Wow, jesus, $6.5B [1] for an API client? 2021 really was a fever dream for VC, huh.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/18/api-platform-postman-value...

Might I introduce you to Calendly[1], a $3bn meeting-scheduling app, that employs >500 people.

Personally, I see these kinds of things as a failing of the US's macroeconomic policy since 2010 first (ZIRP), and the failing of the board and VCs second, before dicing up the blame amongst c-suite and executives. The incentive structures start from the top.

[1]: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/calendly

Honestly, even Calendly makes more sense to me.

Massive addressable market, pretty mediocre state of the art, problem that people already spend real money to solve (poorly). $3B is high, but I can see a world where it’s justified.

Employee count seems high but I would imagine a disproportionate number are sales/marketing because, again, addressable market is huge and competition is fierce.

Postman… the addressable market is just not that large, especially for the features you actually pay for.

Apparently it's 155 engineers (if LI data is to be believed), and about an equal amount of Sales employees [0].

There's definitely value in the space, but I struggle to imagine how the ends (capturing that value) justifies the means (how they're pursuing that value).

If you know your way around CalDAV [1], you can build the most valuable 20% of their features in a weekend. A team of 3-4 could build the most valuable 80% in a month or two. In fact, some people have not only done that but kept going, and we have FOSS tools like https://cal.com as a result, that are arguably easier to use.

As a board member/founder/executive, one has to in the mirror each night, and feel confident saying "I'm running this company responsibly".

Especially if you're working in a purely digital space (which Calendly is), you have to bend really far to justify hiring that many people. IDK, maybe I'm a standard deviation or two away from norms on frugality, but this baffles me.

[0]: To contrast, WhatsApp sold in (!) 2014 (!) with 32 engineers (~50 total heacount), servicing 450mm active users. So, Calendly have 10x the headcount, on .2x the valuation.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CalDAV

I get sent calendly links all the time by recruiters on LinkedIn, no idea what their economics look like but I can see a $3bn valuation being totally reasonable since they are directly enabling a profit center (for external recruiters) and critical business function for both 3rd and 1st party recruiters.

If calendly links improve the top-of-the-funnel size by X% it would be very easy to justify paying them large amounts of money to do so. If I’m employing 50 recruiters why wouldn’t I pay calendly $100k/year or more to make them X% more effective?

You could argue for building your own, but it doesn’t make sense for every business to build their own, and I think it’s obviously the type of tool where a prototype would be easy to make but getting enterprise-ready would be challenging.

Its the same flawed analysis people use for many of the tech or story stocks.

In practice if calendly gets a large share of the market and really can charge 100k/customer, competitors will pop up quickly and force pricing far lower.

For a long while many tech companies had no serious competition as startups stayed in their own lane, but thats no longer true.

E.g. people were saying the same things about Zoom and Slack, but now they’re a dime a dozen.

Amazon just launched a tiktok clone. Nothing is safe from competition, so dont expect outsized margins to last forever in your forecasts. First movers get a few years of runway before profitability will be pressured

I have no idea what calendly’s financials and growth look like and can’t say whether the valuation is reasonable, I just think they have a solid product that definitely adds value in a way that you can easily attribute to revenue or important hiring metrics.

Sure, every company has competitors. That doesn’t mean $3b is an unreasonable valuation.

$3B may definitely be reasonable depending on the numbers.

Just commenting on the apparent assumptions made using the analysis above. Zoom is still worth $20B, but there were many who said it was worth far higher because they didn't consider or discount competition at all.

However, I also think Zoom is likely to fall quite a bit more from here. Their revenue is flat YoY and still valued at 30 PE.

Nothing is safe from competition, but I'd say Amazon making a TikTok clone is more of an instance of sticking a trendy social feature in where it doesn't belong than a true threat. It's the same driving force that led all of the companies, including the likes of LinkedIn and Pinterest, to introduce Snapchat-type Stories a couple of years ago.

If memory serves Bezos knew Amazon had about 5 years before the competition caught up. That's why he started AWS.

Calendly is nearly ubiquitous when scheduling meetings with people outside your office these days. They’re particularly useful in sales and product. Given the space their in and the market cap they have 3b seems in the ballpark. Of course I don’t know what their numbers look like but if they’re doing 300m revenue yearly it would line up…

Not seen it that much, so I might be missing something, but to me it also looks to be in the "could be a feature" category. I.e. if Microsoft adds a similar feature that vaguely comes close to Office 365 it'll be a lot harder to justify.

Calendly is a good product. But I don't believe it has moat or a unique offering.

Identical competitors is popping up easily by offering the exact same service. It is a simple concept and the fact is that the only innovation they can add is adding very simple bells and whistles. The barier to this industry is virtually non existing.

Nothing is stopping Google or Microsoft to build their own integrated calendly like app. Considering platform risks, I don't believe any SAAS whose core offering relies on external API to have a sustainable revenue model.

Microsoft has built one too (Bookings). I think it sucks and I'm a Microsoft fanboy.

> Microsoft fanboy

What is your opinion about Microsoft Teams?

I think it's fine. Slack seems a little better, for instance I like their threading more. But I like how well Teams is integrated into our Azure Active Directory infrastructure.

You truly are a microsoft fan :)

I have done couple of gigs for a Azure shops. It is borderline admirable how one client vehemently adhered to the MS teams. Even to the point of using Teams integrated Onenote for software design. Everything that was supposed to be written went to onenote on teams.

Google already has one

Every time I read employee numbers like that for a SaaS business, I can’t help but wonder… what do all those developers actually do all day?

I wonder if a large portion of their valuation isn't based on the data rather than the product? (Would allow you to get signal on when [your] employees are interviewing elsewhere, etc. given the name, phone number and/or email address that you provide to Calendly)

VC was cheap after '08 with quantitative easing. Maybe they thought, hey, cheap capital.

They do other things.

They just don’t do them well enough for adoption.

It's useful. But the pro features didn't really stand out that much. I worked at one company that shelled out for pro and then went back because really the pro features weren't that much use.

Well more than anything, 90% of the use cases are people using it as essentially a GUI CURL. There's countless open source alternatives [1] [2]. They can't ever charge too much money because the space isn't exactly hard to enter.

[1] https://github.com/Kong/insomnia [2] https://github.com/flawiddsouza/Restfox

See you in 15 years when the next boom cycle starts.

It’s a very good one though. It just removes a lot of friction that alternatives impose to you.

What friction does curl impose? I get that a CLI command isn't suitable for everyone, but (1) we are talking about a developer audience and (2) there should NOT be a $5.6 billion valuation gap between the two tools.

All seriousness. Curl should be a billion dollar piece of software. It's so widely used, I suspect half of the apps I use on a daily basis would probably stop working if Curl was removed.

No kidding look at this list: https://curl.se/docs/companies.html

Not only that, the author has to deal with angry e-mails from people who are unhappy with their Toyota Corolla: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/11/14/i-have-toyota-corola/

Compensation for FOSS engineers is so broken. So much economic value gets created and rarely any of it is captured by the creators. It’s infuriating.

The way Postman is moving hasn't struck me as a developer audience anymore. At my last job we heavily used it for the QA and support teams. Most devs used the vscode extension that does mostly the same things without all the cloud-sharing junk.

Have you heard about Docusign ?

grpcurl enters the room

grpcurl and httpie are so good it's ridiculous.

Holy crap postman is valued at 5.6 billion?

I... thought it was someone's hobby project. Maybe something ran by a tiny team.

Why did they even take funding? Surely making a profit from the get go wasn't a challenge for them? It isn't like there is some huge growth opportunity for them outside of "gain more customers", and pretty much every developer in the world has known who they are for ages now.

Their enterprise pricing is $99 per user, per month. Wow.

About a half hour of a developers time per month.

I suppose, but it seems odd that it would be approx 2x what Intellij charges per year given the much more narrow focus of postman.

This is simply not true. It is correct for a tiny fraction of developers. There’s people outside of the USA and the Bay Area specifically. A lot of them.

I mean why not take funding, pay yourself $400k a year to "CEO" it, sell equity at a crazy price in the B round, etc. etc.

They'll eventually go out of business, heavily downsize, or pivot away from being accessible to non-corporate users. We'll bemoan their loss, and a lightweight competitor will rise up a few years later that is made by a tiny team who has the huge advantage of knowing what they are building.

I am sure postman is one of those products where 90% of the common features are super easy to replicate, and the last 10% take 80% of the dev org to work on.

I don't mean for this to put down the Postman team and their hard work, but I don't understand what its fit is.

If I'm writing an API, I'm testing that thing as I work on it, and the tests describe the spec of the API along with any public-facing documentation. I'm also going to provide a nice interface for testing it manually, because there are plenty of tools for doing so.

At this point, what does my team gain from using a GUI to interact with the API? Is it better documentation, better accessibility to less experienced devs?

I admit I'm naive, I'm probably missing a killer feature. I don't feel like I have an API problem though. They work well, they're tested, easy to use, directory structure/conventions/tests provide good discoverability, docs exist where code falls short, etc.

What cool stuff am I missing?

lol crazy bubble bursting

postman was good, now its awful. luckily there are other hobby projects that are still enjoyable to use

You mean post.news ?