- Congratulations on your new role as CEO at Piano – tell me about your journey to get here.
thank you! I am delighted to take on the role of CEO at Piano. I joined the company five years ago when I was invited to run the Piano Client Services team by Trevor Kaufman, Piano’s brilliant founder and Builder in Chief. Three years ago I stepped in as COO. Through that time, I experienced how our extraordinary technology can transform businesses, particularly media companies and how effectively our team manages the complexities of our market. I’m confident in my understanding of the many facets of our business, customers, team and solutions. I’ve been working in marketing and technology for decades. Previously, I consulted for Chameleon Collective, supporting the growth of PE-backed B2B companies. Before that, I was Chief Marketing Officer and Non-Executive Director at Selligent Marketing Cloud, and was President & COO at Schematic, which I co-founded. Before stints in management consulting and market research, I actually started my career in journalism, as a metro reporter for the Raleigh News & Observer.
2. What role does Piano play today in the digital content world?
We are the leading provider of subscription management software and analytics for media companies as well as a growing list of customers in industries including healthcare, financial services, retail and transportation. More than 1,100 companies use our solutions to run their businesses.
As evolving technology drives changes in consumer behavior, we provide a solution that maximizes revenue for content companies. Audiences are embracing AI search, and content companies need to make the most of every interaction. Our products do that for them. Even among the 51% of clients who lost traffic, 80% of them grew revenue. We manage millions of subscriptions, billions of visitors, page views and personalized messages every month. For analytics, we process trillions of customer events each year. We serve a global client base, including BBC, Deutsche Telekom, Crédit Agricole, Nikkei, The Telegraph, and the Wall Street Journal.
3. Piano’s subscription software customers are mostly in media and publishing. What other industries do you see as a good fit for Piano?
We have found success where our approach to subscription management and analytics is relevant. The subscription business model has exploded. From meal kit delivery services to e-learning to gyms, consumers have embraced subscriptions. Businesses need to engage site visitors and encourage them to subscribe, keep them loyal and minimize churn, motions that require sophisticated technology. Having worked with publishers for years, arguably the companies most adept at subscription management, we have the knowledge and the solutions to help a wider variety of companies win.
Our analytics tools provide a level of context to the data through AI and industry benchmarks that other tools can’t, making the data far more actionable. We also work closely with healthcare and financial services where regulatory compliance is critical. Regulated industries need an analytics partner that understands data privacy and adheres to various global standards such as the GDPR and HIPAA. In the era of AI, getting data collection right and protecting privacy will be more important than ever.
4. What is your vision for how Piano will evolve in the next two years?
Several factors are dramatically changing consumer behavior and the way companies use software. Our vision embraces these changes. First, we provide a backbone of reliable subscription revenue for our media customers as advertising becomes a less reliable revenue source. At the same time, we’re growing our footprint to include a wider number of industries that have consumer subscription businesses including retail, travel, e-learning and wellness.
We are also adding breadth and depth to our analytics business with AI. Analytics continues to get more complex as companies reach their customers in new channels and platforms and we are harnessing advances in AI to make analytics more accurate and effective at understanding the complexity. We provide rich insights that drive our customer’s business decisions every day.
5. How do you see Piano’s two major business pillars coming together?
Piano provides two main solutions – behavioral analytics and subscription management. For publishers, these two pillars have long gone hand in hand. Publishers use analytics to drive their subscription strategies and the data we deliver to them has made them the world’s most sophisticated subscription businesses. We also have a growing customer base for both products outside of the publishing industry. Piano is built from the ground-up as data and privacy compliant, so we have attracted businesses in regulated industries from healthcare to financial services, as our analytics complies with their requirements and provides rich context across their online properties. We are also increasing the breadth of our subscription business, attracting a number of companies in these same industries as well as retail and travel. Ultimately, analytics and subscriptions work together. When our clients take advantage of that synergy, they get the greatest lift.
6. How does AI fit into that unification?
We embed AI into our solutions so it supports the context and strategic momentum of our customers’ businesses. AI has the potential to bring our customers significantly richer insights, more efficient execution and more compelling outcomes – but it can’t do that on its own. AI needs to be part of a larger technology and data foundation that provides relevant context. Executing on insights for a publisher or a healthcare company requires a deep understanding of their business, their goals, customers and business processes. AI makes that possible. We’re building LLMs into our platform to go beyond tracking to understanding. We’re connecting AI to other systems like CRM to ensure goal alignment, infusing meaning and growth into our analytics. And we’re working closely with our customers to align AI with their larger business strategy. Rather than have AI execute in silos or within a very limited one-off process, we’re building solutions that are easy to merge with our customer’s own intelligence systems and optimization rules. This makes our system flexible and meaningful – aligned to our customer’s desired outcomes.
7. Can you tell me about your partnership with Stripe?
We have embarked on a multi-year partnership with Stripe. We have come together to help enterprise publishers with an end-to-end subscription management solution.
Stripe has the leading billing and payments infrastructure in the world, and we saw an opportunity to bring that best-in-class technology to our customers as a native part of our offering. At the same time, Stripe has prioritized media and publishing as a key category of focus. Piano’s subscription management and journey orchestration capabilities complement Stripe’s infrastructure, data volume and their deep expertise on the financial side of subscriptions. Stripe will also play a vital role in providing a more robust solution to our subscription clients in other verticals.
8. How does your experience with publishers translate to other industries?
The long-term decline of advertising revenue has compelled publishers to be extremely innovative to maximize subscription revenue. They are the world’s most sophisticated subscription businesses and Piano has been the software partner that has enabled their strategies. We see an opportunity to bring that sophistication and use cases like smart personalization, offer optimization, post-conversion retention, upsell, winback and more to other industries.
On the analytics side, we are working with a variety of companies in industries where analytics that adhere to data privacy and compliance best practices is particularly important including those in financial services and healthcare. For example, our customers Allianz, SBB, Vattenfall and Vandialia Health need an analytics foundation that supports faster decisions, better insight, and governance that stands up against the highest privacy standards. With Piano they get one reliable source of truth, access to a full customer journey, a stronger data culture, and faster decision making.
9. How does Piano’s approach to data help companies successfully adopt AI?
AI is changing the way people work, creating both opportunities and challenges across industries. Organizations are working to adopt AI but they are faced with issues like poor quality underlying data, hallucinations, AI slop and one-off AI capabilities that don’t fit well into the company’s current way of doing business. Working with Piano helps bring order to an AI transformation through analytics and context.
Essentially, we help companies get in AI shape by building a solid data foundation. Next we deliver the context. The way Piano approaches data is to natively and automatically ingest a lot of context about the business, driving value and utility for our customers. We offer content profiles and rich modeling that can drive many strategies across subscriptions and engagement.
One example of a company that is AI-ready is our customer Rabobank. Our intuitive, powerful tools and unlimited user access drove adoption across the bank and significantly reduced production time, fostering a data-driven culture. With good data and efficient processes already in place, AI has a much better chance of delivering value to the company. This sets up the company with a strong foundation for adding additional AI capabilities.
About Nick Worth:
Nick Worth is the CEO at Piano, the digital analytics ans subscription management platform. Previously, Worth was Chief Client Officer (CCO) at Piano, playing a critical role in reinvigorating the organization both culturally and commercially. He originally joined the company as Chief Customer Officer. A seasoned executive, Worth has extensive experience in leadership, operational and marketing roles across various industries. Prior to Piano, Nick consulted for Chameleon Collective, supporting the growth of PE-backed B2B companies. Earlier in his career, Worth served as Chief Marketing Officer and Non-Executive Director at Selligent Marketing Cloud, was Managing Director at Possible, and was President & COO at Schematic, which he co-founded. Worth got his start in strategic consulting at Monitor and market research at Harris Interactive. He earned an undergraduate degree in Social Studies from Harvard and a master’s from Oxford.
About Piano:
Piano is the digital analytics and subscription management platform that empowers businesses to understand their audience, orchestrate journeys, and grow revenue. Its market-leading subscription tools enable clients to engage, acquire and retain paying customers, while Piano Analytics delivers clean, compliant data with AI-powered insights for smarter decision-making. The company serves a global client base including the BBC, Deutsche Telekom, Crédit Agricole, Nikkei, The Telegraph, and the Wall Street Journal. For more information, visitpiano.io.
