Postman is a collaboration platform for API development.
Postman started simply as a side project to solve a specific problem: Abhinav Asthana, Postman’s CEO and co-founder, set out to create a tool that would simplify the API testing process. As the tool’s usage quickly exploded, Abhinav recruited two of his former colleagues, Ankit Sobti and Abhijit Kane, to help him create Postman, Inc. In 2010, Abhinav had co-founded TeliportMe, and before that he was working at Yahoo as an intern. During his time at Yahoo, Abhinav met Ankit Sobti, the Co-founder of Postman. The duo was building a front-end architecture of an app and that’s when they came in touch with API. At that time testing APIs was a pain. There were a lot of communication issues with different teams. Thy thought of making the problem simpler, but they didn’t work on the problem then. Soon, Abhinav went ahead to build TeliportMe, where again he was building APIs and found that the problems existed across the board. Ankit went to ISB and after that went to Mumbai for work. It was during his spare time at TeliportMe, Abhinav created the prototype of the first Postman app. At that time, he had built the product primarily for himself, and finding that it worked well, Abhinav decided to put it up on the Chrome webstore as an open-source REST client. By 2013, Abhinav moved out of TeliportMe and took on a few consulting assignments on the side. During the whole time, both Abhinav and Ankit were in touch with each other. After moving out of TeliportMe, Abinav discussed what he was doing with Postman to Ankit and the duo worked on it again on a part time basis. Abhinav would commute between Benglauru and Mumbai, where Ankit was. It was during this time that Abhinav re-connected with Abhijit Kane, who had worked as an intern at TeliportMe. Abhijit was working at Walmart Labs. Till most of the time, they were having fun hacking something and contributing to open-source. Abhijit figured that several people at Walmart were using Postman. That is when the trio actually worked on Postman as a startup in 2015. They began looking at the space more closely and figured that people need flow an API workflow from the point of conceptualisation to publication of documentation and spreading the word of the API. It was during this time Google Chrome Developers approached him. They were using the Postman app and were building a packaged app platform. Soon the new version of Postman went out as a featured app in the Chrome Webstore. Soon the website was built and the minute they hit 500,000 users, they put out notifications. Started with jetpacks and in-app purchases, the team started working on a model. They saw that collaboration was an issue, and realised that they had to build a new type of collaboration platform. This was worked along a per month subscription basis.
