393 Andrei Mincov

Jeffrey Feldberg: [00:00:00] Andrei Mincov is the founder and CEO of Trademark Factory, the only firm in the world that offers trademark registration services with a guaranteed result for a guaranteed budget. Andrei's career in intellectual property began when he fought a Russian radio station that stole his father's music.

Since then, Andrei has written multiple books on intellectual property, one of which is an international bestseller, and he's helped thousands of entrepreneurs and companies protect their IP. He believes people who have created something should not have it stolen from them. Hard working entrepreneurs shouldn't be taken advantage of.

That's why he founded Trademark Factory. He's passionate about sharing his experiences with growth minded entrepreneurs who want to build amazing brands. When he's not helping secure trademarks, Andre enjoys living in Dubai with his wife and three kids. He's also dreamed up, designed, engineered, and made himself a one of a kind drum desk.

Now he can type emails and do double bass paradiddles at the same time. 

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Deep Wealth Nation, welcome to another episode of the Deep Wealth Podcast. I got a question for you. It's a rhetorical question for you. Are you doing yourself the biggest disservice that you are sitting on a literal goldmine, but you don't know it, and the keys to the kingdom are just out for anyone to take?

And you're saying, Jeffrey, what are you talking about? I'm talking about intellectual property and you're probably saying intellectual property. Yeah, I've heard that term. It sounds complicated. What is that? That's what we're talking about today with our very special guest. Andre, welcome to the Deep Wealth Podcast.

An absolute pleasure to have you with us. And there's always a story behind the story. Andre, what is your story? What got you from where you were to where you are today?

Andrei Mincov: First of all, thanks for having me. Excited to be here with you and your audience. Really how the whole thing started for me and my deep dive in the world of intellectual property was as it often happens, a very personal event. My father, who was [00:04:00] a famous composer in Russia, caught a radio station that stole one of the songs that he wrote and that he used to sing with him on stage when I was like seven years old.

And they turned that into an ad for Samsung without his permission. When he called the radio station and told them that they couldn't just take his music and use it as they pleased, they told him to sit down, shut up, and be grateful that they're making his music even more popular. And that's if you knew my dad, you'd know right away it was the very wrong thing to say to him.

He didn't like that very much at all. And so he said, okay, great. I'll see you in court. He slams down the phone and then he realizes that it's 1996, Russia has just transitioned. And in case you didn't hear it from my accent or my name, Russia is where I used to live back then, right? 

And, there were really no attorneys [00:05:00] experienced with X Factors. Disputes around that because it's just happened. And I was a law school student with really no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I didn't see myself as a lawyer. I didn't really have a passion for law. I just thought that I needed a profession that's going to put You know, money in my pocket when I grow up.

 so he came to me and said, Hey, can you help take these assholes to court? And I said as long as you realize that I know nothing about intellectual property, and you're okay with me building this plane as I fly it, I said I'd love to do it because, I've always admired my dad.

I've always been in search of his approval and things like that, and so he said, sure, go ahead. so we sued the radio station and long story short, I had to take this case all the way to the second highest court in the nation because of all the appeals and everything.

And It was fun because again I didn't [00:06:00] own a suit until nine years into practice as a lawyer, right? I had my hair long like this and, I show up in jeans in the court and it was fun. but fun aside really what it taught me is a few things, but one of them is that I feel very strongly about helping people who.

Create something without which we wouldn't have that and I feel very strongly that they deserve to not be stolen from and so my dad was my first and favorite client when I, by the time I left Russia, seven, there had not been a single federal TV station that I hadn't sued successfully protecting my dad's music and only had to do it once for each.

And I joined the biggest international law firm again while still in Russia helping such big names as Apple, Microsoft, Dreamworks, Google, like all the big names you can think of, I've probably done something for them while working there. And then in, you know, [00:07:00] seven, I had enough of Russia and I moved to Canada. Got my Canadian lawyer license., I sent out my resumes all across Canada saying, here I am, welcome me, here I come with all my years of experience, all my passion about intellectual property, I'm ready to join you and You know, continue my career in Canada, and got a grand total of zero offers.

And that was not fun, look I finished top of my class in half the courses and top ten in the remaining ones. So it wasn't that I was a bad student and this is when I discovered the wonderful world of entrepreneurship, If the mountain doesn't come to you, you go to the mountain.

So I said, why not start a firm here? I was shocked that somehow one thing was missing from that business. The clients you don't have a business with no clients. It doesn't matter how much, you know. and so I started transitioning from [00:08:00] seeing myself as a lawyer who knows all of this to an entrepreneur who finds ways to fill an unmet demand on the market. And what I saw is the, is this idea on the intellectual property side that good firms that have lawyers that can actually deliver results, they charge by the hour, they basically fear monger you with uncertainty and as a small business owner, it's really, yeah.

Hard to deal with them, so it explains why so many brand owners, startups, and small business owners, they basically try to delay it until the last second before they go to get proper legal advice those things. And I wanted to build something that would give them a different experience which would be one flat fee, guaranteed result, all of those things.

feeling it's turning to much longer monologue than you probably wanted, [00:09:00] but that's really how I got here.

Jeffrey Feldberg: What a fascinating story. So what I'm hearing you say is it started with your father, like a typical entrepreneur, came up with something unique, big corporate, took it, they gave him the one finger salute and you came in, figured it out, really mastered the system in Russia. You left Russia and now you're really helping entrepreneurs globally really make a difference and you're breaking all the rules.

I love how you set up. To go into your own practice, your own business, to find a very unique market fit for yourself. And so for the listener in Deep Wealth Nation, Andre, who they've heard the word intellectual property, they've heard about trademarks, maybe they've seen it in the movies or read about it in books, but that's the basic extent to it.

Other than it's expensive, it's time consuming, it's complicated, all these legal bills, that's all they know. What exactly is intellectual property, trademarks, why is it important? 

Andrei Mincov: Intellectual property really is an umbrella term. You [00:10:00] don't own intellectual property. Meaningless unless you specify what kind of intellectual property you own. And there are three main ones. Patents, copyrights, and trademarks. So, quickly, I, to identify the difference, so, copyrights, they're really about content.

You own content not for the idea behind that content, but how that content is expressed. if you write a book on intellectual property the information contained in there is not protected by copyright, but how you sequence the words, put them in paragraphs and chapters, that is.

If you write a song about a girl meeting a boy same idea. Anyone can write other songs about girls meeting boys, but your melody, your rhythm, your Lyrics in that song are protected by copyright. The other part is patents, and that's, it's as close as you're going to get to protecting the underlying idea of your invention.

If you come up with a unique product [00:11:00] or a unique method of doing certain things, you can get that protected. With a patent, it's extremely expensive it's extremely long but if you really have a unique product. You may want to consider that. And trademarks is a completely separate field is how you protect the brand.

The way I look at branding is, Or trademarks, really, is try to imagine yourself walking in a supermarket and you walk down the aisle to straight to ketchup or toothpaste, right? It's got the same glop sitting in different bottles and tubes, but it's the brand. That makes you buy one over the other and that's what trademarks really are supposed to do, is to help the customer sell one product apart from the same product or similar product of someone else, and the trademark gives you the legal monopoly to stop it.

Others from copycatting you so [00:12:00] that you can sell your Colgate and if they want to sell their toothpaste, they can't call it that.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Yeah, so interesting. So in that world, I mean, all different kinds of moving parts, and I take it depending on what an entrepreneur does, what area they're in, maybe it's a patent, maybe it's some kind of a trademark. It really depends on what they're doing. So generally speaking, and Andre, you'd be perfectly right to say Jeffrey, it really depends on the situation, the industry, what the business is doing.

But generally speaking, it's my favorite question in this kind of scenario. Is it a Pareto's law situation, an 80 20 situation where most business owners, entrepreneurs, founders, They're making the same mistakes, the same 20 percent of the issues. They're making these mistakes. It's causing 80 percent of the potential problems.

Are there any patterns or themes where we're just not getting it as entrepreneurs, founders, business owners?

Andrei Mincov: There's a lot of misconceptions out there around IP and trademarks in particular, and we're trying to create content that [00:13:00] addresses that, we're trying me being on your show is one of those attempts to actually help entrepreneurs who have those misconceptions to get rid of those misconceptions and have clarity about what's the right way to deal with that, right?

Whether they go with me or they go with someone else which why would they? But all seriousness the biggest mistake that I see is this idea that there's a point when, hey we're too small. We don't need this. Problem is by the time you stop being so small, it's too late.

Someone will have already trademarked your brand and you'll have to go back to the drawing board. Trademarks is the classic case of investing in your brand's future. Because when you come up with the idea of your brand. The value of a brand is zero, nothing, right? It's just a thought. Nobody's seen the brand.

Nobody bought any products or services under that brand. There's no value. There's potential value. And the [00:14:00] real value goes up, hopefully with you Building your products, building your services, building your goodwill, building up your name, your social media presence, like all those people who know you, they give value to your brand.

Not the word that you picked for the brand or the image that you picked for the logo. It's the customers that give you value and your products. Similarly, the problem is The moment you come up with your brand in your head is the most registrable your brand will ever be as a trademark.

So you get this gap where the value goes up and the registrability goes down. Because the more your brand is out there the more You're not trademarking your brand for yourself, the more you're opening yourself up for someone doing it. And I'm not even saying that sometimes you come up with a name that's already taken, something that already cannot be taken.

owned by you. So every day you're spending promoting that brand, every [00:15:00] dollar you're investing in getting your brand known is a day and a dollar you're investing in someone else's brand. 

Jeffrey Feldberg: So interesting. And let me ask you this, because with the internet now, really the world is our backyard. It's no longer, I'm just going to operate my business, it's going to be in this town. I can be global. So. From that perspective, Andre, when I'm taking my brand out there, maybe I'm a SaaS company, perhaps I'm going to be out on the internet having some kind of online presence.

When it comes to protecting my brand, what are some of the options? What should I be thinking about in terms of protecting my brand and what I should do as early as possible?

Andrei Mincov: And that is where the Pareto Principle definitely comes into play. you're right. You don't have the resources to protect your brand everywhere the way that Apple's and Google's over the world do it. You have significantly lower budgets for that and trademarks, like all intellectual property, is country specific, right?

If you have a [00:16:00] brand in Canada, it does mean that it's protected in the U. S. and vice versa so you have to pick your battles and the way I recommend dealing with this is very simple. It's kind of a four stage framework. You always start protection with your home country wherever you are and when I say your home country, I mean the business's home country where the business is is registered or registered.

The second layer of protection is you look at countries where you're going to have a lot of revenue from. Not today. Again, forget about today. Think about it two, three years from now. Where do you expect the money to come from? Where do you think you're going to have customers? So if you're a Canadian business with SaaS platform, it's probably reasonable to assume that a lot of business will come from the U.

S., right? Maybe Europe. Maybe Australia. Bye bye. So that's kind of the second layer, and to me, the magic number is if you think that you're going to be making at least 30 grand annually in revenue from a country, protect your brand there, hey, because it [00:17:00] pays off for the investment of getting the trade.

The third layer of protection is If you are targeting certain jurisdictions for expenses, like if you're running ads to a particular country or you're setting up a branch in that country basically if you're spending more than 5K in that country, again, get your brand trademarked. And lastly, something a lot of people don't realize is that if you're making physical products not SaaS, if you're making some stuff overseas, make sure you get your brand trademarked.

In the country of the factory, because exporting your own products that you paid for out of that country to where you want to sell them is considered trademark infringement in that country, if someone trades master brand there. We actually had a situation with an owner of an e bike company in U.

S. So, they came up with a name, they came up with a design, they did. of the hard work, they found factory in China, they placed a massive order to have crap ton of e bikes [00:18:00] made in China, and they paid for those orders, the China factory made the bikes, they put them in a container, they put the container on a ship, and just as the ship was about to leave the port, the captain of the ship gets the police with a piece of paper that says that the brand is owned by someone in China and that they are prohibiting the cargo to leave China because that constitutes trademark infringement.

So the captain of the ship goes to the factory says, what's up? And then the factory gets to the owner in us and says. Whoops. And can you imagine how that feels like? Like you got all your money invested in those bikes and you can't even get them. And you have to pay someone for it's insane because what do you do?

Do you burn that? Do you basically say, okay, we'll walk away from all this money and all these bikes. Do you pay off someone who trademarked that brand? And there's no [00:19:00] good solution. I've told the story a few times and say really the only. A good solution there is to get on the time machine, turn on the flux capacitor, and go back to the time a day before somebody filed that trademark in China and not have this problem at all, right?

Another example, just to give you some context about how time specific this all is. You know the AI company, Eleven Labs, right? These guys are absolutely amazing with their sound AI. I use them all the time. So, I was doing some research. Turns out that they filed their trademark for 11 labs on the same day as someone else ran to the trademark's office and they filed the trademark for 11 The other guy filed his trademark a few hours before 11 labs did. And guess what's happening? The USPTO refuses. 11 Labs [00:20:00] is trademarked because they have a prior pending application and whether or not they win, which they might I can guarantee you they're going to spend a lot more resources than would have taken had they filed their trademark a day before, right?

And all of this is just a great lesson that timing is everything with trademarks.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Wow. So in that particular case, what I'm hearing is a friend, a good friend of mine says, Jeffrey, timeliness is next to godliness. And so timing is everything. And Andre, as you're going through this, if I take a little bit of a cynical approach here, are there trademark trolls that are out there? So they see a company that's up and coming.

They haven't trademarked the name. They will just create a company. They're not going to go in the business, but they want that company to, you Pay them off or they want to create some difficulties or maybe sell that trademark or that company so the company can begin to legally use what they've been doing anyways and what's been really from the very beginning they've been doing everything right except they didn't get that [00:21:00] trademark.

Is there a lot of that going on?

Andrei Mincov: You better believe it. Of course. Of course. Because, it's a relatively small investment for a potentially massive payoff and how far they're gonna go to create that visibility of a legitimate company running that brand. Is, is questionable, but no matter how far they do it, even if they do the bare minimum, and you have a 90 percent or 99 percent chance of winning in a court, it means you still have to go to court, it means you're going to have to pay lawyers, and it means you're going to have to waste time, and it means you're going to have to have your focus taken away from building a business toward having a fight over something that really shouldn't have been a fight.

so, here's a war story from Russia, actually, because that's probably the best example of the extreme that it can be taken before Starbucks got their trademark in Russia, another company, a Russian [00:22:00] company, trademarked their brand there and they actually set up a coffee shop under that brand.

So everything looked sort of legitimate everyone understood, everyone knew, but it took Starbucks seven years. of litigation to get that trademark. Seven freaking years and I'm not even going to share with the audience how much Starbucks paid the law firm that I used to work for in legal fees to get that trademark after seven years.

But forget legal fees. Can you imagine how much revenue they did not make by not being able to sell coffee in Russia for seven years? That's the bigger problem, right? And with trademarks, the way I see it is really there are three main benefits I'm kind of touched on all of them already one is protecting yourself from someone else jumping in and taking your brand away from you, more of a defense situation when you know that if you have this piece of paper that says you're the owner [00:23:00] of this brand it takes the risk of someone attacking your brand.

Not to zero, but something very close to zero. The second big benefit is that it allows you to use your trademark as the offense as a sword. If you see a competitor copycat on you, it's much easier to fight them with a trademark than without. Because if you don't have a trademark register even filed for, and you send a demand letter to someone who steals from you, what are they going to do?

They're going to show your demand letter to their lawyer, and the lawyer is going to do a very quick check whether you filed your trademark or not. And if the lawyer says they haven't even filed a trademark, they haven't even done something that would have cost, a few thousand dollars, what are the odds that This company is going to take you to court and pay 50, 000, 000 to litigate over this.

Almost zero. So, if you want to be taken seriously when you try to enforce your brand, you have to do the steps that the laws provide you to own the [00:24:00] ammunition for this fight, right? And the third big benefit of owning the trademark is really, A hundred percent in line with what you preach on the show is that it turns a name or an image or a phrase that you call your brand and turns that into an asset that you can actually own.

Without it, you don't even have, like I used to say, without a trademark, you don't own your brand, but really you don't even have a brand because a brand means nothing if you can't tell someone else that it's yours. If you can't tell them, hey, it's mine, stop this, how is it a brand? It's just a phrase or a name that you want people to think is your brand, but it's really not.

So. Defense, offense, and ownership. These are the three main benefits getting a brand trademarked is really probably one of the best ROIs you're going to get in business when you go out there, you do a little bit of [00:25:00] paperwork with the government and they give you something That, in theory, can be valued in millions or even billions of dollars, like all those big names their brands are in tens or in hundreds of billions of dollars, just the brand, not the assets, not the people, not their just the brand alone, that boggles my mind, to be honest.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Yeah. So interesting with what's going on there. Now, Andre, I know you really broke the rules of the game when you came on the scene because you did not do what traditional law firms and lawyers do. Because I know one of the complaints of entrepreneurs is, hey, yeah, I hear the importance of that. We just don't understand it, or it's just really expensive.

I don't know if we can afford to do all of that. And yes, we'd like to, but we can't. Enter you, you've done some fairly amazing things and you really, as I said earlier, broken all the rules in terms of what you're doing. So when you came around and you created the trademark factory, you had a vision, share for Deep Wealth Nation why you're different, how you're different, and why you're really from [00:26:00] an entrepreneur to an entrepreneur of why you over the more traditional, call it legal route or law firm route of what most entrepreneurs quite openly are scared of.

Andrei Mincov: Sure, so look, there's, before Trademark Factory was born, there's really three ways to deal with trademarks. Other than pretending that trademarking doesn't exist, obviously so the first option was doing it yourself and in some countries you can do that in some countries you cannot and for example, in the U.

S. You can only file U. S. trademark if you are a resident of U. S. or if you're a Canadian company, you want to trademark your brand in the U. S., you have to use a U. S. attorney. You can't do it directly, right? But this is one way to do it and trademarks are Deceptively simple, right? All you do is you go fill out a form, it takes, 40 minutes to put something together, you file it, and you think you're good to go.

The problem is the process takes [00:27:00] about a year and a half in the U. S., about four years in Canada now and More likely than not, actually, 81 percent of trademark applications filed by people themselves get what's called an office action, which is a rejection letter, where the trademark's office says there's something wrong with your trademark application, and most people who are not trained don't know how to respond to them.

And like I said, usually the problem is if you file your trademark incorrectly, it's often impossible to even fix it. And you only find out about it many months down the road. So, you get this false sense of security only to find out nine months or a year into the process that whoops, we have to go back it all again.

And honestly if you're. Business owner trying to build something that's going to matter. You got more important things to do than try to figure out how to file a trademark application. You're not really saving that much money or obviously not time [00:28:00] when you try to do it yourself. The other option were these that You know, allow you their advertising goal is something like this.

Trademark your brand in 15 minutes for 69. And what these guys do is they make it easier to file your trademark. So with the form, if it takes you like 45 minutes to do it yourself, with these guys, you fill out a form. And takes five minutes. You pay them some money and they mindlessly take your information, they file it with the Trademarks Office and result is usually the same as when you file it on your own.

And the third option was the law firms who have people who actually understand how to get it done right. And the problem there is that Their model is, let's file a trademark application let's come up with some enticing offer to get people in the door, and then when we get the office action, that's when we start to make real money and with The [00:29:00] statistics as they are with those office actions being 68 percent of all applications, not just the sell buy one.

That includes the trade box filed by the biggest names out there, right? It's a viable model from from the law firm's perspective. And I didn't think that this was a fair Situation for entrepreneurs and I saw that there was a need for something different for something that would allow business owners to have a predictable cost for the whole thing from start to finish.

No matter what happens in the middle with those office actions that would give them a high rate of success. And that would kind of back this up with a money back guarantee, not because they really need the money back, but something that would assure them that our interests are aligned. And that's how Trademark Factory was born.

And we got a 99. 3 percent rate of success with the trademark applications that we file. Compare that to the industry average of 51. 2. 

Jeffrey Feldberg: that is almost a [00:30:00] double. That, is phenomenal. So, Andre let me ask you this. I come to you I have this idea. It's unique. It's novel. All those other things. It meets the criteria. You can check the boxes. Roughly, how long is it going to take? And Andre, I know you're going to say Jeffrey, it really depends what country we're in, what we're doing, but let's imagine perhaps I have a European country.

I'm based in Europe, operating now in the U. S. Come to you. How long would that take and ballpark, back of the envelope cost, what are we looking at going through you versus the more traditional route? 

Andrei Mincov: Okay, so how long U. S. is roughly a year and a half now they're starting to tighten this up again the timelines became crazy during COVID, Canada is still using COVID as their excuse for why their timelines are so ridiculously long Canada is, used to be four years. Now it's getting slightly under four, which is still insane.

Europe is slightly under a year. [00:31:00] That's kind of in terms of the timeline. In terms of the fees there's always two components to that. One is what you pay to the government. And those are the fees that you pay to the government. And those depend on how many products and services you're going to put in your trademark application.

It's called, kind of called classes. And which by the way, one of the common misconceptions since you asked before, people say well, how can you, own dictionary words? it's a dictionary word, you can't own it. I always say how about apple? Can you find a more dictionary word than apple?

And the reason apple can own a trademark on the word apple is because they're not in the business of selling apples. And so the way this is. accomplished is that when you file your trademark, you have to tell the government for which products and services you want this brand. And if they say you're trying to trademark the word apple when you're selling apples, that's not what trademarks are for, right?

So they're going to say no. the government fees are scaled based on how many of those classes of [00:32:00] products and services you're going for. Plus there's a service fee. So if you're thinking of Trademark Factory, we've got several packages. The one that most people go with. Is basically the unlimited trademark search in the beginning when I say unlimited means that if your first choice is problematic, you can have an unlimited kicks at the can until you pick a brand that you love and that we tell you is trademarkable.

So we're not going to just say, hey, your first brand is bad. Come back with more money. We're gonna say, send us an alternative, send us an alternative. And we're gonna guide you so that and look, nobody wants to be told that their first choice trademark is, Unownable, but it's much better to hear this sooner rather than later, because your brand is not going to get more trademarkable with time.

If anything, it's going to get less trademarkable with time. Then it comes with a licensed attorney or trademark agent, drafting your application, filing your trademark application, doing all the things from start to finish. [00:33:00] And. We have an add on which we call an Office Action Insurance with a Money Back Guarantee.

So all of that together from search to filing to responding to unlimited number of office actions to filing your evidence of use to mailing you your trademark registration certificate in a custom frame, all of that is going to cost you 2, 500 U. S. Plus the government fees. So it's not pocket change, but it's more than reasonable if you believe that what you're building is going to be there couple of years from now, and actually, if you believe that the brand is going to have some value.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Yeah. There's a lot going on there. And let me ask you this. So you've walked us through the process, some timing, some potential costs. So it sounds compared to what other law firms are doing, you've just taken a different approach. You have a different business model. It's more for the entrepreneur.

Okay. Once this is done and one of the big differentiators that you put out there, Hey, you can do it on your own, but. You're likely going to make [00:34:00] mistakes. You're not going to find out right away and you can lose a lot of time and opportunity cost in terms of doing that. Once everything's done, it's registered, you've got it all in the books as they say.

Are we done or is there maintenance and follow up? What do you want us to know?

Andrei Mincov: So once it's registered, it's good for 10 years. and then you can renew it every 10 years after that. So Coca Cola is one of my favorite examples, filed their trademark in 1892 and they're still renewing that same trademark, which by the way, in 1892, they were selling nine drinks a day. I call it the lemonade stand with a dream, right?

Somebody had this idea that this can be a lemonade stand with a dream today, but if We are successful in building what we're trying to build. The brand will be our most valuable asset. And here we are today, more than a hundred years later, right? So, ten years. In the U. S., there's one additional maintenance filing that you have to do between the fifth and sixth [00:35:00] anniversary of your trademark registration.

A lot of Business owners who file their trademark on their own, or who file their trademark through someone who doesn't notify them of this, lose their brands because they have no idea. They got this trademark registration in front of them, and they do nothing expecting that someone will tell them.

And they don't! And so, if you don't file a document with the USPTO between the 5th and 6th anniversary of your trademark registration saying, hey, we're still around. We're still selling our products and services under this brand. They're going to assume that you're no longer interested in maintaining the monopoly over that brand and that you're going to kill your trade.

But other than that, there are no annual maintenance fees. There are, like, there are no nothing, right? So if your brand is if your brand survives 10 years. Renewing your trademark every 10 years is going to be the least of your financial concerns. so, so that's that. And The other thing that we also [00:36:00] promote is this thing called trademark monitoring.

Which is Us when someone else tries to file a trademark similar to yours usually if it's identical, the trademarks office is going to catch it and they're going to deny anyone who tries to file a trademark after you, but if it's not identical, if it's similar, Sometimes the trademarks office may slip this through, and as the business owner, you want to make sure that you maintain as strong a monopoly over your brand as humanly possible.

So if you see someone trying to file a trademark similar to yours, maybe it's a translation into some other language of your brand. Maybe it's a misspelling. Maybe it's some sort of something similar, right? And you see that the trademarks office approves it you still have a chance to fight this through a process called opposition proceedings.

But the only way for you to find out about it is when you know that someone filed a trademark similar to yours. So, all big companies have this [00:37:00] monitoring turned on 24 7 for all of our brands. And it's the small businesses and mid sized businesses that often don't do this, and they find out the hard way when they realize that someone else owns a similar trademark the same space, and now they're both trademark owners, and they thought What was their domain, right? And maybe you thought you're going to be expanding your, your products and service to something else is already taken by someone else, right? So this is another thing we recommend signing up for. It doesn't cost a lot of money. We have two, layers for that.

One is I think 27 bucks. The other one is bucks a month. So it's not. Not really that much money, but it gives you the peace of mind of knowing that if there's someone out there trying to do something stupid, you can catch them in time.

Jeffrey Feldberg: So it's not going to break the bank. It's really, in many ways, insurance. This is all you do. This is your specialty. And you free us up so we can focus on what we [00:38:00] do best, and that's going out there, creating market disruptions, more profits, happy customers, all those other things. But at the same time, we're really protecting what makes us our brand, what makes us unique out in the marketplace.

And

so, Andre, before we go into wrap up mode, let me ask you this. Because out of every episode, wherever possible, we love for the listener in Deep Wealth Nation to really do one thing before they jump into that next call, meeting, activity. So if a business owner, having heard us talk, if they could do one thing, maybe you mentioned it, maybe you didn't mention it, but if they can do one thing that would really move the dial in your area of expertise, is there a low hanging fruit, something that doesn't take all that long, they can do it, it'll make a difference or really protect them, the business, the brand, what would that one action be?

Andrei Mincov: Sure. want to walk you through a very simple framework that will create clarity for you whether or not you need to do this. You ask yourself two questions. The first question you ask yourself is, if everything goes as well with my business as I hope it will I be [00:39:00] still selling these or similar products and services under this brand two or three years from now?

If the answer is no and it's fine because sometimes we create really short lived products, then you'll know you probably don't need a trademark because again, trademarks take time. You don't need a piece of paper saying that you own a brand to something you no longer need, right? So if someone's telling you, you need a trademark, you need a trademark, but you know, you're not going to use this brand two, three years from now, or if you're planning to, exit, and you know that the company that buys you up is not going to retain the brand if the brand is gone.

If you have a brand of no value to them, then again, there's no point in protecting it. But if your answer is yes, if everything goes as well as I hope it will, and we're still going to be around two, three years from now with the same brand, then you ask yourself a question, will this brand do something for us?

Will it give us any benefits? Will it make it easier for us to find leads? [00:40:00] Will it make it cheaper for us to acquire clients because of higher conversion rates? Will it make it easier for us to advertise because the CPL is going to be lower? Will it make it easier for us to attract better clients?

Talent who are going to work for us because guess what, it makes it a lot easier for Google to attract developers than a software startup that nobody's ever heard of because of the brand. if you think that the brand is not going to give you any of those benefits, Then you probably should go back to the drawing board right now and with a brand that will.

Because even if in the best case scenario you're planning to build a brand for years and you don't expect it to give anything back to you, then why did you choose that brand? And if your answer is duh, the brand is going to do something for us if our business picks up. Then go ahead. You have a very clear answer staring in your face.

This is a brand that has a huge potential future value, and you've got to protect it today. [00:41:00] So run this simple exercise head, and if this is something that your answer is, I'd rather own it than regret that I don't, Then you're more than welcome to go to our website, trademarkfactory. com and get yourself on a free call with one of our Strategy Advisors and the reason they're called Strategy Advisors is not some marketing gimmick to, facelift a sales goal.

What their job really is to help you figure out how to prioritize, Your budget, because obviously you need a budget for trademarking. Obviously we're here to help you protect your brand. But if you're like should I start with my logo or should I do the tagline or should I do the name, or maybe I should start in the US and maybe I should do Mexico, like all of those things that you've, all those million questions that probably rushing through your head, maybe as a result of this interview, that's their job to help you make it really clear how to.

Prioritize it, what to start with what can happen [00:42:00] later and things like that. So get on that call with them they'll walk you through the process. And if you feel that we're a good fit to help you own your brand we'll be happy to welcome you to the Trademark Factory family.

Jeffrey Feldberg: That's a terrific, really terrific outreach, something to think about, Deep Wealth Nation. You've heard it right there. We're going to revisit that, Andre. We're going to put a pause on that for just a moment. We're going to go into wrap up mode. And it's a tradition here on the Deep Wealth Podcast where we ask every guest the same question.

And it's interesting, Andre, because I'm going to share my favorite question with you. And you actually referenced it a little bit earlier when we were talking. Serendipity, the universe winking, who knows, but it's a fun question, let me set this up for you. When you think of the movie Back to the Future, you have that magical DeLorean car that will take you to any point in time.

So Andre, it's tomorrow morning, this is the fun part, you look outside your window, not only is that DeLorean car there, it's curbside, the door's open, it's waiting for you to hop on in, which you do, you're now going to go to any point in time. Andre, as a young child, a teenager, whatever point in time that would be, what would [00:43:00] you tell your younger self, in terms of life lessons, or life wisdom, or hey Andre, do this, But don't do that.

What would that sound like?

Andrei Mincov: If I had one chance of using the DeLorean to go back, I'd go back to 1987 to just watch a live concert by Wasp my favorite band which I missed. During that era, I was still in the Soviet Union, but jokes aside to take it to the more serious realm, I think that all the mistakes that I've made in the business, and I've made so many of them I wish I hadn't on the one hand, but on the other hand, that's what. Makes a good story. That's what makes a good journey, right? So I mean, would I have preferred to take the business foundations more seriously back when I was starting Apsa fricking Ludley, right?

Back in the day when I started this company, I thought that all you need is just a great idea and everything else will happen by itself and that you can outsmart, the big [00:44:00] law firms that have spent You know, years trying to build their models and out of, you know, yeah you have this audacity.

And then after years and years of trying to do certain things the way nobody else does, you ask yourself maybe there's a reason nobody else does those things. And you get rid of uniqueness for the sake of uniqueness. And you keep some of the things that are worth keeping unique and you switch to doing some other things the way that everyone else does.

But it takes time. Experiment, right? I am very grateful for the journey that I've had. I am think we're on a very good trajectory with this company. As I said, we've been in business for more than 10 years. And we had our ups and downs and I think that, obviously, look, be lying to you if I said that I wouldn't want us to become a billion dollar company in our first year, right?

And I'd say, you know what, screw the [00:45:00] mistakes, if the option is go through all those mistakes or become a billion dollar company in our first year, I'll take being a billion dollar company in the first year of any day of the week. But Failing that, I'm really grateful for all the lessons that I learned, and I'm really grateful to the 4, 000 clients that we were able to serve during this time and get our 99.

3 percent rate of success. I don't know if that answers your question, but that's the best rant I could come up with. Trademarkfactory.

Jeffrey Feldberg: with that is what I'm hearing you saying, you can say Jeffrey, you're on base or off base. It's really enjoy the journey. What's a mistake or seems to be a mistake back in the day. Hey, that makes a great story. That's a learning point that makes you better off in the future.

And actually, Andre, you're in really good company because that is the most popular theme from the guests on the Deep Wealth Podcast. Like you were saying, just enjoy the journey. I don't know if I would change anything because I love where I am. I love who I am. I love the life that I built for myself.

And if I change that, I may not be here. So that's really [00:46:00] words for the wise of what's out there. And Andre, before we wrap up, somebody has a question they want to speak about. Hey, how can I use your services? How can we protect our brand and our future income, our reputation, all those good things, where would be the best place online for someone to have that conversation?

Andrei Mincov: com we are like, as we're recording this, we're about to launch a brand new version of the website. It's going live in, I think, a week or two. So, but TrademarkFactory. com, request your free call with a strategy advisor, start from there. And if you just want to learn more about trademarks, we have A YouTube channel search for Trademark Factory.

I've posted over a thousand videos there. So if you have a question about trademarks, I've probably answered it more than once. So kind of two routes, free education on YouTube, or if you're actually serious about getting the process started on getting your brand trademarked so that you end up owning your brand, go to trademarkfactory.

com and get on that call with a [00:47:00] strategy advisor.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Terrific advice. And again, Deep Wealth Nation, it's all in the show notes. It's a point and click. It does not get any easier. Andre, congratulations. It's official. It's a wrap. And as we love to say here at Deep Wealth, may you continue to thrive and prosper while you remain healthy and safe. Thank you so much.

Andrei Mincov: Thanks for having me. 

Jeffrey Feldberg: So there you have it, Deep Wealth Nation. What did you think? 

So with all that said and as we wrap it up, I have another question for you.

Actually, it's more of a personal favor. 

Did you find this episode helpful? 

Have you found other episodes of the Deep Wealth Podcast empowering and a game changer for your journey? 

And if you said yes, and I really hope you did, I have a small but really meaningful way that you can actually help us out and keep these episodes coming to you.

Are you ready for it? 

The dramatic pause. I'll just wait a moment. Drumroll, please. Subscribe. Please subscribe to the Deep Wealth podcast on your favorite podcast channel. When you subscribe to the Deep Wealth Podcast, you're saving yourself time. Every episode automatically comes to you, and I want you to know that we meticulously craft [00:48:00] Every one of our episodes to have impactful strategies, stories, expert insights that are designed to help you grow your profits, increase the value of your business, and yes, even optimize your post exit life and your life right now, whatever you want that to look like.

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So all that said. Thank you so much for listening. And remember your wealth isn't just about the money in the bank. It's about the depth of your journey and the impact that you're creating. So let's continue this journey together. And from the bottom of my heart, thank you so much for listening to this episode.

And as we love to say here at Deep Wealth, may you continue to thrive and prosper while you remain healthy and safe. 

Thank you so much. 

God bless.