$250 Million, 59 Patents, & Why Patents Are Almost Worthless — The Fitness CEO Who Out-Hustled Every Copycat Tells All

How about with 59 patents and trademarks? Intellectual property is clearly central to the strategy.

What's the biggest mistake you see entrepreneurs making around protecting their ideas? Protecting their ideas?

Yeah.

And I'll tell you what I mean by that.

Back in the day when we started with it, We would patent stuff all over the world, right? All over the world.

And you would get patents throughout Europe, Asia, South and Latin America.

But then once you really understand what a patent is, it's basically a right to sue somebody.

It doesn't protect you at all.

You still got to litigate these things.

So you're really going to go have a lawsuit in Lithuania because some guy copied it? Outmarket them instead.

So what I learned through it all and products today is I don't generally do global patenting.

OK, I'll do the America and then I'll do, you know, a few select countries.

That was the first thing I learned.

But the mistake I see people make is oftentimes they don't want to tell anybody about their idea until they get their patents.

patent could take three years.

By that time, whatever trend you were seeing, it's over.

And the other thing is people will spend all this money.

To go down that path with a patent, you could spend $100,000 easily.

The amount of marketing you can do for $100,000 today.

astronomical and today more than ever the train the trends has changed so fast you don't have that time to do it so the great thing that a lot of people don't know who are inventing things is that the USPTO the Patent and Trademark Office has something known as a provisional patent

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And what that does is before you publicly show your idea, you pay a couple hundred dollars.

That's it.

And you get what's known as a provisional patent.

Basically, it's a placeholder, right? It says, okay, I'm the first to file on this.