When Michelle, Lee, and I started working on Cloudflare back in theWinter of 2009 the plan was always to launch at TechCrunch. You makeplans like that in order to give you some sense of a light at the end ofthe very long tunnel that is building a startup, but it's rare thatthings actually work out as you plan. We thought we were onto somethingspecial based on the feedback from our early beta users, but Cloudflarewas really a long shot for TechCrunch. We're a tough story to tell,we're not the typical TechCrunch consumer Internet company, and, as MikeArrington said on stage right before we won the award for "MostInnovative Company," we're a bit "boring" and doing something akin to"muffler repair" for the Internet.
Turns out the Internet has had a broken muffler for a while, and seeingthe pent up demand for a service like Cloudflare has been awesome. Inthe seven days since our launch, the traffic through our network hasincreased almost 10x and, if you measure all the page views or uniquevisitors passing through our site, in one week we went from the 1,000thlargest site online to one of the top 50. We now power more page viewsand see more unique visitors than a major site like CNN.com. That'spretty amazing.
If you're a startup and you get a chance to launch at a TechCrunchconference, I can't recommend it more highly. Heather, Erick, Mike, andeveryone else on the TechCrunch team were professional and worked hardto make sure we told Cloudflare's story in as compelling a way aspossible. The launch of a startup is a sacred event. You only get to doit once. We couldn't have been happier with how Cloudflare's went, andwe can't wait to tell everyone what we're up to next!