Scaling with Virality to 9 Million Users: Postman CEO Abhinav Asthana (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: From a product strategy point of view, what did you start building to address that? In an open source mode, what were the pieces that you were putting out there?

Abhinav Asthana: We were an open source extension, but mostly, we were seen as a free GUI product back then. Now our philosophy is more of a mix of SaaS model along with the open source components that power the platform. It’s evolved over time.

There are a few key things that are becoming more apparent. One is that APIs are becoming very critical for software development. Every company is building APIs. The way they would build those APIs would vary from team to team or from developer to developer. There’s no sanitization. There are no pathways for people to follow.

What teams would typically do is, put together these workflows and Postman would fit in most of them. It won’t do everything. As we started digging into the set of workflows, we saw that that’s the opportunity that we can address just purely from a tooling perspective.

The other thing that we observed was that because of this gap in tooling, different kinds of people are disjointed in their silos. Developers don’t know what QA is doing. QA doesn’t know what developers are doing. They lack this common platform to build APIs together.

That guided the second bit of product strategy, which was to build a collaborative platform for API development. There was no common place for all of this work to be done. We had about half a million users on the Chrome web store.

We have more than 9 million users on the platform today. All of these users had this common need of sharing with somebody else, whether it’s documentation or workflow. They were using Postman in conjunction with things like GitHub or a file-sharing system. It could be done, but it was very slow.

There were two big opportunities here. One is providing the tools for everybody who’s a part of the API economy. The other is building a powerful collaborative platform to use these tools together.

Sramana Mitra: You said you had half a million users. You were giving all this out for free at that point?

Abhinav Asthana: The entire API development environment that we ship is free for individual developers. 

Sramana Mitra: How did users find you? How did you accumulate half a million users?

Abhinav Asthana: If developers love a product, they evangelize. It’s something I did as a developer. People found the product online. They were looking for an API development tool. Once they found Postman, they would talk about it on their blog post, on their Twitter channel, and on GitHub.

It’s an interesting dimension about influencers. The influencers in the developer world advocated Postman. As developers started using more and more of Postman, companies that have APIs started recommending Postman to this community of developers.

Box is one example. A bunch of others started embedding Postman in their documentation. That helped with a lot of the virality that the product initially got.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Scaling with Virality to 9 Million Users: Postman CEO Abhinav Asthana
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