Andrei Mincov, attorney and founder/CEO of Trademark Factory®, reveals his first and favorite client, what had him feeling like Rambo, why Elon Musk definitely is not an idiot, what a trademark is and what it isn’t, which company went from a “lemonade stand with a dream” to a multi-billion dollar valuation, and just what the heck is a Drum Desk?
Legacy means a lot of things to a lot of people. To some, it's lasting integrity. It's building and maintaining a history of greatness. It's making an impact on people and community. For others, it's dependable security and assurance in an uncertain time. To us, it's all of that and more. It's a mindset, a brother and sisterhood of hardworking people dedicated to doing the
right thing for you and those you care about. Of growing today for a better tomorrow. That's what legacy means at Southwestern Legacy Insurance Group. What does it mean to you? Let's talk legacy.
Welcome to Let's Talk Legacy. I'm your host, Gary Michaels. And today we have a real special guest. Andre Minkoff is the founder and CEO of Trademark Factory. He believes people who have created something deserve to not have that stolen from them. And hardworking entrepreneurs shouldn't be taken advantage of. That's why he founded Trademark Factory.
And that's why he is passionate about sharing his experiences. And to him, this is legacy. So welcome to the show, my friend. Thanks for having me, Gary. Great to be here. So your career in this area, a really interesting start, actually beginning in Russia, where you bought a radio station that stole your father's music. Talk a little bit about that.
Yeah, I was born in Russia. You can probably hear it from my accent. You know, I try to not use it too much. But I was born there and I went to my first law school there. And I really didn't see myself as a lawyer. But one day, my dad was a famous composer there, Mark Minkov. He saw on the radio, and it wasn't just played as a song. It was played to advertise an event by Samsung.
Nobody ever asked him if he was okay with that. Nobody ever asked him if he'd like to be paid for that. And so he called the radio station. And said, you guys can take my music and use it as you please. And they told him that they were making him even more famous and that he should just sit down and shut up.
And, you know, if you knew my dad, you'd know very quickly that this was the wrong way for them to handle it. And so he said, OK, great. I'll see you in court. And that was 1996. When Russia has just transitioned from the Soviet laws toward more or less free market laws around IP. And so there weren't really a lot of lawyers who knew how this worked. There were no case, so there's nothing.
And so he said, he came to me and said, can you take this case seriously? and go against the radio station. Like you're supposed to know law. And I used to sing this song with them on like hundreds of concerts when I was a kid growing up, right? So it was personal. And I saw what it was doing to him because he was pissed. And I knew nothing about copyright.
I knew nothing about what you do in the courtroom. But I said, sure, let's figure it out. And so I took them to court. First hearing, you know, I'm there with my long hair and a ponytail. And there's this other lawyer. And I ripped them apart. But they somehow got the postponement. Next time, they had four lawyers on the other side. The judge made the decision that was not in our favor.
I was sitting in my room reading that decision that made zero sense. And my dad came into the room and said, well, what are you going to do now? I did all the right things. I said all the right words. And I don't know what to do. So, well, if you're not going to appeal this decision, you should quit your law school and find yourself a different profession. And so I appealed it. We lost the appeal.
At that point, I figured out what to do later. So we appealed it even higher, basically as high as it gets to the second highest court in the nation. And we won. And in the process, I got really, really passionate about helping people who created something that only exists because they created it to help them protect what's theirs and ensure that that doesn't get stolen from them.
So my dad was my first and favorite client, as I like to put it. Then I had a big career in Russia as copyright lawyer with the biggest international law firm in the world, you know, doing work for JK Rowling, Apple, Microsoft, DreamWorks. If you can think of a big business, I've probably done something for them.
And then in 07, I realized that I had enough of Russia and I moved to Canada just to start everything from scratch. IP has a lot more similarities than many other areas of law because so much of it is done in accordance with international treaties that allow IP owners to protect their stuff in different countries. And so when I went back to the Canadian law school, I said to myself, you know what?
This is a good opportunity for you to try other areas of law and see if you like them. Maybe you fell in love with IP just because of your dad. Maybe there's something else. The only other area of law that I enjoyed, you're going to love it, was insurance law. Oh, wow. Because it was so technical and so logical and really was less about emotion, but more about how can we do what's right.
But I never went into insurance law. I kept with IEP because I realized that it's the one thing that I'm really passionate about. And so- finished my Canadian law school top of my class, got exactly zero offers from Canadian law schools.
It felt a little bit like, you remember Rambo 1 when he's at the store and he says, back in Vietnam, they trusted me with million dollar equipment and here I can't find a job parking cars. That's pretty much how I felt with my years of experience, my PhD in law, my top of the class thing. And nobody would trust me to review a $500 contract.
And so I started my company, still the only firm in the world that offers trademark registration services with a guaranteed result for a guaranteed budget. Really what we do now is we help entrepreneurs, whether they're zero figure entrepreneurs or they're five, six, seven, eight figures. protect what they think will become their legacy. That's really what big brands are.
You're building something that goes beyond you, the founder, and you build a brand that, if you're lucky, thousands and millions of people are going to know, remember, and love and trust. To me, really, trademarks, yeah, there's a money part to it that increases your valuation. It does a billion different things.
But it also builds that legacy that allows you to build something that you'll be remembered.
So we're talking about trademarks here. And so we have a pretty educated audience here on Let's Talk Legacy. But tell us briefly, what exactly is a trademark and what isn't a trademark?
Okay. I'm going to give you a definition that you won't find in the books, but I'm going to give you a definition that I think makes sense. A trademark is a legal right for you to stop someone else from using a brand similar to yours to compete with.
So a brand really could be your name, could be your logo, could be your tagline, could be whatever you feel will identify you from the crowd of competitors who do the exact same thing or something similar to you. But That word, phrase, or image that you want to be your brand does not really become your brand until you can legally stop others from popping you, right?
And the only way to do that is by getting that trademark. If you get a LLC or a corporation registered, that doesn't protect your brand. If you set up a website or get a domain name, that doesn't do it. If you set up a social media profile, that doesn't do it. If you put a TM symbol next to your brand, all it does, it tells them, well, I wanted this as my brand.
But really, you can't do very much with it. Once you file the trademark, once it goes through, that's when you have that legal paper that says, that's my. And that's really what a trademark is. What it's not, it doesn't protect the idea of your business or even copy my business model. But the name, the logos, the taglines, that's what trademarks protect.
What's the difference in a trademark and a copyright?
Well, copyright is more about content, like books, videos, music. That song that the radio station stole, that was copyright infringement. Software. Copyright cannot protect brands, which is why sometimes people say, well, you know, you can just send yourself a letter with your name. and not open it, and that's going to protect your brand. It's not, because that's not what copyright is about.
Really, there's a reason they came up with the trademark law, because when the businesses were starting hundreds of years ago, it was hard for people to do. And so initially, they had this what's called common law rights of passing off, when if you were making shoes and you would put a brand on them,
And someone would copy you to have some recourse to go to court and prove this guy is trying to copy. But then when we went through industrialization, we started getting those factories and became progressively easier for people to build something similar. They realized we need a more robust way for people who invest and spend money building that brand to protect it.
And so they came up with, let's make it easy for people who care about their brands, protect them. And so let's allow them to register it in some registry that's going to have a list of active trademarks. They're going to say who owns them. You know, now today things are getting even harder for brand owners because competition is fierce.
What used to take years for you to build as a brand presence is It can now take days. You can set a website in a matter of days. You can have AI populate all those pages, and you're out there. The question is, how do you make sure that what you came up with stays yours? And that's what trademarks are all about.
Got it. What are some of the most common mistakes you see people making around trademarks? Mistakes of people that didn't get the trademark and wished they would have.
Well, the second type is unfortunately more common. People wait too long before they realize, hey, my brand might actually be worth something. So with Trademark Factory, the first thing we do when someone becomes a client is we do a comprehensive search to confirm that whether this brand is trademarkable or not. Oftentimes, we have to tell them, you know what? Great brand. It's not yours, really.
It's someone else's. You can't have it anymore. And It's usually, you know, it's pretty dramatic because nobody wants to hear that. They say, well, I did my search and I found nothing. Well, because you don't know how to do searches. We do. And so we found this. And so the most painful is when we tell them, you know what? You said you've been running this business for three years.
This other trademark that we found, these guys just filed it six months ago. And they're like, so if I filed my trademark seven months ago, I would have have it? Yep. Yep. That is really the most painful news to deliver because it's a self-inflicted one. They just waited too long. They made their run known to too many people. And at some point, like imagine this.
Imagine if Elon Musk was an idiot and for whatever reason, he chose to not trademark Tesla. And anyone, you or me, could just go up there, follow that trademark and own it. Can you imagine how much money you or I would make, but just by saying, you know, Tesla, I own it now. You can't make cars and call them Tesla. Or you can just buy this trademark off of me.
Exactly. So you're saying somebody creates, I'll just use for example, an amazing lemonade in town, it's local, added at the restaurant, and it's like really catching. Somebody else sees it and say, I know what they're doing. I'm going to go trademark that lemonade, even though I didn't make it, think of it or anything, they can go ahead and do that and get proof for that?
Yeah, because trademarks office doesn't care about anything outside of their own system. So if you haven't filed your trademark, they're going to approve unless the person who came up with the lemonade, what's called opposes the mark. So they have to go and it's almost like a lawsuit within the USPTO system. And if they can prove that their brand.
was made known to a significant number of people across the states, they can win. It's going to cost them a lot of money. It's going to cost them a lot of time. They could have easily prevented by just filing first. But they also have to somehow find out about you. And here's the bigger problem.
If it's a lemonade stand, if it's not federal, usually what it's going to mean is that the shirt and socks office is going to say, you know what? Great. Where are you selling your stuff? I okay, so what it's going to mean is that this guy who copied you will have coverage all across the US as a federal trademark, but you will have a license to continue selling your lemonade in Austin. Oh, geez.
Right? And so really, like I said, the whole idea of Trademarks was to give brand owners who care about their brands an easy way to protect them. And the assumption is if you didn't do it, you probably don't care about it very much because it's so easy to do. Use the tools that we gave you.
Courts are not very sympathetic to entrepreneurs who suddenly remember that their brand is worth something when someone else made a lot of money using it.
Right. You say that trademarking is all about building and protecting a legacy for the business. That obviously makes sense. And you cite Coca-Cola as a really famous example. Tell us the Coke story and if there's a few other good examples that people would recognize.
Yeah. Coca-Cola is literally one of my favorite examples. I will remember it by heart. You wake me up in the middle all the night. I'll tell you. They trademarked their brand back in 1892, which is incidentally the year when they just set up a company and when they were selling nine drinks a day.
I call it a lemonade stand with a dream because all they had is this idea that, hey, if we are going to spend any time, money, and effort trying to build those into... a brand, a national brand, we might as well own it. And trademarks is the only type of intellectual property that you can own forever in theory. Copyrights expire, patents expire, design patents, everything expires.
Trademarks, you can renew and renew and renew. So they've been renewing that same trademarks since 1892. And I can bet that there was a lot of people back there who looked at them and said, why are you – bothering spending money on lawyers to trademark this stuff. It's just a drink.
Right.
Yeah, for sure. The more recent one, which really highlights the value of getting it done right and early, there's this startup called Bird, the electric scooters. You see them everywhere. They were, back in 2021, recognized as the fastest company to grow to a billion-dollar valuation. They knew a thing or two about building a successful business.
So what they did is they started the company and 13 days later, after they started the company, they filed their trademark. Before they launched, before they had their first scooter made, before they, like, I don't know if they had an office back in the day or not, 13 days. Again, because they asked themselves a question, will the brand be important to us if we are to become successful?
And the answer to that was, of course, because if anyone can put a scooter and put the same brand on it, we can't have a viable business model because people are going to be confused and they can't operate like this. And so they said, yeah, brand is going to be important. We want to build it into something that will become big. And so they went and trademarked it.
And now it's part of the billion dollar valuation.
Is there more cost to a certain type of trademark than another cost? Or does everybody follow trademark just the same way?
So there are extreme cases when you file what's called an unconventional trademark, like if you want to trademark a smell or if you want to trademark a sound. So there's significantly more that goes into those. But those are like a fraction of a fraction of 1%. Whether it's name, logo, or tagline, the normal ones. With Trademark Factory, it's the same thing.
And really, that's where the name Trademark Factory was born. Because I asked myself a question. If Bill Gates goes to McDonald's and wants to order a Big Mac, are they going to charge him... 10 times more just because he has more money? No, right? They're going to charge him the exact same thing. And I realized for business owners, for entrepreneurs, a trademark is a trademark.
You don't care how difficult that is for me to give it to you. All you care is did you get one or did you not?
Aside from the incident where you helped defend your father, what else drew you to the area of law? What caught your attention to even go in that direction?
That's a funny story. So in Russia back in the day, if you didn't join a university, if you didn't go to university, you had to join the army. I'm a short guy, not tremendously, you know, big muscle. I didn't want to join the freaking army. And so I realized I got to go to a university. I got to study something. And I had no idea what I wanted to do. I was zero.
Then I remembered that when I was growing up, I would always come up with some arguments to get what I wanted to get from my parents. Like, I would structure it in a way that they felt compelled to give me what I want. And they would say, I got to be a lawyer, right? When I was four or five years old, right? Maybe I should become a lawyer.
And the other part of that was, it was 1992 when I had to make the decision to go to university. That's when Russia was just collapsing. And even though my father was a famous composer, he was barely making enough money for us to eat. We were all used to a very good standard of living before that. And I saw how unreliable that was, even if you were as talented as he was.
And so before that, I was studying music and still love music. But I realized I didn't want to be in a position when I wouldn't be making any money. So like, what can I learn that that is an easy path to comfortable living? Yeah. And so I went to the law school really for the first couple of years. All I cared about was girls, alcohol and parties and music, rock and roll.
But then my dad heard his music and that changed everything so very quickly for me. So the overall success rate with trademarks filed in the U.S. is 51.7%. It means half of the trademarks filed never make it. With Trademark Factory, it's 99.3%. So we do something different from everyone else.
And there was this other category of websites out there that, you know, I'm sure your listeners have come across, you know, those $69 offers. Whoa, we've got to trademark your brand in five minutes. Right. They do not even follow through a lawyer because they've duped a lot of entrepreneurs into using them. And some trademarks go through, even through them. But their model is also the same.
And we're going to file your trademark. And then if it doesn't go through, well, too bad, so sad. I wanted to do something different. I want to give them the assurance that there's someone on their side who actually gives a damn and who wants to give them the same result that they deserve.
Absolutely. So as you know, our show is called Let's Talk Legacy. And I'm curious, what does legacy mean to you both on the business side and then in your personal family?
On the business side, it's easy, really. It's building something. that transcends you, something that you want to be remembered for. And it's really, we build businesses. One reason, of course, is to live a comfortable life. That's great. But the only way we get rich, the only way we make that money is when we give the world something that the world wants.
The more of it we do, the better trace we leave. And that's what, to me, legacy is about. Like with brands, I'm going to challenge you. Try thinking of one successful business without thinking of its brand. It can't. Because the brand is what we think about when we think of a successful brand. The brand is the thing. It is the thing we remember the business for. And that's the legacy part.
On the personal side, I just want to be remembered for being a happy father, happy husband, and happy guy who played the drums. And it was a little crazy just to move from Russia to Canada, from Canada to Dubai. And I don't know what else is going to lie ahead of me, but who lived a happy life and did something that's worth remembering. Goodbye.
Awesome. So before we let you go, you've got to tell us about your drum desk. Yeah. I'm sure people would get a kick out of this. What in the heck is the drum desk?
It's something that I dreamt up maybe 12, 15 years, I can't remember, but a lot of years ago. And the idea was, how do I combine an office desk where I will do boring work with something that's going to give me the energy, something that's going to make me excited about being here. And I love drums. Like from my high school days, I loved drumming.
I remember to this day, like we were in the classroom and me and my friend were listening to Wasps, I Want to Be Somebody. And then there's the section in the break where they're like... We were just using pencils and rulers, just playing that. And one day we're like, hey, why don't we go and learn to play the drums? And so it became my big passion.
And like, how can I combine a disc with a drum set? And I had some ideas about this. And then one day I'm like, you know what? I've actually made enough money that I can make this dream a reality. I put together my thinking cap. And I'm not much of an engineer. I don't understand physics all that well.
But I wanted to figure out how can I make it work so that the surface that you write on or that you type on doesn't prevent you from using the surface of the drums. And so it has this thing that moves away. And my biggest concern was how do you make sure it doesn't topple over? I figured out how to do it. And so it has a fully functional double bass kit
For those of you listening today, he literally is. Look, we're looking each other face to face here. He is playing the drum like you would see a normal drum player playing. That's awesome.
If you go to YouTube, you can search for Andre's Dream Drum Desk. It will show you the whole thing. It will show you how I play it.
It's a little video that I shot and that'll give you... You probably just got several more views on your YouTube, my friend. If someone wanted to get in touch with you, talk to you about trademarking and getting their company trademarked, how would they reach you?
So, TrademarkFactory.com is the easiest way. There's a big button that says book a free call with one of our strategy advisors. Click that button, you fill out a little form, and you get on a call. And they're going to answer all your questions. They're going to help you prioritize what to start with, where, what. And if you feel that is a good fit, they're going to help you get started.
And if not, then you get free advice. That's one thing. And If you want to learn more about trademarks, I've posted close to a thousand videos on that YouTube channel. And if there's a question about trademarks, I'll probably answer it more than once. So that's another way to kind of get to know us a little better.
And once you realize that, hey, there's a reason I came up with a brand for my business. This is the stuff that kills me. And that's to your point about mistakes. There's a reason you came up with some name. You didn't go with just a random number or random sequence of letters. There was something going through your head. There was something going through your heart.
You were like, I want this business, have this name. It means it meant something to you. There's one message that I want to finish on is that your brand, Even if you haven't built it into something huge, it's not worthless. It's worth something.
And if you are planning, if you're hoping that one day you're going to build it into something successful, something worth remembering you by, go and get a trademark today because tomorrow might be too late.
Yeah.
When you book that call with a strategy advisor, mention you came from this show. We're going to do something special for you because, you know, to me, legacy means a lot. And I really appreciate you having me on the show. So as a thank you to you, we're going to pass that thank you to everyone who comes from the show.
Just tell your strategy advisor we're here from Let's Talk Legacy and they're going to do something special for you.
That's awesome. Well, gosh, thank you so much, Andre. It's really been thought provoking for me and I know our listeners are going to love it.
Thank you. If you've enjoyed today's podcast and want to learn more, visit us at southwesternlegacy.com. Shoot us an email via our easy contact form to find out how you can become an agent or how we can meet your needs for final expense coverage. You can find this and other episodes at letstalklegacypod.com on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, and anywhere else you listen to podcasts.
Let's Talk Legacy is a presentation of the Southwestern Legacy Insurance Group, a member of Southwestern Family of Companies.