For all the API developers out there, looking to build connected software with ease, Postman provides a one stop-solution for all your needs.
Postman is the complete tool chain for API developers, used by developers and companies worldwide. Postman is an elegant, flexible tool used to build connected software via APIs – quickly, easily and accurately. Founded in 2014, the company has scaled great heights and today, it is used by more than 3 million developers and 30,000 companies worldwide.
The Addressable Market and The Underlying Opportunity
Postman strongly believes in Gartner Inc.’s finding that “APIs Are At The Heart of Digital Business”. ProgrammableWeb reports the number of public APIs has grown from 5,018 in January 2012 to a current count of 16784.
There are far more internal APIs, and the same explosion in growth is seen there. APIs are becoming more and more critical to every aspect of computing. Every developer sends API requests! It is a great market to be in, right now and it is this opportunity that the company has capitalized on.
“We, initially started as a side project. Our user community grew rapidly and we’ve always tried to stay focused on solving problems and making their life easier.” says Abhinav Asthana, CEO & Co-founder
Developers at industry-leading enterprises use Postman, which has offices in San Francisco, Bangalore, and Austin. The company is privately held, with funding from Nexus Venture Partners.
The Industry and The competition
Almost every software that is built today uses APIs. Be it mobile apps or enterprise software, APIs are at the heart of the digital economy. Postman is helping developers with tools that help them build APIs faster and is available as a free downloadable native app for Mac, Windows, and Linux users.
Postman Pro is paid product available through the Software-as-a-Service model, for professional developers and developer teams, with extended collaboration, documentation & publishing, and monitoring features.
The company faces competition from Curl, an entrenched developer tool, which comes preinstalled with every OS. SmartBear and Apiary are also two legacy companies which solve for API testing and documentation, respectively. There are a few other products in the market, such as Runscope, Paw, and StopLight, which offer competition.
Product Differentiation and Competitive Advantage
Postman was designed to support the entire API development cycle: design, debug, test, documentation, and monitoring. Developers are allowed to customize their environment, since it actively supports the integration of other tools.
“We are totally focussed on a great user experience, and serving the developer. One of the first things Postman does is give one visibility into how an API is behaving.”
Postman supports the entire development workflow. When the company started out, every other tool provider was focused on doing one thing right. The workflow of the API developer was quite fragmented. Instead of multiple tools that work together, Postman is a single tool that covers more than just one aspect.
Key Features
- Downloadable Chrome, Mac & Windows App
- Saved History of API requests
- Unlimited Collections, Environments, Tests and Sharing
- Team Library of Collections
- Extensive team collaboration tools
- Extended documentation & monitoring features
- Customizable API Documentation
- API Monitoring for uptime, performance & accuracy
- Multi-timezone email support
- Phone support & extended support options
- Additional invoicing & billing options
- Enterprise level security, encryption & governance
Inspiration
Abhinav Asthana, the CEO & Co-founder, built a lot of things before some of these translated into companies and partnerships.
He worked on APIs as an intern at Yahoo, where he met his co-founder Ankit Sobti. The experiences at Yahoo! and the knowledge gained while working around APIs made it very clear that the way the world sees software and uses it, was going to change radically due to the need for interconnectivity in software.
It was then that Ankit and he realised that the tools available for supporting the API development process were not standardized, let alone automated or developer-friendly. The process was fragmented and required using a bunch of software for different functions, and thus the idea for Postman was born.
“The most common coding protocol is HTTP and within that protocol, you have ‘post’ used as a term. Adding ‘man’ to it, created a dual-meaning name for us – because it was about delivering seamlessly to developers.”
The Founders
Ankit Sobti is the CTO and Co-founder. He graduated with an MBA from Indian School of Business. Ankit worked at Yahoo and Adobe as a developer and has also headed the Real Time Bidding business at the Ad-tech company, Media.net.
Abhijit Kane, Product Architect & Co-founder, is a graduate from BITS Pilani, Hyderabad. He worked on computer-vision based mobile apps at Adobe. Abhijit has also worked with Walmart Labs, building single-sign-on mechanisms for a number of Walmart properties.
Abhinav Asthana, the CEO & Co-founder is a graduate of BITS Pilani, Goa and cofounded TeliportMe as a CTO. It was one of the pioneering panorama apps on Android and received more than 5M downloads. He wrote the first version of Postman, while still at TeliportMe, and this gained significant traction in the developer ecosystem.
Journey so Far
Postman evolved from a side project to a mature product with several integrated features within a short time frame. It has offices in three cities – Bengaluru, Austin, and San Francisco and a team of more than 30. Postman is used by more than 3 million developers and 30,000 companies worldwide.
Go-to-Market Strategy
“We never went out to sell our product initially. Most of our activities were spread by word-of-mouth. We gained popularity from social media, especially Twitter.”
Postman raised $1 Million in the first round of funding in 2014 from Nexus Venture Partners, and $7Million in Series A, also from Nexus. The traction among developers ensured that funding was not a major challenge.
However, today, the company is building a marketing & customer success team in the San Francisco office, led by a VP of Marketing. Getting the word out, regarding the product and features helped accelerate the growth.
What the Future Holds
Postman is constantly working at making APIs easier for developers, and it strives to be the best, most ubiquitous API toolchain around. As a major update to its free Postman app, version 5.0. Starting immediately, users of the Postman 5.0 will have limited-quantity access to many of the paid features of Postman Pro, intended to support small and individual development projects.
With latest product release, all API developers can leverage the full power of Postman, with support at every stage of their workflow. Postman 5.0 is free to all users, and available as Mac, Windows and Linux native apps, as well as a Chrome app.
The Postman free app has always included extensive collaboration, testing and automation features, making API development faster and easier. With Postman 5.0, the application now includes key features of Postman Pro; in particular, API monitoring, API documentation, mock servers and the Postman API.
In a recent development, the company has also enabled developers to select geographical locations from which to run API tests. This solution enables developers to monitor and measure network latency issues from a network in one region to a network in another region.
Postman supports six regions namely US East, US West, Canada, EU, Asia Pacific and South America to allow broad coverage for customers.
The implementation for regional monitoring mirrors the Amazon Web Services (AWS) stack, allowing Postman to support the many regions that AWS supports, and to add new regions when AWS adds new data centers.
