Seven Name Checks UK Founders Run Backwards — And the Bill That Turns Up After Traction

There's a particular kind of email that arrives about eighteen months after a UK startup launches. It's polite, it's from a solicitor in a market town you've never visited, and it uses the phrase "without prejudice" three times. It concerns your name. The one you picked at 11:40pm because it was two syllables and the .co.uk was free.

Naming feels like a creative decision. It is really a commitment — to a register, to a class of goods, to a set of handles, to a Companies House record you'll be typing into bank forms for years. Founders tend to do the creative bit first and the commitment bit later, which is why the order is usually backwards.

Here's the sequence, roughly in the order it should happen, and what each one actually protects you from.

Start with the register nobody finds fun

Companies House has a free search. It takes about ten seconds and almost nobody runs it before falling in love with a name.

The rules are narrower than founders assume. Companies House will reject a name that is the same as an existing one on the register — but plenty of very similar names get waved through, and that's where the trouble lives. "Kestrel Payments Ltd" and "Kestrel Pay Ltd" can both exist quite legally. What they can't both do is convince a customer, a supplier or a payment provider that they're the same business.

The other thing worth internalising: registering a company gives you exactly zero exclusive rights to a name. It's an entry in a public record, not a badge of ownership. Founders who think the certificate is protection tend to be the same ones who discover it isn't, usually in writing.

Run the IPO search before you run the design brief

The UK Intellectual Property Office holds the register that actually bites. Its search tool is free, mildly ugly, and covers both identical and similar marks within the same class of goods and services.

For most tech startups, that means looking at Class 9 (software and downloadable goods), Class 35 (advertising, business services, retail-ish activity) and Class 42 (SaaS, design, tech services). Consumer-facing products often pull in Class 41 too. Search the word, then search the word with a letter changed, then search the stems. If a mark is registered for something adjacent to what you do, that's a conversation worth having before the packaging is printed — not after.

Filing itself is relatively cheap: an online application starts around £170 for one class and £50 for each additional class. The application is not the expensive part of this story. The expensive part is discovering a conflict when you already have 4,000 paying users.

Passing off: the risk with no register at all

This is the one that catches people who assume "I searched the trademark database, I'm fine."

UK law protects unregistered goodwill too, under the doctrine of passing off. Broadly, if someone else has built a reputation under a similar name in your market, and your use of it misleads customers to your benefit, they can act — regardless of whether they ever filed anything. No register to check, no neat database. It's built on evidence of trading history, reputation and confusion.

Practical version: a small Bristol firm has been selling coffee subscriptions as "Roast & Reconciled" for six years. You launch "Roast & Reconcile" as a payroll tool. Different sectors, so probably fine. But if you launch it as a coffee subscription with a mildly similar look, you've walked into a problem that no database would have flagged for you.

The cheap version of this check is a search engine one, done properly: quoted searches, local news, Companies House, Instagram, and the trade press for your specific niche. Twenty minutes. Look for anyone who has been quietly trading under something close.

Domain sprawl is a real cost, not a tidiness issue

.co.uk and .uk are two different things, administered by Nominet, and the shorter one is not automatically yours. Check both, plus the .com, before you settle. Then check the obvious typo, and the hyphenated version, because someone else will own whichever one you skip.

Two rules of thumb. First, if the .com belongs to an unrelated business in another country, that's survivable — but know it, rather than finding out from a customer who emailed the wrong company. Second, if the .co.uk or .uk is parked, held by a squatter, or sitting on a page offering to "make an offer", assume that price goes up the moment you launch.

Handles, app stores, and the two-hour sweep

Before the landing page goes live, do the boring sweep in one sitting: social handles on the five or six platforms you might plausibly use, the App Store and Google Play for anything close to your name, and a quick check of the .uk variants you skipped.

Changing a handle at 300 followers is an afternoon's admin. Changing it after a piece in a national outlet, a conference talk and a podcast tour is a forensic exercise in tracking down every backlink and mention you've ever earned.

What rebranding after traction actually costs

Companies House will let you change a company name for a few dozen pounds. That's the only cheap part.

The rest of the invoice is longer than founders expect: domain migration with redirects that must not break, an SEO dip you'll spend a quarter recovering from, printed materials and merchandise written off, a new bank account and payment provider setup, a VAT registration update, new contracts and terms, app store resubmission, and a stretch of confused customers asking whether they've been acquired.

None of that is fatal. All of it is avoidable with roughly three hours of work in week one.

The Tuesday afternoon order of operations

1. Companies House search, including near-misses.
2. UK IPO search across Classes 9, 35 and 42, plus anything sector-specific.
3. General web and social search for existing traders with similar names.
4. Domain check: .co.uk, .uk, .com, plus the typo.
5. Handle check across your realistic platforms.
6. App store check, both stores.
7. Only then: buy the domain, book the designer, tell anyone.

None of this is legal advice — for anything involving a live conflict, a solicitor who does this daily will cost you less than the rebrand. But the checks themselves are free, and doing them in this order means the creative decision and the commercial commitment happen at the same time, by the same person, with the same information.

A launch-day name is not a placeholder. It's the first thing you ask a stranger to trust, and the last thing you want to be explaining to a solicitor in a market town you've never visited.