When you’re building deep tech products outside India’s metro innovation hubs, you’re not just solving technical challenges—you’re also navigating infrastructure gaps. One of the hardest things we did as a startup based in Ahmedabad was filing our patents.
Unlike Delhi or Mumbai, the two main Intellectual Property (IP) hubs of India, Ahmedabad doesn’t have a strong bench of high-quality patent lawyers, especially for tech startups solving niche or complex problems. What this meant for us was simple, but brutal:
We had to write our patents ourselves.
🧾 Why We Couldn’t Rely on a Patent Lawyer
It wasn’t just about availability. We did hire an IP lawyer early on. But very quickly, we realized that:
- The technical depth required to explain our invention was getting lost in translation.
- Explaining the idea to the lawyer was more time-consuming than writing it ourselves.
- Every draft returned to us felt like a shallow version of what we actually built.
So we took the long road—we filed the patent ourselves, from search to claims to formatting. And here’s what that journey looked like.
🔍 The Most Time-Consuming Phase: Patent Search
Before we wrote a single word of our patent, we had to make sure no one had already filed it.
This was the hardest part.
Patent search is like doing detective work across obscure PDFs, WIPO databases, USPTO filings, and Google Patents. You not only need to search exact phrases, but also variants, synonyms, and even how other people may have described your exact invention using completely different language.
This alone took weeks. But skipping this step would have been a fatal mistake.
✍️ The Writing Process (Our Order)
Once we were confident our IP was novel, we followed this structure:
1. Claims (Most Important)
Claims define the legal boundary of your invention. If your patent is a fortress, claims are its walls. Writing these took the most effort—they had to be precise, defensible, and technically sound.
2. Diagrams
We created diagrams not for aesthetics, but to guide the examiner’s mental model. These became critical when explaining workflows, system interactions, and edge cases.
3. Description
Once the claims and visuals were locked, writing the description was relatively easier. It had to be detailed but also accessible enough for a non-specialist examiner to understand.
4. Abstract (Deceptively Tricky)
The abstract seemed easy—just a few lines! But it turned out to be the most delicate piece. It’s the first thing anyone reads—including potential competitors and investors. It had to capture the essence of the invention without revealing too much.