Yazan Sehwail

Yazan Sehwail is co-founder and chief executive of Userpilot, a company whose software lets product teams add onboarding guides, feature announcements, and surveys inside their apps without writing code. He went to high school in Ramallah, in the West Bank, and is known as a regular voice on product-led growth, where people try software on their own before they ever talk to a salesperson.

A first company at 21

After high school he won a full academic scholarship to Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, where he studied mathematics, computer science, and economics, according to CEOWORLD magazine. He started his first software business, InnerChip, at 21. It built enterprise web software for companies such as BMW, and he ran it as chief executive for almost five years, bootstrapped, past $1.8 million in gross revenue.

A contract before an alpha

Userpilot began with user interviews before any code was written. Two months in, the team signed its first contract, long before an alpha version was ready, and more than 200 teams used Userpilot during its closed beta. Userpilot launched officially at the start of 2019.

He learned early not to trust usage numbers alone. Userpilot once shipped a feature that showed high adoption, but interviews revealed users struggled to configure it, and the team discontinued it. “The data can lie sometimes!” he said. His advice to first-time founders: “never get emotionally attached to your ideas; sometimes ideas fail, and that is OK.”

Timing in-app messages

He has changed how Userpilot announces its own features. “It’s no longer ‘we have this new feature, come everybody see it!’. No, we wait for the right moment for the right user to present it to them,” he told Growth Machines in 2024.