As a brand guy, I’ve registered a few trademarks and I’ve advised clients on registering trademarks with the UK Intellectual Property Office.
So when it came to registering Comus as a trademark, it felt obvious that I should just get on with it myself.
I paid the £170, submitted the application, and considered it done.
It was only after submitting it that I realised I’d made a mistake.
What I got wrong with the trademark filing
When you apply for a trademark, you select the class your business falls into. As a SaaS business, that part was straightforward: Class 42 – scientific, technological, and IT services.
Within the class, you then need to select the specific services you’ll be providing. This is where I went badly wrong.
You choose from a pre-approved list of services. You can either browse the full list or search by keyword. I’ve done this before. I assumed I knew what I was doing. So I searched by keyword.
I searched for “SaaS” and found this option:
Software as a service [SaaS] featuring software for machine learning
I read that as “SaaS (including AI)” — essentially the SaaS option, with AI covered for good measure.
So I selected it, moved on, paid, and filed the application.
The next day I logged back in and, this time, looked at the full list of services. That’s when I saw it:
Software as a service [SaaS]
I hadn’t selected it.
I had applied for a trademark that didn’t actually cover the one thing we needed to protect. Instead, I’d applied for SaaS featuring software for machine learning: something we don’t do.
That mistake is now permanently visible: a withdrawn application on the IPO database, sitting right next to our successful trademark registration.
What was the impact of this mistake?
Financially, it wasn’t a big deal, just irritating.
We withdrew the application and started again. That cost another £170. We also added an extra class the second time, which was another £50.
The real impact wasn’t financial. It was psychological.
I’d made a basic error in an area I’m supposed to know. An area I’ve charged money for in the past. And it made me question whether I actually know what I’m doing.
Most people experience imposter syndrome at some point. I build brands and websites for a living, but I’ve never held a relevant qualification. Everything I know comes from experience, years of trying things, breaking things, and figuring it out as I go.
After that amount of time, you don’t expect to make such a basic mistake.
It took me months to snap out of it. That’s why there’s a gap between withdrawing the first application and registering the second. It affected my decision-making too. I started second-guessing myself and struggled to be as decisive as I normally am.
What snapped me back out of it was a conversation with an experienced business owner about something completely unrelated: solicitors.
His view was essentially this: solicitors think they know what they’re doing and try to protect you from everything, but the advice is untested. You only find out whether a contract works when it’s actually used. You can spend £100k on legal advice and still have it fall apart when it hits reality.
That perspective stuck with me.
Experts give the best advice they can at the time. They’re human. They make mistakes. They can be confidently wrong. Failure doesn’t mean you’re incompetent, it just teaches you how not to do something next time.
And in my case, I reapplied for the trademark properly and it was granted.
Mistake made. Lesson learned.
