Tavishi Gupta had already cofounded a startup that built audio tools for Grammy-winning artists before she landed back at Microsoft. The work there did not hold her interest, and as a near-constant traveler she had become the de facto trip planner for every group she joined. About two and a half years before her Product Hunt write-up, she quit with no safety net: no health insurance, expired IDs, and no permanent home. She coded the first version of Tern while living out of Airbnbs and used it to plan her own travels.

The early product was a custom travel editor, which she describes as painfully hard to build. The first five months were 14-hour days funded entirely by savings, working alongside roughly 150 closed-beta users. The turning point came when public AI APIs arrived. Two days after they went live she launched a waitlist for an AI planner that could auto-fill a trip with personalized suggestions, and that is when the product finally clicked for users.

The path was not linear. For about ten months she pivoted to selling to human travel agents and made a few thousand dollars, but concluded the future was agentic AI rather than human agents, so she changed course again. Growth came from places that cost nothing: she went viral on Reddit twice, gained around 1,000 users overnight from a comment on a competitor's Instagram post, and ran Product Hunt launches that pulled in 300-plus upvotes and mentions in newsletters with over a million subscribers. Airports, including Rome and Frankfurt, started reaching out about B2B partnerships.

By month 27 she had shipped more than 400 updates and crossed 12,000 trips planned with users in 120 countries, all with zero marketing spend. She only started charging two months before her Product Hunt story, keeping the product free for most users while picking up paying customers across 9 countries, and began building the mobile companion app that users had requested most. She is candid that the journey ran on daily money anxiety, no friends-and-family round, and savings she was still burning as she began to monetize.