Part 1 — The idea, in plain words

The person with the problem

Picture Maria. She runs a small online shop in Portugal selling handmade ceramics under the name TERRACOTA VIVA. The shop is finally working — repeat customers, an Instagram following, a wholesale deal in the making. And then a friend asks a question that ruins her week: "Is the name protected? What if someone registers it before you?"

Maria does what everyone does: she searches. She learns that to protect a brand across the EU you register a trademark — the legal claim on a name or logo, valid for 10 years. Then she hits the wall everyone hits:

• A specialized lawyer wants €1,500–3,000 and 2–4 weeks of back-and-forth emails.
• The official route — filing herself at EUIPO, the EU's trademark office — is free of middlemen but terrifying: legal terminology, 45 "classes" to choose from, forms that assume you already know the answers, and real money lost if you get it wrong (the office keeps the fee even when it rejects your application).

So Maria does what most small founders do: she postpones. And every month she postpones, the risk quietly grows.

There are roughly 197,000 EU trademark applications a year, growing every year, and about 60% come from small businesses like Maria's. Behind many of them — and behind the ones never filed — is this exact story.

What people do today

Three options, none good for Maria:

• The lawyer — safe but expensive and slow, and mostly performing a standardized procedure that doesn't need €2,000 of judgment.
• Do it yourself at EUIPO — cheap but intimidating; one wrong class choice or a "descriptive" name and the fee is gone.
• Online services (Trama and others) — cheaper than lawyers at ~€1,050 all-in, but still built like slow paperwork with a website in front.

The insight

Here's the part almost nobody knows: EUIPO publishes free, complete APIs — for searching existing trademarks, for choosing the right classes, even for filing the application itself. The official machinery is open. Practically nobody in the market uses it.

Combine that with what AI conversation is now capable of — asking a founder friendly questions and translating the answers into correct legal categories — and a different product becomes possible: not a cheaper lawyer, and not a form-filling helper, but a done-for-you service at a fraction of the price.

What Markster does

Markster registers Maria's trademark across the whole EU in about 15 minutes of her time, for €939 all-in — €850 of which is the official EUIPO fee that everyone pays, and €89 of which is Markster's service fee. Here's her experience, start to finish:

• She talks to the AI (3–5 minutes). Not forms — a conversation: what's the brand called, what do you sell, do you have a logo? The AI translates her plain answers into the official categories (the Nice classes) with the correctly worded list of goods and services.
• The availability check (30 seconds, free). Markster searches EUIPO's real database for identical or confusingly similar existing marks, and shows a traffic light: 🟢 clear path, 🟡 moderate risk, 🔴 high risk. If it's red, Markster says so plainly and suggests alternatives — even though that loses the sale.
• She reviews and pays (5 minutes). One summary screen: the mark, the classes, the itemized price. She pays €939, signs a power of attorney digitally (authorizing a licensed IP professional to file on her behalf), and she's done.
• Markster files and watches. The application goes to EUIPO through the official API. From here, everything is waiting — and Markster turns the waiting into transparency: the application moves through 12 clearly named stations (Filed, Published, Registered…), and Maria gets a plain-English email at every step. About 5–6 months later, if all goes well: "Your trademark is registered 🎉" — protection for 10 years.

One safety mechanism runs underneath: the AI never files alone when it's unsure. Every application gets a confidence score; anything ambiguous is routed to a human expert who reviews it before money or filings move — and that expert is Howard, the team's lawyer. Confident cases flow straight through; doubtful ones land on his desk.

How the money works

• The customer pays €939 once: €850 passes straight through to EUIPO (their fee for one class; a second class adds €50, each further class €150), and €89 stays with Markster.
• The €89 must cover everything: the AI costs, payment processing, the lawyer's review time on flagged cases, support, and finding the customer in the first place. That's a thin margin — which is why the business only works if most customers arrive cheaply (word of mouth, content, partnerships) and most applications need no human touch.
• A gift from good timing: the EU's SME Fund reimburses small businesses 75% of the EUIPO fee (up to €700) in 2026. Markster tells every eligible customer how to claim it — effectively making the customer's true cost dramatically lower.

Who does what

What can go wrong (and what Markster does about it)

Honesty section — a trademark journey has real hazards, and the product's job is to handle them without hiding them:

• The name is taken or too similar → the traffic light says so before any money moves.
• Someone opposes the application during the 3-month public window → the customer is notified immediately and offered expert help (a separate service, not included in €89).
• EUIPO rejects it (for example, names that merely describe the product can't be trademarks) → the customer is told plainly why; the AI's job is to catch these before filing, which is exactly what the confidence check and expert review exist for.

The decisions to confirm

The idea above is built on a chain of decisions. Before you build any of it, go through them one by one — the same way this document's ancestors were built at BONO: decision by decision, each one confirmed or challenged. For each: if you're convinced, confirm it; if something bothers you, mark it with a question — your questions are exactly what Friday's review with Bogdan is for (and they're your P01 material).

Part 2 — How the app works (the technical specification)

This part describes what you will actually build. Come back to it throughout the plan — it's the reference for the screens (week 3 and 5), the state machine (week 5), and the architecture below.

The application's journey — the state machine

An application is always in exactly one of 12 states, and only certain moves between them are legal:

Rules: no going back from Paid to Draft (nothing changes after payment) · unpaid for 7 days → email reminder; 30 days → expires · opposition → notification + separate expert service offer · states 8–11 are driven by EUIPO's own progress, monitored via its API.

The AI conversation, step by step

• "Tell me about your brand" (2–3 min) — name (text or logo upload), what the business sells, which EU country, legal form. The AI derives: mark type (word vs figurative), recommended Nice classes, and the correctly worded goods/services list from EUIPO's harmonised database.
• "Checking availability" (30 sec) — search via the Trademark Search API for identical and similar marks in the chosen classes; similarity scoring produces 🟢 / 🟡 / 🔴 with plain-English explanation and, on red, alternatives.
• "Your application is ready" (1 min) — the summary: mark, type, classes with goods/services, the two required languages, applicant details, itemized price (€89 + €850, +€50 class 2, +€150 class 3+). Customer confirms or edits.
• The invisible self-check — before anything reaches payment: classes validated via the API, terms from the harmonised database, mark not descriptive/generic, applicant data complete. Confidence above the threshold (default 80%) → Ready to Pay; below → Expert Review.

The screens

Every screen must answer, in every state: what is happening, and does the customer need to do anything? Empty states and error states are part of the specification, not decoration.

Configurable parameters

Communication

One email per state transition, in plain language, always with a next step: application ready → pay · payment reminder · payment received → sign · filed (with the EUIPO application number) · published (with the opposition end date) · registered 🎉 (with certificate number and 10-year expiry) · opposition received · rejected (with the reason) · expired · clarification needed · SME Fund guidance for eligible customers (how to claim the 75% reimbursement).

Success metrics

Alerts: any step converting under 10% → investigate · expert queue over 10 → tune the AI threshold · opposition → immediate notification · EUIPO API down → manual fallback.

Integrations — real vs mocked in your build

Every mock is a documented gap: the gap list lives in the repo's docs and goes to Prodi with the README.

Architecture — how the pieces fit

Plain-language map of the system you build:

• The frontend — everything the user sees: the eight screens, running in the browser. Built as a web app, deployed on Vercel, reachable at a real URL. It holds no data of its own.
• The database (Supabase) — the single source of truth: one row per application, its status, its status history, the mock trademark database. The frontend reads and writes it through Supabase's API using the anon key, with access rules on the server side.
• The mock EUIPO module — a clearly separated corner of the code that pretends to be EUIPO: search, classification, filing, status progression. Separated on purpose: when Prodi replaces it with the real APIs, nothing else should need to change. This boundary is the most architecturally important decision in your build.
• The state machine — one module that owns the 12 statuses and the legal transitions; every screen and every mock consults it. Nothing changes a status except through it.
• What's deliberately absent in v1 — no login system (email + unique link instead), no real payment processing, no server of our own beyond what Supabase and Vercel provide. Each absence is a decision, not an accident.
• The seams for the real version — where Claude's API plugs into the chat, where Stripe replaces the mock checkout, where the QES provider replaces the pretend signature. Each seam is documented in the README.

What we deliberately do NOT build (v1)

Monitoring/watching services · opposition management (expert service instead) · WIPO/national trademarks · 3D/sound marks · customer accounts · automatic refunds · a mobile app · renewal reminders (marks last 10 years). The architecture leaves room for all of them; v1 builds none of them.

How this gets built — the six-week map