alt Hacker NewsLaunch HN: Kenobi (YC W22) – Personalize your website for every visitor
Hey HN! We’re Rory, Chris, and Felix from Kenobi (https://kenobi.ai). Kenobi lets you add AI-based content personalization to any website. As a site owner, you install our personalization widget with a script tag, just like you would for e.g. a chatbot integration. As a visitor, you interact with the widget (right now by providing a company name) and Kenobi changes the site content to suit you.
We’ve built a demo that anyone can try here: https://kenobi.ai/start
We believe that large parts of the web are about to go from being static to dynamic because of how adept LLMs are at transforming rendered HTML. And right now we’re focussing on B2B landing page content (as opposed to application UIs) because there is a lot of commercial opportunity for increasing top-of-funnel inbound conversions.
Our journey to Kenobi today is a long and snaking one. You may notice from the post title that we did YC’s Winter 2022 batch (I know that 4 years is practically ancient in YC-dog-years). Kenobi is a hard pivot from our original idea that we got accepted into YC with — a company called Verdn which did trackable environmental donations via an API. Since the summer, we’ve been hacking on different ideas… We started with personalized UI screenshots for outbound campaigns, but then people told us they wanted transformations to their actual site[0] — so we built an agentic workflow to research a visitor-company and “pre-render” changes to a landing site for them. Ultimately, there was too much friction in getting people to incorporate personalized URLs into their cold outbound campaigns[1]. Besides, people kept asking for us to do this for their inbound traffic, and so our current iteration was born.
Right now with Kenobi you pick a page that you’d like to make customizable, and choose [text] elements that you’d like to make dynamic. You can define custom prompting instructions for these elements, and when someone visits your page, our agentic workflow researches their company, and presents the updated content as quickly as possible, usually within a few seconds.[2] You also get a ping in Slack every time this happens so you know who is using your site.
We’ve been experimenting with features such as generating custom imagery that actually looks good and native to the page design, and pulling in company data sources so that e.g. the right case study can be presented based on a visitor’s industry and ICP profile. Our most requested feature is deanonymizing traffic so that Kenobi’s personalization can happen automatically as visitors land on your page — this is coming very soon, as right now you have to specify where you’re coming from.
It’s surprised us just how much business value we’ve gotten from knowing who (most probably) is on the page and asking for a personalized experience. We’ve seen response rates 3x of what we would normally from following people up from companies we know visited our site.
There are many players in this space already, and everyone seems to have their own angle. We are keen to hear thoughts on what people think the future of the personalized internet looks like!
Cheers from London!
P.S. - there's also a video that Chris recorded showing the end-to-end Kenobi experience right now https://www.loom.com/share/bc0a82a2f2fd40f695315bae80e8f5d8
[0] - Many of them had tried AI “microsite” generators but found the maintenance of managing a separate website(s) just for closing deals to be burdensome and inefficient.
[1] - Despite having a CSV export and Clay integration option for our pre-generated website changes, getting people to weave the URLs into their email sequences (everyone uses different tools) seemed almost insurmountable without building what would ostensibly be our own sequencing software.
[2] - We use light foundation models with grounded search for the research step, and translate these into markup changes via another light LLM pass and our own DSL which is optimized for speed.
Comments
Ok, your UI/UX is amazing, the experience is awesome. But for me, I don't immediately understand what you do and for whom. What I understand: You tailor my website to the visitor on my site (landing page), which would be pretty cool as an add on. What I don't understand: How you would do that, how do you create a personalized experience for a visitor you don't know something about?
I am trying to make a constructive feedback and not just critical if I sound that way by anychance. I spent a bit of time but it's hard to get the product. Instead of the team photo on home page, you could show some images of what you mean by the product personalization. Honestly people don't have much time to read through and understand a product , which has a simple value proposition.
Since you're from batch W22, what was your original idea (if you don't mind me asking)? Or was this it?
I love this idea! This could also be used to transform a site for seniors (legibility/simplicity) or neurodivergent users (summarization/focus modes) and address compliance/UX issues for enterprise brands.
If you go to their website and click the "Personalize" toast at the top and enter a random domain (e.g., google.com, hydroflask.com, etc.) it will change all the copy on the site for you.
Where's the evidence that users want this?
By users, I mean the people who browse marketing websites. Do they think having their company name / information in your copy is going to be helpful or creepy?
Oh, and did the IP owners give you permission to take Obi-Wan's name in vain?
I tried several different domains and the copy was so generic it gave no indication of being personalised.
What types of info are you looking at when you are personalizing?
One idea would be to track what recent technologies/products they’ve bought recently (or what products they’re using) using Bloomberry. ie. If they’ve started using Okta, it might mean they’re investing in security tools [1]
[1] bloomberry.com
Everyone worried about privacy - not sure if they realize everyone is already collecting this type of information anyway?
I think this is cool and probably the future of B2B websites. My holdup would be, if the buyer enters their company and the copy just changes into what we think they want, are they going to lose trust that the copy is a true representation of our focus? Maybe it's a framing problem, lots of websites have "solutions" sections for different industries. Potentially could be cool to have a "how we can specifically help {your company}" with an exact use case outline.
I was quite underwhelmed by the demo, I'll try to be as constructive as I can.
The core functionality I expect for such a service is for it to automatically detect who I am, I've seen other marketing services do this, there are ways to map IPs to companies and other techniques. Of course, it's rather creepy and not super helpful to the user, but it may have its (shock) value for making certain kinds of products stand out.
And the personalisation itself... Anyone can make a call to an AI + Search service and generate a new version of the HTML with some slightly modified text, which was not all that different, appealing or accurate in the tests I made. I would suggest upgrading to a higher quality model, proper AI can do much better than this if given the right context.
I suppose it's nice that you are making this easy, if you built your site with a visual website builder this wouldn't be completely trivial to replicate. But still, not a very defensible business for now. I suppose that with good marketing and a serious roadmap to beef this up it could be a viable idea.
There are so many problems with this idea (privacy, security, accessibility, deceptive advertising, design) that I'm impressed it actually got funded. If you're just going to have a LLM generate most of the content, why even sell this as a personalization thing and just have a LLM generate the entire website on the fly per request?
Had high expectations for the website, but maybe because it's bugged or likely because you're using a cheap LLM, Kenobi identified my tech company as a yacht-building/sailing/marine company and tailored the content accordingly.
Yikes
How does it work with SEO? for crawlers, it just serves the default site?