Namesake↗ namesake.baby

Customer

Expecting parents who treat naming as one of the highest-stakes irreversible decisions they will make.

Problem · external

Most baby-naming products are SEO listicles — they cannot tell you whether a name is rising or fading, cannot attribute a rise to a specific film or character or royal birth, and cannot help two parents converge on a single choice.

Problem · internal

The infinite-list feeling — every search returns more names, every name returns more lists, and the decision stays exactly as undecided as it started.

Problem · philosophical

Naming a child is one of the few truly irreversible decisions a parent makes; the choice deserves research, structure, and signal, not entertainment dressed up as a product.

Guide

Namesake — twenty years of weekly search data, a deterministic per-name composite score (SSA stats × LLM-enriched meaning × cultural-event attribution), and a tournament-bracket UX that forces choosing over browsing.

Plan

A wizard captures parents' story, taste, and constraints → the system produces a scored, swipable list → a single-elimination bracket with village voting + shower mode drives convergence on a single name.

Success

Two parents converge on one name they both feel right about, with the research behind why it carries the weight it does.

Failure avoided

Another listicle scroll that ends with the decision exactly as undecided as it started — and a name chosen by default rather than chosen on purpose.

Most baby-naming products are SEO listicles dressed up as products. They cannot tell you whether a name is currently rising or fading; they cannot attribute the rise (which film, which royal birth, which character); they cannot help two parents converge on a shared decision; and they cannot tell you why one name carries narrative weight and another does not. The decision warrants more than a top-100 list. Nothing on the market treats it that way.

Live product at namesake.baby. $24 one-time tournament unlock — no subscription — that gates the builder, single-elimination bracket UX, village voting, shower mode, and birth reveal. A wizard flow walks parents through their story, taste, and constraints; the system produces a scored, swipable list (the *Namesake score* is a deterministic composite — uniqueness × 0.30 + trend × 0.25 + meaning × 0.20 + feasibility × 0.13 + search × 0.12, percentile-normalized into a 5–95 display range against the dataset). A cultural-intelligence content layer maps name spikes to specific films, shows, and events with attribution drawn from OMDb, TMDb, Wikipedia, and AI synthesis — the definitive record of how popular culture has shaped American baby naming. Visual identity is light-mode taste-grade (Libre Baskerville + Source Sans 3, terracotta and cream palette); profile illustrations are generated through a FLUX pipeline via FAL.

• 01Decision-discipline product framing — the locked positioning is *a name chosen, not stumbled upon*. Every surface is built around helping parents converge on a single name, not browse infinitely.
• 02Tournament-bracket UX — single-elimination naming bracket, village voting, shower mode, and birth reveal as bundled features under a $24 one-time unlock. The bracket forces the choosing-not-browsing motion the positioning names.
• 03Twenty years of weekly search data plus systematic cultural-event attribution. Most naming products show annual SSA rankings; Namesake shows weekly trend velocity with named causal events (the film that landed, the character who became iconic, the royal birth) attached. No competitor has the dataset.
• 04Cultural-diffusion research apparatus — Bass diffusion, Hawkes self-exciting processes, Moran's I, Granger causality, Lieberson null model, phonetic-spillover graphs, variance decomposition. The research surface is mirrored to `/research/namesake/` and is structural substrate for the network-mediated-adoption book project: same mechanism on a cultural-name corpus that the book argues for on organizational adoption.
• 05Deterministic, percentile-normalized scoring — no LLM-on-render. The Namesake score is computed in a batch rescore script (`npm run recalculate-scores`); the LLM enrichment runs once per name, not per request. Every name's display score is reproducible and bounded; the substrate stays interpretable.
• 06Light-mode executive-tasteful aesthetic — Libre Baskerville serif, terracotta palette, FLUX-pipeline illustrations on the cooler illustration-surface token. The visual register is the audience's; the editorial discipline does not leak.

1. 2026-05-17DP-156 / DP-160: REUSABLE_PATTERNS.md now references P233 (Operator-Console Visual Discipline) — codifies palette/typography/density rules for the upcoming admin and curator surfaces (separate aesthetic from the consumer-facing card surface).
2. 2026-05-15A-260: Insight cards produced from the predictability-ceiling + Bass / Hawkes / Moran research findings (cultural-diffusion research → consumable cards).
3. 2026-05-14PR #1 merged: 2026-05-13 portfolio SOTA snapshot for Namesake (positioning + state-of-the-art capture).
4. 2026-05-13Mike-voice reference pointer (PA-017) added to AGENTS.md.
5. 2026-05-12A-241..A-247 filed: pull-through from research artifacts to reports/app + phonetic-family product spec.
6. ~2026-05-10 — A-237 shipped end-to-end: spelling-variant sensitivity table with consonant guard; queued A-240 Phase 3a g2p quality fix.
7. ~2026-05-09 — Production view repair: name_full.fictional_origin errors fixed; Supabase advisor cleanup queued (A-251 / A-252 / A-253).
8. Ongoing — chore(research): nightly PIPELINE_STATUS refresh (GitHub Action; runs daily against the linked Supabase project).

• ·Research pipeline phases on Modal — phonetic-spillover graph, null-model Monte Carlo, Bass / Hawkes / Moran fits, Granger causality, synthetic-control panels. App baby-namer-research, volume research-data.
• ·Phonetic-family product (A-241..A-247) — pulling research artifacts through to in-app reports and a phonetic-family surface.
• ·Tier-2 Google Trends weekly fetch — Modal cron every 12h :30, prioritized cohort (top scores + |velocity| ≥ 10 movers + SSA surging / rising).
• ·Operator/curator UI design pass — P233 visual-discipline applied to dense tables, dashboards, status surfaces (separate from the consumer card aesthetic).
• ·Cultural-intelligence content surface at /culture/{films,shows,events} — route currently redirects to /names pending hub build.

Two structural choices define the repo. First, the research pipeline runs on Modal (app `baby-namer-research`, volume `research-data`, secret `supabase-creds`), not on the laptop and not on Vercel — long-running cultural-diffusion compute (Monte Carlo null models, phonetic-neighbor graphs, Bass / Hawkes / Moran fits, Granger causality) lives in an explicit elsewhere with its own cron schedule and parquet substrate. Second, the Namesake score is deterministic and batch-computed (`npm run recalculate-scores`), never LLM-on-render — LLM enrichment runs once per name into `name_enrichment`, the score is a percentile-normalized composite over fixed weights, and every display number is reproducible from the SSA dataset plus a single enrichment pass. The web app is Next.js 16 App Router + Supabase + Stripe + Anthropic; Vercel deploys from GitHub only (uncommitted work never reaches production), and the canonical positioning is locked at *a name chosen, not stumbled upon*.

Live at https://namesake.baby. Paid product at $24 per tournament unlock — Stripe live. Research surface mirrored to peopleanalyst.com/research/namesake (cultural-diffusion methodology, Bass / Hawkes / Moran reports, predictability-ceiling finding, null-model + phonetic-spillover phases). Cultural-intelligence content strategy laid out for `/culture/{films,shows,events}` SEO surface; route currently redirects to `/names` pending hub build.