How game mechanics are changing B2B onboarding in 2026 | Karel Papik @ Product Fruits

Hey there. Welcome to another episode of Sauce Unbound. And here with me is Karel from Product Fruits. Welcome to the show. Hello. Thank you for inviting me. Sure, absolutely. I know that you've got quite an interesting background and I would like to start there. So if you can tell us a little bit about where you're coming from into building Product Fruits, that would be awesome. Okay. So just briefly, I'm video games guy. So I spent most of my life doing some video game stuff. I started several companies producing games. I think I produced about 15 games. Like some hardcore games for PC, Xbox, like Painkiller, Overdose, Cold War. Most of my games were actually for women, some casual games for women. We also had a chance to work on these games based on TV franchise like Criminal Minds or Castle. That's my background and I believe it's helping me a lot in Product Fruits. Actually this game angle, that's very interesting. I knew nothing about gaming, to be honest, before this podcast. So I started researching and it turns out women over 35 is like the one of the biggest markets for gaming. It's crazy. Yeah, actually we had very niche target group. It was women, 40 plus, only from us and mostly from square states. Okay, well that last one is interesting. Yeah. Okay. All right, cool. Then I really want to learn how you put this experience into a product first. But what is it briefly, how did you go in from gaming to SaaS onboarding? I spent some time living in Asia actually, as you do. You are in Bangkok now, right? A little bit outside, but Thailand. Yes, Thailand. So Pad Thai stuff, Right. Do you know that Thai is quite a new dish actually? Thai dish? It's quite new, yes. There's so many of them. Pad Thai was invented by purpose by Thai government in late 40s because they had shortage of good rice. So they invented some meal, some dish which doesn't require good rice but because it's mostly noodles anyway, piece of knowledge. So now you know our listeners. At least they learned something valuable now. Yes. Yeah. So when I returned from Asia, I lived in Vietnam mostly several East. I was acting like some kind of, let's say advisor or mentor. I really don't like these terms for some startups and that's. And one day I found I was working with some startup and they were using Product Fruits in their application and I was amazed by the capability. So I set up short meeting with Ladya. So Ladya Shalom is the main guy behind the product Fruits. Now we have 50, 50 shares. But he started his product Fruits and we had this meeting and it Clicked it was like for me it was laugh from the first moment, like it was like, yeah, this is it. I want to go with this guy. So now we are doing this together because. And I believe it makes a lot of sense this onboarding platforms. Yeah. So many people talk about onboarding and how important it is. And I mean obviously we now at SaaS Group we own 25 brands. So everyone is talking about how to do it. Right. So if you're taking some experience from gaming into product fruits, what are you taking from there? Because as far as I know, obviously gaming is addictive, right? So how to make onboarding as addictive as it is? And is there anything that you for some reasons cannot use? Yeah, I believe the games are like light years ahead of B2B applications in regards to onboarding and adoption. Because game is commodity which you don't really need, right? It's not necessity. My business model in games mostly was based on first hour of gaming. So in the first hour which was for free, the player had decide if she wants to continue or not. So the learning curve and everything, we had to squeeze it into this one hour. Well, some of these gaming principles are so good actually I'm not talking about gamification actually, but really about adoption principles. Some of them are so good that they are actually forbidden. In some countries you can't do this. Like in Japan, it's complete gotcha. It's a. It's a principle which it's forbidden now because it was too good. So people pour a lot of money into games. I don't know for example, if I should give you some example from games. Let's say you are playing a game and you are killing some zombies, right? And you will find some Diamond X. This Diamond X is so much fun. You are killing zombies like crazy. And it's so fun and great. And after 10 minutes I will tell you how you did you enjoy the diamond eggs? Did you? So if you want to keep it, you have to pay me 10 bucks now or return the axe, which is much better principle than to offer you. Hey, do you want to buy Diamond X for 10 bucks? So let the player use it for a long time or for certain time and in the right moment tell him if you want to continue, you have to pay. That's a good principle which you can also use in B2B SaaS. All right? And as far as I understand now with AI and I know that you guys use AI pretty heavily right now inside the product, people are expecting more and more personalized onboarding or whatever process we're going through in SaaS. So how do you build this strategy that you're taking from gaming on top of AI? It's a bit complicated issue so I will try to break it into several parts. So first part is what's the adoption platform? So just briefly, we are acting, let's say we have now 1,300 customers, customers and they are using Product Fruits Innovator. They will add it to their product like in some independent layer, let's say. And in that layer you can create the onboarding and adoption. So we are interface between the application and its users. And in this layer you are creating this onboarding flows like step by step tours, hints, announcements so you can also invite people. Oh, we will have webinar next week. Do you want to come? And many stuff. This was the principle which was there for several years and we were quite successful in this. Anyway, about a year ago we started to significantly change our course towards the AI because we were scared to death when we saw AI coming. It was the most depressed time in Product Fruits and we were sitting with like, we are done here. They will take everything from us. We are riding dead horse and we see now behind us new guys on motorbikes, AI motorbikes. And they will take everything from us. We are done. What we will do, I don't know, it was just instinct. But after like I don't know, two weeks we were like why we are not doing the same? Because we always wanted to build this and we have affinity for AI. We are already playing with AI because we love this concept. So why we are not doing this? Let's make our dreams true. So I pick up the phone or actually I did some presentation for our current investors. We have about four funds and I told them basically we are mostly stopping developing the analog Product Fruits and we are starting to develop the new AI Product Fruits which will be on the market in eight months. It took years and everybody was like this will be big problem because they will not be happy because the MRR baby will stagnate and stuff. Right? Because you are not improving the stuff which our current customers want to buy. Instead of this, they called me within 24 hours and all of them said, do you need more money? Because we are betting on winners. We don't want survivors, right? So they top up the investment. So it's great to having really some investors. We have like Lighthouse, Reflex Capital Venture for the future leverage. They are really supportive. Their angle is not to make money like today, today, today, but to have some trajectory. But fortunately our MRI didn't drop. It kept increasing to our bit surprise. I think in September last year, 2025, we started to put on the market the new AI stuff. And now like today, it's March 2026 and I'm sure we are the most AI advanced digital adoption platform in the world, which has big advantages and also some disadvantages. So this is what we do. And now your question was about personalization. Yes, everybody's talking about personalization for adoption. Like you want to have segments, segments from users, from friends and VIP user and I don't know. Right. And you can build, and you should build onboarding and adoption in this way. But it became very complicated and complex because you can't handle all the scenarios. That's the problem with AI. The principle is very, very different. So it's really personalized. I can give you some, but I'm talking too, too long probably. So sorry. That's totally fine. I wanted to get to the bottom of this, but the story about your investors reminded me of a podcast. Watching a podcast a couple of days ago with Tim Ferriss and Bill Gurley and he said, I cannot express to you how little interest there is among investors in non AI products. And that's exactly what you're saying, which makes sense. But I think the companies that are non AI native still have this huge anxiety and that's exactly what you were talking about. So allegedly all the new kids who are AI powered from day one, they have some kind of an advantage over moving forward faster. I'm always a little bit skeptical about seeing this as purely an advantage because yes, you do move really fast, but no, you don't have the expertise, no, you don't have the validation. No, you don't have, you know, the customers that are ready to pay. And there are companies that already have that which are ahead of you in terms of hey, customers already love them, so there will be the cost of switching. Is the danger really there or is it as big as someone wants us to believe? I agree with what you said. Big companies which are also operating in our market, the way I see they are too big to make some rapid changes. And even when I'm talking about not digital adoption platform, but you read the articles about Salesforce HubSpot, you know, they know they are old school and they want to change the model. But how, you know, they have zillions of users and their users won't do stuff as it is. And to change the course of the ship, it's very complicated. Then There are some new companies which are starting from zero. They go to the agent AI stuff but they don't have the experience. They don't have experience what customers really want. And when I'm talking with them or see some information, some of these things are naive. Not because they are not smart, they are super smart. But they can't have the expertise. Right? So I believe we are in the right spot or we have been in the right spot like company with 25 people, we had the expertise and we dreamt years about how to do the onboarding in better way. We dreamt about it every single day. So now we are able to deliver it based on the experience we have. Okay, so let's go back to AI and personalization. So what do you think is the ultimate idea of the new companies or the companies that are leveraging AI on how to provide the personalization at scale? I'm not really using the word onboarding anymore because we are way beyond onboarding. So I think adoption is probably better term. I will give you example how it works in Product Fruits. You know the personalization you will sign up for some application which is powered by Product Fruits. You you can't distinguish what's the application and what's our adoption layer for you it's a one application, right? And at the start our AI, we'll have some chit chat with you. We are calling it discovery, you know. So hi, what you are looking for, what's your use case and what kind of application did you use? How big is your team? So basically some SDR BDR call, right? But very smart one. And based on this we are personalizing the experience in the application, right? And also which is great what I can do because AI is working and now it's a little bit complicated, not only for the users but also for admins. And to make it even more complicated, now we are using application layer like Product fruits layer on top of our product fruits. So we are also using our product on top of our product. So for example, last week I asked our admin AI where my users are struggling the most, what was the big issue in last three weeks. And he reads all the conversation he had with the clients because we also have the chatbot which is sitting there and answering questions like 80% plus closer to 90% now. So he's reading the conversation and he told me, okay, we are struggling with the pricing. You have new pricing and they are a bit confused. You want to take a look at it? I would recommend you to do this on one side It's AI for the users, but also AI for the adbeds. Yeah, that's also another thing that I was reading quite a bit about now is that AI is amazing. But to this day, I mean to this day it's been a couple of years but a lot of people are convinced that it's some kind of magic and it just does things. And the thing is that we still have to work on teaching what we need and what kind of data sets we're looking for. And there is a bit of work that you need to put into the product before it starts working for you. So if that's the case and we're talking about personalization of the onboarding process, for example, what is that customer side? Like how does the customer teach AI in your case and what exactly they're going to do with the tool and where exactly they need help? That's a great question. And it's exactly the problem which we are dealing with. Right. So we are selling, I would say about 50 new subscribers per monthly. So I don't know, twice per day or something. And we have big influx of companies which are trying product fruits. We are converting about 20% to paying customers. Typically they are coming for the old analog world. So I want this step by step tours, I want hints and video feedback, knowledge based stuff and then they are really, absolutely amazed what's possible. This AI it's like wow. And they, we want to, we want to have it absolutely. Yeah, we want this and then start some hesitations, some problems, but we don't have the data for this. So he's not giving really good answers. He can't give you good answers when your knowledge base is shitty. Right? Of course your tech support guys, they know the informations but you are passing this information like Indians around the campfire, like verbally telling the stories because you don't have written documentation. So you can't expect. But there is even bigger problem with adoption of AI than the data. But in regards of data what we do is that our customers, they are, a lot of them are product managers. All the product managers are able to describe their application, what is their application doing and purpose, use cases, everything. But are they really onboarding experts? They are not. Not even guys from csm, they are not typical onboarding experts. They don't know like what flows to build and which conditions and stuff. It's expertise. They don't have this expertise. We do, we do have this expertise. So this product fruits, you can use our editor and clickety click you know this flows Start here, do this, do this. It works. But when you have hundreds of flows, it starts messy, complicated, if no idea what's going on. So we have different purpose where we are helping also with the data we have something what we are calling annotation. So you like ENA product manager, you will start your application, start product fruits and you will just describe your application. So my application does this text. This episode is sponsored by Rewardful. Looking for new ways to find customers for your SaaS business? Consider building an affiliate program. Rewardful is the easiest affiliate tracking platform to set up, manage and scale. For SaaS companies, building a successful affiliate program can be a little bit intimidating at first. And that's why Rewardful has taken what they've observed from their most successful customers affiliate programs and distilled that into an exclusive online course. The exciting part, their affiliate marketing course is absolutely free. Start the course@academy rewardful.com academy.rewardful.com and turn your biggest fans into your best marketers. This part of application is for this. This part application is for that. This button, do this. So you will. You are just describing. Every product manager is able to describe the application, but not every product manager is able to do the onboarding. Then we are taking all this data, we are combining this data with other sources, CRM mostly of course, knowledge base. And then our Elven AI is able to generate the tours on the fly. So you will ask for example, hey Elvin, I need some integrations. And Elvin will answer you. So Anna, so you are probably looking for Salesforce because we already talked about Salesforce. So he has memory, he understands you are on this page. So he has the context. You also can talk to Elvin with voice by the way, and he's able to point on the screen so he will tell you, Anna, if you want integration, click here, click there. But it's a paid upgrade, this HubSpot. And then he will talk about you, the use case, if you should upgrade or not. Data and information are super important and that's why we are among the others also using these annotations. Yeah, that makes great sense. And I also wonder with AI, just something that kind of gives me up at night because everyone's using AI, right? And there has been also this influx of new B2C products with AI that people are so excited about. And every time there is a new connector, for example on ChatGPT or Gemini or Cloud or whatever, we're all enabling it. And basically at the end of the day we're feeding all the tools all the sensitive information, all the confidential data that we have in our companies, more or less we trust them. Right. So how is it going with trust between your customers and product fruits? We are not sharing any information between the products. So it's product your. It's your product frauds, Product fruits for your product and all the learnings and all the techniques we are not sharing with any other platforms. Also it wouldn't make sense because we are so much in the detail that we know that the principles are quite different, you know and it could backfire. So your data is safe because your data are your data and we don't need them. By the way, you said everybody's using connector. Do you know how many people are using paid version of GPT? No idea. Percentage? Guess. Two. Two percent. Really? Lucky guess. Good ones. Only two. So we have tendency to say everybody but it means everybody in our bubble. Yeah. Right. So. But still 2% of all the users of ChatGPT there is a lot of sensitive data and I'm not exactly asking about do you guys share it with everyone else? No. Mostly I'm asking okay, if I'm feeding all kinds information about my product into AI, is there any trust issues among your customers in a way of controlling what AI is going to show to the users and is there going to always be consistency? Yeah. And that's the biggest issue, not the data. I think when you narrow it down, the word which would describe it is uncertainty. We all did and most of our customers lived in the world which was very deterministic. One plus one is always two. I have calculator and it's always two done. This AI, it's not like this. It's funny but it's more human like response. Right. So it's not always the same and they have to get used to this to take the leap of faith. And sometimes some of them are asking us hey, but we really want your product to to answer for this question in this way. Can you do it? We can, but we won't. But instead what we are giving you is like when you are for example because we have like many tools I said, you know this outcomes and discoveries and elven vision and stuff. And one of them is that you can go through the conversations and you see how your AI or how AI you are utilizing was responding and you can say this was good. Good answer. No, this is some. Maybe you can improve this answer and I would like you next time to improve the question in this way. Can't like have copy paste wording but you make Suggestions how to improve it. So of course you can tune the conversation and the uncertainty is also in payments. For example, like, because we are paying for every conversation on the fly while our customers want rigid payments yearly. We used to say we can't guarantee you yearly payments because we don't know how much conversation you will have. We can't, we don't know. You should tell us how much conversations will your users ask twice daily or 20 times? We don't know. And they answer, we understand you product fruits. We do, but I need to have number. This is $10,000 or $20,000. I take this number, I go to the procurement and they will say yes. I can't tell them it's approximately maybe. So we had to change the pricing significantly and now we are taking the risk on our side. Like you can prepay this conversation. We will cover it. All right. I also want to go back to what you said about your growth and the fact that you get about two signups per day. So where are they coming from and what is your biggest and more successful growth strategy? Growth strategy. Well, from the day one which we started to sell, I think 2022, January something it's four years. Four years. You read in the books that at the start you should do the founders sale, you know, to do everything and then in the next stage do it differently then differently. I'm trying to avoid this. So from the start we try to come up with some sustainable strategies so we would know that we are able to grow in a long term. And also you get the first investment and you want to show some numbers within the year, let's say and ask for the next investment. So you can't say okay, now after 12 months we are ready to start to scale up. No, they want to see the trajectory already. So for example, we decided not to do the content because like four years ago content was a big thing and all the content agencies were like, hey, we will help you with content after 9 months you will see the results. I would love to have a business when somebody is paying me nine months and after nine months they will say oh, it doesn't work, bye bye, I will find another knife vendor. So we decided to go with PPC mostly because we saw quick results and it's quite manageable budget and stuff. So at the start I was doing the sale, then we hired one guy, two guys and we still don't have that many. Now we have 1, 2, 3, 4, 4 sales guys but they are working with inbound only. We don't do Any outbound. All right, I see. Has anything changed with the rise of AI and everyone has been talking about how to be found on ChatGPT and whatnot. Have you guys done anything specifically for that? Yeah, we did. We had a project where we used some applications and like Ranketta and others to see how we are scoring in GPT and other platforms and also directly in Google AI and stuff. And it's not so easy to really track these information. If I should simplify, like it's the same like SEO mostly the differences are not that big as somebody wants to imply. It's very actually similar the principles, I think 80% is mostly the same. I think Google will find you in normal search, GPT will find you as well. Exactly. I think I agree with you here. I think it's easy to see how you're ranking but it's not easy to know what to do from there. And to be honest, I picked a very easy strategy here. I'm just looking at it and I'm looking at fluctuations but I'm not sure how to affect it. And even when we have months with no new long form content, it's still fluctuating and I'm not doing anything. I'm like okay, until I know exactly where we can do something and make a difference. I don't want to just jump on every other trend and just to redo my entire content. But yeah, it's interesting that there is so many speculations about that. Yes, you are totally right. That's my observation. All right, well I wanted to just ask you a couple more questions. The usuals here. So what has been you think over the course of of life of product? First, your biggest win and your biggest failure biggest winning was to have the balls to start to do the AI like a core of platform, not to just add some spice. We will send you some AI summaries, help you with writing text or generating images. We said no, we want to rebuild it from the scratch in the way it's ready for the new time. So that was bold move and it paid off. What about the failure? I'm trying not to do the stuff which other people are trying are doing, but nevertheless we also tried the content. I had some guts feeling it won't work, but everybody's doing it. We had to do it as well. I'm not saying we are not doing content at all. We have a blog and stuff in one moment. We pour more money into this and try to, but we really can't compete with content teams of 20, 30 people. So it was naive and I didn't want to see it and it didn't work. I was talking to another founder on this podcast and we also discussed content and how at first they tried to focus on educational content. The content itself is just the format of the content that didn't work for them. So they are in a very much of a red ocean, as I guess you are as well. And that's exactly what they said. So the content didn't work. The education content didn't work because there were so many other big players already doing this kind of content that honestly they couldn't compete. But once they chose different kind of content, that worked for them. I'm not saying maybe you didn't choose the right format. I'm just saying that there are so many different. Yeah, I hear you. And we tried different formats. Maybe there is some solution. But you know, the way I see it is let's say you have content team like for digital adoption platform like some of our competitors have and you like customers are looking for adoption and you are at the upper part of the funnel. So you will find their blog, you will read some articles, you will do some education, training maybe and then you will decide, okay, I want this kind of product for my product. What you will do, you will buy it from these guys? I don't think so. You will spend 10 more minutes doing research who is in this space and you will check two, three competitors and then you will decide. So we are leaving this heavy lifting to our competitors and then we are just harvesting. Thank you. I have one more question for you and this is something that, yeah, maybe it takes a bit of reflection, but it's about a hack. So anything that you use for yourself as a founder to run a business better, something that works for the company or the team, but you think other founders could benefit from. There is one thing, but I'm not sure if I should recommend it. Really. Let's try. My life miserable. Yeah, it's a critical thinking. I got the disease called critical thinking. I don't care what people are sharing on the LinkedIn. You know, 90% is bullshit. They are just trying desperately sell some stuff. They just absolutely no meaning. You know, every single day. I read that, oh, I'm offering some, some great Legion machine which will help you to have 10 meetings per day. And I used to do, I used to comment like, can you share this me like three your customers which are using your platform. And then we are happy to buy crickets, but zillions of people are posting like Lead, lead, lead, lead, lead. Because they are looking for some silver bullet and I'm not doing this, you know, And Large is far from that. So we have critical thinking and we really don't care much what people are saying. We are. And honestly, we don't care much about what customers say. That's a cruel. Right, that's cruel. Okay, I am like, of course we are talking to a lot of customers, but we are always presenting them something with, in prototype, in early access and stuff. We are really heavy investing in early access. A lot of features we have in early access. But you really can't talk with them about the future of adoption and how the world will look like in two. They don't know, it's not their game, you know, they have a lot of stuff to think about and they are experts in certain areas. They are not experts in onboarding. I can tell you how the adoption will look like in two years. Mostly maybe I'm right, maybe not. But this is my expertise, my life. So I'm into the critical thinking, but I am paying steep price for this. It's a loneliness. I'm lonely because people are hurt animals. You want to share common opinion, you go to the pub and you are sharing opinion. You go to link and you are sharing some opinion. You feel safe. You are part of tribe. That's the way our brains are wired. Because years ago, hundred years ago, when you were expelled from the tribe, it was death sentence. So now we are using consensus as a proxy for truth. Okay, all right. So critical thinking, less LinkedIn, growing your expertise and then go into, just think about it. It's actually all these, you know, the solutions and it's clear. Right? I'm not expert in everything, but when I read 20 years ago, 15 years ago, that Germany is stopping all these nuclear power plants, I knew it's wrong. And now they are, you know, trying to revive, revive this. I don't want to go into politics discuss here, but I think that sometimes the solution is very clear and very obvious. Yet you have tendency not to do it and you have tendency to follow the crowd because it's safe and for the normal life this is perfect strategy. We want to follow some path because they are sustainable, less risky. But in startup it doesn't work. You want to be risky. Basically, startup by definition is doing some stuff which has small chance of success. Small chance, but the success can be big. So you can't follow the crowd. That's a good one. I don't think we've had it here yet. I think we had the one about not listening to the customers much, but this one is taking it a little further. Well, thank you so much Kirill. It's been great listening to you. Honestly. I think you've got quite a unique story there and I'm really looking forward to see how you are taking this gaming experience that you have further. I'm really looking forward to seeing where you guys are taking it, so hopefully we can do it again sometime. Thank you very much inviting me. It was great talking to you. Same here. Thank you. Bye. Take care. Thanks for listening. SaaS Unbound is brought to you by SaaS Group. We're a long term home for a great B2B SaaS. We buy, keep the team and brand DNA and help with the boring stuff like hiring and finance so founders can truly focus on building great products. If you're a founder who'd like to be featured or explore an acquisition, reach out through the form on our website or email me at Anasas Group.