Personalization Without Tracking

Growth requires personalization. Users hate tracking. These two truths feel incompatible. Most companies choose tracking and hope users don't notice. But what if we didn't have to?

At Innovist, we grew from 25K to 1M users partly through personalization. I've seen what works. But I've also seen the privacy backlash coming.

Context-based personalization, using only information the user explicitly provides in-session plus environmental signals (time, device, location if shared), could deliver 70% of the benefit of tracking-based personalization with none of the surveillance.

A prototype demonstrating context-first personalization. No cookies, no tracking pixels, no persistent identifiers. Just smart use of what the user tells us right now.

Coming soon. This section will capture what surprised me, what didn't work, and what I'd do differently.