Cloudflare Growth Playbook

Project Honey Pot wanted to stop spam. They realized they could stop all bad traffic.

Mass-Market Infrastructure Disruption: Cloudflare tacticaly used a high-performance free tier to aggregate a massive percentage of the world's web traffic. Their 'Universal SSL' launch was a masterstroke that secured millions of sites overnight, making encryption a default rather than a luxury. This huge footprint provides them with unparalleled data on global cyber threats, which they turn into a superior enterprise security product, effectively using the free internet as a R&D lab for their high-end customer offerings.