Alican Bektaş

Who is Alican Bektaş?

Alican Bektaş is the co-founder and Head of Product at UserGuiding, a SaaS company focused on helping software teams build better product adoption and user onboarding experiences. As the leader of product at the company he co-founded, Bektaş sits at the intersection of strategy and execution, owning the question that defines modern SaaS growth: how do you get users not just to sign up, but to actually experience the value your product promises? His perspective is shaped by building a product whose entire reason for existing is to solve that problem for other companies.

Bektaş brought that operator's point of view to the SaaStock Europe 2023 stage with a talk titled "Mastering Product-Led Adoption: How to Pioneer Value-Centric Growth in SaaS." Rather than rehearse the familiar gospel of product-led growth, he set out to challenge it. His argument is that the traditional PLG playbook, while powerful, often stops short of the thing that actually matters: making sure users reach a memorable, value-laden experience inside the product. He frames product-led adoption as a deliberate step beyond standard PLG, one that uses laser-focused effort to optimize for user value rather than just self-serve signups and frictionless funnels.

Speaking from his experience building UserGuiding, Bektaş positions adoption as the true heartbeat of any successful SaaS business. His talk draws directly on how his own team applied product-led adoption internally to sharpen the value users get from the product. This page collects Alican Bektaş's recorded SaaStock talk, with the transcript, so founders and product leaders can study how he reframes growth around the moment a user actually feels the product working for them.

About UserGuiding

UserGuiding is a product adoption and user onboarding platform built to help SaaS companies guide users toward value inside their products. The category it operates in is increasingly central to how software businesses grow: as more SaaS adopts self-serve and product-led motions, the burden of activating, educating, and retaining users shifts onto the product experience itself. UserGuiding exists to make that experience deliberate rather than accidental, giving teams the tooling to design the path from first login to lasting value.

The company's mission maps closely to the themes Alican Bektaş explored on the SaaStock Europe 2023 stage. In his talk, he describes the heartbeat of any successful SaaS as its ability to provide users with an experience that is both memorable and value-laden. That is precisely the problem UserGuiding's product is designed to solve for its own customers, and it is the lens through which Bektaş, as Head of Product, evaluates what good adoption looks like.

What makes UserGuiding's story instructive is that the company practices what it preaches. According to his SaaStock talk, Bektaş and his team used product-led adoption to optimize user value at UserGuiding itself, treating their own product as a live case study in the approach. That dual identity, both a vendor of adoption tooling and a practitioner of value-centric growth, gives the company a credible point of view on a discipline that many SaaS teams are still learning to operationalize.

Key lessons from Alican Bektaş's talks

Adoption, not signups, is the real heartbeat of SaaS. Bektaş argues that the success of a SaaS product hinges on its ability to deliver an experience that is both memorable and value-laden. Acquisition and frictionless onboarding matter, but they are means to an end. The metric that actually determines whether a business compounds is whether users reach and repeatedly return to genuine value.

Product-led adoption is a deliberate step beyond traditional PLG. Rather than accepting the standard product-led growth playbook as the finish line, Bektaş challenges established PLG strategies and frames product-led adoption as what comes next. Where PLG optimizes for self-serve signups and funnel efficiency, product-led adoption optimizes for the value users actually extract, treating activation as a designed outcome rather than a hopeful side effect.

Laser-focused effort beats broad tactics. Bektaş emphasizes creating value-laden experiences through laser-focused effort. The takeaway for product teams is that adoption is won by concentrating energy on the specific moments where users either find value or churn, rather than spreading attention thinly across every part of the funnel.

Practice your own thesis on your own product. Per his SaaStock Europe 2023 talk, Bektaş and his team used product-led adoption to optimize user value at UserGuiding directly. The lesson is that the most credible growth strategies are the ones a team is willing to run on itself, turning the company's own product into the proving ground for its philosophy of growth.