Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Podcast! This podcast is focused on leveraging AI to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Hosted by best-selling author Jonathan Green, the podcast presents valuable insights live from a tropical island in the South Pacific.
Today's guest is Andrei Minkov, a visionary in the field of trademarking. Andrei brings a fresh perspective on how the trademarking process has evolved, especially with the advent of AI and the internet. He shares crucial insights on the changing landscape of trademarks, the importance of timely filing, and the impact of AI on the trademarking process.
In this episode, Jonathan and Andrei delve into the challenges and complexities of trademarking in the modern era. They discuss the surge in trademark filings due to Amazon's brand registry requirements and how AI is reshaping the trademark application process. Andrei provides valuable advice on when to file trademarks, the significance of having a unique brand, and how AI tools can aid in the trademark search process. For entrepreneurs and business owners looking to protect their brand, this episode offers essential strategies and tips.
Notable Quotes:
Connect with AndreiMinkov:
Connect with Jonathan Green
Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Podcast! This podcast is focused on leveraging AI to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Hosted by best-selling author Jonathan Green, the podcast presents valuable insights live from a tropical island in the South Pacific.
Today's guest is Andrei Minkov, a visionary in the field of trademarking. Andrei brings a fresh perspective on how the trademarking process has evolved, especially with the advent of AI and the internet. He shares crucial insights on the changing landscape of trademarks, the importance of timely filing, and the impact of AI on the trademarking process.
In this episode, Jonathan and Andrei delve into the challenges and complexities of trademarking in the modern era. They discuss the surge in trademark filings due to Amazon's brand registry requirements and how AI is reshaping the trademark application process. Andrei provides valuable advice on when to file trademarks, the significance of having a unique brand, and how AI tools can aid in the trademark search process. For entrepreneurs and business owners looking to protect their brand, this episode offers essential strategies and tips.
Notable Quotes:
Connect with AndreiMinkov:
Connect with Jonathan Green
Jonathan Green: The battle between trademarks and AI on today's episode with special guest Andre Minkov.
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Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you wanna make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now. Then you can come to the right place. Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. You will learn how to use artificial intelligence to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep.
Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by bestselling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host.
Jonathan Green: Now, I'm always interested in, especially now with trademarks, it's gotten crazy because Amazon made their new rule that everyone has to have a brand name, and so the number of people submitting trademarks as like skyrocketed, right?
So you see every brand on Amazon is like this like weird name. That's a random combination. Seems to be six letters. So now Trademarking has, it seems to me, has gotten so different than when I got my trademark just five and a half years ago. It was like such an easy process for me that now doing a trademark search, you never know what's gonna come up.
'cause I've seen some, like small words get trademarked, all sorts of crazy stuff. So how has that really changed even before AI made things even crazier over the past year? Start
Andre Mincov: there. Trademarking has changed really with the speed of dissemination of information. If you think back to, I don't know, a hundred years ago, it took companies a long time to set up a brand and for others to copy that brand.
Companies used to have this leeway when they didn't have to run to the office the second they came up with a brand, right? And with the internet, with e-commerce, the more we have that the easier it is for someone in China to replicate what. You're doing, the more important it becomes to follow your trademarks as early as possible, because really it's never too early, but often too late to do that.
And as you said correctly with Amazon pushing their brand registry, that becomes even more important. So to give you stats for, to me that's absolutely mind blowing. So in Canada they file about 70,000 trademarks every year. In US, they file about 700. Thousand trademarks every year. And in China they file about 7 million trademarks every year.
And what China does, and they're trying to figure out a way to stop this, basically, in China, they, what they do is they trademark pretty much everything, just ran all random combinations of characters. And then they try to sell them to, to, to people with actual brands. That's really why we always say to business owners.
You what you need to figure out is, can I get a domain name of that and can I get a trademark if the answer to either of these two is no, pick a different name. Yeah.
Jonathan Green: I'm always amazed that I got mine, like I got serve no master.com and mine not that long ago, like 2016, like I just assumed when I typed it, I go, this has to be gone.
Because it's clever. I was like all the two word ones were already gone. But even getting a three word one now I can't even imagine. And it's really, then I don't have a unique name. So there are so many Jonathan Greens, I'm like the eighth most famous Jonathan Green, which still pretty good 'cause it's such a common name.
But some people get away with, they have a unique enough name that could become their brand. But. It's very interesting how to deal with exactly that, which is that every domain name, every brand, if you're even become famous, I remember when it started 20 years ago, people would buy the domain name of your name as soon as you got a part in the movie.
If you didn't think of it or started your band, if you didn't think of it, then you suddenly found someone squatting your domain. Now that people are squatting on your trademark, like that's even tougher because the question is really. It seems like this is an area that AI is making things worse 'cause AI could just spit out trademark applications.
All of these things very quickly are ai, are trademark applications just way cheaper in China? Short
Andre Mincov: answer is yes. But there's also less of them previously filed, so there's a lot more that you can do there. Plus they're not as, they have different rules of examination, basically their approach to likelihood of confusion is different from let's say American, right?
And the way I see it, the trademarking laws will inevitably need to change at some point. I don't know when. There's really two big flaws that become more and more obvious. One is the, that's towards reality. Basically, when you get a trademark, you only get it for one for the country where you file it for.
And if you want to protect your brand globally, you have to file your trademark everywhere. Whether you do it with a Madrid application or you do it directly, it's still costs a shit ton of money, right? And. The bigger problem with that is not just that it costs a lot of money it's that usually you'd be able to get your brand somewhere, but not somewhere else.
And so burger King couldn't get Burger King in Australia. They're hungry Jacks there, right? And there's a lot of examples like this. So they'll have to figure out a way around, around this. Because again, when the system was initially designed, it was okay because again, the, the growth, the scaling internationally happens so much slower. And copying happens so much slower than it does now. And so nobody thought that this would be the case when you could click a button, have a website five minutes later, and sell your stuff to anyone anywhere, right? And the second thing that, that will also need to change that this trademarking system is based around goods and services.
So when you come up with a name you don't. Get a monopoly over that name in vacuum, you get a monopoly over that name in connection with specific products and services that you're selling to the market. And similarly, back in the day when they came up with the system, I. They thought that, hey, if you're making refrigerators, you're gonna be making refrigerators under that brand.
You're not gonna be selling t-shirts, you're not gonna be selling educational courses, how to fix a fridge. Like you're not gonna do any of that. And now there's more and more businesses that say, we actually do a lot more than one thing. Do we have to file in 45 classes? And so I think eventually they'll need to.
To figure, to figure this out. And one thing that might change at all is something like Amazon Brand Registry really, because it's not gonna be a formal government registration, but if there's a platform when you can sell stuff and you can't be there unless you're registered and that the registration there happens with some other rules, maybe that will.
Take over the the government registration. It's probably not something that's gonna happen tomorrow. Probably not gonna something that's gonna happen five years from now, but eventually something like this will probably will start seeing.
Jonathan Green: So for someone who's starting out this process, right? I know a lot of people go, let me figure out my business name with JA GPT.
Now it's not really private, a hundred percent private, right? Because you're doing it online and you know their database has everything. Whatever they say, it's still stored somewhere, right? So what is the right approach to using AI to coming up with your business name or coming up with your logo.
'cause if you come up with your logo using an AI image generator, do you actually own that logo? Because it's made by an ai And AI can't own an image, right? So that's they keep going to court with that. They say, oh, you're not an artist. If the AI makes it in between, you have to do something yourself where it doesn't count.
What about that area, like with creating your logo? That's a good,
Andre Mincov: great question. Let's start with the logo question. 'cause I think you asked two questions and I'll start with the second. Logo what you're referring to is authorship, which is copyright. Who created the image, and that's very separate from your trademarking rights.
'cause trademark rights, they don't care who designed this for you, like the Nike Swoosh. They paid the artist 35 bucks for. For the image and they went and trademarked that and now it's worth billions of dollars as a brand. So they didn't ask Nike at the trademark's office. What was the name of the artist who drew that for you?
They don't care. All they care about is they were the first to go and request that as their brand. And unless there was someone who raised their hand and said by the way, Nike stole it from me because I designed it that was the end of it, right? Because you can't take someone else's image and claim it as your trademark.
Then in that case, copyright could prevail. But when AI does that. There's no author, right? It's work of the machine. And some works that would not qualify for copyright protection. For example, the green square, right? It's not. It's not something that could be protected by copyright, but it is something that could be protected by a trademark like h and r block, right?
So that's really, I hope, answers your question about the logo. As for your question about the names it's really not about always coming up with some genius, super original name like Apple again. Great example, right? You can't find something more common than Apple yet it's one of the most valuable brands in the world, right?
And so you don't need AI to come up with that. What you need is is an idea that, hey, we can use this word and start doing something with. It has nothing to do with selling apples, right? Which is how what they did. But like I, if Steve Jobs at some point said, you know what? Let's not call it Apple, let's call it a plum, right?
How different would it be? Or orange or mango, whatever, right? It's not just about coming up with a genius name, it's about what you do with it. So with Chad g pt, same thing, right? It can't suggest stuff. That's good. It can't suggest stuff that's crappy. What's more important to business owners and entrepreneurs from.
Long-term perspective is not that you came up with a perfect name, it's that you came up with a name that, that you can own. Because if it's too similar to something that already exists, it doesn't matter how good it is you will never own it, you will never be your brand. Owning a brand is better than having the brand.
Jonathan Green: Yeah, I think that I. We, the thing that people have discovered is that with Amazon you see all these like random letter name brands still selling a ton of units that people don't actually care as much about brand as we thought, right? If their product seems okay and has enough reviews, and obviously that's led to lower quality products getting flooding the market.
But that's something I've seen. That's interesting 'cause everyone just assumed the big brands would still dominate, right? Because you go, oh, I could buy shoes from this company. Why I buy shoes from xRE four, right? That's not a real company. Or maybe it is now, but that's exactly what they found out is that oh, you can have a really random dropshipping brand name and do Okay.
So is the value of, is the value of a brand being changed by the way the market is shifting, especially in the past year? Has, is the value of actual brands diminishing? 'cause we're seeing, oh, people just care about the thing. So
Andre Mincov: it's funny you should say that. 'cause I created a graph a couple months ago that was like to I woke, I had a dream with it and then I woke up and I put it together.
So when you come up with a brand, like the moment the owner thinks of whatever combination of letters, images, whatever, that moment when they come up with it, the value of that brand is zero. 'cause nobody knows about it. All it has is potential value, right? That's one thing. And also at that very moment your brand is the most registrable it will ever be.
Because as you start putting stuff out there, you'll start putting money into ads. You'll put start putting money and time and efforts into marketing and getting the brand known to other people. The every day that passes by the value hopefully goes up because more people find out about you and the hopefully you're doing something good, so the value goes up and the relatability goes down because there, it increases the risk that someone's gonna say.
Oh, this QRS TP 4 27 seems like a good brand. Why don't I get a trademark on that? And then it's up to you to fight this. So really it goes like this, right? So from that point it goes, I. The value goes up, register ability goes down, and the longer you play this game the wider the Cham be between the two.
And you don't want to be in a situation when you've actually built something really valuable, only to find out that, whoops, I can't have it. So that answers your question.
Jonathan Green: Yeah. So when should someone, I guess it's because I've seen a lot of these people that have an idea and then they spend 65 or a hundred thousand dollars registering trademarks around the world before they know if anyone wants their product.
And then they go, oh, that was our whole budget. They spend their entire marketing and sales budget on trademarks, and there's this thing of I get you wanna secure it, but you don't know if it's a good idea. And I see this happen. It's the same thing when people buy a ton of inventory before they've sold any units.
They go, oh, we got the best deal for buying 20,000 units. Yeah. And then they spend the rest of their life with a warehouse paying warehouse fees for something that they because now you have to pay to store it. Because, and I, this is why I don't like to sell physical products. People ask me why I only do print on demand and digital this.
Why that's my nightmare is to have a warehouse full of stuff no one wants. Yeah. Where is the, when is the right moment to grab your trademark? Should you just get the first version, like just get the trademark just in your home country right out the gate, and then deal with other countries later? Because it can get, as worldwide is so expensive and it's are you really gonna do business in Czechoslovakia and in Brazil and in Korea?
It's probably not all of them.
Andre Mincov: So we have four rules of thumb about it. One is, yeah, you always start with your home country 'cause that gives you all the flexibility and also buys you six months of grace period during which you can. File anywhere else and backdate your applications to the date of your application in your home country, right?
Which is not something that would work if you start with some other country. So you always start at home. Second is you put countries where you think are you're gonna have a lot of revenue from. So if, I don't know if you're a Canadian business, but most of your sales are from the us. US is gonna be the territory where you want that trademark.
To me the magic number is around if you think that you're gonna be making at least 30 k a year from that country. Get a trademark there. Third is you get a trademark everywhere where you have significant expenses. So if you have an office, if you target ads to a specific country, get a trademark there. And to me that is about five KA year. If you deliberately spend money on a country get a trademark there. And last one is if you make physical stuff somewhere like you gotta. Factor in China, get a trademark in China because if you don't and someone else trademarks it they may prevent you from exporting your own products out of China to sell to the US because the act of exportation, qualifies as trademark infringement if someone else owns that trademark, right? So you don't have to try to sell anything to China to get hit by someone else trademarking a brand in China. So that's the one that most people don't know about, and that's that, that, that creates a lot of headache for business owners, right?
So that's really the game. But you said it, right? You start with your home country because that buys you six months anyway, right? So what I suggest people do is file your trademark, start, small because a trademark in one country. Is not gonna break your bank. If you're serious about building this as a business regardless of who you go with, if you go with the most expensive law firm, you go with us, you go with, some of those cheap websites, it's still not gonna break your bank, right?
But do it right and then see if people want your product. And if they do then keep expanding your trademark portfolio.
Jonathan Green: Yeah, I think that's some really good advice. 'cause most people either think, go all in or don't do it. There's no middle. So I like to have very specific numbers. That thing about, there's another reason why I don't like to do physical products.
Like just another surprise. And I know a lot of people get caught up in categories like, oh, I thought I was only gonna make electronics, now I'm doing T-shirts. And someone can grab the T-shirts category. And different countries have different category lists, right? So they might not exactly match up.
They're
Andre Mincov: very close. So pretty much the whole world uses this NEE classification which breaks down all possible products and services into 45 categories. They call them classes. There are some minor distinctions, how countries approach this different wording here and there, but generally it's roughly the same.
Okay.
Jonathan Green: And how has AI changed the process of trademarking in the past year or the past two years?
Andre Mincov: I can't remember where I heard this, but I think it's really, it was really well said. A lot of people think of ai is that we're gonna have some war between humans doing the work and AI replacing humans, doing all that work for them and where in fact, that's how it's gonna work.
Really what's gonna happen is we're gonna have a war between people who use ai. People who don't, and people who are not gonna use ai, if they're gonna do things slower, probably miss out a lot of things, but you're still new humans, right? So what AI does simplify a lot, like all those trademark search systems that we're using like we're using paid software to do that.
They have their internal AI that, evaluates likelihood of confusion and this and that. Of course, we use that, right? The other stuff we use in trademark factories business, there's this wonderful AI tool I. Can't recommend this enough. It's called Olympia. And what they do is basically they set themselves off as you're almost chatting with, there's I think eight or 10 personalities.
Like they got a marketing expert, they got a legal expert, they got this and this. They got programmers and we chat with it all the time and ask it a bunch of questions. It helps us with some of our marketing. We don't really use it to draft applications 'cause I think that I would ne I would never rely on it fully.
But we do rely on searches. We do rely on it finding similar products and services that it does really well. And, eventually when AI will have access to the databases of cases of case law, that will be very interesting because then then you'll be able to very quickly see what responses to office actions work, which don't how to phrase it and things like that.
Jonathan Green: So I think you brought up something really important, which I wanna make sure it doesn't slip past people that a big reason to hire a trademarking firm or a trademarking lawyer is. Not even just the application, it's actual the research part, which is the will my application get rejected. And you mentioned it and it's called like possibility of confusion, which is my logo or my name, which I'm trademarking too similar to something that already exists and the research process has, and that's a hard question.
Do two things look too similar. I remember when I was first trying to do this stuff and my dad had his law firm do something and they sent me a bunch of stuff and I was like, this is insane. It's just 'cause they just searched like circle and I was like, of course there's a million things to circle.
Like I just trademarked my words. I was like, I don't care about the logo. I changed my logos every couple of years. We changed what it looks like. It's not intrinsic to my brand because it's not. On like your shoes or your shirt, right? It's not as important when you're an e-commerce brand. You can change what it looks like.
It's not a big deal. And I learned, oh, if you trademark the image and then you change the font, now you have to redo it. And I was like, oh my God, no thanks. No thanks. I don't care that much about what the image is in the back. 'cause I changed what I want in the background anyways, so that part of the research of.
Are things too similar can, and it sounds like the tools you like AI tools will give you a shorter list. Are they good at going, oh, these are similar. Knowing the line and because it's really the line of what the inspector at the. At least in America, US PTO office is gonna go, oh, these are too similar or not.
'cause you're getting a, at the end of the day, it goes to a person who makes that final decision goes, this is too similar and this is not, I know of cases where you send it to one, they reject it, you send it right back in, changing nothing, and then it gets approved, right? Because it's just a different person reviewed it.
So yeah, our AI tools helpful with that particular thing. Now for someone who's trying to do it themselves or doing that initial research phase to cut down on the cost.
Andre Mincov: So with search, it's, I it's actually very cool to have a conversation with you 'cause so much of this. And with searching and providing Registrable opinion, really it's about two things.
One is the universe of. Marks that it finds that that it thinks could be potentially confusing. And two making the right conclusions based on what and if you don't have access to the full universe, if it if it finds some trademarks but doesn't find some others, if it's not reliable then you have a massive problem.
And that's really the big problem with all of those. Free trademark searches that you can see online. 'cause they only look at identical matches usually for registered trademarks. And that's just tip of the iceberg. On the other hand, if you get too many you have a problem with. How do you figure out what's relevant and what isn't?
You need to understand what to look for. U-S-P-T-O has recently changed their interface for trademark searches. It be, it was bad but at least it was, it was pretty full and it was usable. It looked like shit, but it was usable. Now they changed it. Now it looks very modern, but the quality of the searches went down like this.
And I'm sure that, they're using their variation of AI to do that. And I remember a couple years ago when we were shopping for the. Platform to do our trademark searches for, 'cause we file a lot of trademarks for our clients. Obviously we need a reliable source of that information.
We were trying to make that decision because it's always a compromise, right? When you do a search, you don't want to go through 30,000 trademarks. 'cause you can do that, but you also don't want to. Have five and realize that, whoops, it didn't show this and this and this, and those would actually kill the registrable of app of your application.
We ended up with a solution that we thought was would provide the perfect balance. So the, that's the problem. So layman don't know, right? They really nobody knows because you are you're dealing with the results that, that you're, that they give you. If they don't give you certain results, you assume that they're not there.
And unless you have the luxury of comparing, what would this system give me? If I search for this would this system give me, if I search for this that system, and then you compare and then you,
Jonathan Green: yeah. That's really interesting because when I first did my US PT application, the website was so terrible looking, but I watched their training videos and follow the process and everything was actually a really smooth experience.
But I know that since then things have gotten a lot crazier. I. I don't know what
Andre Mincov: happen
Jonathan Green: with the change in their website design and with the fact that there are so many more trademarks. How, like how many trademarks do you want to get back in a result? What's the ideal number? You go, okay, this makes sense.
When do you expect, when you do a search, you expecting to get back a hundred, you expecting to get back 500 that you go through manually? What's the number? Like when you chose your software, you go, oh, this is the sweet spot. 'cause five is too for you, 30,000 is too many. What's the. Kind of number you, X factor where you go, wait, something's wrong.
If this number's too low or too high.
Andre Mincov: It really depends on the brand, right? If it's just a random combination of letters you probably don't want too many you'd probably be okay with, I don't know, 10, 20. If you're looking at a tagline made up of three common words you'd probably be looking at.
I don't know, a hundred and a hundred, 200. So internally, we have our own that's our secret sauce. That's how we have 99.3% rate of success with our trademarking services, right? Which is way higher than anyone else in this industry. And really the secret sauce is by doing searches that allow us to predict whether the trademark is gonna go through or not, and help.
Business owners not waste time and money on stuff that's not gonna go through. And for if it's a combination of if it's a tagline, right? Two, three words or four words, whatever we're gonna search every single word. We're gonna search different combination. We're gonna search synonyms, we're gonna search different languages.
We're like in us. We will, translate this in Spanish. We're gonna translate this, in Canada, we're gonna translate this into French and things like that, right? And we're gonna play around with that. So it's gonna be multiple queries. And for each, yeah, probably want to wanna see somewhere between maybe 10 50.
But there's gonna be multiple approaches, multiple kicks. Again I would rather us do those queries than fully rely on AI to do it for now. One Once. Once, once they've learned how to do it. I'm more than happy to save our search or time and just click one button.
Jonathan Green: Yeah. 'cause I think that's an interesting future because most people don't think it's the coming up with a good idea.
And it's really, the search is it gonna get approved? Because it now, the response time has gotten way longer. Yeah, I know that for a lot of people it takes more than a year, which I, that blows my mind 'cause I got mine very quickly. Even can four years
Andre Mincov: now. You have to wait four years till initial examination in Canada.
Can you believe that? That's ridiculous. Like how many business are you even gonna survive? Four years. Yeah.
Jonathan Green: And it's like you don't know 'cause you have to renew in America, you have to renew it five years and you have to prove you're using the thing. I have no, the first one's at five 'cause I have to do one.
They just said it's saw renewal, it's
Andre Mincov: maintenance between the fifth and
Jonathan Green: sixth anniversary. No, sorry. That's the word I have to prove. I'm still using it, is what I mean. I used the wrong word. You're right. But I have to prove, and I have to prove each category, so I have to show an example of each of my categories.
I have to go and remember what categories I did, and as I'm c I'm, I think I did four and I'm probably still using at least three or four of 'em. I never, the thing that is confusing is clothing. Because it's I don't sell a lot of clothing, right? But if I put a hat or a T-shirt, it's gonna have that on it.
It's do I care that much? And it's interesting 'cause there is someone who's infringing on my copyright. There is a T-shirt out there that says, served a master and it's like a motorcycle T-shirt. And I. There's no confusion for me. No one looks at that and goes, oh, that's Jonathan's motorcycle gang.
So I just have never, I haven't bothered, 'cause it's what's the point? What are they selling one T-shirt a month. It's just happens to come up if I search looking for infringing. And I was like, it doesn't matter to me. You have to make that decision. It's is there enough money in suing someone who has one T-shirt that has my brand name on it that probably doesn't sell that much and making an enemy of a motorcycle gang probably not worth it.
Because it's like such a small thing. But the. Yeah, it's now the importance of getting, because it takes so long to find out if you've gotten it right. It's wait, by the time I get it, I have to prove I'm still using it. Then I have to do the maintenance thing and then I have to renew it.
It's so it the delay, and I just wonder. It's like I wish that. Their office would learn to use AI to do things faster because really what you wanna get is a same day, yes or no. I don't wanna wait four years to find out, oh no, you've, this has never been your brand. That's so scary. So now it's interesting 'cause my opinion has always been, 'cause I did it on my own and I got it and now I'm like, maybe I got really lucky.
I followed the steps. I watched their tra, their training videos were so boring on the website, but I was like, nobody watches these. I just followed 'em step by step. It was very methodical and it worked. And of course, as soon as you submit, you get hundreds of emails from law firms that go, you totally messed up.
You're never gonna get this. We'll fix it for you. And then I got it. First try, they go, no. Then I got the letter from USB deal with the cool thing. He goes, no, you got it. Great job. You did it on your own. Amazing. No one ever watches our videos. We're so happy you're approved. Yep. Part of it was that I was already using the bread.
I owned the domain name. I had a podcast with that name. I have a book published under that name, that's a bestseller that's done really well. So like I established my usage of it and nobody else was. I. Super similar. Obviously the word serve could be server and there's a lot there and there's a lot with no what am I gonna do?
Everyone has no. So there was definitely a lot of things that came up that could have been a confusion, but they weren't in the same category. So I just think now, but also I got it in two or three months now. The thought of waiting year or four years, like Ollie, it's so scary. So now I think my pain has shifted into us is about 14
Andre Mincov: months now, like the whole process from.
Jonathan Green: Yeah. That's so long. Yes. I waited two. I was like, I have to wait three months. This is crazy. The thought of waiting and finding out in a more than a year. So I have to do my maintenance thing, of course, which is like a simpler form 'cause I've already approved, but it's yeah, golly. They've made it so that you
Andre Mincov: What you're saying really is testament to yes, you can do it yourself.
The, you're the one of the lucky 19%. Who filed their own application, and it goes through without any issues. So 81% of self filed applications get an office action, at least one, right? Yeah. And USP t's own statistics is that out of all applications filed, whether they filed by self-represented applicants, or they filed with the most expensive law firms only 51.7% of trademark applications ever get approved.
I don't think you got lucky. I think you know more about trademarks and how the system works than 99% of people out there. So there's something to that where you took the time to figure that out. A lot of people, I. They're like I came up with this name that's my trademark.
And when you tell 'em, Hey, there's government fee, there's classes, there's the requirement to show use, they're like what are you talking about? But they have no idea, right? So we have to educate them. But when they follow on their own, they assume that they know everything. So this is something to me, as the founder and CEO of this company that's been the most mesmerizing thing because the extent of.
Of certainty of people of how much they know and how much they really know. It's just a vast difference, right? We use different forms to get people to book a call with one of our strategy advisors, and we used to ask two questions, like it was one of the experiments that we ran. One was basic, one was.
How much do you, how certain are you about what you wanna file, why you wanna file, how much you understand about trademarks? One is, I know everything. And the other option was, I'd rather watch a short video that explains me that. And the second question was, second screen was how much, how well do you understand trademark factories offer and how we're different from everyone out there?
And one was like, I know exactly what I want. I picked the package, I know exactly what I want. And the other one. I don't mind watching a short video that explains me all that well, guess what the 90% of people said they know everything about trademarks. They know everything about Trademark Factory.
Then they get on the phone and the advisor's great, so what do you want a trademark? And which package they're like. What are you talking about? I have no idea. Tell me more. And so a lot of people they think they understand trademark, they think they understand how the system works. They think it's like the main name you come up with some combination.
You submit it to the government, click a button, pay them 20 bucks, and then five minutes later you own this. Not so much with trademark.
Jonathan Green: Yeah, I think that what people think at LLC or getting that tax ID number is really hard. Yeah. When it's actually crazy easy. Yeah. They'll fax.
They'll fax it to you. So you have to have a fax machine. That's the hard part. That's the hardest part is they want to fax it to you, so you have to get it online fax machine to get it to receive it. That's the one hardware, but it takes 30 minutes. So that department is shockingly easy because you think, oh, business tax city, that's gonna be so hard, so easy.
Yeah. Then the trademark thing. Yeah, I, because I knew someone who was really good at, who was an inventor and he had massive success with trademarks and lawsuits and stuff, and he was like, just watch their videos and be very methodical. The videos are, they're a tough watch let's be honest, they're government made training videos.
Of course, they're a tough watch, but it's very interesting to me that. This approach of, oh, I know everything. 'cause it's really, the form is very confusing. Yeah. Unfortunately they have a video about each question because the thing about categories that is really, 'cause you pay per category. So if you go, oh, I need every category, I'm gonna do all of the categories, that's so expensive.
And then you don't use 'em, you lose 'em after five years anyways. And I think that's where a big mistake is made. And then the other thing of my experience was when I looked at that was when I saw the video, they explained, oh, if you ask for the. Versus just the letters way. I was like you have to, every time you change your logo, you have to redo it because maybe we won't let you have it in a different font.
I was like, okay, I'll just do the letters 'cause I don't care that much 'cause it's my domain name. So that's where I got, just because I figured out those two critical steps. I think those where I would've made the biggest mistake because I've changed my logo since. In the last five years, like three or four times, I change it every two years I modified a little bit, upgrade it.
So that thing is so important. So I think this has been really useful. It's very interesting to see your approach to trademarking, especially with how a lot of things have changed. And a lot of people do think, oh, I want to use like the bigger, the more expensive the law firm, the better the experience I'll get.
Which is not always true, especially for something like this where no, a lot of it is looking at two designs and going, these are too similar. These are different enough. That's a very. Subjective process. Because that is, that's the thing that it comes down to is someone's sitting in an office who's working for the government, which means they already hate their job and they're looking at two pictures and going, are these two similar?
And that's a really weird thing to leverage your entire business on. If you think about is like some person in a room providing an uncomfortable chair, making a decision if two images are too similar or they're just different enough that you're allowed to have that be your business and that can change everything.
So scary to think about. It's been an amazing episode.
Andre Mincov: This was something, gimme your final thoughts. Yeah this was something that I had in mind when I launched Trademark Factory because I realized that to business owners, really you don't care. I. About what happens in the process.
All you care about is the result. Did I get my trademark? I didn't. And it's impossible really, because everything is subjective when you tell 'em, Hey, we're the better law firm, we're the worse law firm. Like how do you prove that? The only thing that matters is the result.
And so I came up with this concept of offering trademark registration services with a guaranteed result for a guaranteed budget. And everyone told me I was crazy because that's not how legal services are provided. And when someone tells me it cannot be done. That to me is a sign that I'm on the right track.
And so we've been running this for over 10 years and it's been the best things to us since slice bread. 'cause it's my first business, right? I made a million mistakes in the process. But the one thing that kept us going is the best offer on the market. And that's very forgiving to a lot of the stupid shit that I've done, like on the marketing front, on the hiring front because we know that.
If we can deliver the results that people want, they're gonna keep coming back for them. And that's what we've been doing.
Jonathan Green: No, I think it's interesting. Prices are not crazy 'cause I paid I think a couple hundred dollars, maybe as much as 500. I can't remember exactly doing it on my own.
And your price is not that much of a difference to have to get started with doing it. Whereas I've seen a lot of people that charge tens of thousands, 20,000. It's really expensive and it's like there's no guarantee. Very interesting approach. I think what you're doing is very cool and I definitely know people are gonna find this interesting.
So people are thinking about trademarking, especially in this world where it takes 14 months now that it takes longer. It's you really, it's not so much paying for what you guys do is as much paying you for saving me from time and headache because. Waiting. I have four kids and waiting nine months for a kid to arrive is hard enough.
The fact that it's a kid and a half, right? That's so long. Yeah. When I think about that scale, 'cause my wife wants another baby, she brought it up today and I was thinking, oh my gosh, nine months. And
Andre Mincov: imagine you're waiting for that and 14 comes a spoon, not a kid. And you're like, wait, that's not what I wanted.
And then that's why it's so important to get it right the first time.
Jonathan Green: Yeah, so I think this is really cool. So everyone, the website is Trademark Factor. I'll make sure to put it in the show notes and below the video. Thank you so much for being here, Andre. This has been a very cool episode and I had a really good time.
Andre Mincov: Thanks for having me, Jonathan, and look forward to seeing it go live. I.
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