My $20,000 business mistake and what I learned from it

ust listen to those guys i am so glad to inform that your silicon valley girl trademark was registered by the european union intellectual property office this is what i do now this is what i do these days when i come up with a name that i really like because i already made this mistake with linguatrip and i'm going to tell you a story today that cost us 20 000 it could have cost more and i just want you to learn from my mistake so here's the story 2015 we decided that we want to build a platform for booking uh language courses online and uh the initial name for the platform was mp reserver like mgilko pisalakov first letters of our last names and somehow we thought that reserver will be associated with booking language courses in real life people were thinking we were a server company so the first advice that we get from our first advisor from london he says before you apply to y combinator or any other accelerator you guys need to change the name of your startup and we're like okay that sounds reasonable because people don't understand what's going on with our company so i sit down and i remember that day i sit down in an office and we had a partnership with a company which name started with lingua and they were like lingualeo russian company and we had this first partnership and i really liked the lingua part because we were trying to build an international company and i thought when you start with lingua lingua is italian it's spanish and italian speakers spanish speakers are very active language travelers used to be very active travelers before covet now i guess i need to say things in the past but i'm hoping that the industry is going to recover and i thought you know lingua trip is a perfect name and we were looking for a dot-com domain and i google it and wow it's free like before that we were trying so many names and every home domain was taken and all of them were empty and i know there are companies out there who just take popular names uh they just generate a lot of names they buy those domains in hopes that somebody would come up with that name and they will buy the domain for a higher price for them i was so surprised that linguatrip.com was available and i called dma and i was like oh my god i came up with an awesome name it's gonna be lingua trip you understand exactly well and again i thought people would understand exactly what we mean but in america when we had our first day at 500 startup and i told people like uh we're a lingua trip guess what we do and they thought we were doing something with linguine like a type of kind of spaghetti but you know what i mean not a lot of americans know the word lingua but again i was okay with that because our target market is not america our target market are actually people who learn english and again for spanish speakers i thought that would make a lot of sense so we were super happy that dot com domain was available we booked it right away we started changing our name everywhere and i also googled linguatrip.ru and russia was one of our main markets because we started there and uh i just thought it was bought by someone but there was nothing on the website i was like oh okay maybe that's just another company who bought the domain in hopes to sell it later and because we weren't really interested in pursuing the russian market i was like okay whatever we just go with languagetrip.com and uh we raised money we started operating and then suddenly we started getting messages from from our customers saying you know i booked a trip with you but you haven't responded et cetera and i start realizing they booked a trip on a different website linguatrip.ru and they were russian customers and i got to the website and i realized the website has the exact same thing that we were doing just a different design and people started mixing us up like crazy because we still had a lot of russian speaking customers so our initial thoughts were like probably the company that bought that domain has noticed us because there was some press in russia about us raising money and they started doing exactly the same thing just to take the traffic from us and instead of talking to those guys right away we decided that we're gonna start this bid war on google google ads so we started bidding on the name linguatrip to advertise ourselves to be on top of the search they started doing the same and it basically the price for that lingua trip ad started skyrocketing because we were out bidding each other and it just became crazy and i think they were the ones who reached out to us and said like hey guys we really need to talk about it because continuing wars like this wouldn't work and we were planning our trip to moscow and we decided to meet up with them and so when we met up with them they asked for a hundred thousand dollars to purchase that domain and we actually realized they had this name for their company before we emerged and they were doing also kind of the same thing so it's not like this website company that just keeps buying websites they were actually doing the same thing and that was a business for them that's why they asked for a hundred thousand dollars but back then i think we raised a little more than a hundred thousand and we just didn't have that money and uh we told them you know we really like this name but in this case it would just make sense for us to change the name of the company or just continue working in the u.s without really tapping into russian market but it was unaffordable like it was easier for us to just change them the company and we already started brainstorming other names some time passed and they reached out to us and said like hey i guess they were not making too much money and like competing on bidding on google ads wasn't a good idea for them and they reached out to us and said like hey let's settle on on 20k i think that was the year when we started growing really fast and i just thought you know we'll just pay them 20k they had the registered trademark that was the whole thing they not only had the domain they had the registered trademark in russia so and we had the registered trademark in america and the european union and so we made this deal to buy the domain name and the trademark for twenty thousand dollars and this was an expensive mistake so these days i try to register every single name that i use just because it would be really disappointing like having grown silicon valley girl and then coming to europe and you know having someone impersonate me or use my trademark i like having conflicts because of that so my action plan for you would be first of all if you're serious about your company and you came up with a good name register a trademark in the us i register trademarks myself just because you can do it you go to uspto and you do everything yourself and it's a it's a pretty straightforward process there are no conflicts if you're not like trying to register apple as a trademark but in europe i can highly recommend a professional hub test with both linguatrip and silicon valley girl because silicon valley girl is a very a difficult trademark i couldn't get it in the u.s because of silicon valley hbo but i was able with her i was able to get it in europe sophia has started a company in london and they've been doing this for over eight years helping people from all over the world get their trademarks registered in european union and the uk you can go to the website fillon.com trademarks and see how they can help you but again i highly highly recommend that if you're serious about your company if you started building it already and if you think that the name is perfect like i had those thoughts i would just go ahead and file for trademarks in countries where you try to operate maybe us uk europe would be like three main countries so sophia will be able to help you with the european union and uk because they helped us with our trademarks i was able to get an offer for you guys as well so with the trademarks it works in a way that if you file for a trademark in the european union you need to file for a separate trademark in the uk and normally the service will cost 390 british pounds but for my subscribers she's waiving this additional fee to register your trademark in the uk and just remember this is a new rule it started in 2021 that uk trademarks are no longer covered by the european union laws and the offer is still june 30th uh 2021 again uh 20 000 that we paid for a trademark in a country like russia that was like a big deal for us but i also understand that if your company grows like crazy people would ask for a lot more money they would ask for hundreds of thousands of dollars especially if they own a trademark and you try to operate in their country so think about this in advance and learn from my mistakes.