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

Summary

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/startWe 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...