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Launch HN: Kenobi (YC W22) – Personalize your website for every visitor

46 points by sarreph 10mo ago

Hey HN! We’re Rory, Chris, and Felix from Kenobi (https://kenobi.ai 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 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 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.

candiddevmike 10mo ago
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?
- sarreph 10mo ago
  Fair criticism! We actually got funded for a different idea (this was a pivot) so perhaps you're onto something.... Jokes aside -- and to address your points.... Privacy: Visitors currently opt-in and provide only the company they are from (no other PII). Security: Our current version handles only text (we have images + dynamic content in the works), but we do our best to build a sanitisation pipeline around this, it's the same kind of problem that any arbitrary-code widget builder needs to account for. Accessibility: I'm keen to hear what concerns or ideas you have here since we are interpolating content and copying existing structure (so that a11y is kept as intact as possible). Advertising: Companies choose to integrate this themselves on their own website, so if anything we see it as forming part of their marketing strategy.
- chrismjelde 10mo ago
  Also re: ‘deceptive advertising’ - if what you mean is that the output of the model will misrepresent what the host site actually sells/provides, that does happen on occasion, and it’s a top priority for us. We’re constantly working to reliably improve what Kenobi outputs in any given situation. It’s partially a research problem (i.e. deeply understanding the host website, and the nuances of their offerings, as well as research on the visitor, where the time window is seriously constrained), and it’s a model + prompting problem. One of the ways we want to enhance Kenobi is to allow the host site to plug in more data sources (e.g. an FAQ, KB, etc). This helps solve the research problem, and it also increases the utility of the tool because more the very generic website can be be customized in more nuanced, specific, and esoteric ways, depending on the visitor.
srameshc 10mo ago
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.

46 points by sarreph 10mo ago

candiddevmike 10mo ago

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?

sarreph 10mo ago
Fair criticism! We actually got funded for a different idea (this was a pivot) so perhaps you're onto something.... Jokes aside -- and to address your points.... Privacy: Visitors currently opt-in and provide only the company they are from (no other PII). Security: Our current version handles only text (we have images + dynamic content in the works), but we do our best to build a sanitisation pipeline around this, it's the same kind of problem that any arbitrary-code widget builder needs to account for. Accessibility: I'm keen to hear what concerns or ideas you have here since we are interpolating content and copying existing structure (so that a11y is kept as intact as possible). Advertising: Companies choose to integrate this themselves on their own website, so if anything we see it as forming part of their marketing strategy.
chrismjelde 10mo ago
Also re: ‘deceptive advertising’ - if what you mean is that the output of the model will misrepresent what the host site actually sells/provides, that does happen on occasion, and it’s a top priority for us. We’re constantly working to reliably improve what Kenobi outputs in any given situation. It’s partially a research problem (i.e. deeply understanding the host website, and the nuances of their offerings, as well as research on the visitor, where the time window is seriously constrained), and it’s a model + prompting problem. One of the ways we want to enhance Kenobi is to allow the host site to plug in more data sources (e.g. an FAQ, KB, etc). This helps solve the research problem, and it also increases the utility of the tool because more the very generic website can be be customized in more nuanced, specific, and esoteric ways, depending on the visitor.

srameshc 10mo ago

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.