Things I’ve done professionally to help companies grow.
I'm an experienced entrepreneur and technical consultant with a highly empathetic understanding of the customer. I help founders with strategy, marketing, product development, and technical execution.
Accomplishments
- Exited with Hotels for Hope, selling to Quint Events, 2019
- Exited with Eventful, selling to CBS, 2014
- Launched Tiny Geocoder, serving 2M+ requests/mo., 2010
- Popularized #hashtags use on Twitter, 2007
- Sold bootstraped, single-founder company, 2007
- Time Person of the Year, 2006
- Created the first keyword/query filtered RSS feeds, 2003
Skills
Product Development
Researching customer pain points, analyzing findings, planning and prioritizing features to reach customer value as fast as possible.
Business Strategy
Developing an understanding of the customer needs and positioning companies to create value for that customer profitably.
Technical Architecture
Ability to understand technical feasibility and collaborate on solutions with an efficient use of modern technical architecture, systems, and development operations.
Engineering Team Dynamics
Help engineering and executive teams work effectively, positively, and empathetically together to build what the customers and business needs most.
Experience
Creator-Founders.com - Founder | Remote | 2023-Present
Serving content creators with resources, tools, connections, blueprints, frameworks, and mentorship to help them grow their businesses. Creating and launching SaaS products and communities to help creators add sustainable income and revenue streams for their futures.
NateRitter.com - Founder & fCTO | Remote | 2022-Present
Consulting, advising, and mentoring startup founders and tech teams on product development, business strategy, and technical architecture. Building and leading teams to execute on product development.
Perfect Space - Co-Founder & CEO | San Diego, CA | 1996-2023
Co-founded this service company to $1M+ in revenue per year, onboarded teams of service providers and engineers to grow, successfully providing the highest customer value. Responsible for building systems architecture and automated internal operations to facilitate production of our own financial technology SaaS products, launching a loan brokerage platform and serving over 21M loan applications to partner lenders.
Founders First Capital Partners - CTO | San Diego, CA | 2021
Hired, trained, and managed a small, highly talented tech team. Identified, negotiated, contracted, and managed projects with external vendors and consultants. Automated financial documentation gathering, improving underwriting experience for the Revenue Based Investment teams. Helped marketing department conversion rate increase 80% within first 2 weeks.
Hotels for Hope / QuintRooms - CTO | Austin, TX | 2018-2021
Hired, trained, and managed internal & external teams of engineers and marketing employees. Resolved operations bottlenecks, reducing time-to-deliver by 99%. Decreased page load time by 70%. Increased conversion rates by 100%. Led creation of new product including direction on customer journey, onboarding workflows, continued operational account management, and technical implementation.
ResBeat - Director of Technology | Austin, TX | 2016-2018
Worked with stakeholders to understand the user, scope the project, hire and manage the team, and build the flagship product. Led a remote engineering team in agile development. Shipped the company’s first hospitality brokerage engine.
CloudBeds - Senior Software Engineer | San Diego, CA | 2014-2016
Executed on development projects bringing in $1M in revenue in 6 months. Solely responsible for strategic partnership execution via discovery sessions, customer journey walk-thrus, prototyping, etc. Hand-picked highly qualified team of engineers and managed the build through an agile project lifecycle. Cultivated and onboarded travel and hospitality industry strategic partners.
Education
Western Washington University - Bachelor of Arts
Major: Business
Minor: Management Information Systems
Volunteer Service
San Diego Microfinance Alliance - Business Advocate and Technologist
I assisted with technology choices, integration, and usage training. I also helped promote the San Diego Microfinance Summit each year and gave feedback to the Alliance related to the San Diego business community and it’s involvement (current or potential) in the Summit, the Alliance, and general micro-lending thoughts.
Giving Anonymously - Board Member
Giving Anonymously was a nonprofit organization facilitating generosity between people. Their goal is to enable and encourage you to be your own charity, and for you to give anonymously to those around you in need. I participated in, advised and discussed organizational and operational topics during board meetings, reviews, emails and calls throughout the year.
International Rescue Committee - Loan Finance Committee Member
Collaboration, deliberation and decision making in regards to particular loan applications which meet minimum requirements and are brought to the loan committee for consideration. The loan committee members review and discuss the loan application to decide whether or not to approve the application.