markencheck.ai

TL;DR: I'm building markencheck.ai to help founders check their brand name and the legal risk around it in seconds, before it costs them anything...

Quick backstory. I kept seeing the same painful pattern. A founder falls in love with a name, drops money on branding and a lawyer, and only then discovers there's a conflicting trademark sitting right there in the register. That gap between "I love this name" and "oh no it's taken" is the thing I'm obsessed with closing.

So I'm dedicated to one job: give founders a fast, clear read on their own mark and the "dangers" around it, upfront. No legalese, no waiting.

While building the tool I ended up with the entire EU register locally, got curious, and ran the numbers on all 2,875,008 marks. Stuff that stuck with me:

Filings went from almost nothing in 1996 to 160k+ a year now. It's loud out there.

The most claimed category is Class 9 (software), 773k marks. SaaS people, you're naming into the most crowded room in the building.

Half of everything ever registered is already dead. Expired, withdrawn, refused. A graveyard of names founders fought for and lost.

Most active filer is L'Oreal with 5,207 marks. Big brands treat naming like a sport. Most of us wing it.

I turned it into a free report, charts and methodology, no signup: https://markencheck.ai/en/trademark-report-2025

Now the build-in-public part. I'm at basically zero domain authority, so instead of fighting the big legal sites on head keywords, my bet is original data and genuinely useful content as the growth engine. This report is experiment #1 and I'll report back here with whatever numbers it pulls, good or bad.

If you've ever been burned by a name, or you're picking one right now, how did you go about checking it? And for the early-stage folks: what was the first channel that actually moved the needle for you?