The Importance of Doing Your Due Diligence Before Getting IP Protection

Intro (00:09):
Welcome to innovations and breakthroughs with your host Rich Goldstein, talking about the evolutionary, the revolutionary, the inspiration and the perspiration and those aha moments that change everything. And now here’s your host, Rich Goldstein

Rich (00:33):
Goldstein here, host of the innovations and breakthroughs podcast, where I feature top leaders and the path they took to create change past guests include Joe Polish, Roland Frasier, and Mitch thrower. This episode is brought to you by my company, Goldstein patent law, where we help you to protect your ideas and products. We’ve advised and obtained pads for thousands of companies over the past 26 years. So if you’re a company that has software product or a design, you want protected go to Goldstein, pat.com, where there are amazing free resources for learning about the patent process. And you can email my team@welcomeatgoldsteinpc.com to explore if it’s a match to work together. You can also check out the book I wrote for the American bar association that explains in plain English, how patents work it’s called the ABA consumer guide to obtaining a patent. I have with me here today, Mario norphel, uh, Mario started his first business with $300 in the bank selling blenders door to door. He brought his blend of business to a million dollars in the first year and 10 million in the second year. He currently runs a business conglomerate that operates a variety of businesses, including e-com events at a marketing agency. They operate in more than 40 countries. He’s an international speaker. I’m very pleased to welcome here today, Mario. Norful welcome, Mario.

Mario (01:45):
Thanks for having me rich.

Rich (01:47):
My pleasure. Um, and, uh, so, um, so yeah, we met on clubhouse and, uh, we’ve both been spending a great amount of time hanging out there. And you’re a guy that people turn to for guidance on how to go about their businesses, how to launch their product, to how to, uh, you know, how to, um, you know, pitch what they have to people that can help them move the action forward. Um, so you’re an authority on that. And so I, you know, I appreciate you being here to share your wisdom with my audience, who are people who are looking to bring their ideas out into the world. Um, but like, let’s get back to the humble beginnings of it. So you started out selling blenders door to door. Tell me about that and tell me kind of like what led you to that moment?

Mario (02:35):
Yeah. So even before blenders, I was selling water filters door to door and I tried to sell coffee machines, led lights. So I’ve tried to sell everything door to door, but that’s why I started, um, before that I was doing banking and finance. I didn’t know what entrepreneurship meant. And then I saw a video by a boy called Farrah gray. He was, it was a story about how he made a million dollars by the age of 14. He was older by the time the video came out and I realized, wow, I don’t have to wait to like late twenties or thirties, start making money. I can start doing it now. You know, it’s going to be late soon. Um, so I mainly dropped out of university. I was in my second year in Australia, got the first job I could, which was door to door on a commission basis. They’re the easiest job to get. Um, and they’re paid, you know, Wiki and I started selling products door to door, blenders, juices, coffee machines, water filters, TV ads, anything that would sell,

Rich (03:26):
How do you like sales?

Mario (03:29):
Now? I can’t be screwed. And to be honest, like I just can’t be bothered. But then again, like how do you define sales? If it’s jumping on a call and convincing, not as a new person, like generally for someone listening now, right? If you define sales as someone, um, talking to someone, telling them, Hey, you should sign up without, uh, you know, my, my growth hacking agency or my consulting crypto consulting firm. I don’t take those calls at all. Like I haven’t taken a sales call for years now, but how do I like sales in general? I’m selling myself every day. Like even now the way I speak, I need to be confident enough. So people take what I say seriously and apply it. Um, I’m not selling myself, but I’m selling a certain ID. I’m selling a certain concept. You know what I’m going through. Um, clubhouse, for example, um, I was selling a story, selling a story. It doesn’t mean the story’s incorrect. Just what I look at selling is, is communicating something in a way. So people pay attention to it and get them to take certain action. Whether support you, whether the join you or they just believe you, whatever it is. So if that’s selling, I’m selling every day, really?

Rich (04:34):
Yeah, no, I love it. And I, I agree with that and I love sales and I think it’s probably the most important skill for anyone to have. Uh, no matter what business you go into is just the ability to communicate with people and move the action forward

Mario (04:51):
Cannot be a hundred percent. I would, I usually say copywriting is one of, if not the most important skill in business and copywriting and sales, same thing, copywriting sales, you’re essentially it’s influencing people. That’s it communication?

Rich (05:06):
Absolutely. And I would say like writing in general, like to me, like no matter what position I’m hiring for, I want someone to be an excellent writer. I think that your ability to write your ability to communicate, of course, being a copywriter is a subset of that. Having specific set of communication skills in terms of, of crafting a message that’s going to be used on a sales letter or a sales page or a sales script or something, but writing and sales, I mean, to me are the two top skills for, for almost anyone

Mario (05:38):
In life and in business. I always struggling now to find a good writer. We’re helping write an article for fortune magazine that will go out tomorrow and finding a good writer for that. It’s just not easy. It’s one of the skills that’s under appreciated. I think hiring journalists is something businesses should actually consider the journalists are losing their quickly over the last few years. Um, so they need a job. Um, and they’ve got an incredible skillset cause, cause that’ll be essentially influencing people and big companies have hire journalists. Um, so absolutely. I agree with you a hundred percent there.

Rich (06:10):
Yep. Um, great. And so, um, when you, um, you know, like essentially though you were, you were deeply involved in selling door to door selling a specific type of thing. And then from there you really transitioned into kind of selling your thing. Like not someone else’s thing, but your thing. So let’s

Mario (06:29):
Yeah, let’s see. A lot of people, a lot of people ask me about drop shipping, for example, that kind of applies to my to hear drop shipping or sales or door to door sales, selling other people’s products is a good way to make money potentially, but you’re not building any equity. That’s a problem selling a product that’s branded with that with a brand that’s copyrighted, you know, you deal with, with trademarks, et cetera. So if, if it’s, if you have a trademark brand name and you build that, that is an asset worth something longterm, if you’re doing it for someone else’s brand, you’re building their brand. So I was, my goal was to shift to my own brand and I eventually did that.

Rich (07:12):
Hmm, great. So, um, like let’s, I guess let’s get into it, uh, how you went, how you transitioned from, from selling someone else’s stuff to selling your own and what what’s your

Mario (07:22):
It’s a process. So the first step was, um, finding someone in the country in Australia that had the product that I wanted to sell at a good price, the most convenient one. And that was a local coffee supply that was selling blenders. Um, it was under their brand and I built their brand trying to get some sort of exclusivity, but explicitly on it goes so far. So that was the first step is, is, um, getting some sort of exclusive to the local supplier. Next step is importing something from China, which is what we’re talking about. E-comm here. What most companies do is they find a product in China. They bring it in, they try to put their brand on it. Sometimes it’s possible. Sometimes not. They might need a minimum order quantity. Um, one of the first one I bought from China, I couldn’t label it as my brand because I didn’t couldn’t order enough. I didn’t have enough money. The next shipment, I brought it under my brand, which exists to this day, which is optimum that sells blenders and juices. So, um, and now optimum is one of the leading brands in over 30 countries.

Rich (08:22):
Hmm. Interesting. And, and so did you like, um, I, I guess you start out by white labeling someone else’s product and you move towards differentiation

Mario (08:33):
A hundred percent. Like it is a process. And you’ve probably seen that process many times with your clients. First step is you just get whatever you can on the market. You don’t have money to be picky. Next step is you find something, some product from China, bring it as, as you trust the supply. No, you can’t afford a mechanical engineer and I’ve gone through that process. Then you start improving that product. Then the final step is you develop your own product. Um, that I would say this is a final step. Starting that with that step from scratch, I think is a risk because you know, I’ve done it twice with two products that we’ve developed from scratch. Both of them failed for various reasons. Not saying you’ll always fail. Of course it might be a massive success, but when you’re developing a product from scratch, you don’t know the cost, you don’t know the, the demand.

Mario (09:14):
You don’t know what issues you’re going to face, but if you, you white label an existing product, it’s a safe way to start building your brand. But it’s not a good long-term strategy because you’re white labeling another product and eventually customers will find out. So we’ve gone through that exact process. I’m explaining how we white label the product was the easier path customers found out, started talking about it in the backend, we’re developing our own product. You start making small changes that were not too visible for the customer and then expand to bigger and bigger changes until it was a completely different product.

Rich (09:43):
Yeah, absolutely. And, uh, so, um, and then once you, you were able to differentiate it that way. Um, I mean, did you, did you notice that it, it made a difference in terms of sales, um, having a fully differentiated product in that and that sense or is it kind of like, um,

Mario (10:02):
Yeah. Customers don’t care much. Yeah. Customers don’t care much if it’s different customers will care if it’s better for them. So if the changes you make, bring more value to the customer, then they care the changes you make a purely for the sake of making changes, they don’t care.

Rich (10:20):
Right? Absolutely. Absolutely. And I mean, what role has, has IP protection played in, in any of this? Like in having differentiated products?

Mario (10:28):
I have my stories as PMs. I have my stories that I P so I’ll tell you some IP stories that I had. Um, I’m going through one right now. I can touch on that one. We’re selling an e-bike similar to the van roof in Europe. So there’s anybody called the van Ruth. I was going to be called the Hey check city H X city. And as launching, we made it, we made develop the product, but we made it too similar to demand, move to have a lot of patents. One of them is a design pattern. So we’re going through the pattern. We’re getting an attorney to go, yeah, you got to get an attorney with those things cause they backfire. And I’ll tell you another story of one that backfired on us. Um, but we’ve got a pattern if you, it, to look at the design, review it and see what changes need to be made to be able to, to avoid any future issues.

Mario (11:11):
Because you know, when you’re starting out, like, I’ll tell you one of the juices we’re selling. That’s a pretty ugly story. It’s going to be cool story for the audience. I think they’ll understand where patent does come in because I was one of the entrepreneurs that really didn’t care. No, I just want to launch a product, get some revenue in, get a brand I’m like, yeah, no, one’s going to care about pots and all that crap. So, um, we developed a product that looked, they look too similar to a competitor, but they had a pretty broad Peyton and design Payton or functioning, not a utility pack. And, um, we, you know, it was a ma not as a juicer, you know how the slow juices have a small shoot. This one had a big shoot it’s by a brand called Truven and you can put a full Apple in.

Mario (11:53):
Um, so that was a selling point. Now we made a similar product, but one of the early ones to make a similar product to them. And it was just doing really, really well in Australia and in Europe. And then, um, cubing sent us a letter hate, you know, you’re breaching our patron. We are two issues, God lead attorney path or talk to the factory. We talked to the factory, they said they have a lawyer onto it. And they gave us an indemnification agreement. And again, that was three, four years ago. They gave us an indemnification agreement, which means that we’re indemnified, we’re safe. It says, if you get into legal trouble, we will protect you and pay all the costs. Perfect. After a few months, the competitor took legal action against us, the factory, as per their word, they went to court and they protect. So the company defended us, you know, the indemnification agreement was there. They’re meant to defend us. And then near the end of the case, they just disappeared. Um, no response, nothing. And we’re left with the case. You know, whether the defendants were left with a case, they apparently did no work. They just delayed, delayed, delayed it. And we suffered seven figure losses with that. The muscles, um, because indemnification agreement was useless because they didn’t honor it now.

Rich (13:02):
I mean, you know, it’s like, if you can’t hold them to their agreement, cause they’re gone, you know,

Mario (13:08):
Exactly, exactly. Try like, where’s the legal case of where we have a case against them now, but they’re Chinese factory, you know how difficult it is. Yeah. Um, so yeah, that’s, that’s one of the horror stories that we’ve had. Um, we’ve been sued in one of our other products, also got sued, but that one, we won the case. Do you remember the company Juicero in the U S had the juicer that went bust, they raised hundreds of millions of dollars over a hundred million dollars. And they had the juice away, press a button and to make these Jews and they were mocked all over the media, all over the press and then they just went out of business. Well, they were suing us for having a product that’s too similar. They lost the case. But, um, yeah, we did that homework in that one.

Rich (13:48):
Yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely. And a great lesson. There is like, you know, in terms of the company that said that they would indemnify you, um, that th that indemnity agreement is only as good as the company that gives it to you and only as good as they are trustworthy and stable. Right. And so, uh, that’s, I guess there’s a, there’s, there’s a lesson there for sure. And, um, but yeah, so you’ve had your brushes with IP and it sounds like, so currently when you have a product that you’re looking to get out there, that you do, you do your homework to make sure that you’re not going to be stepping on any toes.

Mario (14:24):
Yeah. So it’s a balancing act. Um, so on one hand doing your homework is key because look at what happened to us for not doing our homework. On the other hand, you know, you got some people that will just go so deep into IP before knowing whether the product is even worth launching. I would say, first test the market, do some market research, test the product. Do you get pre-orders et cetera. Once you got the proof of concept, then look at the next step, which is IP. You basic check for, for IP, just check online, but that’s just, before you do a proof of concept, then you got to talk to an attorney, um, uh, just to do a, a more in-depth research. I remember if you’re selling in different countries because different countries to look into, um, and we’ve had to go, you know, a patent to Germany doesn’t mean it’s patent that then another country could, that doesn’t mean it’s patented in another country. So we’ve had to go through that because we sell in over 30 countries.

Rich (15:15):
Absolutely. And so that’s, uh, you know, it, it’s something that always needs to be in proportion to what’s at stake with the rest of the venture. Right. You could spend a lot of money on, you know, the type of due diligence. We’re talking about the quote, freedom to operate, where it’s like, am I stepping on anyone’s patent anywhere of any kind. Right. And it could get to be extremely expensive. Um, and it always needs to be in proportion to what you’ve got at stake. If you’re just in the process of testing the waters in the market, then it doesn’t pay to spend a lot of money on IP. Um, but if you’re, uh, if, if you’re heavily invested, if you’re making molds, if you are, um, you know, if you’re putting a lot into whatever’s next, then that’s an appropriate time to make sure that you’re not going to, um, get yourself into trouble.

Rich (16:03):
It’s kind of like, what do you have at risk? And whatever you’re spending should be in proportion to what you have at risk and not more, you shouldn’t be spending more to see, um, you know, what problems you might get into, then you’re actually even risking. So, um, yeah, so I, I totally agree with you, um, take it and do it in stages. I mean, it doesn’t pay it’s some people just get too heavily invested in IP in the beginning and it doesn’t, it doesn’t make sense. Um, you’ve got to see the, it fits with the market. Um, so, and, and you’ve gone into a whole bunch of other businesses, um, you know, in terms of, um, marketing and like, so you run a marketing agency. So, so, so tell me about that in terms of like working with people, to help them get their message out there for their product.

Mario (16:51):
Yeah. My team, if my team sees that podcast, they see Mario, why did he say you have a marketing agency? You don’t have a marketing. I used to have a growth hacking agency, so growth hackers and marketers don’t get along. But yeah, so growth hacking is I consider it marketing is a form of marketing. So I do have a growth hacking. I do have a growth it’s called the, we are growth hackers. Uh, I, I freaking love it. Like the advice I’ve been giving entrepreneurs, I’ve given a lot of advice on clubhouse, enough clubhouse, but financial preneur I’d say learn the skill of growth hacking, you know, you know, influencer marketing, you know, Facebook marketing, you know, Google marketing and affiliate marketing, no one talks about growth hacking marketing. Um, and I think it’s way way, under-appreciate now even Lu. I’m a partner at a law firm and I helped them apply some of those strategies that their law.

Mario (17:33):
Awesome. So I freaking love it. I started the agency last year. I didn’t start with an agency. I started by renting a big Villa, getting it was in Turkey and nine bedroom Villa on the beach. I got some of the smartest and some very successful growth hackers to come in, build those relationships that employed a lot of them. And we just had a growth hacking Villa for close to a year, um, about seven, eight months. So it was incredible, incredible Villa, incredible team, incredible friendships. I got two business partners, three business partners from that Villa that were formed in that Villa for one of them was existing business partner that came. So I had a lot of business partners come in or for forming that Philip. And it was all focused on growth hacking and it’s expanded two of my B2B businesses significantly. And I eventually made it into an agency about five months ago, six months ago.

Mario (18:21):
And it was obviously a really good decision it’s going really quickly. And so that’s probably my passion. I talk a lot about it, even though I’m not a growth factor myself, I’m just high. I know how they work. I know the strategies they do and I’ve hired some of the best ones. I cannot take credit for the strategies they apply, but, um, you know, they, they do pretty well. They’re, you’re sending hundreds of messages of sizes and we send thousands of messages a day on LinkedIn, pretty much for free and pretty high open rate emails, Slack, Facebook, Instagram, we get rank high on Google. Like now if you go into clubhouse, um, moderators, I on to top moderators, if you go into clubhouse bullying, we rank high for that keyword because of my story. If you go to best bachata dancer on number two on Google. So they, I won’t talk too much about it, but it’s something I think should be talked about a lot more. Well,

Rich (19:10):
How would you define growth hacking for people that are unfamiliar

Mario (19:15):
The best way of describe it? It’s a way to gain to ethically legally force gain algorithms. That’s the best way I would put it. Um, again, I’ll do it for a law firm. So obviously there’s a lot of, we can’t cross the line.

Rich (19:29):
So it’s like, it’s like knowing the system, what makes the system tick? So you can do exactly what the system is looking for. Is that kind of a good way? Looking at it,

Mario (19:39):
A bag, exactly. A basic rough hack is the following, which as you know, I’m getting on clubhouse to get your room big. You have to have big names on stage. Cause they, when you have big names on stage at pings their audience and when they speak, it pings that audience again. So it’s a very basic logical growth hack is to have big names on your stage, bring them up. I think if you’re, I dunno if you mowed them, it also mowed them. So they stayed in the happy, the Eagles happy and then speak to them, engage with them. So they, they think they’re then network. So this is a very, very basic golf like, well, you know how the algorithm works. You’re like, okay, what can I do to take advantage of how the algorithm works?

Rich (20:18):
And a similar thing would be like, SEO. Like you understand how the algorithm works and you know, kind of what you need to do to your article that you’re writing or to the attributes of the page that you’re building so that the search engine will just see it favorably and put it at the top.

Mario (20:34):
I’ll give you an example. So let’s say you’re an IP attorney. Um, you want to rank as one of the best IP attorneys, I’ll give you that we’ve done for me and for successfully. And I’ve given one example already. So we say we gone medium. Okay. Quora, Quora, you go on Cora and you have someone try, um, who are the top IP attorneys I’m based in London. Okay. And then you have someone else’s who can go in. They say, Oh, these are the best ones. Number one, you’ll choose a big law firm. Number two, you’ll choose a really big law firm. Again, number three, rich Goldstein. I’m assuming you’re not one of the top five law firms. If I am, I do apologize. But if you’re not whoever the audience is not in the top five, but put yourself as number three, after like the top two that everyone knows it’s like the Toyota or the Ferrari Lamborghini of cars of a law sense.

Mario (21:25):
So please office number three, and the number four, number five, we can put anyone that’s reputable. So he, you ranked in the top three in the UK along with really big names. And it was the reason we didn’t put you as number one is to make it more realistic. Assuming whoever is doing this is not number one. If you are one of the top of that, put yourself number one, it doesn’t matter if you’re already in the top three. So that’s the first one. Now, why did we use core and not make a blog post on your website? Well, Google trusts Quora as a website with authorities because it’s called website authority, Quora, medium Reddit, et cetera. They’ve had got a lot of authority on Google. So it’s more likely you’re leveraging the authority that now this is step one, but how do you get it to rank?

Mario (22:02):
And the same thing works for medium. So on medium, for example, and or something similar, I think you’re up vote, but on medium too, like you got to clap. You know, you can select that clap button at the bottom of articles that gives the algorithm that gives medium a signal that, Hey, this article is good. People are clapping for it. Okay. That means it will rank highly on medium or Quora. You do similar strategy. They’ll rank highly on Google, but then you go a step further. You’re like, okay, how does Quora or mediums algorithm work? Let’s go to medium. How does medium’s algorithm work? Well, they want people to read the article and if they like it to clap rich. So if someone goes in and collapsed without reading the article, the algorithm will spot, Hey, this person came in, they clapped. So if you get your friends to clap, but they only spend three seconds on the page and the architect’s 15 minutes to read like that doesn’t make sense.

Mario (22:56):
Obviously the clap doesn’t count. So now you’ve got to find a way for people to spend 50 minutes scrolling on the page and then clap at the end. There’s a way to do this. And then you could use a website like micro workers to go pay people, peanuts. Cause they, you know, they get people from countries that don’t cost too much, pay them very, very little to go on the website and to clap. And then there’s a way to get the spent time on the page and you can verify it as well. So now you’ve asked people to go in, spend time on the page, scrolling down clamp, which still makes it rank higher in Google. And you could do similar to Quora, which then will rank it high on sorry, rank time, medium and Quora, which will then make it rank high on Google. So you’ve gained the algorithm of medium or any other platform. I don’t know, Google and you’re ranked time again. I’ve got a couple of a few examples personally about this. My team has a few examples for our companies and we’ve done it for clients. That’s what a growth hacker is.

Rich (23:50):
Got it. Okay. Um, and, and so, and I can see how sometimes you’re your aunt, you’re skating on the line. Like, but you, you want to stay on the, on the white hat side of the line or at least gray, um, and not go black hat, right. Where, um, where you can face consequences, you know, but, uh, but yeah, no, that’s fascinating. Um, and uh,

Mario (24:12):
Black, black hat, black hat is not sustainable. Is that like black hat, anything, anything that breaks ethics, um, or breaks? Of course the laws is the biggest notoriety and breaks ethics. It’s just not sustainable and that’s in business in general.

Rich (24:25):
Absolutely. Um, cool. And so, um, now, like in terms of like people who are starting out, people that want to take their idea and bring it out into the world, you know, w what, you know, what type of advice would you give to someone in that situation

Mario (24:43):
Beyond learn golf, hiking? Cause that gives you a lot of, um, uh, if you’re, especially if you’re a B2B B2C less, so it helps, but not as much something is even more important is learning the importance of timing. So I, other than watching, which is what a podcast, um, and finishing this episode, what I recommend you do after this episode is one thing I want you to go to YouTube and build Ross, G R O S S Ted T E D. So bill Ross got a great Ted speech where he talks about a study. He did that studies the various reasons a business could fail. And there were a few reasons from, uh, you know, the timing is sorry, the business idea was bad. They didn’t get enough funding. The team was bad. The business plan wasn’t good, but the biggest reason for business’s failure or success was timing. If you lost the right business at the right time, you get a massive, massive headstart. And that was the most important factor. He gave him a lot of good examples, and I’m sure everyone can think of some of that started in crypto in 2017, 2016, 2015. It doesn’t have to be a, an entrepreneurship, a guru or business juror to succeed because he was there,

Rich (25:52):
Right. It’s hard not to succeed if you, if you were at the right place at the right time, right.

Mario (25:59):
A hundred percent timing, it’s it gives you an advantage, but it doesn’t mean that you have to do good. You can still launch a restaurant now and be successful, but it’s going to be easier, you know, launching a psychedelics content website or, um, I don’t know, a clubhouse or website that talks about clubhouse media or blog about clubhouse. Clubhouse is blowing up or Twitter spaces. So if you leveraged timing to our advantage, again, is this because you had to say, I got to look at everything in business as a puzzle. There’s so many pieces to it. You’ve got to try to understand which pieces to start with and which ones are the most important ones. Timing is one of those top ones.

Rich (26:35):
Got it. Yeah. I think that’s awesome. And I’ll make sure that there’s a link to, um, you know, to that, to that video, um, along with the blog post on my website for this episode. So there’ll be a link directly there, um, for that. Um, and so if people want to learn more about you again, in touch with you, how do they go about doing so,

Mario (26:57):
Um, best way to Google me? Um, you can reach out to me in any way you like, uh, if you do go Murray or Norful and for Nelly a w for whiskey F for Fred, a L, um, and you should reach out to me just personally, if you don’t know what to reach out to me for just say community and my team will just add you through to my community. It’s not a funnel, so there’s nothing to sell you at the end. It’s just a community where I ask the questions. I help out as a few thousand of us helping each other out.

Rich (27:22):
Awesome. Thank you. And you know, Mary, I really appreciate you taking the time to be here on this podcast. This was, this was awesome. Thanks so much.

Outro (27:31):
Pleasure. Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to innovations and breakthroughs with your host, rich Goldstein. Be sure to click, subscribe, check us out on the web@innovationsandbreakthroughs.com and we’ll see you next time.