The Traklight Blog

This article originally appeared on the GoDaddy blog. 

With the new year fast approaching, now is the time for people to make resolutions for 2016. We're all going to eat better, exercise more, finally tell off that neighbor that's been eyeballing us since we moved in. But words are cheap, and few of us meet those goals we so ambitiously set forth in the excitement of a fresh start.

Is your small business on track to succeed? How do you know? How do you communicate that knowledge to stakeholders? It turns out that the answer is found in how well you understand your business’s intangible or strategic assets—those assets which you cannot see or touch, but are powerful enough to trip you up if you miss them.

If a potential investor looked at your company today, what value would you place on the company? How would the investor value the company? These are both interesting questions to ask yourself and ones that you need to have answers for to be ready.

If you’re familiar with venture capital, then you probably know how hard it is to transform an idea into a profitable and successful project. This is because new ideas, regardless of how promising they are, are associated with all kinds of risks that must be thoroughly monitored at all times to avoid losing the money invested.

A question we frequently receive here at Traklight is why should I identify my intangible assets? In our marketing, we show how our own products help businesses easily identify intellectual property (IP), which consists of assets that are both tangible and intangible. At first glance, identifying tangible assets always looks more important because they're things you see and physically use. But many of the intangible assets in your business bring more value than you probably ever knew.

Today we're featuring a new crowdfunding project known as Kit Lab, a site where you can sell ingredient kits of your home brewing recipes. Kit Lab packs and ships the kits, authors share in the profits. The crowdfunding campaign launches tomorrow, April 2nd (link coming as soon as it's up). Our interview with Kit Lab founder Ryan Sanders is below.

1. Why did you start Kit Lab?

I started Kit Lab because I wanted to solve the headaches I was running into when brewing from recipes I found online. I also felt like I wanted a better way to know when my favorite authors posted new recipes online. What materialized from those needs was Kit Lab, a site where you can follow your favorite recipe authors, receive notifications when they post new recipes, and where when you find a recipe you’d like to try, you can simply “click to brew” and the exact ingredients are on their way to your doorstep. Simple!

If you've just opened a new business, this question perhaps hasn't crossed your mind yet: Is IP part of your business's foundation? In order to answer, you might wish to understand your intellectual property (IP) and how it factors into making any money. But before you do that, statistics tell us you probably aren't paying enough attention to how important your IP is. Some small businesses do not fully comprehend the importance of what IP does for them and that is the crucial mistake they are making.

Women make up 82 percent of network marketers due to their many awesome abilities. Those amazing capabilities, however, also put women at risk of being ripped off. Let’s say a woman has created a jammin’ anti-aging skin cream with a proprietary blend of herbs. She tests in on herself for two years and then waits another year to see if any side effects happen. She has pictures of her progress and vines of people congratulating her. She contacted Washington, D.C. for a trademark on her product which she calls WhatAge? A trademark is an intangible asset; it isn't physical meaning it can't be touched, but it protects which makes it an asset.

Specializing in intellectual property (IP), we often come in contact with people who know they have something unique to protect, but aren't entirely sure what that is. Cornell University School of Law defines intellectual property as "any product of the human intellect that the law protects from unauthorized use by others."

That definition is accurate, fine, and useful...if you understand the legal speak they're using. But for the lay person, what is IP for a creative type?