Starting a business in which you are confident and believe that it is able to scale, you immediately ask yourself questions about a trademark, domain name and image. After all, you want everything to be right from the very beginning.
Prices for trademark registration
Everything is right and expensive. If you do business only in Estonia, then the cost of registering your trademark and brand name costs 300 euros. Not so much, but if we want to “stake out”, for example, a name in the entire European Union (there is one site for this, where you can register a trademark), then you already need to lay out 1100 euros on the table and this is only the brand name and just a few categories in which you can write it down. That is, for example, you can stake up to 3 areas, computer games, games for development, organization of collective games. Moreover, as you can see from the example, all categories are still very overlapping, and for choosing, for example, marketing or finance, please pay extra about +200 euros.
Do you want to register a logo? Then be kind enough to lay out another 1100 euros. It's certainly nice here that if you make a black and white version, then it will cover all the color variations of your logo, but the categories still have the same trouble as in the case of the name.
Pitfalls
And now let's talk about the most offensive. Think it gives you "protection"? Of course, to some extent it does, but all your applications can be challenged by other companies. Lawyers call these things an “attack” on your brand, and the more categories you choose, the more likely it is that a court can invalidate your application for some area if other companies try to challenge your application. Why? Yes, you need to proceed from the goals and direction of your business, doing, for example, cosmetology, the court will consider the closed category in IT as nonsense. Ultimately, you can't actually register everything under your name, or you must then actually do business in all categories to have a good justification. Plus, for all the “attacks” on your brand and litigation, you will need to shell out money and, most importantly, waste your time.
And even more embarrassing. You bought a name and llogo, laid out 2500 euros and protection is given to you for only 10 years. This is, in principle, the duration of all transactions in the European Union. And in 10 years you will have to bring a new pack.
Is all this necessary?
Does it all make sense? I'm not sure if such a path is needed firme with a turnover of less than 150 euros per year. In-firstly, you can always change everything and choose a name that is free, since the company still does not have so many clients to talk about the weight of the name. And for startups, these things are all just deadly. I speak based on my personal experience.