The Art of Community Building | Postman's Joyce Lin

**Joyce Lin** (0:00)
Some of our community complains today, there's too much in postman, just do your one thing, stay in your hole, and do the one thing really well. And we do have a lot of features. It's like an IDE. You know how to do like three things, five things, 10 things, but there's a thousand things you could do. And so one of the directives from our CEO is anything that you add, take something out.
Stop just adding more things, think really hard, and then talk to at least 50 users that are using it before you even come to me and propose it.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:31)
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So hey everyone, welcome to Dev Interrupted. This is your co-host Conor Bronsdon, and today we're joined by Joyce Lin. Joyce is the head of developer relations at Postman. Joyce, welcome to the show.

**Joyce Lin** (1:23)
Thank you, Conor. I'm excited to be here.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:25)
Yeah, it's a pleasure having you with us today. We're gonna go chat about a few topics. What's going on at Postman, APIs, Community Building, which is a favorite of mine, and of course, TikTok.
So let's- Of course. Yeah, absolutely. I really am excited to hear about your strategy there and how it's impacting your community building efforts. But let's start by getting to know Postman a bit better for those in the audience who don't know Postman is an API platform for developers.
Why is that so important?

**Joyce Lin** (1:53)
Yeah, so Postman is an API platform and a lot of developers know Postman for an API client and a bunch of the other stuff along the API development life cycle. Managers, maybe not. They might not know unless they came from development backgrounds, but we have currently it's 20 million users around the world.
It's not just developers, it's testers, tech writers, a bunch of other functions. So fairly ubiquitous now in working with APIs is, I mean, you can't get away from working with APIs. So that's part of the success of Postman.

**Conor Bronsdon** (2:23)
Yeah, I think I've heard you call APIs table stakes, and frankly, I agree with that.

**Joyce Lin** (2:27)
Yeah, so like every company has internal APIs for sure.
And the table stakes I'm talking about is if you have a public API, I looked, I think it was last year, it's probably been a full 12 months now. I looked at the Forbes Cloud 100 and just manually looked to see who has a public API. And it was almost every single one of them. And by the time I published my findings, it was like, I think one or two did not have a public API. So for cloud services, it's table stakes. Like if you don't have it, you're not looking great to potential consumers.

**Conor Bronsdon** (3:00)
And that's been a huge shift in the industry the last five, 10 years, it feels like.

**Joyce Lin** (3:04)
I think so. And I think it's part of, you know, development moving faster, people releasing new stuff faster, getting a little bit more competitive.
And APIs are a way for you to decouple some of the work so that people aren't waiting on your end team to deliver. And so decoupling that allows your partners to then just, you know, go sky's the limit.

**Conor Bronsdon** (3:24)
So I think most folks listening would agree with what you're saying. You know, we need APIs. They probably have at least one that they're doing internally, probably externally as well. But there's also a lot of buzz around other topics that maybe relate to APIs, things like low code versus no code.
How does that fit into the work that Postman's doing as an API platform?

**Joyce Lin** (3:43)
So low code, no code is typically a wrapper around traditional infrastructure. So traditional web development APIs.
Postman actually launched a low code, no code tool. I would call it low code, not no code, about a year and a half ago. And it's had a huge uptake. I mean, we see people who of course are technical working with APIs, but there's PMs, there's partner engineers, there's just like a ton of different people who aren't building APIs, consuming them.