Introduction

What is Miso?

Miso is a unified platform for rapidly building powerful personalized UX, using just APIs and the small data that you already have. Our goal is to democratize personalization. We're giving every team the tools to build personalized products like Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, or Spotify — without needing the infrastructure, machine learning PhDs, and big data that those companies have a monopoly on.

What is personalization?

Personalization is:

• Tailoring a unique experience for each and every user that ensures they can find exactly what they're looking for and discover things they never knew they needed
• Semantically understanding your products and closely observing your site's visitors in real time, then doing expert matchmaking between the two
• Having the capability to show entirely different site layouts for each user and change how content and products are presented
• The technical crown jewel 💎 of companies like Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google

Personalization is not:

• Presenting things to the user that they've told you to remember (like saving their home airport on a travel app)
• "Customizing" the UI to display the user's name
• Notifications and alerts based on user-generated information (like letting them know when their order has shipped)
• A search query that returns the same results to an entire group/cohort of users
• A recommendation based on rules, like always suggesting a "buy together" offer if the user has a certain item in their cart

To do personalization, many of the big platforms have gone in a direction that is, quite frankly, creepy. At Miso we feel strongly that personalization should not and in fact need not be:

• Tracking and surveilling your users around the web
• Buying third-party data
• Horizontally mining your customers' data

How does personalization work with Miso?

Miso trains real-time personalization models at the level of each individual user or visitor, based on the product and interaction data you upload from your site. At the core of Miso is our breakthrough research on privacy-centric small data personalization. Miso's models can triangulate what a user is interested in after just a few clicks, even at cold-start. User data is completely optional — Miso supports anonymous personalization using just your session IDs.

Miso's models use neural networks that were pre-trained on the open web, so they understand your product catalog at a deep semantic level. Miso also pays attention to every clickstream interaction on your site and understands how it fits into your conversion funnel (whether it leads to the user becoming more engaged, or dropping off). Miso maps all this knowledge about your interactions and products into an interconnected space that is constantly updating in real time.

With Miso Recipes, you can use APIs to build practically any kind of personalized experience, from instant search to product recommendations to dynamic homepages. Because Miso is a unified platform, as you add more personalized experiences, metrics funnel back and informs your models (this mirrors the way that FANG companies build personalization). Customers typically see an immediate increase of 50–200% on conversions with steady growth over time.

Where should I start?

• If it's your first time using Miso, we'd recommend going straight to Quickstart. This guide will walk you through building an end-to-end Miso Recipe with sample data in about 20 minutes.
• Once you've completed the Quickstart, we suggest taking a look at Miso's Recipes. There you'll find a clear set of personalization use cases we support, along with step-by-step instructions for building each one.
• If you're the type of person who likes to read the whole textbook before jumping in, you can visit our Deep Dives.