This guy founded a $6 BILLION SaaS from a village in India. His initial revenue stream was a *donation* button The story of Abhinav Asthana & how he built Postman:

At $100M+ of ARR today, Postman is used by 13 million developers and 98% of the Forbes 500 including Microsoft & Twitter. It launched in 2014, but really began making noise in 2020 after raising $150M at a valuation of $2B.

In short order, they raised another $225M at a $5.6B valuation just one year later. In 2022 they crossed $100M in ARR. So what does Postman actually do?

Postman is a tool that makes it easy for developers to create, share, test, and document APIs.

An API allows services & applications to communicate with each other. Simply put, API is just like a waiter who takes your order (request), carries it to the kitchen & tells them what to do (application). And, then delivers the food (response) to you.

It was founded by Abhinav Asthana (@Abhinav Asthana ) in 2014. Asthana grew up in a small Indian village. He was 10 years old when his father bought him a computer - a Pentium I PC. His father did not allow him to play games on the PC. So he decided to program.

This instilled n entrepreneurial spirit in Asthana. While he was still in school and just learning to program he: 1. Built a Yahoo! clone for fun 2. Ran a design consultancy and made some side money

By 2010, Asthana had gone to study at an Engineering college, a traditional career route a lot of Indians are pushed towards. But his love for entrepreneurship stayed alive, he founded a tech company called TeliportMe - an app creating immersive virtual tours for smartphones.

It was not until 2013 that Asthana realized that this was not something he wanted to do. TeliportMe was a stable startup with enough runway, but Asthana had fallen in love with another problem: "simplifying APIs for developers"

Although Asthana likely did not realize it in the early days, simplifying API's was something that firms and developers all over the world needed. Today, Postman controls over 4% of the GLOBAL API market.

That might seem small on the surface, but that's 3% MORE market share than Google Cloud API. It's also a MASSIVE market that basically touches every software product out there. CRAZY.

While software is volatile and it's easy to copy an innovation & launch a competitive product, competitors are struggling to compete with the growth of Postman.

The question is: How did they do it? Why couldn't thousands of other API start-ups not replicate the success of Postman? Asthana thinks their success is due to two things: 1. Focusing on building a community of loyal users. 2. Keeping innovation at the heart of the product.

Let's go a bit further on those two points:

1. Building a community of loyal users. Postman initially operated out of Bengaluru, a tech hub in India. But in 2017, Asthana moved to San Francisco to be close to his largest user base. He is a believer in being close to his users and he proved it by relocating.

Additionally, Postman constantly looks for user feedback. Through a community of 11 million developers across the globe, they get a tremendous amount of insight. That's how they prioritize and steer their product roadmap. Asthana understood 'community' long before others.

2. Keeping innovation at the heart of the product. Asthana says: "We make a ton of mistakes and our mistakes are open for everybody to see. Our bug tracker is open. The features we have are on our website, the features we don’t have are on our issue tracker."

According to Asthana, Postman fixes bugs 4x faster than its competitors. With developers as his end users, that's a key value proposition.

And here's his advice to young entrepreneurs building a software company and looking for funding: Stop focusing on fundraising. Focus on building a great product. Care about competitors less. Just keep going.

Postman never spent a ton of time going to investors, it's rumored they never even created a pitch deck. Which is surprising for a company that's raised hundreds of millions.

The big takeaway for all of us? Focus on the product and and making it as powerful as possible for your customers. Nothing else.

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