lol, revenue not even mentioned on the page. Seems like an absurd valuation but times are crazy and VCs are throwing money anywhere they can

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.

You don't have to guess. You only had to go to their pricing page [0] to find out what they are selling.

0. https://www.postman.com/pricing/

> VCs are throwing money anywhere they can

How do you meet VCs or find good ones? Do you hunt them down? Do you suggest a valuation for investment?

Start Googling. You'll find many hundreds of blog posts and podcasts about this. If all else fails, start listening to This Week In Startups.

Networking

The valuation is eye-popping, does anyone have a reasonable explanation of how that could be sustained?

The only justifications I can see for this valuation:

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.

Those sounds like the exact justifications for Dockers valuation and that didn't seem to pan out.

Docker's valuation didn't pan out because they tried to swim against Kubernetes.. compare that to CoreOS and openshift.

In this case it should be compared to valuation of tools like figma

Figma is a lot harder to replace than postman and it's primary users are not developers (although they often consume the result of the primary users). I think developers are more fickle than designers as a customer, especially for tools that are not central to the end result.

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.

Developers don't make the call. Companies would ask people to create and share a postman collection with API tests instead of checking it into git.

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?

In the post they say:

> 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.

Postman is a nice free tool, but nothing more. I would never pay any money for it. I don't think they can monetize more than 1% of their user base. I am absolutely stunned by this valuation.

Does that "17 million users" include people like me who use the app but have never given them any money?

Oh, 17mm for sure it includes everyone who ever uses it.

Perhaps it’s unrealistic that they’ll be able to monetize 100% of those users?

I'm going with averages here just to ballpark it.

I think they can make significantly more per year for enterprise users, in the $100+ per user range.

There is no way - people will just switch to Insomnia.

the problem with these estimates is that freemium products are lucky to get 1% conversion to paid tier

Valuation seems out of whack - that said money is cheap and trying to find a home right now. VCs need returns so why not?

I have to second this comment... I really like the Postman software (I don't use it with an account). I really want to understand how this kind of valuation can be justified.

I've actually found it has felt bloated for a while now and switched to insomnia.

I'm not a full time frontend dev though so perhaps they would be more willing to pay.

Thanks, I didn't know about this.

No clue. I dropped Postman for Insomnia and haven't looked back.

Everything these days has a billion or more in valuation.

Too much money floating around amongst funds

Printing presses switching into high gear around the world. LBO shops follow.

Money have never been cheaper, ever

VCs really like bottom up SAAS

> bottom up SAAS

What does that mean? Is there a top down SAAS?

Bottom up = individual users sell to decision makers

Top down = decision makers force individual users to use

Haven't you read the announcement?

  strong management team point to a future for Postman with virtually unlimited possibilities

If you find Postman too bloated, a great alternative is Insomnia (https://insomnia.rest/) which is very similar when Postman just started; a simple, very useful tool without all the corporate bullshit and lots of unnecessary paid features packed in Electron.

Although I love Postman and I want to see it succeed, I'm a little stumped when it comes to how this company can scale given its niche.

gradually start tightening the noose on the free tier. enterprises would be forced to pay.

What eventually will happen is that someone will get fed up and build an open-source alternative on Github. Rinse, repeat.

Insomnia is already pretty good. Other alternatives are also present that cater to basic usage (most of them as browser plugins).

In-somnia is in-credible... And allowing import from postman collections means I've never once looked back.

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 ;) )

Can vouch for insomnia, have been using it for a long time now and it's been great.

The space is already crowded, though (many of them being open source), for example Insomnia, Paw, Fiddler, Hoppscotch, and even Thunder Client (a VS Code extension). I suspect that the Postman investors are privy to information that warrant the investment (plus the economic climate being what it is).

Charles proxy too (paid)

They did their is insomnia iirc and another one. And script friendly stuff like httpie. And ide stuff like httpclient. That's stupidly high valuation

There are already quite a few, a JavaFX for those with Electron allergy and there are VSCode plugins for the Electron lovers.

For the rest of us there is curl and Powershell Web-Request.

Holy shit I thought the valuation was stupidly high at 225m, now Ive reread 5.6b, that's more than fastly market cap ffs insanity

It's a GUI around curl commands. Any enterprise company could trivially spin up a team to build an open source tool that does 80 percent of its use cases.

"Its just X around Y" is actually a very common multi-billion dollar solution/business.

> 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.

Is there not already a 100% open source solution? This is one of those cases where a good dev could likely build a clone in a month. And it hardly needs constant updates.

> where a good dev could likely build a clone in a month. And it hardly needs constant updates.

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.

> I wish I had $5 / user / yr for every person who says this about products!

Yeah I'm getting Show HN: Dropbox thread vibes from this thread lol.

We need a "common business misconceptions for HN engineers" sticky!

Your posts are incredibly condescending. If you could at least make some effort to explain your thoughts, at least you'd be adding something to the conversation.

Maybe I'm using postman wrong? Besides saving data, what is there to scale? And even saving data is likely a minor point for many who use this, they could export their routes in some way.

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?

I mean, I have no idea how you use it, but I doubt you're "using it wrong". You're just not everyone or every use case.

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.

It's a socially-networked gui around curl commands! I need to dig up the quotes, but in Bruce Sterling's sci fi book Heavy Weather, he says that no one pays for sotware, except groupwere, which everyone begrudgingly pays out for.

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...

Obligatory response to "you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially" comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

> Any enterprise company could

And yet...don't?

Company i used to work for just hired a few part-time interns to build and maintain a custom version of Postman. Auto-generated web-forms based on the underlying service code. Then would offer those interns full time jobs on graduation and hire new interns to continue maintaining the project (with any ex-intern full-timers able to jump in and/or advice as needed).

I used to love Postman, but with their recent updates, it has become nearly useless for work.

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.

I’ve totally had the why not just use curl moment a la the famous Dropbox quote. But man developer tool saas in general are on fire with growth and outright command these type of valuations. Congratulations to the postman team!

I do like how Postman can both import & export cURL requests.

My jaw hit the floor when I saw $5.6B. Valuations have been crazy for a while, but that kind of money for an OK-ish developer tool is bonkers in any world.

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 don't know anyone personally that pays for Postman...anyone here pays for it? I've used many times Postman, in the past, but never paid. In comparison I pay and have paid for Github for a long time though, and know plenty of people who also do either through personal/work

It always amuses me that Postman's branding is all space themed.

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.

Leaving aside their valuation, profit, or ability to scale (which other comments have brought up), what could they possibly need that much money for?

If you look at their feature matrix they seem to plan to expand from a deveolpment tool to a general purpose API tooling/monitoring platform: https://www.postman.com/pricing/

I would pay a small one time fee for a good collection that would save me the time having to read the documentation. The API collection store could allow developers to create and sell their collection. They could also have sponsored links, you could target people with specific needs.

I can't help but think all these crazy raises and valuations that keep jumping from round to round are just a scheme to legally print money.

Yep, hence why they are pushing everyone to subscription based use, and some features now only work with an account.

You have got to be kidding me. What's the pitch? Spyware? Send the returned JSON data to the Chinese?