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 nothing in between — a fast, paid, multi-signal clearance that a busy founder can run on Tuesday morning before the Wednesday standup.

What NameVerdict does

For each candidate name we run six parallel 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, Reddit, Product Hunt, Crunchbase — places real products live that don't show up in a USPTO record.

  • Lane 3 — Social handles

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

  • Lane 4 — USPTO

    Federal trademark search via the USPTO's TESS database, scoped to the product's Nice class (the 45-category international system trademarks are filed under — software is class 9, SaaS is class 42, etc.).

  • Lane 5 — Google search results

    What Google's first page actually shows for your name today.

  • 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.

All six lanes run in parallel per name. A 5-name report typically comes back in under 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. If a verdict comes back YELLOW or RED, the next step is to pay a TM attorney for a knock-out search ($400-600) — they'll catch things our automated lanes can't (phonetic similarity in obscure dictionaries, foreign-language collisions, examiner-only USPTO data). Our job is to filter the obvious GREEN names from the obvious RED ones for $39-99 instead of $400-1,200, so you're only paying the attorney on names that have already cleared our cheaper screen.

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.