Land & Expand is a series for Indian founders building global enterprise companies from India. In this edition, Arvind Parthiban, co-founder & CEO of SuperOps, takes us inside their playbook for shaking up a decades-old, slow-moving Managed Service Provider (MSP) category—and why building a bold brand and an active community was as critical as the product itself.

"These guys care more about my business than my current vendors, whom I've known for ten years."

When Arvind Parthiban heard these words from a customer who had initially refused to buy SuperOps for over a year, he knew the community-first approach was working. It wasn't just about building software anymore, it was about earning trust in an industry that had been burned before.

This is the story of how SuperOps cracked a 30-year-old market not through better features or cheaper pricing, but by turning 150 skeptical MSPs into co-founders and building a product so intertwined with its community that competitors couldn't copy it if they tried.

The Psychology of Partnership: Why MSPs Are Different

The MSP (Managed Service Provider) market is a peculiar beast. When Arvind looked at his old notes from 2009, four names dominated: Autotask, ConnectWise, Kaseya, and SolarWinds. When he checked again in 2019, the same players still ruled. In thirty years there has been no disruption.

"70% of our clients are still on-prem," the president of SolarWinds told Arvind before SuperOps even launched. "They haven't even moved to cloud."

But the stagnation wasn't the opportunity, understanding why it persisted was.

"This is more than just a software. It's their way of living. They log in, close tickets... They use that product to manage everything. They get certified like, ‘I'm a ConnectWise certified technician.’ They use that to get jobs."

The switching cost wasn't just financial. It was emotional, social, and professional. MSPs weren't just using software; they were married to it. And as one MSP told Arvind in a moment of raw honesty: "Being with [their vendor] is like being in an abusive relationship. We know we want to get out of it, but we don't have a choice."

The community aspect ran even deeper. MSPs depended on each other for everything: marketing help, technical advice, business strategies. They were, as Arvind discovered, "a very outgoing community" that made decisions collectively, not individually.

This insight shaped everything that followed. SuperOps wouldn't just need to build a better product. They'd need to become part of the community fabric itself.

From Zero to One: The 150 Design Partners Who Changed Everything

Instead of building in stealth, Arvind and his co-founders did something counterintuitive: they recruited 150 MSPs before writing a single line of production code.

The pitch was simple but revolutionary for the space: "Till now, products have been built and forced on you. We want to listen to you and build for you."

"We reached out on Reddit. We reached out to friends and other MSPs through our entire network, including our investor network. We onboarded close to 150 MSPs. We got on calls with them, some calls went for a couple of hours about workflow."

These weren't feedback sessions. They were excavations. MSPs would screen-share their cobbled-together systems, their manual processes, their workarounds. One conversation particularly stuck with Arvind. After hours of discussion, an MSP had those cutting words about feeling trapped in an abusive relationship with existing vendors.

But the real revelation came slowly, painfully, over eight months, as they took the product live.

"Every month, they'd say this integration is missing. We'd need to build it. Getting the first 150 customers onboarded taught us so many things through mistakes. Even if they loved the product, they still wouldn't switch. They wanted everything in place first."

SuperOps wasn't just competing with ConnectWise or Kaseya. They were competing with an entire ecosystem—40+ integrations that MSPs had stitched together over years. QuickBooks for accounting, various RMM tools, documentation platforms, each with regional variations.

To prioritize what to build, SuperOps created a unique system: a "closed-lost analysis" board using Canny software:

"We created a Canny board where anybody, even a salesperson could actually put the closed lost reason and which feature was missing. The sales team got only one vote. That same thing could be put on Reddit or our website if they come and evaluate and don't see any feature. So that actually went viral in the community. They started asking."

The system triangulated three data sources: sales team feedback on lost deals, community requests from Reddit and their website, and competitive analysis. This data-driven approach meant they weren't just listening to the loudest voice in the room.

"We prioritized which features based on what's the closed lost number for this particular feature. We also cross referenced how important it is with the competitors and how the community is reacting. Three different angles; it wasn’t just sales driving it."

"Integrating with them was hard," Arvind recalls. "If you are a nobody, integrations will not be prioritized for you. When we went to integrate with a leading marketplace vendor, they asked if we had more than 5,000 customers. We had to send a mail to their board to get prioritized."

The CAB Playbook: From Design Partners to Strategic Advisors

The trajectory told the story: the first $150K ARR took eight months of grinding through integration requests. But once trust built, the flywheel spun faster—$150K to $1M in eight months, then $1M to $5M in the next year.

At the $1M milestone, SuperOps recognized they needed to evolve their community engagement. The ad-hoc design partner approach had worked for product-market fit, but scaling required something more structured: a formal Customer Advisory Board.

"A customer advisory board is where you treat them as strategic advisors to your business, similar to board members or investors, not just MSPs you're trying to solve problems for. You need to show your weaknesses, discuss openly, and not try to sell to them."

The structure was deliberately intensive:

• Monthly offline meetings with individual CAB members
• Group sync-ups to build collective momentum
• Annual in-person gatherings to "put faces to names"
• Demo days where Arvind personally showed new features one-on-one

But the real magic was in the selection and incentive design. SuperOps carefully curated a diverse CAB: from five-person MSPs to 30-person shops, and even Dave Patel, who runs a $100 million MSP that acquires others across the East Coast.

"We had different sizes of MSPs. One MSP had five technicians, another had 30. Dave Patel, who runs a $100 million MSP on the East Coast also invested in us—he wanted SuperOps to succeed. Someone like that could guide us on how to go upmarket."

The lesson about selection was hard-learned:

"A lot of folks have good brands and big names; they look ideal on paper. But it's really about investment and time. They might be too busy. They won't join any meetings the entire year."

The incentive structure was equally thoughtful: perks and privileges in year one, equity only for those who consistently contributed. No free rides. When SuperOps launched from beta to GA (general availability), they sent gift baskets to every design partner who had helped build the product, a gesture that sparked a wave of LinkedIn posts welcoming them into the community.

The cardinal rule Arvind learned? "Never go to a CAB with an answer you're expecting. Never go and say, 'Hey, I've built this, is this good?' That will always be ineffective. You need to involve them in different stages."

His framework for CAB engagement was methodical:

"The questions we asked them initially were too narrow. We focused on features and problem statements 'How can we make each feature better?' But those questions shouldn't be 'I built this, will it make your life better?' That always gets a positive answer. We need to engage them much earlier 'This is what we're trying to build. Is this a real problem? How are you solving it today? Can we do it better?'"

The key was engaging CAB members at three distinct stages: problem validation first, solution exploration second, and only then feature verification. This prevented the common trap of building solutions to problems that didn't exist.

Brand and the Art of Strategic Controversy

While most enterprise software companies play it safe, SuperOps chose controversy as a growth strategy. The moment that put them on the map? The "Goodbye Datto" campaign.

When Kaseya acquired Datto, a beloved company in the MSP space, for $6.2 billion and immediately fired its CEO, the community was furious. SuperOps seized the moment at DattoCon, once a much loved event among the MSP community.

"We sent flash mobs around the event. They all started dancing with placards saying 'Goodbye Datto.' That pissed off Kaseya."

The reaction was swift and polarized. Reddit moderators condemned it as "below the belt." But in Facebook groups and private forums, MSPs were celebrating.

Three years later, at a conference in Dallas, Arvind got his answer about whether the gamble paid off:

"Every single exhibitor flocked to us and congratulated us, saying somebody finally stood up to them. They literally said, 'We're scared, we don't want to lose business, but we're glad you did it.' That campaign welcomed us into the community."

SuperOps had positioned themselves as David against Goliath. But more importantly, they'd shown they understood the community's frustrations and were willing to fight for them.

"When you throw a stone at someone, you should be prepared to take a couple of punches. The greater good is: Are you coming across as a vulture, or are you coming across as a hero?"

The Community Flywheel: From 5 to 50,000

Building a community from scratch required something most startups lack: patience and consistency. The first conference the SuperOps team attended taught them that lesson. At Vision20 in Dallas they put up a placard: "Your tools are outdated. Change my mind."

The MSPs stopped to smile…and kept walking.

"In the initial days, hardly five to ten people would come and talk to us. That was an eye-opening moment. It doesn't matter what you build, if they're not ready to come and talk."

SuperOps started with goodwill campaigns that had nothing to do with their product. They launched a mental health awareness program for MSP founders, acknowledging the lonely journey of entrepreneurship. They created Bugle magazine, aggregating insights from 800+ MSP communities into one digestible format and ran the SuperPod, where Arvind sat down for 20+ candid conversations with the people shaping the MSP industry.

The key wasn't any single initiative, it was relentless consistency.

"Community is not a place where you announce things. It's a consistent thing. You need to keep engaging and working with them every single day. Even if there are only five people in the community, you need to work with them."

By 2025, the community had grown to 10,000 active members, with a target of 50,000 by year-end. But the numbers tell only part of the story. The real victory was changing how MSPs saw SuperOps, from an Indian outsider trying to break in, to a champion of their cause.

The approach to marketing itself evolved. As Arvind puts it: "Marketing doesn't have a seat at the table in many companies. It's not just about leads anymore. It's about brand and how we are positioning."

The AI Marketplace Play: 400 Agents, One Community

In 2025, facing the AI revolution, SuperOps made another contrarian bet. Instead of building proprietary AI features, they decided to crowdsource them.

"Five or ten agents we build in a year won't make a big difference. If you build 500 agents in a year, that's a big difference. It's not easy to copy and replicate."

The execution was audacious:

• A $100,000 hackathon prize pool
• Partnership with AWS for infrastructure
• Goal of 400 community-built agents in two months
• An app store model where MSPs could monetize their creations

The launch itself was spectacular—a 400-drone show in Vegas, witnessed by 30,000 MSPs and developers. They'd also put billboards outside competitors' offices and created an "Agent Missing" campaign questioning whether competitors' AI was real. Each campaign was designed to spark conversation, not just awareness.

But beyond the spectacle was strategic thinking: SuperOps wasn't just building features, they were creating an ecosystem where the community had skin in the game.

"Demand and supply are created simultaneously. We'll know what to build, what's happening in the community. We don't have to wait for just SuperOps to build everything."

The Bottom Line for Founders

Looking back at SuperOps' journey from zero to 1600 paying customers worldwide, three lessons emerge from Arvind's experience:

Trust is your true moat: "They need to know that you are not some new kids who are trying something. They should believe this company is going to be there forever. If that perception is not created, they are not gonna even consider you."

Consistency compounds: "From day one, we were starting to build the GTM engine. The investment has to be as important as the product from day one."

Community is psychology, not just numbers: Understanding that MSPs saw their software as "their way of living," that they feared looking foolish in front of peers, that they needed to feel smart for choosing you—this psychological insight drove every decision. Your worst critics can become your best champions once you understand what truly drives them.

The MSP market may be boring, crowded, and resistant to change. But SuperOps proved that community building isn't about growing user counts or hosting events. It's about understanding the deep psychology of your users: their fears, their pride, their need to belong. When you build with that psychology in mind, community isn't just a growth channel, it becomes the product itself.

The flash mobs have ended, the drone shows have landed, but the community SuperOps built continues to grow. Not because they have to use the software, but because they helped build it.

And that customer who said SuperOps cared more about his business than vendors he'd known for a decade? He's still a customer today. That's the power of building with your community, not just for them.

In an era where AI makes features easy to copy, the only real moat is trust, emotion, and belonging. Most Indian companies still shy away from marketing the future. SuperOps, has made it their DNA. Larger than life, community-first, and unapologetically bold: what it takes to take on giants.

Features can be cloned. Community can’t.

Wondering how to turn your community into a growth engine? We’ve distilled Arvind’s approach into a cheatsheet: actionable, tactical, and built on years of doing it for real.