 "'Magic circle' for software developers")
Saiteja Veera, a 25-year-old techie, would spend hours to share code with fellow developers. Today, the co-founder of Belong.co, a talent sourcing start-up, writes software and shares it with other engineers at one go, using Postman.
Software development platforms are not new. The differentiating feature Bengaluru-based Postman offers to thousands of developers across the globe is collaboration. When Abhinav Asthana, an alumnus of the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani decided to build a software development and testing platform in 2012, his prime focus was to provide a more interactive solution. The blueprint for Postman was making an easy-to-use development tool.
Postman, which raised $7 million in Series-A funding last month from Nexus Ventures, has created a playbook that allows software or app developers to do things in an organised manner. The special feature is called Postman Collection, a tool allowing developers to build application programming interface (API) documentation, test suites and workflows on one platform. The start-up received its first $1 million in seed funding from Nexus.
Concept
The nature of the product has helped Postman see viral adoption among developers. Asthana explains why. API is often considered very opaque. “One of the first things Postman does is it gives you visibility into how the API is behaving. Through a very intuitive system, you can see what is going on and then make decisions. We have some functions in the product that help people create some entities and share them with other developers.”
The increasing emergence of software developers prompted Postman to create something that would change the way software is written or tested. Demand for speed of delivery and lack of integration between tools make it difficult for developers to deliver high quality APIs. Postman’s model seems to be solving this by providing a comprehensive work process and documentation features.
Opportunity
Asthana and his team, Ankit Sobte, a former co-worker at Yahoo, and Abhijit Kane, his intern at the first start-up TeliportMe, see great opportunities as Postman is already used by at least 30,000 companies through its three million individual subscribers.
As the Bengaluru-based start-up sailed on a journey in 2013, it did little to claim fame among developers despite its hard work in developing the right eco-system with the magic circle. Asthana says this magic circle primarily defines how a collaborative development tool should look, with all the objects talking to each other.
“The idea was to make API development collaborative. The thing about such interface is there are lots of different stakeholders involved and systems for helping them that collaborate well were not there. We made it much faster, much smoother and interactive,” he adds.
The firm first heard about its popularity on Twitter. “Much of our activities were spread by word-of-mouth. We never went out to sell our product,” the confident co-founder says.
Challenges and growth
There were many challenges. “Developing a platform for really smart developers was one,” Asthana says. It was important to figure how to build such a platform faster and the founder’s experience with API works offered clarity on the demand. Managing finances was a bit of a hindrance in the initial days. However, it continued to focus on building a strong product which would eventually receive funds.
“I tried different approaches. Postman received donations that kept us afloat. Postman also had some sponsors for some time. I did a bit of consultancy. We always thought of building the foundation right, work with great people from the beginning,” Asthana recalls.
Not many offer platforms for software development in a collaborative manner. Curl is another important API-based platform that enables basic development. For Postman, the bigger vision is to create a system for a smooth process of development and spread it. Nearly 40 per cent of the users are from the US and the rest from India, China and Europe. The firm has opened an office in San Francisco and employed a head of marketing to spread the buzz about its product.
Beginning January this year, Postman Cloud started offering paid services with documentation and other facilities under SAS. Services under this model are offered to a team of developers as well. To be completely effective early next year, it will have a product called Postman Enterprise for large companies. It is going to be priced at $21 per user per month. It will offer customisation and additional features with the core product.
“We expect these two offerings to help us gain revenue,” Asthana said.
Jishnu Bhattacharjee of Nexus Ventures believes in two fundamental growth drivers for Postman. While every developer will benefit from it, Postman will become ‘an integral part of the modern software development stack’.
“It is the era of connected software, whose fabric is being woven by APIs. Emerging as the de facto platform for all things API, Postman is at the very centre of connected software, and is being adopted at an unprecedented rate by developers across the world,” Bhattacharjee says.
Fact Box
Founded: 2014
Area of business: Software development and testing platform
Founders: Abhinav Asthana, Ankit Sobte, Abhijit Kane
Funding: $8 million in two rounds
Investors: Nexus Ventures
Opportunity: Postman Enterprise for large companies
|
EXPERT TAKE The free downloadable workbench concept of Postman can encourage developers to rapidly adopt standardisation and improve testing capabilities. Also, extending workbench services to the cloud is a big plus, since it enables collaboration and content sharing among the development community. Organisations are increasingly using API as a business strategy. They are gradually seeing the value of APIs as their assets, rather than a software development activity. Mobile, the Internet of Things, and digital transformation will be key drivers of future growth. Testing of APIs is also a key opportunity, since quality APIs are the biggest challenge for developers. The biggest opportunity is in the enterprise segment. They have successfully leveraged cloud technology to create a collaborative environment. Also, the software as a service model can help Postman continuously enrich the collaborative workbench and churn out newer capabilities. Leveraging Amazon’s web services has provided credibility to the security aspect of their cloud infrastructure. They should focus on enterprise customers by providing more flexibility to customise and enhance usability. It is also important to rationalise the pricing for enterprise customers. Postman needs to constantly upgrade its infrastructure security features to attract large-scale API development that involves organisations having several partners. Sunil Padmanabh, independent advisor, enterprise application and digital transformation |
