Postman

“My second feature request that came through GitHub, and the project was open source, In the beginning was actually, you know, somebody who was at Google and he was like, I'm using this a lot.”

“The biggest surprise for me was when Google reached out to feature Postman on the Chrome web store. They're building a version two of their web store and Postman was one of the top 20 apps to be recommended.”

“We went to collaboration in a recurring SaaS model when we monetized eventually in 2000, late 2016, 17. So monetization happened for Postman way later.”

“I tested for that by putting the highest price point I could think of with the lowest possible amount of features. And I would say, how many will still sign up for this thing? And actually that was the best pricing test we kind of ever did.”

“We had a million dollar inbound, like, kind of seed round or so, which we rolled into a seven million dollar total round in a series A.”

“So yeah, we just started making, you know, kind of recurring revenue, which grew You know, 200% first few years, then hundred percent for the subsequent years.”

“Key insight we built was that if you're building an API, it is going to be used by someone else. Which is like an obvious thing, right? But actually most people did not think it was obvious because there's so much in the code centric world, because you're alwa…”

“We saw that a lot of the early users of Postman, not a majority, but a significant fraction were non-developers. These are product managers, technical writers, developer relations, solution engineers customer facing folks and go to market teams.”

“A product decision that we took was that the product has to be useful for non-developers as well. So complexity is Revealed through progressive disclosure versus something you have to read a manual or learn over the next five years on how to be good at Postman…”

“Like there are millions of, you know, users who come in without us paying, you know, anything on advertising even now.”

“So we put the dividing line as collaborating beyond three users as the time at which a team has actively decided to standardize on Postman. In the free product, you're just using it individually. So the single player product is free, the multiplayer product is…”

“What I learned was that for something that has a commitment to end user experience, you cannot do it with open source.”

“So if we had open source, you would have a product with like You know, 30 buttons 70 toggles with, you know, 500 configuration options, and that just becomes a product not worth using.”

“I heard Stuart Butterfield from Slack say it at a conference that, you know, if the money is available on good terms, you just take it. And the money was available and on good terms. So I took it and it allowed us to invest.”

“Postman does essentially a platform for developing APIs. This is a new concept. Nobody had this idea of a platform for APIs before Postman came up with it.”

“Postman last primary valuation was five billion. Recently secondary happened between 2.5 to three billion, whoever wanted to exit, right?”

“The art of selling is still to be figured out. I think for, I think SaaS from India has still not seen that type. There are a few success stories, obviously Freshworks, some of the Postman, some of these have been good stories for the ecosystem, but SAS India …”

“I'm sure a lot of people don't know that companies like Postman, or Chargebee, or Atlan, et cetera, were started in India, and then came to the US.”

“Is why I left Postman. In fact, if I may admit, I couldn't even understand what they did at that point in time. I looked at it at the same time as others did in seed stage. One of my colleagues was very keen, actually, that we do it, but I couldn't even unders…”

“As you are in this forward, ah, motion of, you know, trying to hit those ERR multiples, trying to scale, ah, companies effectively, you know, they stop listening actively, ah, because you're so busy telling your story, and you have to tell the story to employe…”

“One challenge that people have is that as you're trying to kind of, you know, up-level your price point, you start thinking about newer customers, and you don't really service customers who have bought into your vision already. And you need to make sure that a…”

“What typically happens is, you know, you launch your first product, there is some product market fit, and everybody thinks that, you know off to the races. And what happens is that people build a very narrow view of the market. So if it's one feature, that fea…”

“So whether you are a ten million dollar company or if you get to a hundred million dollar company or, you know, even a billion dollars in ARR growth rates eventually stall and this whole cycle repeats itself where, you know, you have to then find new insights …”

“Now the funny thing about software is that we all believe software to be valuable, but you know, most software in the world goes unused. People don't want to use it and you know, they don't want to come back to it.”

“And for the first two years, Postman founders were the highest ticket solvers with the highest CSAT rates at the company.”

“In a product led model, it kind of flips over where no matter how small a customer is, you have to make sure that there is somebody who has eyes on it. And what CSMs can help you do is look at your target opportunity and expand the market because they are In t…”

“If you are only incentivizing for specific OKRs, you've kind of narrowed down the scope of the creativity of people, and what we like to look at it is kind of in the opposite way on how operational systems can help enhance the creativity of people”

“When you decide to, you know, hire someone in sales, hire someone in product, hire someone in marketing, if they come from a non-PLG company, they might not have the right cultural intuitions to fit into this model, and we had to, you know, kind of bake that i…”

“We had to kind of shift the motion entirely for functions like customer success, where they were, you know, effective in a post-sales process in their prior roles, and we had to, you know, make them comfortable that even if it's a thousand dollar ARR customer,…”

“So some of our customers, you know, from five, six years ago are paying us, you know, five, five times, 10 times larger just because of the fact that what they believed where the product will go is where it's at, and we valued their feedback and baked them in.”

“We have about 1500 feature requests open on Postman today. I think we have solved and probably 2000 of them since we started as a company.”

“So for that to work well, you need to have really, really fast releases. And I mean fast, like really fast, which means that, you know even a day. And that was kind of like a benchmark we set for ourselves when the Postman founding team was just three people.”

“I would say Postman is in the category of developer tools, which are similar to things like GitHub and Figma. So GitHub, Figma, Postman, those are kind of a category of tools. Now, these are tools that are basically design time tools. Right? These are tools th…”

“We did the first, very first investment when it happened, it was just a seed. In fact, the company was not even incorporated, if I'm not mistaken. Then they, we put in some seed money. They came in to our office, we're in Bangalore, where they started working …”

“20 14 we invested that seed money and that we rolled it into 2015 end of 2015 we led our series a and we are the only investor till that time”

“Like, when we invested, it was like, you know, tens of thousands of users. At this point, as we talk about, it's twelve million plus users.”

“Like, I mean, our CAC is zero customer acquisition cost is zero.”

“I mean, total in the company, we raised maybe 200 odd million. Almost hundred percent of the money is still in the bank.”

“Postman is becoming the, like at this point, currently we have like two, fifty million plus APIs in Postman platform.”

“See, I think this is the first time probably any company in the world I know of has brought in this concept of network effects into enterprise software.”

“And of course, like, you know, I mean, the company is growing without spending any money. I mean, you know, I don't know very many companies which grows like, you know, three X profitably. You know, without, without like kind of, you know, generating cash rath…”

“I definitely think that for most of the companies like Postman for us, ARR is a lagging indicator. Like we, among all the metrics that drives the company, I will definitely say that in, in most cases, it's not the ARR, which is the main goal.”

“Postman is already profitable, and Druva is very large in size, you know, triple digit revenue, growing strongly, very strong customer base, very low, you know, churn.”

“Postman is an example of that. We don't do any marketing. And that, that is to me an ultimate kind of a source of success. So rather than measuring Postman revenue two years ago, which was close to zero anyway, or very small I think looking at that promoter sc…”

“The important part to keep in mind is that real value comes typically when you scale companies, you know, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 years. I think three, four years ago, it was an unwritten rule that strong value creation takes about 10 years. Of course, now…”

“And now with the success of Postman in India, I predict that as Postman succeeds, it goes public, people will learn that playbook, more people will leave. And if those other factors can exist around it, then you will see a blossoming of true technology insight…”

“They started off and out of our office in Bangalore. We seated there and wrote them the first million dollar check.”

“You know, they have a 25% market share in the globally across the developer base, right? Eight plus million developers use their platform. 400,000 companies use their platform. Enterprises use their platform.”

“He had a buyout offer from a company. At that point of time, which he was considering, which would have made him very rich. I mean rich. It's a relative term, but he would have made a couple, you know, one or two million dollars as a result for just a side pro…”

“Without a investment committee meeting or whatever, I had another colleague of mine, Sandeep join in for that meeting and we didn't let him leave without signing up the term sheet. So pretty much, so we hold in and close on that term sheet then and there was, …”

“There were early signs, even when I met him that, you know, they would, they had about 304 100,000 developers on their platform using this.”

“And that's available through a SaaS based model of, you know, eight dollars per user per month when paid annually. And on our enterprise plan, we charge a little higher.”

“So our average team size typically starts at you know, it's about six to 10 developers, but the tail is very, very long.”

“Yeah, I'd say more, more like hundred.”

“I think it came down to about 1001 1500 dollars in total savings.”

“Like now we have more than like five million users, as you said, and more than 2.5 million monthly active users.”

“That is you know heading towards it's actually more than 8000 teams right now.”

“So we've raised seven million in series A.”

“Yeah. In that range, you know, 200%.”

“We actually don't have a sales team right now. Like it's all like all the revenue that we do is on a self-serve basis and people just go and buy the product online.”