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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

With a name like "Postman", one might expect this has something to do with mail, or messaging. The blog post gives no clue as to what it's for. It's apparently a test tool for testing HTTP-based APIs. [1] (HTTP "POST", get it?)

Not to be confused with Postman Corporation, which is a "computer repair shop" near CIA headquarters.

[1] https://www.getpostman.com/

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It's a fairly well known tool if you're a consumer/producer of APIs for web/mobile dev. May be that's why?

No its not. :)

Blog has no product description, and even the product description on getpostman.com (below the fold) is amazingly vague:

"A powerful GUI platform to make your API development faster & easier, from building API requests through testing, documentation and sharing."

So... It's a text editor? A test framework? What languages does it work with? Web APIs or native? Why would I use it over my existing toolchain?

In the time it took you to write this post, you could have googled it like thirty times. What's your point?

It's just a gui version of curl with helpful things like an editor for post bodies, persistence of old requests, stuff like that.

Point is that if they're selling a product, they could make it more clear what the thing they're selling is. I'm EXACTLY the target market, and they failed to entice me.

You're not the target market if you couldn't figure out what they are. I've never heard of it but one look at the screenshot told me exactly what it is.

That's not a reason to have a poorly explained product or service, it's only a justification for not caring enough about clarity.

But for developers, who see hundreds of libraries and services being posted every day, it matters if there is a clear explanation at the top or not.

The target market are developers who are in need of a very specific solution that postman provides. How do you think most postman users end up at the site? They probably search for some very specific keywords on google, asked some very specific question on stackoverflow, or got referred to it by reading some very specific article on reddit/hn/etc. They aren't people with 2 second attention spans who can't be bothered to read beyond the tag line.

smlacy's response felt pretty much like trolling to me.

The table on this page should help: https://www.getpostman.com/products

Because the blog post is written for Postman users.

I don't think anyone on HN, besides you, confuses the Postman App with a CIA cover shop.

With a name like "Apple", you'd think they're selling fruit!

Vinyl records, perhaps?

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