A Framework for Thinking About Startup IP Strategy

Investors diligencing an early-stage company almost always look for two kinds of protection: trademarks and patents. They signal different things and serve different purposes, but together they say, “this team knows what it’s building and how to defend it.”

Trademarks: Make Sure They Find You—and Only You

Trademarks protect brands. Their job is to prevent confusion in the marketplace so customers know who they’re buying from. They can cover your company name, product names, logos, and even slogans. For many startups, a basic strategy of protecting the company name and flagship product name is enough. Complexity creeps in when similarly named products or companies operate in the same or adjacent spaces, or when your roadmap spans multiple categories.

How it works in practice: you file an application identifying the goods/services your mark will cover (grouped under one or more of the 45 “Nice” classes) and submit either (1) proof you’re already using the mark in commerce (a “specimen”) or (2) an “intent-to-use” filing, followed later by a brief Statement of Use once you launch. The USPTO examines your application for distinctiveness and conflicts with existing marks in the classes you selected. It’s straightforward in many cases, but the classification and clearance steps deserve care because they define the scope of your brand’s protection.

Patents: Protect the Technical Advantage

Patents cover technical ideas. In the U.S., patent rights arise from a constitutional bargain (Art. I, §8): disclose your invention to the public in an enabling way and, in return, you get a time-limited exclusive right (generally up to 20 years from the non-provisional filing date). Historically, this was a corrective to guild secrecy; societally, it turns private know-how into public knowledge while giving inventors a head start.

A single product or service can implicate many inventions. Think of a modern smartphone: wireless protocols, camera pipelines, sensors, SoC designs, display stacks, battery management, haptics, security enclaves, and UI/UX interactions. Each of these domains can spawn multiple patents. The same pattern holds for cloud software, even if it’s less visible to the eye.

Why Software Founders Get Stuck

Founders often know they “should get patents,” but translating that instinct into a filing plan is hard. What, exactly, is patentable in software? More than you might think: algorithms and data structures, distributed systems, real-time collaboration engines, security and privacy mechanisms, deployment and scaling methods, and (in the right circumstances) UIs and UX flows tied to concrete technical effects. The trick is figuring out where to focus.

The Framework: Start From the Experience, Map to the Enablers

The most practical way to build a software IP strategy is to step back from “patents” and start with the customer experience.

1. Identify what users actually value. What is the moment of delight or relief your product creates? Why do users pay, keep using it, and refer it to others? Name the two or three experiences that truly matter.

2. List the “technical lifts” that make those moments possible. For each valued experience, ask: what hard technical problems did we solve to deliver it reliably, at scale, and with great performance? These lifts might be a ranking method, a conflict-resolution protocol, a latency-hiding cache, a privacy-preserving data flow, or a deployment trick that makes it all seamless.

3. Target patents at those lifts. From a business perspective, the best use of patents is to make it hard for competitors to reproduce the experiences your customers love. You do that by protecting the enabling mechanisms—not every feature, just the ones that power the value. If you can prevent rivals from delivering the same experience, you’ve blunted the competition where it counts.

4. Prioritize with three simple tests.

• Differentiation: Does this lift create a clear, demonstrable edge for users?

• Durability: Will the approach still matter (and be recognizable) 3–5 years from now?

• Detectability: Could you tell, from public behavior or reasonable discovery, if a competitor is using something materially similar?

If a lift scores high on all three, it’s a prime patent candidate.

5. Sequence filings pragmatically. Many teams file a well-developed provisional first to lock in a priority date while continuing to iterate. As the product and evidence mature, convert to a non-provisional and add related applications around the same value theme, creating a small, coherent family rather than a scattered set of one-offs.

Bringing It to the Team (and the Boardroom)

This framework is designed to be easy to convey to co-founders, engineers, and investors:

• To engineers: “Circle the hardest technical lifts that make our best user moments possible. We’ll document and protect those.”

• To PMs and designers: “Tell us the experiences customers can’t live without; we’ll make sure competitors can’t mimic them cheaply.”

• To investors: “Our IP concentrates on the enabling mechanisms behind our core value. It’s a tight fit between what users love and what rivals would need to copy.”

Putting Trademarks and Patents Together

Lead with trademarks so your audience can find and trust you; fortify with patents so competitors can’t easily give customers the same experience in the same way. Keep the brand clear and defensible; keep the technical lifts protected and hard to clone. That combination travels well in diligence and—more importantly—keeps you in front of your market.