Ask HN: Do provisional patents matter for early-stage startups?

There are exceptions to ever rule, but generally patents are (1) not incredibly important in software (2) solving a question that's secondary.

The biggest risk to building a startup isn't "can I build this thing" (feasibility risk). It's "will people even care if I build this thing" (value risk) then "can I do it in a way people use" (usability risk). Patents help solve business risk, but that's generally considered to be the 4th (and last) of the risks.

There are exceptions where patents do need to be filed first or the business viability dies. However, I generally assume that if you've addressed value, usability, and feasibility risks to create something truly meaningful, your competitors will find a work around to deliver the same value, usability, and feasibility without infringing on your patent. Thus, patents, are nothing but a minor inconvenience. In some cases, the public filing of a patent, can give your competitors a leg up on competing with you.

https://www.svpg.com/four-big-risks/

Solo founder here building B2B SaaS in a niche vertical (accounting automation). My take: your moat at pre-seed isn't IP, it's domain depth.

I decided early not to patent anything. Not because our technical approach isn't novel - we have some genuinely interesting pattern matching pipelines - but because the defensibility comes from accumulated domain knowledge that's almost impossible to replicate quickly. We've hand-built logic for 16 different VAT code classifications, edge cases in how platforms handle API fields differently, quirks in how bank statement descriptions vary across hundreds of merchants. None of that is patentable. All of it is incredibly hard to reproduce.

A competitor could read a patent filing and build a workaround in months. They can't shortcut two years of discovering that one accounting platform silently ignores a field that every other platform respects, or that merchant descriptions follow completely different patterns at different transaction amounts.

The practical concern with provisionals is the 12-month clock. If you file one, you've committed to either converting to a full patent (expensive, time-consuming) or letting it lapse. At pre-seed, that's a decision you're forcing on your future self at potentially the worst possible time.

If your "core technical approaches" are truly about AI model architecture, that's a different conversation - but if it's mostly about how you apply models to a specific domain, I'd argue your time is better spent going deeper into the domain than drafting patent claims.

From what I have seen, early investors care far more about speed, adoption, and clarity of problem than provisionals. Patents help later, but at pre-seed/seed they rarely change a decision unless IP is the product. Shipping and learning usually wins.

I work in IP. You can easily operate without patents. Patents cost money to file and maintain. Most patents exist only for marketing purposes. Enforcement also isn't cheap. So, unless the IP is perceived to be highly valuable, corporations don't bother filing the patent. Only a fraction of what's patentable ever gets patented.

Go read The Founder's Dilemma by Wasserman. It's great and covers almost any problem a founder will run into. To really summarize, it's all about trade offs and prioritization. Patents vs trade secrets fits nicely.

Trade secrets are far cheaper and easier to maintain than patents. In short, patents are only as strong as your ability to enforce them. Also Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International (2014) weakened software and process patents. That said, if you can’t realistically defend IP in court, you effectively don’t have it. From an early-stage founder perspective, that makes patents a questionable use of time and money and potentially what kills the company.

This may contrast from information you get from a lawyer or VC. Patents are attractive because they create an asset someone else can later buy or defend. For the founder, the incentives aren’t squarely aligned.

Neither approach is more right or wrong, but there are very real practical consequences. If you are pre-seed who is bootstrapped or done a family & friends round and are pre or early revenue, trade secrecy is by far your better option.

As an additional note, if you don't own the underlying AI models and are just a better wrapper for Claude or ChatGPT you at best have a very weak IP or patent position.

In very early stages, signaling often matters more than protection. A provisional can buy time, but traction or a clear narrative usually does more to move conversations forward.

Typically not much, but in practice if you truly have a unique technical moat it's easy enough that I'd get a provisional patent in place just in case.

I would start accumulating patents at a gradual pace at around $100m ARR in preparation for IPO, assuming that you feel that is in the cards.

What are you delivering? A physical product into someone's hands? If so, a patent can make some sense. If not, don't bother - patents for software are rarely worth the paper they're printed on.

Could make sense to file provisional patents, just to be able to say you have them. Expect no one will actually look at them. And remember that if you don't file a follow up within a certain time, they die.

You might consider a non-disclosure agreement with parties that you need to share things with.