4 ms·

There are state trademarks and national ones from the USPTO. If his is a state trademark and he is in another state, it shouldn't affect you at all and him hara

by bugsy 15y ago

There are state trademarks and national ones from the USPTO. If his is a state trademark and he is in another state, it shouldn't affect you at all and him harassing you would be malicious interference with a business. If it is national, you should just change your business name. As far as the other guy needing to work, that should have been figured out before. I take it you must be independently wealthy to be able to self fund for a long time? You are fortunate, but it's not realistic to assume this is true of everyone. Obviously his debt is related to not getting much if any income after 7 months of working on this venture. I think your advice is very premature to say the least. You have not successfully executed yet. So you don't have working advice to give. It's strange when this happens, but seems kind of common. So many business books written by guys who don't have experience creating or running successful businesses. A lot of wild eyed speculation presented as fact. Here is some advice. I see in your explanation you have a list of blaming other people. It's the cofounder's fault for not working more and wanting to earn an income after 7 months. It's the other guys fault for having a trademark. But if the cofounder worked with no salary longer you'd still have run into this trademark issue. The thing is, if you suspected your product had any chance of working at this point you'd not be giving up on the trademark. You know that the business is failing for other reasons, yet you come up with this other stuff. It's a denial of reality. Figure out why the company really failed. It wasn't the cofounder or the trademark that did it. Now I know you are reading this and getting ready to press reply and type, "Bugsy you big dummy, didn't you see that I accepted blame? The title of this article is 'How I messed up'." Right, about that. Let's look at your numbered list of the four ways ways you are taking responsibility. #1 says your cofounder is to blame. #2 says the trademark is to blame. #2 says your cofounder situation is to blame. #4 says your cofounder situation is to blame. So you don't actually admit to doing anything wrong. Saying "I made a mistake depending on all these other morons!" is not taking responsibility. It's blaming others, while not even taking responsibility for blaming others. Was there a product? Were there customers? Was there growth? None of these questions are addressed at all in this essay, and these are the real questions to have been asking. If the company has a viable product, a customer base, and is making sales after 7 months, the co founder wouldn't be walking away due to becoming destitute after 7 months of no income, and the other cofounder wouldn't be abandoning the business over a extremely minor branding issue.

calebhicks 15y ago
You're right. I wrote my post in one sitting, and didn't realize that I was hiding my own faults and shortcomings in getting to the position the business is in today. My list was not one of reasons I failed, but one of lessons I felt I should learn from the situation. It is not a complete list of my failures by any means. I'm sorry if it came off that I'm trying to give expert startup advice. I do not pretend to be a success story, or one worthy of providing advice to startups. But I sure wish someone had told me 8 months ago that I should look into any possible trademark issues with my name, and thought I'd pass that along. I certainly don't blame the cofounder for our predicament. I was there for each step we took. I was merely pointing out that it's important to figure out the responsibilities of each cofounder, and that it may be wise to understand the life circumstances of your cofounder before diving in. Also, it should be noted that he got a job 4 months ago, not just this week. But you're right, not everyone has the luxury of being able to work with no pay for an extended period of time. If you read the comments in the thread, you'd know that there is a product, we've been making sales (although not as quickly as we'd hoped), and are at a near break-even point. Yes, I would be abandoning the project too early to tell if we could have been successful. Yes, I was undercapitalized, and don't have the money or passion (gasp!) to redo a lot of the work that we've been doing. There's an opportunity cost in redoing the work that I'm not sure I want to take on alone. For the record, here are some key areas in which I failed: 1) Undercapitalizing the business. I knew we should have more cash, and I didn't make it happen. I felt nervous and unqualified to approach investors, particularly because we weren't doing something new and exciting, and our goal wasn't to become the market leader, but take a piece of the overall pie. I wanted to work full time for myself, more as an ideal to feel like I was a true entrepreneur than to do what was best for the business. As others have mentioned, I should have been working and doing this as a side project until it could provide a livable income for me and my cofounder. 2) I often created and even sought out distractions from pure customer acquisition. I spent too much time tweaking this-or-that on our website and other things not directly tied to gaining customers. 3) I failed to motivate myself to get stuff done when my cofounder was out of the office. I could have moved forward with the project without him there. I didn't. This was a huge failure point, for which I accept 100% responsibility. 4) I misallocated some of the little money we did have. Unnecessary expenses that did not contribute to building the business. I wanted business cards, I wanted a nice whiteboard, I wanted an office, I wanted a vanity 800 number. I wanted to feel more official than the business was ready or could afford to make me. And I allowed that to distract me from selling. 5) I began working on the project because I saw the dollar signs, not because I was truly interested in the product or service I was developing and offering. Now some would say that the money is all that matters, but for me, working on a project I was more interested in would better motivate me. There are plenty of other mistakes I made. But, those are the 5 that come to mind first. I appreciate the time you took to write a thought out response, and to make me look at more lessons that I can learn, or more of my faults I can work on.

by bugsy 15y ago

calebhicks 15y ago

You're right. I wrote my post in one sitting, and didn't realize that I was hiding my own faults and shortcomings in getting to the position the business is in today. My list was not one of reasons I failed, but one of lessons I felt I should learn from the situation. It is not a complete list of my failures by any means. I'm sorry if it came off that I'm trying to give expert startup advice. I do not pretend to be a success story, or one worthy of providing advice to startups. But I sure wish someone had told me 8 months ago that I should look into any possible trademark issues with my name, and thought I'd pass that along. I certainly don't blame the cofounder for our predicament. I was there for each step we took. I was merely pointing out that it's important to figure out the responsibilities of each cofounder, and that it may be wise to understand the life circumstances of your cofounder before diving in. Also, it should be noted that he got a job 4 months ago, not just this week. But you're right, not everyone has the luxury of being able to work with no pay for an extended period of time. If you read the comments in the thread, you'd know that there is a product, we've been making sales (although not as quickly as we'd hoped), and are at a near break-even point. Yes, I would be abandoning the project too early to tell if we could have been successful. Yes, I was undercapitalized, and don't have the money or passion (gasp!) to redo a lot of the work that we've been doing. There's an opportunity cost in redoing the work that I'm not sure I want to take on alone. For the record, here are some key areas in which I failed: 1) Undercapitalizing the business. I knew we should have more cash, and I didn't make it happen. I felt nervous and unqualified to approach investors, particularly because we weren't doing something new and exciting, and our goal wasn't to become the market leader, but take a piece of the overall pie. I wanted to work full time for myself, more as an ideal to feel like I was a true entrepreneur than to do what was best for the business. As others have mentioned, I should have been working and doing this as a side project until it could provide a livable income for me and my cofounder. 2) I often created and even sought out distractions from pure customer acquisition. I spent too much time tweaking this-or-that on our website and other things not directly tied to gaining customers. 3) I failed to motivate myself to get stuff done when my cofounder was out of the office. I could have moved forward with the project without him there. I didn't. This was a huge failure point, for which I accept 100% responsibility. 4) I misallocated some of the little money we did have. Unnecessary expenses that did not contribute to building the business. I wanted business cards, I wanted a nice whiteboard, I wanted an office, I wanted a vanity 800 number. I wanted to feel more official than the business was ready or could afford to make me. And I allowed that to distract me from selling. 5) I began working on the project because I saw the dollar signs, not because I was truly interested in the product or service I was developing and offering. Now some would say that the money is all that matters, but for me, working on a project I was more interested in would better motivate me. There are plenty of other mistakes I made. But, those are the 5 that come to mind first. I appreciate the time you took to write a thought out response, and to make me look at more lessons that I can learn, or more of my faults I can work on.