Find a baby name you both love.

It starts as a note on your phone

You start out excited. You screenshot names, you text each other links, you start a note on your phone and it turns into a list, and the list turns into a spreadsheet.

Then one night you open it and there are fifty-eight names in there, and you feel nothing. You cannot remember which ones were yours and which were theirs. You scroll to the bottom, close it, and decide to think about it tomorrow.

You did the work. You have a list. And you are no closer to a name than you were in the first week.

Generators generate. That is all they do.

A name generator has done its job the moment it shows you something you like. What happens after that is your problem.

So you get volume instead of progress. And the volume is padded: most apps count Jason, Jasen, Jayson and Jaysen as four names, which is how a database of a few thousand becomes a headline of thirty thousand. It is one of the two loudest complaints in the category.

Mamou shows one card per name. Kaitlyn, Caitlin and Katelynn are one decision, not three swipes. And when a name is finally yours, you pick the spelling then, when it matters.

You do not choose a name by reading it in a list.

You choose it by living with it for a minute.

That is what parents already do, on their own, in a hallway at eleven at night. Mamou just gives it a shape.

The name you both liked second is not a consolation prize.

Most lists die the same way. One of you loves a name, the other vetoes it, and it goes quiet. Months later it is still the one you think about.

Mamou is built so that does not happen. Once you are both in the rounds, nothing is eliminated because one person disliked it: a name only leaves when you have both cut it, on the same test. And at the end, if you each pick a different favourite, you do not fight about it. One becomes the first name, the other becomes the middle name.

Once the shortlist is set, there is no way to veto your partner’s name. A name only leaves when you have both let it go.

Your partner’s phone is not an afterthought.

The loudest complaint about apps in this category is that the pairing breaks: you match on names your partner never sees, or you cannot connect at all, which defeats the entire point of using it as a couple.

Mamou is a two-person app first. Matches land on both phones the moment they happen, and pitch night is designed to be played on two phones in the same room.

Then you put the phones down and talk.

Two phones, one room, eight names left. You take turns making the case for a name out loud, reading where it came from and why you like it. You both vote in private. The phones reveal at the same moment.

Then the last table. You each secretly pick your number one. Same name and it is done. Different names, and both of them are the final pair, and the only thing left to settle is which one goes first.

Nothing you love can lose there. That is the point.

You finish with a first name and a middle name, and a certificate you can keep.

Every name in Mamou belongs to someone.

They come from open national birth registries: the US Social Security Administration, France’s INSEE, the UK Office for National Statistics, Ireland’s CSO, Spain’s INE and more. Nothing is generated, and nothing is padded.

Around 104,000 names you can actually be dealt, drawn from a corpus of 235,000 registry records. The second number is bigger than the first because Kaitlyn, Caitlin and Katelynn are three records and one card. Most apps count them as three names, which is how a few thousand becomes a headline of thirty thousand, and why parents end up swiping the same name over and over with the letters moved around.

So Mamou can tell you how many people have really been given a name, where, and when. The rarity dial is real, from household names down to deep cuts that came out of a register rather than out of a machine.

Unique is easy. Unique and wearable is the hard part.

Parents who want an uncommon name almost always want the same second thing: for their child not to spend a lifetime spelling it down the phone.

Mamou takes that seriously. You see how a name reads in each of your languages, how common it truly is, and how it looks written down, before you commit to it.

We did all the things that do not work

We collected hundreds of names from wherever we found them, and read the same list over and over. We vetoed each other. We kept trying to force it down to a top ten, then a top five, and we never really liked the names we ended up compromising on.

We found our first child’s name seven days after they were born. For seven days we called our child “the baby”.

When the second pregnancy came round we started doing the exact same thing, and we were weeks in before we noticed. So we stopped, and built this instead.

This time we had a name in three days. We both love it, and we love the middle name too.

This time neither of us shot the other one down. Once the shortlist is set, Mamou gives you no way to: in the rounds that decide, a name only leaves when you have both let it go.