Scaling with Virality to 9 Million Users: Postman CEO Abhinav Asthana (Part 1)

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Postman has found tremendous adoption among developers through word of mouth. Read on to learn more.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Abhinav Asthana: I was born in Varanasi, India where my grandparents used to live. My dad later moved to Lucknow. He is a Civil Engineer. I did my schooling all across small towns wherever my dad was posted. Lucknow was the mainstay for some time.

Then I went to Goa for four years to do my undergraduate studies. Then I did my first startup. It was a consulting startup that I started in my last semester but formalized after college. I was in Delhi and Bangalore for the startup. That led me to meet my first co-founder at my first startup.

The startup did these mobile app 360-degree views. The vision was to have the social street view sort of thing. We raised half a million seed round. My co-founder was in the US for a while. We were, for the most part, a five-member team. We moved to Bangalore until I started Postman.

Sramana Mitra: What years was this?

Abhinav Asthana: 2006 to 2010, I was in college. 2010 to mid-2013 is when I was with TeliportMe.

Sramana Mitra: What happened to that company?

Abhinav Asthana: The company still exists. The product is doing pretty well. We were featured on the Google Play store. It became a top-rated app. We eventually found out that the business model around charging people in the app was good for bootstrapping but not really a big seller in terms of building a long-term sustainable business model.

I wanted to take the platform one way. My co-founder had different ideas, so we parted ways in 2013. It moved on to doing a bunch of other consulting work.

Sramana Mitra: What was your next step?

Abhinav Asthana: While we were building all of this, I found out that we were building our application for a lot of different platforms. We were building an Android app at that time. Then we started to move towards iOS. From our software stack, we also had a whole bunch of API’s that we were constantly building.

I realized that it was a big pain point for me as a developer. We found out that this was a recurring challenge. I’ve built a side project called Postman as an open source extension for the Chrome webstore. It was a fun side project for me.

In 2013 when I decided to move on, I didn’t join another company. I just did some consulting on the side. I started focusing on what was going on in the API world. Postman grew through word of mouth. It had its own life. I decided to look into why people share this pain point so much.

Sramana Mitra: What was going on in that world? There were companies like MuleSoft at that point that were significant and successful. What were the gaps?

Abhinav Asthana: Nobody was addressing the needs of the developer when it came to testing and documenting APIs. A lot of the focus was on a narrow set of public APIs that were popular then. The tools and the system they were selling were not tuned for the needs of developers who were writing code.

Because of this gap, the workflows that were being adopted were broken. That’s why people were coming to Postman and using the product to smoothen their workflow. Of course, they had a lot more that they wanted from the product, but no other product was fulfilling their need.

We started this cycle of learning more about their deeper needs. At a very fundamental level, we understood that APIs are becoming very important to developers and their needs are not being met by the existing cohort of companies.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Scaling with Virality to 9 Million Users: Postman CEO Abhinav Asthana
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