My day job contract has an IP assignment clause and I'm building on weekends

Priya Natarajan· Building a scheduling app for independent physical therapists; still at my product day job· Named it, SaaS & Software·Jul 17

This has been sitting in my stomach for a month so I'm just going to say it here. I work as a product manager at a software company. When I signed my offer I signed the standard confidentiality and invention assignment agreement, the one nobody reads. I have now spent seven months building a scheduling product for physical therapists on my own laptop, on weekends, in a market my employer has nothing to do with.

I paid for an hour with an employment attorney last week. Her short version was that it depends on my state and on the exact wording, that some states limit what an employer can claim when you use no company time or equipment, and that the cleanest fix is a written carve-out signed by someone with authority. Which means telling my employer.

So now I'm weighing a conversation that could get weird against a risk that could make the whole thing worthless the day it's worth something.

Two smaller questions while I'm here: does a one-person software company need actual business insurance before the first paying customer, and did you write your own terms of service or pay someone?

Has anyone asked their employer for a carve-out? How did that conversation actually go, and did it change how they treated you afterwards?

3 replies

Ken Washington· Registered·Jul 17

I did exactly this fourteen months ago, at a company that installs HVAC controls, so arguably closer to my product than yours is to your employer's. I asked my VP for a written acknowledgement that the dispatch tool was mine, built on my own time and equipment, outside their line of business.

It was a deeply awkward twenty minutes and then it was fine. He said he'd rather know than find out. Legal took six weeks and sent back a narrower version than I asked for, which I signed anyway.

The part nobody warned me about: after that, every conversation about my career there had an asterisk on it. Not hostile, just understood. Worth it, but go in knowing that.

Carla Vasquez· Open·Jul 18

On the insurance and terms questions, from the services side of the fence. The first time anyone asked me for proof of insurance was a client with a procurement department, not a small business. Once I had a policy it cost less per month than I'd budgeted and I stopped thinking about it. I'd get it before your first paying customer rather than after, if only because you'll be asked at the worst possible moment.

Terms of service I did not write myself. I started from a template, had someone read it properly, and it was the cheapest lawyer hour I've ever bought. Yours will need actual thought about who owns patient scheduling data, which is not a template question.

Priya Natarajan· Named it·Jul 19

Update for anyone who finds this later: I asked. Three sentences to my manager, framed as 'I want this on the record, not permission', and we had the conversation the next morning. It was not warm and it was not a disaster. Legal has it now.

The thing that unlocked it was Ken's line about the VP preferring to know. I had been treating it as asking for a favour when it was closer to declaring a conflict, and those are very different conversations to walk into. Insurance quote comes back Thursday. Terms of service still unwritten, which is the item on the checklist I keep sliding to next week.

Sign in to reply

Replying and upvoting need a free LaunchAdvisor account. Reading is open to everyone.