How a Love of Travel Turned Into an 8-Month Obsession
After eight months of building a travel planning app, Iter officially launched on May 21.
Travel has always had a profound impact on my life. Through culture, food, design, and discovering places beyond the obvious tourist path, I've come to appreciate how transformative meaningful travel experiences can be. Yet I found travel planning increasingly fragmented across Instagram, travel blogs, reviews, booking sites, and now AI tools. Despite having more information than ever and the pressure not to miss out, travel planning often became an exercise in chasing what is popular rather than discovering what is personally meaningful.
With the acceleration of AI, I saw an opportunity to rethink the process. Instead of building another itinerary generator, I wanted to create a tool that helps people anticipate a trip before they take it, one that learns their tastes, style, and pace to create more personalized travel experiences.
While technology evolved rapidly over the past eight months, the core vision remained the same: combine AI with a deeper understanding of personal taste. At the same time, I felt strongly that travelers should remain in control. AI can provide a strong starting point, but users should always be able to add, remove, rearrange, and refine their itinerary until it feels thoughtful and uniquely theirs.
To bring this vision to life, I worked with designers to develop the product narrative, UX, and visual identity before a single line of code was written. A small and talented development team then helped transform those ideas into a working product. Along the way, I gained a deep appreciation for the relationship between design, engineering, and product thinking.
Now begins the next phase: getting the product into people's hands and learning whether it resonates beyond my own assumptions. Like every founder, I believe in what I've built but conviction doesn't guarantee product market fit.
I'd genuinely love feedback on the product, the journey so far, and what you would focus on next as we begin learning from real users.
This is a thoughtful direction because most AI travel tools still feel like itinerary generators. The stronger angle here is not “plan my trip faster,” it is taste-aware travel planning: understanding someone’s pace, style, interests, and what kind of experience actually feels meaningful to them.
That is a better category than generic AI trip planning, especially if the product experience and design are already central to the story.
The part I would pressure-test now is the brand frame. Iter is short and clean, but it feels abstract, and IterTravelApp makes the product feel more like an app label than a premium travel companion. If you are trying to build something around personal taste, anticipation, design, and meaningful discovery, the name has to carry more of that emotional value before users, content, and search memory lock in.
Auryxa .com would fit that direction better because it feels more polished and premium, while still being broad enough for AI travel planning, personal taste, curated itineraries, and discovery-led travel under one stronger brand shell.
Thank you for the encouraging words!
You bring up a good point about the brand name. Iter is derived from the Latin word meaning "journey," "way," or "path," and it also shares roots with the word "itinerary."
As you mentioned, it might be abstract without explanation. It's definitely something worth thinking about as the brand evolves.
That meaning behind Iter is strong, and I like that it connects to journey/path/itinerary.
The only thing I’d be careful with is that users usually judge the brand before they understand the origin story. So the question becomes: does Iter communicate the feeling of the product on first contact, or does it need the explanation before it becomes memorable?
For a utility itinerary tool, Iter can work. But for the direction you described, the product feels more emotional and premium than that: taste-aware planning, personal pace, meaningful discovery, and trips that feel designed around the person rather than generated from a prompt.
That is why Auryxa.com came to mind. It gives the product a more polished, premium shell from the first impression, while still leaving room for AI travel planning, curated itineraries, taste profiles, and discovery-led travel.
I would pressure-test both frames before too much content, user memory, and app positioning lock in around IterTravelApp: Iter as the clever journey name, versus Auryxa as the premium travel companion brand.