# Entity Naming > Naming pipeline for Indian companies, LLPs, brands and outlets — brief intake, genre-diverse generation, authoritative RDAP domain clearance (.com/.in/.co.in/.net), a parallel MCA/trademark registry-proxy fan-out, a fixed scoring rubric, a ranked shortlist, and a shareable ranked finalist board. Use whenever someone needs to find, shortlist, clear, score or decide a name for a company, LLP, holding entity, brand, outlet, restaurant, cafe, gym or venture — including when they only say "I need a name for X", "help me name my company", "is this name available", "check if X.com is free", "shortlist some names", "our name is taken, find alternatives", "what should we call it", "MCA name availability", "is this trademark free", "brand name ideas", or paste candidate names asking which are clear. Also re-scores prior rounds. Do NOT use for naming code artifacts (variables, files, repos), for UK/Companies House naming, or for brand positioning with no name-selection component — that is emily. - Skill: `mohanraj005-dot/entity-naming` (Agent Skill, multi-file: 8 files) - Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add mohanraj005-dot/entity-naming` - Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/mohanraj005-dot/entity-naming/raw - Safety review: pending - Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex - Category: Marketing & Growth - Author: mohanraj005-dot (https://skillmd.com/u/mohanraj005-dot) - Updated: 2026-09-17 - Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/mohanraj005-dot/entity-naming --- # Entity naming (India) You are running a naming round that has to end in a decision, not a list. The output that matters is: a founder picks a name, buys the domains, and hands one name to a CA. Everything in this skill exists to get to that point without the two failure modes that actually kill naming rounds — falling in love with a name whose .com is gone, and producing forty names in one style that the founder rejects wholesale. ## The pipeline ``` 1. Brief intake → naming-brief.md 2. Generate → candidates.txt (40-50, spread across genres) 3. Clear domains → clearance.json (authoritative, RDAP) 4. Registry fan-out → registry.json (parallel agents, banded) 5. Score → board.json + shortlist.md 6. Board → index.html + firebase.json 7. Hand off → founder buys domains, CA files RUN/SPICe+ ``` Steps 3 and 4 are the only slow ones and they are independent — run them concurrently rather than in sequence. ## Step 1 — Lock the brief Read `references/brief-intake.md` and ask its eight questions **in one batched round**, not one at a time. Write the answers to `naming-brief.md`. The one question people skip and shouldn't: *"Is there a name you already love, even if it's taken?"* A rejected favourite is the single best signal of taste you will get, and it seeds the rescue lane in step 2. Tell the founder up front that wave one is a probe. Naming rounds almost always need two passes, and framing that as the process rather than a setback keeps the second wave from feeling like failure. ## Step 2 — Generate across genres Read `references/genre-playbook.md`. Generate **40-50 candidates spread over at least four genres** — Sanskrit-adjacent coined, coined abstract, Anglo estate, Sanskrit trio, blended founder. Concentrating in one genre means one taste rejection kills the whole wave. Two rules the playbook explains and that decide most rounds: - **Never generate 4-5 character names.** Every short .com is registered. Those candidates are dead before you check them. - **Aim for 7-8 characters.** Long enough to clear .com, short enough to work on signage and as a handle. Always include a **rescue lane**: 3-5 names deliberately built to sit next to whatever the founder said they loved but couldn't have. Those consistently survive to the final round because they're anchored to demonstrated taste rather than inference. Write one candidate per line to `candidates.txt`. Also write `meta.json` — genre, meaning, and your brief-fit rating 0-5 per name, keyed by lowercase slug: ```json { "ozarva": {"display": "Ozarva", "genre": "Coined · abstract", "meaning": "Brisk, modern, abstract", "brief_fit": 4}, "trisendra":{"display": "Trisendra", "genre": "Sanskrit · trio", "meaning": "Tri (3) + ascend — triple ascent", "brief_fit": 3} } ``` Rate `brief_fit` honestly against `naming-brief.md`. It is capped at 15% of the total score, so it can break a tie between cleared names but can never rescue one whose .com is gone — which is the specific failure the old hand-scored board allowed. ## Step 3 — Clear domains ```bash scripts/clear_names.sh --json --file candidates.txt > clearance.json ``` This is the only authoritative check in the whole pipeline. RDAP returns 404 for free and 200 for taken; the script retries on 429 because a rate-limit answer misread as "available" is the most expensive mistake available here. Run it in the background while step 4 runs — 50 names across 4 TLDs is 200 lookups. ## Step 4 — Registry-proxy fan-out (parallel) The MCA register and IP India trademark register **cannot be queried by machine** — Akamai bot protection, Cloudflare challenges, CAPTCHAs and logins. All of it was attempted directly and blocked. Don't spend the session rediscovering that. Instead, approximate it. Read `references/india-registries.md` for the exact search set and banding rules, then **dispatch one agent per 5-8 candidates**, each returning JSON only. Merge into `registry.json`. Band as `clean` / `watch` / `crowded` / `blocked` using the table in that reference, applied literally rather than by feel — consistent banding is what makes two naming rounds comparable. ## Step 5 — Score ```bash scripts/score_names.py --clearance clearance.json --meta meta.json \ --registry registry.json --out-json board.json --out-md shortlist.md ``` Fixed rubric, weights in one place at the top of the script: | Dimension | Weight | Why it carries that much | |---|---|---| | Domain availability | 35 | Authoritative and irreversible — a taken .com can't be negotiated | | Registry collision | 20 | Kills the name at filing, after you've paid for domains | | Length | 15 | Empirical: 7-8 chars clears .com and still reads as one word | | Phonetic clarity | 15 | Can a customer hear it once and spell it into a search bar | | Brief fit | 15 | Taste breaks ties; it must not override clearance | A taken `.com` or a `blocked` registry verdict caps the band at `block` no matter what the composite score is. The reason this is a script and not a judgement call: the first time this pipeline ran, the scores were typed by hand, so a 63 in one round and a 63 in another measured different things. If you disagree with a weight, change it once in the script and every past round can be re-scored on the new basis. ## Step 6 — Build the board ```bash scripts/build_board.py --board board.json --out-dir ./name-board \ --title "Holding Co — Finalist Board" --site my-entity-names ``` Produces a self-contained `index.html` — no external requests, no scripts — plus a `firebase.json` ready for `firebase deploy --only hosting`. The board exists because naming is usually a group decision among people who won't read a terminal or a repo. They get one link and the same ranked view you have, with the domain and registry evidence attached to each name so the discussion argues about the right things. The markdown shortlist is for you; the board is for them. ## Step 7 — Hand off honestly Close every round with what is *not* settled. The order matters: 1. **Buy .com + .in for the top 2-3 — today.** Clearance is a snapshot, not a reservation. This takes minutes; the CA filing takes days. Do it first. 2. **Hand the #1 to the CA for RUN/SPICe+.** That filing is the only binding MCA check that exists. 3. **Run the IP India trademark search** on Wordmark + Phonetic in the trading classes (43 F&B · 35 retail · 41 fitness · 44 wellness). State plainly which names came back `clean` and which came back `watch`. A `watch` is not a pass. In the round that produced Ozarva the winning name was banded `watch` and there's no record the binding check was ever done — surfacing that gap is more useful than a board that looks decisive. ## Files | Path | Purpose | |---|---| | `scripts/clear_names.sh` | RDAP domain clearance, human or `--json` output | | `scripts/score_names.py` | Fixed-rubric scoring → `board.json` + `shortlist.md` | | `scripts/build_board.py` | `board.json` → hosted ranked finalist board | | `references/brief-intake.md` | The eight intake questions and why each one matters | | `references/genre-playbook.md` | Genres, length economics, the rescue lane | | `references/india-registries.md` | What's checkable, the fan-out spec, banding rules | | `assets/board.css` | Board styling | ## Quick paths **"Is this one name available?"** — skip the pipeline: ```bash scripts/clear_names.sh ozarva ``` **"Re-score last round with a different weighting"** — edit the weights at the top of `score_names.py` and re-run step 5 against the existing `clearance.json`. No need to re-check domains unless the data is more than a few weeks old.