Interview with Ladislav Salom, the CEO of Product Fruits [2023]

I’m the co-founder of Product Fruits, a product adoption platform. Like so many successful startups, Product Fruits was born from a real-life need. In my previous job, I needed a flexible, easy to deploy but powerful user onboarding tool and I just wasn’t able to find one. There were many tools on the market, but every single one had some limitations. So I decided to build my own.  

My background in software development is essential for being able to create functional product architecture and make sure that our dev team ships out only first-class products. But what was even more important for my Product Fruits vision was experiencing unnecessary churn. 

And I wanna elaborate on the “unnecessary” here. Every SaaS has some churn, that’s natural. But what I was seeing was users churning because they couldn’t figure out how to use the app fast enough to experience its value.

 Imagine investing tons of money into acquisition, getting new users and then losing them because of poor onboarding. 

Seeing this again and again in all the companies I worked with, was my eureka moment. One day I just knew what needed to be done.

Initially, I was building Product Fruits as a side project but when it started to get traction in the market I quit my day job and created the Product Fruits company. Now we have customers on all continents. Except for Antarctica, not many SaaS companies out there:)    

Every app is unique but users are very similar in that they never have time to properly learn the app. We see this across every vertical, every acquisition channel, every country. It seems to be the new norm. Sadly, this means users who could have benefitted from using a particular app churn because they don’t see the value. 

We help product owners by providing them with a set of tools that allow them to build impactful onboarding experiences without any coding. With Product Fruits they can guide a new user step-by-step to experience product value fast. 

After implementing Product Fruits, a SaaS would typically double-digit increase in conversions and retention.

Providing great onboarding experience has become a standard, or at least a vision that every product owner understands and aspires to. What I see to be equally important for the overall user experience is providing users with an easy way to share feedback or just voice frustration if they encounter a problem. 

Live chat goes a long way, but one problem that we see again and again is that users don’t know how to describe the problem they’re experiencing. The support person then needs to ask all sorts of clarification questions to figure out what’s going on, which incurs cost. What’s even worse is that a lot of users don’t even bother reporting a problem, they either put up with it or churn.

We solve this problem with our feedback widget that allows the user to take a screenshot or record a video and share it with support. No need to explain what part of the app, which feature, or what does not work. Just one mouse-click. Small thing, big impact on retention.

I’m afraid I can’t answer that question. I’m failing the good work-life balance qualification.

On the flipside, working on something that you like and seeing that what you do helps so many users to get a better experience is extremely rewarding. I consider myself lucky to have such a great job.

When we get great feedback from a customer. Hearing how their business KPIs improved following the implementation of Product Fruits. That always gives me a huge sense of achievement. 

Not looking at anything right now, we go on a need-to-have basis.

We pride ourselves on powerful product, fair pricing and exceptional support. 

Not exactly a rocket science but user adoption software is what’s called a low-touch solution. It’s super easy to get started, no coding or integration is needed. 

It’s also easy to leave and move to competition. And I’m proud to be able to say that we’re seeing a lot of that – users coming to us after having had less-than-perfect experience with some of the other names in our vertical.

Two things:

1. Be clear on the job-to-be-done of your app. What’s the #1 reason your users are hiring the app for?  
2. My second point relates to the first one. App owners are trying to achieve too much right after a new user signs up. That creates a cognitive overload. We advise our customers to focus their users on one thing at a time. Then move on to the next one and so on. Always making sure a user can achieve something concrete, rather than presenting all the features that your app offers.

Doing for product adoption what Slack did for business communication. In a sense of simplifying how things get done and making a powerful tool accessible to everyone regardless of whether they have huge budgets, free IT resources, a project implementation team or none of that.