You know the feeling.
You've been sketching wireframes for two weeks. The product finally makes sense. You grab coffee with your co-founder and someone says the magic words out loud — that's the name. You type it into a registrar. The .com is parked at $12,000. You try a .io. Taken. You search Twitter. A YC company from 2019 already owns the handle. Your cousin had the same idea in 2017.
Three weeks later you're in a rebrand you never planned.
Naming a company is supposed to be the fun part. In practice it's a scavenger hunt across registrars, search engines, social handles, and — if you're serious — trademark databases and company registries. Most of us only discover the dead ends after we've already told investors, designed a logo, and printed business cards.
I kept hitting this wall while building side projects. So I built Naamkaran — a name generator and viability checker that puts creativity and reality checks in the same workspace.
Naamkaran (नामकरण) is Hindi for "naming ceremony." The idea is simple: name your company before the domain registrar names your regret.
The problem isn't coming up with names — it's knowing which ones are alive
Most naming tools stop at ideation. They'll spit out fifty clever portmanteaus and call it a day. That's useful for the first hour. It's useless for the moment you actually need to decide.
What you really need at decision time:
- Domain availability across the TLDs you care about — without opening twelve registrar tabs
- Brand collision signals — is someone already running a company, product, or campaign with this name?
- A way to compare finalists — not vibes, but a score you can rank
The gap between "I like this name" and "I can register this name" is where weeks disappear.
What Naamkaran does
Naamkaran is a split-pane workspace: a conversational name generator on the left and a live viability panel on the right. Every path through the tool ends in the same checks.
Three ways to explore
1. Manual viability check — You already have a favorite. Type it in, optionally add a product category for sharper context, hit Check. Results stream in live.
2. Generate names (ideas only) — Pick a naming style, describe what you're building, and brainstorm freely. Click any suggestion to run a full analysis when you're ready. Great when you want maximum creative range.
3. Smart pick — Turn on Smart pick before you generate. Each candidate runs domain and brand checks automatically. Names below the bar are set aside; names scoring 60+ surface with their scores. The fastest route from product idea to an ownable shortlist.
What "viable" means today
| Check | How it works |
|---|---|
| Domain availability | RDAP (IANA bootstrap) with WHOIS fallback across common TLDs |
| Brand uniqueness | Gemini 2.5 Flash with Google Search grounding — exact name, name + category, similar spellings — with cited evidence |
| Composite score | 50% domain + 50% brand, streamed as checks complete |
This isn't legal clearance. But it catches the obvious collisions early — the parked domains, the well-funded competitor with the same name, the product that already owns page one of Google.
Ten naming styles, not one generic prompt
Great names follow patterns. Naamkaran doesn't use a single "generate startup names" prompt. Each style encodes a different creative strategy:
- Best fit — let the model read your brief and mix approaches
- Action phrase — imperative + object (great for consumer apps)
- Gen-Z — short, vowel-forward, feed-native
- Single word — real English words chosen for evocation
- Twisted word — familiar words with ownable spelling
- Minimal tech — tight, terminal-aesthetic names for dev tools
- Desi modern — Indian-language roots in Roman script
- Playful, Premium, Compound — and more
Pick a lane, chat to refine ("shorter," "more Desi," "avoid hyphens"), and check when something clicks.
Under the hood
Naamkaran is a Turborepo monorepo:
-
apps/web— React Router static SPA on Firebase Hosting -
apps/functions— Firebase Cloud Functions with ananalyzeNamecallable that runs domain and brand checks in parallel -
packages/shared— Zod schemas shared between web and functions
Checks run concurrently. Results stream to the UI so you're not staring at a blank panel while RDAP and grounded search do their work.
Bring-your-own-key (BYOK) is supported if you want to use your own Gemini API key.
What's next — the checks naming actually needs
Domain + Google search gets you far. The next step is adding legal and registry signal checks directly into the same flow.
Here's what's next:
Trademark checker
Search trademark databases for conflicting marks in relevant classes so obvious conflicts are caught early.
Registered company name checker (country-wise)
Cross-reference your candidate name against official company registries across countries.
For example in India, this can check MCA records to catch exact or close company-name matches before you proceed.
Try it
No account required. Open the workspace, type a name you're curious about, or turn Smart pick on and watch a scored shortlist build itself.
Links
Live demo: naamkaran-ai.web.app
GitHub: github.com/neetigyachahar/naamkaran-ai
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/neetigyachahar/
Final thought
The best name is the one you can actually own — domain, search results, and eventually registry and trademark records.
Naamkaran exists to shrink the loop between "I love this name" and "yes, I can build on this." If you've ever lost a week to a name that was dead on arrival, I built this for you.
Happy hacking! 🚀
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