I have named a lot of side projects, and for years I got the order wrong. Brainstorm a name, check the .com, fall in love, ship. The trademark check was the thing I did last, if at all. That is exactly backwards, because the domain being free tells you nothing about whether someone already owns the name.
So here is the process I use now, written the way I wish someone had handed it to me. It is free, it takes a few minutes, and it happens in a place that changed recently enough that most guides online are out of date.
TESS is gone
If you learned to search US trademarks before 2024, the tool you remember no longer exists. The USPTO retired TESS, the Trademark Electronic Search System, on November 30, 2023, and replaced it with a cloud system called Trademark Search at tmsearch.uspto.gov. Old TESS links redirect there now. Any tutorial still telling you to open TESS is describing a system that was switched off.
The new system is free and needs no account to search. It gives you two ways in:
