Growing Company, Growing Industry
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This week, we are very proud to share Postman growth & milestones from 2018. We had a great year, and we’re really looking forward to 2019. In addition, we welcome IBM to our important and growing industry: API-first development!
To our surprise here at Postman, we recently found our name headlining IBM’s marketing materials. In December 2018, IBM launched an uncomplicated API testing & monitoring service, heralding it as an “alternative to Postman.” When a global Goliath like 100-year-old IBM compares itself to Postman’s David – well, we’re honored to know we must be doing something right!
![](https://blog.postman.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Screen-Shot-2019-01-17-at-12.11.07-PM.png)
Back in 2014, we started with an uncomplicated API testing tool too, and since then, have developed Postman into a complete API-first development platform, with tooling to cover the entire API lifecycle. Building a simple tool for testing API requests wasn’t the real challenge – there are many companies providing ample tools for single-use cases. What we’ve learned, however, is that if you want to work with complex, real-world APIs in an effective way, you need a robust tool to support your workflow.
The API space is growing quickly, with both large, established companies and startups like Postman. We can hold our own in this space – even with massive enterprises like IBM! We recently outlined our 2018 accomplishments in a press release – we grew like gangbusters in 2018, and there’s more to come in 2019.
In the meantime, I’ll share an important rubric on choosing an API-first development platform. It outlines the key questions an API-first dev organization should be asking when evaluating tools for their development journey. It’s based on our extensive experience, and the feedback from the Postman community – which is currently 17 million developers and more than 200,000 companies.
What do you think about this topic? Tell us in a comment below.