Hi Welcome to the Eev blog an Electronics Engineering Video Blog of interest to anyone involved in electronics design. I'm your host Dave Jones Okay, so you're an Electronics hobbyist, hacker, maker, inventor, midnight engineer, garage engineer, small businessman, whatever you want to call it and you've got a new product. Great idea and you want to bring it to Market How do you do it? well? I'm glad you asked. Here's Dave's top five tips for bringing your product to: Market Tip Number One: Don't even think about a Paton Don't spend a cent on them.

It will almost guaranteed to result in a waste of money and time with no benefit whatsoever. And here's why. My top five reasons for not getting a patent. Reason: Number One: A patent will not protect your design.

It will Not stop somebody copying your design. And okay, fair enough. you got this great idea and it's natural that you want to protect it and a lot of people will naturally think about getting a patent. They think, oh yeah, a patent will stop somebody copying it.

It won't. Anyone is free to copy your design. In fact, when you get a patent, you have to publish all the information you're giving it freely out there to people and they they can go and copy any aspect you like. All a patent gives you is an Avenue or a right.

Um, but basically an Avenue to sue somebody or attempt to sue somebody if they do or threaten them with legal action. It does not stop them copying anything. If you think so, then you're kidding yourself. it's a joke.

Reason Number two: A patent will not give you any return on your investment. None whatsoever. Zip Nada Brass Razu. You pay out all this money and nobody.

Believe me. Nobody is going to buy your patent and nobody is going to pay your royalties. It just doesn't happen to the to the small businessman, hobbiest hacker maker, small company, small organization. It just doesn't happen.

Maybe if you're a you know, a 10 20 million doll startup company with venture capital and all that sort of stuff, patents might be useful, But we're not talking about that. We're talking about the midnight engineer here. the hobbyist, the hacker. It's just not going to happen.

No company is going to spend a cent on your patent. They would rather spend hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars doing it themselves before they will give you 1 cent in a royalty or spend one cent buying your payon. Don't be delusional, it's not going to happen. Reason Number three: A patent is easily bustable by anyone with time or money.

It's not just about prior art either. It's Very. It's incredibly easy to find prior art to bust your Payton, But it's also even just as easy for someone to claim that. Oh well, that's obvious obvious to a practitioner in the field.

and that's all it takes. It's incredibly simple unless you've got something so massively Innovative or so massively narrowly Focus that it's not even close to what anything's done before, then it's going to be absolutely useless. And don't kid yourself, you're an idea is not that unique. I Guarantee it.

Reason Number four: You have to publish every minute detail of your invention. your idea. Whatever it is, all the information ultimately becomes freely available for anyone to look at and anyone to do derivative work from that. So, if you want to keep your idea secret, don't get a patent and you pay for the privilege.

You pay a massive amount of money and you just got to give your information away. Geez, you can do that for free. Reason Number Five: Patents are massively expensive. You're talking at least $5,000 Us to get a a basic patent in just the Us.

Or you know one or two major countries. And that doesn't include patent Ay attorney fees for drafting. Uh, your Payton application? Sure, you can do it yourself if you really want to. But trust me, you're going to want a Payton attorney to do it.

because then you'll at least have a vain hope they know how to word it correctly. You'll have a vain hope of being able to actually defend it if it comes down to that. And of course, if you have to defend your patent. okay, that's upwards of a million dollar.

If you think that you can defend your patent for 10 grand, 20 grand or something like that, you're kidding yourself. It doesn't your average basic patent. uh, case, defense case. It costs many hundreds of thousands of dollars, even a million dollars minimum.

So unless you're if you make a 10% uh, you know, if your business is making 10% a typical business, 10 15% That means you're going to have to make $10 million a year to afford the million to be able to, uh, defend your patent. It's utterly ridiculous for the night. Engineer, the hobbyist, the startup. Forget it.

Okay, here's tip Number two: Don't get involved with these companies that supposedly help you. Uh, Market your invention Or your product. They're a scam. You've probably heard their R their ads on radio or seen them on TV And you know, oh, we're invent.

Help, Let us help you Market your invention. If you've got a great idea, we've got the resources to help you. Don't touch them, They'll just force you. They'll talk you into buying really expensive patents.

They'll force you into getting copyrights which you don't have to spend a scent on. Copyrights are implied. Don't ever spend a scent on a copyright. All you got to do is put copyright you know in 2010.

David Jones And that's it. You're protected under natural copyright laws and they'll help. They'll pay for marketing and you won't see a single scent on your return. Uh, single return on your investment there.

Forget it. they're a joke and a scam. Avoid at all costs. Tip Number three: Stick to a niche, own the market, and sell Direct Design the best product you possibly can for that niche market and be the first out there or be the best and own the market, Then nobody will be able to touch you.

You'll be the recognized expert on that product in that field, and that's so massively important. important and design price into your product so that you have a large cost margin so that if anyone does try and compete with you, you can undercut them or bring out a new version. Keep one step ahead of your any potential competitors. Niches can make the best markets don't try and Market you know some novelty.

Gadget To the mass population you, the odds of failing are incredibly high. But stick to a niche market. your odds of success. Uccess are incredibly high, and there's nothing wrong with getting other companies with established online businesses to sell your product for you.

If you don't want the hassle of selling direct, well, you can make a smaller margin and get them to do all the work for you. Just be careful and just know that you do make a bigger margin. If you sell direct, it's more work, but it could be worth it. Tip Number four: Don't spend a cent on advertising or marketing.

It's money down the toilet. Really part of Designing a successful product is knowing your target audience and how to reach them. And if you don't know that well, you probably shouldn't be in the business designing a product in that. Niche Don't bother cuz you're just going to lose.

The odds are against you. But if you do know your target market and how to reach them, then why spend a scent on advertising in marketing? Get them on blog. Get that mentioned on blogs. Get people to do reviews, talk about about it on forums.

Whatever. Get the people to Champion your product and spread the word. It's the best way and it doesn't cost you a Cent. And my final tip is publish your design and make it Open.

I Know it sounds crazy. You know you got this great new product. Great idea. It does some nice little thing.

why wouldn't you want to keep it a secret? Well, there's a very good reason for it. if you publish it and make it open. It generates increased interest in the product, especially among the Geeks and the Nerds out there. They go apeshit over Open- Source Uh, Hardware open source software, all that sort of stuff.

It's great and it makes you the expert in the field for that product. and that can lead to Future uh, orders. It can lead to Future jobs, work, cooperation, all sorts of things. If you just sell a product that nobody can take apart in a niche field, it can work.

There's nothing wrong with that, but you get more vages from publishing it and making it open. But I know what you're saying? Well, what if somebody just copies my design and goes and manufactures it and undercuts me? then I'm screwed, right? Well, no. Take a look at the Creative Commons licenses. I'll put up a link for it on the blog here and take a look.

There's six different types. um, there's ones that uh, you know, attribution only and stuff like that where people only have to mention you. and but the the key thing is there are ones that aren you can specify as non-commercial and that means you can freely publish and make your information open to everyone. They can play around with it, do whatever they want, but they're not allowed to make a scent from it.

only you can. And all of the uh, legal framework for all that is there in all this crap. Look at it all this. Legal Information that you'd pay 10 of thousands of dollars for, right? It's all there for free.

Make use of it and open source your projects. It'll be a winner. I Guarantee it. And if you're extra paranoid, there's also a noncommercial plus no derivative option in the Creative Commons license.

That means not only can nobody make a scent from your design, but they can't, Uh, change it in a certain way and then do a spin-off product from it. You protected both ways And all the legal Frameworks there. How is that not a winner? But hey. okay, if you don't want to go the open source route I Understand, you've got your product and you want to protect it Well, there's plenty of ways you can do that I'm glad you asked.

First way to do it is you can, uh, build in microcontrollers into your products, building firmware where you might use some surgery. Well, whack a micro in there, Make it, you know, put some firmware in there, blow those fuses, and protect it. Sure, you can reverse engineer them, but it's pretty difficult and by the time people do that and try and copy it, well, it's it's not worth their while. They may as well rip off your whole idea and re-engineer it from start really.

but there are several ways to do it. You can sand the component values off the chips. There are traditional ways to do it. You can encase your entire product in a potting compound, you put it in the Box, you fill it all up, goo it, and uh, you can actually make some final connections with little uh, fine tin copper wire instead of just on the PCB And then when they if they try and deot it, boom, It breaks the circuit and they can't trace the circuit.

That's another old technique and there's various other ways to protect your designs. But really I think open source is a better way to to do it cuz all the legal Frameworks in place if you ultimately want to sue someone. but I don't recommend suing somebody because well, the only winners will be the lawyers. and ultimately, it doesn't matter what you do or how much you spend, if somebody in China wants to copy your product, there's nothing stopping them.

and there's nothing you can do about it, even if you got millions or billions of dollars. Really, it's just not going to happen so it's not worth worrying about. Don't spend a scent on it. Go Open Source and you'll be a winner.

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