One of our clients, Tony, recently graduated from our Product Protection Playbook and was kind enough to share a few of his thoughts on how it went.
He started out giving a bit of context on where his company was before they started working with The IP Link: “We were kind of going around in circles, it was backwards and forwards a lot with the lawyer, and we didn’t seem to make any headway in regards to ‘what do we actually have?’ and is this the right way to proceed.”
Tony and his team had actually already started working with a lawyer before finding The IP Link, but it wasn’t going well. Of our program, he says “it just gave me better insight into what steps come first before you start going down the road of legal patent lawyers.”
While working through the first phase of The Product Protection Playbook, we uncovered an existing patent from a competitor that wasn’t previously on their radar.
“[The program] gave me a better understanding of how to search better when it comes to patents. We’ve all been doing searches, all plugging away at it, and we even had a patent lawyer looking at it and they didn’t even find that one particular patent that came way too close to make us feel comfortable. So to me, the plan works.”
This competitive intelligence helped them decide to pivot the development of their product away from a sensor to data analytics! Working through the program, he says, “helped us decide we weren’t a sensor company, that we were more of a data analytic type company. After going through this process it made us think our business strategy should be more around the data collection and how we would sell that data. That changed our strategy a bit around what we were as a company.”
Looking back on it, he says that if they hadn’t worked with The IP Link, “my biggest fear would have been we would have probably wasted a lot of money backwards and forwards to the lawyers because the lawyers are going to charge you no matter what. So if we were unclear and we kept making revisions to what we were doing, we were just throwing money down the drain. Doing it this way saved us that headache…”
“My experience with the patent lawyers in the past was that they’re quite willing to keep taking your money. And there’s a lot of that backwards and forwards, and a lot of time goes by, because you wait a week or two to return your emails to give you good news or bad news.”
For anyone considering patent protection, he gives this advice: “If someone was to come along and they’ve got an idea and they want to save themselves a headache or spending too much money, this program would probably benefit them quite a bit. It would give them a better understanding of the patent process.”
To hear a bit more of our conversation, check out the video here:
