August 28, 2026
Do marketing design growth hacks work on B2B SaaS sites?
Considering whether any of the sign ups my designs have helped generate are meaningful or vanity.
Reflecting on growth-oriented design roles I've held at both types of B2B SaaS companies, ones that died or ones that are succeeding, my perspective on the impact my output plays in that is shifting.
From a designer's point of view, a beautiful brand and industry leading marketing site appear to be crucial for a B2B SaaS company's success. Salesforce kind of fucks that up, though. It is visually disgusting and wildly successful.
Some of the most heavily used tools in SaaS are ones you haven't even considered, unless you're an engineer. Surely, you or any other designer, has never referenced their marketing website. Take NodeJS for example. It has a website, but most people at most companies that have software running on it have never seen it (or even heard of it). If you've ever vibe-coded a website, chances are, you have used NodeJS, too.
It's worth noting, NodeJS is free and open-source. I am not sure whether that should impact its relevance here. Like Salesforce, what makes NodeJS adoption massive is its necessity—at least in the context of how software is built today.
Recounting a past experience
In a past role, the software I was designing and building a marketing website for automatically, intelligently recorded video calls. It aggregated these recordings in one place, across an entire company. Users could also upload screen recordings. Every video that was uploaded was transcribed. The transcript was displayed alongside the video itself, so users could read or watch. Users could also comment and collaborate via threads at specific points in the video (or transcript). It was an early adopter of AI-powered features. Every video had a succinct summary generated along with action items that could be directly ported to the users favorite project management tool or GitHub.
Collectively, this blew Zoom or Team's built-in recording functionality out of the water. It also replaced Loom-type tools and, potentially, Gong. At the same time, it created a new, shared surface for knowledge management that was much more delightful and flexible to engage with than traditional text-based mediums. To some extent, it was almost as if it automatically generated a Confluence or Notion replacement. The interface was beautiful.
The team at this company moved faster than anywhere else that I have worked. It was a very small, empowered team with top-level talent. It was here that I learned to be as efficient as I am today. The barrier between building or improving and shipping was nearly non-existent.
Your engineer's and designer's favorite companies all used this tool. The coolest startups and enterprises—like Linear and GitHub. There was no shortage of social proof. The website was no stripe.com or linear.app, but it was better than most, if I do say so myself.
The company was purchased (not a "yay!" type purchase) and the product was sunset. While I may be biased, to this day, it might be my favorite piece of collaboration software that I have ever used. Weekly, I long to use it again and wish that the processes I work within still leveraged it. I genuinely miss having it. Having since talked to people working at companies that used it, it sounds like others feel the same.
So, why didn't it take off?
To be honest, I have no idea why this company did not succeed. But I can say with fairly high-degrees of certainty that it wasn't due to the design surrounding it. Larger or more buttons on the marketing website would not have led to a different outcome. A sleeker contact sales form was not the downfall to this company's success.
My best guesses as to why this company didn't take off are (1) the problems the product addressed were simply not felt deeply enough or (2) felt by enough other companies to the point that they were actively seeking a solution for them. It could also be the case that the solution was too far ahead of where teams were at in the process of problem identification. To this day, I'm not sure most companies realize just how much context is being lost in video calls and how unused and/or unusable their video calls default documentation systems are.
Convincing people something matters
The above could be attributed to a marketing failure. It is feasible to convince people that something matters. Especially in 2026, we experience this form of influence daily via the 24/7 news cycle. For example, I have been recently convinced to not eat factory farmed lettuce to (ideally) prevent myself from getting explosive diarrhea.
Because marketing is output through design in the form of ads, posts, webpages, and content—it could be implied that design may have played some role. Though, I disagree. Thinking back to the news cycle, appeal and concern is commonly generated by the risk or opportunity being shared. I don't stop eating lettuce until I hear it might cause explosive diarrhea. I don't buy lotto tickets until the jackpot is over a milli.
Foundationally, the risk/opportunity stemming from the problems this product solved for were not directly consequential enough to engage an audience being bombarded with "explosive diarrhea" headlines.
To solve this, the first instinct may be to anchor the product to a more compelling problem upstream. In the case of this product, we tried that.
Employees are sitting in loads of video calls every day. All of that time amounts to a large, quantifiable dollar figure. This product massively reduced that time. Easy money. Let's just tell people they are wasting money and this product will result in massive cost savings... If you look at it this way, the product pays for itself in the first two weeks.
Convincing companies something matters
This did not work either. Again, no clue why—but I again have what I think is a pretty good guess... How many people deeply care about saving the company that they work for money? Me getting explosive diarrhea is terrifying, but if the entity that I work is only susceptible...
In plain speak, to compell a company you must compell humans. Quite frankly, business software is boring. The chances we get people to care about abstract business pain points is low. To do this, I'd assume the problem being communicated probably needs to have some sort of direct relation to the individual versus solely the business. E.g. if you don't use our software, you will be out of a job soon.
Recounting current experiences
The rapid adoption of AI tools utilizes these tactics. Individuals, like businesses, who don't adopt AI will be left in the dust by their savvy peers. Super shady, but compelling and a reliable form motivation.
I enjoyed the process of designing and building websites prior to AI. I never suspected that I needed something to do this faster or make it easier. To some extent, the challenge was a fun aspect of the process. My part in the process was never the slow or frictiony one. Yet, just nine months into the singularity, here I am with advanced knowledge of AI harnesses and the individual models themselves.
It took me years to get halfway decent with HTML, CSS, and Javascript. I spent gobs of time outside of work learning how to code and a pretty penny on various online courses. Satisfaction stemmed from the obvious improvement in my own capabilities as I spent more time with the medium. It was a natural transition from my youthful hobbies of snowboarding and skateboarding. Whereas (X) number of hours snowboarding resulted in the ability to do a backflip, (X) number of hours coding meant I could now animate a button.
All this to say, the value of AI to businesses is obvious and inarguable. AI almost instantaneously provides employers value by making their entire workforce pretty decent generalists. The likelihood people will spend time outside of work refining their craft or learning is low. Businesses expecting employees to do this would likely be looked at just as shadily. Argue this if you'd like, but the fact that you are here reading this suggests you are an oddity, like me. Most people have better shit to do in their spare time. It's why for the past ten or so years, most designers didn't code or prototype outside of WYSIWYG tools until now.
We just identified one growth hack that works 🎉. Here, we must instill and cultivate a deep fear in people to get them to care about something enough that it changes their behavior in almost an instant...
I find this to be an unacceptable way to generate shareholder value and retain empoloyment. There has got to be another way...
Making things that are needed
I now work at a wildly successful company. Out of principle, it is intentionally optimistic. Optimism is literally an operating principle. It is also, by far, the highest growth company that I've ever worked for.
It has found a way to grow without being shady. People much smarter than myself have figured this out. It appears this has and is occurring because they built something people and companies actually needed—surprising, right? The product/s itself would otherwise be incredibly difficult, potentially impossible, to make or handle on one's own.
This is not a growth hack
At this time, because the product itself could be deemed a business requirement for many companies, the resulting growth is not meaningfully driven or decided by "hacks". E.g. updating the headline of an ad or on the website doesn't change the fact that businesses need the product to function.
That's not to say growth hacks can't help in adding a couple of sign ups or sales leads here or there. Though, having specifically worked on these types of projects, I'm not convinced they play a consequential factor in the company's overall success.
Rather, the benefits from these types of initiatives at this type of company are likely skewed due to the underlying growth tailwinds stemming from identifying and addressing a real user need.
But, can growth hacks still help?
It seems almost impossible to accurately measure meaningful growth metrics. For instance, measuring more sign ups doesn't necessarily equate to more paying users. Let's take this to the extreme. Simply deleting a marketing website and redirecting every path to land users on a registration page would likely succeed in increasing the number of sign ups—but, it doesn't change the number of people who actually need a product. It does not account for why users are here in the first place. Similarly, moving a button or updating a headine does not impact this. It may make it more likely people click to land on a contact sales form or registration page, resulting in more leads or sign ups, but does not influence their underlying needs.
Now, it could be the case that more people start paying because they've already committed to creating an account and invested some of their time here. This approach is fairly shady and unreliable. In the scenarios where users fall off, and don't start to pay, we tend to resort to utilizing spam machines—retargetting and drip campaigns.
Without underlying sustainable growth tailwinds, funding these extraneous, growth hacking initiatives may not make sense. Employing an entire growth team and paying for ads is not cheap. This is especially true when it is next to impossible to quantify their impact to revenue.
Wrapping this up cause I'm bored
To recap, I have yet to hear or see a convincing argument for design-oriented growth hacks on B2B SaaS sites. I'd prefer working for business that prioritize and value solving hard, big things any day of the week.
Apologies for closing this article so quickly. I'd rather stop here than forcefully ramble on and become a spam machine myself.