Partnerships are the second of the three legs of evangelism — the collaborative, co-creative relationships that amplify the work and extend the reach of an API program through aligned partners. Where partners in the business sense are organizations granted elevated API access, partnerships in the evangelism sense are about co-marketing, co-evangelism, shared storytelling, and mutual amplification with aligned platforms, tools, and companies. I’ve always framed evangelism as equal parts internal, partner, and public outreach, and the partnership dimension is the one that multiplies your effort by aligning it with others doing complementary work. Good evangelism partnerships aren’t transactional; they’re relationships built on shared interests and mutual benefit, where each party’s evangelism strengthens the other’s. Throughout my own work, partnerships have been central to how I extended my reach and deepened my understanding.
The foundational framing, which I established in 2011, is that evangelism is equal parts internal, partner, and public outreach — and the partner third is the one that’s most about collaboration rather than broadcast. The partnership leg of evangelism is where you align with companies, platforms, and individuals whose interests overlap with yours, and where the work of evangelism becomes collaborative. This isn’t the same as the business partner tier; it’s the evangelism practice of building relationships with aligned parties to amplify your shared message. When two evangelism efforts align around a common interest, each reaches the other’s audience, each lends the other credibility, and the combined effort is greater than the sum. The partnership third of evangelism is the multiplier, and neglecting it means doing all your evangelism alone when you could be doing it with collaborators.
What partnership actually means to me is fundamentally about sharing, which I articulated clearly in 2014. I wrote that partnering, for me, is about the sharing of ideas, research, and stories — not a transactional exchange but a genuine collaboration where both parties contribute and both benefit. This is the heart of how I’ve understood evangelism partnerships: they work when they’re built on real mutual contribution and shared interest, not on one party extracting value from the other. The best partnerships I’ve had were ones where we genuinely shared — research, insights, audiences, stories — and where the relationship made both of our work better. When I partnered with companies like Singly to evolve the social and personal API space, or with various tools and platforms to extend my work, the value came from genuine alignment and mutual contribution, not from a quid-pro-quo arrangement. Partnership as sharing is the ethos that distinguishes authentic evangelism partnerships from cynical co-marketing.
Looking for partners at every turn is a discipline I built into how I planned evangelism, and it’s a practical strategy worth adopting. I wrote in 2016 about looking for partners at every turn when planning your API evangelism — the practice of, whenever you’re doing an evangelism effort, asking who else cares about this and could amplify it. A release, an update, a piece of content, an event — each is an opportunity to involve aligned partners who will amplify the effort to their own audiences. This partner-discovery mindset turns every evangelism activity into a potential collaboration, multiplying its reach. The strategic-partnership thinking I wrote about in 2015 — how open APIs, open source, open definitions, open plugins, and open partnerships reinforce each other — reflects the same instinct: partnership and openness are mutually reinforcing, and an evangelism practice built on both extends much further than one built on neither.
The storytelling partnerships are where evangelism partnerships do their most distinctive work, and I leaned into these heavily. I partnered with companies specifically to tell more API stories — like the 2018 partnership with Bridge Software to tell more API integration stories from the trenches, or the partnership with APIWARE to help people do the hard work of developing and managing APIs. These storytelling partnerships were about combining my evangelism reach and narrative skill with a partner’s domain knowledge and real-world experience, producing stories neither of us could have told alone. This is evangelism partnership at its best: each party brings something the other lacks, and the collaboration produces genuine value for the audience. The stories from the integration trenches that a partner could provide, combined with the storytelling platform and craft I could provide, made for evangelism that was richer and more credible than either of us could manage solo.
The honest framing I’d offer is that evangelism partnerships, done right, are about mutual benefit and genuine alignment, and done wrong, they’re just co-marketing that audiences see through. The API Evangelist partner program I built was deliberately structured around merit, community signals, and mutual value creation rather than pure pay-to-play, because I cared about partnerships being genuine rather than transactional. The productive partner program framework I wrote about in 2018 — thinking about partner A, partner B, and the customer who benefits — captures the key test: a good partnership creates value for a third party, the audience or customer, not just for the two partners. When an evangelism partnership genuinely serves the audience by combining complementary strengths, it works and it builds trust. When it’s just two companies amplifying each other’s marketing for mutual benefit with nothing real for the audience, it reads as exactly what it is, and it erodes the authenticity that evangelism depends on. The partnership third of evangelism is powerful because it multiplies your reach and deepens your work through collaboration — but only when the partnerships are built on genuine alignment, real sharing, and mutual benefit that extends to the audience. Partnership is the leg of evangelism that lets you do more than you could alone, and the relationships I built through genuine evangelism partnerships were some of the most valuable and enduring of my entire career, because they were grounded in the sharing of ideas, research, and stories rather than in transaction.
References
- API Evangelism Is Equal Parts Internal, Partner And Public Outreach
- Partnering For Me Is About Sharing Of Ideas, Research, And Stories
- API Evangelist And APIWARE Partnering To Help You Do The Hard Work Of Developing And Managing Your API
- How Open Source API Proxies And Other API Services And Tooling Can Strategically Partner
- Looking For Partners At Every Turn When Planning Your API Evangelism
- Details Of The API Evangelist Partner Program
- Creating A Productive API Industry Partner Program
- API Evangelist Is Partnering With Bridge Software To Tell More API Integration Stories
