S5 E1: How Postman Scaled to 30 Million Developers with Abhinav Asthana

0:02 [SPEAKER_01]: You know, Postman grew, I started, you know, looking at every data point that was coming in, you know, people recommending it on Twitter, people posting reviews, people posting feature requests on GitHub. [SPEAKER_01]: I think, first of all, it was just a lot of fun to explore and, you know, I think the feeling of joy that you get, that somebody independently of you telling them, hey, go and use my product, you know, somebody discovering it, using it was just like a pretty magical feeling and I think what we tried to have as GoFounders and the team was really try to picture the world that that person was in.

0:39 [SPEAKER_01]: I'm Abhinavastana, I'm the CEO and GoFounder of Postman.

0:48 [SPEAKER_00]: This is Code Story, the podcast bringing you interviews with tech visionaries, who share in the critical months of what it takes to change an industry and build and lead a team that has your back. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm your host Noel Apphart, and today how Abhinavas Thamav, built the Chrome extension turn platform, making the way for API collaboration. [SPEAKER_01]: All this and more on Code Story.

1:20 [SPEAKER_00]: Abinath Astana grew up in several small towns in the northern part of India. [SPEAKER_00]: One of those towns was Basti, a 150 miles from the capital. [SPEAKER_00]: He's been a computer geek since 5th grade, when his dad bought a pretty sophisticated panium for the time. [SPEAKER_00]: The small towns he lived in were not the most connected parts of the world, and as such he experienced the impact of computers in the internet, improving lies from very early age. [SPEAKER_00]: He enjoys reading books, and as a kid, he was in a fiction, reading Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Agatha Christie, et cetera, slowly.

1:51 [SPEAKER_00]: He started to drift towards popular science, design books, and non-fiction, more towards the tech sphere of the world. [SPEAKER_00]: In 2012, the projects that Abonov was involved in had the same pain point, how to work with the APIs that connected the front and back ends of the application. [SPEAKER_00]: And the tools he had to use never helped and develop efficiently. [SPEAKER_00]: He thought, what would make this better? [SPEAKER_00]: This is the creation story of Postman.

2:21 [SPEAKER_01]: Postman is an API platform that helps deliver great quality APIs for development teams. [SPEAKER_01]: It helps developers test, debug, document, and just generally build APIs faster. [SPEAKER_01]: The way it got started was I, you know, realized in 2012 that for a lot of projects that I was doing, [SPEAKER_01]: whether it was hobby projects or it was my internship at Yahoo or the startups that I'd either worked with or you know just have to call it a founder to company called Teleportmeat.

2:54 [SPEAKER_01]: Like I was building these apps on different platforms all the time, sometimes on the web, sometimes on desktop, sometimes on mobile devices. [SPEAKER_01]: And the main point I encountered always was working with the APIs that would connect the back and in the front end. [SPEAKER_01]: You know, the problems were very many like, you know, what is the right documentation for the API? [SPEAKER_01]: Do I really know how that API works? [SPEAKER_01]: Do I know how it behaves in a particular setting?

3:23 [SPEAKER_01]: More often than not, I would find out that it's a multi-person problem that an API would be created by somebody else and you know, I was the recipient of that API or in some cases I was building the API and somebody else had to use the API. [SPEAKER_01]: So I always found out that, you know, the whole experience was a bit of a challenge and the tools that I was using back then it was, you know,

3:51 [SPEAKER_01]: would never really help me work faster. [SPEAKER_01]: So I thought of you know what would make my life a bit better and the point I started off with was just a basic API debugger saying that you know I just want to have a very clear understanding if an API is not working is it my code or is it the API? [SPEAKER_01]: And I started with a rest-blind, I used Chrome extensions, you know, to build that, it avoided network issues by having something on the web. [SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, was a pretty simple tool back then.

4:22 [SPEAKER_01]: So that's how it started. [SPEAKER_01]: I had a pain point and, and I saw everybody having those pain points around me. [SPEAKER_01]: And, uh, I just built a Chrome extension and, and kind of put it out on the Chrome web store and started recommending people to it. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, you know, a lot of people picked it up and started using it themselves.

4:40 [SPEAKER_00]: We'll tell me about that MVP, so you mentioned building something and putting on the Chrome store. [SPEAKER_00]: How long did it take you to build that and what sort of tools did you use to bring it to life? [SPEAKER_01]: I think it probably took two months or three months to build the first version. [SPEAKER_01]: If I'm not wrong. [SPEAKER_01]: You know, I was at that point, you know, I was very much into like building, uh, using the latest frameworks or whatever was hot, you know, back then and I've all found out that I would always get into issues later down the road because I really did not understand a framework or a language properly.

5:14 [SPEAKER_01]: So, I basically the first version of postman was probably three or four files, you know an HTML file, CSS file and JavaScript file, very, very simple, you know, code base and probably not more than a few hundred lines of code. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, you know, I think the primary focus for me was the interface back then. [SPEAKER_01]: I think I used the bootstrap library, I'm not sure if it's still popular now, but it was pretty popular back then. [SPEAKER_01]: Pretty simple, like I think I was using JQuery.

5:43 [SPEAKER_01]: A lot of interesting stuff at that time was happening on the Chrome APIs, like the local APIs at the browser was providing. [SPEAKER_01]: So indexed TV was a local storage layer that I was using. [SPEAKER_01]: So you know, it was a very, very simple MVP, which we just wrote. [SPEAKER_00]: I think that's a great message to send to people starting out building something, trying to find the perfect framework or I'm going to use this school tool and really you can just start out with the basics and build something quite amazing.

6:10 [SPEAKER_00]: So with the MVP, with any MVP, right? [SPEAKER_00]: You have to make certain decisions and trade-offs about what you make in the short term and how you kind of cope with those decisions. [SPEAKER_00]: So tell me about some of those things where it would be like, you know, technical debt or feature cut or starting small or anything like that. [SPEAKER_00]: Tell me about some of those trade-offs and how you cope with them.

6:34 [SPEAKER_01]: So the way I think about it is that, you know, when you're building a product, and I'd by the way, you know, built and failed at many, many products, you know, until postman. [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, we, I had more data on a success previously. [SPEAKER_01]: The way I kind of looked at product building at that time, instead do is, you kind of exploring a problem space and you're exploring a solution space. [SPEAKER_01]: and you don't know the fullest extent of both of those, you know, in the beginning.

7:00 [SPEAKER_01]: You know, that's why you kind of have a minimum viable product to help you explore that. [SPEAKER_01]: And what I tried to have always in front of me was this awareness that I've don't really know the problem set completely just yet. [SPEAKER_01]: But I want to have my solution be robust enough to explore an increasingly wider set of problems to solve. [SPEAKER_01]: And it might happen that, you know, my problem space might just expand very rapidly, you know, just a feature, for example, somebody, I think said, that, hey, you know, what would be, what would be cool in postman is if these tests could be automated, you know, what you're writing or something like, hey, could I just add some JavaScript to it?

7:41 [SPEAKER_01]: And what I noticed was that the brain which people use products, you know, those ideas that come into your mind could really expand the problem space very quickly. [SPEAKER_01]: And it's not very likely that your solution that you've been building or the way you've been building that is going to scale up to that right away. [SPEAKER_01]: So there was like this, I think repeated periods of refactorings, you know, like from [SPEAKER_01]: those three files I had to you know organize stuff into folders and then I had to go to separating stuff into modules and then I had to go into figuring out to how to separate the UI layer and the compute layer and the read-a-based layer and so I can have always kept in mind like okay what are the next six what what are the next six months look like what is the next one you look like [SPEAKER_01]: And when my co-founders joined in, which was in 2013, we've always kept in mind that, hey, this is an increasingly bigger and bigger problem space to an extent, of course, now we see that, you know, every company in the world needs an API platform.

8:40 [SPEAKER_01]: But at this point in time, you want to focus. [SPEAKER_01]: We want to solve problems as a limited set of problems for these users. [SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, can we ship next week? [SPEAKER_01]: Can we ship next month? [SPEAKER_01]: If we, if a time horizon of shipping is six months from now,

8:58 [SPEAKER_00]: Well, from that point, how did you progress the product? [SPEAKER_00]: How did you mature it and I'm curious how you went about the process of building your road map and deciding, okay, this is the next most important thing to build.

9:15 [SPEAKER_01]: So as this, you know, postman grew, I started, you know, looking at every data point that was coming in, you know, people recommending it on Twitter, people posting reviews, people posting feature requests on GitHub, you know, blog articles or references of all sorts and I think first of all it was just a lot of fun to explore and you know, I think that I see those feeling

9:42 [SPEAKER_01]: independently of you telling them hey go and use my product you know somebody discovering it using it was just like a pretty magical feeling and and I think what we tried to have as co-founders in a team was really try to picture the world that that person was in what are they going to deal with at work you know why are they asking about this particular feature you know how many APIs are they building every day so we were continuously asking all those features on top of the reviews and the references that we were getting [SPEAKER_01]: And we try to draw out themes from that.

10:12 [SPEAKER_01]: We try to see, you know, what is the right categorization of these asks, for example, that are coming in and do these asks help us stay the course, you know, of where we want the product to go. [SPEAKER_01]: So we also framed our two core hypotheses around the product. [SPEAKER_01]: First of all, was that, you know, the world is shifting from code first to API first development, where essentially every piece of software is going to be an API or we're using APIs. [SPEAKER_01]: and developers are using tools that are not built for that kind of world.

10:41 [SPEAKER_01]: So that was the first hypothesis we framed and the second thing we framed which became very critical to the product was that the way people collaborate on APIs is also going to fundamentally change. [SPEAKER_01]: What people are primarily doing is code collaboration, not API collaboration. [SPEAKER_01]: So these two themes is, you know, we kind of kept inside and saw, okay, it's feedback coming in and adding weight to any of these things or are they taking the product

11:07 [SPEAKER_01]: you know then I think we benefited from having designers and the team very early on who looked at UI design and user experiences, we still haven't nailed down the perfect formula that can be just given to people and say that you know run with it, it's a mix of intuition, metrics, qualitative data and vision that goes into building success evitations of product. [SPEAKER_01]: The number one rule for us is that we got to continue increasing the speed of iteration. [SPEAKER_01]: If that goes down then we have a bigger problem.

11:39 [SPEAKER_00]: Well let's switch to team. [SPEAKER_00]: So in those early days we start getting some traction, you build your road map, you start to grow the postman solution. [SPEAKER_00]: How did you go about building your team? [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm interested in what you looked for in those people to indicate that they were the

11:58 [SPEAKER_01]: The first and I'm probably the most important thing was really like the belief in our vision and you know just basically even something as simple as do they understand API's at all. [SPEAKER_01]: You know if you don't understand API's or really don't see the power of API's it'll be very hard for you to be excited about what we're building. [SPEAKER_01]: I mean we made our mistakes as well and you know people just didn't see it the same way and you were like you know that's fine. [SPEAKER_01]: We have a unique viewpoint and [SPEAKER_01]: Nobody knows about it.

12:25 [SPEAKER_01]: It is likely that we will see more people who don't see things and people who do. [SPEAKER_01]: So that was kind of like the number one thing. [SPEAKER_01]: You know, we looked for journalists who could, you know, divide their time into multiple different tasks in the early days and, you know, they could focus on one thing if asked to but could really like double up in multiple roles. [SPEAKER_01]: People who are, you know, kind of long-term thinkers. [SPEAKER_01]: people would pass the marshmallow test for example for adults.

12:52 [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, you know, like that's a good phrase it. [SPEAKER_01]: So that those those sort of things we like looked at, you know, and I think having a healthy team and a team that is giving each other positive feedback and negative feedback when needed to to strengthen, you know, the team was was much more important than I'd say. [SPEAKER_01]: a specific skill set. [SPEAKER_01]: We found out like specific skill sets don't translate to velworking themes in the holidays.

13:22 [SPEAKER_00]: Well, let's flip over to scalability. [SPEAKER_00]: Did you build this in the beginning to scale efficiently or were you fighting this as you grown? [SPEAKER_00]: I'm curious to see how this applied to you as you grew postman.

13:37 [SPEAKER_01]: The things that we have learnt is that it is a lot of pull from the market. [SPEAKER_01]: almost at like all levels, you know, and I could even see it in our issue tracker or, you know, sometimes references when I was a solo developer, you know, people were extremely nice. [SPEAKER_01]: Like, oh, we want this, but I know how are you working, you know, please, you know, take your time and build it, right? [SPEAKER_01]: But there was still like a lot of requests and as we became larger, you know, people wanted more things and as we had customers, people, you know, still wanted more things.

14:09 [SPEAKER_01]: In our market, there's just like a lot of pull and that has forced us to scale way faster than, you know, it's a, for most other companies. [SPEAKER_01]: I think there are two dimensions I would say one is the breadth of the company where we had to add additional functions and capabilities inside the company like, you know, we need to have a developer relations function, we need to have a marketing function, we need to have a customer success function, we need to add support and then on the depth of talent and capabilities, we need to grow within engineering our cloud capability.

14:44 [SPEAKER_01]: We need to learn how to deliver things in order to millions of developers at scale. [SPEAKER_01]: So kind of like these two dimensions, whether once you were tracking, you know, today the company is more than 400 people now across probably more than 10 countries already and we continue to scale, but you know, kind of like the structure is more well defined.

15:05 [SPEAKER_00]: As you step out on the balcony and you look across what you've built, what are you most proud of? [SPEAKER_01]: Two things, you know, first is the community and the feedback and the love that they have given us and you know, I think the credit goes to the whole company like seeing what we ship, you know, be loved. [SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes, you know, hit it, it's all good. [SPEAKER_01]: Like it's just amazing and as I said, like, you know, that moment of joy that I got the first time around, it's just never gone away and it's kind of kept me excited about the next decade.

15:35 [SPEAKER_01]: I think it's been quite a few years since I started.

15:42 [SPEAKER_01]: The company is relatively young and the project has been around longer. [SPEAKER_01]: So that's been a big source of motivation for me in a very proud of that. [SPEAKER_01]: I think the second thing I'm proud of is basically our team itself. [SPEAKER_01]: The way my co-founders work with me and the rest of the team and the way team members are, it's just fantastic to see people really caring about APIs and really caring about [SPEAKER_01]: What they're gonna build. [SPEAKER_01]: I think it just it just feels amazing sometimes.

16:11 [SPEAKER_01]: I'm like, I'm like, oh my god, that's really happening Let's flip the script a little bit. [SPEAKER_01]: Tell me about a mistake you made and how you and your team responded to it So I mean there are many many many mistakes, you know, I think over time. [SPEAKER_01]: I'd say one mistake probably as I was moving [SPEAKER_01]: to the US was I probably did kind of underestimated the amount of work that you know I should have put in on building and kind of sticking to our culture. [SPEAKER_01]: you know I kind of assumed early on that you know there are going to be you know different personalities and distinct identities maybe events at the company and it was just like a thought in my head which had many implications down the road and you know people be hired and the kind of [SPEAKER_01]: processes we built and it took some time to uncover that and really, you know, hone in on what, you know, we wanted everybody, you know, to be like in a way.

17:13 [SPEAKER_01]: So, it was just a hard realization that, you know, you just have to really work in establishing the right culture, the right processes that apply to postman and not something that you can just copy paste from another company just because somebody worked at a, you know, a bigger company

17:32 [SPEAKER_01]: So now we are much more rigorous about onboarding people, hopefully much better at assessing and interviewing people. [SPEAKER_01]: So all those things we had to put in place after those mistakes.

17:42 [SPEAKER_00]: So this would be interesting and I'm excited to hear what is the future look like for postman the product and for your team?

17:52 [SPEAKER_01]: I'm extremely excited about the potential of APIs. [SPEAKER_01]: I think we're still just getting started on what APIs unlock for the world. [SPEAKER_01]: Our vision is that Postman is going to help create new developers in the world. [SPEAKER_01]: I talked about it that I've conference recently, what we're seeing is this massive explosion in the number of people who want to build stuff and building, you know, can have many different connotations. [SPEAKER_01]: You know, you can write code, you can, you know, integrate different applications, you can, you know, build things on top of other platforms like in a Slack and Salesforce.

18:29 [SPEAKER_01]: But what we are seeing is this unique need to improve work flows, whether it's customer support, it's sales, it's marketing, and it's like all of these different professions that are coming up now. [SPEAKER_01]: And all of that is powered by APIs. [SPEAKER_01]: And I believe that even more so in the world, like everything's going to be API driven. [SPEAKER_01]: It's going to force people to think about new kinds of business models that are more relevant for a more privacy-avocative world and more of the security implications that exist today and we are all connected.

19:04 [SPEAKER_01]: Along with creating these building blocks, which is what this new generation of developers or builders, if I may, will do. [SPEAKER_01]: And Postman is at say in a unique place. [SPEAKER_01]: and that we have the trust of more than 15 million people as of today to help build that new world. [SPEAKER_00]: So what's which to you, I've been honest, who influences the way that you work? [SPEAKER_00]: Name a CEO, a CTO, an architect, really, really any person. [SPEAKER_00]: Name a person you look up to and why.

19:36 [SPEAKER_01]: you know, my geek days, uh, it's a still a geek, right? [SPEAKER_01]: Like, you know, like, you know, oh my god, Windows, uh, and, you know, Bill Gates, like, I want to be like that. [SPEAKER_01]: But it shifted more to, I think, as I, that I've more into coding, like, you know, Steve was me, I, you know, right, I was, we had a matter of conference recently, and he was amazing. [SPEAKER_01]: I think recently, you know, I've been admiring framerally because of the way Amazon does APIs in the kind of pioneered AWS, you know, more of Jeff Bezos, you know, I mean, I think everything that is written, you know, I try to read and see, you know, what I can learn from.

20:16 [SPEAKER_01]: So I think that's one person in the recent times, you know, that is influenced by thinking a lot. [SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, I think I mostly now look at mentors as, you know, people who I can learn certain things from rather than the person I itself. [SPEAKER_01]: Kind of gone over, you know, the jobs versus wasn't the activated and sort of things.

20:36 [SPEAKER_00]: Well, we talked about mistakes, right? [SPEAKER_00]: But a little bit different spin, if you could go back to the beginning. [SPEAKER_00]: What would you do differently? [SPEAKER_00]: Or where would you consider taking a different approach?

20:50 [SPEAKER_01]: I would have probably, you know, if I had the benefit of hindsight, I would just have started sooner and, you know, forced my co-founders to, you know, kind of leave their jobs earlier. [SPEAKER_01]: You know, I kind of took, took some time out from my first company and then the second company, just to recharge, which was generally a good thing, but knowing the potential that that we have today, I would have just gone all in earlier. [SPEAKER_00]: I hear that answer a lot, and I represent that answer, too.

21:22 [SPEAKER_00]: I wish I would have started early.

21:25 [SPEAKER_00]: Well, last question, I have enough. [SPEAKER_00]: You're getting on a plane, and you're sitting next to a young entrepreneur who's built the next big thing. [SPEAKER_00]: They're jazz about it. [SPEAKER_00]: They can't wait to show it off to the world. [SPEAKER_00]: They can't wait to show it off to you right there on the plane. [SPEAKER_00]: What advice do you give that person having gone down this road a bit?

21:44 [SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, after having spoken to a few founders, I would say, you know, listen to your customers like deeply and believe in your vision and yourself. [SPEAKER_01]: I felt like everything in between is something that clouds the clarity that I think early founders can have. [SPEAKER_01]: You know, if you are the customer or the early customer of your product great, you know, it probably helps you a lot because you kind of felt the pain, but if your product is

22:13 [SPEAKER_01]: You know listening to them and listening not in the sense of just I have to sell a product to them at some point But really empathizing with their pain point really believing and you know feeling their pain point And then when the challenges of company building like fundraising, hiring, pitching You know just the basic operational stuff that comes your way and you kind of feel like oh my god Do I really know all this stuff? [SPEAKER_01]: You know you kind of go back to kind of the clarity that you probably had when you start the company [SPEAKER_01]: That, you know, why you did that and if you believe that, I think you'll be through.

22:44 [SPEAKER_00]: That's great advice. [SPEAKER_00]: Lebanon, thank you for being on the show today. [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for being on Code Story and telling the creation story of Postman. [SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for having me know I was a pleasure.

22:57 [SPEAKER_00]: And this concludes another chapter of Code Story.

23:04 [SPEAKER_00]: code story is hosted and produced by Noah Labhart. [SPEAKER_00]: Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or the podcasting app in your choice. [SPEAKER_00]: Support the show on patreon.com slash code story for just 5 to 10 bucks a month. [SPEAKER_00]: And when you get a chance, leave us a review. [SPEAKER_00]: Both things help us out tremendously.

23:25 [SPEAKER_00]: And thanks again for listening.