How Nomad Internet’s Customer-First Focus Yielded Its Newest CEO
By Space Coast Daily // May 20, 2023
Nomad Internet was launched in 2017, fueled by the belief that access to the Internet is a human right and that rural communities should have access to the same high-speed Internet available in urban areas.
Now, in 2020, the ISP brand welcomed Robyn Weber as its new CEO — but that wasn’t the start of her journey with Nomad.
As Weber explains, “I was actually a customer before I became an employee. I found Nomad basically on a whim. I was familiar with cellular internet, so I’d worked with it in the past for many years as an end user. And there was just something that drew me to Nomad and I wanted to be here.”
Fairly quickly, Weber knew she’d found something special in Nomad Internet — and she wanted more of its customer-first mission. “I was a customer for about a month, maybe even less than that,” she says, “and then I came on board working 20 hours a week as just a tech support rep and worked my way up to customer service manager and started dabbling in operations … and now I’m here [as CEO].”
An Evolution of Support
Now, Weber’s discovery of Nomad Internet was not just a happy accident. In fact, she says, “I live out in a rural area myself. About seven years ago, I bought this place and we have a cable company that is the exclusive provider for the area where I live, yet they only serve as pockets of my area.”
Noting that the competitor’s infrastructure didn’t quite reach her home, Weber says, “I called them and I said, ‘Hey look, I’d like to be connected, I’ll pay.’” In response, she recalls, “They sent an engineer up and he said, ‘It’s going to be about $15,000 and we can go ahead and get you hooked up.’ And I looked at him and I said, OK, go ahead and do it.’ And he said, ‘Well, we actually can’t; we just tell you that so that you say no.’”
Fed up with being baited and gaslit, Weber says she was “understandably furious, and that led me on this quest to find something else.” After a brief foray into the world of conventional satellites — and their inevitable disappointments — she was primed for something better. So, she says, “When Nomad came along and found me, or I found it, I landed here and I’ve been here ever since.”
The Intersection of Caring and Performance
As the customer turned employee turned CEO rose through the ranks, Weber says, “One of the things that I have enjoyed about being here is we don’t put out a product that we wouldn’t run in our own homes.”
As the primary example of that dedication to Nomad Internet’s client base, Weber reveals that she’s been “heavily involved since the beginning in product testing.” She admits that she’s “spent countless hours testing modems in situations where our customers would use them,” coming up with smart, effective solutions that Weber says she’s “super proud of.”
Still, she knows that amid Nomad Internet’s explosive post-COVID growth, the company veered away from its core mission of serving the underserved. Instead, the focus shifted to “our full-time RV traveler market. We did well there in that space,” she admits, but says, “One of the things that I am working on doing as CEO is pushing us back into the rural market.”
By refocusing on the mission of “connecting the unconnected and those who cannot get internet any other way other than through a company like us,” she believes, “I’m working on taking Nomad back to its roots and getting us back into that rural internet space where we still have people who are underserved.” In other words, by returning to the customer-first focus that drew her to Nomad to begin with, Weber may just be hooking up — and nurturing — her future successor.
