Stories of acquisitions are always encouraging for startups. Many a times even I have slept with more hope after hearing the news of acquisitions dreaming of those bright days when I too drive the most expensive cars and go to the most exotic places for a vacation.

Acquirers can have a lot of intentions and goals for acquiring a company — expanding their offering, filling a missing piece in their business plan or saving themselves from an upcoming competitor. The sad truth is, most often, the acquisitions kill the startups than grow them.

But the news coming in about a number of acquisition forces me to think about the most important set of people for a startup. No it is not the founders or employees or advisers I am thinking of. It’s the Users.

Availability is the key

Every successful product has a great set of users who love the product. When the acquirers think of how the product can be a great use for themselves instead of how it can be a great tool for the users, the loyal customer base is at toll. As Sarah Perez writes about the acquisition of the popular product Rapportive by Linkedin — “But LinkedIn isn't interested in what made Rapportive so great for users; it’s interested in how Rapportive can be so great for LinkedIn.”

Bump, Flock, CardMunch, Ness, mSpoke, Connected are all examples of these, the latest being Rapportive. Rapportive was a hightly successful gmail plugin for chrome and firfox which stopped active development after acquisition by Linkedin and the latest development reports that it is about to get less useful with Linkedin making it a Linkedin exclusive tool. That means you no longer will be able to view all the social networks associated with a person in your Gmail inbox. Anumber of alternatives to Rapportive have floated in the market. Our own product Vibe, 360Social, Connect6 etc aim to replace Rapportive for the users. These products are available as chrome plugins for users to get context on the users by a reverse lookup on email IDs. However, every product, including mine will take time to get the loyal users to switch from the existing solution that they use.

Acquirers and startups who get acquired, can we see ‘customer first’ even after acquisition?