Scaling with Virality to 9 Million Users: Postman CEO Abhinav Asthana (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Did you make any moves on the monetization of this half a million users?

Abhinav Asthana: Not really. We used to have an in-app purchase. It used to be for $10 at that time. We eventually made it free. We started the company formally at the end of 2014. We were just monetizing a fraction of the user base. It was just an experiment to see if people would pay for something.

We didn’t have an idea about value proposition that the paid product would eventually have. We just want people to use more and more of Postman and provide more value to them as individuals. Eventually, we started charging for collaboration when we launched our paid products in 2016. 

Sramana Mitra: Where in this timeline did you raise your first round of financing?

Abhinav Asthana: We had a ton of inbound in 2014. We raised a round in 2014. That was a seed round of a million which soon rolled up to a Series A of $7 million.

Sramana Mitra: In your fundraising process with Nexus, what was the hypothesis on monetization?

Abhinav Asthana: We were pretty clear that this is a very big industry trend that is happening. It’s one of those generational shifts. Our approach is very unique. A big lever that companies aspire for is developer adoption. We want to focus on that problem. Monetization will eventually follow.

We had a plan. We wanted to deliver value on the free side and paid side. It was more about really focusing on the adoption and making it a de facto standard. Once we do that, then there are lots of opportunities for monetization. 

Sramana Mitra: When did you start monetizing?

Abhinav Asthana: In 2016, we launched the first version of our paid product. It was called Postman Cloud back then. It was a SaaS service. Now we call them team, business, and enterprise plans. Basically the product lets you share APIs with your team members in real-time. We launched it as a cloud product. You could buy multiple licenses on your credit card. We started in 2016.

Sramana Mitra: What are some of the other highlights of building the company from there on? After you started monetizing, what other learnings and conclusions did you draw?

Abhinav Asthana: Monetizing is an interesting word. We look at that a little more closely. It’s typically having a bunch of people and wanting to extract value out of them somehow. That’s not our model. We look at it like we have provided some value with our product. That sets a certain behavior.

What we can do is unlock more value points. Some of those value points will be worth charging for. It’s kind of a fair exchange of value that we see with our developer community versus extraction of value. We are focused on continuous product innovation, listening to users and the community.

It’s still very early on for our customers as well as us. We have started cracking the right way to build APIs. How should you manage your workflow? What are the tools you need? These were open questions when we started.

We knew that collaboration is a very key aspect of delivering value. We operate nimbly. We ship quickly. We ship a new version almost twice a month. We ship something which could be qualified as an improvement almost every day. This continuous learning and development happens all the time. 

This segment is part 3 in the series : Scaling with Virality to 9 Million Users: Postman CEO Abhinav Asthana
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