Day 17: The IRS fax machine at 2am, and what it taught me about building for the default user

I spent three hours trying to send a fax to the IRS.

Not because faxing is hard. Because I was filling out Form SS-4, and box 7b asked for an SSN. I don't have one. I'm not American. The instructions said "foreign applicants without an SSN leave blank." So I left it blank.

The fax went through. The IRS rejected it. Reason: "Box 7b cannot be empty."

So I called them. At 2am my time, because that's when the IRS phone line opens. The agent was polite. She told me to write "FOREIGN" in box 7b.

Not "leave blank." Write the word FOREIGN. Six letters that appeared nowhere in the instructions.

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That's when it clicked for me.

Every form, every platform, every onboarding flow I'd been fighting — Stripe, Mercury, the IRS, OpenAI — they were all built for the default user. The default user has an SSN. The default user has a US address. The default user's name fits neatly into "first name, last name" with ASCII characters.

If you're outside that default, the system doesn't fail loudly. It fails quietly. It lets you think you made a mistake. It makes you chase ghost errors that aren't errors at all — just gaps between who the system was designed for and who you actually are.

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This changed how I build TopStartNow.

I stopped asking "what would this flow look like for a US founder?" and started asking "what would this flow look like for someone whose name gets mangled by Romanization, whose address proof is a Chinese credit card bill, and who's never heard of Form 5472 because nobody told them it exists?"

The onboarding isn't a checklist anymore. It's a walkthrough for someone who was never the default.

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I'm curious — if you've built a product for users who don't fit the mold, what was the moment that made you realize the default wasn't working for them?

And if you've been on the user side of this — what system broke on you in a way that wasn't a bug, it was just never built for you?