Brand Cleared is the naming agency built for the founder who’s already lived the sprint — eight free generators, twelve open tabs, every short pronounceable .com gone since 2014. One $149 report runs five creative-director briefs in parallel — Lexicon, Igor, Cultural Linguistics, Consumer Moment, Viral & Social — then knocks every candidate against USPTO federal trademark, RDAP domain data, Apple App Store, Google Play, seven social platforms, common-law SERP, and a four-panel expert audit. About fifteen minutes.
About 10–15 minutes · No subscription · Free re-run if you don’t love it · Refund if our system fails
The wall you already hit
Real posts from real founders on Indie Hackers in the last twelve months. Pick the one you recognize.
Moment 01
You’ve fed your keywords into Namelix and a half-dozen others. The output is technically novel and emotionally interchangeable. The five agencies in Brand Cleared run distinct creative methodologies in parallel — sound-symbolism, four-category framework, cross-cultural etymology, occasion-mapped, virality-aware — and produce candidates that don’t all sound like the same model talking to itself.
Moment 02
You have five candidates you actually like. All five are gone — the .com parked at $4,800, the trademark dirty, the X handle squatted. Brand Cleared widens the candidate pool to roughly one hundred clearance-screened names, so the survivors you fall in love with are survivors you can actually ship under.
Moment 03
You shipped under a name nobody federal-searched. Six months in, a registered mark holder noticed. Brand Cleared is the layer that catches the obvious USPTO federal conflict in twelve minutes, before you’ve named the product to your customers. Research, not legal advice — but research that would have flagged the conflict before the rebrand bill arrived.
Moment 04
You have a launch date, a working title you hate, and forty-eight hours of energy left. The full Brand Cleared pipeline finishes in about fifteen minutes — five agencies, ~100 candidates, every clearance check, the audit, the report. You can run it tonight and have a defensible name in the morning.
Brand Cleared · The spine
The category insight
The naming sprint is the most universally hated phase of building a product — because the second you’ve called something “the project” for a week, you’ve gotten attached to it. Said it out loud. Typed it into a deploy script. Told your partner. Paul Graham wrote about this years ago: it’s the endowment effect, applied to startup names. Once you own a candidate, you can’t see it clearly anymore.
Brand Cleared isn’t about generating a longer list. It’s about producing the verdict that lets you let go of the wrong name — before it costs you a rebrand, an emergency .com purchase, or a cease-and-desist email six months in.
The verdict is the product. The names are the medium.
From the threads
Three verbatim posts from Indie Hackers, last twelve months. Linked, attributed by username, anonymizable per Indie Hackers’ terms. We didn’t invent these and we didn’t write them. The naming sprint sounds the same in every founder’s voice.
“I’ve spent too much time on this in the past, and it’s kinda annoying, because I’d rather spend that time on building the product.”
“Can relate with you. Took me almost 2–3 weeks for the name.”
“Trademark research is almost more important than the name itself.”
Two-to-three weeks of part-time fixation, compressed into about fifteen minutes for $149. The math is the pitch.
What the $149 actually buys
This isn’t a feature list. It’s the work that has to happen on every candidate before you bet a company on the name. The pipeline runs it whether you bring a name you already love or want the system to generate from your brief — same $149 either way.
Five creative agencies run in parallel. Lexicon Agency works phoneme-first, the way a linguist would. Igor Agency provokes — invented, evocative, functional, experiential. Cultural Linguistics Agency runs every candidate through cross-language plausibility. Consumer Moment Agency anchors names to occasions a real customer would use the product in. Viral & Social Agency optimizes for handles, memes, shareability. Roughly one hundred candidates land in the pool, deduplicated, filtered, each one unique.
Then the eight checks run on every candidate in parallel. USPTO federal trademark knockout, phonetic and Nice-class- aware. RDAP domain data on seven TLDs — .com, .app, .io, .co, .ai, .net, .org. Apple App Store and Google Play conflict scan. Seven social platforms — Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, Bluesky, Threads, LinkedIn. Common-law SERP sweep via Brave, analyzed by Claude. Famous-entity match via Wikidata. The Wayback Machine for historical commercial use.
Then the scoring. Seven brand dimensions per name — merch, social, visual identity, visual object, voice and personality, scalability, story. Five growth dimensions — word-of-mouth, SEO, virality, market positioning, international potential.
Then the audit. Four panelists — Brand Strategist, Industry Expert, Growth Marketer, Design Director — argue every top finalist. You read their reasoning. You decide.
About fifteen minutes from brief to report. A private shareable link, not a PDF. Refundable inside thirty days if our system fails on you.
The honest scope
Same honesty as we’d want from any tool we’d buy. If any of these are deal-breakers, save your $149.
It won’t pick the name for you. The four-panel audit hands you arguments per candidate — Brand Strategist, Industry Expert, Growth Marketer, Design Director. You read them and choose. The verdict makes the kill list easy. The pick is still yours.
It won’t give you a logo, a color palette, or a brand identity. No typography, no voice guide, no Figma file, no positioning deck. Brand Cleared names and clears — identity work lives somewhere else.
It won’t cover international trademark registration. USPTO federal only. If you’re selling outside the US, the report tells you what’s clear stateside; international coverage needs a separate trademark attorney.
It won’t replace your trademark attorney. The report is research, not legal advice. When you land on the name, take the report to an attorney before you file — that’s the workflow. We tell you that on the report itself, not just in a buried disclaimer.
It won’t promise the .com you want is available. The pipeline tells you the truth: which TLDs are open, which are parked, which are premium-priced, which are actively used. If the .com is gone and you want it anyway, that’s still a separate $4,800 conversation with a domain broker.
It won’t tell you whether your idea is good. The pipeline scores the name, not the business. A clear, well-scored name on a bad product is still a bad product. We’d rather tell you that than pretend the report is something it isn’t.
One report. One price.
$149. One-time. No subscription. No upsell. The same pipeline runs whether you bring a name you already love or let the agencies generate one. The report is a private link, yours to keep, yours to share with whoever you want to see it.
About 10–15 minutes · No subscription · Free re-run if you don’t love it · Refund if our system fails
Questions before you buy
ChatGPT generates names. It doesn't check them. It doesn't run USPTO federal knockout, it doesn't probe seven social platforms, it doesn't query RDAP for domain availability, and it doesn't read the Apple App Store. Brand Cleared bundles the verdict layer — eight live clearance checks on every candidate — that no chat session can do end-to-end. The $149 is the price of the screening, not the generation. The generation is the easy part everyone already has.
Yes. Two modes, same price. Bring a name you already love and we'll run only the eight clearance checks on it — same $149. Or describe your business and the five creative agencies generate roughly one hundred candidates, every one cleared, scored, tiered, and explained — same $149. There's no penalty for arriving with or without a candidate.
We'd rather tell you that than pretend otherwise. The report tiers every candidate honestly — clear, investigate, blocked, eliminated. If your shortlist comes back without enough green-tier names to choose from, run the pipeline again on a tightened brief — different audience, different feel, different secret weapon — at no charge. The free re-run policy is real, not theater. Email hello@brandcleared.com inside thirty days.
USPTO federal database, yes. WIPO, Madrid Protocol, and international registers — no. Knockout-stage US federal coverage is the layer most likely to catch a name that will get you in trouble, and it's the cheapest one to run. The report tells you what we checked and what we didn't, and recommends a trademark attorney for anything that surfaces an “investigate” flag or that you intend to file federally. We don't have a referral relationship with any law firm — no affiliate, no kickback — so when we say “hire a trademark attorney,” it's the workflow, not an upsell.
Free re-run, inside thirty days. Tighten the brief — sharper audience, sharper secret weapon, sharper sensory and competitor inputs — and the agencies produce a different pool. The honest read on this: the briefs that produce the best names are the ones where the founder spent time on the wizard's deep-context fields instead of skipping them. If you ran it once with a thin brief, the re-run will surface the difference.
Yes. A live sample report from a real pipeline run is linked from this page — open it, scroll through every candidate, read the audit arguments, see the tier breakdown. The free single-name preview that the homepage offers (a teaser generation with one name and live clearance signals) is the second sanity check before the $149 commitment. You see exactly what you're buying.
Jesse Meria, MERIA, LLC, US-incorporated. Brand Cleared is one of several products from the same studio — alongside HookGenius, Composed, Puana, and Meria Chai. Independent software publisher, no investors, no naming agency hiding in the background. The about page has the full story; the receipts are linked at the bottom of every page.
Run one brief. About fifteen minutes from now, you’ll know which name to ship.
About 10–15 minutes · No subscription · Free re-run if you don’t love it · Refund if our system fails