STARTUP STAGE: Tern uses GPT technology for travel planning

Tern

Tern is an artificial intelligence-powered travel planning system that provides personalized recommendations in minutes.

Tavishi Gupta, a former Microsoft software engineer, founded the company in July 2022.

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

In an era where we can buy a TV in 10 minutes (Amazon), make a complex meal in 20 minutes (HelloFresh) and even sell a car in 15 minutes (Carvana), it still takes 8-20 hours to plan a great trip. Tern is an AI-powered app to reduce this stress of travel planning, which impacts 141 million Gen Z and millennial travelers.

Tern’s goal is to make travel planning stress-free and enjoyable. We want to empower the next generation of travelers by providing a one-stop solution that solves for every phase of planning in just a few clicks.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

Tern will reduce the stress of travel planning by providing personalized recommendations using the cutting-edge GPT-3 technology, significantly shortening a process that typically takes 8-20 hours to five minutes.

Tern's intuitive user interface allows travelers to personalize their travel plans based on their preferences. The itinerary is created in our collaborative travel-specific editor - built closely with travel planners - replacing Notion, Google Docs and Google Sheets.

Tern also enhances search results with Google Search links and Google Maps links, making it even easier for users to centralize their findings and research further. While Tern does not currently help with bookings, it is the starting point for any travel planning instead of searching for "things to do in X" on Google.

In the future, Tern will enable travelers to discover more things to do through a Tinder-like swiping of lists of other travelers, friends and bloggers. Travelers will also be able to combine their own discoveries and social media inspiration with Tern's recommendations and arrange their decks with Tern’s travel-specific and collaborative itinerary builder. 

As the product grows, we hope to also help travelers reminisce about their trips and become a hub for all things travel: booking, planning, sharing and reminiscing. Tern will be available on our website (travelwithtern.com) and is mobile-friendly, making it accessible on both laptops and mobile devices.

Give us your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the company.

• Strengths: We are a product-led company, obsessed with producing high value for travelers. Being a group with deep technical knowledge, we are able to maneuver through how we can produce user-friendly and simple experiences as we build complex travel-specific features.
• Weaknesses: We are a group inexperienced in building communities. However, we are fast learners and have growth experts in our corner to help navigate the early days of the product.
• Opportunities: Post-pandemic, 87% of Gen Z and millennial travelers are using social media for inspiration. Moreover, there is a rise in the number of digital nomads, who are taking multiple small trips every month. This is an incredible opportunity to map social media as well as provide these growing niche of travelers the tools to plan faster.
• Threats: With GPT-3, the landscape of all tech verticals is changing drastically, and there is a possibility some of the value propositions of Tern become commonplace. However, we aim to be an end-to-end solution for travel planning, and our travel-specific editor is a complex part of the product to build. So we are confident we will be able to navigate the value proposition as we continue to iterate toward the larger goal.

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspective?

Gen Z and millennial travelers are a lot more spontaneous and want ways to integrate their social media inspiration, friends and family recommendations and their own finds into their travel experience. However, since this process takes hours of planning, many choose to either not take that trip they desire or cut back on sifting through their saved inspiration or asking more friends. 

Travel tends to become more of an overwhelming process than that enjoyable desired vacation. Tern aims to steadily fill these gaps in planning and significantly speed up the process of thinking of a place to go to visualize what a trip to that destination can look like. We want to empower this generation of travelers.

So you've got the product, now how will you get lots of customers?

Our current users have come through referrals and social media posts. Since Tern is meant to be collaborative, we already have organic growth mechanisms implemented into the product.

We are also establishing relationships with influencers to spread the word and are actively posting on social media. We will also start highlighting best itineraries and profiles as part of our content marketing campaigns. Moreover, once the core product is ready, we will do a full launch with a trusted marketing agency.

Tell us what process you've gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market.

We surveyed 100 other Gen Z and millennial consumers to learn that 75% of them feel very frustrated by group travel planning, and 90% want an efficient end-to-end solution. This scales up to the 141 million Gen Z and millennial travelers just in the United States.

Moreover, we have been getting a lot of sign-ups on our wait list since the end of last week when we announced our upcoming beta launch to our personal network. Multiple people have reached out to get earlier access for their upcoming trips, as we are only giving the first 100 users access on launch and will stagger the next cohorts. We have also seen a spike in referrals, which enable travelers to skip five people in the wait list, and have been featured in a travel newsletter as a potential “game changer” for both lazy and experienced travelers.

How and when will you make money?

Tern will be free to use initially. Eventually, we will implement a freemium model so consumers can still benefit from using Tern’s free platform, but the AI features would be paid for after a few free trials. However, we hope to give our first few hundred early adopters any benefits we can as they help us create the ultimate tool for travel planning.

What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team?

Tern's solo founder, Tavishi Gupta, is an ex-Microsoft software engineer and technical product manager, as well as a two-time founder (previously raised $1 million for her startup Samply). She is also a passionate slow traveler for the past two years, spending up to six months at a time in more than 12 cities across the United States, Mexico and India.

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?

We are a female-founded company that truly believes in the power of diversity and inclusion. From our founding engineer to our board of advisers, we are 50% female and come from diverse backgrounds. Diversity and inclusion in ethnicity, gender, previous experience, lifestyles - all of these matter to us as a company, as these diverse factors reflect the world we live in.

Moreover, in the future we hope to add accessibility filters to Tern, to enable a larger group of travelers to use our platform efficiently. We already have preference options that include families with children, where you can specify the age of the youngest child on the trip.

What's been the most difficult part of founding the business so far?

The most difficult part of building Tern has been the lack of funding opportunities available for solo female founders. Tern is currently completely bootstrapped and has navigated the highs and lows of the kickoff stages purely through perseverance and determination for helping ease other travelers’ pains.

However, we are grateful to have acquired 150 users for our private beta product, who significantly helped us build a collaborative travel-specific itinerary builder meant to enable adding tickets, flight and stay information, making the itinerary visual with in-app photo browsing and automagically creating snippets of Google places, so travelers can view what places in their plan are open with direct links to Google Maps. Moreover, this group helped us further understand what the next big step for Tern needed to be.

Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time making an impact - so why are you going to be one of the lucky ones?

After extensive research, it seems like what doesn’t exist in the market today is a super app that ties in all these pieces together. The problem isn’t that the information doesn’t exist, the problem is that it’s scattered, and there is no singular workflow/place to plan and store all the information and inspiration.

We have come to realize that the value is in an integrated solution that covers all steps of a traveler’s journey - from inspiration to the end of their travel. With any missing piece, the solution will continue being incomplete and therefore, unsuccessful. At Tern, we aim to be this end-to-end solution.

A year from now, what state do you think your startup will be in?

We want to launch the full vision of the product in the next three to four months. So in a year, we hope to have helped 50,000 travelers plan their trips. Moreover, we hope to have expanded the product’s booking and reminiscing (photos, etc.) capabilities.

What is your end-game? (Going public, acquisition, growing and staying private, etc.)

We will not stay bootstrapped forever (we are already raising funds), so going public is our goal for now. Along the way, we would consider an opportunity to be acquired by a company aligned with our vision like Airbnb since they would massively accelerate Tern’s mission to make travel planning easy and enjoyable for as many people as possible.