Static onboarding is a manual script, adaptive onboarding is a conversation. Don't force users through a rigid path they'll just skip.
There is a moment in every piece of software where a new user decides, often without realizing it, whether the thing is worth their time. It usually arrives in the first few minutes: the empty dashboard, the blinking cursor, the vague sense of "now what?" Most companies answer that moment with a product tour - a rigid sequence of tooltips that marches you past buttons you did not ask about. Product Fruits, a company based in Prague, has built a business on the belief that this is exactly the wrong instinct.
Product Fruits sells a product adoption platform: a set of tools that software companies bolt onto their own apps to guide, teach, and nudge users toward the point where they actually get value. Product tours, onboarding checklists, tooltips, in-app announcements, surveys, a searchable knowledge base, and - more recently - an AI copilot that answers user questions from inside the app. The pitch is that a product manager can build all of it without filing a single ticket with the engineering team. You paste one snippet of code, and from there the work happens in a visual editor.
The problem Product Fruits solves is not glamorous, but it is expensive. Software companies pour money into getting users to sign up, then watch a large share of them vanish before ever reaching the feature that would have made them stay. In the industry's language, that is the gap between activation and churn. Support teams feel it as a flood of "how do I..." tickets. Product teams feel it as a graph that trends the wrong way.
Its customers are the people who own that graph: SaaS companies, product managers, and support teams at organizations ranging from early-stage startups to large enterprises. The named ones are a mixed bag by design - the accounting and advisory giant KPMG, the Japanese commerce group Rakuten, the Nordic software house Visma, the fashion retailer Mango, the healthcare-booking platform DocPlanner, the media company Sanoma, and the learning firm Docebo. What they share is a moment in their own product where a user might get lost, and a preference for fixing it without a six-month engineering project.
Static onboarding is a manual script. Adaptive onboarding is a conversation.Product Fruits, on its own thesis
Product Fruits was founded in 2019 by Ladislav Šalom and Karel Papík. Papík's background is the detail that makes the company make sense. Before software, he spent roughly 15 years designing video games - many of them aimed at women audiences - and shipped more than a dozen titles. Games live and die on onboarding. If a player cannot figure out the first level, they quit and never come back, and no one files a support ticket about it. Papík learned to teach through the interface itself, using psychology rather than a wall of instructions.
He has described Šalom as the pattern-spotter of the pair, the one who can see a few years down the road while staying calm through the daily grind. When the two joined forces, the company had six customers. The strategy from there broke a common rule: instead of proving the idea at home in Central Europe first, they aimed straight at the United States, the largest and most competitive market, from day one. It is a decision that could have looked reckless. It did not.
What you actually get is a suite. Flows are adaptive, multi-step onboarding sequences that respond to what a user does rather than forcing everyone down one path. Product Tours & Guides handle the classic walkthroughs. Onboarding Checklists give users a visible sense of progress toward their first win. Hints & Tooltips place small guidance markers exactly where a feature lives. In-app Announcements cover banners, pop-ups, and newsfeeds for product updates. NPS & Surveys and a Feedback Widget collect sentiment and bug reports without users leaving the app. A Knowledge Base rounds it out with searchable self-service help.
The newest and most consequential addition is Elvin, an AI copilot that sits inside the customer's app and answers user questions directly. It is the visible result of a bet the company made in 2024 that could easily have gone the other way.
By its own telling, Product Fruits hit a wall around $2M in annual recurring revenue. The product-led model - let users find the tool, try it, and buy it themselves - worked beautifully until the product got too capable. There were too many features for a new user to discover unaided, which is a strange kind of success. Meanwhile, a wave of AI-native competitors was appearing. Papík has described a fortnight of "dark times" before he proposed something drastic: pause work on the existing product and rebuild it from scratch around AI.
We're stopping work on the existing product to rebuild around AI. Expect revenue decline.The email Product Fruits sent its investors
According to Papík, an investor replied within 20 minutes: how much money do you need, we're betting on you. That is a rare sentence to hear after telling your backers revenue is about to fall. The €1.47M seed extension that followed in May 2024, led by Czech fund Reflex Capital alongside earlier backers Lighthouse Ventures, LVRG, and the Venture to Future Fund, funded the rebuild. The output is Elvin - a copilot that, in the company's words, resolves the large majority of user questions without a human touching the ticket.
Share of user questions Product Fruits says its Elvin copilot can resolve in-app - the questions your support desk never has to see. Figure is the company's own; treat as approximate.
The business model is straightforward B2B SaaS, priced by monthly active users - your bill scales with how many people actually use your app. Entry plans start under $100 a month for roughly 1,500 users, with higher tiers unlocking surveys, the knowledge base, localization, and integrations. That price point is the strategy, not an accident. Appcues, a well-known American incumbent, starts around $300 a month; Userpilot around $299. Product Fruits positions itself as the option that does the core job - tours, checklists, tooltips, guides - for a fraction of the cost.
There is a limit to that model, and the company found it. Product-led growth is efficient right up to the point where a product is too rich to explain itself, and then you need salespeople to close the bigger accounts. Product Fruits added a sales-assisted motion above roughly the $2M mark for exactly that reason. Today its revenue sits in the lower millions, run by a team of around 25 to 33 people split between Prague and Pilsen.
The category has a name - digital adoption platforms, or DAPs - and it is crowded. At the enterprise end sit WalkMe and Pendo, sprawling and expensive. In the mid-market are Userpilot, Appcues, UserGuiding, Userflow, and Chameleon, plus the onboarding features baked into tools like Intercom. Product Fruits' answer to all of them is not a longer feature list. It is a shorter invoice and a lower learning curve, with the AI copilot as the newer wedge. Its user ratings - 4.7 on G2, 4.8 on Capterra - suggest the "easy to set up, does the job" positioning is landing with the people who actually run it.
What is unusual about Product Fruits is less any single feature and more the shape of the company behind it. A game designer's instinct for teaching through the interface. A decision to fight in the US market from a Prague office of a couple dozen people. A willingness to email investors that revenue is about to drop, and the kind of trust that gets a yes back in 20 minutes. In a category dominated by well-funded American names, it has carved out a real position by being the cheaper, simpler tool that a product manager can pick up on a Tuesday and ship by Friday.
Papík has a line for the pressure of all this. Scaling, he says, is like riding a tiger: it destroys anything in front of it, and you cannot get off, because the moment you stop, it eats you. Product Fruits is still riding.