super important. We work with tons of clients that are Amazon sellers trying to get out of brand registry. So we traffic in this all the time. And I want to get back to the initial thing you asked, which was okay, well, when do you do this? Right? So something Derek mentioned earlier. When it comes to trademarks. Trademarks don't exist because you, the business owner, say, I now have a trademark, I'm applying. Really, getting back to when I said the sort of 40,000-foot view of what trademarks are, they're source identifiers. And they're really there to protect consumers. We want consumers to know: ⁓ I see Nike on that product. I have a feel for what the quality's gonna be, what the price point's gonna be, how comfortable it's gonna be, right? So what we can't do is allow somebody to open a place called Nike Cowboy Boots, even if Nike's never sold a cowboy boot ever. Because what's a consumer gonna think? You know, I run into a street national, yeah, you me wearing cowboy boots, never one of those. ⁓ we're Nike Cowboy boots. You're not gonna be like, ⁓ that's a new company. You're gonna be like, ⁓ Nike's selling cowboy boots now, right? Yeah. So we're really trademarks are about protecting consumers as much as anything. It's a real windfall often to the brands that they're so valuable. So from the day you start using something in commerce to identify your business as a source of goods or services, you have a trademark. Now, you have common law rights at that point, as Darren mentioned. Common law rights are territorial in nature, and that's going to be determined by a court. So what happens is if you don't go register your trademark federally, ⁓ say I'm in Nashville, I launch a business, I call it trust treaty. Don't register federally. I'm offering legal services. ⁓ well my I somebody then in California, you know, a few weeks later launches their trust tree offering legal services. I may lose to them. Because what it may happen is a court may say, well, yeah, Kevin, you were using trust tree, but your rights were limited to National, or maybe it'd be Davidson County where National is maybe the middle of Tennessee, maybe be the state of Tennessee, it'd be the southeast east of the Mississippi. Who knows? That's right. So the reason you apply federally is when you register your trademark federally, you get a nationwide presumption of validity and enforceability for your trademark. Now, the general rule is that the first party to use a trademark. In commerce has the priority right to that mark for the associated goods and services, and including other goods and services a consumer might date. Like my Nike Cowboy Boots example, a natural expansion, maybe just beyond what you sell into things a consumer might think a business like yours would. Okay. So the person who files for the federal or the person who uses it first as a general rule has the priority right. Okay. There's one exception. That is, if nobody has used the trademark yet for those products or services, then the first person to file their application with the federal government will have the priority right, assuming they ultimately register their trademark. So here's how it works: you can either file what we call a use-based application with the federal government. That's where your mark's already in use in commerce, and now you're just asking the federal government to recognize your rights and register that trademark. Or You can file what's called an intent to use application. That's where you say, we haven't used this yet, but we have a bona fide intent to do so in the future. And we want to go ahead and start accruing our rights now. And I'll just give you another example. That's probably 100% of our clients. Yeah, absolutely. You can construct a use state as well. That's right. Okay. So you haven't done it yet, but you're going. To eventually once it registers. Well, and you said it's the ⁓ presumed we're gonna start saying it again. Well, let me just run through an example I double with it. So say that ⁓ we're gonna launch some new really cool golf product. I was talking to some of ⁓ your employees earlier, and they were telling me about some golf products y'all have that are very exciting, right? And I'm gonna call it Trust Tree. Yep. Okay. So I'm launching my golf product, I'm gonna call it Trust Tree. I'm really excited about it. It's ⁓ something that ⁓ you know can be used to clean golf clubs. And okay, I start going around town and telling everybody, hey, look at this new device I have that's gonna clean your clubs. I call it trust tree. Right? Well, maybe one of those people sees that, here's it. I haven't developed it yet. I'm not selling it yet. They're like, ⁓ this is a great idea. I'm gonna go on, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna I'm gonna take this to market faster. I I got the the supply chain to do it. I'm gonna take it to market, I'm gonna take it to market as soon as I can, and I'm gonna beat this guy to touch, right? And maybe they do that. And maybe I haven't filed an application yet for it. Well they they they might have the priority right now to that mark. I mean I might be able to come in and argue some things like unclean hands and get into a nice expensive lawsuit I'm not prepared to get into. So so what the reason we have this system is to encourage people to say go ahead and file Go ahead and file your intent to use application. That way you put your marker in the ground. You don't have to be worried that you go out and start talking to people about it and they get they beat you to the punch, right? Because if I were to ⁓ come up with the idea first, but then you file first, ⁓ you win. If I were to come up with the idea first and you use first, you win. So we encourage people to file first where they can. Now Something we said earlier though, it is death by a thousand cuts. We do understand that. And some people, like you said, it's like the idea. Some people are like, idea first, some people are like, I gotta get it done first. Right. There's so much chicken or the egg conversation that go on in in all of this, right? Like which do you do first? And so look at I I just our our philosophy has been. Let's educate everybody in the entire process. Yeah. Because the biggest challenge I have is when someone thinks they've done it all and they haven't even started. You know, I'm the first person that's to tell them you haven't done anything. And now I'm the villain and I don't like being the villain. I I want to explain to everybody, look at here's the journey. The first thing you gotta decide is, you know, in my world. Is does this does this even make money for it? Like is this an idea that someone will buy? Is it something that you know can be re can we make it? Once those are done and and I know that there's a a good degree of chance that they can be sold and the market's looking for it, that's when that's the only time I would take any recommend or or offer to take a get a get into a contract with the client. And so, but in that journey, the conversation of patents, ⁓ trademarks, ⁓ obviously, you know, obviously the LLCs, the starting businesses, and all the other business side to to what you're Yeah. That's what I love having you guys on. This is an incredible experience. It's an incredible amount of information for everybody to learn and understand. And it's not too, it's more just ask the right questions. Yeah. And then use the experts to say, how do we line this up so it works? So I'd say 99%, not 99, 100% of our clients are in or intend to use, right? Because we know that someone hired us with the intent to get a product and turn it into a business. And some people that are early on in our stage are like, well, how do I know this is going to sell? Why would I start writing a check for that kind of language? Because the time is not on my side. It's on, it's the, you know, there's things like you just brought up. Like the minute you start sharing, the minute you have intent to move forward, you gotta move forward. And if you have any doubt about moving forward, don't move forward. Like keep it a secret. Do do what you need to do to evaluate yourself with your group of friends. But when you decide to move forward, you need a team of people. I have 65 of you, you guys walked in here. It it's buzzing on a Monday. Yeah. Right. We're we're busy. This isn't something the AI can do. It's not ⁓ I'm not hiding employees. Like this is all hard work that sixty-five people need to do, plus attorneys, plus business attorneys, plus marketing people, plus the journey going forward. So just understand the whole process, right? When you and this one like you guys, especially and and I give Jack a lot of credit for bringing you guys in. ⁓ and again, I you know, we talk to a lot of attorneys, but in your guys' case, the specific the specificity here is you guys are business. Mind it as well as trademark and protectionary in your role. So ⁓ the Amazon conversation for me, you know, short-sighted, it's like I just need the number, plug it in and go. So help me educate myself and my clients. Like it's more than that, right? Like I just need the number in the serial number to set up brand registry. ⁓ yeah, the brand registry. Apparently, all I've needed, or maybe I've done more than I. Yeah, my understanding was that like once we have the number in, we're good. Well so I'll say Amazon is above the law. Yeah, no idea. ⁓ but so it's it's been a bit of a moving target what what their systems have entailed. So you the the brand registry set up at one point in time I think you could have ⁓ what would be a merely descriptive word, but if you protected it as a logo, I think they allowed that. ⁓ I think they still are allowing that. In fact the this is i we if we go through the brief history of how ⁓ I've seen it develop. When the brand registry first launched, you had to have a registered mark on the principal register and it had to be a standard character mark. So so just to back up a word mark. It has to be the word. It could not be a logo that incorporated the words. Now, because I think of some of the issues with some descriptive marks that would have the distinctive design elements as part of the logo. They started allowing people who had registrations for their logos incorporating these words to use those as a basis for the brain registry as well. But it used to be that you had to have registrations. Now over time they've evolved even further to allow you to get a conditional approval to operate on the brain registry. Excuse me, when you only have the serial number, which which you get in and let's back up. When you file a trademark application with the federal government, you get a serial number immediately. Right. Also, sometimes called your application number. Yeah. The registration process, it can take a year or more. I mean, right now, the the fastest it will go is about 11 months. So you don't get a registration number until it's registered. And in fact, something we we talked about off podcast was when you get to use the registered trademark symbol. And that's exactly that. You are not supposed to use that circle with an R inside of it until your mark registers. Until that point, what we recommend people do, use the TN, because that's ⁓ giving the world notice of your common law rights in the trademark that you're claiming. But once you have that number, that's what you need. And and and we're here to help people get that. Yeah, well look at let's unpack a little bit more, because my understanding was the word marks, those are hard to get. Well, this this depends on the mark. It depends on the mark, going back to what we said. If it's fanciful marking you've invented the word, it may not be so hard to get. But often invented words that pertain to like Apple, but in the technology space, very doable, it's a word mark. having a word be descriptive of what the product is, those are all the ones. Very hard those are the ones that I'm going to say. Very hard. So Kentucky fried chicken until it got to that point that it became the normal it became synonymous with the actual exclusivity because it's so, you know, y you ubiquitously tied to a specific source. ⁓ you know, I I'll give you just a real example that I've had to deal with in the past six weeks. I have a very well funded client who is spending over one point five million on ads. If you watch sports, you've probably seen this brand. ⁓ they've tried to enforce a mark that's merely descriptive and it is an uphill battle and it can be losing effort. ⁓ so even if you're super well funded, even if you have all the venture capital backing It still is just not doing yourself any favors because the market is merely descriptive day one. ⁓ you're just constantly fighting a million battles because people are using these terms in their descriptive capacities as you would expect in the English language. ⁓ and that's not really what trademark law is designed to protect. Yeah. So well look at that the there's probably two sides to that, right? There's a business conversation that he's gonna fight for as long as he can because he's generating the revenue he can. That's kind of the argument I fall into. It's like, hey, I don't want to kick a can down the road, I wanna do what's enough, but with limited funds, I ⁓ if revenue doesn't start coming in they're not you know we have to fund this through through sales and again somewhere along the way that balance is is back and forth so i i i i love that conversation i i do want to talk about the the the value proposition though because yeah i really do believe this so ⁓ our firm We charge a flat gate of $975 to prepare and file a trademark application. Okay. The government filing fee is $350 per trademark class, typically. Most people need one class. Trademark classes, there are 45 of them. I'll just give you some quick examples. Class 25, that covers clothing. If you sell a clothing product, you're in class $25, $350 fee, right? So, you know, just with what we charge, say is $1,350 all then. Now our our processes we include with that a search report, we include with that all attorney communicate. I mean people are gonna hear me on this podcast. I'll spend hours talking to you about your trademarks. You're not getting charged anything additional. And you know I'll have those conversations with you before you place an order with us. But the the point I'm trying to make is we try to make that ⁓ cost the cost. And there are a few things that can cost money along the way, ⁓ but not many. And we try not to charge much for those if they happen to come up. But but this is what I want to point out. There are very few things in this world that you can invest about a thousand to fifteen hundred dollars in that might be worth millions, if not billions, of dollars. The most valuable trademarks in the world are worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Coca-Cola's trademark portfolio is more valuable than every single physical asset Coca owns Coke owns factories, they own trucks, they own up almost every vending machine you see. Right. Right? And the value proposition, I know it's the 5000 cuts. But look, the things you need to spend your money on. Yeah. You need to form your entity. Yeah. Really, that's not that expensive. Most states now you can file for an LLC online for the Secretary of State's office for somewhere between like $50 and $300. Form your entity. You go get your EIN next. That's your your tax identification number. You can do that the next day on IRS.gov. That is free. I mean, you can hire an attorney to do it, you can hire other services to do it, but you can go do it yourself and it's free. It is easy. You do those two things. You go to a bank, you open a bank account, that's free. Put some money in it. And then in my opinion, one of the early things you should be looking at is figuring out your IP, trademarks, patents. Do I need them? If I do, what's the cost? How do I get at least that money to get that ball rolling? Because again, we're talking something that you y'all know. You've got some clients that have done amazing things. Their trademarks, that's where the value is. Go back to my Google example. Somebody's gonna buy it? They're buying the name. They're buying maybe there's some customer lists. May maybe there's some ⁓ other IP, but but really what are they buying? Just for the everybody watching, I live in that chicken and egg space every day. People ask me, how do I know? What do I know? Like if if I could predict these things, I would charge you million dollars for the minute of conversation I'm about to have with you. ⁓ yeah. I can't just I don't know. I mean, I know the process, I know the path, I know that the affordability is always a question. If we could do it all, we'd all be self-employed. The challenge is that it it's a step. So I agree with you. I'm I'm totally on board. This is why we're having more of these conversations ⁓ the last four years. Our journey has been aligning better and better with the Patent and legal side of this, because the other side of that point is how do I get the product made? How do I get started? How much the tool holy crap, I had no idea was that much. Right. So my job is to navigate a very tough process in that's 8,000 miles away with 90% of the manufacturing and still gets done. And we get tariff conversations that scare the crap out of everybody. But if you have the ability to get started at any point, in any direction, whether you start with the trademark, whether you start with a patent, whether you start with kind of calling out. Like the the process can't be circumvented. It needs to be processed well. I just have to mention we have a client with a very, very, very exciting tool related to tariff calculation. And we should talk about that because they're they're I think going to go a long way to helping people figure out how to navigate tariffs. ⁓ But you know, saying that little conversation aside, you know, Trademarks, patents, copyrights, these things, when you register them, they are assets. Not only that, you can use those as collateral to get loans. So banks routinely record ⁓ liens against intellectual property. So you don't want to put your house up, you don't want to put your factory up. Guess what? If you have valuable intellectual property, you can use that, you can leverage that. So there are all sorts of reasons why for an owner. These things can take on outsized value very quickly. It's a competitive advantage in some ways, right? ⁓ if we're talking patents, you get somewhat of an anti-monopoly or you have the right to preclude other people from doing whatever is your patent covers. Talking about trademarks. You get to stop anybody from using a mark that's confusingly similar to yours. we haven't really talked about trade. If someone infringes on my trademark, I can actually stop the parking lot. You're systems. I mean, and that's exactly why those processes exist. Yeah. Or in happening. We we charge a few hundred dollars to record somebody's trademark with customs and border protection. And for for that very tiny fee, they will seize any counterfeit product that they find coming into the country and destroy it. It is well worth your while to do that. Yeah, no, look at the that that's ⁓ that's super insightful. Now we gotta go back and make sure that we've been we've let our clients know they gotta go back and talk. To get that done, because that's that's that's awesome. And one more thing about trademarks, and part of why I really love trademarks, is it's very obvious trademarks are the only thing. Patents patents aren't this way, copyrights aren't this way. Trademarks can exist in perpetuity. So long as you're using it, you can maintain those rights, and you can just keep renewing the registration and renewing the registration over and over and over again. And so it's one of those things where you know you. Businesses that go out of business ⁓ you know, ⁓ Bet Bath and Beyond, their intellectual property assets were bought out of the bankruptcy for thirty million dollars. I'll give you Blockbuster, I'll give you ⁓ Toys R Us, I'll give you like there's a ton of valuable names out there that The brand is there, the business is dead. Right. I'm sure Barnes and Nelton's in that conversation. I saw now that they're back in active, so someone's put them back into the game. I mean, look at that. I don't understand, I agree with you guys on that. Here's the challenge. Somebody wakes up in the morning, has an idea, right? We're both on the same side of the argument, just on different sides of the coin. We want them to move forward. The reality is, we just talked about before you even started, how do you plan your exit, right? And so that's where the Of these conversations come in, is that like I wish everybody was more optimistic about their ideas because I've seen I understand the process, I understand it's a risk, our job is to mitigate it, our job is to like let's evaluate it quickly and say yes or no. If it's not a business conversation, then it's not my ballmark. Maybe I'm missing it, but I've said no to some products that have done quite well. And you know, and again, thankfully they've still done with us, but I was like, I don't know how that's gonna sell. And I made them sign to say, like, I don't see this. And they're like, I do, and I'm good. I'm here to support the entrepreneur, the adventure, the business owner to move forward. But realistically, this is a business. And if you're going to think about exit, you want to have proper patent. You want to have the trademarks in place, all of them that you can get, the design, whatever you can do to protect the the IP, because the business might pivot, but the name, like, you know, people don't realize Chodo was a loon manufacturer. They made carpets and textiles and moved into the automotive industry. Same name though. They had changed that. That was their brand. They were well known, at least in the Asian markets, and then came over here. But yeah. Help help me process that. What like when you're you guys probably deal with other clients that I don't deal with. So the higher level clients that you have, tell me how they think so that my clients can help and our clients together that are in the infancy stages of becoming those bigger products. How should they make that case? So we have one client that has a billion dollar plus market cap. They decided to do a rebrand a few years ago. But th but this is how you know. Far ahead their thinking with their strategic planning, right? They reached out to us, it was probably five years ago. They came up with six names. Actually, they gave me a list of about 20 names. Right. We then filed applications for six of those names because of the issues we're talking about. You want to, you never know, you might get a refusal from the trademark office. You might have somebody pop-up who opposes your application because despite all the searching you may do to determine whether or not a name's available. Somebody might own a mom and pop store in Ketchukam Alaska that's been operating under the same name for 20 years already. And going back to the conversation we had about first use, they used first. They have common law rights that predate doors, right? So you know you're trying to navigate for all these things, and then they're they're not sure what they want to use. they want to market test, they're gonna do some surveying, they're going to, you know, hire. Some outfits to go out and test this with different people, whatever it may be. But they reached out to us about five years before they rolled out the name they finally went with out of these six that they had us apply. Well, ⁓ not with us. No with Because I told you what we charge, and we did six applications for them. And I and I ran searches for all 20 of those marks for them, and I didn't charge them. But in general, they had some other costs to make my decision. So I was a short cost with the overall cost. business decided that isn't a direct revenue source but a plan for long term. That that's what I think that that's the difference between a business owner conversation and an an entrepreneur. Entrepreneur is just trying to get their shortcut his way or her way to a point where they can start selling. Tell me the near-sightedness or again, help educate my clients on the nearsightedness. Minimal viable product, and this is how I feel. In fact, you know, we I would I was telling some of your colleagues earlier about how sometimes we run these well-capitalized clients who've been able to go out and raise a bunch of money, but they haven't been able to bring anything concrete to market yet. And sometimes they call us and they just keep wanting us to file new trademark applications. Because I think they have some investors who wanna know what they're doing and they wanna show that they're doing something. Right, yeah, right. But that's not the way to me, to your point. When I talk to somebody who's launching something and they're really excited, they've got a bunch of ideas and you know they've got a logo, they've got a slogan, they've got a brand name. ⁓ well, we're doing this product right now, but we think in the future we're gonna do these five other products that might fall into these other trademark classes that would entail additional government filing features right, is what I say to everyone. So start with your standard character mark for your core product or service. That's it. That's what I would pursue. That's what I would try to register. I would do one, right? But start there. So it's like building a home, right? Building a business. You're just laying the foundation to begin with. And this is one of your cornerstones. So lay that cornerstone. We can add to it later. Trust me, we we will we will add everything you need as you as you have revenue coming in. And then what I generally suggest is when revenue justifies. Adding something, that's where we start adding to it. That's where we're so on. And so that cornerstone is to me, I want the core value propositions of the thing that we're making. That lines up with the trademark that we're trying to say. This is what we are selling. And so when those two sign line up, that's our MVP. Or, you know, again, in our world, I do have the resources to make this really looking at a product that's been in the market six or seven years. And so, you know, we go through a lot of extra steps. But that's the alignment. That's where people need to start thinking. Like if you're going to do this, the thought isn't about, ⁓ I need to come up with an idea. No, we need to get hyper-focused on the idea and the trademark and the purpose it serves to somebody and the value proposition it gives to the consumer and the solution that it's off. From there, that's that's the package that you have that you guys that we can all run with this and make it successful in a very short period of time. Absolutely. It's when you have all those divergence and I can do this, I can also do this, and I can do that. Whoa, whoa, which is the best one? Let's start there. Council, right? I mean, having a team of people, yeah. ⁓ and I like to use accounts as an example. Like, you can do your own taxes, sure, you can cut your own air too. Yeah, ⁓ so you might as well surround yourself by people who are are very good at what they do, know that the best CEOs outsource parts of the job that maybe they can do themselves. Yeah, they put the right players on the board to make the moves that they need to make. ⁓ and it keeps you dialed in as an entrepreneur. You might be You know, excitable. You know, you might we want to chase all these different iterations of what you want this vision to become in ten years, but how do you get there is a question? It's one step at a time, exactly like what does an attorney do during the trademark search? The normal person couldn't next one. Yeah, I I'll I'll take that one to start. So ⁓ I want to talk about ⁓ how lot of law firms do things briefly. ⁓ I'll talk about the firm I used to work at. I used to work at a large mid-sized firm down in Nashville. And people would call us about applying for trademarks and they would ask us about running a search. And I'd have to tell them, ⁓ yeah, we can run a search for you, but it's gonna be you know $1,500 to $2,500. And most people, going back to what we talked about, would be like, no, that's okay. No search. And so then we file their application and then we get a refusal from the trademark office citing a very similar trademark, right? And they'd come back to us and say, well, why didn't you tell me there was something else out there? We'd say, ⁓ well, here's this email. You said you didn't want us to run a search. ⁓ it just like made my skin crawl. I mean that's part of the foundation of of what we started here at you know, w we're big believers in flat fees. Right. We're big believers in everybody needs a trademark search before we file. Now what can an average person do? Right? Average person what what what can ⁓ a person without the the tools we have do? ⁓ knowledge experience yours was ⁓ But but what people can do that that we would do too if they don't, I suggest clients do this on their own though. Go to search engines, type in the name, go to social media, type in the name, go to the domain registrar, see if you can get the name. Those are all things that everybody can do. What we can do is we pay a fee to a third party that provides searching tools that we use, that we have vetted, that we think are great. For helping us identify potential conflicts with our client Smarks. Now, many law firms like to charge people a lot of money for those searches, even though we pay one flat fee for access to that tool. We have decided that we are folding that in to that flat fee cost. We spread across every single client we have at nine seventy-five so that we can run a search every time. We don't charge any additional because I want to know. I wanna know. I don't want to lead you down that path. But I will say this. You can do comprehensive searches too. You can use tools that are even more comprehensive than the one we use. We use a very good one that will primarily tell us has anybody else applied for something or registered something already is too similar. We're trying to see, can you get this through with the trademark office? If you go overturning every stone looking for every common law use. I promise you what happens, you get a full comprehensive report, you get something this big is a thousand pages, gonna scare you from using any name. Right. Right. And those do cost still a thousand, fifteen hundred, two thousand dollars. I don't think they're worth a client's while in the position we're talking about. Look, you you As long as long as they have flexibility understanding that there is a risk. Which you don't pay for and and look at it's not sh exactly I hate the word shortcut. I just want to find a faster way. Yeah. No. So understand that there is l mitigating risk and and absolving risk are two different things. I've learned that from the attorney conversations. I live in the mitigation world. Yeah, like I I can only mitigate as much as I can from what I see. And after that, okay, so what's the worst case scenario? Might have to go back and Preach conversation. Preach, like it's not that expensive. And and I know it sucks because it's your it's especially in the entrepreneur world and the venture world, it it's a it's their baby. I get it. You want, you know, it's like changing your kid's name halfway through their life. Like don't we want to know what the name is more trouble than this for us? Well, that's the real key. But but I also tell clients this too. If you want the name, like I said earlier. We can probably get you the name. Now, now if you're if you have enough money, we definitely can. Otherwise, if if we return a report to you, here's what we're gonna do. I'll just give you an example. If you come to us and you you place an order with us, this is what happens. You come to our website, you you fill out our form, it takes you a few minutes, you pay the fee up front there. Okay, once you pay that fee, it goes into our client trust account. What we do next, we run a search, we send you that report. We give you our feedback. We tell you if you want to have a call to discuss further, we're happy to do it. If you decide not to move forward, we're either going to send you a full refund or we're going to hold that in trust and we're just going to keep running searches until you find the name you want to move out. That's the camp that we're very much aligned on. Because I've again I've heard the same thing, right? All of sudden we've done our due diligence and look at what the creative side of this. I gotta come up with the name that fits the brand about the product that we're gonna sell. So all those rules come into apply. We've gone through probably about 20 to 30 names, or maybe 10 to 15. Now the one we pick, I send to you guys for you know trademark attorney and comes back with like you know some sort of concern. I'm not even talking you know arguable, but like, hey, there's a concern. The first call we get is like, hey, I thought you guys knew how to do your job. Like, we are this is a diligence process, right? The reason why you're hiring us is to go through the reason why we're flat feed is because I'm okay having to go back and do it again again. Yep, that's right. That's not on you. I cannot predict everybody's outcome without the team. I can give you the creative side of it, and I need you guys to go to the legal side of it. Even then, in the end, if we need to change it again, we're gonna work together to figure it out because like you said, don't fall in love with the name. Like be be flexible and and and you want a name that represents you, but I'm also gonna say that we're good at brand building. Welling about that like risk mitigation thing and how we can't really predict what's gonna happen, ⁓ I really love giving clients additional background on how it works. Right. Which I feel a lot of attorneys maybe don't do in the trademark space, which is there are about five hundred examining attorneys that work for the federal government in the trademark office. So when you file your application, it's gonna be assigned to one of those five hundred people. Which is how many applications go in every day? ⁓ well, about five hundred thousand a year. So I mean th these people have an overwhelming amount of applications to review. It's impossible to process. It's very difficult to do five minutes max. And you're dealing with a cricket on a bad Friday whether they want to get out of there. This is what I'm saying. No, no, no, no, no, no, for no reason. It's just it's an overwhelming reposition, it's a practical reason. ⁓ So Yeah, which is why also I say if you get a refusal, it's not we we I hate I I mean I don't wanna I don't wanna pat pat pat ourselves on the back, but but our ⁓ the rate at which we overcome refusals is incredibly high. Now now number one that's because we send a search report and we get very honest feedback. I mean I will tell you very much so, but I do not think you should move forward with a name. I do not hesitate to tell people that. Just like I don't hesitate to tell people that ⁓ in litigation, the lawyers are the only people who make money. So do not litigate unless you absolutely have to. Now we do litigate. Sometimes you do have to. Yeah, it's gonna make a litigation. Right? ⁓ but I am not here to somebody's arm. I'm here to say it's an offer, it keeps the lights on, keeps your services going. Litigation's gonna come with your bigger. Yeah and again I I'm doing the same thing. I'm trying to take these small like you look at I got two choices. I gotta go out and find a something to do with every big company out there, or I can listen to the next big thing that's coming in and give me a call. Yeah. I've chosen to listen to thirty thousand people that might have the next big thing. Yeah. And I am trying to find again, just you know, our own record. I've got just over seven hundred people that we've taken or in the process of taking the market. It's a very small percentage of people that I've chosen to say I like this, and I would say probably a bigger portion of people that are still in the process of trying to figure out how to afford to do it. Yeah. And so that's fine. Both are acceptable. But it's the ones that just jump in and think that money can can solve it. Yeah, I don't I don't see that. But you guys look at anything that you want to add, I know we've got a what's the next one? What protection are granted trademarks? I think that's pretty much covered. So walk me through enforcing a trademark on Amazon. How does that process work? Yeah, so we're talking about litigation. Is this litigation or is this just sending a letter? I'd say it's on the gradient. ⁓ it again, Amazon being above the law. They have their own well no it is. It's it's really like you know, the laws can't catch up with what they're doing. Well dispute response. And guess what? They're really not doing anything wrong. No, not at all. I mean I think that most of our consumer really well. They're they s very difficult if you're a vendor. Well, getting back to what I was saying about litigation, litigation is so expensive. I think it's incredible that Amazon and the social media platforms, they have created processes by which if you have a registered trademark, because it's the same thing, if you have a registered trademark on the principal register, and somebody's using your name on any of Meadow's platforms on Instagram, on Facebook, to ⁓ you know offer competing goods or services under the same name, you can file a takedown request. It's very easy. You can do it yourself, or if you hire us to do it, it's going be very, very Very, very, very, very, very, very inexpensive compared to what it costs to file a lawsuit in federal court to embrace your rights. Right. They want to wash their hands. They they basically don't want to get in the middle of an IP dispute. Yeah, this principle of registration. ⁓ look at I I I made a comment that they're very difficult for vendors, and and rightfully so. There's so many vendors that have taken advantage of loopholes that that probably Amazon didn't know that. Now they're No, I I say it's difficult. It's actually practical. They want to make sure that everyone is protected, that the products are protected, but more that the consumer is protected. ⁓ I like the fact that, you know, highly returned items, like there's things now that you can see every day. Those platforms are working to better it and make it. I would tell you, yeah, as simple as it seems to submit a takedown request. ⁓ I represent a client right now in a lawsuit ⁓ based on an Amazon takedowns file. ⁓ You still have to be careful. There are pitfalls like anything else. If you go willy-nilly trying to take people down because you think you have the right to, but you haven't consulted with an attorney yet, you you may, you know, find yourself subject to a claim as well. But I think to get to the heart of the question you ask, if a client comes to us and they say, Hey, somebody's out there infringing my mark, what what do you recommend I do? Well, typically we recommend first you send a C synthesis letter. Then if you send a C Synthesis Larry, we say though you've got to be prepared to take additional action if they don't respond in a way to try to resolve this display. Respond with proof of Yeah, yeah, you're going go down sand. Exactly. Yeah. But what's nice about something like the tools Amazon might allow, if it's Amazon seller to Amazon seller, is, well, if they don't comply, you don't have to go file your lawsuit in federal court. We've got this nice intermediate step we can take to say, okay, well, now we're going to file this take that request, right? And it's it's not the most difficult process, but like Derek said, there are pitfalls to doing it if you just rush to go do it right without ⁓ understanding exactly what you're allowed to do and who you're allowed to do it against and and what the risks might be if you're get out over your skis asserting your rights against somebody maybe you should have a hundred percent. All right, so how how did you guys be tell tell us a little bit about you guys? ⁓ I guess I was actually in law school at the time. ⁓ Brought this energy to a guest lecture. No, no. I think it's a leader's context. ⁓ you know, talking about the future of the legal profession, people are thinking about not just your run-of-the-mill legal services, but what the practice in law should look like in 2050. ⁓ and I think you had just recently started the firm ⁓ we are maybe a couple years ago. Yeah. ⁓ and actually my wife ⁓ is an attorney as well. She said, you've got to meet this guy. He talks like you, he thinks like you. Like, let's go. You know, so it just slowly ⁓ we've stayed in touch. We've just been ⁓ friends for about a decade at this point. Yeah. We connected when Derek was in law school, and you know, we we we wanted to work together, but you know, get getting to the point you made, when we started this law firm, ⁓ Bill Randy and I, the the founding partners, we started just with an idea. In business plan. Yeah. We brought very few clients from our old practice. We were mostly patent litigators. They were patent litigators. Randy did trademark work as well. I was ⁓ a business litigator and a patent litigator, but we spent about two years developing this business plan and immersing ourselves in trademark law. Now, this is I mean we've been we've got this firm for eleven years now. I I've lived in Green, you know, ⁓ IP law clients this all the time about disputes because we were just talking about them. When you're in a dispute in federal court, you need to understand this judge may this may be the most important thing in the world to you, but to this judge. ⁓ He's got much bigger fish to fry and he's probably in or she's probably like, why can't these business owners just figure this out? And that's what they want. So we talk a lot about disputes and dispute resolution and we are big believers, like I said before, try to resolve is shorter litigation. I mean, w we're ready to fight if if if it's time to fight. ⁓ we you know, I I bring my intense energy in a very different way to those sorts of disputes. But, you know, if if ⁓ you're gonna be in court The judge is probably going to be sitting there ⁓ thinking if these people make me make a decision, nobody's gonna like it. Yeah. No, th that's okay, that's that's great advice. I I think everything is is manageable, mitigatable, I think you know, going A process is exactly that. It's a process. It's a discovery. It's to find out, hey, this is what we want to do with the best intentions. I think everybody does go forward that. Love the fact that you get a flat feed. I love the fact that I do think that you know the billable hour method is good for like the bigger, high-powered attorneys that have spent the years and earned those rights, but even then, I think that model is changing. I don't think that the bottom client is coming into those big firms. So and even the top clients, I think they're they're starting to recognize that there's More predictability here than the traditional hourly model, you know, maybe really reflected. ⁓ so even for us on litigation services, especially for something like a TTAB proceeding where somebody has opposed a trademark application or they've filed a petition to cancel a registration based on whatever grounds, we know what the stages are. We know roughly what the work will entail for each given phase of the proceeding. so we we think it's actually better for the businesses to say, okay, I can predict for the next 12 months what these expenses will look like, and then I can make a business decision to say. All right, do I actually want to have a conversation with the other party about coexistence? Or is it worth me pushing through and seeing how they react if we go through the motions with discovery and whatnot? ⁓ well I think this is the power that you guys brought to the table. Again, I'll say I appreciate everybody is welcome to come and visit the podcast and let's have this conversation. This is not about me, this is about me and you guys teaching everybody out there. Yeah, what needs to be said. But you guys specifically came here on your own dime, and I want to give you guys a lot of credit for that because we're going to teach everybody. And the I think the the part that I am struggling with when I when I out or Jack reach out, reaches out, we talk to a lot of attorneys. They get their business, but they don't get mine. Right? And so they don't get my product. They don't get, and I'm speaking for my clients and speaking for myself. Like, you know, sometimes like you just I need to do more things in-house and I do think with the hybrid of counsel that is more boutique to their business clients or their clients understands that business is where this has got to go. I think there's flat fees, I think there's times where you gotta pay the hourly rate. I think there's just a there's a working relationship here that still needs to be figured out. It can't be I don't want to call it one sided because that's unfair, but it just I I don't always feel like when I get a contract back or I get responses back, I'm like, you don't get this. Like you're missing the context. Yeah, like I'm I'm trying to keep things as simple as possible. And so help me understand what what you're misinterpreting here. Let's just get this done. But once people understand, it's pretty easy. Yeah, our our mantra is kind of we want people doing people things and computers doing computer things. Yeah. Right? So if a Client calls, I want to be able to spend as much time as I need to spend talking to them to understand their business, to advise them, answer all their questions. I don't want them thinking there's a clock running and I'm getting billed and I gotta rush or I gotta leave things out. That's not helpful to anybody. Where we can save them money is by having they what they don't need to be paying me for is data entry that I can build systems to do much better. Yeah, right. So what we're trying to do is use these flat fees to make it so that spread across. all of our clients, it makes sense for us. It's going to make sense for everybody because what we're going to do is actually get to know you. We're going to be able to advise you. And when you have a need, we're going to be able to identify it, tell you what it costs, and you have the agency then to make the decision, is that worth it where I'm at in my business right now? Not some unpredictable and one thing I hate, especially on the litigation front. You see it all the time. We're very honest. I'm going to tell you this is going to be expensive. This how much it's going to cost. People don't believe it sometimes because there are plenty of lawyers who say, ⁓ yeah, I can follow them. Who wants that? I want it to be clear. I I want to know up front. I want you to know up front so there's no questioning of of what we're charging. And also we don't feel like, ⁓ wait, wait a second, because this also happens. I mean, I used to work in a place where we build by an hour, you send a big invoice, and the person's like, I'm not paying that. Right. I just worked eighty hours a week for eight straight weeks on this case, and now this person's saying they're not gonna pay? Like, I'd rather spend time with my family. Yeah. That's very much how I feel. So we're trying to find that balance. There's a shortcut until there's just there's a certain thing, like in our world, it's tooling, it's manufacturing. That's a pro that that is a well defined process and it's a well-loaded machine, so to speak. Making things is easy. You get choices, you make those choices well in the beginning, you get well results in the end. If you rush through it, you end up with mistakes. And as much as we go fast, we don't make mistakes. I think going back to what you said, that's why collaborations like this make a lot of sense to me. ⁓ I think a lot of attorneys might live within their own. Think about the manufacturing side. I might kind of contemplate go to market strategies. ⁓ you guys, not just being on the marketing. sides of it but really taking something all the way to shelves. ⁓ I think that's a lot of insight that a lot of startups that a lot of early stage entrepreneurs they they need that input but it's informed by the IP side and the IP side's informed by the practical decisions about you know ⁓ and there's a different lawyer for every step in this case. Like you know like just what goes on the packaging. Yeah. You know what what goes into consumer protection laws like there's a different attorney for every step which you know again if if you really look at what ⁓ again we we can have another subject I'd love to get you guys take on where ⁓ where AI is gonna take this industry, your industry and my industry. Can't do that today because that's a whole another hour podcast. Yeah. ⁓ but it's definitely worthy of the conversation because I think a lot of old information is what chat GPT and and AI is giving you. Yeah. But there's already a big transition towards the new way things are done, especially for the four or five different generations that are now still active in business, right? Boomers are still running their businesses, Gen Xers are still running, millennials are running, and now you got Xennials and whatever comes after them are are just getting the DIE. So you know it's not just like what do I do? It's how do I do it based on the generation gaps. Absolutely. So gentlemen, it has been a pleasure. So anything else that we need to know about ⁓ your guys' business? So where to find you guys, please plug it, tell them. This goes live just the way it is. Yeah, come to trusttree.com if you need a trademark, you need a patent, if you need any really intellectual property service at all, we're happy to talk to you, happy to talk to you about branding, happy to talk to you about any of it. And if you don't like talking to people, ⁓ we're also great for that too, because you can just come click a button, place an order, and we'll email you and you never have to speak to anybody. So we know there are people also prefer it that way. ⁓ you know, you've heard me talk here a lot and if this is ⁓ not the energy you're looking for, ⁓ you can talk to Bill via email and ⁓ you'll find it to be a very pleasant and efficient experience. Attorneys, you guys are not all you guys cannot take referral. So I'm not, I'm not here to refer or pay you guys for saying things good. I'm looking for alignment. Like to me, the most important thing is our client. The alignment of that, this process is something we have to navigate together. Let's make sure it gets done right. Let's make sure at the end of the day the client succeeds. Because at the end of the client doesn't succeed, we do not have. I I want to be able to talk to the client that we've worked on together at one. these podcasts at some point and talk about how they navigate the whole thing front to back with everybody that needs to be involved so that people understand because when you understand it's scary but it's not hard to bring a product to market. Not all, it's like everything else. It's the base reward too. Yeah. It is. It is. Full circle. Guys, yeah, ⁓ you know, I appreciate everybody tuning in and watching. ⁓ please like us, share us, follow us. ⁓ Pitch the Product Podcast is here for you guys to learn everything that you need to know about how to bring a product to market, including these two special guests that came in and flew in on their own dime from. Tennessee, the great state of Tennessee. And please reach out to them if you have questions before you even meet us. The idea here is I want everybody to understand it's a process. It is something we all do very well. We do something very well together. So thank you gentlemen for coming in today. Yeah, thank you for having us. Yeah, thanks for having us. Awesome. Thank you guys for tuning in.