Head nerd Marc-Andre Tanguay, Sr. Manager at N-able, shared the history of the nerds program at N-Able. It was created six years ago by Tanguay to help people with troubleshooting and training as examples. The cultural paradigm for the nerds was “when other’s say no we say yes.” Tanguay shared. He said that the nerds program is committed to reinventing itself every year to stay relevant. This program has eight nerds on staff which is a hellva investment commitment to something that can’t be easily measured.
Looking forward to the second half of 2026, the nerds are committed to even more events.
Kinda analogous to “Feed Me” Audrey the plant in Little Shop of Horrors lol. Basically N-able is scaling the nerds program up moving forward.
Listen to the full podcast HERE.
Track Tanguay HERE on LinkedIn.
History
- SolarWinds has the head geeks program. N-able split with SolarWinds in July 2021.
- Mark Crall directed a program called “Rock Stars” at Autotask in the early 2010s that was going down the same partner-led growth journey.
- Microsoft MVP program. Not the best example but the 25+ year old Microsoft MVP program deserves mention for its efforts to get the SMB MSP community thinking this way. One challenge? The MVPs had a bad habit of not leaving their egos at the door so there was/is a lot of grand standing.
The final word on Tanguay. He’s cool – he’s Canadian!