Many people believe that they should be selling the product for several months before having an initial patent search conducted. This is dangerous for a number of reasons:
You may be infringing upon someone else’s patent without realizing it.
You may incur substantial cost and expense in manufacturing your product only to find that all of your profits and inventory are confiscated in an infringement lawsuit.
You may invest a great deal of time and money pursuing what you believe to be your invention, only to later learn that it is not really your invention but has in fact already been invented by someone else.
By having a patent search conducted first, you can determine what the Patent Office has allowed in the past, and you are often able to think of ways that you can improve your product to make it more likely to be patented.
Wherever possible, the initial patent search should be conducted before doing anything else. It takes approximately four to six weeks to have a thorough patent search performed. During this time, you can be raising funds to help pay the cost of pursuing a patent application, or several applications, as well as Trade Mark applications and marketing or licensing of your product.