Postman raises $225M Series D at $5.6B valuation
blog.postman.com
blog.postman.com
my only guess is that they raised based on their user count and have pitched some sort of strategy to monetize based on that. I'm guessing it is B2B focus, maybe some platform to make it easier for SaaS API companies to get to users. Or just pure enterprise sales and try to get big companies to pay for it. Maybe even try to monetize the data about what APIs free tier developers are using, although that type of telemetry would probably piss off most their users
I just don't see developers paying for Postman directly, there are decent open source alternatives.
How do you meet VCs or find good ones? Do you hunt them down? Do you suggest a valuation for investment?
I'm not a full time frontend dev though so perhaps they would be more willing to pay.
Money have never been cheaper, ever
What does that mean? Is there a top down SAAS?
Top down = decision makers force individual users to use
> There are now 17 million developers on the Postman API Platform, and the Postman app has been downloaded more than 60 million times so far.
That's a significant user base for a b2b oriented app in a very monetize-able space.
Throwing out some numbers to try and math it out:
- At $5 / yr / user, that's 85mm revenue. 5.4B = 64x rev
- At $10 / yr / user, that's 170mm revenue. 5.4B = 32x rev
- At $20 / yr / user, that's 340mm revenue. 5.4B = 16x rev
All depends on how effectively they monetize.
There's definitely a credible-to-vc's story that this is a large company in the making.
I think they can make significantly more per year for enterprise users, in the $100+ per user range.
strong management team point to a future for Postman with virtually unlimited possibilities1. 17 million developers using Postman. This is impressive for any developer tool.
2. Public API network. This is something that could easily turn into an API marketplace, which sounds like it could excite investors.
I am curious how they calculate #(developers using Postman). I have had Postman accounts associated with my emails at a few different companies. In every case, we moved away from Postman. I probably account for 5 different Postman accounts, all inactive.
In this case it should be compared to valuation of tools like figma
If I deploy my app and it works it does not really matter if I tested/documented it with postman, it's not central to the app at runtime.
I also think that postman's core product is a lot easier to replicate (they were not even the first to do it) than figma and there are a number of open source projects that do.
When it comes to their API gallery I would expect that any serious API would come with a non-proprietary definition or documentation (in something like OpenAPI or at least just good docs) too.
I don't know, I just have a hard time to see why this product (and by extension the company) is worth 5.6B.
Valuations are crazy these days. But I don't see how this is crazier than other SaaS valuations. Why github when you can run your own server? Why use confluence when you can check in your docs into git?
Postman is quickly trending towards bloatware, where _most_ people just want it for is for a GUI for curl and to share APIs across teams, but Postman becomes more and more bloated with "enterprise" features to justify valuations, while losing focus on the core demo that first adopted it!
[1]: https://insomnia.rest/ (hattip for the domain name as well ;) )
For the rest of us there is curl and Powershell Web-Request.
And yet...don't?
> could trivially spin up a team
Or they could trivially pay for a 100% solution w/o having to lose focus on what they actually do.
I wish I had $5 / user / yr for every person who says this about products!
Kidding aside, I think this dramatically underestimates what it takes to build a product that solves the problems that Postman solves.
"Curl has no gui" isn't the problem they're solving.
Yeah I'm getting Show HN: Dropbox thread vibes from this thread lol.
Obviously dropbox has a sharing problem to solve, but I honestly don't see what your post adds to the discussion. Perhaps you could enlighten me to the problem that Postman is solving?
Expanding on that, just because you don't understand what problem it solves, why people would want to pay for it, or why VC's believe they can profitably invest at a given valuation, doesn't meant that any of them are wrong.
It just means you don't understand from someone else's perspective. So when you say "This is one of those cases where a good dev could likely build a clone in a month. And it hardly needs constant updates." - it's coming from a place of ignorance to the other people's problems and their scope.
> Perhaps you could enlighten me to the problem that Postman is solving?
A quick glance at their homepage helps with this. "Build APIs together" and then the value props go on with "Postman simplifies each step of the API lifecycle and streamlines collaboration so you can create better APIs—faster."
So Postman is about the collaboration and process of building APIs. Not about a curl gui. That's an expensive, big, valuable problem space.
I gotta say though I am super unimpressed by the Postman team's ability to prioritize / do the right things. Basic capabilities likes SOCKS proxies or proxies DNS are just totally awol, making this tool practically useless in a wide variety of everyday development circumstances. Ticket's been open 6 years now[1]. Really not that hard to add, would make such a powerful difference.
[1] https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman-app-support/issues/13...
They've clearly made it cumbersome to collaborate with collections via git so that you have to pay for their service, and the cost of the service is too high to justify what it does.
I don't think the cloud service route was the correct one for monetizing Postman. I think they should have left basic HTTP support at the free tier and then offered feature parity w/ curl and testing at paid tiers.
Weber Grills just went public at a similar valuation. It's truly amazing that a global household name would go for the same price as a niche tool that is optional to pay for.
I realise the "post" in Postman is likely a reference to the HTTP POST verb, but wouldn't it have made more sense to go postal (ha) for their branding instead of space? Feels like such a missed opportunity.