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 deposit it, he has said, but he framed it instead. Fifteen years later, as he told First Round's podcast, that same client wrote to say how much they liked Postman.
He got his first computer around 1997, after a months-long wait for it to arrive in India. His father, a civil engineer who had mastered Excel, taught him C. The family moved between small towns in Uttar Pradesh, and one profile starts his story in Basti. His parents set one rule on the machine: go and do something useful with it. And when he wanted a MacBook and an iPhone, his father said he had to earn them himself, which he did with freelance web work.
The family moved between small towns in Uttar Pradesh, and one profile starts his story in Basti.
The failures came early. After a year out preparing for India's entrance exams, he went to college in Goa and 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, bombed in its first week, and he has said he was disappointed. He moved to virtual tours, which became TeliportMe, an app with six or seven million users.
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 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. 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 shared a Bangalore apartment with a dog named Cooper. Money came from donations, three firms paying $500 a month and a $10 lifetime purchase he later called an extremely bad pricing decision. It still brought in thousands of dollars a month. A $1 million seed arrived in 2015.
The price was a long confusion. He could not at first explain what Postman was. 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. A father who would not let a son skip earning his own things raised a man who kept the first payment on a wall.