From Breach to Brand Trust: Jeff Nulsen on Rebuilding and Scaling with AI

When SolarWinds was breached in December 2020, the market assumed N-able had been breached too. It had not — the breach was of SolarWinds software, not the MSP division that became N-able, and the spin-out had been decided months before. Jeff Nulsen joined two months ahead of that separation and spent the next year rebuilding trust in a brand that had been dormant for years. He walks through what actually moved the narrative, why N-able still leads with the point solution rather than the platform, and where AI removes the capacity ceiling that has always limited segmentation.

Show Notes

Jeff Nulsen joined N-able in May 2021, two months before it spun out of SolarWinds and became an independently public company. He inherited a brand that had been dormant for years and a market that believed — wrongly — that his company had been breached. Since then the business has gone from roughly $300 million to about $500 million.

Inheriting someone else's crisis

In December 2020 SolarWinds was the target of what was then the largest nation-state cyber attack on record. The breach was of SolarWinds software, not of the MSP division that became N-able. The market didn't make the distinction.

"Because of association, N-able was assumed by many — I would say probably most — to have been breached."

Worse, most people concluded the spin-out *was* the response to the breach. In fact the decision predated it by five or six months.

What Jeff describes next is the most interesting part. Sitting next to a company going through that experience — the FBI in the office for months, engineering teams auditing their own code to a depth they'd never attempted — shaped how N-able approached its own separation.

"Because we witnessed that firsthand, because we looked so closely at our own software at that moment, we really during the spin prioritized above all else ensuring that our products and our infrastructure was secure."

That became the story, repeated relentlessly, supported by a dedicated security center on the website. It took roughly a year before the market leaned in. Then growth returned.

Brands are built on experience, not messaging

Asked what actually turned the narrative, Jeff points to in-person events — and is careful not to over-generalize from it. The MSP community favours relationships and honest conversation over polished assets. Showing up with technical people who could teach something useful mattered more than anything they could publish.

But his underlying principle is broader:

"Brands are built on experiences more than anything, in my opinion. You can do a great job with a beautiful website. You can do a great job with messaging that hits in many different channels... But if you're not delivering great experiences, whether that's through the product or through the service or with great value-add content, to me that's where brands are truly created."

He points at product-led companies as the clearest case — the brand comes from using the product, which is why those companies work so hard to get it into as many hands as possible rather than locking it behind gates.

Measuring events without fooling yourself

Two pieces of practical advice for anyone spending real money on events.

First, measurement horizons. Sales will tell you an event was great or poor, often within days. N-able tracked influenced impact at 90 and 180 days, attributing more weight when the event was the first interaction.

Second, the detail is the job:

"There's 20 or 30 or 40 different aspects of making that event work really, really well."

His favorite recent experiment: putting SDRs at events. Two reasons — they're paid to create opportunities, and their personalities mean they'll actually engage people rather than stand behind the booth.

"I can't tell you how many times I've walked by an event booth and the team there, they look the part, and they're all dressed... but nobody's engaging anybody."

Run three times now, with strong results. SDRs pull people in; a sales engineer gives the demo.

Point solution first, platform second

N-able's positioning has moved deliberately: from remote monitoring, to data protection, to cybersecurity. The market sizes drove it — data protection was more than twice the RMM market, cybersecurity roughly three times, both growing faster.

The data protection product got renamed Cove and given a distinct personality: ocean imagery, a calming tone, deliberately the opposite of fear-based security marketing.

"We weren't trying to drive fear when it came to data protection. We're really trying to drive a belief that N-able and Cove were the places to go to get comfort."

Cove is now as large a customer acquisition engine as RMM.

The cybersecurity shift came from one customer sentence Jeff says he'll never forget:

"When I go and win business, I no longer lead with IT. I lead with cyber, and then I get the IT as a result of that."

But he's resisted the obvious temptation to lead with the platform story. His view is that buyers still arrive with a point-solution problem, and the platform works better as a conversion and cross-sell lever than as the opening pitch.

"It's going to be in the sales deck, but you're really going to spend 95% of the time talking about the problem they have."

Where AI actually helps

Jeff is direct that AI touches every part of marketing — and equally direct about the word that matters:

"There's not a single part of our jobs that AI cannot assist with, and that word *assist* matters."

What excites him is personalization combined with workflow automation. His team used to have the same conversation repeatedly: should we add persona to our segmentation? Industry? Each idea was exciting, and each ran into the same wall — more segments mean more content to create, deliver and measure, with no more people.

That constraint is the one AI removes, opening markets that capacity previously ruled out. With a caveat he returns to twice: it gets things wrong, and oversight and governance have to keep pace.

His advice to marketers is unglamorous. Get outside your four walls, take vendor meetings, watch what other marketers are doing, and try things — knowing in advance how you'll measure them and what good looks like.