Like most of you, I first heard of Cloudflare via this blog. I read about HTTP/2, Railgun, the Hundredth Data Center, and Keyless SSL — but I never thought I would work here. I, along with my co-founder Adam, and our friends and coworkers were hard at work building something very different. We were working on a tool which spent most of its life in the web browser, not on servers all around the world: an app store for your website. Using our tool a website owner could find and install any of over a hundred apps which could help them collect feedback from their visitors, sell products on their site, or even make their site faster.
Our goal was to create a way for every website owner to find and install all of the open-source and SaaS tools technical experts use everyday. As developers ourselves, we wanted to make it possible for a developer in her basement to build the next great tool and get it on a million websites (and make a million dollars) the next day. We didn’t want her to succeed because she had the biggest sales or marketing team, or the most name recognition, but because her tool is the best.
When we began talking with Cloudflare, it was about integrating with Eager, not about being acquired. But Cloudflare presented an opportunity to grow so much faster than we had hoped. In fact, we plan on releasing our platform to Cloudflare’s millions of customers as soon as April of next year. That is a scale which we could only dream of last year.
As an app platform, scale is uniquely important to us. With millions of users we can ensure app developers that what they build will get installed and purchased. We can support thousands of apps and generate millions of dollars of revenue for developers. We can hire the best developers in the world and grow our team. We can make the Internet an easier place to build great things.
This blog is perhaps not the best place to bestow Cloudflare with compliments, so I’ll leave it with this. After visiting Cloudflare’s offices in Austin and San Francisco, after meeting its co-founders, after attending the company retreat in Santa Cruz, we decided to join Cloudflare. We have already begun working on reimagining our app platform, turning it into Cloudflare Apps. Beginning in April of next year, any and every developer will be able to use our platform to get their code installed onto millions of websites.
If you want to build amazing tools for all website owners, even for the ones who don’t know how to “copy-paste and embed code”, we’re the platform for you. If you want to build a tool which can make money from small and medium sized businesses, rather than by selling to huge enterprises, we’re for you too.
We’ll be releasing more information about our app development platform in January. If you’d like to get notified when we do, let us know.