Becoming a Stripe Community Builder and Launching the Stripe Osijek Community

I am now the Stripe Community Builder for Osijek. In practice that means I lead the Stripe Osijek Community, a local group on stripecommunity.com for people who build products and businesses on the internet, and I host its events. The first one is on Saturday, 21 November 2026, and you are invited.

This post covers what Stripe Community is, how I went from an email in my inbox to a published launch event in under three weeks, and what we have planned for the first evening.

What Stripe Community is

Stripe Community is Stripe's network of in-person and online events and peer groups for the people behind ambitious businesses. Its tagline is "Building the future of the internet economy together." The network is organised into clubs: groups for a city, a topic, or both, each run by a volunteer Community Builder. Clubs host meetups, panels, hackathons and online sessions, and each one has a space on stripecommunity.com for discussions, event pages and photo albums.

Two details are worth knowing up front. Membership is open, and you do not need a Stripe account to join a club or attend its events. And events do not have to be about Stripe. The point is to put founders, developers and operators facing the same problems in one room, and Stripe brings in its own experts and speakers when a topic calls for it.

How I became a Stripe Community Builder

It started in mid October with an email from Stripe's EMEA community team. Stripe was launching local communities in cities around the world and was looking for people to lead them: someone established in their local market, who knows Stripe well, has an audience to bring along and is willing to run quality events. That description fit closely enough that I applied the same day.

From there, the process was short and well organised:

• • Application. A form on the Become a Stripe Community Builder page about you, your market and the community you want to build.
• • A call with the community team. About a week later I was invited to schedule one, to talk through the plans for Osijek and what the role involves.
• • An NDA. Builders get early visibility into what Stripe is working on, so everyone signs one before onboarding.
• • Onboarding. Two short courses on stripecommunity.com, "What it means to be a Stripe Community Builder" and "Getting started on stripecommunity.com", which together make up the Builder Foundations learning path. Alongside them came access to a private Slack channel for builders and weekly EMEA office hours, where builders from across Europe, the Middle East and Africa drop in to ask questions and share what is working.
• • Publishing the launch event. The last onboarding step is to put your first event on the calendar. That is what makes the community go live.

The commitment is concrete: a builder hosts at least four events a year and moderates the club's online space. In return Stripe provides ready-made event kits and promotional material, funding for events, access to Stripe speakers and offices, and a direct line to its product teams. One thing the program is explicit about is that builders are individuals, not companies. Jaspero is hosting the first evening at our office, but the community belongs to the people who show up, not to us.

Why Osijek needs a Stripe community

Osijek has more people building for the internet than it gets credit for: software agencies and freelancers working for clients abroad, founders running SaaS products, and shops selling online across Croatia and the EU. Most of them solve the same problems on their own, and the nearest place to compare notes is often Zagreb or a Slack group.

Some of those problems are specifically Croatian. Every card payment to a consumer needs a fiscalized receipt, and since 2026 business invoices have to go out as fiscalized eRačuni. Stripe handles neither on its own, which is why we wrote up how to fiscalize Stripe payments (F1) and how to send eRačuni from Stripe invoices (F2). Both are pinned as resources in the Osijek club. The other theme we want to dig into is AI: how small teams and founders here can actually put it to work in their products and operations.

Payments and billing on Stripe come up in a lot of our client work at Jaspero, so leading this felt like a natural way to share what we have learned locally, and to meet the people around us who are building similar things.

The first event: Stripe Osijek community launch

The Stripe Osijek community launch is an in-person evening for developers, founders, ecommerce owners, operators and anyone curious about starting something. There are no long talks and no guest speakers. The first meetup is about getting to know each other and deciding together what this community should become.

The plan for the evening:

• • 19:00 to 19:30: Welcome, snacks and finger food
• • 19:30 to 20:15: Shaping the Stripe Osijek community: goals, principles and plans for the coming months
• • 20:15 to 20:30: Show and tell: two minutes each to share what you are working on, a recent win, a challenge or a question
• • 20:30 to 21:00: Networking over Croatian craft beer and food (this part may run longer)

The show and tell is the part I am most looking forward to. Two minutes is enough to say what you are building and what you are stuck on, and it is usually where the best conversations of the night start. You do not need slides, and you do not need to be using Stripe.

Spots are limited, so please RSVP on the event page. If you cannot make it on the 21st, join the Osijek club anyway, so you hear about the next one.

What comes next

After the launch we will meet at least four times a year. What those evenings look like is exactly what the 19:30 slot on the 21st is for: which topics matter most to people here, whether we bring in Stripe speakers, how much is hands-on versus social, and how the club's online space should be used between meetups. Croatian fiscalization and practical AI are the obvious starting points, but the agenda will come from the room.

See you on the 21st. And if you are building on Stripe and want a hand with payments, billing or fiscalization in the meantime, the Jaspero team is happy to help, and you already know where to find us.