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

I'm George.

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.

The stack:

Frontend: React + Vite (deployed on Azure Static Web Apps)
Backend: Azure Functions (Node.js)
AI: Azure OpenAI (GPT-4o) for cover letters, interview prep, resume optimization
Database: Cosmos DB
Hosting: All on Azure (I'm in the Microsoft for Startups program)
It's got 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 copycat domain —> similar name, different extension. Not my domain. Mine was registered first.

I didn't think much of it.
Then they filed a UK trademark for my brand name.

Then 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.

Here's what makes this infuriating: my company was incorporated at Companies House before their trademark was even filed.
My domain was registered before theirs.
I built the product.
I wrote every line of code.
I designed every screen. I handle every support email.

And someone thought they could just... take it.

What I Did About It
I didn't panic. I didn't tweet angrily. I documented everything and filed a formal invalidation with the UK Intellectual Property Office.

Then I emailed every directory where fake listings appeared, with proof:

Companies House incorporation records
Domain registration dates showing mine came first
The UKIPO case reference
An offer to verify ownership via DNS, meta tags, whatever they needed
Most responded within 48 hours.

Lesson for every solo founder reading this: register your trademark early.
I know it costs money you'd rather spend on servers.
I know it feels like a problem for "later."
It's not. File it before someone else does.
In the UK, it's £200 through the IPO.
That's 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. A salary negotiation tool. Cool stuff.

Then I launched and got... crickets.

The product was never the problem. Distribution was the problem.
SEO, content, backlinks, directory listings — that's the actual work. Building the product is the fun part.
Getting anyone to see it is the hard part.

1. Your competitors have a 1,000x backlink advantage (and that's fine) I checked my backlinks last week: 1. One backlink. From LinkedIn.

My biggest competitor? 1,100 backlinks.
Their top source? A major US university with 2,600 links — they'd partnered with university career centres.

You can't outspend that. You can't out-backlink that in a month. But you can be faster, cheaper, and more honest.
My comparison pages don't lie about competitors.
My free plan actually lets you do real work, not just tease you. My pricing is £19/month, not $29-49 like everyone else charges.

1. AI visibility is the new SEO Here's something most devs don't know yet: 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 your product
Schema.org structured data on every page type
An /.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 right now and not doing this, you're invisible to a growing chunk of your potential users.

1. Ship ugly, fix later My first deploy looked terrible. The Kanban board had alignment issues. The AI cover letters sometimes started with "Dear Hiring Manager" twice. The 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.

1. 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:

Pre-rendered SPA pages — React app, but every public page is pre-rendered at build time. Google and AI bots see real HTML, not empty

. This was a game-changer for SEO.
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 — I have 8 automated workflows: SEO auditing, competitor monitoring, content research, blog writing, conversion testing, AI visibility tracking. All running on cron. I wake up to reports.
Cosmos DB — expensive at 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
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.

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.