Insight
Asthana: Products committed to user experience cannot succeed as open source
“What I learned was that for something that has a commitment to end user experience, you cannot do it with open source.”
What-if
Asthana: Open-sourcing Postman's UI would have bloated it with toggles
“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.”
Insight
Asthana: Generic doc tools fail for APIs because syntax errors break execution
“If you're familiar with something like notion or Google docs, it has an abstraction for just a literal doc there, but that's not good enough when you're dealing with technical abstractions like APIs. APIs have a very specific language and one character is off.…”
Insight
Asthana: Best pricing test combines highest price with minimal features
“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.”
Insight
APIs are inherently built to be consumed by someone else
“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…”
Insight
Asthana: Postman used progressive disclosure to stay accessible to non-developers
“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…”
Assertion Contradicted
Asthana: Tech startup salaries in India have grown 5x to 6x
“Pay packages ballooned, like average salaries probably have grown five X, six X, and that's like the state of the market.”
Disclosure
Asthana followed Stewart Butterfield's advice to take capital available on good terms
“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.”
Insight
Asthana: Never skimp on lawyers or accountants; cut office costs instead
“Always never spare money for the lawyer or the accountant. Don't skimp on that. Skimp on the office if you need to.”
Opinion
Asthana: Most software from the past 20 years actively harms flow state
“And unfortunately, most of the software that we have created over the last 20 years is anything but that. We have collaborative software that always is, you know, I would say it actually distracts you positively. I have notifications off on my phone, but every…”
Opinion
Asthana: Visual Basic was the original no-code platform
“So back then, you know, visual basic was the original no code software.”
Assertion Partly supported
Asthana: Google selected Postman as a top 20 Chrome Web Store app
“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.”
Assertion Supported
Asthana: Postman rolled a $1M seed into a $7M Series A
“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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Asthana: Postman's recurring revenue grew 200% initially, then 100% annually
“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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Asthana: Non-developers formed a significant fraction of Postman's early user base
“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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Asthana: Millions of users adopt Postman without any paid advertising
“Like there are millions of, you know, users who come in without us paying, you know, anything on advertising even now.”
Disclosure
Asthana: Postman made single-player free and charged for team collaboration
“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…”
Assertion Supported
Asthana: Teleport Me reached six to seven million users
“We had, I think, about six, seven million users.”
Assertion Open · timeframe Aug 2025
Asthana: Postman's second open-source GitHub feature request was from a Google engineer
“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.”
Disclosure
Asthana: Postman adopted recurring SaaS model in late 2016 or 2017
“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.”
Abhinav Asthana