Hello everyone and welcome back to another Patent Hacks® video. In this video Patent Hacks® Co-Founder and CEO Trevor Skene provides a detailed overview and demo of the Patent Hacks® Learning Center platform. We have also provided a complete transcription of the video below for those who prefer text over video. Keep in mind, this video includes a demo of the Patent Hacks® Learning Center (https://www.patenthacks.com/learning-center/), so without the visuals some of the transcriptions may be hard to comprehend. We highly recommend viewing the video for the most complete understanding of the platform. Enjoy and we look forward to seeing you inside soon!

Transcription

Hello, everyone, my name is Trevor and I am the co-founder and CEO of Patent Hacks. Today, I’m gonna be talking about what patent Hacks is, the benefits of Patent Hacks, and then do a quick demo of our platform so you can see everything from the inside.

So to start off, what is Patent Hacks? Well, we are a patent education company. It’s founded by myself and two other people. We’re all former USPTO, patent examiners. And we’re all, we’re all engineers as well. So, I always say we’ve kind of seen the patent industry from both sides. And essentially, what we noticed from inside and outside of the patent industry was the cost, the cost was the big problem that was preventing people from getting into the industry, I experienced it myself, and so did my partners. And what we want to do is create a more cost-effective, affordable, and approachable way for the everyday person to be able to navigate the patenting process. So our goal was to help that little guy, the students, the startups, the entrepreneurs, things like that. And our foundational goal, like I said, was to just remove or eliminate that cost barrier to entry to make it possible for anyone to get started in the patent industry and be successful.

So to go over just a few higher-level benefits of the platform, there’s no experience required to get started, everything we did in our platform was to provide over 500 real-life examples, 50 Plus step-by-step guides, 30 plus templates, hundreds of patent-related definitions, everything was designed to make it easy enough that anyone can understand regardless of their experience level in the patent industry, we also made it easy to use, you’ll see in a moment, we have a familiar ebook style layout to make it feel comfortable and normal to work with. We made it Ultra affordable. It’s actually 1% or less than 1%, the cost of working with a patent attorney. And that’s why we’re not actually really competing with the attorney market, we’re actually a tool that can be used alongside it. Or, you know, for those that can’t afford to work with patent attorneys were a tool that makes it still possible for you to navigate the patenting process. Simplify learning, this is what I just touched on a moment ago with all of our step-by-step guides, templates, and real-life examples. And then unlimited possibilities. One of the other things that happens when you learn about how to handle a process yourself is you’re no longer reliant on anybody else to handle that for you. If you learn how to prepare and file your own patent applications, you can do so on your own without anyone else’s help. So now you’ve created the ability to go forward and produce as many applications as you could possibly want for the rest of your life, for any sort of innovations that you come up with.

One of the big questions a lot of people ask, why is a patent important? Well, there’s actually a lot more than the traditional understanding of just protecting intellectual property. There’s also the ability to make it patent pending, there’s also the ability to license and resell your patent. That’s actually a huge thing these days. A lot of people are applying for patents, and not even actually spending all the money and building a company themselves. If they have ideas, they patent them, and then they license them and sell them to other people that have already established companies, around manufacturing, things like that. It could also be used to block competition. When you’re in a space. Sometimes people file multiple applications of a technology from different angles to make sure somebody else can easily come into their space and take it over with a slight variation. It creates legitimacy for any startup companies, people looking for funding, I was actually surprised to find out in the past few months when I talked to a lot of VCs and investors that a lot of them don’t want to invest in a company unless it’s already handled its IP process. So that might be something that you run into when trying to seek funding. This builds legitimacy for your company. And it’s also if you’re trying to move up in industry. And if you’re trying to get better jobs, having patents on your resume is never a bad thing. And then a patent also establishes a priority date, which is really just establishing the date of when your idea was invented. So if you want to go with a provisional patent or a utility patent, as soon as you start filing, you’re locking in a date as to when your idea was invented. And that’s super important when it comes down to litigating between patents or determining who had an idea first. So with our platform, what we do is we try to make it super simple. When you come in, you just sign up, you get into the platform, you learn at your own pace, you build your own applications at your own pace, and then you earn patents as you file them and work through that process with the USPTO. So it’s super simple and easy to get started at any point in time.

So let’s hop into the learning center now. And we’ll be able to take a look at some of the real-world examples that we talked about. And we’ll be able to see here how the different use cases in our platform can be utilized. So you can see in here now that here’s the sidebar menu that we discussed, or that we mentioned before searching drawings, drafting, filing, those are the four topics we cover and our platform can be used in a few different ways. So one of the things that’s most important when you’re getting started in the patenting process is research, right? When you first have an idea, the first thing you should always be doing once you formulate the specifics of your idea, don’t just go with the idea of, hey, I have a, you know, a grip for a pencil and just go in without having an understanding of how it’s going to work. But as long as you start to figure out, what are the different components of what am I, what am I, what I’m doing? How are they going to work together? How is the functionality going to come into play? How would this be built or made or assembled, once you sort of start to have some of those examples and those things figured out, then you could go into the researching process. And you could take those elements and those functionalities that you thought of, and you could actually start doing searches. So you could see here, what we do is we actually teach some of the basics understanding of patent examiner’s approach preparations, what to look for the key thing, the key elements of that. But then also, you could see here, we break down the six different searching strategies. These are all the searching strategies we were taught as USPTO patent examiners. And then you can see we actually break down here eight different free-to-use patent searching databases. So if we just click on one of these here really quick, and we hop in, I can show you what this looks like. But essentially, this is a guide to using a database, so that you can understand how to do so. So this is Google patents. Here’s the different searching strategies that are used in that platform, we have a video tutorial, which you can see, here’s a four-and-a-half-minute long video just breaking down some of the nuanced functionality of how this platform works, the searching syntax. So these are the specific ways you can search in our in that platform using the different searching strategies that we described. The advanced search operators, these are specific to Google, some searching options, in this case in Google, it kind of just looks like a Google, a normal Google search bar. But then what happens is you land on this search results page. And this page actually breaks down with a lot of different ways that you could refine your search results. So what we do is we break all of those down here below so you can understand how to use all these different filters. But also all of that is covered here in this video tutorial as well. And each of these pages for each of these different databases are guiding you how to utilize that to perform a prior art search.

So one of the things that’s important to understand at any point when you’re doing a prior art search is there’s really three ways that you’re going to utilize that right. You’re going to utilize it for obviously patentability, right, you’re going to compare your idea to what you’re finding to see if anyone else has done what you’re trying to do. But you can also use it for two other things that a lot of people don’t think about. One of those is freedom operate. So even if you don’t have a plan of patenting anything yourself, you really have to make sure that you’re not infringing on somebody else’s idea. So what you’re going to do there is you’re going to still do the same researching process, but you’re doing it through a different lens, right now you’re looking to see does somebody else have a patent for this thing that I’m trying to create, to make sure that you’re not going to get sued. And if it is in existence, you’re gonna have to either innovate to differentiate what you’re doing from the prior art, or you’re gonna have to go to that person and license that from them to be able to build what you’re trying to build. Then the last thing is market research. A lot of people don’t realize that patents, in essence, are kind of looking three to five years into the future of what technology is going to come to a specific field. So one of the best ways to position yourself for long-term success is to do prior art searching. And then understand that the research results that you find are what technology is most likely going to be coming to the industry over the next few years. That’s how you figure out what your competition is and how you can work around that and remain competitive for years into the future. Those three things are absolutely crucial. I always tell everyone, that’s what they should be doing first thing, whenever they have an idea, and they want to see if it’s actually viable, you have to compare it to what else is out there and make sure it’s unique and make sure that you’re going to be able to be competitive against the other technologies in any given field.

From there, you have your drawings. Once you start prototyping or doing anything of that nature, you’re going to want to start sketching and drawing your ideas. Here we break down all the different USPTO drawing requirements and things of that nature so that you can make sure that everything you’re doing is meeting the USPTO’s rules and regulations. A lot of this is pretty straightforward. Patent drawings are just black-line drawings. So as long as you can use a CAD software or you know someone who can, it’s pretty straightforward to follow those guidelines and prepare an application.

One of the things you can see here on the drafting section is that a lot of the early chapters in these content categories is introductory in nature. So you can see here making sure invention is patentable. These are the four criteria you have to meet in the USPTO’s eyes to be considered patentable. Here, when we’re talking about anatomy of a patent, we’re introducing what is an abstract? What is a specification? What are claims? For the first time. So this is super high level. And I could show you an example of this super high level just introducing for the first time what is a patent claim. In this context, we’re going to be talking about an independent claim. And you can see here we’re describing first, what is an independent claim, patent examiners versus independent claims. So a little bit of a pro tip based on our experiences, limitations and fees associated with them. You can see here when you use more than three, you start being charged extra money. And then you can see here conventional independent claim example, we have an example here that is pulled from a real-life patent document. And you can see here, we link back to that patent document so that you can do additional research on this example, if you want. It’s also helpful if English isn’t your first language, you can easily go to that Google patents page and translate to your native language to make it easier for you to understand this example. But you can see here, we have a breakdown of the introductory statement, it only appears between in the beginning of the first claim, and it’s highlighted in purple for reference. Next, there’s a preamble which identifies what the invention is, it’s highlighted in yellow for reference. Finally, invention details, which define what the invention is made of and how it functions highlighted in pink for reference. You can see all of that right here in this example. And it’s a real-world way to comprehend and understand, okay, this is what the components of a independent claim are and what they look like. You can see in the rest of this page that we cover several other examples, to make sure that anyone can understand the different use cases, and different types of independent claim usage.

So you can see here throughout our drafting content category, we go on to talk about preparations and things to consider, using your prior art search results, the importance of details, terminology and nonlimiting language. These are all pretty introductory topics that introduce you to a lot of concepts that are going to be carried through the rest of the chapters. Then once you get down to the art of claiming, claiming strategies and building your application, you’re building your specification and the perfect abstract. Now we’re getting to the actual execution steps. So the art of claiming here claiming strategies, we’re breaking down how to actually draft your claims and how to strategize them. So you can see here, that under the claiming strategy section, we’ll just look at one of these claiming strategies. Essentially, what we do here is we break down what is the strategy, what are the execution steps, and what are the pros and cons of that strategy. So you can see here broad to narrow is a pretty standard application strategy, things to consider, high-level pro tips, independent to dependent, the positives of this strategy, the negatives of this strategy, and the execution steps of this strategy. And then examples, the first being one that we created for simplicity sake, and then the next two here being from real-life patent applications showing you this strategy in action. Then here’s a second iteration of this strategy. Again, for simplicity sake, we created an example first, followed by two examples from real-life patent documents, to show you this exact claiming strategy in use in a real-world application. So that’s kind of how we guide through all of the different aspects of what we’re teaching. We’re always backing everything up with real-life examples. And with step-by-step guides, pros and cons, pro tips, things like that.

You can see the same thing here with the art of claiming when we go to how to draft your claims, independent claims. And we’ll go back to into claim independent claim preamble, something we just talked about earlier with our last example. And you’ll see here that we provide tons of templates and examples so that you can follow along with whatever strategy you want to use. So again, here, independent claim preamble, new verse improvement, the prior art will help you decide. So an improvement template, here’s two separate templates, you would just plug in your details into the stared sections. And here’s examples of what that looks like. And you can see four different examples that we’ve provided here of that invention identification. So now we’re talking about a very broad approach, or a generally broad approach, or a narrow approach. And that relates to the different claiming strategies that you want to use. So if you wanted to take a very broad approach, you could come here to this page. You can look at this template, follow this template, look at examples if you want more of an understanding of how you would put that together. And you can start actually drafting that application. You will also see here that in every step claims, abstract, and specification, we actually provide a giant template that walks you through how to build and format that entire application. So these templates are standalone Word documents that you can build, there’ll be living breathing documents, you can build your application in.

And then once you’re done with that, you can move on to the filing section. And you can see here we have the different filing options. Paper and electronic, I always recommend electronic, there’s an extra $150 fee for paper filing. Then you have the different application requirements. So you can see here, if we go to electronic filing, we break down the exact forms and documents that you need to submit. And you’ll see here, the form specification, each aspect of the specification claims abstract drawings and another form these link to the exact form pages where we guide you through completing those forms. Then there’s other optional additional forms that may be necessary depending on what type of application your filing, and what types of entity status you qualify for, for discounts on your filing fees. Then you can see here we break down over a dozen different forms. On each of these form pages, you get a downloadable version of the form a guide to completing that form and a pre-completed form with a John Doe alias to show you what a form that’s completed is supposed to look like. We have these five steps for formatting your application. This is the last step where we have checklists, and they guide you through making sure you’re meeting the USPTO’s requirements. I’ll show you one of these really quick just so you could see. For example, here, we have these checklists, and make sure, you got to make sure that you’ve satisfied all of these requirements. Then there’s the do not do this list, the anti checklist, if you will. And then there’s two examples here from real-life patent documents. These are the actual application parts. So these are real specifications that were submitted to the USPTO. They were retrieved from the public pair portal, which we describe in the searching section. But you can see this is an actual specification. And there’s a downloadable version of it right here. But this is just showing you in a quick snapshot what this formatting should look like to fall in line with all of these requirements up here. So everything in this chapter is just guiding you through a last-minute checklist to make sure that everything is done correctly. And then you can navigate here to the utility filing process or the provisional filing process. And we guide you through each of the steps for how to actually follow the process with step-by-step screenshots of every step of the way, and how to go through the filing process accurately.

So that is the gist of the platform. One last thing you’ll see here, there’s a lot of colored text in different places. And that’s actually just built-in patent-related definitions. So every time you see the colored text in the different sections, you can hover over those. And that’s just patent-specific definitions built into the platform. So that’s the general gist of the platform. Like I said, it can be helpful in a lot of different ways. We cover the provisional process, we cover the utility process, we cover prior art research, everything you need to DIY the patenting process completely by yourself start to finish. But we’re also a really useful tool if you want to work with patent attorneys. Because if you get started in our platform, and you do the legwork for them and you build an application, you know, an abstract a specification, if you get your patent drawings done, when you link up with a patent attorney after that, you’ve already done some of the work for them. Therefore, you’ve reduced the amount of billable hours you’re gonna spend with them. And you could save a lot of money doing that. So regardless of how you want to use our platform, if you want to DIY it, or if you want to use it to get jump-started and save money working with a patent attorney, our end goal is to help reduce or eliminate that cost barrier to entry in the industry for you. So however you want to use our platform, we are more than happy to work with you and continue to expand the platform and add more resources that can help you do that. So thanks again for watching. I hope you enjoy and I hope we see you inside very soon. Have a great day.