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First Round CapitalFrom Chrome extension to $5B platform | Postman’s journey | Abhinav Asthana (Co-founder & CEO)
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Early computer access: from games to building software
Abhinav Asthana describes getting a computer in fifth grade and how it felt like “teleportation” from rural India into a bigger world. He starts with games, then gets pushed by his parents to use the computer productively—leading him to programming and early internet experimentation.
- •Gets first computer in the late 90s and immediately becomes hooked
- •Starts with gaming, then shifts toward understanding how software is built
- •Learns early programming fundamentals from his father
- •Experiences the internet as a way to connect and create at global scale
First entrepreneurial momentum: small projects, consulting, and the first paycheck
He explains how building websites and small software projects created an early loop of independence, income, and confidence. That first “dopamine hit” of shipping something useful and getting paid becomes a lasting motivator toward building rather than taking a job.
- •Builds early projects and does consulting as a way to earn money
- •Receives an early payment for building a client website and service
- •Learns that going from idea to real usage is rewarding, despite repeated failures
- •Decides not to pursue traditional employment after college
College product-building: BITS360 and the viral virtual campus tour
In college, Abhinav wants to build a product (not just projects) and spots a pain point in the college admissions journey. He and others build BITS360 and a panoramic virtual campus tour that becomes widely used by applicants, planting the seed for a later startup.
- •Finds a product itch while participating in campus tech demand (web design/programming)
- •Builds BITS360 as an online community for prospective students and parents
- •Creates an immersive panoramic tour that goes viral among applicants
- •The project becomes a successful but initially non-monetized product
Developing entrepreneurial taste: design obsession and resilience
He connects early building experiences to a strong point of view on product quality and design. That taste—combined with repeated iteration—builds resilience and confidence to keep shipping despite failures.
- •Becomes focused on building things that look good, feel good, and work well
- •Develops a habit of constant critique and iteration (V2, V3 mindset)
- •Builds resilience through repeated failures and occasional wins
- •Gains confidence from knowing he can always earn money as a fallback
Where taste came from: integrated products and graphic design craft
Abhinav traces his taste to contrasts between extensible tools and integrated experiences, sharpened by using a MacBook and iPhone in college. He also dives into graphic design work for marketing materials, blending structured product thinking with creative expression.
- •Notices what he enjoys using versus dislikes using from an early stage
- •Sees a contrast between flexibility/extensibility and integrated experiences
- •Gets influenced by a “less is more” mindset and subtraction in product design
- •Learns graphic design through posters, websites, and marketing collateral
Pre-Postman ventures: ExamCrunch fails, TeleportMe pivots and scales
He recounts building ExamCrunch, a student-focused Q&A platform that quickly fails to gain traction. The team pivots into virtual tours as a service, then to a mobile-first product (TeleportMe) for creating and sharing tours, which grows to millions of users before he leaves.
- •Builds ExamCrunch (a Q&A platform) and wins a Facebook API competition prize, but sees no traction
- •Pivots to building virtual tours for institutions and real estate customers
- •Adapts the tech for smartphones with cloud stitching and early GPU experimentation
- •TeleportMe app gets featured and reaches millions of users; he exits amicably in 2013
The pain that preceded Postman: APIs everywhere, no good client experience
While working on products that relied on external APIs, Abhinav feels constant friction in testing and debugging. After failing to find an API client that met his expectations—especially visually—he decides to build his own tool.
- •Realizes he is working with APIs constantly across projects and an internship
- •Struggles with testing a backend serving multiple interfaces and switching contexts
- •Searches for existing API clients and finds them unsatisfying in design/usability
- •Decides to build a better solution himself
Postman’s first form factor: a Chrome extension that spreads on its own
He chooses a Chrome extension as the fastest path to a lightweight, universally available runtime. After publishing to the Chrome Web Store, usage grows organically, with early feedback and feature requests coming through GitHub—including from experienced developers.
- •Builds Postman as a Chrome extension to avoid a bulky standalone app
- •Publishes on the Chrome Web Store and sees adoption without active marketing
- •Open-sources the project initially and receives feature requests via GitHub
- •Learns that users include experienced developers in varied environments
From API exploration to a broader product: debugging, testing, documentation, and feedback loops
Abhinav describes the early capabilities: exploring, debugging, testing, and later documenting APIs with API endpoints treated as first-class objects. As users bring new needs, he becomes intensely responsive to feedback, expanding Postman’s usefulness beyond his own experience.
- •Early product supports API exploration for debugging/testing and later documentation
- •Treats APIs as structured objects rather than plain text in generic docs
- •Learns new contexts from users (different companies, different API styles)
- •Maintains a tight feedback loop: if users get stuck, he prioritizes fixing it
Going full-time: ramen profitability, co-founders, and clear roles
He decides to pursue Postman fully after recognizing how indispensable it became for users and seeing the broader organizational importance of APIs. He prioritizes making money without heavy fundraising, recruits co-founders from prior relationships, and emphasizes early clarity on roles to avoid later chaos.
- •Interprets strong user pull as a signal Postman could become a big company
- •Aims for early sustainability and experiments with ways to earn revenue
- •Brings in Ankit (worked together previously) and Abhijit (from earlier startup)
- •Pushes uncomfortable early decisions (e.g., CEO/CTO roles) to prevent confusion
Scrappy early company life and the first monetization experiments
The founding team keeps costs low, works out of a shared apartment, and experiments with monetization—from donations and sponsorships to a lifetime in-app purchase. Later, they shift toward team collaboration and recurring SaaS, validating pricing and demand through a beta program and early customer signups.
- •Commits to being scrappy: no shiny office, focus on building
- •Lives and works together in an apartment setup while building momentum
- •Tries donations, sponsorships, and a low-priced lifetime in-app purchase (which he calls a bad decision)
- •Moves to SaaS monetization later after observing team license-management and sharing needs
Scaling into a platform: collaboration, GTM through community, and the open-source dilemma
Abhinav explains how Postman expands from an API client into collaborative workspaces and a broader platform, while navigating multiple audiences (developers, non-developers, and enterprises). He describes community-led go-to-market via meetups, ongoing messaging challenges, and why Postman moved away from being fully open source to protect the end-user experience.
- •Builds collaboration as a core theme: workspaces and sharing patterns drive platform direction
- •Designs for both developers and non-developers using progressive disclosure, aiming for usefulness in the first five minutes
- •Leans on community (meetups) where users help each other rather than being “sold to”
- •Finds product positioning hard as scope expands beyond “API client,” and eventually centers on “API collaboration platform”
- •Explains why full open source conflicted with curated UX, keeping only certain components open source
Publisher timestamps
- 1:18Why early computer access changed everythingRead this chapter
- 3:39The first taste of the entrepreneurial bugRead this chapter
- 9:58Building BITS360 in collegeRead this chapter
- 11:14Curating entrepreneurial tasteRead this chapter
- 15:49The ventures that didn’t make itRead this chapter
- 20:53The problems that preceded Postman
- 29:56How Postman’s team was formed
- 34:01Why clear roles prevent chaos
- 34:50Scrappy startup life in the early days
- 36:26Postman’s path to monetization
- 39:59Building a truly collaborative platform
- 43:00Navigating market and customer needsRead this chapter
- 46:02Cracking the go-to-market code
- 49:39Bridging the developer-enterprise divideRead this chapter
- 54:43The open-source dilemma
