Dwolla experienced a hockey stick traffic spike on June 7, the day of the GRID release. Screenshot from twitter.com/bpmilne.

Ten days ago, the day Dwolla launched GRID, which we called a “Facebook connect” for its payment network, the startup’s founder and CEO Ben Milne tweeted about the day’s activities: “Today is insane. No idea what else to say.” And later, in a screenshot, embedded above, he showed the hockey stick jump in site traffic.

While he might have been speechless that day, we’ve since caught up with Milne to hear more about GRID and the biggest news of this week: Dwolla hit $1 million a week in transactions, a milestone first reported by TechCrunch last night: “Payments Service Dwolla Hits $1M A Week In Transactions.”

“GRID was the best launch we’ve ever had from a traffic perspective,” Milne said in an email interview earlier this week. On GRID’s June 7 release day, Dwolla saw its active user count more than quadruple, and the amount of activity on the servers brought down Dwolla’s dot-org site (which appears may happen again today).

“Through the SPN article, RWW article, and TNW we saw more incoming traffic and registrations than any other single day in history. GRID will take more time to fully explain and implement but I think it marks the 2-3-4th time people are seeing the Dwolla name and giving us a shot.”

Those people giving it a shot are likely now early adopters from outside the Silicon Prairie region. “We are seeing tons of growth in SF, NY and Austin,” Milne said. At this point, individually, the states of those cities – California, New York and Texas – have all overtaken Iowa’s Dwolla usage. As to why those cities, Milne pointed to his and Dwolla’s communication director Jordan Lampe‘s personal time spent in those cities, such as at Finovate, TechCrunch Disrupt and South by Southwest Interactive. “It also doesn’t hurt these are tech hotbeds and likely to find a platform like ours,” Milne said.

As to why the uptick in traffic and usage, Milne gives credit to the startup’s focus on continually improving the product as well as mobile integration across multiple platforms – after launching with an iOS app, they’ve added Android and Windows 7 Phone apps. Getting attention from blogs and media outlets outside the region has helped, as well. In a company blog post last night, Milne called out Y Combinator‘s social news site, Hacker News, as a reason for a “good chunk” of traffic on the GRID release day.

When asked what most makes him exited this week, Milne said: “It’s working… Dwolla is working… We’re building products and people are using them. That makes me feel like we are on the right track and I just want to keep executing with our team.”

To get more numbers around Dwolla’s growth, including a comparison to its early adoption, see Dwolla’s company blog post: “We’ve officially passed $1M a week in transactions.”

More on GRID

As of today, Milne said there are “dozens of developers working with it” but there isn’t anything out in the wild, yet. He did add, “it won’t be long.” Additionally, Dwolla continues to be committed to catering to its developer community. “We’ve had a lot of outreach since last week,” Milne said. “Dwolla is one of the few companies who actually has a full time developer on staff whose primary duty is community / developer support. Karrie [Zeman] is working through dozens of implementations with developers all over the U.S.

We are also working with a to-be-named individual on an SDK to make life easier for new implementation and building libraries for developers to work with,” Milne said. “Over time we want to continually make it easier and easier for developers to work with the Dwolla platform.”

GRID backstory

When speaking with Milne the week before the June 7 GRID release I asked him for the backstory of the two-month development of GRID. Although it didn’t make my first article on GRID, I think it’s a great story to share, so I’ll do it here.

Milne said:

This whole project was spearheaded by Brandon (Weber) and Shane (Neuerburg) and the way it came up was we were kind of talking a lot about managing permissions of other platforms and making sure users weren’t exposed, and you know, looking at it from a software development stand point a lot of the trends in terms of security are being set by non-financial platforms, because honestly what we’re doing with credit cards is really silly if you think about it, but the way we’re managing privacy makes a lot of since. So if you take the model [set by the social networks] and tie it into a payment platform, that makes a lot of sense.”