- I've been involved in a tech startup. It was quite a wild rollercoaster ride. It was very stressful at times, mainly due to the fact we kept on running out of money to pay employees & creditors.
- You need confidentially with everyone who sees the product.
- Stakeholders in our case received shares in the company. Over a number of years the original shares became worthless because of dilution. (Every time we ran out of money we had to issue new shares to new investors).
- If things go quickly & go well & your product is an easy build, you may find that the initial capital is enough. It depends on whether you run into technical problems which take time to solve and how many employees you need to solve them etc.
- And finally patenting, you need to protect you key ideas in your product, making sure that your idea hasn't been invented before (search patent databases). If you find that another company has already invented your idea, you will be starting out on an uphill battle because the other company may be unwilling to grant you a license.
- Patent fees can be quite large. A patent attorney can charge $3k-10k to draft a patent application. To get it granted in say the USA, Canada, Europe, Japan, China & Australia may cost around $400,000 spread out over a number of years. Note that Europe & Japan are expensive and its hard to get anything meaningful granted in these countries.
- If you need to negotiate a license this can be quite expensive due to lawyers fees.
- You really need to start with a patent search (and maybe scientific journal articles) to determine if anyone else has already invented the same idea.
