Andrei Mincov
speaker
73 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Andrei Mincov’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And so I started my company, still the only firm in the world that offers trademark registration services with a guaranteed result for a guaranteed budget. Really what we do now is we help entrepreneurs, whether they're zero figure entrepreneurs or they're five, six, seven, eight figures. protect what they think will become their legacy. That's really what big brands are.
You're building something that goes beyond you, the founder, and you build a brand that, if you're lucky, thousands and millions of people are going to know, remember, and love and trust. To me, really, trademarks, yeah, there's a money part to it that increases your valuation. It does a billion different things.
But it also builds that legacy that allows you to build something that you'll be remembered.
Okay. I'm going to give you a definition that you won't find in the books, but I'm going to give you a definition that I think makes sense. A trademark is a legal right for you to stop someone else from using a brand similar to yours to compete with.
So a brand really could be your name, could be your logo, could be your tagline, could be whatever you feel will identify you from the crowd of competitors who do the exact same thing or something similar to you. But That word, phrase, or image that you want to be your brand does not really become your brand until you can legally stop others from popping you, right?
And the only way to do that is by getting that trademark. If you get a LLC or a corporation registered, that doesn't protect your brand. If you set up a website or get a domain name, that doesn't do it. If you set up a social media profile, that doesn't do it. If you put a TM symbol next to your brand, all it does, it tells them, well, I wanted this as my brand.
But really, you can't do very much with it. Once you file the trademark, once it goes through, that's when you have that legal paper that says, that's my. And that's really what a trademark is. What it's not, it doesn't protect the idea of your business or even copy my business model. But the name, the logos, the taglines, that's what trademarks protect.
Well, copyright is more about content, like books, videos, music. That song that the radio station stole, that was copyright infringement. Software. Copyright cannot protect brands, which is why sometimes people say, well, you know, you can just send yourself a letter with your name. and not open it, and that's going to protect your brand. It's not, because that's not what copyright is about.
Really, there's a reason they came up with the trademark law, because when the businesses were starting hundreds of years ago, it was hard for people to do. And so initially, they had this what's called common law rights of passing off, when if you were making shoes and you would put a brand on them,
And someone would copy you to have some recourse to go to court and prove this guy is trying to copy. But then when we went through industrialization, we started getting those factories and became progressively easier for people to build something similar. They realized we need a more robust way for people who invest and spend money building that brand to protect it.
And so they came up with, let's make it easy for people who care about their brands, protect them. And so let's allow them to register it in some registry that's going to have a list of active trademarks. They're going to say who owns them. You know, now today things are getting even harder for brand owners because competition is fierce.
What used to take years for you to build as a brand presence is It can now take days. You can set a website in a matter of days. You can have AI populate all those pages, and you're out there. The question is, how do you make sure that what you came up with stays yours? And that's what trademarks are all about.
Well, the second type is unfortunately more common. People wait too long before they realize, hey, my brand might actually be worth something. So with Trademark Factory, the first thing we do when someone becomes a client is we do a comprehensive search to confirm that whether this brand is trademarkable or not. Oftentimes, we have to tell them, you know what? Great brand. It's not yours, really.
It's someone else's. You can't have it anymore. And It's usually, you know, it's pretty dramatic because nobody wants to hear that. They say, well, I did my search and I found nothing. Well, because you don't know how to do searches. We do. And so we found this. And so the most painful is when we tell them, you know what? You said you've been running this business for three years.
This other trademark that we found, these guys just filed it six months ago. And they're like, so if I filed my trademark seven months ago, I would have have it? Yep. Yep. That is really the most painful news to deliver because it's a self-inflicted one. They just waited too long. They made their run known to too many people. And at some point, like imagine this.
Imagine if Elon Musk was an idiot and for whatever reason, he chose to not trademark Tesla. And anyone, you or me, could just go up there, follow that trademark and own it. Can you imagine how much money you or I would make, but just by saying, you know, Tesla, I own it now. You can't make cars and call them Tesla. Or you can just buy this trademark off of me.
Yeah, because trademarks office doesn't care about anything outside of their own system. So if you haven't filed your trademark, they're going to approve unless the person who came up with the lemonade, what's called opposes the mark. So they have to go and it's almost like a lawsuit within the USPTO system. And if they can prove that their brand.
was made known to a significant number of people across the states, they can win. It's going to cost them a lot of money. It's going to cost them a lot of time. They could have easily prevented by just filing first. But they also have to somehow find out about you. And here's the bigger problem.
If it's a lemonade stand, if it's not federal, usually what it's going to mean is that the shirt and socks office is going to say, you know what? Great. Where are you selling your stuff? I okay, so what it's going to mean is that this guy who copied you will have coverage all across the US as a federal trademark, but you will have a license to continue selling your lemonade in Austin. Oh, geez.
Right? And so really, like I said, the whole idea of Trademarks was to give brand owners who care about their brands an easy way to protect them. And the assumption is if you didn't do it, you probably don't care about it very much because it's so easy to do. Use the tools that we gave you.
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