The valuation is eye-popping, does anyone have a reasonable explanation of how that could be sustained?
1. 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?
> 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.
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
strong management team point to a future for Postman with virtually unlimited possibilities