Article · About 10 min read

How we built Postman, the product and the company

Abhinav Asthana · Postman Blog Free Intermediate India

The founder's own account, including the detail that reframes the whole story: Postman was announced in a Stack Overflow thread, not launched, and reached nearly half a million users before major funding.

  • Postman's first public announcement in 2012 was a Stack Overflow post, and Google later featured it on the Chrome store homepage.
  • It reached nearly half a million users while still just a Chrome extension.
  • A significant share of early users were not developers, which broke the original hypothesis.
  • Browser CORS limits forced the move from web to desktop, a constraint that was only reversed with the 2020 web version.
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The question it answers

  1. What did Postman do differently to get developers to adopt before it ever sold anything?

Read with it

  1. Asthana says plainly that Postman built customer success instead of a sales team early on. That one staffing choice explains... OpenView Article · Short read Postman on Designing for the End User and Product-led Success Abhinav Asthana
  2. A useful breakdown of the signals Postman used to decide a company was ready for a sales conversation, such as many developers... Reo.Dev Article · Long read Postman's Sales Playbook: Scaling Enterprise Sales Without Breaking PLG Reo.Dev
  3. Video · Interview From Chrome extension to $5B platform | Postman's journey | Abhinav Asthana (Co-founder & CEO) Abhinav Asthana
  4. The scale the free adoption eventually bought: 17 million developers, 500,000 organisations, and 98 percent of the Fortune 500,... TechCrunch Article · About 4 min read API platform Postman valued at $5.6 billion in $225 million fundraise Manish Singh
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