How to create IP that extends your expertise as a freelancer

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Developing your very own IP is a signal of deep immersion in your field, especially when self-employed, as expertise is your edge.

It’s in your best interest to create IP that you’re proud of, that addresses a worthwhile opportunity, genuinely scales your impact to the right people, and keeps your career resilient.

IP or intellectual property is the legal designation for the exclusive rights to assets you create in the form of patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets. More colloquially, it’s an original idea or resource you’ve shared with the world that’s beneficial and unique from what’s available.

Protected legally, reputationally, or ideally both, IP as a freelancer could be a proprietary framework you’ve developed, a book, a frequently used tagline, a training program, a newsletter, a technical solution, or design assets like a layout or logo you’ve created.

I wrote about why IP is a competitive advantage before as it can help you stand out, improve your discoverability and defensibility in the age of AI, and anchor your expertise in a referencable and repeatable asset that can increase your visibility and compound trust.

To understand what it actually takes to build your own IP, here’s how three self-employed professionals (who I admire) developed their own intellectual assets.

Actively working in your industry for at least a few years is how you immerse yourself in the nuances of a job’s most prominent challenges and assess the available solutions on the market. That’s when you’ll come across meaningful gaps, ideally ones you’re excited to address.

“You find your ownable idea in your work. For me, I kept hitting a wall around trust and how we treat customers. I kept trying to understand why we didn’t have this figured out yet,” says Christina Garnett, a fractional Chief Customer Officer, CX strategist, trust theorist, and author of Transforming Customer-Brand Relationships.

“So I did the research. I wanted to see what existed, hoping maybe I’d missed something. The Trust Equation by Maister, Green, and Galford from The Trusted Advisor is brilliant, but it was built for professional services relationships. When I applied it to brand-customer dynamics, it kept breaking down. If you keep hitting a wall and wondering why it hasn’t been fixed yet, you can’t keep waiting for someone to come in and save you.”

As a result of this frustration and seeing a gap emerge, Garnett developed the Customer Trust Diagnostic, a framework for pinpointing how much trust your brand has to build and where. It’s how she onboards every client as a starting point for an engagement and as a way to serve businesses of all sizes, even if she doesn’t get to work with them directly.

Similarly, Beck McCormick kept noticing an underserved opportunity as she delivered custom design work for clients. She and her husband led a graphic and web design business from 2014 to 2023, resulting in some burnout, but luckily, revealed an appealing gap: designing her own fonts.

“I’d always been interested in handlettering, and repeatedly mentioned how neat it would be to turn my handwriting into a font. I looked around for resources, but never found anything comprehensive, so it remained merely an idea for a long time. Eventually, I stumbled upon a font-making course, and my husband encouraged me to invest in myself. That was in 2017. By 2019, I was making a full-time income, and the rest is history,” she says.

Today, McCormick is a self-taught font designer and hand lettering artist who’s developed and now sells 500+ original fonts and other assets featured in Home Goods, Michaels, and Minted.

Both Garnett and McCormick built IP of value to their customers by paying attention to the friction they kept encountering in their areas of interest. And where they had an advantage, given what they went to look for didn’t exist, so they leaned on their own expertise to build it.

The name you choose for your own framework, methodology, or other IP asset is an important initial choice as it’s how others engage with and communicate about it, but don’t overthink it. Select a workable, discernible name and start getting feedback.

“My concepts and names almost always evolve over time through application. When I want to create ownable IP (which isn’t always the case), the real challenge is balancing two things. The name needs to be distinct and interesting, yet remain obvious enough that people instantly understand the core concept,” says Dr Gemma Leigh Roberts, a chartered psychologist and author of Mindset Matters, who helps high-performers and firms unlock peak performance through the lens of sustainable success.

“I prefer to test terms out in the wild first. I’ll use them with leaders and organisations to see if they actually resonate. If a framework proves it has long-term value and becomes a permanent part of my business offering, that’s when I bring in a trademark lawyer to start the registration process.”

Roberts has several IP assets from frameworks to taglines to a book, all with sticky names like the Human Powered Advantage or no-tocols. For example, she describes no-tocols as a deliberate choice to ignore the strict protocol or rulebook, and do what makes sense for you in a given moment. These no-tocols appear in each edition of her Substack newsletter, paired with a quick definition as she familiarizes readers with her terminology.

“If you track my Substack or LinkedIn newsletters over time, you can see exactly when I started testing the no-tocol concept. I knew I wanted a practical experiment in every edition, but I really dislike rigid protocols,” says Roberts.

“The truth is, I built them for myself and for the professionals I work with who want to make small shifts without the guilt of failing to meet a strict parameter set by an expert telling them what they should do.”

Beyond the name, get clear on the actual use cases of your IP by testing it with your audience to see if your experience-based suspicions are right, and where adjustments are needed.

“We all wax poetic on LinkedIn and in our newsletters, but none of it matters if someone can’t do anything with it. Saying trust is important isn’t enough. I had to stop talking about it and make it something people could use,” says Garnett.

“I chose a diagnostic because I wanted to give people a real starting point and something to act on. Building it in Lovable meant I could get it out into the world quickly and let the tool itself do some of the teaching. It took four versions to get it right. I sent each one out and told people to break it. The feedback helped me ensure a better user experience and make sure the questions really got to the root of the problem instead of just pointing out a symptom.”

A powerful signal that your IP is resonating is if it’s useful enough to purchase, like a course, training, book, or, in McCormick’s case, a newly designed font or hand lettering guide.

“I constantly look at what people purchase from me across all the marketplaces where I sell and look for patterns. I think it’s great information to have, but I don’t always jump on the [design] trend bandwagon. For me, everything is worth designing in the beginning,” says McCormick.

“Not everything will be a smashing success, and that’s ok. Because I control my designs, I sometimes enjoy throwing something out there to see if it resonates with someone.”

That’s an advantage of having your own IP as a freelancer—full ownership of the format, the use cases you target, the feedback you decide to act on, and whether it’s a free or paid offering.

“You also need to decide early what you want to be free versus what you want to gatekeep. For me, I can give you guidance and frameworks and tools for free. But if you want bespoke advice, a battle plan, someone to build the infrastructure around your specific problems, that’s when you work with me. Knowing that line makes everything else easier to share freely,” adds Garnett.

It’s necessary to publicize your IP in multiple destinations and on a frequent basis so the right people discover it, use it, and share it with others.

“Your idea will not flourish on its own. You have to be its greatest champion, and you have to be consistent. That means going deeper, not just wider. Build its premise and its architecture. Know the questions people will ask before they ask them. Understand its place in the world on a micro and macro level,” adds Garnett.

This happens by promoting your IP in your own community across your newsletter, website, email signature, social media, and in discussions with clients.

Plus, get your IP in front of audiences beyond your own network, like referencing it in an article for a trade publication, mentioning it during a podcast interview, or anywhere it’s a relevant value-add. The intention is that with thoughtful repetition, it’s embraced by audiences and has legs of its own.

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all. For McCormick, she sells original fonts on her website and on third-party marketplaces like Etsy, Creative Fabrica, MyFonts, Fontspring, and Creative Market. Garnett references her diagnostic tool in multiple channels: LinkedIn, an article for the industry publication Customer Think, and a working paper on SSRN. And for Roberts, she covers no-tocols on her Instagram, LinkedIn, Substack, and the podcast she co-hosts.

As you can see, creating IP as a self-employed professional is an ongoing process of fine-tuning your expertise into digestible formats that meet a real need. It can be a messy, time-consuming, and vulnerable endeavor, but that’s how you figure out where your expertise is most impactful.

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