The project founder came to us with a very strong fondness of Iowa, and an equally strong inability to stand the sight of it. They didn’t want to read about it less, or think about it less. They wanted it gone from their screen, on every site, without having to ask twice.
“Make Iowa disappear from my internet.”
The founder asked to stay anonymous, and we’ve honored that: no name, no photograph, no location. We can say they were decisive, unusually clear about what they wanted, and entirely serious. So were we.
02
What counts as Iowa?
Discovery took one question. The answer ran longer than anyone expected.
In scope
The name itself, in any capitalization, along with Iowan and Iowans.
The nickname: the Hawkeye State.
IA, when it is plainly the state code, as in “Des Moines, IA 50309”.
Its towns and its counties.
ZIP codes beginning 500 through 528.
Area codes 319, 515, 563, 641 and 712.
Its colleges, and their teams.
The hard cases
Waterloo
There is one in Iowa. There are others, in Ontario and in Belgium, that have done nothing wrong. They stay.
IA inside other words
Asia, media, Virginia and California all contain it. None of them were the problem.
Text that loads later
Endless feeds, comment threads, anything that arrives after the page does. Iowa doesn’t wait for the page to finish loading, so neither can we.
Places people type
Search boxes, forms, an email in progress. Rewriting someone’s words while they type them is how you lose a client. What the founder types stays exactly as typed.
A test page with Corn Protector on. Ohio stays: it wasn’t in the brief.
03
Months of work
The founder described the timeline as “months.” We scheduled accordingly, then left room for notes. Dates approximate; effort sincere.
Month one
Discovery
A list of everything that might be Iowa, and a second, shorter list of things that only look like it.
Month two
The detection engine
A MutationObserver watches each page for new text. Changes are gathered into batches and handled together, so a feed that loads a thousand posts doesn’t cause a thousand interruptions.
Month three
Restraint
Editable areas are skipped entirely, and so is code: Iowa inside a code sample stays, because changing code changes what it does.
Month four
Very large pages
Long threads, archives, documentation that never ends. The engine works in small slices and lets the page breathe between them, so scrolling stays smooth.
Month five
The off switch
One tick per site, from the toolbar. We hope it’s never needed. It’s there anyway.
Month six
Chrome, Firefox and Edge
Built for Chrome first, then ported to Firefox and prepared for Microsoft Edge, each with its own store review.
Month seven, approximately
Notes
Six weeks of revision rounds, feedback calls and emails that began “one more thing.” They have a section of their own, below.
04
Monetization, at the client’s request
Midway through, the founder asked a question we hadn’t scoped: could Corn Protector make money? We built two plans and priced them exactly as instructed.
The free version already does the whole brief. It hides Iowa on every site and puts an emoji in its place, chosen personally by the founder.
Everything after that is optional, by design and at some length.
Plus
$1.99 a month
Replace Iowa with 🌽, 🫏 or 🐂, or an emoji of your own.
A counter of what you avoided, today and all time, and a streak of Iowa-free days.
Hide headlines that mention Iowa entirely.
Plus: corn instead of Iowa.
Platinum
$99.99 a week
Replace any word or first name you choose, the same way as Iowa.
A variation finder, powered by AI, for the forms you’d miss: type “Anna” and it suggests Annalee, Audrianna and Annabelle.
First names and words only.
Platinum: replace any first name or word.
To be clear: this is a joke, and nobody is expected to pay. Platinum is billed weekly because the founder felt strongly about it, which works out to $5,199.48 a year. We built it carefully, and we recommend against buying it.
05
Weeks of back and forth
The build was finished in month six. The notes took a little longer. We read every one, answered every one, and kept them all.
The founder reviewed everything we sent, usually within the hour, and always in detail. What follows is written up from our side of the inbox. The founder’s words stay between us, as agreed; the decisions are all here.
Week one
Round one
The first build went over on a Monday. By Tuesday the founder had found Iowa in the comments under a sweet corn recipe, three screens down. It was gone by that evening. Their only other note was that the corn looked pale in dark mode. We checked. It is the same corn.
Week two
What counts as Iowa, again
A second scope call, at the founder’s request. The Mississippi River borders Iowa, and nine other states; it stays. Idaho looks a little like Iowa at a glance; it was not the brief, and it stays too. Iowa City was already in scope. So was the Hawkeye State.
Week three
The emoji
Corn was never in question. The other two choices took four rounds. A horse was ruled out as too fast, a pig as too pleased with itself, and a tractor as too close to the subject. The donkey and the ox were approved together, and the founder asked for a fourth option they could choose themselves. That became “an emoji of your own.”
Week four
Platinum, by any other name
The top plan was Gold for one afternoon and Diamond for most of a week before it settled as Platinum. Then the name finder: whether Joanna counts as a form of Anna (yes, if you tick it), whether Annie does (yes), and whether names that only rhyme should be suggested (no, after a long call). Hannah came up as well. It reads the same backwards, which the founder asked us to mention here. We have.
Week five
Feedback calls
Two calls, each booked for fifteen minutes. The first took fifteen minutes. The second settled whether the counter should say Iowas avoided or Iowas prevented, and ran long. Prevented won; you can see it in the results.
Week six
Sign-off
Final approval arrived in writing, one line long. A second email followed shortly after, and it began “one more thing.”
The “one more thing” emails
Weekly pricing
Platinum was going to be monthly. The founder asked for weekly. We asked whether they were sure. They were sure.
Ohio
Raised once, late in the evening, and ruled out on the next call. It wasn’t in the brief, and it still isn’t.
The off switch
Asked about, questioned, reconsidered and kept. It’s still there. It’s still one tick.
The corn itself
Whether corn needed protecting from Iowa. It already was. See the results, under Corn.
This page
Whether it could leave out the founder’s name, location and anything else that might identify them. It does.
Still a joke. The rounds above are written up from our notes, for fun, with the founder’s blessing. The founder stays anonymous, nothing here is a quote, and no client was harmed in the revision process.
06
Iowa stays on your computer
The engineering decision we’re proudest of is the one you can’t see.
Corn Protector reads and changes pages inside your own browser. The pages you visit, your counter and your list of words stay on your device.
Only two things ever leave the browser:
The plan check, which asks whether a Plus or Platinum plan is active.
Platinum’s name finder, which sends the one name or word you typed, and only when you ask it to.
Corn Protector is in the Chrome Web Store now, and on its way to Firefox and Edge. Leave your email and we’ll write when it gets there, and when we publish a new project, if you like.
Have an unusual brief?
The Bespoke Lab takes the strange, specific ones. Tell us about yours.
