Texting Base is a product I have built over the last 3 and 1/2 years which is finally "live" with our first 180+ paying accounts.

At about 400 paying accounts, we are profitable.

January was a slow month to start. I started to wonder why, considering I think our product is pretty incredible and our customers love it.

Mid January I received an email which said "your sign up doesn't work." I checked it, and it worked for me. I reached back out to that customer multiple times but never heard another word back.
A week later on a demo a mortgage company started signing up during the demo. After a brief pause he said "I'm just waiting on the text."

Quick digression. During sign up we have a 5 digit code texted to the mobile phone of whoever is signing up. We did this for a few reasons:

1) Reduce fraud by validating the cell number.
2) We are a texting company, and the code through email would have been ironic
3) Once the phone number is verified, we automatically tie their new phone number to the phone they receive the text on. That way, if a customer calls the number they received the text from, it rings to the person's cell who set up the account. By automating this, it saves time and human error and makes sure we forward to the right number.

This all made sense 2 years ago when we made the decision.

Back to the story...

So I said "waiting on the text-it should be instant...let me check"...everything worked perfectly for me.
That's when I asked..."what browser are you using?"
Of course the answer came..."Internet Explorer"

His browser was over 6 years old, and would not work with the Json objects required to receive the text code.

It was at this point I asked my IT staff to provide me with a full list of how many people had started to sign up, but never completed sign up since September. The total number? Almost 1300 accounts. 92.7% used Internet Explorer. Some browsers were 11 years old!!!!

Even getting 30% of this business would have made us nicely profitable...

We have a new sign up being released this week to account for people with 10 year old technologies...but the moral to the story is that no matter how slick or cool your technology may be, if your sign up can't capture the older generation who uses what was on their computer when they bought it, you may miss out on a lot of business.

Hopefully this saves somebody on here the time, money and embarrassment of missing out on a lot of business because you forgot about the people who use old browsers.

Browser compatibility...super important.