I’m a Patent Strategist. I Don’t Care About Your Invention.

I’m a patent strategist, and I don’t care about your invention.

That surprises people. When a startup founder calls me about a patent, they want to show me the thing. The prototype, the algorithm, the clever bit the engineers are proud of. I get it. It’s their baby. But I care about something else: what that invention does for your customers, and what it can do for your business. If I start with the invention, I’ll end up writing a very good patent on the wrong thing.

What you invented is just where your R&D happened to stop. Maybe the budget ran out, or the demo date arrived, or a supplier made one part cheaper than another. A patent built around that stopping point protects the product you had on filing day. Your competitors will be selling the next version.

So before I draft anything, I work through three questions with the client. None of them is about the technology.

An invention is a better version of something that already exists: a quieter blender, a faster chip. An innovation is something the market adopts that changes how customers behave. Think of the first time people stopped buying maps because their phone gave directions.

The difference matters because it decides how far the patent should reach. A quieter blender deserves a patent on the quieter blender. An innovation deserves protection for the new way customers solve their problem, because that’s where every competitor will show up, with their own technology.

If someone brings me an invention, I usually send them to someone else. Getting a good patent on an invention is a solved problem. Innovations are where the hard design work is.

This is a business question, and the founder has to answer it. Are the patents there to protect revenue while you scale? To show investors the business is defensible? To give you leverage with a big partner? To keep a fast follower from serving your customers?

That’s the heart of patent strategy for startups: most of my clients want to sell their company someday. That changes the answer. You don’t patent for the business you have. You patent for the exit you want.

Patents are expensive over their life, often more than $25,000 each. That money should earn a return like any other business spend. So the budget follows the business goal, not how hard the engineering was.

Most companies go straight from “we need patents” to how many, where and how much. Some define their goals first. Almost nobody does the step in between, which is designing what the patents need to cover.

Here is what that looks like in practice. Picture two telematics companies with the same business model, the same budget and the same goal. The first claims the algorithm it built. But other algorithms can solve the same customer problem, so competitors walk right around the patent and serve the market the first company created. The second company claims the exchange of data among everyone the solution depends on. The algorithm makes the exchange possible, but the exchange is what customers pay for, and nobody can deliver the solution without it. One left the gate open. The other closed it.

For innovations, I send seven questions before I draft a word:

– What does the customer actually pay for, and why do they need it yesterday?

– Do you already have patents or applications pending? A pending family is an option you can use later, after you see what a competitor builds.

– Where do you sell today, where next, and what’s next door?

– Who does what in your customer’s workflow? A claim that takes three companies to infringe can’t be enforced against any of them.

– Why haven’t the big players solved this, even with serious R&D budgets?

– What does a real customer’s day look like with and without you? In plain English.

– What patents will you want in year four, and does the application hold enough to support them?

Engineers can’t answer these on their own. The answers live with the people who talk to customers. More and more, my clients answer them by pointing their own AI at their own business documents, which works well as long as the AI is looking at the business and not just the technical write-up.

I worked with a founder this fall whose product had been on the market for well over a year. She had sold it, taught it and talked about it publicly. Her first instinct was to patent what she had built. My first job was to tell her that was probably off the table. In the U.S., selling or publicly disclosing an invention more than a year before you file generally bars a patent on it.

So we didn’t spend time there. We asked what her product makes possible once it’s in many customers’ hands, something she hasn’t built or sold yet. That conversation turned up a much bigger opportunity than the original product, and it’s what a future buyer of her company would most want to own. That’s where the filing is headed now.

Notice what happened. The question shifted from “what did you build?” to “what does this make inevitable?” That shift is the whole point of designing before you draft.

You don’t have to predict the future. Your customers are already telling you about it.

I ask every innovation team the same question: if we’re right about the technology and wrong about the business model, what might the future be? Then we keep going. What else?

Years ago a client built robots to photograph the inside of factories and warehouses. A few customer conversations mentioned drones, so we put a few paragraphs about drones in the application. Their first market stalled. Then insurers turned out to want roof measurements, and the application already covered it. The company later sold.

Being wrong about a future use costs you very little. Leaving it out of the application can cost you the company.

When the answer is yes, it’s usually one comprehensive filing built to seed a family of patents. It claims what matters most now and holds the rest for later filings as the market moves.

Sometimes the answer is “not yet,” and I’ll say so. Not filing is a strategy too, when it’s a business decision made on purpose.

So no, I don’t care about your invention. I care about the business it can build. Strategy is defining an endpoint and working backward. Start with the business you want to own, and work back to the filing that gets you there.