Now… What Did You Learn? An Infringement Retrospective

Exactly one week ago today, I went public with the story about how our trademark was being infringed on by three “founders” of a project that is now named “nobeefwanted” on Twitter and Instagram. Here are the lessons that you can learn from what happened; entrepreneurially, ethically, and socially.

Entrepreneurial lessons:

1. The most obvious lesson that you can learn from our story is the importance of protecting your intellectual property. In any other situation, if we were not already protected and had registered our trademark, we would not have been able to enforce any kind of action from the infringing camp. We would have been forced to try to retroactively protect ourselves and we would have failed because of their competing application. Protect yourself FIRST and include the cost of your trademark in your start-up costs. Shontavia Johnson, Esq has compiled some resources here for those who would find it cost-prohibitive. It is always more expensive to try to protect yourself after the fact than to do so beforehand. Someone assumed that we could be steamrolled, but because we were strategic in protecting ourselves and made that a part of our starting our costs- they were unable to.
2. It is ok to stay quiet and strategic while you are building. Social media has made it so that if you are not loud, people assume you have less validity. If you KNOW you aren’t prepared for that level of scale just yet, it is ok to stay small and appreciate where you are rather than where you *could be*. We are an intentionally small community because we are in the process of building to handle scale and know that we have a major migration coming for our users. It was prudent to stay smaller to have less users to migrate. Not everyone wants to be loud for their own business objectives. This does not make what they’re doing any less great or valid.
3. Our infringers were quite loud while promoting. They made several promises. They were in almost every room on Clubhouse, promoting and pitching themselves. They were soliciting money and telling people that they had been experiencing issues with submission to app stores. In the end, they admitted that they did not even have anything close to a product. Not even a beta. Just as it is ok to be quiet while you build, you…