Postman is a platform developed entirely for the mobile developers in the market. The development sector is, no doubt totally different from the rest enterprise sector. This platform is designed to assist mobile app developers in building, test, document as and share their APIs at a faster pace. The product was launched in November 2015, and ever since, it has become one of the priority products for the developers.
Three million developers around the globe have been working with Postman during their product development cycle. With all the recognition gained through this period, Postman gained a rapid traction and had expanded its boundaries from Bengaluru to Austin.
The product was initiated by Abhinav Asthana; this has been Abhinav’s second startup till now. Before Postman, Abhinav’s first startup was TeliportMe, and before that, he was working as an intern at Yahoo.
During his internship period, Abhinav met Ankit Sobti, who later became the co-founder and CTO of Postman. Before working on Postman, the duo was working on a front-end architecture of an app, and that’s when they came to knew about what an API is. Ankit says, testing an API was a great deal of pain at that time. They also faced communication issues with different teams working with them. The team knew that they need to work out something to make things simpler. Being beginners, they didn’t start working on this at that time.
Later, Abhinav went towards TeliportMe, and again he was working with API and soon realized having troubles gain working with the APIs. Ankit had to go to ISP and then to Mumbai for some work and during this time, Abhinav created the prototype of the Postman app. He built the product primarily for himself, and when it worked well, he decided to put it up on the Chrome web store as an open Source REST client.
And within time, the team saw a surprising rise and traction for Postman. Soon, people started giving feedback on the application making it better to work with. Postman has about 2000 downloads in the year 2012 from the Chrome web store. Interestingly, it was a side project, and people were still using it. After a little while, Abhinav went out of TeliportMe taking up some of the consulting projects. At this time, he again contacted Ankit, and they started to work with Postman.
They realized the need to make the project more conceptualized. They needed something that enhanced API workflow and improvement in documentation and communication. These road blockers were recognized when they came to know that people were facing issues along their development process. While improving the product, The Google Chrome Developers approached them one day. These people were using the Postman app and were building a packaged app platform. And soon, a new version of Postman was launched on Chrome Webstore.
The Bottom Line
This new and big step made Postman hit 500,000 users. They soon started working on the collaboration issue. Working on this, they soon realized that a new platform has to be done to make it a hit. This also worked along the per month subscription of the product.