When Your API Consumption Influences The Acquisition Of Your Startup

I saw that the contact API solution FullContact recently purchased the professional network management solution Conspire. Thankfully FullContact is good about blogging about the move, and the details of the motivations behind their decision -- without this type of storytelling I wouldn't even have known it happened.

One thing I noticed in the blog post was that "Paul, Alex, and the entire Conspire team have been fabulous partners with FullContact, having utilized our Person API as a part of the Conspire offering". Acquisitions from within an API ecosystem is not new. It is why many companies do APIs in the first place, to help identify talent within their ecosystem like Paypal does, and complimentary companies and teams like FullContact has done.

There are many mating rituals you can perform as a startup these days, and building an interesting product, service, and company on top of an API is a pretty cool way to accomplish this. Obviously, it is easier said that done, but if you can identify a real-world business problem, and develop a solution to solve this problem on top of an API, and get some real traction--it can lead to some pretty interesting outcomes.