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Growing Our AsyncAPI Community and Finding Funds: A Step-by-Step Strategy for Open Source Projects

Decide To Do Your First Step

When you work on an open source project, you often start small. You don’t have a budget. You don’t have a network of directors, sponsors, or salespeople. You might be a developer or maintainer without many industry contacts. So how do you grow the community and also find people who can support your project financially?

This is the story of how we did it in the AsyncAPI project. We used events not just to grow our community, but to meet people who later became sponsors, partners, and financial supporters. And we didn’t start with a big budget or a big stage. We started simple and grew step by step.

We didn't think about a huge conference like KubeCon. We thought about something much smaller. It could even be an online event at first. That's exactly what we did at AsyncAPI. For our first three years, we only had online events. And honestly, that was good enough! It helped us make connections, give a stage to our community members, and discover new people who helped our community grow in the long run.

You don't need a super professional online conference. Really, start tiny. You could even do a half-day webinar. Or just something small that creates a buzz around your project. You'll be able to tell people about it, and you can even open a "Call for Papers" (CFP) to see if anyone wants to speak.

Our first event was a spontaneous idea. Only three people organized it. We were probably not very professional, and we probably made mistakes. We had to start somehow and learn. The good thing is that in open source communities, people support you a lot and encourage you to do more. We used OBS Studio and Zoom and livestreamed to YouTube. You should have a look.

This article is not about theory. It’s about a strategy that worked. It helped us meet people, get funding, and grow our project—all at the same time.

Step 1: Start With Online Events

At first, we had no money and few contacts. So we ran online events. Simple, low-cost, and short. A few hours. One day. Later we grew them into three days.

These events helped us discover community members and early adopters. We opened a call for proposals (CFP). Some people submitted talks. We met people using AsyncAPI that we didn’t know about, Walmart and eBay. These talks gave visibility to the project, and they also gave us access to people inside companies.

We also realized that some sponsors actually prefer to sponsor a conference instead of a project. We learned that every company is different, with different structures and different budgets. The majority of companies do not have processes for sponsoring open source projects directly, but marketing processes can bring money to conference sponsorship. We learned you need a prospectus for sponsors of the open source project, and a separate prospectus for conferences only.

We learned and opened an alternative revenue stream for conferences that helped us invest in conference travels in the following years.

Step 2: Small In-Person Events

After building some community through online events, we wanted to meet people in person. But we didn’t have the money to organize a full conference. So we asked companies from our community: do you have office space? Do you run meetups already? Can we host an AsyncAPI event there?

This worked. Companies offered their venues for free. That saved a lot of money. We only had to cover travel, logistics, and swag, of course.

We ran small meetups in different countries. One at IBM’s office in London. One in Madrid at a company called SNGULAR. One in Bangalore at the Postman office. These events were small—around 30 to 70 people—but they were powerful.

  • In London, we met someone from Gartner who gave us useful strategic advice about the importance of gathering use cases. As a result, we built our case studies, where we gather different use cases and stories about using AsyncAPI in production.
  • In Madrid, we met people from Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (oh, it was great to learn AsyncAPI is used in academics) and a large logistics company called Kuehne+Nagel that later submitted talks to other events. We also learned Oracle was going to use AsyncAPI and gained great contacts there.
  • In Bangalore, we made contacts that later helped us get financial support from Aklivity.

We started getting contacts, friends, and first funding. Another great side effect was the number of new use cases we learned about for AsyncAPI, like learning that people use AsyncAPI in production to also manage their broker topologies.

With the funding we gathered, we were able to hire a community manager who now organizes and scales these events, making our outreach more consistent and impactful.

Step 3: Partner With Bigger Conferences

Next, we partnered with APIDays, an international API conference organizer. They noticed how open we were to organizing AsyncAPI conferences on different continents and in different venues with diverse partners. They invited us to join their events. We brought speakers and content about AsyncAPI. In return, they gave us visibility—and something new we had not even thought of: a free-of-charge booth at the venue.

We knew that the success of APIs is not only the success of AsyncAPI, but also of all the other API standards, like OpenAPI, JSON Schema, and others. So we decided that the booth offered to us should be shared with other standards, and this is how we also started collaborating cross-standards.

Booth crew in Helsinki

Can you imagine the expressions on people's faces? Seeing a booth with open source content only—no vendor pitch, just pure community feedback and support. Priceless.

This helped us reach many more people across different regions. We went to Paris, London, Helsinki, and more. In each location, we met developers, architects, decision-makers, and company representatives who were using AsyncAPI or interested in it.

Some of these people turned into contacts that helped us get sponsors. For example:

  • In Helsinki, we made contact with folks from Kong. Months later, Kong became a Platinum sponsor.
  • In Bangalore, a speaker talked about a use case. After the talk, we reached out. That company—Aklivity—became a Silver sponsor.
  • In Paris, we met a great guy from HDI, a large German insurance company. They submitted a talk and later became a sponsor.
  • At our API Standards booth, we spoke with an expert from SmartBear who shared the booth as an OpenAPI expert. This connection led to sponsorship. But we also gained a friend—and a running companion.

These were not cold calls. These were real conversations at real events. This is how we found people who could bring money into the project.

Step 4: Keep Expanding With Purpose

By this time, the process was clear: each event helped us find more users, more contributors, more real-world use cases, and more people who could support us.

We planned more events for 2025 with APIDays in Singapore, Munich, Lagos, London, Paris, and Bangalore. In 2026, we will organize our first AsyncAPI conference in the United States, in Silicon Valley. This was possible because of the many contacts we made along the way.

Final Thoughts: Events Help You Find People Who Can Help You

This strategy is not only about growing your community. It is about building a network that brings in funding. If you are a maintainer with no budget and no big-name contacts, this is your path. Events give you the chance to meet people you cannot reach otherwise.

Start with a short online event. See who shows up. Use a free CFP tool and invite others to speak. Then ask your community if someone can offer space for a meetup. Use that moment to connect not just with users, but with people who work at companies that might support you. Then look for partners, like bigger conference organizers, who can give you a stage or a booth.

You don’t need $50,000 to start. You need time, patience, and consistency. For us at AsyncAPI, this was the key to both community growth and project funding.