Takeaways From an IP Conference That Actually Helped Me Build

One of the hardest parts of building a niche or enterprise-focused product is finding your actual audience and getting honest feedback from people who really live with the problem.

If your product isn’t built for “everyone,” you don’t get the luxury of broad channels or fast validation loops. Your audience is small, busy, and hard to get time from, which makes real feedback difficult to collect.

Why Conferences Are Tricky For Niche Products

Most founders I know are skeptical about conferences and for a reason.

Generic events rarely help if your product is built for a very specific audience. You end up talking to people who are curious but not your users, and the feedback is shallow, and the signal is weak.

For a niche enterprise product, the value of a conference depends on one thing: are the right people actually in the room?

Why I Chose This One

I spent a few days at IP Service World (IPSW) 2025 in Munich, talking to people who run IP operations at scale.

IP Service World (IPSW) is one of the largest IP-focused conferences in Europe. It’s built specifically for professionals working with intellectual property: in-house IP lawyers, IP managers, and teams responsible for patents and trademarks across multiple jurisdictions.

The main reason I came back this year was straightforward: I wanted direct feedback from our core audience on a new product we’re building and understand whether this kind of automation is actually needed in real workflows. IPSW is one of the few places where this audience is concentrated in one room, which makes it possible to have real, in-depth conversations instead of abstract user interviews.

Beyond that, there were more obvious reasons: to see which topics are gaining traction across the industry, to understand how teams talk about automation and scale today, and to build long-term relationships rather than one-off contacts. All of that made the conference a good environment for both product validation and broader context.

What Actually Happened There

Most of our time went into conversations.

People were open about how their IP operations work today and where they struggle. The same topics kept coming up: coordination across jurisdictions, routine checks that take far more time than they should, and the constant background stress around deadlines where mistakes carry real consequences.

One of our main focuses this year was IP Paralegal — a new product we’re exploring for teams that deal with IP operations at scale. What mattered wasn’t the pitch itself, but what followed. Conversations quickly moved from explanations to real situations. People wanted to map what they saw to their own workflows and talk through where it could realistically reduce pressure without affecting quality or control.

Many of these discussions didn’t end at the booth and continued afterward as follow-ups.

What I Learned From The Exchange

AI and automation came up often, usually in a calm and practical way.
The interest was around what already works, where the boundaries are, and how to introduce automation without creating new risks. Reducing repetitive work and lowering the chance of human error were themes I heard again and again, especially in processes that get harder to manage as volume grows.

Why This Mattered For Us as Builders

From a builder’s perspective, IPSW was valuable because it removed a lot of guesswork.

Spending time with people who live inside these workflows every day helped confirm that we’re focusing on the right problems and gave us a clearer picture of the constraints teams operate under. I left Munich with ongoing conversations, new relationships, and a sharper sense of how IP teams think about scale and risk.

The Broader Takeaway

For founders building niche or enterprise products, conferences are about proximity.

If you pick the right event, you get access to context that’s hard to replicate through calls, surveys, or desk research. That’s why IPSW mattered to us. Not as an event, but as a way to spend time inside the world we’re building for.
Experiences like this continue to influence how I think about building iPNOTE, through steady confirmation of what actually matters when work grows in volume and complexity.