Protect Your IP

So, u need to ensure that u have a business identity that u can defend. It seemed like a crazy good idea at the time to secure a TLD like scuba.com and it worked for me for some time. I spent north of a million dollars a year to defend a my sweet little bouncing baby noun/verb/acronym.  Make life easier on yourself and find a weird made up term that gives u a giggle or two and then fight like hell to tie it up and own every square inch of it. So, i was thinking about all of this great advise, of course, when i selected my own word that i invented that meant absolutely nothing. ever. I added it to urban dictionary and facebook and bought the url and tied up twitter, facebook and insta with these five lovely letters. I am a giant fan of irony so i needed to secure a 5 letter acronym successfully…unlike the one i paid zillions for. So this was the birth of coafse. There are so many adept online tools now for securing your trademark and setting up your corporate structure that if you intend to do any commerce you should put those things in place. I have used a few of these but for coafse I decided on Swiftfiling because it looks like just about the most economical.  You don’t have to pay for the search features for trademark or for business name. State and federal agencies will have databases that you can access to do the searches yourself and save some money and it’s kind of a fundamental research piece for selecting the name in the first place. I still recommend a terrestrial website because this is your opportunity to optimize your pages for organic viability for search.  Organic is codeword for free and that’s a good price to pay. Your option is to pay a ton of money to Bing or Google (alphabet)- to have your company turn up in search results. For the coafse website platform-I have selected word press. They have a few different versions of the product & the one I have selected is the business platform which allows for e-commerce. I particularly love word press because it’s easy to deploy-there is even a mobile app that makes it easy to add content. Lastly-since it’s blog format and it’s easy for others to leave comments-I have enabled that feature so I can get feedback on each chapter and modify as necessary. To prevent spam-I have deployed captcha at the point of comment contributions. My goal through this process will be to choose simple tools and have full transparency to make it easy for the next person to bring their project across the finish line. Despite  my opening rant-I still feel really lucky to have the url  Scuba..com.  it’s a pretty unusual acronym that means absolutely one thing. Despite language barriers-it is a pretty universal word.  and there’s no plural version. Some of my other companies have equally cool names and a lot of this is because i think you have to have a tiny bit of a crush on the name you give your business. It’s sort of like naming your kids-you want to have that sound hit your heart hard every time you hear it. So make sure you fall in love with the name u ascribe to your bouncing baby business.   Love, #coafse