One question business consultants get asked a lot is how important things like patents are. Well, this deserves the standard disclaimer: we’re not lawyers, and this post is written for a general audience. But for most of you, I’m going to say that “idea protection” just isn’t a huge priority.
If you want to pursue patents for your work, by all means, look into it. But there is a much more important question you need to address: what will you be doing in the meantime? This stuff can take years, and a lot of resources.
If you’re letting the fear of stolen ideas prevent you from moving forward, that’s really just another way of procrastinating.
There are a few reasons you might want to avoid holding onto your ideas too tightly:
- Presumably, you’re going to need the help of other people to get your product off the ground. Realistically, most of the people you tell about it aren’t going to end up helping you. You’re going to need to share your idea with a lot of people before you actually get anything done. If you hold onto your ideas too tightly, that’s never going to happen.
- Patents require very detailed descriptions of exactly how your product is going to work. That’s big design up front, and it’s usually a bad idea, because as you develop your product, you’re pretty much always going to discover flaws in the plan.
- Patents don’t stop people from stealing your core idea, only the exact mechanism. (In fact, the idea you have probably can’t even be patented in most realistic scenarios.) Apple’s patents might have allowed them to sue Samsung for giving their tablets rounded corners, but they didn’t stop anybody from stealing the idea of a touch screen tablet.
Whether or not you decide to patent your idea, there are other things you need to figure out first:
- How are you going to raise the money to develop and promote your product?
- Do you know enough about the market to develop a product that people will actually want?
- Will you be able to convince people with the skillset you need to help you develop the product?
Contrary to what you might think, very few investors pressure startups into getting patents. Most of them say they will support the decision, but it’s not high on their priority list. In fact, pretty much all of them will say that you shouldn’t waste resources on a patent until you have an established product.
In fact, the biggest threat you face is the possibility that you might infringe on somebody else’s intellectual property. Patent trolls have become a serious problem for startups, and companies as big as AOL have had lawyers advise them not to research existing patents, lest they face the possibility of “knowingly” infringing.
In general, I think it’s a bad idea to avoid playing with patents as a startup. These rules are written for the big players in the industry, and it takes a massive legal budget to keep up.
Focus on building a minimum viable product. Prove that your solution solves a problem people actually care about. That matters more than anything else.