MSP Communities and Learning Resources

Why this list matters

Running an MSP is a lonely business for a technical founder: your clients can't sanity-check your pricing and your competitors won't. The MSP industry compensates with an unusually open community culture – pricing, vendor experiences, and even P&L benchmarks get discussed in public. But there are more communities, conferences, and podcasts than any one-person shop can absorb. This reference organizes the options as of 2026 and ends with a sane path through them.

Online communities

• r/msp – the default free community. Unfiltered pricing threads, vendor experiences, sanity checks, and weekly recurring threads. Read the pricing megathreads before you set your rates – they pair well with MSP pricing models.
• MSPGeek – free, technical, Discord/Slack-based community. It grew from ConnectWise/Automate roots but is broad now, and it runs its own community conference (MSPGeekCon). The best free technical peer support available.
• The Tech Tribe – Nigel Moore's low-cost paid global community for small MSP owners. Templates, marketing materials, contract samples, "Tribal Perks" vendor discounts, and meetups. Repeatedly cited as the best value for a solo founder.
• ASCII Group – the longest-running independent North American MSP association (since 1984, roughly 1,300 members as of 2026), with around eight regional events a year and member vendor discounts.
• GTIA – the former CompTIA Community, rebranded to the Global Technology Industry Association in January 2025 after the CompTIA certification brand was sold to a for-profit. A vendor-neutral nonprofit channel association with 2,000+ member companies.

Peer and accountability groups

A peer group puts you in a room with non-competing MSP owners who see your real numbers and hold you to your commitments. These are paid programs – the common guidance is to join once you have staff and roughly $1M in revenue, when you have a real P&L to benchmark and the fee stops being material.

All three cost materially more than the communities above and expect real commitment – shared financials, quarterly meetings, homework. What they deliver is the thing free communities can't: accountability against your own KPIs and benchmarks from people with no reason to flatter you.

Conferences worth the money (as of 2026)

• IT Nation Connect – ConnectWise's flagship, Orlando each November. The business-of-MSP event.
• Kaseya Connect – Kaseya's flagship; DattoCon NA held its final separate edition in October 2025 and folded into it.
• Pax8 Beyond – fast-growing, with North American and EMEA editions.
• MSP Global – Zurich, run by the CloudFest team; the European business-of-MSP event.
• Right of Boom – security-focused and well regarded; the natural pick if security services lead your catalog.
• MSPGeekCon – community-run, technical, inexpensive by conference standards.
• Regional events – ASCII's roughly eight events a year and GTIA regional meetings deliver much of the networking value at a fraction of the cost.

Economics for a small shop: a national conference is not just the registration fee – it's flights, hotel nights, and several days you are not billing, which for a one- or two-person shop is often the largest real cost. Budget for one national conference a year at most, chosen to match your vendor stack or growth stage, and fill the rest of the year with regional events. Industry watchers (Omdia) note the energy is shifting from mega-conferences to smaller community-driven events anyway, which favors the small shop's budget.

Podcasts, blogs, and trade press (current 2025–2026)

• Business of Tech (Dave Sobel) – daily news and analysis of channel and vendor moves.
• Paul Green's MSP Marketing Podcast – weekly, focused on the marketing and sales problems covered in MSP sales and marketing.
• TubbTalk (Richard Tubb) – long-form interviews with MSP owners and channel figures.
• MSP Zone – GTIA's podcast; channel policy and association news.
• SMB Community Podcast (Karl Palachuk) – small-MSP operations and community.
• Trade press: MSP Success magazine, ChannelPro, ChannelE2E, CRN, and Channel Futures (home of the MSP 501 ranking) for vendor and industry news.

Vendor-run education

Acronis MSP Academy – open-access training for new and established MSPs, covering business operations, sales, marketing, technology, and technician productivity. It offers short modules, learning plans, certification exams, and Credly badges. Acronis also provides separate product-specific training.

Most major vendors and distributors run free or bundled partner education. Before paying for third-party training, check what your distributor, RMM, and PSA vendors already include. Use general business courses to improve operations, then use product certifications to train technicians on tools you have already chosen.

Benchmark and report sources

• Service Leadership Index (ConnectWise) – the canonical annual profitability benchmark. As of 2026 it shows best-in-class MSPs sustaining 19%+ adjusted EBITDA, with the top quartile earning roughly 2.5x the EBITDA percentage of median peers.
• Kaseya Global MSP Benchmark Report – the broad annual survey; the 2025 edition found 1 in 3 MSPs naming new-customer acquisition their hardest problem, rising to 71% looking toward 2026.

Read one of each per year and compare against your own numbers in MSP KPIs and benchmarks.

How to use all this without drowning

Community time is real time, and Reddit arguments about RMM vendors don't bill.

1. Starting out: join r/msp and MSPGeek (free) and consider The Tech Tribe (low-cost). That trio covers pricing sanity checks, technical peer support, and business templates – everything a founder needs alongside starting the MSP.
2. Cap the habit: a fixed weekly slot for community reading beats ambient scrolling. Subscribe to one daily podcast (Business of Tech) and one weekly.
3. First few years: one national conference a year maximum, plus regional ASCII/GTIA events.
4. Around $1M revenue with staff: graduate to a paid peer group – Service Leadership, IT Nation Evolve, or TruPeer – and let shared financials and accountability replace anonymous advice.

Bottom line

Start free, stay focused, and upgrade deliberately: r/msp and MSPGeek today, The Tech Tribe when you want its templates, one well-chosen conference a year, and a paid peer group when your revenue justifies real accountability. The MSP community is one of the industry's genuine advantages – used on a schedule, it compounds; used as a distraction, it just feels like work.