Were you on Shark Tank?

It’s been awhile since I took to the blog. Our updates have been coming via Kickstarter and Newsletter and thus the blog has been neglected. Nonetheless, a few of you have asked about the recent appearance of MuteMe on ABC’s Shark tank. Did they copy mütesync? Do they really have a patent? What does this mean for you?

For you old timers, you’ll remember that we were originally named müteme. We spent the first nine months or so of our existence as muteme with our website www.mutemepls.com. I mean, who could forget our cute Xmas message on Instagram.

We designed and launched our first two physical mute buttons (RIP Big Red!) in mid 2020 and many of you were among our first customers. During that time we started posting the designs and prototypes for our new mute button and decided to do a Kickstarter.

During the Kickstarter preparation process (it takes a lot of time to get ready for Kickstarter) we saw another illuminated mute button launch on Kickstarter. And they took our name!

Tom and I have both been in tech for a long time and we didn’t want to be bogged down by legal overhead. But we were concerned that we’d be sending our traffic to them. After all, we were already posting on social and sharing content under the name muteme, but they had an active kickstarter. So we did a rebrand from müteme to mütesync to avoid confusion. And since then, we’ve pretty much forgot about them. After all, there will always be competition and we think we should spend our time focused on delivering you a great product.

Regarding their claim of a patent. We want to assure our customers and backers that there is no reason to worry. According to MuteMe’s Kickstarter, they made a prototype in October 2020 then filed their patent in November 2020. We started working on our mute button in March 2020 and had our first actual sales in September 2020.

As US patent law (35 U.S.C. section 102(a)) states: “A person shall be entitled to a patent unless – (1) the claimed invention was patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale, or otherwise available to the public before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.” If the patent office were to grant them a patent, which would take years, we will have no problem nullifying it as our product was on sale and purchased months prior to their patent filing.

Of course, it wasn’t fun to see muteme on Sharktank with our former name and also selling a physical mute button. But we see it as healthy competition that only pushes us to deliver a quality product that people love. May the best button win!