Your website makes promises. Your product keeps them. Break this chain, and you’re f*cked.

After launching dozens of products over 7 years (both my own and through my design studio Grauberg), I’ve witnessed a pattern so consistent it’s almost a law of nature:

When a product doesn’t match its marketing website, users leave and never come back.

Yet I’ve never seen a single article, course, or “growth hack” about this invisible thread between website and product. Everyone’s obsessed with acquisition while ignoring this fundamental retention killer.

Here’s the brutal truth: your polished marketing site gets people in the door, but your actual product decides if they stay. If these two experiences don’t align, you’re building a leaky bucket.

The Three Critical Connections

After analyzing countless launches (the good and the embarrassingly bad), I’ve identified three critical connections between website and product that determine whether users stay or bounce:

1. Promise Alignment: Does your product deliver what your website promises?

I recently saw a startup claim their AI could “Write blog posts in 30 seconds.” Yet after signing up, the user had to:

• Create an account (2 minutes)
• Verify email (1 minute)
• Fill out their content goals (5 minutes)
• Wait for the AI to “learn their style” (3 minutes)
• And only THEN could they start writing

That’s 11 minutes of setup before the user could test the core promise. By then, they’re already disappointed and skeptical.

The fix: Either make the product faster or change the promise. Don’t claim “30 seconds” when it’s really “under 15 minutes.” Be honest about the actual user experience, not the idealized one.

Better yet, deliver on an honest but narrower promise. Instead of “Write blog posts in 30 seconds,” try “Generate engaging blog titles in seconds.” That’s something you can actually deliver immediately, and it builds trust.

2. User Qualification: Are you attracting the right users?

Nothing destroys your team’s morale faster than spending hours with users who were never going to benefit from your product.

One B2B tool I worked with proudly told me they’d grown to 10,000 free users. Yet only 50 had converted to paid. Why? Their marketing appealed to everyone with business problems, but their product only solved specific workflow issues for product managers.

The result? Support waste, feature confusion, and poor reviews from people who should never have signed up in the first place.

The fix: Be crystal clear about who your product is for, and equally clear about who it’s NOT for.

This is usually done with branding and copy, meaning how you write and how the website looks like directly speaks to a specific audience.

To be honest, copy is probably the most important thing for any website.

Something I use on my agency website, + some of my design colleagues recently praised is a “not for you” section:

On your landing page, include a section called “This isn’t for you if…” alongside your usual “Perfect for…” section. You’ll attract fewer users but convert more of them.

3. Visual Continuity: Do your website and product look like they belong together?

I’ve seen startups spend $30K on a beautiful marketing site, only to drop users into a product that looks like it was designed in 2012.

This creates cognitive dissonance. Users feel like they’ve been tricked, even if the functionality is solid. It’s like a restaurant with gorgeous photos online but flickering fluorescent lights when you arrive.

The fix: Your marketing site and product should share the same:

• Color scheme
• Typography
• Button styles
• Illustration style
• Voice and tone

This doesn’t mean your product needs to be as flashy as your marketing site. It means your marketing site should use visual elements that can realistically translate to functional software.

The True Cost: What Misalignment Costs Your Business

When your website and product don’t align, you’re f*cked in ways most founders never realize. After years at Grauberg, I’ve seen this disconnect silently kill promising startups.

1. Support Waste: The Time Sink

Every user with wrong expectations becomes a support nightmare.
It costs you a lot of time, money and effort to deal with customers who are not a great fit.

Imagine how much time could be saved if you only qualify the right customers?

2. Acquisition Waste: Burning Money

You spend thousands on marketing to get signups who bounce immediately because the product can’t deliver what was promised.

With ads, you even have a third variable in this: Ad-website-product alignment.

Only the best teams in the world manage to keep the promises and expectations consistent over those 3 touchpoints.

3. Reputation Damage: The Invisible Multiplier

Disappointed users don’t just leave—they actively warn others away.

I watched a promising AI tool collapse after their launch because they promised capabilities still 6 months from being built. Every disappointed user becomes a negative evangelist among your exact target audience.

4. Lifetime Value Destruction: The Long-Term Impact

The most successful products I’ve worked with aren’t the ones with the most features—they’re the ones where experience consistently matches expectations.

One B2B tool actually removed features from their marketing site and saw retention dramatically improve, because users who signed up found exactly what they expected.

Side note: Removing features is hard, but so worth it!

5. Team Morale: The Hidden Cost

Nothing destroys a team faster than constant friction between marketing promises and product reality.

Product teams grow resentful of marketing’s “unrealistic” claims. Marketing feels product isn’t delivering fast enough. Support gets caught in the middle, and great talent walks out the door.

The Bottom Line

When expectations match reality, everything improves.

Support load decreases.
Retention increases.
Word-of-mouth accelerates.

You might see fewer signups with more honest marketing. But they’ll be the right ones, and they’ll stick around.

The Compound Effect

When you create strong alignment between website and product, three things happen:

1. Support burden decreases - Users have accurate expectations
2. Activation rates increase - People find value faster
3. Word-of-mouth accelerates - Delivered promises create evangelists

I’m currently working on a case study with one of our long term clients, where we invested quite some time and money in their most recent product launch, and for now we saw a 41% increase in 7-day customer retention!!!

Huge success in my opinion, let’s see the metrics after a longer time period.

Real Talk

Most founders resist this approach at first. There’s a fear that being more honest and selective will hurt growth.

The opposite is true.

Temporarily, you might see fewer signups. But you’ll retain more of them. Your team will spend less time with bad-fit users and more time delighting good ones.

In the long run, this creates the most sustainable growth engine possible: satisfied users who tell others about you.

What To Do Now

1. Take screenshots of your marketing site and product
2. Put them side by side
3. Ask yourself honestly: “Do these make the same promises?”
4. If not, decide whether to change your product or your marketing
5. Commit to fixing the 3 biggest disconnects this month

Remember: acquisition is seduction, but retention is relationship. And relationships are built on kept promises.

If you don’t want to do this on your own, we offer a free UX Audit at Grauberg to answer exactly those questions for you. (If you are a designer, working for a startup, feel free to apply as well to get some ammunition for your next design review)