Paydirt turned 'we don't support IE' into a feature and let the debate sell it

By 2012 a decade of Internet Explorer 6-8 had left web developers bitter: supporting it meant Windows-only testing, version fragmentation and endless hacks, and for a small team on Macs the cost could exceed the revenue it represented. Paydirt, a bootstrapped time-tracking and invoicing app run by two hard-working guys, sat exactly in that squeeze.

Their answer was not a quiet browser check but a public manifesto: 'we don't support IE – at all – and we don't pretend to. You can't even sign up for Paydirt using IE.' The announcement, posted to Hacker News under the headline 'We don't support Internet Explorer, and we're calling that a feature,' argued that limiting the app to sensible browsers let it take full advantage of canvas, SVG animations, CSS3 and web sockets.

Rey Bango, a Microsoft evangelist, decided to check the claim: by faking a Chrome user agent in IE9 and IE10 he signed up and used the app with no functional difference, and he found the code standards-based with CSS3 features those versions supported anyway. The block was user-agent sniffing, not engineering necessity, and commenters split between calling it bad business and calling it a deliberate stunt aimed at the Mac-using freelancers who were Paydirt's actual buyers; a friend of the founders said the two simply lacked the resources to test IE.

Whoever was right, the refusal turned a resource limit into the company's loudest advertisement. People said they had never heard of Paydirt before the post, the Hacker News argument drew 202 comments on Bango's rebuttal alone (267 points), and even a Microsoft IE team member joined the thread. A two-person startup got the web's attention by declaring war on the browser its customers already hated, and its IE traffic was only about 1.6% anyway, partly because it had blocked IE users at the door.

Make the refusal the feature and let the fight market you

Paydirt's buyers were Mac-using freelance developers and designers, so refusing IE cost almost no audience while signaling that the product was built for people like them.

An explicit refusal beats silent half-support: no IE testing, no Windows VMs, no bug reports from a browser the team could not reproduce — and IE users could still get in by changing their user agent.

Because the app was written with standards-based markup, IE9 and IE10 rendered it correctly anyway, so the 'unsupported' line was mostly a claim and a filter rather than lost functionality.

The provocation marketed itself: Hacker News and a Microsoft evangelist turned the stance into a public fight, and people who had never heard of the startup learned its name from the argument.

A support constraint can become positioning when the excluded group is not your buyer: say the refusal publicly and let the argument it provokes market you to exactly the audience it targets.

The manifesto's visible outcome was the argument itself: Bango's rebuttal drew 267 points and 202 comments on Hacker News, developers debated whether Paydirt was dishonest, foolish or brilliant, and a Microsoft IE team member joined the thread before Bango closed comments after what he called 'plenty of lively feedback.' Within this record Paydirt did not reverse the policy; the exchange ended with Bango offering to help and the startup keeping its stance.