Some Early Clues Signaled these Entrepreneurs to take their Product Global Waiting to build the perfect product or executing the perfect strategy is often the cause for failure
By Sneha Banerjee •
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For Indian entrepreneurs, it's not easy to have global ambitions at the initial phase of their entrepreneurial journey. Entrepreneurs usually try bagging their Indian consumers first and then decide to chart the global route.
Companies like Freshdesk, Zoho, Helpshift and a couple of others have very well proved that it's not impossible to leave a global impression provided you've got the right product market fit and other requisites that complement the same.
Abhinav Asthana, Ankit Sobti and Abhijit Kane – who together co-founded Postman, which had initially started as a side project, across several countries like San Francisco and Austin.
Postman is the complete tool chain for API developers, used by more than 3 million developers and 30,000 companies worldwide. Postman is an elegant, flexible tool used to build connected software via APIs—quickly, easily and accurately.
Speaking to Entrepreneur Abhinav said, "The company's user community grew rapidly and most of the early feedback I received was from outside India. This made it clear to us early on that the market for our future products will also be in the US,"
Since it was first released in 2012, the Postman app is now used by over three million developers and estimated 30,000 companies – both small startups and large companies such as Netflix, Cisco, Microsoft, Sony, Paypal, VMware, Adobe and DocuSign. We have offices in Bengaluru, San Francisco and Austin.
When can a product go global
According to Abhinav there are couple of things that are necessary to take a company on the global route namely; product-market fit for a company outside local markets (or at least a path towards that), technology that can compete with products built in more mature markets, great user experience and design (especially for consumer products and now more so for enterprise products).
Abhinav's lessons from his journey clearly indicate that entrepreneurs should be open to experimenting with their products every day. "We built a lot of things before Postman came along and some of these translated into companies and partnerships. The biggest lesson that I have learnt is the importance of iterating quickly and putting something out in front of users as quickly as possible. Waiting to build the perfect product or executing the perfect strategy is often the cause for failure. I found out later that these thoughts have been echoed by several startup veterans," he said.
Postman currently aims to make APIs easier for all developers, and we want to be the best, most ubiquitous API toolchain around. It plans to launch Postman Enterprise soon, which will extend Postman Pro with key features that Enterprise customers have requested.The company is backed by Nexus Venture Partners.
