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2.5 years ago, I quit my job with no backup plan. Today, I'm making a living from Tern, the AI travel planner I built in my bedroom. Here's the raw, unfiltered story of how it happened:
Numbers, Because Product Hunt Loves Data
✈️ 12,000+ trips planned
👥 Paying customers from 9 countries (started monetizing 2 months ago, still free for most users)
🌍 Users from 120 countries
⭐ 5/5 stars on Product Hunt (and 1 of the 20 products hunted by CEO @rajiv_ayyangar )
💰 $0 spent on marketing
🕒 14-hour days, 7 days/week in the beginning
📦 400+ updates shipped
The Journey
It started after I left my startup where I built audio tools for Grammy-winning artists. I was back at Microsoft, working on things I had zero passion for. I was also a nomad, constantly traveling — and the planner friend in every group.
One night I thought:
What if you could instantly discover, collect, and edit travel ideas — without getting lost in Google abyss or rebuilding Notion docs from scratch?
So I quit. No health insurance. Expired IDs. No permanent home. I built the first version of Tern while living out of Airbnbs — and used it to plan my own travels.
We started by building a custom travel editor (ridiculously hard). Then the AI wave hit — and we added personalized suggestions that auto-filled your trip. Suddenly, it clicked. It was magic for our users!
Reality Check Moments
🗓️ Month 1–5: Coded 14 hrs/day. Survived off savings. Worked with 150 closed beta users.
🚀 Month 6: Got into Antler. Visible Hands VC gave us our first grant.
📬 Month 8: Launched our AI planner waitlist — 2 days after the APIs became public.
💸 Month 9–19: Pivoted to work with travel agents (made a few $k), but realized the future wasn’t human agents — it was agentic AI.
📈 Month 15: Went viral on a competitor’s Instagram — gained 1,000 users overnight.
📣 Month 22: First big Product Hunt launch — 300+ upvotes, newsletters w/ 1M+ subs mentioned us, even the director of Deadpool became a user.
✈️ Month 23–26: Airports started reaching out — Rome Airport included. Opened the door to B2B.
📱 Month 27: Finally started monetizing + building a mobile app (our #1 request from users).
🤝 Month 29: Got added as a perk for Google employees
Hard Truths Nobody Talks About
🐞 Spent weeks debugging bugs in our editor
💸 Kept it free for 2 years — while burning savings (still burning as we monetize)
😰 Lived with daily anxiety about money
🧾 Most founders raising quickly have ~$200K from friends/family. I didn’t.
🤝 Talked to many VCs who love the product... but kept moving the goal post for what they wanted to see (heard similar stories from other underrepresented founders)
👩💻 Being a full-female team doesn’t match “the pattern” for investing (1.5% of VC $ goes to women).
What Worked, Surprisingly
Keeping it free longer than comfortable was the best way to get feedback quickly
Obsessing over UX and user feedback
Shipping constant updates (even when no one was asking)
Product Hunt + Reddit launches
Commenting on competitor social media posts = actual traffic
Pivoting a few times helped us learn the travel landscape in depth
If you're curious, check out Tern, but that's not why I'm posting. Just wanted to share that it's possible to survive (and eventually thrive) by building something useful, even if it seems small.
