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If you have a special talent, hobby or skill that could create a little nest egg that could be allocated for your invention, this is a great way to come up with the needed cash. Do you have a service you can offer to make extra cash or a product that you can create and sell? Lots of people have taken the time to learn specialized crafting and they can make and sell products or offer a class to teach others the skill. We know of a man whose “regular” job is an airline pilot, but in his spare time, he designs and creates special t-shirts for charity events, sporting events, school groups and so on.

Think about what you like to do in your spare time. Do you play an instrument so that you could provide music for social occasions? Perhaps you know how to bake beautiful pastries or can sew like a professional. Can you groom pets or teach a craft? Get your creative juices flowing about what you could do in your spare time that would bring in the extra income to pay your invention costs.

If you can finance your invention from your own funds, this is the very best, least complicated way to go. We did exactly this with a twist. As we have previously mentioned, quite a lot of the initial steps were funded by our personal savings. Once we were patent pending we started manufacturing and selling Ghostline® on a limited basis. We loaded up the trunk of the car with 100-piece packages and drove around selling it to local independent teacher stores and office supply stores. We made enough money doing this to pay the legal fees when our First Office Action came back from the patent office. An Office Action is any correspondence that comes from the USPTO relating to your application for protection of your intellectual property, whether it is a patent application or a trademark application. Office Actions require a response from whomever is prosecuting your application.

We also made enough money from sales of the poster board to pay for the next run of the product. Several times we repeated the cycle of manufacturing small runs and then selling it to earn enough money for the next run and to pay patent related expenses until we finally received notice that our patent would be allowed. So, even though we weren’t selling a lot of Ghostline®, we were “in the black.” We were covering our expenses as we went.

By proceeding in the pay-as-you-go mode we kept complete control of our product and our company. For us, it was the right decision. Success might have come sooner had we gotten investors or loans, but the comfort of knowing that we were limiting our financial risk was worth the extra time it may have taken. Only you can decide if this is the proper course of action for you and your product. If your product is “time sensitive,” that is if it is essential that you get to market as soon as possible or risk losing out entirely, you may need to consider the following options.