About NameVerdict

Why this exists and who's behind it.

The problem

Naming a product is the most reversible decision a founder makes — until it isn't. By the time you've printed the t-shirts, registered the domain elsewhere, set up the Stripe account, and hit your first 100 paying customers, renaming costs days and dignity. The cheapest moment to discover "this name is already taken in your category by a litigious competitor" is before you commit.

The existing options miss the middle. Free tools (NameSquad, namechk) check 2-3 signals and stop. Trademark attorneys do thorough USPTO searches at $400-1,200 per name. There's little in between — a fast, paid, documented preliminary screen that a busy founder can run before paying for finalist-level legal work.

What NameVerdict does

For each candidate name we run six independent lanes:

  • Lane 1 — Domains

    Live registry lookups across .com, .io, .app, .dev, .ai. Real registrar + expiration data, not third-party scraped lists.

  • Lane 2 — Common-law

    GitHub, iTunes, and Reddit, supplemented by best-effort Product Hunt and Crunchbase web searches.

  • Lane 3 — Social handles

    Instagram, GitHub, TikTok — because shipping with @yourname_real is brand suicide.

  • Lane 4 — Structured USPTO search

    A preliminary search of live structured records from the official USPTO Trademark Search application, with class-overlap annotation, serial numbers, status, goods/services, and TSDR links. It is not legal clearance or a comprehensive attorney search.

  • Lane 5 — Web-search landscape

    What the available search evidence shows for your name today; not a guaranteed reproduction of Google's top ten.

  • Lane 6 — Category collisions

    The intersection of search results + GitHub + Product Hunt + crypto-token registries — names that aren't formally registered but already mean something specific in your market.

The deterministic lanes run in parallel and the research agent works the rest in the same pass; names run concurrently. A 5-name report typically comes back in around a minute with a synthesized GREEN / YELLOW / RED verdict per name plus the underlying evidence so you can audit the call yourself. See a sample report.

Who's behind this

I'm Corey Slick. I run Slick Engineering & Consulting, Inc., an indie software studio out of Delray Beach, FL. I built NameVerdict because I needed it: every product I've shipped has cost me a half-day of clearance research that nobody had productized at this tier. The version you're using is the version I use myself.

What NameVerdict is not: a substitute for a trademark attorney. Every result is preliminary, including GREEN. Before adopting or filing a name, pay a TM attorney for a knock-out search — they can investigate evidence and legal issues an automated structured search may miss. Our job is to filter obvious problems before you spend that money on finalists.

How to reach me

Questions, bug reports, or a screenshot of a verdict you'd like a second pair of eyes on: hello@nameverdict.com.