Osman Koç had found a way to get people to try the software. There would be a single payment, a lifetime of access, and an audience ready to buy. For a young company short of cash, that proposition had obvious appeal. The complication lay in the word lifetime. A sale could be completed in seconds; the obligation would be considerably more patient.
UserGuiding sold about 2,300 AppSumo coupons in two weeks and brought in roughly $50,000, Koç recalled in 2019. The money helped pay urgent debts. The customers explored the product and supplied feedback. A company that had been trying to persuade people to take an interest now had a rather different administrative problem: interested people.
This is a useful place to begin with Koç, the co-founder and CEO of UserGuiding. He tells the story with the inconvenient parts attached. Cash, attention, and feedback all arrived together. So did the work of serving the people who had supplied them. Growth had answered one question and filled the inbox with others.
One payment. A continuing promise to the customer.
Two school friends take a different exam
Long before the coupon campaign, Koç and Muhammet Enginar were classmates at Konya Meram Science High School. Koç was studying in the science track. With two friends, he decided to sit the examination route that included the subjects needed for business studies. All three entered Boğaziçi University’s business department. Enginar would eventually become UserGuiding’s co-founder and CTO.
The connection matters because it preceded the company, the product, and any sensible forecast of revenue. They had already made an educational detour together. Years later, the same friendship would travel through unsuccessful business ideas and a venture studio before reaching a software company.
Koç tried corporate internships while at university and concluded that a corporate career did not excite him. He then spent about two and a half years as a venture analyst at BUBA, Boğaziçi’s angel investment network. It offered a close view of founders and their plans. The analyst’s seat let him study entrepreneurship before assuming its bills.
A product hiding in the handover
The next education came through doing work for other entrepreneurs. Koç co-founded YNOT Partners, a startup studio. The work put him between people with ideas and the practical task of making those ideas usable. Software can look finished to its builders while remaining baffling to the person expected to use it. A polished interface does not automatically explain itself.
That gap became the subject of UserGuiding. The product lets teams create interactive, on-screen walkthroughs without writing code. Its analytics help them examine how tours, messages, and guides perform. The proposition gives product and customer teams a way to change a user’s first encounters with an application without routing every adjustment through developers.
In 2018, Koç was already recounting the move from working life into UserGuiding with Enginar, his friend from school and university. The founders had spent approximately six months in Silicon Valley researching the market and learning about entrepreneurship. The geography changed; the recurring problem was familiar. People needed help getting value from the applications in front of them.
Friendship has to learn about deadlines
Koç has publicly defended founding with people he already trusted. His account is practical: knowing someone’s strengths and weaknesses helps decisions, and established relationships reduce the effort spent wondering about one another’s intentions. Shared history is useful when a new business supplies enough uncertainty on its own.
By the time he described this choice in a later public post, the friendships stretched back roughly fifteen years, with Enginar’s longer still. These were relationships with a life outside the capitalization table. They gave the venture a starting vocabulary of trust that a newly assembled team would have to develop.
He also acknowledges the managerial difficulty. Working with close friends can make deadlines and accountability awkward. In his 2023 account of growing UserGuiding, the CEO’s responsibility included finding and hiring people better than himself. Affection cannot finish every task. A growing company needs expectations that survive the occasional uncomfortable conversation, along with enough humility to make room for somebody else’s expertise.
“I co-founded UserGuiding with friends I've trusted for 15 years.”Osman Koç · on choosing co-founders
Brazil enters through the budget
The plan was to hire a sales team in the United States. The available pre-seed funding was $200,000. Then the founders looked at what candidates would cost. Koç’s account of the next step is refreshingly short on retrospective grandeur: they opened a world map.
Brazil offered a time zone close to the United States and a talent pool they could recruit from. They hired locally in sales and support, tried small experiments, and saw traction. English blog posts that already performed well were translated into Portuguese. Advertising followed. By late 2023, Koç described Brazil as UserGuiding’s second-largest market.
He had also spent almost three months there, attending and sponsoring events and helping organize one of their own. His advice to other founders was to hire local people and visit. Language and proximity had practical consequences. The map solved an initial hiring problem; people on the ground helped turn that decision into a market. A spreadsheet can identify a promising country. It is less accomplished at introducing you to anyone there.
- Hiring costsA US sales team exceeds the budget.
- Local teammatesSales and support hires in Brazil.
- Local languageProven English content becomes Portuguese content.
- Local presenceVisits, events, and relationships.
The work behind a very large number
By June 2023, Koç was discussing a content operation bringing in more than ten million organic impressions a month. The figure is a historical snapshot of visibility, not a count of customers or a statement about today’s revenue. Even with that distinction, it describes a considerable amount of discovery happening before a salesperson enters the conversation.
The methods he discussed were ordinary enough to fit on a list: useful material, research, link building, frequent updates, and continued attention to performance. Their cumulative effect depends on doing the work repeatedly. An article can attract a reader long after the meeting in which somebody approved it has been forgotten.
Koç later described inbound SEO and content as UserGuiding’s repeatable customer acquisition engine. His distinction between the first hundred customers and the next thousand centers on a change in operating method. Founder effort gets early conversations started. Evidence, references, and processes become more important as volume grows. The story shifts from getting through an individual door to building a route that other people can follow.
A funded founder learns to spend like a bootstrapper
In February 2025, Koç described a change he called latestrapping: adopting the spending discipline associated with bootstrapping after having raised investment. The company had taken external capital. The lesson he drew was that another round was not automatically the answer to every growth difficulty.
His emphasis was on cash flow, deliberate hiring, and sustainable growth. This introduces a different rhythm to the founder story. A new hire carries a continuing cost. A faster expansion can put strain on an organization that has yet to develop the habits needed to support it. Caution here has operational substance.
He also identified losing talented team members through inexperience as a mistake, and working with people he cared about as a major win. Together, those admissions give his leadership account some weight. Enjoying the team does not exempt a CEO from learning how to retain it. His involvement in founder communities, including the Turkish Founders Club, provides another setting for exchanging lessons that tend to become expensive when learned alone.
Please let the user get on with it
A company selling onboarding tools might be expected to prescribe more onboarding. Koç’s public argument has become more selective. He has described simplification as preferable to overeducation, reasoning that many users already recognize conventional interface patterns. Familiarity deserves some credit. A person arriving at an application need not be treated as if encountering a button for the first time.
His February 2026 writing develops the point through the user’s intended task. Teams should understand why people came, identify a few useful segments, and prioritize the relevant workflows. He recommends keeping checklists below five tasks and tours around three to five steps, with advanced guidance introduced later.
Those numbers suggest restraint rather than a universal formula. The underlying question is what helps this person do the thing they came to do. A tour that celebrates every feature can easily become a procession through the builder’s enthusiasms. The user may have a much smaller ambition: complete the work, understand the result, and carry on with the afternoon.
Start with the user’s task. Leave advanced guidance for later.
A clean desk, a damaged bishop
Koç’s personal answers introduce smaller, more tangible measures. In a 2024 interview, he said he liked parks for thinking, preferred a clean desk, and kept a wooden chess bishop with a broken top from childhood. The bishop is a welcome detail in a career usually described through software and subscriptions. Even a founder surrounded by tools for optimization can preserve an object whose principal feature is a defect.
He named The Hard Thing About Hard Things as an influential book. Earlier, in December 2020, he had reported completing 290 consecutive days of reading, totaling 41 books. There is a domestic scale to that achievement: one day, then another. It sits comfortably beside the repeated maintenance required by a content operation.
He has given tree planting its own measure, too. In 2024, he reported 285 trees planted per team member and an ambition to reach a thousand. He connects the planting to employees, customers, partners, and investors. It is an unusually literal way of thinking about what a company leaves behind.
The next feature still needs a reason
Koç is based in London and continues to write about product adoption while leading UserGuiding. His Forbes Technology Council profile describes mentoring early-stage founders and sharing lessons through weekly writing and the podcast Türk Gibi SaaS. The former analyst now has operating experience to put beside the business plans.
In September 2026, he addressed a fresh version of an old temptation: AI tools allowing teams to ship features faster than before. His question was whether those additions were things users actually wanted. Speed can shorten the distance between an idea and a release. It does not settle whether the release deserves a place in someone’s working day.
That question brings his career back to the handover. A team builds something; another person must understand and use it. Koç has approached that exchange as a studio operator, a founder, a salesperson, and a writer. The task keeps changing its surroundings. His ambition remains recognizable: make the route into software easier to follow, and give the person at the other end a reason to stay.