Evan Carmichael explains why a patent alone won't protect your invention. You need a commercialization plan, a marketing engine, or partners to bring it to market. He warns against filing "junk patents" and suggests negotiating with law firms to reduce costs in exchange for equity and introductions to companies.
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How to prevent people from stealing your idea. So I got a great question from one of my YouTube viewers— love you guys— Michael, who wrote in to ask, "What if you have a sex toy? I have a provisional patent on a sex toy. I'm finalizing utility patent as we speak. My question is, how do you prevent them from stealing or taking your idea? The reason I'm asking is I have a wife that doesn't work. I have $2, 6 and 3 months, and I'm finishing up my computer science degree. I lost my retirement. I gotta start all over again. How do I connect with you? How do I get into the Addertorium?" industry, he wants to get this thing out. So how do you do it? So this is a great question, and Michael, you're already on your way. Okay, the best way to protect your idea, you have two options. One is a patent, so nobody can copy exactly what you're doing, or you go with trade secrets, and that's more like Coca-Cola. You have a special recipe, you have a special way of doing things that you don't want to be made public knowledge, and you see lasting for hundreds of years. So the patent is a great way to go. The thing with patents, okay, this is important to remember: you have to be willing to do more than just create a patent. Because a patent costs money, and looking at your situation, you don't have a lot of money, right? So you need to not just create a patent. If you're gonna decide, "This is what I'm gonna do with my life, I want this sex toy to be the greatest thing ever," then you need to be willing to go beyond just making a patent. You have to get this thing out there. I remember going to an inventor's conference that I was speaking at, and one of the speakers was talking about a toothbrush. A toothbrush that had toothpaste inside the handle, and you press the button and the toothpaste came up through the bristles, and it came up as you're brushing your teeth. So it's like a toothpaste and toothbrush all in one. And there were hundreds of different patents for this kind of idea. Hundreds of patents that are out there. Have you actually seen go to market? How many successful toothbrushes have you seen where the toothpaste is somewhere in the handle? I haven't seen it. I haven't seen any. And so the point is, is a lot of patents. There's a lot of patents out there. And most of them are just junk patents. Because the inventors don't do anything with them. It's not enough to have just the patent. You waste your time and money on this thing For what? You have to get out there and commercialize it. You have to build a marketing engine. You have to create a movement around it. And if it's not you who's going to do it, you have to partner up with people who will. One of my best suggestions, if you're going down the patent route, is to partner up with your lawyer. Okay, a lawyer, a law firm, they're not making a lot of money off of you, right? You're going to them for one patent. They know you're budget-conscious. They're not making a lot of money off of you. The companies they're making money off of are the huge companies. The companies who you wanna sell your product into. Right now, your product, I'm assuming, is game-changing. It's gotta be. You want companies to license it from you, it's gotta be something special. It's gotta be something nobody has done before. Something that's really gonna take off in the market. But the law firms, those big clients, they could get big billings from them. And I would try to structure a deal with a law firm who has connections into those companies to either do the patent for you for free or at a massively reduced cost and give them a piece of the upside and have them help you make the introductions to the companies. That's how you can partner up to sell this thing in. You could try to do it yourself, but it depends on what you want to do with your life, right? Do you want to be the inventor or you want to build a company? They're two different things. But you have to do more than just get the patent. You've got your provisional patent, it's going to run out. You need to start paying for your patent. You got to pay a lawyer to do it, and you got to pay annual maintenance fees for each country. Man, that gets expensive. So you have to decide where you want to take this, who you're going to partner up with, and how you're going to build your movement and your marketing machine to turn this idea into a game-changing, revenue-producing, adult toy industry smashing product. Believe. For those of you watching, you like the video, give it a thumbs up below. Let me know what you think. Please leave a comment underneath, ask me your question, I'll make a video response. And if you wanna see more videos like this, click on my face, subscribe to the channel, and I'll see you soon.
