Entrepreneurship
Accelerating Startup Growth Initiatives
Helped launch Patent-It, an AI startup that unifies patent search, drafting, and infringement analysis with transparent pricing - enabling inventors and attorneys to move from idea to protection faster and more affordably.
My Role
Head of Business Development
Duration
10 months
Tools
Figma, Adobe Illustrator, MS Excel
Link
Overview
Inventors and small firms juggle multiple tools and unpredictable fees to research and draft patents, creating friction and high upfront costs. We needed to validate demand, secure legal guidance, model our costs, and design a clear MVP - all while scaling our underlying patent corpus.
After mapping the patent service landscape, I did the following:
Advisor Onboarding & Networking: Recruited a seasoned patent attorney as advisor and pitched at Women in Tech & Entrepreneurship events to connect with VCs and investors.
Financial Modeling: Built a burn rate dashboard in MS Excel to project compute and hosting costs at scale.
Design & Branding: Sketched logo concepts in Illustrator, guided a designer to the final brand mark, and began wireframing core screens in Figma.
Customer Feedback: Onboarded early adopter inventors for beta testing, gathering input to refine feature priorities.
Research
Conducted 20+ interviews with inventors and patent attorneys to identify pain points.
Analyzed competitor pricing models and feature sets.
Consulted AI and IP experts to scope infringement analysis workflows.
Design
I led a rapid branding sprint - drafting initial logos in Illustrator and refining them with our designer. I then translated the brand into low-fidelity Figma wireframes for our core patent search and report generation screens, iterating based on advisor and user feedback to ensure clarity and compliance.
Results
Won 1st Place and $5K at UF AI Days Gator Tank pitch competition, validating our pitch and funding initial scale up.
Selected to join UF's Innovation Fellows Incubator ($3K).
Selected as a finalist for the Cox Business Rising Star Startup Award at startGNV.
Scaled patent database from 10K to 18M records, enhancing search accuracy.
Secured early adopters for beta testing, whose feedback drove our MVP roadmap.
