Juraj Cvik - CEO & CMO at Trama

Welcome to another CEO Wisdom Pod. We have Yura Svick with us today. He's CEO and CMO at Trauma, protecting the heart and soul of your business. So it's basically a business that you can go on the website, by the way, to try the full experience. But if you want to check if your business name is trademarked, you can go there and see. It's a self-serve experience. You just pay full e-commerce. I like the UX of it. And they have a whole bunch of reviews. They're one of the biggest in the world at this. And interesting thing, Juraj started as CMO there and scaled to CEO. So Juraj, welcome to the pod. Tell us a bit more about yourself and what you've been up to.

Hello, Charles. Pleasure to be here. Thanks for the invite. A little bit about myself. I joined Trama 6 years ago after basically a career of about 8 years as a business analyst in a UK-based company. In Trauma, I started on the position of, let's call it pretty much anything you do with the marketing, as it was a startup, basically 6 people there. So you had to do, you get to get your hands dirty, do all of the stuff. And 2 years ago, I was promoted to the CEO. And over those, over the course of those 6 years in Trauma, we have done magnificent things. And I'm really looking forward to what's ahead of us.

How did you arrive in that business as a marketing guy and were promoted to CEO? What's that story?

To answer that, let me tell you a little bit about the dynamics in the founders team. There are 4 of us. There's the legal arm, which is handled by the original founder Igor. There's the tech and product arm, which is handled by Andy. the CEO, biz dev arm, and then we got the marketing. And it's really the intersection of these 4 arms that allow us to really perfect what we are doing. If it was just a legal arm, we wouldn't be where we are right now. And so it was this dynamics that allowed us to move forward. And over the course of the years, we sort of realized that it is that marketing angle, how we can work with our clients, how we can explain very complex legal issues to them, how we can learn from their feedback and perfect the product. That is probably the driver of the company. And so we decided to, to have this internal shift, and we basically advanced the marketing function into the CEO role.

But did you have the CEO skill as a CMO? Like, what made you a great leader? Um, I mean, I promoted CEOs before of my businesses, and I would never do I wouldn't do really this lightly, right? I would think a lot. I would evaluate these people. I think the founder of the business has had a couple of years to evaluate you and your skills. Did you contribute to the bottom line growth? What was the reason why he thought you were the chosen man for this?

I guess it was that we were seeing some things that are left untouched that are basically wrong in our own organization. I was mainly the guy pointing at them and I was also the guy trying to fix them. And I'm not a lawyer, so I can't give legal advice, which is sort of strange that I work for a law firm, but I've been around lawyers for 4 years before becoming the CEO. So I really got the understanding of the company through and through, and we have seen it in several projects that It is really that understanding which I acquired over the years, plus that marketing knowledge and domain that allows us to really work better towards the clients, increase their delight, and in turn improve the company.

Right. And the company was started in 2020. How's it grown since you've took the CEO role in 2023?

In 2023, we started working on a whole new proposition. Before then, it was just trademark registration. Still very, very cool, very valuable. We have advanced trademark registration and brand protection through trademark registration, made it available to the masses. In 2023, we expanded from that, introduced trademark and brand monitoring proposition. Basically, if you have a registered trademark, it is a piece of paper. And unless you use that piece of paper, it does not necessarily mean anything. If there is a new brand that is copying you and you do not use your rights, then you just, well, you will be better off without registering the trademark. So we felt like this is the natural progression of where the company wants to be. And over the years we have grown with our clients. Even as part of the trademark registration, our first clients start registering their UK, US trademarks with us. Over the years, we've added basically every country in the world into our offering. And as our clients grew, they wanted to register in Vietnam, China, you name it. And this is also the part of the progression that as our clients grew and they were basically more demanding that, okay, what can we do about this particular threat? So we were feeding into that demand. So this was the main change that happened. There were a few process changes which allowed us to really scale our operations, but this is the main thing that I introduced as a CEO.

Right. Your business, is it— we talked about this last time, you and I. Do people check their trademarks before it's too late? Like, also, can you explain to founders why basically trademarks are important? What can happen if I don't trademark GTM.Ventures, for example?

I'm having this conversation basically twice a day with some of our clients, and the best way I try to explain it is like everyone has heard something about trademarks, right? So I'm not going through the very basics, but ultimately it is the legal mechanism for protecting your brands. And the way I try to explain it is that, look, if tomorrow somebody showed up with the same exact name of your brands or your products and you would lose access to e-commerce, you would lose access to Amazon, you would be just blocked. If a new domain popped up, started stealing your traffic, stealing your customers, your customers coming back to you complaining that the quality of the products or services is not what you promised, would that bother you? And if the answer is yes, then trademark registration is the perfect start to prevent that from happening.

And what can be the financial consequences precisely of that?

All over the place. Some of these are really harmless, that they just steal a client here and there, but they can be very substantial. The best illustration is on an Amazon store where it is so easy to protect the brands as long as you have a registered trademark. If you don't, you risk somebody registering your brand name and then blocking you on the platform. So all your stock, all your orders, everything you've got is just lost.

Okay. And you can lose millions, I guess, like if you have That much invested in your brand, right? You've printed it on material and you've told a bunch of clients, and that could be very bad for your company, right? So that can— it can have catastrophic consequences. Is it like, um, only in the US, or where can— so how does the trademark system work? Like, if I get sued in the US, I can keep the trademark, but in other countries, how does that work?

Trademark system is very country-specific. And so if you register a trademark in one country, let's say US, it is protected only in the US. If you want to protect it elsewhere, if you are selling or manufacturing your products elsewhere, you want to protect it in those countries as well. This is pretty much where Trama comes in because in the past you would have to talk to 20 different attorneys to coordinate their efforts across 20 countries. With Troma, you just talk to one account manager and we handle everything. We handle everything through our internal team, through our external partners. And where were we? What was the main question? Sorry, I lost the thread a little bit.

Yeah, so your account managers help manage a trademark in like all countries, right? So they'll check if I'm clean in France, for example. They'll check if I'm clean in Spain. So That's the advantage of dealing with you? Like, is it I pay one-time fee and you check all of this for me? What's the deal here?

We talk to you, we try to understand your needs. So there are people whose biggest business ambition is just to have a store in their hometown. For them, talking about global brand protection is nonsense. And we just focus on, let's call it France. If there is at least some ambition that the brand may grow in the future, Then yes, we start the clearance search on a global level and we may start the trademark registration process in one country and continue over time as the business grows.

So they come to your website. How do they find out about you most of the time? Is it SEO? Is it ads? How do you get your clients?

It's a combination of different things. SEO, performance marketing, influencer marketing. Referrals over the last year or 2, referrals have been the main thing for us. And obviously returning clients, a few partnerships. But regardless of the way they get to us, they get to our website, they can start with a free screening. They just need to tell us their brand name, what their business is all about, leave us the contact details. Within 24 hours, We run a very comprehensive search and then we are in a position to actually provide proper advice whether it can be registered, what will be the strategy to do that in the most effective way.

So what's your plan to grow the company 2x, for example, next year? What's your number one growth system here?

To be perfectly honest, for just 2x, we just need to keep doing what we are doing. We need to keep delivering high-quality service, and we are seeing that our clients come back to us and they invite their friends to come back to us. So for 2x, this is all we need to do, just uphold our standards. And we obviously have much, much, much higher ambitions, and there are several ways for us to grow. One of them is what we are calling proactive brand monitoring. Basically, we don't really need our clients to pay for monitoring subscription, but we are experimenting in with cost-efficient ways how to do the monitoring for them sort of free of charge and just tell them if there is an infringement. And so it's a, it's a very good quality of service for the clients which they do not have to pay for. And they also see that infringements are there and then they come back to us again. Okay, can you help us? Can we deal with this in some way?

And yeah, AI, where do you leverage AI in that full process? On the product side, on the sales side? Tell us a bit more.

The AI, there's a lot of buzz about AI, particularly AI in legal services. Few companies are being worried that, okay, the AI will replace all the lawyers. To be perfectly honest, we started this company as a legal tech company. This was way before AI was cool. But from our position, AI is really just speeding up things for us. So things that could have been automated back then can be automated now much faster. A very good example is there is a lot of routine mundane work involved in the work of a trademark attorney. One of those myriad of things is just filing the trademark application to the intellectual property office. They have their own website, they have their own form, you need to fill it out. And this process takes half an hour, maybe an hour of just manual tedious clicking, no value-adding activity at all. What we did 5 years ago, we developed a Chrome extension which does it basically in seconds, saving all the valuable time, all the valuable money for the clients. These days, the whole process of development with the AI would take us 1 day. Back then, it took us 4 weeks. So it's— From our vantage point, it's really just about the speed of moving forward in terms of improving things, improving the experience rather than opening a whole new door.

Tell me why you have a 96% success rate versus the competition at 64%. Like, is that accurate? And if so, why?

Obviously, we believe there are things that we do the right way. I would say there are 2 main things that distinguish us from that industry average number. The first one is that we really start with that free lawyer's check, free clearance search. So if you are an entrepreneur and you have come up with a brand name, instead of you just filing the trademark application or having an attorney file it for you, paying the full amount of money, you can come to us. And if there is any significant risk, we would just flag it and you can save that money. And it's our experience, our expertise. We've got former intellectual property examiners, so we know how the system works. We've had 30,000+ cases handled on behalf of our clients, which means we have got data, we have got the experience to tell if the trademark is viable or not. So this is one of the important things to note when we are comparing the numbers. And the second one is really that legal expertise, meaning the way we draft the trademark application itself, the choice of goods and services affects the success rates. And also, if the office sort of raises an office action, Or if another party opposes the trademark application, instead of you being on your own or with an inexperienced attorney who just, okay, just fold and find a new brand name, we can fight for you. We are in the position to tell you that it's worth fighting for.

So the full service makes sense here. Do you also have like lawyers on staff or do you outsource that externally?

We do have roughly 20 lawyers on staff internally. We are covering main jurisdictions internally, including EU, UK, US, Canada, Australia, quite a few more. But we also have a dense network of partners through which we handle more exotic jurisdictions like that. mentioned Vietnam, where we do not have an internal person working there.

How do you get like all these ratings from clients? Is there like an automatic email being sent to them asking them to review you? How fundamental is that part of the strategy?

It is absolutely crucial when it comes to legal services. I do believe that trust is the ultimate deciding factor. And especially when we were starting and people didn't know about us, we had basically zero footprints in the markets. It were those reviews and references which allowed us to establish that level of trust. And so for us, they're absolutely crucial. We use Trustpilot. We even did a little bit of A/B testing. Okay, if we show the Trustpilot widget or if we don't.

Yeah.

And we've learned that there is actually a considerable increase in the conversion rates when we just add the Trustpilot widget. So this is free advertising for Trustpilot. We've been happy with them. They do great work in terms of moderating the reviews. So if there is something obviously fake, for example, if somebody mentions a review for a different company, they just take it down on their own. You don't have to do anything. And as part of the policy, it needs to be transparent. So we need to approach all of our clients equally and hope they will leave us a review.

Got it. Is it an advantage to build from Slovakia? There's not so many startups from there. Yeah, what's special about building and hiring people from there?

It's quite challenging, to be honest, and I would be very surprised if you knew anything about the political situation in Slovakia. But as a company, we are trying to attract global talent, and we do have quite a lot of very talented individuals on the team, and we even managed to relocate them into Slovakia, but it is also the political situation which sort of complicates the strategy, that they are a little bit more cautious, not willing— like, if our main headquarters was in London or Brussels or Hong Kong or wherever, it might be slightly easier in this regard. So instead of Well, hitting this roadblock, we decided for a slightly decentralized structure. So we do have these regional offices.

Juraj, where can people find out more about you and your company?

TraumaTM.com.

So that was Juraj and Charles for another