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What's your marketing like? Have you tried approaching relevant blogs like Popehat for a mention? Or trying to get in contact with places where startups congregate, like YC? Or asking if EFF or others who oppose patents for ideological reasons would be willing to give you publicity, advice, or referrals? Heck, a Show HN post might get you some publicity and feedback.

Also, the website is a little unclear about what exactly customers are buying. "Search for prior art" -- it sounds like you're charging people $10k to copy-paste the sentences from their product's specs one-by-one into Google. What exactly are your customers paying for? It's not clear on your website.

Remember, you probably have a decent understanding of patent law if you have a JD, but your customers don't. Your target audience is (I'm guessing) similar to much of HN -- intelligent hackers who have a good business sense but little formal training in law or business. Hackers'll want to know the "how" and "why" of what they're buying, but your explanations don't explain legal jargon like "examining applications," "prior art search," or "ex parte".

Also, I would suggest offering services on contingency-fee basis -- you only get paid if you actually bust one or more patents at least dimly related to your customer's business, or produce some other sort of tangible result for the customer. To make this financially viable for you, you may need to substantially increase your fee for contingency clients, and have cash reserves in case you lose multiple re-examinations in a row.

Also it'd be nice to show patents you've busted. If you don't have any yet, you might consider looking for easy patents to target, and self-funding a re-examination of them, or (if you don't have the money or it's against the rules for a lawyer to bring such a case on their own initiative) approaching the EFF or somebody to ask if they'll fund you.




Thanks for the thoughtful response.

I originally created this page as an exercise in "marketing driven development" aka just testing the waters to see if there is a market for this sort of thing.

I did consider your last point of busting a bogus patent and self-funding the ex parte filing fee. I was considering going for a particular linked list implementation which was patented in the 2000s. My approach was more or less to grep / lucene a wide range of open source projects with extensive timestamps of publication dates (e.g. linux kernel).

It turns out that is a lot of work, and since I got no response to the site, I figured this kind of legal service is not really appealing -- for reasons I don't understand. At least, not enough demand to spend a bunch of time on it, since I have other projects I enjoy working on more.

Thanks again for the thoughtful response.


> since I got no response to the site

Just putting a website on the internet is no guarantee people will find you. There might be a lot of people interested in your service, and it could be that your site is too hard for them to find.




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