I Built a SaaS Solo. Then Someone Trademarked My Name and Tried to Steal It.

Source: Dev.to

I’m a solo developer from the UK.

Last year I started building ApplyArc → an AI‑powered job‑application tracker.

If you’ve ever job‑hunted seriously, you know the pain: spreadsheets everywhere, cover letters you copy‑paste and forget to change the company name, interviews you didn’t prep for because you lost track. I lived that pain, so I built the tool I wished existed.

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The Stack

It has 17 AI tools, a visual Kanban board for tracking applications, smart reminders, weekly analytics, and a Chrome extension that lets you save jobs from any site in one click.

I bootstrapped everything—no funding, no team, no marketing budget. Just me, my laptop, and an unreasonable number of late nights.

The Part Where It Gets Ugly

A few months after launch, I noticed someone had registered a copy‑cat domain → similar name, different extension. Not my domain. Mine was registered first.

1. They filed a UK trademark for my brand name.
2. My listing on a major product directory disappeared overnight → replaced by a fake one submitted by a stranger, pointing to their domain with incorrect product details.

Why this is infuriating:

• My company was incorporated at Companies House before their trademark was filed.
• My domain was registered before theirs.
• I built the product, wrote every line of code, designed every screen, and handle every support email.

And someone thought they could just… take it.

What I Did About It

1. I didn’t panic. I didn’t tweet angrily.
2. I documented everything and filed a formal invalidation with the UK Intellectual Property Office.
3. I emailed every directory where fake listings appeared, attaching:
   • Companies House incorporation records
   • Domain registration dates (showing mine came first)
   • The UKIPO case reference
   • An offer to verify ownership via DNS, meta tags, or whatever they needed

Result: Most responded within 48 hours.

Lesson for Solo Founders

Register your trademark early.
It costs money you’d rather spend on servers, and it feels like a “later” problem—but it isn’t. In the UK, it’s £200 through the IPO, cheaper than one hour with a lawyer.

What I Actually Learned Building This

The trademark drama makes a good story, but here’s what I wish someone had told me before I started:

1. Nobody cares about your product until they can find it

I spent months perfecting features:

• 17 AI tools (resume scoring, AI cover letters, AI chatbot, interview prep with feedback, salary‑negotiation tool, etc.)
• Launched and got… crickets.

The product wasn’t the problem. Distribution was.

2. SEO, content, backlinks, directory listings = the real work

• My biggest competitor has 1,100 backlinks (top source: a major US university with 2,600 links).
• I have 1 backlink (from LinkedIn).

You can’t out‑spend or out‑backlink them in a month, but you can be faster, cheaper, and more honest.

3. AI visibility is the new SEO

When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity “what’s the best job tracker?”, the AI pulls from specific sources. If you’re not in those sources, you don’t exist.

I set up:

• llms.txt and llms-full.txt – machine‑readable files that tell AI chatbots about the product
• Schema.org structured data on every page type
• /.well-known/ai-plugin.json for ChatGPT discovery
• Citation meta tags so AI can properly attribute answers
• Explicit bot access rules in robots.txt for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot

This is the SEO of 2026. If you’re building a SaaS now and not doing this, you’re invisible to a growing chunk of potential users.

4. Ship ugly, fix later

My first deploy looked terrible:

• Kanban board had alignment issues
• AI cover letters sometimes started with “Dear Hiring Manager” twice
• Chrome extension crashed on LinkedIn

I shipped it anyway. Real users found real bugs I never would have caught. Every ugly launch teaches you more than a month of polishing.

5. The solo‑founder advantage is speed

A VC‑backed competitor needs three meetings and a Jira ticket to change a button colour.

I push to production during lunch. My blog post goes live the same day I write it.

My comparison page against a new competitor was deployed within hours of discovering them.

When you’re alone, speed is your only unfair advantage. Use it.

The Tech Stuff (For the Devs)

If you’re building something similar, here’s what worked for me:

• Pre‑rendered SPA pages – React app, but every public page is pre‑rendered at build time. Google and AI bots see real HTML, not an empty shell.
• Azure Functions for everything – auth, Stripe billing, AI endpoints, email reminders. Serverless means I pay almost nothing at low traffic.
• IndexNow – every deploy pings Bing/Google with all URLs instantly. Pages get indexed in hours, not weeks.
• GitHub Actions for content ops – 8 automated workflows: SEO auditing, competitor monitoring, content research, blog writing, conversion testing, AI visibility tracking, etc. All run on cron; I wake up to reports.
• Cosmos DB – (expensive at scale, but cheap enough for early‑stage traffic).

TL;DR

• Register your trademark early (≈ £200 in the UK).
• Focus on distribution: SEO, backlinks, AI visibility.
• Ship fast, iterate fast – speed beats polish when you’re solo.
• Make your product AI‑discoverable with structured data, ai-plugin.json, and citation meta tags.

Good luck building your SaaS! 🚀

Scale, but the free tier is generous and the global distribution is unmatched if you ever need it.

Total monthly cost at current scale: ~£40 (Azure credits cover most of it through Microsoft for Startups).

Where I Am Now

• 90 pages indexed across Google and Bing
• 17 AI tools, all free to try
• Active trademark dispute (and I’m winning)
• Zero funding, zero debt, zero regrets

Advice for Solo Builders

If you’re thinking about building something solo — do it.
The tools have never been better:

• AI writes half my boilerplate.
• Azure gives startups free credits.
• GitHub Actions automates the boring stuff.

The hard part isn’t building. It’s showing up every day when nobody’s watching, when the backlink count is 1, when someone tries to steal your name, when the dashboard shows single‑digit visitors.

You show up anyway. That’s the whole game.

About Me

I’m Adrian. I build ApplyArc — a free AI‑powered job tracker.

• If you’re job hunting or know someone who is, give it a try.
• If you’re a solo founder going through similar stuff, my DMs are open.