A Letter from Yazan Sehwail, Co‑Founder & CEO of Userpilot
Dear Fellow Product Innovator,
I’m Yazan Sehwail, Co-Founder and CEO of Userpilot, thank you for taking the time to learn about us. I’d like to share why we built Userpilot, what drives our team, and how we hope to help you. Consider this a personal letter from someone who’s been in your shoes – a product person passionate about building something users love.
Our story began back in 2017. At the time, my co-founder (and friend) Thabet and I were building software for other companies. We kept encountering a frustrating pattern: we’d pour weeks or months into developing new features, only to discover that users weren’t using them. I vividly recall a project for a client (a well-known enterprise) where we added some powerful capabilities to their product. But after launch, hardly anyone found these features. The client’s team had to scramble, writing how-to guides and hosting training sessions, just to educate users about what we built. It was disheartening – not because the features weren’t valuable, but because users simply weren’t guided to see that value. We realized this problem was universal: great products often go under-utilized due to poor onboarding and lack of in-app guidance. This realization was the spark that planted the seed for Userpilot.
In those early days, we had a clear mission in mind: to revolutionize how companies approach product adoption and user onboarding. We envisioned a platform that would make it effortless for product teams to guide and engage users inside their apps, without endless coding or engineering effort. In other words, we wanted to give non-technical product managers the power to craft delightful in-app experiences on their own. The idea behind Userpilot was to enable product teams to create code-free, contextual onboarding flows that introduce users to the right features at exactly the right time. No more waiting on development cycles or guessing what users do – with Userpilot, you can build tooltips, checklists, interactive walkthroughs, and surveys without writing a single line of code, and have them feel like a natural part of your product’s UI.
What problems does Userpilot solve? In short, we help you bridge the gap between your product’s potential and your user’s actual experience. You’ve probably felt the pain of users dropping off during onboarding, or skipping over awesome features you know would help them succeed. Userpilot tackles this by letting you be there for the user inside the product. With our platform, you can personalize the onboarding experience for each user – guide them step-by-step, highlight the features they need, and even nudge them if they get stuck. The result is that companies achieve higher user activation, engagement, and retention rates by using Userpilot to tailor in-app onboarding to user needs.
You might be thinking: there are other user onboarding tools out there – what makes Userpilot different? I’m glad you asked. We’ve always believed in doing things a little differently. First, Userpilot is built for product-led teams. That means everything is no-code and intuitive, so that product managers, UX designers, or anyone driving the user experience can take charge. You don’t have to rely on developer resources to tweak an onboarding flow or launch a new tooltip. We hear from our customers that this agility is a game-changer – you can experiment and improve the user journey on the fly.
Everything we do comes down to one core belief: product-led growth is the future. We’ve seen firsthand (and industry trends confirm) that if you give users a fantastic product experience, they will reward you with loyalty and referrals. Our philosophy is that the product itself should be your main growth engine – it should drive user acquisition, conversion, expansion, and retention by delivering real value. That’s why we focus so much on helping you improve in-app engagement.
Let me also share a bit about what drives our team and why we care so much. Every member of our team is deeply passionate about user experience and customer success. Many of us come from product management or software development backgrounds, and we’ve felt the pain of low adoption and frustrated users in our past lives. That’s why nothing makes us happier than hearing about our customers’ wins. When a client tells us they halved their churn rate in a single quarter after implementing Userpilot, or that they 10x’d their product adoption by using our platform to better onboard users, it literally makes our day.
Looking back to our humble beginnings, I sometimes can’t believe how far we’ve come. Today, over 1,000 companies rely on Userpilot to drive their product growth – from scrappy startups to global enterprises. (Seeing names like UiPath, Oracle, and McGraw Hill on our customer list still gives me a bit of a thrill, to be honest.) But whether a customer is big or small, our approach remains the same: we treat your product as if it were our own. We genuinely care about your onboarding challenges and growth goals.
Thank you for reading my letter and for considering Userpilot. If you are a potential customer, I hope this gave you a sense of who we are – not just what our product does, but why we do it. We truly believe that together with forward-thinking product teams like yours, we can change the way users experience software for the better.
I invite you to join us on this journey. Whether you’re aiming to boost your trial conversions, increase feature adoption, or craft a smoother onboarding for your users, we’re here to help and cheer you on. We’re proud of what we’ve built so far, but we’re even more excited about what you will build with it.