Delighting users and improving conversion rates with Postman

Cronofy is an API based platform to connect with calendar services such as iCal, Google, and OutLook. It provides server-to-server synchronization to read and write events. It is used by travel companies, labor marketplaces, etc. to understand availability and manage bookings in real time.

As an API product, Cronofy uses Postman across all facets of its business. On the customer front, Cronofy caters to developers and wants to onboard them as fast as possible. Wisely, they want to show devs the magic right away. When they heard about the Run in Postman button, they saw the opportunity to do just that.

In the past, developers issued a token for the their calendars in the Cronofy dashboard and then had to start building their apps right away. There was no easy way to test the API before committing to an integration. So Cronofy wanted to offer a low touch entry point. With the Run in Postman button, they did just that. They’ve created a collection of requests to read calendars and create events that people can start testing immediately.

According to Adam Bird, the CEO,

“We’ve seen an immediate benefit since implementing the Run button. Our conversion rate has improved dramatically.”

Because they have seen a clear ROI from reducing barriers and smoothening the developer flow, they are now working on improving the rest of it to get developers to the final stages of integration as fast as possible.

Internally, Postman has helped the Cronofy team with product development, starting with the API design process. They document the endpoints to be created in a collection and then build them. Once the endpoints are live, the developers test the requests using the Postman collection to make sure responses are as expected. The key reason they use Postman is the visualization it provides. It is the testing defense layer to ensure things are working.

Another front where Postman has proved useful is when Cronofy integrates with other APIs. As an example, they have a custom payments set up and wanted to utilize Chartmogul – a company that provides SaaS subscription metrics like MRR, Churn, LTV, etc. Because they can not utilize anything turnkey, they used Postman to integrate with Chartmogul’s API and built a custom Ruby gem for the integration. They tested extensively using Postman and became confident that the library was production grade and open sourced it for the community!

The Cronofy team started using Postman when it was just a Chrome extension. In the words of Adam Bird, the CEO,

“Postman has always done everything we needed, so there has been no need to look for anything else.”