Winning at patents as a start-up
Tags: startup, management, legal
Published: 2022-05-16 13:43:36

I never liked patents. Being part of the Open Source and Linux community, I vividly remember archenemy Bill Gates and his patent lawsuits against everybody who tried to build amazing things for a greater good. You hear about 1-click buying patents from Amazon and that even Microsoft Word gets banned from sale for infringing an absurd patent on a method for reading XML. The whole patent system is rigged towards big players, so how should this system not retard innovation?

![Bill Gates and Richard Stallman meme](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/5vve1atfg6q4gytklv52.png)

But when I joined the start-up ecosystem, I saw hardware-, deep-tech- and even software startups fail because a big competitor either copied their product or accused them of violating one of their thousands of patents. Others got sued by a patent troll. Yet, who wants to have that $800 an hour meeting with a fancy lawyer in an even fancier office, selling you on what makes them rich?

Truth is, you still can’t just ignore or even abolish the system, so the next best thing to do is to ace it without losing your time and money.

Easier said than done – if you are no patent lawyer. You spend long nights googling “how do I file a patent” and “best NDA template for free” and still never have peace of mind. Do I need a patent for my new colored socks dropshipping business? Probably not, don’t I? I am about to manufacture and sell this new iPhone gadget, do I infringe some patent? Do I seriously need to spend $20k on a freedom-to-operate search now? How do I respond when investors ask: Do you have patented your idea?

![Our founder Bastian literately fighting in the ring for start-ups and IP in the early days](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/tf9k81x494q8ejhh19d6.jpeg     "Our founder Bastian literately fighting in the ring for start-ups and IP in the early days") _Our founder Bastian literately fighting in the ring for start-ups and IP in the early days :-)._

During the years we gathered a lot of hands-on experience while helping start-ups with intellectual property at GoodIP. We are founders ourselves and learned what investors want to hear and what not. We also gathered quantitative data from various sources for research projects and worked through many research papers.

So one day we had an idea that resulted in a clear vision 
> Help founders navigate the intellectual property shark tank – without the legalese.

[![This is how the result looks like. If you still find legalese, please let us know.
](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/ijm8hrtbffql5xn78dij.png)](https://goodip.io/gosamples/biontech.html "This is how the result looks like. If you still find legalese, please let us know.")

We used all of our in-house expertise in intellectual property law, data science, and economics to build GoodIP GO, a data-driven IP strategy tool every entrepreneur can use and understand. It provides a tailor-made list of goals, risk analysis, budget forecasting, and a vast knowledge base answering any question you might have. Everything is individualized to the start-up based on the answers in a really short questionnaire. You can have a look at a sample of what the Covid vaccine company BioNTech would have received when it still was a startup [here](https://goodip.io/gosamples/biontech.html).


![Current core GoodIP team](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/7rv9hbtchhw851p0euut.jpg  "Our core team")

We are super excited to announce that we have left beta stage and now want to help as many founders as possible. So if you are currently having these topics on your bucket list, learn more about GoodIP GO and try it yourself [here](https://m.goodip.io/en-gb/early-bird).