IP / Patents · Marketplace · AI · 2024 — 2025
MindMiner is a two-sided marketplace for invention: companies post the problems they cannot solve, inventors submit ideas, and the ones that get used turn into patents and payouts. The entire product rests on one thing — an inventor believing their idea is safe the moment they type it in.
Executive Summary
Open innovation has an obvious shape and a hard centre. Companies have problems they cannot solve internally; there are people outside who can solve them. Connecting the two looks like a directory problem and is not.
It is a disclosure problem. An idea has no value until it is described, and describing it is exactly what makes it possible to take without paying. Every inventor knows this, which is why the good ones stay quiet — and a marketplace with only the ideas people were relaxed about sharing is a marketplace of weak ideas.
So the product leads with the guarantees rather than the catalogue. IP protection, guaranteed payouts and a global network are stated before a single challenge is shown, because they are the actual product. The challenge feed, the credits, the IP points are all mechanisms for making participation feel survivable enough to start.
Section 02 — The Problem
The disclosure paradox is not a UX problem you can design around with reassuring copy. Until an inventor believes submission creates a record that favours them, the rational move is to submit nothing worth having.
A company that receives four hundred submissions has bought itself four hundred evaluations. Open innovation fails on the review burden far more often than it fails on idea quality.
Guaranteed payouts is a strong claim, and strong claims are load-bearing. The first time someone contributes a used idea and is not paid, the story travels further than any marketing did.
Section 03 — Research & Discovery
Retention is the wrong first problem here. A marketplace like this dies at first submission — the moment someone with a genuinely valuable idea decides the risk is not worth the expected return and closes the tab.
That reframes discovery around a narrow question: what has to be visibly true, before signing up, for a cautious expert to type their idea into someone else's website. Everything on the landing surface is downstream of that answer, which is why the guarantees appear above the challenge feed rather than in a policy page.
The informative population is the one that arrived, read the terms and left. Everyone who completed a submission had already accepted the trade — they can tell you about the form, not about the fear.
In a product whose core promise is 'your idea stays yours', the IP terms are the highest-stakes text on the site. Treating them as a legal artefact to be linked rather than a product surface to be designed is how trust products quietly fail.
Section 04 — Current State Analysis
Before / After
The activity is the same in both columns — a company has a problem and someone outside has an answer. What changes is whether the person with the answer is willing to say it.
Before
Unprotected
Company publishes a problem
Inventor decides whether disclosure is safe — and usually decides it is not
Disclosure riskAnything submitted arrives with unclear ownership
No recordCompany sifts volume with no reliable signal
The strongest ideas are the ones least likely to be sent, which inverts the quality of everything received.
After
Protected
Company posts a challenge with a stated reward
Submission creates a timestamped, attributed record
Evaluation happens against declared criteria
Used ideas convert into patents and payouts
Protection and payout are mechanisms in the flow, not promises in a footer — which is what makes a cautious expert willing to start.
Section 05 — Competitive Research
Rival platforms are not what this product mostly loses to. It loses to inaction — the expert who reads the page, concludes the asymmetry is not in their favour, and keeps the idea for a patent they may never file.
That sets the bar differently. Beating another marketplace on features is a smaller job than beating the default of silence, and the things that beat silence are legibility and evidence: clear ownership terms, a visible payout mechanism, and named examples of people who were actually paid.
Both are free and neither requires trusting a stranger. The platform has to be clearly better than doing nothing, which is a higher bar than being better than a competitor.
Trust in this category is transferred, not argued. One credible, specific payout story does more than any amount of copy about protection — which makes surfacing those stories a product decision, not a marketing one.
Section 06 — Key Insights
The instinct is to show challenges first, because that is the content. But nobody evaluates a challenge before deciding whether participating is safe — so protection and payout have to clear that gate first.
Challenges can be commissioned; credible inventors cannot. The scarce side sets the pace, and every growth decision should be read against whether it makes that side more or less willing to participate.
IP points and credits are engagement mechanics, but they sit next to a real financial claim. Anything that looks like a game beside anything that looks like money makes users ask which one the payout resembles — and the answer must always be the money.
Section 07 — Design Strategy
'Guaranteed payouts' is either a system or a liability, and users find out which one at the worst possible moment.
Rights negotiated after disclosure are negotiated from the weaker position, and inventors know it.
An opaque decision after an idea has been handed over reads as a taking, whatever the intent was.
Companies can be recruited; inventors with valuable ideas leave quietly and do not come back.
Section 08 — The System
The idea exists on the platform as a timestamped, attributed record. Ownership is established here or it is never established at all.
Assessed against the criteria published with the challenge. The inventor's rights do not weaken because a company is now reading it.
Either it converts into a patent path and a payout, or the idea returns to the inventor cleanly. The second outcome matters as much as the first.
The third state is the one that earns repeat participation. An inventor whose idea was not selected but who walked away with their rights intact will submit again; one who is unsure what happened to it will not, and will say so publicly.
Section 09 — The Features
Companies post problems with rewards attached and new challenges arrive daily, but the first thing the product asserts is IP protection, guaranteed payouts and the reach of the network — because that is what determines whether anyone participates at all.
A submission becomes an attributed record, evaluation runs against declared criteria, and a used idea converts into a patent path and a payment — with the unselected case returning rights cleanly rather than leaving them ambiguous.
A signup grant and an accumulating IP balance lower the cost of starting, and are deliberately kept legible as engagement mechanics so they are never mistaken for the payout itself.
Section 10 — User Flow
The real conversion point, and it happens before any account exists. Everything above the fold is doing this job.
Lowers the cost of the first step for someone who has decided to try but not yet decided to commit an idea.
Where a daily cadence matters — a stale feed signals a marketplace nobody is using.
The moment the product's central promise is either kept or broken.
Silence here is what loses inventors permanently, which makes status visibility a retention feature rather than a convenience.
Section 11 — End-User Experience
The branding is playful — a cosmic network, challenges, points. That tone is doing real work for a category that otherwise reads as intimidating and legalistic, and it lowers the perceived cost of trying.
It also carries a risk worth naming: the further the interface drifts toward a game, the more a user has to ask whether the money is real too. The line the product has to hold is that the invitation can be playful, but ownership and payment must always read as serious.
Section 12 — Impact & Outcomes
Performance figures are not published, so none are claimed here. The measures that would settle it are specific to this model: submission rate per challenge, the proportion of submissions from repeat inventors, and time from award to payment.
The second is the one that actually matters. Anyone can attract a first submission with a signup bonus; a marketplace built on trust is working only when the people who have already been through the process choose to come back.
Section 13 — Reflection
The homepage gets the attention because it is where conversion is measured. But in a product whose promise is 'your idea stays yours', the IP terms are where a cautious expert actually decides — and that page deserved the same scrutiny as the hero.
A hundred clean payouts build credibility slowly; one disputed one undoes it fast, and publicly. That imbalance is structural in this category, and no amount of product design removes it — it only determines how carefully the edge cases are handled.