13 ms·

Try as they might, I don't think Postman will ever be able to justify that $5.6bn valuation...

phpnode 3y ago
It's an absolutely crazy valuation for the product / industry. Ultimately they're competing with free & good enough. What's their moat?
- cemerick 3y ago
  As long as they're approximately the only "enterprise" option, that's a moat all by itself. No comment on the valuation, but it makes for a very resilient business.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - smt88 3y ago
    What makes them an enterprise option? Why does an enterprise need Postman at all? The collaboration features aren't useful on any size team.
    - cemerick 3y ago
      Well, they have the organizational maturity to accommodate enterprise customers, and in contrast to much of this subthread, they don't say things like "just use curl".
      - smt88 3y ago
        In what way do enterprise customers need accommodation? If they all used Insomnia or Firecamp, what would be different?
- YetAnotherNick 3y ago
  > What's their moat? I find this question really annoying. Almost all tech companies have no moat except for maybe brand and network moat which postman also kinda has. What's Apple's moat? Or Google's?
  - asfasfo 3y ago
    Google has a search index. Apple has hardware & manufacturing IP.
    - YetAnotherNick 3y ago
      How is search index a moat? It's hard to build, yes, but there is no moat here and anyone can build it as long as they have infra, talent and money. Also for Apple while I am not sure, but looking at the Android phones there is hardly any feature of Apple which hasn't been covered by some Android phone, so I don't think IP is an issue. It's just that overall quality is much more consistent for Apple across generations that it has built a good brand.
      - finitestateuni 3y ago
        I don’t think you understand how moat is used in this context. A moat isn’t impossible to cross, just harder to cross than a lawn. Also, I don’t think you can saw two features are the same unless the quality is the same. Two sms apps are not equal if one of them occasionally fails to send/receive messages.
        YetAnotherNick 3y ago
        If you include quality as moat, by that definition postman has the moat of better quality, higher brand reputation and having more money.
        finitestateuni 3y ago
        I agree that postman has a moat. I think it’s important to say that every company has a moat in that they’re organized, located somewhere, and have customers. The size of the moat varies. We can treat a moat as a scalar value of dollars to cross. Every company also has a valuation, either through public markets, private markets, or discounted cash flows. A house cleaning company has a moat of trained cleaners, existing client generation process, goodwill of existing clients, etc. If the value of their discounted cash flows exceed the cost of crossing their moat, they are vulnerable. The argument is that crossing postman’s moat would cost much less than their private valuation, and their future roadmap is unlikely to build a moat that is significantly harder to cross.
- drewcoo 3y ago
  They're trying to get people to host/share their Postman data inside Postman's walled garden so that they're stickier. And they're competing with free and good enough but they're making a suite out of the tools and slapping a GUI on it. They're owning making it all work similarly and owning the training for their tools and if you pick them for all they do, it will be consistent. How many companies use Atlassian suite even though it really just bundles a bunch of functionality that was already free and good enough? (ROT13 spoiler: nyzbfg nyy bs gurz!)
madduci 3y ago
Now they are forcing to register to their platform to continue using the collections for free. So most of the users will have to enter their data, or just leave the product (difficult, there's not that much alternative)
- timvdalen 3y ago
  Really? I haven't used Postman since Insomnia came out. What's keeping you with Postman?
  - Xeophon 3y ago
    Isn't Insomnia the same? The parent company (KongHQ) is also backed by VCs @ 1.2B valuation. Whats the difference/better?
    - enlyth 3y ago
      Insomnia isn't as far along the enshittification process yet (emphasis on yet)
    - filleokus 3y ago
      KongHQ at least have Kong (the proxy), which I guess they can sell enterprisy support contracts etc for. Perhaps they won't need/want to make Insomnia a subscription nightmare?
    - manojlds 3y ago
      But this isn't their main product. As it should be ideally.
  - traspler 3y ago
    I tried Insomnia but for me it felt incredibly janky and half-baked. I tried to like it but at the end Postman was just way smoother sailing for me.
  - CincinnatiMan 3y ago
    I wish Insomnia had tabs the way Postman does. Also Insomnia doesn't really have a save function, so whereas in Postman you could take a request, modify it, then close the tab without changing the underlying saved request (because you didn't save/overwrite it), you can't do that in Insomnia.
finitestateuni 3y ago
Does postman do anything curl doesn’t? When I was on onboarding at a job my pair started teaching me postman, which ended with me teaching them curl and them dropping postman. If you need to share queries, put them in version control!
- tombert 3y ago
  Does curl support websockets? It might, but I think the appeal of Postman is how straightforward it is to play with APIs across basically anything in the HTTP stack, with a nice GUI. Also, I thought Postman also had the ability to export your queries to curl if you want to need to use it outside Postman.
  - finitestateuni 3y ago
    It does, but the support is not great. There’s active work to make it better. We don’t use WebSockets so that might be why my colleagues didn’t have too much attachment to postman. We have a list of bash functions we import into our zshrc/bashrc that just wrap around curl with some parts pre-filled and automatically grabbed creds from ENV as needed. It’s a better workflow since you don’t need to switch applications and you can chain calls together with some glue.
- asfasfo 3y ago
  postman was essentially built as a easy GUI version of curl. Once it went the VC route it kinda jumped the shark.
  - candiddevmike 3y ago
    > X was essentially built as a easy GUI version of Y. Once it went the VC route it kinda jumped the shark. Pretty much applies to a lot of startups. VC money does weird things.
    - BerislavLopac 3y ago
      Not "weird" -- that's literally the operational model of VC. It is all about increasing the valuation of the invested company, as quickly as possible, and then selling it while the evaluation is high. Once a company gets VC investment, this is the only route that matters (unless the board somehow resists the dominance of the VC shareholders, which is extremely difficult to achieve).
re-thc 3y ago
> I don't think Postman will ever be able to justify that $5.6bn valuation... Maybe when they actually deliver parcels like an actual postman? Fedex is worth more.
dudeinjapan 3y ago
Postman is one of those "so dumb why the hell didn't I think of it" ideas.
hiatus 3y ago
FWIW I've seen Postman shares offered on the secondary market at FAR below that valuation.
pearjuice 3y ago
They don't have to. They just need enough time and believe for the investors to dump it on retail (IPO) or get bought-out by another company.
fakedang 3y ago
Postman is one of those services that should have been bootstrapped/angel-funded, or at max Series A.
theanonymousone 3y ago
And Credit Suisse was sold for one billion :/

It's an absolutely crazy valuation for the product / industry. Ultimately they're competing with free & good enough. What's their moat?

cemerick 3y ago
As long as they're approximately the only "enterprise" option, that's a moat all by itself. No comment on the valuation, but it makes for a very resilient business.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- smt88 3y ago
  What makes them an enterprise option? Why does an enterprise need Postman at all? The collaboration features aren't useful on any size team.
  - cemerick 3y ago
    Well, they have the organizational maturity to accommodate enterprise customers, and in contrast to much of this subthread, they don't say things like "just use curl".
    - smt88 3y ago
      In what way do enterprise customers need accommodation? If they all used Insomnia or Firecamp, what would be different?
YetAnotherNick 3y ago
> What's their moat? I find this question really annoying. Almost all tech companies have no moat except for maybe brand and network moat which postman also kinda has. What's Apple's moat? Or Google's?
- asfasfo 3y ago
  Google has a search index. Apple has hardware & manufacturing IP.
  - YetAnotherNick 3y ago
    How is search index a moat? It's hard to build, yes, but there is no moat here and anyone can build it as long as they have infra, talent and money. Also for Apple while I am not sure, but looking at the Android phones there is hardly any feature of Apple which hasn't been covered by some Android phone, so I don't think IP is an issue. It's just that overall quality is much more consistent for Apple across generations that it has built a good brand.
    - finitestateuni 3y ago
      I don’t think you understand how moat is used in this context. A moat isn’t impossible to cross, just harder to cross than a lawn. Also, I don’t think you can saw two features are the same unless the quality is the same. Two sms apps are not equal if one of them occasionally fails to send/receive messages.
      - YetAnotherNick 3y ago
        If you include quality as moat, by that definition postman has the moat of better quality, higher brand reputation and having more money.
        finitestateuni 3y ago
        I agree that postman has a moat. I think it’s important to say that every company has a moat in that they’re organized, located somewhere, and have customers. The size of the moat varies. We can treat a moat as a scalar value of dollars to cross. Every company also has a valuation, either through public markets, private markets, or discounted cash flows. A house cleaning company has a moat of trained cleaners, existing client generation process, goodwill of existing clients, etc. If the value of their discounted cash flows exceed the cost of crossing their moat, they are vulnerable. The argument is that crossing postman’s moat would cost much less than their private valuation, and their future roadmap is unlikely to build a moat that is significantly harder to cross.
drewcoo 3y ago
They're trying to get people to host/share their Postman data inside Postman's walled garden so that they're stickier. And they're competing with free and good enough but they're making a suite out of the tools and slapping a GUI on it. They're owning making it all work similarly and owning the training for their tools and if you pick them for all they do, it will be consistent. How many companies use Atlassian suite even though it really just bundles a bunch of functionality that was already free and good enough? (ROT13 spoiler: nyzbfg nyy bs gurz!)

madduci 3y ago

Now they are forcing to register to their platform to continue using the collections for free. So most of the users will have to enter their data, or just leave the product (difficult, there's not that much alternative)

timvdalen 3y ago
Really? I haven't used Postman since Insomnia came out. What's keeping you with Postman?
- Xeophon 3y ago
  Isn't Insomnia the same? The parent company (KongHQ) is also backed by VCs @ 1.2B valuation. Whats the difference/better?
  - enlyth 3y ago
    Insomnia isn't as far along the enshittification process yet (emphasis on yet)
  - filleokus 3y ago
    KongHQ at least have Kong (the proxy), which I guess they can sell enterprisy support contracts etc for. Perhaps they won't need/want to make Insomnia a subscription nightmare?
  - manojlds 3y ago
    But this isn't their main product. As it should be ideally.
- traspler 3y ago
  I tried Insomnia but for me it felt incredibly janky and half-baked. I tried to like it but at the end Postman was just way smoother sailing for me.
- CincinnatiMan 3y ago
  I wish Insomnia had tabs the way Postman does. Also Insomnia doesn't really have a save function, so whereas in Postman you could take a request, modify it, then close the tab without changing the underlying saved request (because you didn't save/overwrite it), you can't do that in Insomnia.

finitestateuni 3y ago

Does postman do anything curl doesn’t? When I was on onboarding at a job my pair started teaching me postman, which ended with me teaching them curl and them dropping postman. If you need to share queries, put them in version control!

tombert 3y ago
Does curl support websockets? It might, but I think the appeal of Postman is how straightforward it is to play with APIs across basically anything in the HTTP stack, with a nice GUI. Also, I thought Postman also had the ability to export your queries to curl if you want to need to use it outside Postman.
- finitestateuni 3y ago
  It does, but the support is not great. There’s active work to make it better. We don’t use WebSockets so that might be why my colleagues didn’t have too much attachment to postman. We have a list of bash functions we import into our zshrc/bashrc that just wrap around curl with some parts pre-filled and automatically grabbed creds from ENV as needed. It’s a better workflow since you don’t need to switch applications and you can chain calls together with some glue.
asfasfo 3y ago
postman was essentially built as a easy GUI version of curl. Once it went the VC route it kinda jumped the shark.
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  > X was essentially built as a easy GUI version of Y. Once it went the VC route it kinda jumped the shark. Pretty much applies to a lot of startups. VC money does weird things.
  - BerislavLopac 3y ago
    Not "weird" -- that's literally the operational model of VC. It is all about increasing the valuation of the invested company, as quickly as possible, and then selling it while the evaluation is high. Once a company gets VC investment, this is the only route that matters (unless the board somehow resists the dominance of the VC shareholders, which is extremely difficult to achieve).

re-thc 3y ago

> I don't think Postman will ever be able to justify that $5.6bn valuation... Maybe when they actually deliver parcels like an actual postman? Fedex is worth more.

dudeinjapan 3y ago

Postman is one of those "so dumb why the hell didn't I think of it" ideas.

hiatus 3y ago

FWIW I've seen Postman shares offered on the secondary market at FAR below that valuation.

pearjuice 3y ago

They don't have to. They just need enough time and believe for the investors to dump it on retail (IPO) or get bought-out by another company.

fakedang 3y ago

Postman is one of those services that should have been bootstrapped/angel-funded, or at max Series A.

theanonymousone 3y ago

And Credit Suisse was sold for one billion :/