The no-code onboarding tool that grew from an Istanbul startup studio into a product-adoption platform used by teams at Verizon and Costco - by betting that the people who understand users shouldn't need an engineer to guide them.
Every founder has a story about the moment they got tired of the same problem. For Osman Koç and Muhammet Enginar, the problem was watching perfectly good software get abandoned in its first five minutes. The two had been friends for the better part of a decade, running a startup studio in Istanbul, shipping products, and noticing that the products died in the same place: the empty screen a new user sees before anyone has shown them what to do. The fix always required a developer. The developer was always busy. So in 2017 they built the thing that removed the developer from the equation, and called it UserGuiding.
UserGuiding is a no-code product adoption platform. In plain terms, it lets the people who understand your users - product managers, marketers, customer-success leads - build the little guided moments that teach someone how to use an app. Product tours. Checklists. Tooltips that appear at the right second. In-app announcements. Surveys. A knowledge base. And, since 2024, an AI assistant that answers questions from your own help content. None of it requires touching the codebase, and that is the entire point.
Onboarding sounds like a small thing until you price it out. A user who cannot figure out your product in the first session tends not to come back for a second one. In subscription software, that lost user is lost revenue, month after month. The traditional fix - having engineers build in-app guidance directly into the product - works, but it competes with every other item on the roadmap. Guidance loses. Features win. The user gets the empty screen.
UserGuiding's answer was a browser extension. You install it, open your live app, click on the buttons and fields you want to explain, and the tour builds itself on top of the interface. No deploy, no ticket, no waiting for the next sprint. The person who wrote the onboarding email can now build the onboarding flow, this afternoon, and change it tomorrow when it does not work.
If you understand your users, you shouldn't need a developer to guide them. The thesis behind UserGuiding
The customer list is where the story gets a little strange. You would expect a low-priced onboarding tool to serve only small SaaS companies, and plenty of them do use it. But UserGuiding also shows up inside large organizations: Verizon, Costco, Dentsu, Informa, Guardant Health, TOTVS, VSP Vision, Loblaw. Roughly 130 companies pay for it. The common thread is not company size but the job to be done - somebody, somewhere, needs to guide users through software and does not want to file an engineering request to do it.
That breadth is possible because the product scales down as gracefully as it scales up. A three-person startup can build a checklist in an hour. A large enterprise can run segmented, targeted flows across a complex product. The builder is the same; the ambition is different.
Look closer at who inside these companies actually opens the tool and a pattern emerges. It is rarely engineering. It is the product marketer trying to lift feature adoption, the customer-success manager cutting down repeat support tickets, the product owner who wants to test a new activation flow before committing engineering time to it. UserGuiding is built for that person - the one who owns the outcome but has never owned the codebase. Giving them a lever to pull, without a queue in front of it, is the whole proposition.
The company started with onboarding and kept widening the surface. Today the platform covers most of the moments a user might need a nudge. Product tours and hotspots handle first-run guidance. Checklists push people toward the action that actually matters - the "aha" that turns a trial into a habit. In-app modals, banners and update hubs carry announcements. Surveys and NPS collect feedback without bolting on another tool. Segmentation and analytics tie it together so teams can see which guides work and which quietly fail.
In 2024 UserGuiding pushed into support. It launched a Knowledge Base to hold self-serve help content, then an AI Assistant - an in-app chatbot, powered by GPT models, that answers user questions from your own documents, URLs and PDFs, and can point people toward the right action instead of just talking. The three pieces - knowledge base, resource center and AI assistant - are bundled into a free forever tier, which is a fairly confident way to say the paid product can stand on its own.
The idea came from running a startup studio and watching good products fail because of bad onboarding. On UserGuiding's origin
UserGuiding operates in a crowded category. Pendo pairs guidance with heavy product analytics. Appcues is feature-rich and polished. Userpilot leans on analytics and native mobile. Whatfix and WalkMe court the enterprise with long rollouts, deep integrations and consulting attached. Against that field, UserGuiding picked a lane and stayed in it: be the affordable one, be the fast one, be the one a non-technical person can set up without a services contract.
Reviewers tend to describe it the same way - cheaper than the alternatives, quick to implement, strong value for smaller and mid-sized teams. It scores near the top of its category on ease of setup. The trade-off is real: it is web-first rather than native mobile, and it does not try to be a full product-analytics suite. It is a classic bottom-up play - win the teams the incumbents price out, and grow with them.
| Tool | Entry price | Setup ease | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| UserGuiding | Free / ~$174/mo | Very fast | SMB & lean teams |
| Userpilot | ~$249/mo | Fast | Analytics-led PLG |
| Appcues | Higher | Fast | Feature-rich flows |
| Pendo | Enterprise | Slower | Guidance + analytics |
| WalkMe / Whatfix | Enterprise | Long rollout | Large enterprises |
The financial shape of UserGuiding is unusual for its category. It raised a pre-seed and then a $1.1M seed round in 2020, led by Collective Spark with Galata Business Angels and Angel Effect, at a valuation around $4M. That is roughly the whole story of its funding. Its rivals have raised tens or hundreds of millions. UserGuiding grew revenue to about $2.4M, then $3.3M, with a team hovering around 40 people. The model is straightforward subscription SaaS - a free tier for support, paid Starter and Growth plans priced by monthly active users, and custom enterprise deals - run at a profit rather than at a loss chasing scale.
That restraint doubles as a marketing engine. UserGuiding built one of the more widely read content libraries in the onboarding space, ranking for the questions its buyers were already asking. It is a distribution strategy that costs patience instead of cash, which suits a company that never had much cash to spend.
There is a version of this company that moved to San Francisco early, raised a headline round, and burned through it. UserGuiding did not take that path. It kept its Turkish roots, built remotely, and sold to customers on several continents from a base most SaaS maps ignore. The founders are candid that persistence carried more weight than any single clever decision - the unglamorous work of surviving each year long enough to grow the next one.
Where it fits in the market is easy to state. Product-led growth only works if the product can teach itself, and most products cannot, not without help. UserGuiding is the layer that does the teaching. It sits between the moment a user signs up and the moment they either stick or leave, and it tries to tilt that outcome toward stick - for a startup and a retailer and a telecom, using the same set of tools, built by whoever knows the users best.
The expertise underneath is narrow on purpose. The team has spent close to a decade on one question - how do you get a stranger from confused to competent inside an unfamiliar app - and the product reads like the accumulated answer. The 2024 move into AI-assisted support was less a pivot than a logical next step: if the platform already knows how to guide a user through a task, teaching it to answer the question that prompted the task is the same muscle. The bet is that guidance and support are converging, and that the tool sitting in the interface is best placed to do both.
None of this makes UserGuiding the loudest name in its category. It is not trying to be. It is trying to be the one a small team reaches for first and does not outgrow too quickly - the default for the vast middle of the market that the enterprise players ignore and the free tools cannot serve. Judged by revenue that climbs every year, a customer roster that runs from seed-stage startups to household retailers, and a funding history that fits on an index card, that is a position worth holding.