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This Founder Wants To Let AI Plan Your Trips

Today, I interviewed Joy Lee, the founder of Turtle Journey. Joy is a travel enthusiast and wants to reduce the time spent planning trips with the help of AI. Read on to know more.

Who are you and what motivated you to step into tech?

Hello, I'm Joy Lee. I've been living in Korea for over 20 years and just quit my job to become an indie hacker. I've been dreaming of starting a business since I was a teenager. I was happy when I imagined that many people would like and use the services I created. So I studied software and AI in college. By the time I graduated, innovative AIs that changed the world started to come out, and I worked for a company as an AI engineer for a year and I could feel the world changing rapidly. I decided that now was the right time to launch the services I dreamed about since I was a teenager, and I started my career as an indie hacker.

What are some of your previous projects?

Turtle Journey is my first product as an indie hacker. Until a few days ago, I was working as an AI engineer in a company. For the past year, I've been building a commercial AI photography service using generative AI.

Coming to Turtle Journey, what prompted you to build it?

I'm a big fan of traveling. I like to travel every year and have different experiences while I'm there. I never take the same trip twice, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends, coworkers, or family. Sometimes I rent a car, sometimes I take the train, and sometimes I go on a road trip in a campervan. Sometimes I go freediving, sometimes I go to eat delicious local food, and sometimes I go to enjoy New Year's festivities. The conditions for each trip vary greatly, and it was too time-consuming and frustrating to plan the best trip for all of them. So I started with the idea of a service that would allow me to pick the country I wanted to go to and the dates I wanted to go, and it would organize everything from flights to accommodation to destinations based on my preferences and those of my travel companions, and quickly developed and launched an MVP.

What does Turtle Journey offer that the competition does not?

Two things that differentiate Turtle Journey from other generative AI travel planning services: it prioritizes the quality of its results, and it recommends flights, accommodations, and more. Not only does it recommend personalized tourist destinations, but it also takes into account your travel routes and the time it takes to explore each destination to create an optimal travel plan. If you try to generate it with your previous itineraries, you'll see similar results! It also makes it easy to book flights and accommodations based on your dates and preferences. Turtle Journey ensures that you get the best possible scenario for all your travel plans.

What are your future goals for Turtle Journey?

The goal for the future is to minimize the entire process from pre-trip planning to trip completion in the least amount of time possible. In the future, we'll develop flight, accommodation, and tour recommendations to be of higher quality, and we'll create a community system where you can share your itinerary, find tour companions, and get information from people you're going with.

So if you have somewhere you want to go, and you have the time and money to get there, you don't need to organize a trip anymore!

I'm currently getting a lot of feedback, and feedback is always welcome!

How has the response of your customers been?

The 100+ users have given me a lot of feedback, which has helped me get direction on improvements and additional features. The developers have given me developmental advice, and I'm working on making the landing page more user-friendly. Not bad for my initial expectations.

Do you have fears that what if the indie hacking journey doesn't work out? How are you dealing with it?

I still haven't gotten rid of that fear, but I know how to handle that stress. I regularly engage in high-intensity exercise - swimming has been a great fit for me - and that takes my mind off the useless thoughts that come from that fear.

Anything else you want to share with the world (might not be related to tech)?

Do what you want to do! Start anything! My only regret is that I didn't start sooner.

My income is less stable than when I was working for a company, but I'm happier now.

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