Have you heard of any startups that got a Cease and Desist letter ordering them to rebrand?

This happened to a video conferencing app I've used, appear.in, which is now Whereby. You can read more about their situation in the following links.

https://medium.com/the-making-of-whereby/appear-in-is-now-whereby-b258d77d3ad9
https://whereby.com/information/brand

I agree with @nprail here that mention is a bit of a long stretch to trademark, even if they did manage to get, it was probably by a very limited use case. Its a tough situation as, even if they are dead wrong, they have money, and you probably don't have a lot of cash sitting around to battle it if it goes to court.

I ran a company www.tenrocket.com that ran into similar issues of someone who owned tinrocket.com. Unfortunately people were going to his company url asking for us. It didn't bother us much but he wasn't too keen on it and wanted us to rebrand. Thankfully in our case we decided to trademark it very quicky and got ahead of the game, putting the issue to rest.

Though even if we had to change our name I wasn't too concerned. Being overly worried with names puts your focus on the wrong things at first, you can always change it later, best to just get out and learn and try some stuff before getting hyper focused on naming.

Facebook complaining about Openbook is justified as it is pretty clearly borrowing from Facebook (i.e. its not just because "book" is in the name). But I'm a little surprised at Mention.com complaining about MentionMe. Seems like it is a too generic word for them to be able to defend it. But I guess you are competing with them.

When I came up with the name eventOne, I found quite a few trademarks. However, they were trademarks for "even tone" not "event one" which is an entirely different industry. There was only one trademark for "event one" which was meeting software. But I emailed the company asking if the name was still in use. By the time they responded (saying that they no longer used the name), the trademark had expired.

Just out of curiosity, how hard is it to get a trademark? Are there any trusted services you guys would recommend?

I received a C&D from PayPal after registering the domain PayPerPal.com for a micro influencer social marketing app. We had very little accomplished on the project that depended on the chosen name so it was relatively simple to switch it up.

Reflecting on that time, the C&D did pull us away from our core vision for the project as it forced us to re evaluate what we were trying to accomplish and caused us to overthink our app's potential. Even though the meaning of a domain/brand name can be shaped by the user's experience, I think early stage projects need the hyper focus of a solidified name to drive the mission and keep everybody on the same page. It's best to simply pick your name and let the market determine its validity.

For us there were other obstacles besides the name change but it was definitely an unwelcome distraction and something we immediately decided not to fight against for the sake of forward progress.

Haven't had a C&D letter for a project, but did get a message from founder once asking me to change the name of a side project I built at a hackathon. It was early enough that it I just did it, no point fighting over it.

I did get a C&D letter from the lawyers of the Tolkien estate a few years back. I registered a domain name with the word "hobbit" in it and they said I had to turn it over to them because they owned the trademark. I politely declined. I decided not to build anything on the domain, but didn't turn it over to them.

One way to prevent this is to register a trademark of your startup name at a really early stage - e.g. before doing any design work. If you have the trademark it will prevent against a Cease and Desist and also prevent against someone copying your name in the future. It's also useful for getting things like Twitter handles and protecting your domain. Worth the investment in my opinion.

I understand that sometimes you'll get letters like this, and sometimes due to limited resources it's easier to just change, but honestly there needs to be more pushback on this.

I find it a little ridiculous to trademark something like "mention" and go after small guys who are just using a word from the English dictionary in their brand name. To me that screams "we don't want to actually compete, so call the lawyers".

It's one thing if you get a cease & desist for a name like "Twatter" or "Tumblor" or "Pentrest" but folks shouldn't be able to hog the dictionary just because they have the resources to retain a legal team.