A few years ago, when I launched a daily email newsletter called StrictlyVC, I was ecstatic — thrilled! — to be striking out on my own for the first time. Alas, just a few weeks weeks after filing to secure a trademark, an officious-sounding note appeared in my inbox, and soon after, I found myself shelling out $10,000 in lawyer’s fees over a short-lived trademark dispute. It wasn’t nearly as painful as it might have been, but it was a rude realization that figuring out the right brand can time consuming and complicated and have implications that founders might not foresee.
Of course, my experience is hardly rare. Most founders are typically left to either conduct trademark searches on their own (which leads to a scenario like mine), or else pay top dollar for law firms or branding agencies to do it for them.
In fact, thoroughly — and affordably — eliminating risky name choices is exactly the opportunity that a two-year-old, Bay Area company, Naming Matters, is chasing, and it has already convinced a growing number of people — including 15 founders from Y Combinator’s most recent class — that it’s service is worth a spin.
Its founder certainly appears to know what she’s doing. S.B. Master previously cofounded Master-McNeil, a 29-year-old corporate naming and branding firm in Berkeley, Ca., whose clients include Apple, General Motors, Disney, and PayPal, among others. Now Master sees an opportunity to cater not just to deep-pocketed corporate customers but also startups on shoestring budgets. Indeed, 18 months ago, she decided to take everything she has learned over the years about linguistic analysis, trademark searching, and domain name acquisition and pour it into a self-service software product that also incorporates search and data visualization. (Her head of engineering, John Jansen, worked last as a senior engineer at Quid, a platform that offers machine learning-powered market research.)
I talked with her earlier today to learn more.
TC: You’ve already run a naming company for decades. Why start this new thing?
SM: Naming is hard, and we tend to work with companies that can afford us to do deep preliminary availability screening. I grew frustrated with how slow and antiquated that searching step is [for companies that can’t afford such a service]. I mean, if you have 100 names, how do you figure out which are most likely to get you in to trouble, and which are your stronger candidates that you should focus on? There are legacy providers, but their model is to charge users for every name they look up. If you’re looking for a name in every country and every class, it adds up. You have to be very skilled to [keep your costs down].
TC: So the idea is to pay less to your friendly trademark attorney.
SM: The idea is that instead of this being some super expensive cottage industry, that anyone, anywhere, whether founders or innovators in companies or paralegals in law firms or companies under pressure to do more faster and with less, can use this tool in an unlimited way.
TC: How big a problem — or opportunity — is this?
SM: About 5 million trademarks are registered worldwide each year, and to get to a name that you’re willing to spend the money to file a trademark application, you’ve probably looked at 50 to 100 names, so suggests our experience. That means people are looking up something like 500 million names a year. That’s a lot of time and effort and it still often doesn’t answer the question of whether it’s worth it, whether the name will get you sued . . . We’ve been told by big law firms that to look at one name a paralegal is going to spend three hours, and they cost $300 an hour. So, there’s $1,000 right there.
TC: Why is this the killer solution?
SM: There are so many engineers and creative people who have no knowledge of trademarks or how they should work, and by merely looking at the visualization (that we produce for users), where the bigger the dot is to the name you’ve chosen, or the more crowded, the more [risky] the brand — it’s just offers incredible cost and time savings by being able to visualize this data.
TC: Are you scanning trademarks globally or just in the U.S.? And how much are you charging?
SM: We’re still working on pricing, but we offer an unlimited day pass for less than $50 which provides users with unlimited use to search U.S. filings. We also have a standard product that offers unlimited use on a monthly basis; one seat is $100 per month, and we think it makes sense for many clients to subscribe over the long term but the service can be stopped at any time.
And we’re working on a pro product that’s much more feature rich and that will be a bit more expensive and it will include multiple data sets, not just U.S [data].
TC: Don’t companies need to worry about competition globally from the outset?
SM: Absolutely. Any business that puts itself online is intrinsically international. So even though you may not plan to do business in Germany or the U.K. tor Japan, knowing what’s out there and who could come after you – without hiring an attorney in Tokyo – you’ll be able to see if there’s something there that you should be aware of.
TC: There’s no sort of global database that exists as of today, though?
SM: You can find a newish database on line that’s sponsored by the EU. But unless you’re a very skilled operator, it’s rough. It’s almost like doing a Google search, where you’re getting inundated with large amounts of large irrelevant hits, or you have to have a lot of knowledge to know if you should care. Nothing is sorted; you can’t see how much of a threat other trademarks are. What we can do with our algorithm is rate and rank and visualize them, so you can see those that look like the most serious threats. That’s what we can do with our algorithm is rate and rank and visualize them so you can see on the graph and click on those that look like the most serious threats.
You can see who else is out there in your space with similar names and get new ideas yourself for names that are different and probably smarter in the context of knowing who else is out there. Using this as a creativity tool wasn’t something we anticipated, but it turns out to be useful to people. Once they see what’s out there, it prompts more creativity on their part to think up more unique names.
TC: Can you talk about who some of your clients are?
SM: We have some law firm users. We have a prominent product innovation company. Fifteen companies from the last YC class signed up too. [President] Sam [Altman] loves what we’re doing.
TC: Can I ask how you came up with the brand Naming Matters? I’ve talked with branding agencies in the past that say most early firms in a space use something that literally describes their business, like Facebook. Brands start getting crazier sounding the more crowded a space grows.
SM: [Laughs.] It’s a pun. Naming does matter, but also, if you’re a lawyer, you call legal topics a “matter.” What do you think? We’re supposed to be good at this!