Don't listen to those other people who tell you you can do it alone. You can't.
You have 4 kids, there is no way you have that kind of time.
Regarding the patent: I know this is going to sound harsh, but what is likely is that it's going to be harder to find someone who finds your invention cool than to defend against anyone who might want to steal it.
Patents defend technical inventions useful in the industry, a social media gizmo not so much. Filing a patent will take a lot of time, and you won't have the money to litigate anyone who steals it anyways.
In your position, I would just throw the idea out there, make a kickstarter campaign or something. Try and get anyone interested. If there is interest, then it's easier to find a cofounder who might want to be in with you on this.
There is a good chance that the kickstarter result is a giant "meh" from the world. And you can go back raising your children and chase that GS15 (Idk what that is).
Also if you do this just to scratch your own itch, build the stuff just for yourself (LLMs and 3D printers make everything quite simple these days), and post a youtube video about it.
Anyways my take is:
- you need a cofounder to launch something
- but you need to validate the idea before finding a cofounder.
also don't be greedy with your cofounder, split 50 50 or close to that, it may be your idea, but you can't do it without the other person.
Well, the patent attorney was very clear that a kickstarter (at least any that offer anything remotely like a 'sale' or anything) 'voids' a lot of the protections of the provisional, and maybe even the full patent.
I don't know anything about provisional patents, but if selling a product that embeds patented ideas voided the protections of a patent, patents would be pretty useless.
Maybe there's some context or nuance that didn't get conveyed that I'm missing.
I would imagine you can't get treble damages from willful infringement on a provisional patent, given that they're not published... so if you publicize your item on kickstarter while the patent is provisional and/or pending, less potential damages from infringers ... but I dunno how many people get treble damages anyway.
The provisional serves as a timestamp only. It's literally not reviewed. The only reason at all to file a provisional is if you're going to file the proper one. Goods that are actually patented are under the 'proper' ones, and do not get the classic "protection" that we think of. The only thing the provisional really does is serve as the 'timestamped-steak-in-the-ground' that only you can claim as your timestamp. But it comes with conditions. You can't start selling your goods as-though-patented until you file the patents. You can put 'patent pending' on them after you file the big one and it's under review. But the provisional one doesn't really get you the 'patent pending' part at all. That's my not-even-close-to-a-lawyer version that I've learned in the last few months.
But what complicates this even more is that I don't really want to sit on the tech at all. I want it to become ubiquitous and (eventually) a standard (like how Yubico/Yubikey led to FIDO/FIDO2 later).
But others in the thread also bring up a totally valid point: I need to prove this has teeth with real people somehow.
I think I may have to bight the bullet and fork over some savings to get the proper patent done. I need to get busy with R&D to finalize the design.
Yes, I know, but my point is you don't need a patent in the first place. Your patent is going to cost you a bunch, and it's not going to help at all.
If your product does not interest a lot of people, the patent is going to be useless, cause nobody will want to steal your idea.
If your product does interest a lot of people, some people may want to steal it, but:
- would you sue a Chinese company for selling copies of your stuff on AliExpress? How would you even sue that company?
- would you sue a major tech firm, while it's likely that anything that you built is likely infringeing on at least one of their patents?
- in the case you want sue, what are the odds of winning? Your patent may be void for a variety of reasons, and a copying product may not be considered as infringeing, if it has enough difference with the patented invention. What time frame are you looking at? 5 years, 10 years? Do you want to spend 10 years in litigations? What legal costs are you facing? Probably in the tens of thousands.
My advice to you as a failed startup founder myself, is to cool your head down, and stop imagining that what you invented is the next telephone, and pitch pitch pitch. If you pitch a room with 100 people, you'll be lucky if 2 guys come up to you at the end telling you your stuff is a good idea.
The patent is keeping you in a fantasy world, and that's not good.
Probably because while is the source of many infinite loops, and because it’s sometimes faster and more rigorous to compute the length ahead of going into the loop.
That said, I personally don’t think it’s smelly at all.
I imagine launching anything from space to earth would be highly inefficient and inaccurate. So it must be space to space.
Space to space weapons are what? Small drones with an explosive charge? I guess that could work. These "combats" are going to be weird, because the objects are trapped in their orbits. Things are going to move very slowly with a lot of intertia.
Waiting eagerly for the "crying baby" extension pack. The "get to your seat" MMO. And the "I want to pee, but the guy next to me is sleeping" campaign.
Also, inflightsimulator: 1980, with ashtrays and lethal weapon playing on dropdown TV sets
Or the passenger who is friendly and wants your window seat, but doesn't want to straight out say it. Then turns deranged when they find out they are in the middle seat for the whole flight.
What a great idea! How about, a kid behind kicking your chair, the person in front of you abruptly putting his seat back all the way, and a person of size next to you spilling into your seat.
For those asking who wants this, Marques Brownlee pointed out in his quick review that this is mostly targeted at China's market, which apparently loves foldable phones.
Open weights agents with hacking capacities can reproduce themselves into the systems they hack (non-open weights ones will have to hack their creators first). Not saying they will, but if they do, good luck finding the kill switch.
Once swarms of agents run unsupervised on unmonitored hacked hardware, who can tell what they will do? The Huggingface incident showed that such swarms behave without any safeguard. It was a real HAL moment.
A lot of things are possible then: ransomware campaign, taking over IoT devices, self driving cars, planes, ships, satellites, missile launchers. If nothing's out of reach, everything is possible.
Bring robots into the mix, and the possibilities are endless.
I'm not particularly frightened tbh, but we shouldn't discard the worst-case scenario, and the worst-case scenario doesn't look good.
How is that open source? There’s not a single line of code. No CAD. Nothing. Sure, there’s a “coming soon” CrowdSupply link, which I guess is more than a KickStarter. But open source?
Fair enough but I trust CrowdSupply to keep them in check. I bought quite a few projects via CS and never been disappointed. They have too much trust from the community not to follow up, it's their most important differentiator versus KickStarter and other crowdfunding platforms.
You have 4 kids, there is no way you have that kind of time.
Regarding the patent: I know this is going to sound harsh, but what is likely is that it's going to be harder to find someone who finds your invention cool than to defend against anyone who might want to steal it.
Patents defend technical inventions useful in the industry, a social media gizmo not so much. Filing a patent will take a lot of time, and you won't have the money to litigate anyone who steals it anyways.
In your position, I would just throw the idea out there, make a kickstarter campaign or something. Try and get anyone interested. If there is interest, then it's easier to find a cofounder who might want to be in with you on this.
There is a good chance that the kickstarter result is a giant "meh" from the world. And you can go back raising your children and chase that GS15 (Idk what that is).
Also if you do this just to scratch your own itch, build the stuff just for yourself (LLMs and 3D printers make everything quite simple these days), and post a youtube video about it.
Anyways my take is:
- you need a cofounder to launch something
- but you need to validate the idea before finding a cofounder.
also don't be greedy with your cofounder, split 50 50 or close to that, it may be your idea, but you can't do it without the other person.
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