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MindTektInternational
MindTekt IP acquisition platform
Two issued patents.
One category-growth platform.
Two independent cone-use accelerators — product sales, licensed dealers, royalties and repeat cone consumption.
The principle
Convenience converts
Removing friction changes consumer behavior. Across retail, e-commerce and customer experience, easier and faster experiences are consistently associated with stronger conversion, engagement and customer value.
Baymard Institute
18%
Abandoned because the process was too long or complicated
Baymard Institute reports that 18% of U.S. online shoppers have abandoned an order because checkout was too long or complicated.
Baymard Institute — Checkout UX Research
Deloitte + Google
+8.4%+9.2% AOV
A small speed improvement changed retail performance
Deloitte/Google research found that a 0.1-second mobile-site speed improvement was associated with an 8.4% increase in retail conversions and a 9.2% increase in average order value.
Deloitte + Google — Milliseconds Make Millions
PwC
80%
Speed and convenience matter
PwC reports that nearly 80% of American consumers consider speed, convenience, knowledgeable help and friendly service key elements of a positive customer experience.
PwC — Customer Experience Research
Harvard Business Review / CEB
Lower effort
Simple + quick outperforms extra complexity
HBR / CEB research emphasizes reducing customer effort over adding delight to support loyalty.
Harvard Business Review / CEB — Customer Effort Research
Why this matters here. SPARK and FiberStick reduce the time, mess and manual effort of filling smoking cones. These studies do not predict a specific sales result — they establish the commercial principle that reducing friction moves consumer behavior. Note the scale: the research above describes effects in the high single digits and above, and some observers put a floor of 10% on changes of this kind. This model starts at 2%.
Enter your own numbers, or load an example to explore the opportunity — 25 manufacturing partners, each producing 1,000 units a month. Assumes all licensees are active for the full modeled year; fees and production volumes are illustrative.
Step 1 — your metrics
What does your cone business do in a year?
A ballpark is fine — nothing confidential. You know your own numbers better than we do, so move it until it looks right.
Your cone businessIncluded
Annual cone revenue
Step 2
Select the IP to model
Each patent stands on its own. Model either one alone, or both together as a portfolio.
Step 3 — the metrics that pay
Three ways this makes money
Each engine is a separate income stream. They add together at the bottom of the page.
01
INCOME STREAM 01 OF 3You sell more cones
Easier filling moves more of what you already sell
You sell more cones
Easier filling moves more of what you already sell02
INCOME STREAM 02 OF 3
You sell the devices
Money made selling SPARK and FiberStick themselvesSPARK12,478,093 B2
FiberStick12,660,845 B2
A distribution network is not an order. A brand with 35,000 dealer locations does not put a new product into 35,000 of them. Each store decides for itself, shelf space is already full, and planogram resets happen once or twice a year — so year-one adoption is always a fraction of the network. Only the stores that actually stock the product sell any.
And stores are not equal. Retail movement is rarely spread evenly. This model applies the 80/20 rule — the Pareto principle — to the stores that stock it: roughly 20% of them do about 80% of the units, and the rest sell at a fraction of the average. Both halves reconcile to the average you entered, and if that split is wrong for your network you can change the numbers and watch it move. And the shelf price is not the buyer's price. A shopper pays $15 for a SPARK, but the store keeps its margin and a distributor may take a cut before that. Your company receives ~$6.75/unit. Every figure below is what you bank, never the shelf price. So the monthly figure above is an average, and the split is shown for each product: the strongest stores sell several times that rate, and the long tail sells a fraction of it. Both reconcile to the same average — which is what makes the average defensible when a buyer challenges it.
03
INCOME STREAM 03 OF 3
You sign licensees
An upfront fee and a fixed royalty on every unit they manufacture — plus manufacturing margin, if you also make it yourselfSPARKlicence terms
Royalty per unit — what you charge each licensee for every unit they manufacture
3B — Manufacture & sell yourself
As the patent owner, you can also manufacture — or hire a manufacturer — and supply finished products to your customers.
FiberSticklicence terms
Royalty per unit — what you charge each licensee for every unit they manufacture
3B — Manufacture & sell yourself
As the patent owner, you can also manufacture — or hire a manufacturer — and supply finished products to your customers.
License your technology. Earn on every unit. As the patent owner, you can authorize other businesses — manufacturing licensees, not ordinary dealers buying finished product — to manufacture the patented product under their own brand. You receive an upfront license fee and a fixed royalty for every unit they manufacture: a flat dollar amount you negotiate, independent of what they charge for it or what it costs them to make. The realistic pool is the cone and rolling-paper brands, private-label manufacturers and dispensary house-brands: a few dozen companies worldwide. It does not take many.
Your licensees fund their own manufacturing. You receive the modeled license fees and per-unit royalties — the numbers below are illustrative starting assumptions, not established industry averages, negotiated commitments, or forecasts, and this isn't your net profit: administration, enforcement, taxes, and costs outside your assumptions aren't deducted here.
Signing fees are paid once. Royalty income (and the manufacturing margin, if you also manufacture yourself, entirely separate from any licensee) is earned every year a licensee is active, and runs for the length of the licence — shown both as this year's income and as the total over the full term. Renewal is not modelled — anything past the term is upside this page does not count. A minimum annual royalty is available under Explore minimum commitments as an optional floor: when it applies, a licensee owes whichever is bigger, the earned royalty or the minimum — never both, and enabling it never silently changes the example above. Or you keep it exclusive and sell no licences at all — tap Exclusive to see that floor.
Illustrative contribution
Combined portfolio value
What this adds in year one
—
More cone profit, plus money kept on device sales, plus licence fees and first-year royalties.
Where the year-one money comes from
WHAT THE ARITHMETIC CANNOT COUNT
Owning it is the part that has no number
Everything above is cash flow. It is the part of the value a spreadsheet can measure. This is the part it cannot — and for a company setting out to take a category rather than defend one, it is usually the larger half.
Nobody can follow you
A U.S. utility patent runs twenty years from filing, and both of these are issued. For the whole of that run, a side-injection filler and a hard-pack cone platform are yours to sell and nobody else's. A competitor who wants one either licenses it from you or goes without.This is the only line on the page that no amount of anyone else's money can undo.
One stream ignores how big you are
—
Signing licensed dealers earns the same whether you are the largest brand in the category or the newest. It is the one part of this that does not scale with your size — which makes it worth proportionally more to a challenger than to an incumbent.
It changes who calls whom
Today you compete for the same shelf as everyone else, on price and on relationships. Owning the only patented way to do this puts you on the other side of that conversation: the brands you compete with become the brands who need something from you.A licence you grant is revenue. A licence you are refused is a product you cannot make.
There is one of each
Two issued patents, sold once. Whoever holds them holds the category position that goes with them, and the next company to want it will be buying from you rather than from us. That is the whole of the scarcity here — there is no second copy to sell.
What comes on top of that numberAdded value
The figure above is only the first five years, only the United States, and only the stores already carrying your cones. Everything here comes on top of it.
A category of your own
The only true performance cone on the market.
There is no such thing as a performance cone today. With these patents there is — and only you can sell one. Pack it loose or pack it tight. Run fine, medium or coarse grind for exactly the airflow you want. Do it in under fifteen seconds. No other cone on any shelf can claim one of those things, let alone all three.
A name nobody else can use.
Because the mechanism is patented, the claim is yours alone to make. The SPARK Performance Cone becomes your category, your shelf tag and your language — and every competitor beside it is selling an ordinary cone with nothing to answer back.
A premium tier you set the price on.
Performance versions of ordinary products carry premium prices, and the category leader sets that price. Nothing in the figure above assumes a single cent of premium on your cones — it prices every cone exactly as you sell them today.
It runs far longer than five years
Fifteen more years of ownership.
A U.S. utility patent runs twenty years from filing. You own this through all of it, and every year from six onward earns on top of the figure above.
Dealers renew.
A dealer making good money on a product signs again when the term is up — and a renewal costs you nothing to win. Those years are all additional.
It grows as your business grows.
Every dollar you add to your cone business multiplies the first income stream automatically. Your own growth compounds this, and none of it is in the figure.
Distribution keeps building.
Sell-in does not end when the modelled years run out. Reps keep placing it, and every store added after that is pure addition.
It reaches further than these stores
The rest of the world.
Every figure above is United States only. Canada, Europe and beyond are entirely additional territory.
More places to sell it.
Dispensaries, online, subscription boxes, festivals, and your own direct-to-consumer channel — all on top of the stores counted here.
Manufacturing it for others.
With capacity, you can run private label for brands that would rather buy it finished. That is an entire additional business.
Bundling it with cones.
Device and cones together as a kit lifts the ticket and moves both products. Every unit above is counted as a bare device on its own.
What owning it does for you
The cones keep selling long after the device does.
This is the big one. A device is bought once; the cones it fills get bought forever. Easier filling means more cones consumed, month after month, by every customer who owns one — and that repeat consumption is the whole reason a cone company wants this.
Something no competitor can put on the shelf.
For as long as the patents run, this is yours alone. A rep walking in with a product nobody else can offer wins more facings for the entire line, not just the new item.
Prices hold.
Exclusive products do not get price-matched. Protecting margin across a whole category is worth real money on its own.
New accounts walk in.
A product nobody else carries opens doors with retailers who were not buying from you before — and those accounts then buy the rest of the line.
Favourable treatment of the purchase.
Acquired patents are generally an amortizable intangible asset in the U.S., which improves the after-tax cost of the deal. Worth a five-minute question to your own CFO.
Credibility metrics — how these numbers hold upFour checks
Where the market numbers come fromSources
53.7%Cone gross margin
Turning Point Brands’ Zig-Zag segment posted $178.5M net sales and $95.9M gross profit in FY2025 — a 53.7% gross margin. The one assumption here that comes straight from an audited filing. FY2025 results
220,000Zig-Zag tier retail locations
Turning Point Brands reports reaching about 220,000 retail locations in North America across Zig-Zag and Stoker’s, through roughly 900 distributors plus 600 secondary wholesalers. The only audited distribution figure in this category. 2025 Form 10-K
152,255U.S. convenience stores
The mass-market ceiling. A cone product reaches a fraction of these, at low movement per store. NACS, 2025
30–35kU.S. smoke and head shops
Industry consensus. The Census tobacco-store code counts only 12,000–15,000; IBISWorld reaches about 52,000 by including vape retail. This range, not any single brand’s footprint, is where the widely repeated “35,000 doors” figure comes from. 2026 data
~15,000Licensed U.S. dispensaries
Up from 12,080 active licences in mid-2023. An incremental channel for both patents. Cannabiz Media / Flowhub
NoteOn private-company revenue
Private U.S. companies file nothing, so every published revenue figure for private brands in this category is a data-vendor estimate, and the vendors disagree by an order of magnitude. That is why this tool asks you for your own number rather than quoting one at you.