Interview with Nimrod Cohen – Founder, OnlinePianist [2023]

Hey guys, delighted to be here, thank you for the opportunity to tell you about OnlinePianist. My name is Nimrod, I co-founded OnlinePianist about a decade ago to make it easy & fun to play songs on the piano, even if you didn’t learn piano for years or don’t know how to read sheet music.

Learning how to play the piano is awesome, but the traditional course of learning how to read music with a teacher is not something that anyone wants or can go through. However, everybody wants to know how to play their favorite songs, and this gap is what OnlinePianist is aiming at solving.

The app includes a massive catalog of songs (piano tutorials for songs to be precise), arranged by genres, difficulty levels & personal recommendations. As well as the player with various features that shows you how to play the song. You can also connect your digital piano to your phone/tablet to get instant feedback on your playing experience. 

In my previous positions, I was mainly doing marketing, specifically, I was in charge of building the social & organic presence of the brands that were managed under the companies I worked for. Back then, the connection b/w organic & social traction was not as clear as it is today, but I always believed that these two go hand & in hand and feed each other.

I gained a lot of experience that I then later brought to OnlinePianist and helped us a lot in the early days of the company. 

OnlinePianist was an answer for a personal need of mine. I love music, but unfortunately, no matter how much my parents pushed me into music lessons when I was young, it didn’t catch my attention back then and I preferred doing other things (Soccer!). It’s not that I didn’t want to play the Piano, it’s just that I didn’t find myself in school’s music lessons.

Going forward 20 years, the urge for playing piano returned, I started to feel bad about not being able to play my favorite songs, so when I turned 27 (the age many musicians end their careers…) I decided to buy a keyboard and give it a real chance. A good friend of mine who knows me very well suggested that before I invest money & time into my new “bug”, perhaps it would make sense to look for free sources online and see if I persist. 

One thing was clear to me, I wanted to play the songs that I love, that was my main goal. So I started using YouTube, which has millions of piano tutorial videos for almost any song you can think of, I was sure that I found what I was looking for.

The experience with YouTube was good and served the purpose of playing songs, but it felt incomplete. Video is limited to play & pause usually and lacks capabilities that are meaningful to the process of playing songs such as speed, finger placements, getting real-time feedback, and more.

I couldn’t find an app that focuses on songs on the one hand and have the proper features and capabilities to make it easy to play songs on the other, so I decided to build one myself.

This, in my opinion, is the beauty of OnlinePianist as a product. Like a song playing app, it provides an additional fun & engaging “layer” to other educational solutions such as a piano teacher, school music lessons, and even other piano learning apps. Since the essence of OnlinePianist is not to teach how to play the piano but rather to play songs, users can use it in addition to other more educational solutions.

OnlinePianist is being used by both private & school music teachers, as a means of encouraging students to spend more time on the piano, so there is even an educational “byproduct” to the app. 

All the tutorials at the app are being recorded by our content team. There are some elements to the tutorials that are being created automatically, and we expand those all the time in order to make the content creation as efficient as possible.

But having said that, it is crucial for us to preserve the “human touch” in every tutorial. Theoretically, we could have created more tutorials at a faster pace, but they wouldn’t be the same quality.

Great & obvious question. I am a big believer in being focused on what you do best, that is your best chance to win. Making it fun & easy to play songs is what we do best & what we love to do, so the answer, at least for the short-term is no.

We constantly add learning elements to the app, but for the purpose of playing songs. These days we are working on a dedicated learning journey for each song so users can take the playing process step-by-step and get a sense of progress and achievement.

The million dollar question… Work-life balance is very important for me as a CEO & for the company. Our (amazing) team knows that as a small company we can’t compete with the crazy salaries that are going on now in the hi-tech industry (specifically in Israel), instead, we offer a decent work-life balance and have a very convenient office hours.

This is not only a tool to “fight” high salaries but part of the company’s culture. We value the personal & family time of our employees and the founders. Much before Covid and remote working was a thing, every member of our team had one day that he/she was working from home.

What I like most about being a CEO of a product company is the fact of being able to “touch” so many people around the globe. I really like to read the reviews about the product and how it makes people feel good and happy, that’s a great balance for the pressure of being CEO. 

In terms of work atmosphere, I push our team members to take ownership & responsibility for their departments. I believe in giving professionals the lead and tend to surround myself with smarter people than me.

There is a lot of freedom, but with freedom comes responsibility, and employees that don’t use the freedom they get to grow their responsibility are usually the ones that don’t stay long in the company.

Yes, completely. We do have such plans, but only after we brought OnlinePianist to its best shape. It’s very easy to get thrown away to more products but I believe that it is better to make one excellent product than three that are ok.

The best way to start is within yourself, what YOU are missing in what the industry has to offer today, and how meaningful this thing can be to others. 

There are hundreds of start-ups these days, many of them make a real change in people’s life while many others don’t. Unlike the gaming industry for example, in order for a music-related start-up to succeed, it needs to provide real value. 

First, you need to be really connected to your idea, otherwise, it will be very hard for you to keep your heads-up when the storm comes (and it will come), second, provide real value to a real problem. 

In five years from now we hope to become the go-to app for anyone who is looking to play songs on the piano, continue to deliver real value and joy to our users, maintain a healthy and balanced working atmosphere for the OnlinePianist employees, and hopefully have at least additional app for another instrument.