We went through YC with Verdn, a donation software for ecom stores to give a small proportion of revenue to e.g. plant a tree with each sale: verdn.com
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.
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.
Thank you. Accessibility came up in another comment and to be honest we've only thought in terms of _preserving_ accessibility so far, not _improving_ it (as you're suggesting) -- would love to see if we could explore something along these lines soon even though right now we're focussed on B2B...
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.
In general the case that we’re building for here is the one where we are able to do two things effectively: “streamlining” content, so that instead of 7 different use-cases on a maze of a brochure site, as a visitor you see the top one or two use case you actually care about, in way more detail.
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.
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?
Glad to hear you enjoyed the UI/UX and experience! The ‘how’ is a key question - right now the visitor inputs what company they’re from, and with that info we send out a research agent that compiles a) context on that company, and b) combines that with the deeper research its already done on your domain — essentially it marries up what it knows about you, with what it quickly learns about the visitor, to the customise whatever sections of the website you’ve given Kenobi permission to transform
Obviously a lot of companies have vastly different personas, and this is a harder problem to solve which we are working on.
What they do is ask the visitor from which company they come from.
Behind the scenes, this is what I imagine happens:
- Kenobi scrapes that website and understands what it does
- Has some prompts to transform the text in your website through the lens of your user: eg "Transform this text [your website text here] to appeal to a visitor from this company that does the following [scraped content here]"
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.
really? My very first interaction was it prompted me for my company name, and the basic html text <input/> didn't behave correctly.
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.
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]
We use apollo and gemini 2.5 flash lite with web search in a quick pass to ground and enrich data on the visitor. Right now, the queries are generic, as opposed to constructing more "tailored" queries based on what the host might be pitching to that visitor.
We're definitely going to be looking into finding more relevant signals on a case-by-case basis, and this kind of idea fits really neatly into that paradigm!
Felix handles our personalisation pipeline so will let him chime-in. We do some fast-scraping (cached where possible) to understand the host site, and pull in as much extra page data as possible. We also use other (firmographic) sources like Apollo.io.
Neat idea to track the technologies they've bought _recently_ though! I think capturing buying signals (and inferring intent that way) would be a neat addition to the pipeline!
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.
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.
> 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?
Great point. That's pertinent to how we've been configuring the research → computing "intent" pipelines. Our focus right now is mainly just to streamline content and show brands "in context" as much as possible without having too much of an "opinion".
Your idea about showing how specifically the company could be helped + a use-case is lovely way of putting some of the more complex layout generation ideas we've been working on!
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.
The number one request we have is to integrate deanonymisation, so you’re right on the money there. That’s coming in the next couple of weeks or so…
Wrt the changes being text-based for now, we do actually have image and complex element and layout generation working, but have kept it as an experiment for pre-rendered pages until we are confident we can get it right in most cases. (Some early beta users used Kenobi to send out in some cases thousands of customised landing pages with imagery)
We‘re also starting our on demand product with text only precisely because we want to hear what people think we should be working on next as we are a super small team of three!
I do appreciate you taking the time to respond. I wish you luck.
I suppose I was frustrated due to a mismatch of expectations and the fact that I do things like this every day with AI, it feels rather trivial to me.
But I can see how it may appeal to a wider market. I remember coming across a couple websites that were doing this automatically pre-AI, simply detecting who I was and displaying it in some basic ways. And yeah it was a bit weird, but it sure stuck in my mind for a long time, and it was a data-broker type company anyways, it triggered the thought "well if it can do this with me, it must have good data about everyone".
And I can see the more general case for B2B to surface the right use-cases for the user and such. I've interacted with many people with a business profile that would certainly click a "just show me what I care about" button, hell many technical people would love it too just to remove all the whishy-washy hype language and just see what the thing does.
> many people with a business profile that would certainly click a "just show me what I care about" button
You've encapsulated better than I did the kind of visitor segment we're building for right now.
> I do things like this every day with AI, it feels rather trivial to me.
I also agree with this sentiment. It's how I started ("surely it can't be hard to jiggle a page around now with LLMs") and it mostly worked! But the edge cases and heuristics are also proving to be a big chunk of the effort "iceberg" :D
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?
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.
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.
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.
Damn, that’s unfortunate. We found the logs and looks like apollo returned empty for your domain. I just pushed an update that uses the same enrichment workflow as the rest of the app and looks like it correctly IDed your co. we're using gemini 2.5 flash-lite under the hood, and if it's not grounded it can come up with some whacky results! we'll shortly be shelving it for flash-3-lite as soon as we can
Since you're from batch W22, what was your original idea (if you don't mind me asking)? Or was this it?
We went through YC with Verdn, a donation software for ecom stores to give a small proportion of revenue to e.g. plant a tree with each sale: verdn.com
Sorry, it's literally in the post, I didn't read it properly. But I did try the demo though.
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.
> You could show some images of what you mean by the product personalization
This is a great point, we've heard this elsewhere so I will be adding a section to our site for this. Thanks!
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.
Thank you. Accessibility came up in another comment and to be honest we've only thought in terms of _preserving_ accessibility so far, not _improving_ it (as you're suggesting) -- would love to see if we could explore something along these lines soon even though right now we're focussed on B2B...
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.
Adding to what Rory said:
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.
In general the case that we’re building for here is the one where we are able to do two things effectively: “streamlining” content, so that instead of 7 different use-cases on a maze of a brochure site, as a visitor you see the top one or two use case you actually care about, in way more detail.
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.
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?
Glad to hear you enjoyed the UI/UX and experience! The ‘how’ is a key question - right now the visitor inputs what company they’re from, and with that info we send out a research agent that compiles a) context on that company, and b) combines that with the deeper research its already done on your domain — essentially it marries up what it knows about you, with what it quickly learns about the visitor, to the customise whatever sections of the website you’ve given Kenobi permission to transform
Obviously a lot of companies have vastly different personas, and this is a harder problem to solve which we are working on.
What they do is ask the visitor from which company they come from. Behind the scenes, this is what I imagine happens: - Kenobi scrapes that website and understands what it does - Has some prompts to transform the text in your website through the lens of your user: eg "Transform this text [your website text here] to appeal to a visitor from this company that does the following [scraped content here]"
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.
really? My very first interaction was it prompted me for my company name, and the basic html text <input/> didn't behave correctly.
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.
Thanks for the feedback and sorry about the poor UI experience there! That should be fixed now and we'll keep an eye out for more cases like that.
Definitely a balance to be struck with going heavy on styles, whilst not breaking native element features and violating users' expectations!
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
We use apollo and gemini 2.5 flash lite with web search in a quick pass to ground and enrich data on the visitor. Right now, the queries are generic, as opposed to constructing more "tailored" queries based on what the host might be pitching to that visitor.
We're definitely going to be looking into finding more relevant signals on a case-by-case basis, and this kind of idea fits really neatly into that paradigm!
Felix handles our personalisation pipeline so will let him chime-in. We do some fast-scraping (cached where possible) to understand the host site, and pull in as much extra page data as possible. We also use other (firmographic) sources like Apollo.io.
Neat idea to track the technologies they've bought _recently_ though! I think capturing buying signals (and inferring intent that way) would be a neat addition to the pipeline!
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.
Thank you yes, we perhaps should have made that a little clearer in the post body :')
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.
> 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?
Great point. That's pertinent to how we've been configuring the research → computing "intent" pipelines. Our focus right now is mainly just to streamline content and show brands "in context" as much as possible without having too much of an "opinion".
Your idea about showing how specifically the company could be helped + a use-case is lovely way of putting some of the more complex layout generation ideas we've been working on!
Tried a couple times but it failed
Thank you for flagging! Are you able to share the input you tried so we can diagnose it for you?
Failed requests that are coming in (people are trying some wild inputs!!) we are keeping an eye on and adding to our edge cases pile to fix asap!
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.
Appreciate the candid feedback!
The number one request we have is to integrate deanonymisation, so you’re right on the money there. That’s coming in the next couple of weeks or so…
Wrt the changes being text-based for now, we do actually have image and complex element and layout generation working, but have kept it as an experiment for pre-rendered pages until we are confident we can get it right in most cases. (Some early beta users used Kenobi to send out in some cases thousands of customised landing pages with imagery)
We‘re also starting our on demand product with text only precisely because we want to hear what people think we should be working on next as we are a super small team of three!
I do appreciate you taking the time to respond. I wish you luck.
I suppose I was frustrated due to a mismatch of expectations and the fact that I do things like this every day with AI, it feels rather trivial to me.
But I can see how it may appeal to a wider market. I remember coming across a couple websites that were doing this automatically pre-AI, simply detecting who I was and displaying it in some basic ways. And yeah it was a bit weird, but it sure stuck in my mind for a long time, and it was a data-broker type company anyways, it triggered the thought "well if it can do this with me, it must have good data about everyone".
And I can see the more general case for B2B to surface the right use-cases for the user and such. I've interacted with many people with a business profile that would certainly click a "just show me what I care about" button, hell many technical people would love it too just to remove all the whishy-washy hype language and just see what the thing does.
Thank you!
> many people with a business profile that would certainly click a "just show me what I care about" button
You've encapsulated better than I did the kind of visitor segment we're building for right now.
> I do things like this every day with AI, it feels rather trivial to me.
I also agree with this sentiment. It's how I started ("surely it can't be hard to jiggle a page around now with LLMs") and it mostly worked! But the edge cases and heuristics are also proving to be a big chunk of the effort "iceberg" :D
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?
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.
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.
Yikes
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.
Damn, that’s unfortunate. We found the logs and looks like apollo returned empty for your domain. I just pushed an update that uses the same enrichment workflow as the rest of the app and looks like it correctly IDed your co. we're using gemini 2.5 flash-lite under the hood, and if it's not grounded it can come up with some whacky results! we'll shortly be shelving it for flash-3-lite as soon as we can