Article · Short read

Postman on Designing for the End User and Product-led Success

Abhinav Asthana · OpenView Free Intermediate India

Asthana says plainly that Postman built customer success instead of a sales team early on. That one staffing choice explains most of what people call Postman's PLG.

  • Postman runs a customer success team instead of a sales team, treating the business as bottom-up.
  • Opening collaboration features to free trial users produced a large jump in conversions.
  • Two design principles guide the product: keep it simple, and embrace the community.
  • Asthana frames APIs as forming three kinds of relationships: technical, business, and people.
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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. 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
  2. The founder's own account, including the detail that reframes the whole story: Postman was announced in a Stack Overflow... Postman Blog Article · About 10 min read How we built Postman, the product and the company Abhinav Asthana
  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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