The first money Abhinav Asthana ever earned was an $80 cheque, and he never cashed it. There was no bank nearby that could take it. His father told him to hold on to it, so he framed it. Fifteen years later, as he has told First Round's podcast, that same client wrote to him to say how much they liked Postman.
He was about ten when he got his first computer, around 1997. His father, a civil engineer who had taught himself Excel, taught him C. Asthana called the machine a teleportation device. The family moved between small towns in Uttar Pradesh, and one profile starts his story in Basti.
His father, a civil engineer who had taught himself Excel, taught him C.
The failures came early. In college, in Goa, he built a virtual tour of his campus that went viral and earned nothing. His first startup, a student question-and-answer site called Exam Crunch, died within a week, though it placed third in a Facebook contest. He moved to virtual tours, which became TeliportMe, an app with six or seven million users whose cloud processing ran on graphics cards in his apartment.
What almost nobody knew was that Postman was an irritation. He was juggling back-end work for three interfaces at a startup and kept switching between his editor and the API tools he found ugly. So he made his own, as a Chrome extension, and put it on the web store with no marketing. Developers found it by search. Feature requests arrived on GitHub, one from a Google engineer. At first he built it only for himself.
The turn was a sentence from users: this is the one tool I cannot give up. He recruited a former Yahoo and Adobe colleague, Ankit Sobti, who gave up a well-paid job, and Abhijit Kane. They lived together with a dog named Cooper. Money came from donations, three firms paying $500 a month and a $10 lifetime purchase he later called extremely bad pricing. A $1 million seed came in 2015, unasked.
The price was a long confusion. He could not at first explain what Postman was, and tried several labels before settling on API collaboration platform. In 2017 he moved to San Francisco to be near customers. In August 2021 a $225 million round valued the company at $5.6 billion, a figure now more than five years old.
The framed cheque is a small proof of something large. The first customer who pays you for real work tends to remember you, and the one who writes back fifteen years later is the only review that matters.