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.
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.
We don't know for sure. This is built on the intuition that websites are still a one-size-fits-all approach that makes no sense in an age where we have intelligence at our finger tips, able to process and reformulate information that speaks directly to people.
You could see this idea as being on the opposite side of the same spectrum as agentic browsing (which hasn't really taken off yet).
And thanks for the feedback! There are limitations in the quality of the personalizations in onboarding experience due to latency constraints. These get lifted the moment you create an account, and can start doing some more in-depth context gathering of your website and the types of visitors you're likely to get.
If every website is tracking my identity and surrounding me with an echo chamber outside of my control, that is not a good thing.
If the profile and prompt is something the user controls, it could be useful, but it’s still hard to trust it. It takes away the ability to have trustworthy links to information/products, if it’s different for every user, especially if the customization methods are hidden behind opaque LLMs and system prompts.
I do think this idea can make money, but it’s likely bad for the internet consumers and likely to be part of future enshittification.
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Second, we want to show B2B visitors’ brands in context. I.e. showing you what it would look like if your company was using the service in question with social proof from your industry peers. We don’t have our image tech in the on-demand demo right now, but companies that we have helped pre-render copies of their site with dynamic images (especially e-commerce brands), found higher engagement on their outreach as a result.
However, I’d argue that there are some good arguments for this sort of optimization with what we know about potential consumer insights and how insignificant (but unique) aspects of an appeal can make or break someone’s interest. Or just given other evidence of how unique appeals can be effective (see things like Project Narwhal from Obamas first campaign.)
It’s also more tangential than argument above, but what we know about regular users of larger platforms indicates that a one size fits all approach doesn’t really fit all. Also consider that we really do have the tools/data now more than ever to offer a unique experience to users, and how that very concept of a unique user experience is what led to the proliferation of the platforms we use in the first place. There is a reason we preferred Google to Yellow pages and Google ad revenue took off — or atleast it wasn’t just about the profit motive of easy to access, updatable information. It was about using your insights and insights from others to craft unique results that appealed to you in a way that mass produced impersonal solutions did not do.
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This is a great point, we've heard this elsewhere so I will be adding a section to our site for this. Thanks!
Obviously a lot of companies have vastly different personas, and this is a harder problem to solve which we are working on.
Of course internally it might be much more complex than this but this is how I would do this if I had to build it.
It had no highlight styling so if you wanted to highlight a portion of your input it would be impossible to tell what the current selection was.
Looks cool, not trying to hate, I just have a pet peeve around native elements having basic function/accessibility features removed during heavy styling.
Definitely a balance to be struck with going heavy on styles, whilst not breaking native element features and violating users' expectations!
Please reach out to us if you would like to at product@kenobi.ai
Even better, the LLM can make up rules for matching traffic to targeted profiles (corp IPs shows enterprise content, gov IPs shows gov offering, EU IPs shows European hosting options, etc). This way you don't use an LLM while rendering the page, reducing cost and speeding up page load times.