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
Courts are not very sympathetic to entrepreneurs who suddenly remember that their brand is worth something when someone else made a lot of money using it.
Yeah. Coca-Cola is literally one of my favorite examples. I will remember it by heart. You wake me up in the middle all the night. I'll tell you. They trademarked their brand back in 1892, which is incidentally the year when they just set up a company and when they were selling nine drinks a day.
I call it a lemonade stand with a dream because all they had is this idea that, hey, if we are going to spend any time, money, and effort trying to build those into... a brand, a national brand, we might as well own it. And trademarks is the only type of intellectual property that you can own forever in theory. Copyrights expire, patents expire, design patents, everything expires.
Trademarks, you can renew and renew and renew. So they've been renewing that same trademarks since 1892. And I can bet that there was a lot of people back there who looked at them and said, why are you – bothering spending money on lawyers to trademark this stuff. It's just a drink.
Yeah, for sure. The more recent one, which really highlights the value of getting it done right and early, there's this startup called Bird, the electric scooters. You see them everywhere. They were, back in 2021, recognized as the fastest company to grow to a billion-dollar valuation. They knew a thing or two about building a successful business.
So what they did is they started the company and 13 days later, after they started the company, they filed their trademark. Before they launched, before they had their first scooter made, before they, like, I don't know if they had an office back in the day or not, 13 days. Again, because they asked themselves a question, will the brand be important to us if we are to become successful?
And the answer to that was, of course, because if anyone can put a scooter and put the same brand on it, we can't have a viable business model because people are going to be confused and they can't operate like this. And so they said, yeah, brand is going to be important. We want to build it into something that will become big. And so they went and trademarked it.
And now it's part of the billion dollar valuation.
So there are extreme cases when you file what's called an unconventional trademark, like if you want to trademark a smell or if you want to trademark a sound. So there's significantly more that goes into those. But those are like a fraction of a fraction of 1%. Whether it's name, logo, or tagline, the normal ones. With Trademark Factory, it's the same thing.
And really, that's where the name Trademark Factory was born. Because I asked myself a question. If Bill Gates goes to McDonald's and wants to order a Big Mac, are they going to charge him... 10 times more just because he has more money? No, right? They're going to charge him the exact same thing. And I realized for business owners, for entrepreneurs, a trademark is a trademark.
You don't care how difficult that is for me to give it to you. All you care is did you get one or did you not?
That's a funny story. So in Russia back in the day, if you didn't join a university, if you didn't go to university, you had to join the army. I'm a short guy, not tremendously, you know, big muscle. I didn't want to join the freaking army. And so I realized I got to go to a university. I got to study something. And I had no idea what I wanted to do. I was zero.
Then I remembered that when I was growing up, I would always come up with some arguments to get what I wanted to get from my parents. Like, I would structure it in a way that they felt compelled to give me what I want. And they would say, I got to be a lawyer, right? When I was four or five years old, right? Maybe I should become a lawyer.
And the other part of that was, it was 1992 when I had to make the decision to go to university. That's when Russia was just collapsing. And even though my father was a famous composer, he was barely making enough money for us to eat. We were all used to a very good standard of living before that. And I saw how unreliable that was, even if you were as talented as he was.
And so before that, I was studying music and still love music. But I realized I didn't want to be in a position when I wouldn't be making any money. So like, what can I learn that that is an easy path to comfortable living? Yeah. And so I went to the law school really for the first couple of years. All I cared about was girls, alcohol and parties and music, rock and roll.
But then my dad heard his music and that changed everything so very quickly for me. So the overall success rate with trademarks filed in the U.S. is 51.7%. It means half of the trademarks filed never make it. With Trademark Factory, it's 99.3%. So we do something different from everyone else.
And there was this other category of websites out there that, you know, I'm sure your listeners have come across, you know, those $69 offers. Whoa, we've got to trademark your brand in five minutes. Right. They do not even follow through a lawyer because they've duped a lot of entrepreneurs into using them. And some trademarks go through, even through them. But their model is also the same.
And we're going to file your trademark. And then if it doesn't go through, well, too bad, so sad. I wanted to do something different. I want to give them the assurance that there's someone on their side who actually gives a damn and who wants to give them the same result that they deserve.
On the business side, it's easy, really. It's building something. that transcends you, something that you want to be remembered for. And it's really, we build businesses. One reason, of course, is to live a comfortable life. That's great. But the only way we get rich, the only way we make that money is when we give the world something that the world wants.
The more of it we do, the better trace we leave. And that's what, to me, legacy is about. Like with brands, I'm going to challenge you. Try thinking of one successful business without thinking of its brand. It can't. Because the brand is what we think about when we think of a successful brand. The brand is the thing. It is the thing we remember the business for. And that's the legacy part.
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