Why Startups That Prioritise UX Raise More Investment

When I was a teenager, my grandmother taught me how to cook. She didn’t use cookbooks or apps or videos. She just stood beside me, watching, nudging, guiding. “Taste it,” she’d say. “Smell it. Feel the dough.” She wasn’t just teaching me recipes—she was teaching me how to pay attention. To people, to responses, to subtle clues that something needs fixing.

Years later, sitting across from a startup founder pitching their latest app for remote team coordination, my mind wandered back to that cramped kitchen. Here was a brilliant mind, speaking in speeds too fast for human understanding, explaining their product in ways that made my head spin. The app might be powerful, sure. But it didn’t feel like anyone had ever asked, “Would people even want to use this every day?”

And that’s the quiet, often uncomfortable truth. Many startups are filled with people smart enough to build things that work. Far fewer understand the importance of making things that people actually want to use. Yet when we look at the companies attracting the most investment, over and over again we see a common thread: they care, deeply and deliberately, about the experience of their users.

First Impressions Are Not Just About the Dress

We’ve been told not to judge a book by its cover, but who doesn’t, honestly? Whether it’s the tap of an app icon or the moment a homepage loads, our first interaction with a product sets the tone for everything that follows.

Imagine being introduced to someone new. They seem distracted, don’t make eye contact, and forget your name halfway through your first conversation. Do you want to meet them again tomorrow? Probably not. Now, translate that to a startup whose sign-up screen is complicated, whose onboarding process feels like solving a puzzle, and whose interface is as intuitive as a remote control from the 1980s. That’s the product equivalent of forgetting your name.

Startups that understand user experience (UX) make a great first impression—and then keep making great impressions. They know that the best products don’t demand attention. They provide clarity. They evoke trust. They feel like they were designed with care, not coded in haste.

And investors? They see this immediately. They feel it when they use the product themselves or when they listen to early users describe it with genuine excitement. A beautiful pitch deck matters. But a product that feels beautiful because it understands people—that’s unforgettable.

People Don’t Love Features. They Love How You Make Them Feel.

I’ve seen founders beam with pride over feature lists longer than my weekend shopping receipts. They show graphs comparing functionalities, illustrations of custom integrations, settings menus galore. To them, it’s proof of effort. To users, it’s often noise.

A mother trying to find better ways to schedule school pickups doesn’t care if your app has a proprietary decision engine. She wants simplicity. A designer switching between teams on a project management tool isn’t impressed by layered dashboards. She just wants fewer tabs open. The complexity under the surface might be genius. But if the experience on top doesn’t feel calm, clear, respectful—people tune out.

UX is about emotion, connection. It’s about how users feel using your product. Is it empowering or exhausting? Delightful or frustrating? Friendly or robotic?

Startups that embrace these questions build products people bond with—and talk about. They form communities, they spark social shares, they invite loyalty. Investors know that emotion translates into attention, and attention fuels growth. The best UX doesn’t just retain users. It converts them into ambassadors.

More Listening, Less Guessing

Great UX starts with humility. It requires asking not just “How quickly can we build this?” but “Is this what people really need?” The most successful founders I’ve met aren’t the ones who assume. They’re the ones who ask. Constantly.

They ask users what feels awkward or repetitive. They sit beside real people clicking through real flows and cringe when someone gets stuck. They welcome discomfort, because each awkward pause reveals a conversation waiting to be had—a chance to make things better.

And this habit of listening isn’t a one-time checkbox. It becomes a way of building. Startups that invest in UX research aren’t wasting time; they’re buying clarity. They’re learning how to avoid wasted sprints, rushed redesigns, and expensive fixes after launch. They move slowly at first—but build momentum over time, because they’re always learning in the direction of better.

When investors see this approach—when they recognise that a startup is building with the customer, not just for them—they take notice. Because betting on a team that listens is more dependable than betting on a team that guesses.

Investors Are (Still) Human

Investors are not robots scanning spreadsheets. Most of them get into this field because they genuinely care about change. Sure, they have obligations to returns, but they are people first—curious, cautious, hopeful people. And like all people, they’re drawn to things that feel right.

I once watched a notoriously silent investor spend twenty full minutes playing with an early version of a journaling app. It was beautifully quiet, gently animated, even humorous in subtle ways. When he finally looked up, he said five words: “My wife would love this.” That one sentence led to £500,000 in seed funding.

The point? An investor has to explain to others why they believe in this thing. They have to narrate a compelling story that transcends spreadsheets and technical specs. A great user experience turns a product from a tool into a story: something that connects, that matters, that works because it fits into people’s lives in ways that feel almost invisible.

In a sea of slides, demos, and data, a product that tells a story through its user experience stands apart. It becomes more than plausible—it becomes personal.

Growth That Feels Inevitable

Founders often think of scaling as something mechanical—servers, hiring, ads. But the most scalable part of a startup isn’t the technology. It’s the product’s ability to go from “nice idea” to “of course.”

When a product’s experience is good, people don’t just use it. They assume others must too. Recommendations become natural. Word-of-mouth becomes powerful. A clean experience doesn’t need training sessions or support forums. It welcomes newcomers gracefully, while encouraging existing users to explore more deeply.

This kind of scale is priceless. And it’s not about removing complexity; it’s about hiding it behind thoughtful design. When a product anticipates needs, guides users gently, and creates tiny moments of surprise or delight, it grows. Not because someone pushed it—but because it pulls people in.

Investors love this kind of growth, because it’s sustainable. It doesn’t rely entirely on paid tactics. It doesn’t crumble when the ad budget thins. It grows like trust grows—slowly at first, then suddenly.

UX as a Mirror of the Team

Product experience reflects not just the product, but the people who built it.

Teams that prioritise user experience signal something important: they care. Not just about code or strategy, but about people. These are the same teams that communicate well internally, that test their assumptions, that work cross-functionally and listen across disciplines.

An investor doesn’t just invest in a product. They invest in a team. A team that values UX is a team that understands that building something worthwhile means walking with users, not ahead of them.

I’ve come to believe that the way a team treats its users is a mirror for how they treat one another. And investors want to see reflection, not projection—they want to see people building something real, together, not simply imagining what users “must want.”

Some Quiet Advice

If you’re building something, please take a moment—close your laptop, set down the designs, step back—and go talk to someone. Watch them use your product without instruction. Notice where they smile. Notice where they hesitate. And listen.

Great user experience doesn’t come from pixels or pathways. It comes from empathy—from paying the kind of attention my grandmother gave to her pots and pans, to the faces at the dinner table, to every subtle sound and scent.

Her food, by the way, wasn’t fancy. But people asked for seconds.

That’s what good UX does. It makes people come back. It makes them want to invest—not just their money, but their time, their trust, their belief in a better way of doing something.

And in the world of startups, that kind of faith can become fuel.