Show HN: Vendo (YC S26) – Let your users add their own features to your product

Show HN: Vendo (YC S26) – Let your users add their own features to your product(github.com)

2 points by yousefh409 43 days ago | 4 comments

Hey HN, my name is Yousef and I am one of the co-founders of Vendo (YC S26). We let your users create their own personal micro-apps and features right on top of your product.

Me and my co-founder have been thinking a lot lately about how agents are going to change the way that dashboards and UIs are consumed by users. And one of the big things we often come back to is personalization. Everyone has their own workflows, outcomes, and views they want from a product. Instead of devs having to wade through hundreds of feature requests, we think agents will let every user use a product exactly how they want to.

We started working on this problem initially through an open-source software angle: we would let users easily deploy open-source software so they could customize it directly. What we found, though, was that customization alone wasn't enough to convince users to switch to us, and people just wanted to customize what they already use. So we pivoted to what Vendo currently is. We now give businesses the ability to let their users personalize the product directly. Users can generate their own custom micro-apps, customize existing components, create automations, connect to external tools, and more! And the goal is not just to generate UIs, but full-on micro-apps and features that can do real stuff for users.

Everything your users create is built within your existing brand/theming, security guardrails, and API. All the code your users create is run in secure sandboxes, so the application's source code is not touched at all. We have some demo GIFs here if you would like to see how it works: https://github.com/runvendo/vendo

We are open-source (as seen from above) and we can integrate with existing agents (or set up a production-ready one with everything needed) all with one command! That one command lets Vendo learn your brand, components, and API. We currently support Vercel AI SDK but are adding support for other agent frameworks soon.

Please check out the repo, and am happy to discuss how everything works under the hood! Two of the hardest problems we've been working on are (1) generating high-quality and on-brand UIs fast and (2) securing everything while still giving users a lot of power, and would love to share more technical details.

yousefh409 43 days ago |

Would also love to hear what others have been thinking about in this space, as well as any feedback/criticism!

verdverm 43 days ago | |

I forget what podcast / guest, but I recall this phrase "inversion of control" when it comes to SaaS and the "it's on our roadmap" for every feature request and bug report. This was in the context of what a real moat is (data and process expertise, not UI) and that SaaS could provide great APIs and let customers build their custom UI or integrations on top.

I'm definitely of the opinion that a new era of personalized software is emerging. I'm not sure that UI is long for this world as agent harnesses become the primary interface people use. That being said, i.e., I would like to have custom pages / layout in Argo because what is there is terrible (devops doesn't do design / UX well)

You might want to attack this market from the other side. Companies (providers) like control too much and users are the ones with the real pain. I don't want to have to wait for them to add something like Vendo to their roadmap and hope it gets built one day. "Now's the time, the time is now!" ~ LZ

yousefh409 43 days ago | | |

That is really interesting!

Agreed that agent harnesses as the primary interface is also a big possibility. From our conversations though, a lot of companies also don't want to lose complete control over the user experience. Which is why I think an increasingly more likley direction is every company having their own agent that functions as a "personal concierge" that gets stuff done for their usrs user and gives them what they want, but all under their own control.

I think it is a really interesting space in general, and looking forward to continue building in it!