If your product does not interest a lot of people, the patent is going to be useless, cause nobody will want to steal your idea.
If your product does interest a lot of people, some people may want to steal it, but:
- would you sue a Chinese company for selling copies of your stuff on AliExpress? How would you even sue that company?
- would you sue a major tech firm, while it's likely that anything that you built is likely infringeing on at least one of their patents?
- in the case you want sue, what are the odds of winning? Your patent may be void for a variety of reasons, and a copying product may not be considered as infringeing, if it has enough difference with the patented invention. What time frame are you looking at? 5 years, 10 years? Do you want to spend 10 years in litigations? What legal costs are you facing? Probably in the tens of thousands.
My advice to you as a failed startup founder myself, is to cool your head down, and stop imagining that what you invented is the next telephone, and pitch pitch pitch. If you pitch a room with 100 people, you'll be lucky if 2 guys come up to you at the end telling you your stuff is a good idea.
The patent is keeping you in a fantasy world, and that's not good.
Yes it makes you vulnerable to IP theft, and it does happen. But if you look for startup founding advice, people will tell you that it's a mistake to try and protect your idea. The main arguments are:
1. Execution matters more than the idea.
2. It's always better to get feedback / test the market earlier rather than later.
3. Your IP may be protected in theory, but in practice, companies infringe on patents all the time.
See for instance here:
https://daniellenewnham.medium.com/no-one-is-going-to-steal-...
or here:
https://www.talkingquickly.co.uk/2015/04/what-id-tell-myself...
Maybe there's some context or nuance that didn't get conveyed that I'm missing.
I would imagine you can't get treble damages from willful infringement on a provisional patent, given that they're not published... so if you publicize your item on kickstarter while the patent is provisional and/or pending, less potential damages from infringers ... but I dunno how many people get treble damages anyway.
But what complicates this even more is that I don't really want to sit on the tech at all. I want it to become ubiquitous and (eventually) a standard (like how Yubico/Yubikey led to FIDO/FIDO2 later).
But others in the thread also bring up a totally valid point: I need to prove this has teeth with real people somehow.
I think I may have to bight the bullet and fork over some savings to get the proper patent done. I need to get busy with R&D to finalize the design.