This led me to searching https://ppubs.uspto.gov/pubwebapp/ and finding https://patents.google.com/ where I think I discovered there are existing active patents at Big Tech company(s) around the area that I'm working in.
How much should I be concerned about potentially infringing on others patents? Does anyone have any experience / war stories of how things might play out?
I realise being sued for patent infringement is one of those "good problems to have", but it is something in the back of my mind (especially knowing that patent trolls have come after some of the larger companies in my space).
Generally large companies won’t sue you until you hit $100M in annual revenue because it isn’t worth their time and effort until then. The advice we received for patent trolls is that they generally want to extract $10-20K and most companies will just pay them off to save the headache. It is unclear whether trolls will target very small companies or solopreneurs.