From a spark to a strategy
you can act on.
EntreDash walks you through the whole journey, one real step at a time. Here is exactly what happens, why it works, and how your idea stays yours the entire way.
Capture your random spark before you lose it. Refine it together. Walk into your attorney meeting prepared, and make every billable hour count.
Not a chatbot. A structured journey that produces concrete artifacts at every stage — an invention strategy memo, prior-art search plan, drafting workbench, and a curated attorney match when you're ready to file. The work you do here is real preparation for the conversation that actually files your patent.
Capture the spark.
A few sentences in plain English is enough to start. We help you flesh it out as we go.
Refine it together.
A real, adaptive conversation that asks the questions a patent attorney would, but in plain language. You learn the IP basics as you talk.
Get an honest answer.
A clear Go, Pivot, or Stop verdict, backed by real US prior art. If it is a Go, we tell you what to do next.
An idea, on its own, isn't patentable.
The patent office doesn't grant patents for sparks. It grants them for fully developed inventions — novel, non-obvious, useful, and described in enough technical detail that someone else in your field could actually build them. The gap between “I had a thought” and “I have an invention worth filing” is real, and it's where most independent inventors get stuck.
Most people don't find this out until they've already paid an attorney $700 an hour to tell them. EntreDash helps you do the developing work first — turning a spark into the kind of structured, defensible description a patent attorney would actually want to file.
Not what your invention does — how it does it. Components, interactions, the actual technical claim that distinguishes it from existing things.
Find the closest existing patents and products. Identify what is genuinely new and what is just a tweak. This alone kills 60% of patent applications before they cost real money.
Some ideas are inventions but bad investments. Some are great inventions in a saturated field. You should know which before you spend $5,000+.
Your idea is the seed. The invention is what you grow from it. EntreDash is the workbench where that happens — before you ever pay an attorney to file it.
Whichever path you take, EntreDash is your co-pilot.
Once you have a verdict, the question becomes: who actually files the patent? Most inventors should work with a registered patent attorney — that's the path we recommend in most cases. Some choose to file themselves after weighing the tradeoffs. EntreDash supports the path you choose with step-by-step guidance.
- Cost: $75–$1,600 in USPTO fees
- Best for: Simple mechanical inventions, provisional filings, inventors who want to learn the process
- Harder for: Software, chemistry, biotech, anything you plan to license commercially
- ✓Drafting Workbench for claims, abstract, and specifications
- ✓USPTO form preparation walkthroughs
- ✓Office action response guidance in plain English
- ✓Filing fee and timing reminders
- Cost: $5,000–$30,000+ depending on complexity
- Best for: Complex inventions, anything you'll license commercially, fields requiring specialty expertise
- Tradeoff: Higher quality patent; you become passive in your own filing if you're not prepared
- ✓Attorney brief generator — walk in prepared, save billable hours
- ✓Practitioner Marketplace to match you by field, location, and budget
- ✓Cost estimator before you sign any retainer
- ✓Translates attorney communications into plain English
For full utility filings, an attorney is almost always worth it. Claim drafting is the most leveraged hour in the patent process. Most inventors should plan to engage a registered patent attorney or agent for the utility conversion — even when the provisional was filed pro se to save money.
The more you understand the process, the fewer billable hours you owe. EntreDash is designed to make you a more prepared client. Walking into your first attorney meeting with a strategy memo, prior-art context, and a clear invention description can save several hours at $400–$700 per hour.
Coming next: your strategy memo includes a personalized pathway recommendation. A deeper pros-and-cons analysis specific to your invention — with drafting templates, an attorney brief generator, and office-action response guidance — unlocks in the Drafting Workbench module.
The choice between pathways depends on your specific situation. We always recommend consulting a registered patent attorney before filing a full utility application.
General AI chatbots are brilliant. They aren't built for inventors.
We get asked this constantly — and it's a fair question. The short answer: general AI chat tools like consumer ChatGPT were built for general work. EntreDash is a strategy engine — it packages the workflows of a product strategist, an intellectual property (IP) consultant, and a financial analyst into a single experience that handholds you from a random idea to a clear next-step roadmap. It's not a legal precision tool, and it doesn't replace a patent attorney. It's the strategy partner most independent inventors never had access to.
A general-purpose chatbot.
- No invention or patent specialization
- Hallucinates patent numbers, no live database access
- Free-form chat — no roadmap, no structured deliverable
- Speaks like an LLM, not a strategist
- Consumer chatbots train on your data by default
- $20 / month subscription
A strategy engine for inventors.
- Combines a product strategist, IP consultant, and financial analyst
- Live search against US patent and Google Patents corpus
- Strategy memo: verdict, prior art, filing roadmap, next steps
- Plain English — designed to handhold everyday inventors
- Enterprise-grade AI APIs — your inputs are never used for training
- Free to try. Paid plans from $12.99 / month
Sharing details of an unpatented invention with a consumer AI service that trains on your inputs may, under US patent law, constitute a public disclosure of your invention — which can permanently affect your ability to obtain a patent on it.
EntreDash runs on enterprise-grade AI infrastructure that contractually never trains on customer data, paired with our own Confidentiality Terms. That is one of the most consequential differences between the two tools.
Educational analysis — not legal advice. For binding determinations about your specific invention, consult a registered patent attorney.
A general AI tool can help you brainstorm. It can't ground its answers in real US prior art, walk you through the strategic and financial tradeoffs of filing, or hand you a structured roadmap for what to do next. That's the gap EntreDash is built to close — invention strategy guidance, not legal advice.
The workflow exists. You've just never had access to it.
The USPTO uses AI to classify every patent application that crosses its desk. Top law firms run AI-powered prior art searches before drafting a single claim. Fortune 500 IP departments pay six figures a year for patent-AI vendors most independent inventors have never heard of. The tools exist — and so does the workflow that decides what's worth using them on.
- ×Pay an attorney to evaluate every idea you bring
- ×File everything — expensive
- ×File blindly — wasteful
- ✓Run ideas through internal review first
- ✓Structured questioning, novelty checks, stage-gate triage
- ✓Only the strongest ideas escalate to outside counsel
EntreDash brings that same screening workflow within reach of every inventor — structured questioning, a clear verdict, a roadmap. So when you do hire an attorney, you walk in with the right idea, not every idea — and only after you've built real confidence in it.
Patents are one tool. There are others.
Most inventors think IP means patents. It doesn't. The IP landscape has four major instruments, and the best protection often layers two or three of them together.
Protects inventions and their function.
~20 years
e.g. A self-cooling water bottle
Protects names, logos, brand identifiers.
Indefinite while in use
e.g. The brand name on the bottle
Protects creative expression.
Life + 70 years
e.g. The packaging artwork
Protects confidential know-how.
As long as the secret holds
e.g. The cooling-element recipe
Protects how something works — the function, mechanism, or method. This is what most inventors file.
Protects how something looks — the ornamental appearance. Useful for visual knockoff deterrence.
A granted patent gives you the legal right to stop others from making, using, or selling your invention for the life of the patent. That's it.
It does not automatically generate revenue. It does not enforce itself. You still have to commercialize, license, or assert it. Think of a patent as a defensive moat around the value you create — not the value itself.
What happens to your idea, and what doesn't.
Not a privacy promise. The actual mechanism, point by point.
A contractual commitment in our terms, not a preference you have to find and switch off. Your idea is never added to any training set, ours or anyone else’s.
It exists in no search index, internal or external. No one can find it by browsing or querying, and it is never surfaced in anyone else’s results.
No one at Me’Invent reads it. It is processed only by the system that builds your results — until you explicitly request a practitioner connection and reach a USPTO-registered attorney.
You own everything you create here. Every idea you capture, every refinement, and every memo we generate belongs to you, the inventor. We take no license, no assignment, and no claim of any kind.
We research your idea by searching public patent, prior-art, and market records (USPTO, Google Patents, Census, SEC filings, competitor sites) using terms drawn from it. We read those sources; the idea itself is never posted, filed, or shared.
The safest place for an idea feels like your own head.
The only real risk is leaving it unbuilt.
Nothing here is used to train AI, and you can delete it anytime.