Not much to discuss today other than a company saying we are possibly infringing on their trademark. When our attorneys went to file our trademark this company never came up…so is this something to even worry about? Is it better for us to rebrand and avoid all of the legal nonsense that may come? Hell, I don’t know.
So the trademark “Just Fix It” is in question. While we share two common words, they have a trademark filed in a different class (class 37) and we have already filed in a class 35. We are lead gen, marketing, etc. They are in the home service contractors class. We are completely different in how we operate, our customer is not the homeowner, and are a tech company.
So we got wind of this last week via a email and I called them back. They seem to be nice people and simply want to defend their business and trademark which I can understand but I just don’t see the connection. We kind of do overlap in the fact we have HVAC providers on our website but we, Fix it Today, do not do any of the work ourselves. Can they simply say no business in the US can have the words “Fix” and “It” in their name? Sounds like nonsense.
So the question is…where do we go from here. While Fix it Today is an awesome name, we are early in our business and its much easier to rebrand now rather than later. The question is how much do we have to spend to find out? How long do we have to go to find out? It’s much worse to find out in a year we need to rebrand than it is to just suck it up and do it now. It will also be a hell of a lot cheaper than paying nonsense legal fees over the next year.
Some days I wished we got a short name like Uber, Lyft, Stripe, etc. These names are trendy but the idea is to have a very simple name that is easy to find and remember. Fix it Today is pretty simple to remember and find but its a little long. Should we rebrand? I guess we are going to have to start the legal process to find out how far both parties want to really go into this to see who is right. Our lawyer said that nobody’s opinion matters except the judge’s opinion. The problem is always how far people are willing to go to find out who is right. Sucks that this is how our system is built.
