Here in New Zealand, getting into the housing market is tough. Everyone knows the rules: before you can buy your first home, you normally need a 20% deposit. You generally can't skip it. You save, you plan, and you put that money aside before you even start the process to get the keys.
Building a startup is remarkably similar and the analogy runs deeper than some founders realise.
Just as first-home buyers must set aside a deposit before they can secure their property, startups need to set aside time, money, and attention for their intellectual property (IP) strategy before they can truly secure what they're building. Skip it, and you may find yourself locked out of the very market you worked so hard to enter.
The mistake many startups make
I work with startups regularly as a patent attorney, and I often see the same pattern repeat itself. A founding team has a genuinely innovative idea. They're passionate, scrappy, and resourceful. They pour everything into R&D, product development, and early customer validation, all of which is entirely appropriate. But when it comes to IP, they bury their heads in the sand. But what some start-ups fail to recognise is that IP is the only asset that they own.
The reasoning is understandable: "We don't have the budget right now." "We'll deal with it once we've got traction." "Patents are expensive, that's a problem for later."
The trouble is, "later" often comes at the worst possible moment. A competitor files a patent on technology that overlaps with yours. A potential acquirer's legal team discovers you haven't done any freedom-to-operate analysis. An angel investor asks a simple question about your IP position and you don't have a credible answer. These are not hypothetical scenarios. They happen to New Zealand startups every year, and they are largely preventable and not necessarily at great expense.
Your early IP strategy doesn’t need to be expensive
Here's where the housing analogy gets even more useful. No first-home buyer in New Zealand scrapes together a 20% deposit by saving every single dollar they will ever earn. They save enough to get in the door. The deposit is a threshold, a minimum viable financial commitment that unlocks the next stage.
Your IP strategy works the same way. You don't need an exhaustive, airtight, completely bulletproof patent portfolio on day one. That would be both unrealistic and unnecessary for an early-stage startup. What you do need is a minimum viable IP strategy. One that is a genuine engagement with the IP landscape around your business.
What does that look like in practice? At a minimum, it means:
- A basic prior art search: Before you invest heavily in developing a technology, spend some time understanding what's already out there. What has already been patented? What's in the public domain? You can do this yourself, it doesn't need to be a formal legal opinion.
- A preliminary freedom-to-operate assessment: This is the question that makes founders uncomfortable, and that discomfort is precisely why they avoid it. Do you have the freedom to commercialise what you're building without infringing someone else's rights? A light-touch (and honest) assessment that identifies any obvious risks, is better than wilful ignorance.
- A basic IP ownership framework: Are your founders' agreements clear about who owns what? Have your employees and contractors signed IP assignment clauses? These are simple, cheap documents to get right early, and can be catastrophically expensive to unpick later.
- An early conversation on filing strategy: Even if you're not ready to file a patent application today, having a conversation with a patent attorney about what might be protectable, and when you'd need to act. This costs very little and gives you a roadmap of what to expect. See the article: You don't need patents everywhere - just the right places.
Your basic IP strategy is the deposit. Just like a first home, it's not glamorous. It won't make the front page of your pitch deck. But without it, you're building on shaky ground.
