Nate Ritter - A Traveler's Life : Room Steals, Home Schooling and Living Abroad
In this episode Brent speaks with intrepid traveler and entrepreneur Nate Ritter, co-founder of Room Steals.
Room Steals is an online company that helps save time and frustration by being sure that you have found the absolute best prices on hotel rooms. Room Steals is able to offer wholesale pricing on rooms, even if you are only booking 1 room for one night. The business model of the service it to give the best prices of the rooms available, and if you can save money using Room Steals prices then you are offered the opportunity to sign up for the service with an annual membership.
Nate and his team have offered listeners of The Herd of Turtles Podcast a 20% discount code off of the first year of membership to Room Steals. To redeem this 20% discount, enter the code turtlespodcast at checkout.
During their conversation, Nate tells Brent how the Room Steals business idea came about: Nate and his wife love to travel. So much so that they saved for 2 years to try living abroad in France. While that didn't go according to plan, Nate learned a tremendous amount not only about travel, but also about dealing with bureaucracies, and language missteps. It also reinforced their commitment to traveling.
This desire to travel has lead them to homeschool their kids, to allow them the freedom to travel and share new experiences with their kids. Brent and Nate talk about their common homeschooling experiences and some of the great things that can come out of it, as well as some of the societal challenges of being a homeschooling family.
Upon returning to the US, Nate and his wife had been using travel hacks to score severely discounted travel. It was during this time that Nate began working with some hotel booking companies and learned about the ins and outs of how hotels price their rooms. A seed was planted that eventually turned into Room Steals.
Nate shares his experiences of working in start up companies. Working in startups is different from working in a mature, larger company for a few reasons that Nate explains. Nate shares what makes this interesting for him and the satisfaction he gets out of faster pace of startup.
Nate also has the interesting claim to fame as one of the first people to popularize the use of hashtags on Twitter. Nate shares the story of how he began to use hashtags as a citizen journalist during the San Diego fires of 2007.
You can find Nate online several ways:
Twitter: Nate Ritter
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