Scaling with Virality to 9 Million Users: Postman CEO Abhinav Asthana (Part 4)

Abhinav Asthana: Postman is a complete platform for API development. You can collaborate with hundreds of people on the Postman platform. All of that happened through this continuous learning and shipping process.

Along the way, we have also looked at how to design our pricing models to be very much in line with the value that our customers get. We just announced new plans for a product.

We also have an enterprise tier now. We learned that as you scale up your Postman usage, there are different kinds of bias even within the same company. Let’s say you start out with a single user, and the price point they’re authorized to pay is not that much.

If you don’t have a product for them and they can’t pay for it, then you don’t know whether you will grow to that point or if there is a $100,000 value worth unlocking. That’s why we have price points of $12 now. Developers then buy it for their teams.

As usage grows, managers and architects look at a more thorough transformation of the development track. Then they adopt a higher tier of the product. We also tend to cover entire business units or entire functional units.

That process of product evolution kept in sync with the go-to market. It’s something that we have kept on since 2016. Our cycles were a quarter long back then. The whole product development to shipping cycle is just much faster.

Sramana Mitra: When did you start hitting this kind of six-figure deals?

Abhinav Asthana: They have come our way. Our sales is all inbound. It’s been pretty decent. As our users have grown, then they end up paying in the six-figure bracket.

Sramana Mitra: When did the six-figure deals start coming about?

Abhinav Asthana: A little later. Probably two and a half years into monetization. 

Sramana Mitra: Where are you now?

Abhinav Asthana: Postman is the platform of choice for every developer that comes in contact with APIs. We are updating our platform continuously to support more and more enterprise use cases. They need help. Some of the places where we can help the most is with legacy infrastructures.

We’re pretty happy to be at the center of all of this. We are a developer-first company. We manage the product that way. We manage pricing that way. We see that this is a very big change that’s happening in the software industry.

Sramana Mitra: You have about 9 million users now?

Abhinav Asthana: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Beyond the $7 million financing, have you raised any more money?

Abhinav Asthana: We raised a $50 million round in the middle of last year.

Sramana Mitra: Why do you need $50 million given the fact that you have so much organic traction?

Abhinav Asthana: A large chunk of this is for growing the platform. We spend a lot in experimentation and the product. It also supports our go-to market motions as we scale up. We’ve always had a ton of interest from investors. We thought it would be a good time to raise to make more of an impact and shoot for those bigger goals.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Scaling with Virality to 9 Million Users: Postman CEO Abhinav Asthana
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