In the race to hit early traction, founders often treat growth marketing and UX as competing budget lines. The thinking goes: we’ll get customers first, then we’ll fix the UX later. By targeting high-impact growth marketing vs UX decisions from the start, early-stage SaaS companies can avoid costly churn.
It’s a costly mistake. Without a frictionless product experience, even the most aggressive growth campaigns lead to churn. And without smart growth strategies, great UX is like a well-designed store hidden down a back alley — beautiful, but empty.
As UX thought leader Jared Spool puts it:
"Marketing brings people to the door; UX decides if they stay."
In early-stage SaaS, the "growth marketing vs UX" debate is a false choice. The truth is they are interdependent:
Growth marketing drives awareness, acquisition, and velocity.
UX design shapes activation, retention, and satisfaction.
When treated as separate silos, they work at cross-purposes. Marketing teams push users into funnels that aren’t optimised for activation, while design teams create elegant interfaces that don’t get the exposure they deserve. The result? You spend twice as much to acquire customers, and lose them twice as fast.
The overlap between marketing strategy and UX design is where the real compounding effect happens:
Landing page design impacts ad performance. A beautifully designed, fast-loading page increases Quality Score and reduces cost-per-click.
Onboarding flows influence retention curves. The first 90 seconds after signup can make or break lifetime value.
Microcopy is both UX and conversion copy. The right word choice can lift click-through rates and reduce support tickets.
Marketers drive acquisition.
UX designers improve activation and retention.
Higher retention makes acquisition cheaper and more profitable.
A SaaS client in the project management space was facing a plateau. Ads were delivering traffic, but 60% of users dropped off before completing onboarding.
We brought the growth and UX teams into the same sprint. Marketing shared heatmap and clickstream data; UX redesigned the signup flow around the insights. The result:
35% reduction in onboarding drop-off
22% increase in free-to-paid conversion
CAC dropped by 18% in three months
This shift wasn’t magic, it was alignment. As Casey Winters, Chief Product Officer at Eventbrite, says:
"Our biggest growth unlock came when we stopped thinking of design and marketing as two different teams."
Previously this year, Almost Human also dived into the steps you can take to avoid bleeding users after sign up.
A product with ambitious marketing buzz but an overwhelming and unintuitive UX. Users abandoned it quickly because they couldn’t figure out how to use its core features.
Slick, high-end UX design for a juice press, but no real growth marketing to educate consumers on why they needed it. The result was poor market adoption and eventual shutdown.
Rapid early growth through viral marketing, but a clunky, slow user interface that frustrated users and drove them to competitors like MySpace and Facebook.
These failures show that excelling in one area while neglecting the other can lead to a product’s collapse.
To break the silo and reap the benefits:
Share KPIs. Instead of only measuring MQLs or NPS separately, track metrics like activation rate, retention, and CAC efficiency across both teams.
Run cross-functional sprints. Design and marketing should collaborate from the planning stage, not hand off work in sequence.
Do joint user research. Every interview, survey, and usability test should feed both acquisition and product decisions. When these principles are baked into the culture, your product’s growth engine stops leaking fuel.
The most successful SaaS brands treat every pixel and every touchpoint as part of the growth strategy. That means no more "growth or UX" thinking it’s growth and UX, integrated from day one. For early-stage startups, the question isn’t whether you can afford to combine them. The question is whether you can afford not to.