Panache, I used to work for one of those “invention” companies and I suggest you take my advice. Do not work with them. They are a complete scam.
Furthermore, I wouldn’t even recommend pursuing your invention, unless your not in it for the money. Think about it. Where would you start? Who would you contact? How could you get it sold on the market. Companies already have their own engineers with their own ideas in mind. They likely have already thought of your idea, and scrapped it because it wasn’t good enough. In fact, if you look around enough, you will probably find a similar version of your idea. Trust me, I’ve seen it hundreds of times.
To be perfectly honest, you sound exactly like every client I ever talk to or heard from and they all lost out big. People emptied their retirement, mortgaged their house, maxed out their credit card just to chase a dream that has a snowballs chance in hell at making it. I’m sorry if it sounds rude i but I think you should hear it from someones who’s seen this bullshit first hand. I just don’t see the “invention” industry as a worthwhile pursuit for your average joe.
Remember that there are two kinds of patents - utility (the “real” kind, novel and useful and unobvious), and design. A design patent only covers the *appearance *etc. of the thing being patented, not its function. Some of these “consulting” firms promise to get you a patent on your invention, and they will, but it will be the basically-useless kind. The ones that tell you they’ll market it to manufacturers and distributors etc. will send out a few form letters for show, then tell you about the economy and a tough market and so forth, too bad, better luck next time, here’s the bill.
A patent really isn’t worth much to an independent inventor. Even if you do get a utility patent on something a company wants to make, after all the filing costs and renewal fees, remember that the company can afford much better lawyers than you, including the type that specializes in getting patents invalidated. If the numbers are more favorable for them to ignore or crush you than to pay you, or if they can invent a workable circumvention, that’s what they’ll do.
Could you tell us more? What all would the clients sink their money into? Did the patent company just keep coming up with fees that needed to be paid and promising that once this fee got paid and they got past this next hurdle, then the invention would be huge? Did you realize the company was a scam when you started working there? Did the company ever have any successful clients that they helped that the company could then point to in order to show that it wasn’t a scam?
Sorry to bombard you with questions, I just think that it is interesting to hear the inside perspective.
They spent the money on trying to establish a business selling their invention.
But the problem is, product ideas are really really common. Go into a Walmart and look at all the products on the shelves. How are you going to make money selling your invention out of your home business when you’re competing against Walmart?
A manufacturing company will have thousands and thousands of patents on all sorts of random inventions that might make great consumer products. But they only bring to sale a small fraction of those, the ones they think they can make money from.
There is a huge difference between a great idea for a product and a profitable business selling that product. That is where you’re going to go broke. Yeah, the invention assistance firms are scams, but they’re just going to soak you for a couple of thousand dollars. The real way to lose money is to try to manufacture and sell your product.
Even trying to sell your idea to a big company is probably a recipe for failure. They already have thousands of ideas for products, so what makes your idea a moneymaker compared to the other 999?
That makes sense. Regular people wouldn’t realize how much money it would take to manufacture and sell a product and would wildly underestimate how much it would cost. And they would overestimate the demand for their product.
What he said. If you’re both desperate and very determined, the Nolo Press book is a good option. They are the best known self-help legal publisher and have been around since the 70’s.
The biggest obstacles will be
a) comprehending the very specialized language the patent office uses. Looking at similar patents will help you with this. For example, pool lights - the kind that go along the inside of the pool. What would you call them. Doesn’t matter, you were probably wrong - submarine lanterns. If you didn’t know to look for that instead of pool lights, you’d never have found anything back when this was all manual. Nowadays you kids got these 'puters that do shit for you so maybe you’d luck out, but back in my day . . .
b) drawings. I don’t even know where to start with this. I never got this far, or rather I did and was swallowed whole - sort of like a great white shark coming out of a tornado (:D)
c) writings the claims in the specification since this is what gives the patent its teeth. The Nolo book spends, or used to spend a good amount of time on this.
If someone has an idea for a product they want to commercialize, the surest sign they’re clueless is if they’re fixated on patenting it. It can be hard to tell what else anonymous people on the Internet are up to, but I mostly work with people in person and it’s incredibly common for them to fixate on patents.
Imagine if you met someone and they said “hey I have this idea for a product that doesn’t exist commercially… so I need to write a marketing plan and that’s that”
Most people would say, “It’s great that you realize you need to have a marketing plan, but don`t you think you should build a proof of concept model? And investigate how to produce them in quantity? And develop a go to market plan? Maybe secure some financing? Or at least build financial projections? And while you’re at it, look into how defensible your product is and whether it’s worthwhile to pursue patenting it?”
But nobody ever comes up with an idea and decides all they need is a marketing plan. Contrarily, plenty of people think patenting their invention is all they need for success, or at least a huge factor. It’s not, and if you’re that myopic you need to take 10 steps back and start over.
Sure. The clients would sink their money into anything and everything. Literally, we could “design” just about anything. It wasn’t billed as a patent company, but a “design and development” firm. Their fee’s were OUTRAGEOUS. Like 10,000-15,000 dollars.
Yes, the company did keep coming up with fee’s. What they promised was to present your idea to a corporation for possible royalties. If that didn’t work out, (which almost invariably it did not), they would charge another 300 some odd bucks to “repackage” it and present to another corporation. It was a bottomless money pit.
I realized the company was a scam pretty early on, but I do have to give them credit for one thing. They did provide their statistics up-front. It literally said on the website how many people had worked with us, and how many were successful. Suffice to say, the numbers were dismal, but people still went through with it ALL OF THE TIME and I cannot understand why. I think it was a mixture of people who were simply bored with their lives and tired of working.
But, they only deserve the tiniest shred of credit for that since the government basically made them present their numbers after a lawsuit. Also, the sales directors routinely lied to clients and there was no recourse what-so-ever. It was all about the money.
Lastly, they have had a few people who were mildly successful. In my experience, I would compare it to buying a $15,000 lottery ticket at the local gas station, and probably worse than that.