Meet Small Business Patent Expert Rich Goldstein

Protect your brand, product or invention from the hazards of consumer product launching and go from idea to product to big brand. With guidance from retail product design and development experts Tracy and Tom Hazard. Get the insider secrets to put the right things in the right order with the right resources so you can out design, outsource, and out profit your way to retail success.

Hey, product launch hazards. Welcome to our interview with Rich Goldstein. I'm super excited to interview Rich because he wrote the definitive book on obtaining a patent. And this is offered by Rich. The American Bar Association.

Yes, it's the American Bar Association's consumer guide to obtaining a patent.

That's great, because you know what, we really have a consumer focus here. I mean, there are people building companies here, but at the end of the day, they're startups and they're entrepreneurs and they're beginning at this. So treating it from with a consumer mindset, I think is a really good idea. Both because, you know, because that's how we met that I believe that there's so much to do in the product launch process. That patent is only one piece of it where so many organizations that that's the end all and not getting it to market is kind of a waste of time.

I totally agree, and I agree wholeheartedly with having a holistic approach to this, because there needs to be an overlap between what you're patenting and what's marketable and what really matters to your venture, to your business, or to the product that you're looking to launch.

Yeah. Oh, I completely agree. Well, that's why you're here on our platform. Now tell us how you got started in Patton. I mean, you go to law school, you could have gone into any area. What attracted you to intellectual property?

Well, I actually knew before I went to law school, I was studying electrical engineering, and I learned that the reality of being an engineer meant working on the same project day in and day out for maybe five years at a time. You're given a little piece of some type of bigger system and told to design this little piece. I didn't think that would be interesting enough for me, especially as I was getting interested in business at that time and entrepreneurship. Someone suggested patent law. And so I finished my electrical engineering study and then I went to law school. And so basically, once I was in law school, I already knew that I was going to be pursuing patent law.

I've actually met a couple of intellectual property attorneys who came out of the same feeling as you and many, many engineers who, this is why they invent things on the side because they are just not challenged enough at their core job.

Absolutely. And so the great thing is I get to work on something different every day now. So it really was the fulfillment of not just the fear that I had when I was studying engineering that being stuck, but it really is the fulfillment of the promise of being in the field of patent law. So I love it.

Yeah, that's what I love about my job. It's always different. Every day I have a new product. Pretty much every week. We've got something new going on and some new thing to explore, learn, but it doesn't change the process. And I think that's really where this book that you've written is so great, because the process isn't different anytime you're going and launching products. And that's kind of what we're here about on Product Launch Hazards is everybody wants to see what that process is. And reality is that there's nuances and differences depending on the types of products that you're going to go into market with. So some are more engineering heavy and some are more manufacturing heavy and some are more distribution heavy because it's complicated to deliver whatever it might be. But the reality is all the steps are the same, and if you get them in the wrong order, then you have more work to do. So I imagine that you've had to redo a lot of patents because somebody patented too soon and then figured out that the way that they needed to engineer it or the way that they needed to design it or manufacture it involved a complete redesign.

Yes, absolutely. And you're right. I mean, the process is the same, the principles are the same. And it's just helpful to understand those principles as you go into it, because once you have the principles in mind and you know the project that you're working on, then you can begin to map those principles on your situation and really understand where a patent fits in or maybe where it doesn't. It doesn't always fit in. And so it's helpful and it saves a lot of money to know the difference. And similarly to what you're saying about kind of get being in a position of fixing some work that was done without the right forethought, a lot of times it's not fixable. A lot of times there's not much we can do after the fact. If the patent went in a certain direction and the person launched the product and a couple years have gone by and we see, well, the patent that you applied for should have been very different. It may be too late. Because I guess we'll probably talk about this a bit later also. But sometimes if you wait too long, you'll lose the right to apply for a patent, and sometimes you lose the right to apply for your own patent, even though in your mind you've already applied for a patent, but it was just the wrong patent and at the wrong time and with the wrong focus, I suppose.

Yeah, we've been talking about that here. And so that's why we're big fans of. As you heard from my talk, that's how we met at the Prosper Show. We're big fans of provisional patents here because it does give you a little bit of that comfort level to start to explore with protection. But it's not so inflexible that you still have your claims to rights. So you haven't completely blocked yourself out. You may have if you post a little too specifically much, but yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, I think that there's a lot of controversy, I would say, in the inventor community about the new patent laws, but Tom and I are big fans of them, actually, because I think that they're good at helping you build a business without overspending. The costs of filing those provisionals and being a small entity is very favorable. But I think it's the mystery of not understanding the system that makes people so fearful.

Yeah, I totally agree. And it's also the biggest and costliest of the patent process. People ask me often like, well, what's the costliest part of patenting? I'll tell them the costliest part of patenting is your misinformation about patents. So the extent to which you don't understand patents is where you'll spend money that should not be spent. It's where you'll work on a project or get a patent project going that maybe isn't worthy of patenting. And it could be where you lose the rights to something which otherwise might have been a very worthy candidate of a patent. So, yes, it's all about understanding the principles, understanding the process. And I guess anyone who's watching this then realizes this, and they realize that it's important to learn before they jump in.

Oh, I so agree with that. And is that part of the reason why you decided to write the book?

Yes. And I mean, the funny thing is that I've been doing things like that for more than two decades. I mean, I think in 1994, the learning addicts asked me to do a class called Inventions 101 to teach people about the patent process. And I did that for Quite a while. And then eventually I did that in Los Angeles and San Francisco, too, once a month. So for a number of years I was doing that class. And then sometime later, I created videos to help educate the public about patents. And I have the series of six videos, actually a video course which is free. More than 10,000 people at this point have watched those videos, and I get great feedback about that. So what really happened was the American Bar association saw all of that and they contacted me and they said, we've been thinking about having someone write a book to really put in simple terms how patents work. So that's what I did. I mean, they asked me to write this book, which was awesome.

It feels pretty good, doesn't it?

Yeah, it really does. And I see people, my colleagues pitching books to the ABA all the time making book proposals. And here is. They came and asked me to write this book because they saw what I had been doing with regard to educating the public about patents. And it was perfect because I love and I'm passionate about helping people understand the process. I love writing, which is a good thing, because as a patent attorney, almost all that you do is writing.

Isn't that surprising. Yeah. You come out at engineer and all you do is write.

Yeah, well, I mean, it's kind of the unique skill set of a patent attorney is on the one hand you have to have an engineering mind. On the other hand, you have to have the literal or liberal arts mind to be able to write well. And those two don't always go together. But fortunately, those happen to be the two things that I'm good at.

You know what? I think that's kind of interesting because I think that's what always has made me good at my job of being a strategic designer is because I can write, so I can also explain and discuss and enlighten people on what it is that's so wonderful about the product. But it is being able to also then dive in and understand the details of something. You have both sides of your brain working at a higher pace. I love it.

Yeah, absolutely.

So now on the back of your book, and I suspect I don't know what year this one was written, but probably a little bit older than your statistics here, which says nearly two years, 2,000 patents that you've helped obtain.

Yeah.

So you probably have a bit more now.

That's about right. I mean, I've lost count.

But yeah, we sort of do that with how many products are on the market. I'm like, it's 250 plus, because I like, kind of lost count myself. But it's obtaining a patent. I mean, what are the statistics on that? Recently I haven't looked at what the U.S. patent and Trademark Office is. But issuance and getting obtaining a patent, I mean, the statistics are not great. Like, there's a lot of patents that don't make it.

Yes, there certainly are. And I don't know what the exact statistics are. It's probably somewhere in the range of 60% or so of applications that are filed or granted. But even more than the ones that are granted or the statistics of how many of them make it, the question also is, how many of them are good? How many of them matter?

The one that I cite from the US Patent and Trademark Office is a few years old, but I think it's like 2011 or something. But it was less than 2% are what they term called commercialized. So that means that they were used in commerce and that they made money. When I thought of that statistic, it really blew my mind. Because you think of companies like Apple and Procter and Gamble and Johnson and Johnson with these DuPont with giant numbers of patents. I was like, aren't they tipping the scale? Shouldn't it be a bigger number?

Well, yes and no.

Not.

I'll tell you why. Not necessarily because bigger companies like that are filing for every idea that they come up with. So they're not necessarily filing on everything that they turn into a product. They're speculating. They're creating as much IP as they can around not just the products that they pursue, but also the products they think their competitors might pursue or inadvertently step on. And they're just hedging their bets to a very large extent.

No, I think what you're saying is right. And it isn't the same thing in product, which is why I'm not a big fan of small companies patenting too soon or too much. Because you don't have that kind of Runway that an Apple or a Johnson and Johnson has to be able to have that shotgun approach to it. And so you have to be much more specific about it. And so that's why waiting a little bit longer without risking yourself. And that's where advice comes in. Calling on Rich and making sure that you get it right. Concerted opinion with experience. Because what you don't know is what hurts you usually in the process, in everything that we do in product launching. And granted, because there are enough unknowns in inventing something, right? There's enough new things that no one's done before. Hopefully that's the goal. And so that should be the only thing you don't know. And you should have the right advisors to be able to kind of fill those other gaps of the things that you don't know, just because you're not educated in that you're not aware of it. And that's where your resources come in, because those are the things that those rookie errors hurt you and can derail your entire company before it gets off the ground and your entire product before it gets off the ground.

Absolutely. And so it's like those principles, those things that you don't know. It's kind of the unique focus of my book. And I'll tell you why. Like, there was a big gap in available information on the subject. The reason being is, on the one hand, you had patent law books that really were written for people that wanted the details Right. Of patent law. And it was written for lawyers and people that were at a higher level of knowledge to begin with. Then on the other end, there were do it Yourself guys, the Dummy's Guide.

To Patenting, or whatever that was.

Yeah, patent it yourself. And the truth is that you can't patent it yourself. And you know that it's not possible to write a patent. Not just that it may be possible to get through the patent office, but there's no way that it'll be written in a way that protects you. There's just too much that goes into it.

And a lot of people ask us, well, do you do drawings? And early on, and we say, yes, we provide drawings, but we provide them to an attorney and they turn them into legal drawings. Because it's not the same thing. Because you happen to have drawings.

Yeah, your drawings are helpful for me to see what the details are so that I know what I have available to me to focus on.

Yeah. And we do that for our clients that just want to make that aware for you, Rich. Because one of the things that we do is we provide both that communication with the attorney. Because we've done so many patents, we do understand what you guys are looking for. And so we provide that communication and the drawings so that when we identify what we believe is the unique innovation, because we've studied the market, we want to identify that for you because it makes your job faster. It makes it easier for you to go in and make sure you're researching in the right area. Because that is, as I understand it from, we have 37 patents. There's 38. They're on the wall above me. But when is that, having done your research at the very beginning and that research phase of it and determining what is patentable, possibly, and where those gaps are and what's been done in the market and where the art that exists.

The prior art.

The prior art. Thank you. Yeah, so I knew there was a term for that, the prior art, where all of that is, that's your job. And if you're not looking in the right area, then that's not helpful either. That's what takes more time or makes a mess.

And that's the thing is if your attention is in the wrong place, then it's going to cost you more. So I guess where I was headed with that is that the middle ground that I pursued with the book is. So you are not looking to do it yourself. You're a busy entrepreneur, you're developing a product, you realize that it's not really possible to do a good patent on your own. So you're going to hire a patent attorney. But if you're going to do it, let's make some good decisions about how you do it. Let's make some good decisions about why you do it or if you do it. So that's the overarching principle of the book. That's the context of where we come from in the book, which is kind of, like I said, that's the unique space it operates. Because I saw too many entrepreneurs just headed to the do it yourself guy. If you're a business entrepreneur, you don't want to read a 600 page book about all the details, details about the paper size or the margins, about how to prepare a patent application. You want to learn the principle that helped you decide, well, yes or no.

Yes or when. Yes, exactly. I appreciated about it when you sent me your book and I was flipping through it, I was like, I love the order of these chapters. They make way more sense. It's like, yeah, let's take it from.

A higher level and then kind of move further into the details as necessary.

Yeah, it is an interesting thing. And of course, here at Product Launch Hazards, we always are diving into some of the problems that occur over time, whether it's in obtaining the patent or filing the patent or whatever that might be. And as you said, there's a lot of times where you're so restricted you can't fix it later. So we want to talk about some of those things over time here because it is through those problems that we typically get.

You mean hazards.

Yes, that other hazards. Product launching. Right, exactly. That's how I get the most of my clients. And unfortunately for so many of them who come to me, some of them I've seen, they spent 15 to $20,000 between the initial drawings and the patent itself. And they have this issued patent and a big binder and they're super proud of it, but they're out of budget already. And then I have to tell them the bad news that when I looked at it I was like, you can't make that for the cost that you need to make it for the market. It has to be completely redesigned. And I think this might invalidate part of your patent or we'll be unable to use the thing or just make.

It irrelev the patent irrelevant to what we're about to do.

Yeah, make it irrelevant and you'll have to do it again. And I hate that feeling because I was like, that's the last thing I want to do is tell them that, because I know they won't be my client at the end of the day for every reason, but I don't want to tell them that it's such a disappointment, but that's the really way. So what are some of those that you see that are just those gigantic ones that happen and you wish you could fix it, but you can't?

Okay, well, the number one hazard that people step into without knowing better is putting the product on the market before they've applied for a patent. I've seen this over and over again. Yes, I know it's over the last 25 years I've been doing this. I see it time and time again where people are not so sure that it's worth doing a patent. So they say, well, let me put the product on the market first and if it does well, then I'll apply for a patent. So I get people to come to me and they say, I really need to protect this. I've been selling it and it's doing so well and I just need to protect it now. And so I asked a question and really afraid of the answer, I asked them, when did you start selling it? They said, well, about two years ago. And then I have to tell them that I can't help you. It's game over, it's too late. So one thing to know is that if you're at all considering doing a patent, you need to look into that before you apply. Now granted, there is a possible one year grace period, but the circumstances are not always in your favor. First of all, if you start selling the product without having applied for a patent, you immediately lose most of your foreign filing rights in many overseas Countries where you might want protection, you lost them immediately when you put it for sale before you apply for a patent. Now, in the US technically, under some circumstances, there is the possibility of a one year grace period where it won't be too late if you file within that year, but don't recklessly rely on that grace period. So once again, this is definitely the number one hazard. This is something that as a patent attorney, if someone asked me like, well, if we were going to teach people one thing about patent law in high school, like in high school science class, so that they knew, well, tell them about this rule, tell them about this. Because more than likely, if they ever have an invention during their life, this is the one that they're most likely to run afoul of. And then wonder, just like they'll say to me, it's like, well, how could I have possibly known that? How could I have possibly known that I lose the right by putting it on sale? And the truth is that they probably couldn't have.

Yeah, such a good point. And there are so many things that Rich can do for you. That's what provisional patents are great for. If it's a matter of money and not having the big budget to do the full filing start there, or if it's a matter of just, you absolutely have to beat someone else to market it, there's a crunch. Provisional patent, again, a fast way for you to get started. Well, then he takes the time he needs to write the full patent. So I've had some people where they filed their provisional because of a market timing issue. Then like within two, three months, they already had the other one filed. It's not like they waited the whole year. So there are so many new tools. There are so many. I mean, this comes with the new patent laws that were enacted. I think it was 2000, was it 9 or 10? There was a couple of different changes.

There was a bunch of different rounds of it. The provisionals came about 1995, 1996, but then the first file came about just a few years ago. Okay, so you just pointed out two more hazards we should talk about.

Okay, good.

I'd love to see like an animation of like, what do you say hazards? Like a bulldozer kind of backs in or something.

We need a big hazard tape going across the screen. I'll get my team on that.

Okay, great. So another hazard is with provisionals. So people file a provisional because it's an easier way to get patent. And what a provisional does is it gives you priority toward filing that utility patent application within a year. But the major caveat here is that the priority you get is only as good as it is well written. So when you file a provisional, it's put on file at the patent office, but they don't examine it, they don't review it, they don't give you any feedback. They will give you a filing receipt. Almost no matter what, almost no matter what you sent in, no matter how good or bad it was, you'll get a filing receipt and you say, oh, one patent pending. But the thing is, again, that priority is only as good as the application is well written. So if it doesn't dot all the I's and cross all the T's and fully explain the invention to the requirements of the patent laws, then you've left yourself vulnerable. Vulnerable for what? Vulnerable for someone else filing their own utility patent application. And if you've beat them by priority by maybe a month, let's say, then essentially all that's standing between them getting the patent and not is your provisional application. At a certain point in the process, they're going to make their business to poke all the holes in it that need to be poked in it. And I haven't seen an application that was written quickly like that, written by an individual that I couldn't poke a hundred holes in.

Yeah, I bet. Yeah. I mean, because really, and this again, is where those writing skills come in, there is not really, as in a utility patent, you're not outlining all the claims, it's sort of just the abstract. So it's like an introductory paragraph, but it is supposed to encompass everything that you intend to patent, if I understand it right.

Yes, exactly. I mean, there's a requirement for patent applications, section 112, if people want to look it up. If you Google 35 USC 112, you'll see this rule, which basically is all about how clear and concise and what they call enabling the description needs to be. You need to provide enough information so that someone in the field could duplicate your efforts, actually make the invention from your description. And that requirement is for patent applications. Requirement also exists for the provisional. So for the provisional to be adequate, it has to fulfill that same requirement. So that's a big potential hazard there.

And you said you had another one.

Oh, and I'm sitting here thinking like, I had two and like, man, I just forgot what the second one is. It will come back to me.

What was that other one? I know this is like, I'm always making a little note myself. So Tom and I had something Interesting happen. And we decided we're going to do a little episode on it because people don't realize when you write your patent and when you then eventually maybe license it or do something like that. You know, one of the things that you don't really think about at the beginning of it is that it may expire someday. And Tom's and my very first patent, the patent that. Well, not our very first one, that's not true. Tom had one before that. But our big patent that we base our whole story that we tell on stage about our stylus pens for handheld computers with our infringement lawsuit with IDEO and Palm Computing, they just expired. And it's like we looked at each other and we were like, wow, what a milestone. It's been that many years. Like, it just blew your mind that, wow, all that time has passed. And back then, I mean, it wasn't any faster to get a patent. So, you know, you filed and then it was like three years to get before he actually got it. And then now it's 17 years from that date and 20 years from the original filing date. And so we were like, wow, it's expired. But the second thing out of our mouths were, I think we can make it again. Then it's like, it's open game. And so I was like, I think we have to check our contract with how we licensed and sold it. But I'm pretty sure you're right. But how interesting to think about is like, is it still relevant 2017 to 20 years later? And we looked at each other and we're like, crazy. But it is, because stylus pens are still being used, right? And tablets are still being used. Touch tabs. And so we were like, wow, that's crazy to have created something and have it still be relevant and useful. But did we plan that in? Did we think about that? Absolutely not.

Yeah. No. That's amazing. And by the way, you said at the time you didn't think that your patent may expire one day.

That's just not in your mind. Yeah, I knew it would, but it did.

It looks higher, right? It's awesome that you created something that's still relevant all of that time later. And I mean, that kind of goes to one of the inquiries of should you get a patent? So in terms of should you get a patent, sometimes people look at a product and say, well, this is a short term trend. This is something that's not going to have staying power. It might take me a few years to get a patent, so should I even bother? And I guess if it was a situation like yours where it was something that really was relevant for a long period of time, you'd be kicking yourself if you didn't patent it at the time. Yeah, I mean, granted, things like fidget spinners and other fads are here today, gone tomorrow. But if you think it's a fad, then maybe it's not worth doing a patent. But don't be so sure before you just forego the possibility of doing a patent thinking that it might not be relevant 20 years later. Yeah, case in point, case in Bullpoint.

So we have three criteria. I'm going to list them here and see what you think of them. But our three criteria for making some decisions about patenting is, number one, does it have business relevance? So is it going to make my business more competitive? Is it going to make my business more acquirable? So is it going to add an asset that's a value to the bottom line and is it going to make it more desirable from anyone who might be looking at it from that? So we look at it from the business standpoint and then second, we look at it from, hey, is this going to give us that competitive edge, give us time to get to market, time to establish ourselves in that before somebody else tries to figure out how to make it or how to get around it or how to do those things? So is it going to give us some time? That's also another factor for us. And then the third thing we think about long term is like, is it something that we think is trendy or not? Or is it long term? Or maybe it's a little ahead of its time. And so case in point, one of the other products we designed for that same company at the time was a case keyboard that went along with your Palm Pilot and this keyboard flipped and opened and everything. And it wasn't. And so the keyboard thing was kind of a little trendy because there were lots of different ones at the time. And people were using touchpad and they were using the pen and you have your on your QWERTY keyboard on your thing. And then of course BlackBerry's came out after that. So like, you know, there were lots of things like that that came out. And so, yeah, it might have been trendy in the process, but one of the things that we invented was the idea that when you plug the keyboard in here, you could still charge your phone. And so like it was called a pass through port. And it was the pass through port that ended up valuable and was the most valuable claim and the reason why this whole thing was extremely valuable. And we ended up selling it just for that. Twice. We sold it twice. That's a long story, but we sold it twice. And that's the part that ended up valuable because it actually there were a whole bunch of products that needed it in order to be successful. And that was something we designed it out of necessity for what we needed to do. And then it turned out so did all these other products needed as well. But we were first. And so that's also something you can't always anticipate. And I have this good friend, Nicola Riplinger, who is taking unused intellectual property patents that are being developed by the government or by veterans and civilians in government and utilizing them to help our service members be more successful at their jobs, be safer, do all of these things. And so they're specifically developing that kind of tech because a lot of it's sitting there unused, but it's useful. It's just that particular company can't take advantage of it. And so sometimes you don't think about that. But if you think you have very long term implications of doing good in the world, maybe it's worth doing. But that's a third consideration for us because you got to have some resources to make that one happen.

Yeah, no, definitely. And I think that there is a gold mine there too. In expired patents. There are a lot of people, you talked about the 2% commercialization statistic. So there's a lot of patents out there that were pursued that fully explained in the patent. So the patent explains fully how it works, but they were never commercialized. There's some really good ideas that were never commercialized and now expired. So the patents are 20 years old. They were filed more than 20 years ago. And so if someone wants to pick up that technology and make that product, they can.

So 3D printing, case in point, I mean, 3D printing was, I mean this whole boom of 3D printing in the industry at 2009 came about because of many, many expired patents. So it's one of the reasons we got into it, because now all of a sudden the ones who had been holding the patents had been holding them for these industrial, very expensive machines. But all of a sudden all these hackers and all these makers made an industry out of being able to make one accessible and low cost. And all of us today are benefiting from that. And so. Yeah, exactly. A perfect case at point of where if the company's not going to take advantage of it one day it will expire and there are people Interested?

Yeah. Another example is virtual reality. In the 90s, there was a huge wave of virtual reality technology. There was a lot of investment in virtual reality companies. And so there was a lot of patents filed for different variations of virtual reality possibilities, but it was just too early for it to be commercially viable. And so there's a gold mine there of technology that's just right for anyone who wants to pick it up and do it. Now, grant you, you can't patent it over again. You can't see something that's expired and do a patent on it again. But if you wanted to pick that up and do it. By the way, I remembered the second thing that I wanted to talk about in terms of hazards, because just before I said that, you were talking about the changes in the patent law. And so one had to do with provisionals. The other one that I wanted to talk about has to do with first to file. It used to be that if you invented something first, and even if someone else beat you to the patent office, you can prove that you invented it first under the right circumstances and prevail and be the one to get the patent. And by the way, there was this myth that if you wrote it down, put it in an envelope and mailed it to yourself by certified mail and you didn't open the envelope, that would serve as proof that you invented it first. Now, first of all, that's always been false.

That's never been a way that you could actually prove that you invented something. I had an expression for it is a poor man's patent will keep you.

Poor because it just doesn't work, not enforceable.

And I used to have to go through a long explanation about why it doesn't work. Well, the courts would never favor this evidence because Congress went to the trouble of creating a patent system. So why would they ever reward you for going around the system? But now the explanation is just plain simple. Since they changed the patent laws a few years ago, it is now a first to file system. So the first person to file a patent application with the patent office is the one that gets the patent. It doesn't matter what proof you have, whether it was that idea described in an envelope or a thousand witnesses to say that you invented first. If someone else got to the patent office before you, then they will be entitled to the patent. So that's the other major hazard to know of is all that mythology that goes back 100 years about we have an invention, make sure you write it down and notarize it, and all that stuff that doesn't matter.

So when we went into our patent infringement suit, I mean, this is. The thing is, like, our attorneys, of course, asked us, like, where's your documentation? Because back then it was not first to file.

Right.

Though we were the first file between the two companies. They filed for their patents, like, six months later. And so their application date wasn't even close to ours from that standpoint.

So there's a potential vulnerability at that point that maybe they could prove they invented it first. And so he wanted your documentation.

Right. So we pull out. And luckily, Tom is. I mean, we're designers, so we come from our school, so we have bound notebooks that we sketch in all the time. And we've always made it a practice. And we have them and we have. There's serials of them, and we have them all over the place. Like, I'm literally like, do we really need to keep these? And I would be like, yeah, we probably do. Let's just keep them anyway. But they're in the middle of a whole bunch of designs and a whole bunch of things that all have a basis in time when they went to market or when we were designing them for other clients or contracted for them. So there was a really nice, like, bookmarking and relevance of where that fit within those drawings. And so they were like, oh, that's fairly confident. Your timeline is documented. And so we were like, okay, we didn't know that in college. No one told us when we were using sketchbooks and we were doing that, that it might be useful like that. That would have been great to know.

Right.

So anyway, well, I want to just kind of close with a few things about you, Rich, because I want to make sure people get to know you on the platform here, and they're going to have access. So tell us a little bit about. You were saying that you were an engineer, but that probably gives you a little edge with certain types of patents and certain types of companies that you've been working with. And you said me earlier that you worked with so many. Tell us some of the areas that you've worked in.

Well, just about any type of consumer product, electrical, mechanical, computer. Throughout my career. I mean, my niche has always been working with smaller companies and individuals. A lot of my colleagues, they won't work with a smaller company or individual. They don't know exactly how to explain everything to these clients or a decent amount of hand holding that goes into working with clients like that. But I have developed systems that really help us work effectively with people, people that have never done this before. So really that's my niche. It's not based on technology. It's based on the type of client.

That's wonderful. Well, great. And where are you based out of?

We're in the New York area. New York, New Jersey. We have several offices over here. But we work with clients around the country and to some extent around the world. Because it's not really necessary to meet with our clients to understand what it is they're doing and to take care of them.

Well, no, we can demo anything. That's right. We have video calls nowadays, so. Yeah. Right.

I feel like we're in the same room and that's right. Technology. You know, it's funny, like, 15 years ago or more, when I was trying to explain this to clients on the phone, I would say, well, it's not necessary for us to meet because we could do everything by phone and fax. Now if I said that, I would really totally date myself.

I think somebody told me that they had, like, one of these, like, where you could get. It was like a dial fax and it followed you so you could keep the same number everywhere. I was like, oh, my God, that is so old. Let's not say that in public. That we both know.

Right, Right. Well, we could work together by phone and fax. You'd be like, well, who's this guy? How could he claim to be up with technology and be able to help me with my new technology?

That's right. There you go. Well, product launch hazards members, I just want you to know that you have access to Rich over our platform. Of course, he has an expert profile, and we'll be beefing them up with all sorts of links. I made a note to make sure that your course is linked right on your page for us. Yeah, definitely make sure we link to that. And then, of course, as Rich does videos and as he does his office hours, over time, they'll be captured on video if you miss it. So if you're unable to come because you're working at that time, that's fine. Send in messages, send in emails, write over the platform and fill out a form and send your questions in for him. And we'll make sure that they get put up at the next office hour and he gets notified of them. And then also, if you missed it, that video will happen. There's a tab on his profile that says office hours, and you can watch all of Rich's office hours at one time. If you want to binge watch Rich.

That sounds so exciting.

I know. Yeah. If you want to learn over time. You never know when somebody's going to come in through this membership portal and they might come in and you've done six months worth of videos that are fabulous and given them all sorts of new insights. So we want to make sure that that's available to you. Do you have anything else that you'd like to say and maybe preview a little bit about what you're going to talk next?

Okay, great. Yeah. So as far as resources, so yes, we'll provide links to all of that. Course, there's also available patentvideos.com that's where I have a lot of information. And also the book is available on Amazon. It's the ABA Consumer Guide to Obtaining a Patent. So it's not just from the aba. You can get it directly from Amazon. And it's really inexpensive.

There we go.

There we go. Y and I guess in terms of what to talk about next, I think we'll talk about some aspects about really what it takes to get a patent and how to know if it's right for you. Like, is your idea something that can and should be patented?

I love that. Should you patent it?

Should you patent it?

There you go. Okay, wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Rich. We're looking forward to having you be a participant and an expert panel on product launch hazards. And welcome aboard.

Thanks, Tracy. It was great to be here and I'm looking forward to it as well. Thank you for joining us on this episode of Product Launch Hazards. Hazards. If you'd like to access our product launch experts, strategies, trend reports and ongoing support as you build your big brand, please go to productlaunch hazards.com and become a member today.