2025-02-22
Don't try to invent with Davison!
Photo by Avel Chuklanov on Unsplash
TL;DR
There is a company out there called Davison, who claims to offer help to hopeful inventors. I believe they are a predatory company who is happy to take your money without helping you progress your ideas/products/inventions at all. All inventors are strongly encouraged to stay clear of them!
How I came into contact with Davison
I do a lot of inventing. All the internet/social media algorithms know this, so I'm always getting ads for business, entrepreneurship, and invention gurus, "consultants," and their services.
One day, scrolling through Instagram, this ad pops up:
Invention Connect
connect_invention
Get a Free Drawing of Your Invention Today!
Turn your idea into reality with a professional sketch - absolutely FREE!
Plus, get the Invention Success Toolkit to kickstart your journey.
Limited spots available - act now before it's too late!
Claim your free drawing today!
I know that there's no such thing as a "free lunch," but I was interested to see what the offer really was, so I clicked into it. After clicking the ad, there was an explanation that this group (who I don't know is Davison, at this point) is looking for invention ideas and offering free line drawings. As it turns out, I did have a simple invention for which I knew I'd be working on line drawings soon anyway. Since they also included a confidentiality statement, I decided "what the heck," and explained my idea in their submission form.
This is when things started to get interesting, as I started to receive communications back, and finally linking the ad's author to Davison. (Apparently Davison has a history of using aliases... I wonder why?)
Straight from the horse's mouth
The first email I got in response to my invention submission contained, in addition to an ugly "I <heart> my invention" logo, a really long disclosure statement in the email's footer. And I read it, because I'm the guy who actually tries to read through things before signing/agreeing to anything.
It was the most honest/transparent disclosure I'd ever seen! This portion especially caught my attention:
The total number of consumers who submitted new product ideas to Davison during the past five years is, five hundred seventeen thousand nine hundred eighty eight (517,988). ... The total number of consumers in the last five years who made more money in royalties or sales proceeds than they paid to Davison, in total, under any and all agreements with Davison, is nine (9). This number includes people who first made a profit more than 5 years ago, if they continued to make additional profit during the past five years. The percentage of Davison’s income that came from royalties paid on licenses of consumers’ products is .001%.
Did you read that?!? According to their own numbers, your (historical, statistical) chances of making a profit by working with Davison is:
9 in 517,988, or
1 in 57,554, or
0.000017.
For those in the back: it's a really small number behind a LOT of zeros.
In fact, when compared with the odds of making any profit from working with Davison, you are:
over 3x more likely to be struck by lightning,
17x more likely to score perfectly on the SAT,
32x more likely to become an astronaut,
nearly equally likely to die from a bee sting, and
3,700x more likely to become a millionaire!
I later learned that this embarassing disclosure is part of Davison's punishment from a lawsuit they lost. They now has to post this notice on their website and communications (in addition to paying millions of dollars back to their victims). You can read the full disclosure here (backup link).
Ok, so they're bad at (successful) inventing; but how does that make them "predatory"?
That's fair-- you can be sincere and sincerely wrong; and Davison could be honest about wanting to help inventors but just bad at actually helping them.
My assessment is largely based on my interaction with them. I was speaking with one "Janine Pritts," but instead of referring to her directly, I'll assume she stands as a representative of the whole company. (After all, her title is Vice President of Project Management.) They were disorganized and missed multiple planned meetings before we finally spoke, sent tons of spammy auto-emails even after establishing direct and personal communication with me, and wanted to sign me up at ~$1k in the absence of knowing my plan/idea/thoughts. They were very rude on the phone (after being 30 minutes late to the call), cutting off almost everything I tried to say or even try to ask. Even though I have a proven record of profitable product development and demonstrated the ability to learn hard things, they couldn't even be troubled to respect my own knowledge and experience, and instead insulted my intelligence and said I "just didn't understand the process [of product development]." At first, they claimed that they didn't offer anything for free; then when I confronted them with the exact ad, claimed that their ad's offer was "free" with a $1k purchase (lol).
But don't just take my word for it; lots of people actually beat me to the punch of complaining about Davison:
Even though they had taken down their ad by the time I spoke to them on the phone, I was able to find it in the list of ads shown to me on Meta using the method I described in another post.
