Julian: Hey everyone, this is Julian from Behind Company Lines here with Ritesh Raj, coo and co-founder of CuddlyNest, which is the biggest, fastest growing accommodation, booking platform, offering millions of saves across 200 plus countries of all types and all styles for all budgets, for every kind of traveler.

Ritesh, thank you so much. I'm so excited to, to chat with you and learn a little bit more about what you're working on and of course, kind of the. In terms of your expertise in your market with the world being, you know, having had changed so much in terms of travel and work and the, you know, this whole work-life balance culture and remote working culture, so many different ways we can slice it here, but before we get into it, what were you doing before you started CuddlyNest?

Ritesh: Yeah, thanks Julian for having me here. Before CuddlyNest well I took a bit of a sabbatical from work for about five and a half, six years before CuddlyNest. I was actually a full-time traveler, so I traveled full-time to literally every continent, every country in the world, I guess over a hundred countries nonstop.

But prior to that, I have always been in travel tech since I can remember my early. Days. So we started a company very early on that was about vacational website for the US market. And we sold the company later on. And then I started to travel and the whole idea of ness came when I was traveling.

So it was kind of, So if I didn't know it'll happen, but it happened , so, so.

Julian: Yeah. What were you, when you were traveling, what were you seeking out? Or what was guiding the compass? Was it just, I haven't seen this place, I've gotta go see it? Or were you, how are you getting your information?

You know, a lot of us traveling now or are grabbing, you know, we're getting on lists, we're getting on Trip Advisor, TikTok. What was guiding your compass when you were traveling?  

Ritesh: Well, we didn't really have TikTok back then or Instagram, or if there was Instagram, I wasn't much aware of. I'm talking about 2012, 13.

Okay. So I'm from India originally and what I did when I was trying to make this company work back in the days a vocational sites, it was basically having properties in the us private owners who went to something, what Airbnb does, and quite famous now than what I do. But we were a bit earlier than Airbnb started back in the days, and then we sold it later after they got in the.

So, well we used to have it's not really, and Airbnb I can say. I would say it was a shared apartment that I built where we had several bedrooms in the penthouse and we had interns coming from around the world to come and live with us. , mostly from Europe, US South America. So I had over close to 80 flatmates till the time we had the company running.

And so I made a point that while they come to India and I showed them around and this, you know, went to places with me, I wanted to go and explore their country. And plus I was always interested in travel. So that was the starting point. It was like, I'll go and I'll check out Europe, like we call it three months trip.

But then when I started to travel, I realized there's so much more so just Europe than countries in Europe, than South America, than Asia, then Africa, and just. Just went on for about six years. So it was basically that. And for motivation, I really didn't have much of an, let's say, I didn't really, I mean YouTube back then, I'm not sure if you know, but YouTube back then was not really much of a deal.

It was okay. So reading blocks was like, okay, it's more like you go and explore and find out what your friends tell you. Hey, go there, check it out. But I normally. Some friend or flat met already where I'm planning to go beforehand. Yeah. So that was an advantage for sure.  

Julian: Yeah. Well, how do you think traveling has positively impacted the way you, whether it's few, you know, your business or client relationships or people in general, what are the positive benefits that you've gained from that experience that you think will impact your business?

Ritesh: well, let's say this during my travels I have made a point that I don't want to stay in a place for less than a week. When I say a place, let's say a city, not a country. So I always stayed at least a week or more than a week. I always try to do the do so, and I have stayed in. all types of places you can imagine.

And I've stayed in resorts, I've stayed in fancy hotels. I stay in guest houses, hosts. I've stayed in hostile dorms and hostile private rooms. And I've stayed in villas and service departments. You name it. And I have just tried every kind of place because sometimes I really have to be, in some meetings, I need to be focused.

I need to have stable connection, all that. And sometimes I wanna be in a, you know, Early twenties mode, so I don't wanna be like partying and stuff. So let's hostile then. So I believe the kind of people I interacted with maybe tens and thousands of people of all types, like all different ages, they're people traveling for two years, been running for a year, somebody traveling for six months, three months age between, I don't know, 16 to up to like 70.

So you kind of interact with people you understand, and because you live in different kind of places, mostly in hospital, you get to interact with them a lot like evening. Things to do and stuff. And I really interacted and understood why they were traveling. Their purpose of travel. Yeah. And there were so many reasons.

So all that learning their experience, their difficulties, their face. And that is also a kind of source of information that you earlier asked that how I got information about a place. So somebody I would meet, let's say in Crocker in. They may have been to, let's say, vaso or they have been to some cities of Croatia, and then they will share their stories and give recommendations.

So that was a bit of a handy recommendation. So all of that really helped me realize that while I was trying to book those accommodation types there were several platforms out there, and I'm talking about thousand 14, 15 16 Airbnb was there. Okay, but for vacation rental. You were had booking, you had Expedia, you had all these companies that we actually kind of, grow with.

I mean, we know these companies cuz we have used it at some point in our lives. But there were so many out there. We go to South America. Yeah, nobody knows these companies. They know Despegar. Or if you go to Indonesia, they're no travel loca or a Agoda in Thailand, so many of them. So I thought maybe we can make one platform where we put everything together.

And we build it on a very you know, informed sort of budget. And we try to see all that learnings I gained over the years of traveling. So can it be good for people who want to be hustling? And gift the people who want to have a nice place with a nice pool, a hotel or a guest house, or a long stay, those apartments.

But why? To go wander around, it's pretty much together into one place. Yeah. And build a platform. And that's why I went, I had and built the platform with my co-founder.  

Julian: Yeah. What was the challenge of, you know, Taking all those technologies or all these preexisting companies that were , you know, in all these different areas and plugging them into, it's almost like you're creating an API to then integrate all these different pieces of information.

What are the challenges and where do you get the information from? That, that is publicly available or publicly extractable?

Ritesh: First of all, they are not publicly extract extractable. That's first. Second, we don't really partner with booking or Airbnb or travel local. We don't work with them.

Here's the part. I mean, it is so complicated to build something. I'll give an example. Of a complication, let's just say that. And how we get this property is we have thousands of suppliers and they are pretty much the same suppliers who are supplying it to the other companies I mentioned earlier.

It it's no different. Nobody owns any property. I mean, we don't own property. They don't own property. It's property owned by individual owners or a property management company or a hotel. and they want to distribute to have more occupancy rate, and that's what their purpose is. And there are thousands of companies regionally, nationally, or globally who provide those APIs with a certain amount of proper certain kinds.

And we all use the same way. It's just that how we try to cut down as many intermediaries as possible. So we try to connect directly. So we control the prices. But that's one thing. But look in's example, let's say I got 600 partners sending me hotel A in Bangkok, 600 partners now. , I need to figure out which partner gives the same hotel in the best rate.

Yeah. And if they have, let's say, three room types. The room type A is good with supplier A, but the room type B is the cheapest with supplier, I don't know, 27th. So how do you scan those? How do you figure out those are the same property? So you have to build a scanning tools. You have to you know, train AI models and you have to make sure that you don't have duplicates scanning in a system.

This is so much of complexity to it. We have worked in the last four years of building the company. We have worked with thousands and thousands of individual owners, hundreds of suppliers you know, different kinds of searches and channel managers and property management systems. This is a lot of work that put together to really build something that can really go and have book places of all types.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, something that was, you know, you mentioned before we got on the show and we were talking about a little bit, , but in, in regards to the changes post, you know, COVID and now that people have almost an expectation to work remotely, I think in most industries.

I would say above 50% Other industries, I think that you still have to show up because it you need some kind of physical interaction with whatever either the product is or your team or what have you. But what ha has happened in terms of remote working culture and its impact on personal travel that, you know, encompasses people working globally rather than locally?  

Ritesh: Well, yeah. Well, we always tried. See, I told you earlier that we really wanted to build a model that can be built in a very informed budget. So we, the first reason was not to spend money unnecessarily. That was the reason for us. But then we realized while working with that reason, that's kind of actually good.

You don't have to go somewhere. You save time and travel. You save time you know, trying to eat outside and eating unhealthy or spending money on that and, you know, commute the traffic. You know how it is. I mean, there are some places you can just stuck be stuck in traffic. So, so it started with that purpose, but eventually we really enjoy it because, okay, we work eight hours a day, well, we can work nine and still not feel like we have worked 12 hours, because actually you do.

Get ready, prepare yourself. I'm not saying you don't have to get ready, but I mean, like if you got meetings going on with a video call like this, okay. I put a t-shirt on. I don't have to keep suit on every day. Yeah. As I have to, I go to a corporate office, so, yeah. I think it's a matter of that, that how it started.

But eventually I see a lot of potential and I see how people were so happy internally to do so. And then of course the covid happened and things did change a little bit. People start to feel that being home was not an option, but it's accomplished a mandatory thing. You need to be there.

And we coped up quite well with that. But yes, people also have changed their travel trains, of course, and are traveling. There are a lot of ifs and buts countries, regions, depending on rules, regulations, flights, expense, all of that. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of variables. But I can tell you I could fly to my home country in the past for about 500, but now I can't fly for less than a thousand.

Yeah. But did that, does that affect me? Maybe. But does it affect, let's say, thousand other people? Possibly. A lot. Or I, the different kind of people. But it does affect, it does makes you think twice about, oh, do you wanna go four times a year or like two times a year? So Yeah.  

Julian: Is that a function of, you know, the supply decreasing? Because a lot of companies, you know, had to maybe either. You know, dissolve or get rid of some of their their planes or is it a function of capitalizing on demand on people now wanting to travel more? And companies seeing the advantage in just increasing their margin, in their prices on you know, on, on individuals that want to go places.

Ritesh: I will answer that. I'll tell you first that I'm not an expert on airlines, but I do understand how they work because we are about to offer flight bookings next year, starting, hopefully next winter. So I, I believe that look, I mean, you have a standard process. You got SOP going on.

Suddenly your whole you know, , you try to go and accumulate a certain amount of money or profits and you don't have that, and then certainly everything drop and you can't just keep letting people go. And you did that. I mean, during the. In the time period, we, a lot of people losing their work and airline industry.

So I think there's just trying, they know people wanna travel because they've been kind of like jailed in, in their houses for like two years almost. And they feel that urge of traveling and they're like, I don't know if revenge travel is a good word to use here, but they have like the, like, I wanna travel, I don't care, I wanna go just.

I mean, this summer it was an immense amount of bookings that came in. It was just unimaginable. People were traveling all like everywhere. Yeah. I don't know if you heard news about you know, some countries airports were so packed up. People had to stay out of the airport for like an hour queued up to get inside the airport and they would miss their flight , they couldn't handle anymore.

I mean, it was immense. Travelers. So, yeah, I mean, they just want to, it's like a cash cow. They just wanna cash in as much as they can, because I will still pay a thousand dollars. I wanna see my family more than ever after the covid. So I will go and I'm pretty sure people will just not have choice, but they want to go.

So, yeah I think they are taking advantage of this right now. And let's see, for how long they can before they come back to the 2 0 19 levels. Yeah. Yeah.  

Julian: What do you think, you know, or. What have you deployed in terms of strategies or like kind of go to market strategies to, you know, to kind of carve your niche in such a red Sea kind of, industry?

You know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of booking sites as you mentioned and I think you're, you know, you've got a great goal in, in creating a collective you know, database of information to where not only. Learn, but you can book and travel and go places, but it's difficult right there.

There's a lot of, there's a lot of competitors out there and you know, making everybody talks about, you know, having that one tagline that's gonna help, you know, people associate that with your product or a certain experience with your product. How have you gone about kind of carving your kind of making your name kind of well known within the space?

That's, you know, has a lot of other players in it.  

Ritesh: Yeah. Good. Yeah that's a good question. There are a lot of players, as I mentioned, it is kind of like a red suit thing. Yeah. But you see, I believe that I face that challenge about finding that right balance of a platform where you can book everything.

And I'm pretty sure people do too, but this don't have any option. For example, when you have a perception about a brand, you say, okay, I know booking.com. Okay. You know, booking.com. Great. But what do you perceive booking.com as? Like, what do you think you do there? And people will have different mixed answers.

Somebody would say, well, I go there because I have a corporate account and I just have to book from there. Yeah. I go there because they have hotels. I go, Because they have a lot of properties. Let's not ask about what do you mean by lot? Somebody will say, I go there because they're best price. Ask how you know that they have the best price, their best price.

Or somebody will say, oh, they have hostels. Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, they have apartments too, since when I didn't know that. So, and same for Expedia, same for Airbnb is just vacation rentals, of course not the only one vertical. At , we want to create a perception that is you know, one to all. So, You find every kind of accommodation.

So right now we offer over 30 types of accommodations. So of course we offer vacation rentals as one vertical. We offer hotels at the end of vertical. We offer hospitals and third vertical like that. We have service departments and resorts and ranches and all of that. We have. over 30 verticals or 30 house properties we offer and we offer it around the world.

We have over 4 million properties right now. That is the most, I think other companies would have two because I totally supply the same is about how you really cut down your margin numbers. And we charge way less commission and our commission rate goes down as less as like 5%, sometimes even 3%. We really have a dynamic commission commission level.

We try to commending our prices as low as possible, but we really. come out as a perception that I would like to bring into the people is that we are travelers just like you. Like you know Julian you wanna travel to Europe, you know, I have traveled in the past. We are travelers and I wanna build something for travelers so they can just find a place and just book and never think too much about it.

They have to see, okay, this company, you go and. Get what you want and get out. Don't spend time on it. That's why we don't run promotions. We don't have loyalty programs. I mean, why you need to have a loyalty programs. I mean, everything is already super reduced. It is the best you find anywhere. It doesn't matter.

And we have everything, all types of properties. So with time of course, we add more and more. So we don't really see as a really. Competition. We have competition, of course. Yeah. I mean, Airbnb is the biggest competition, the best company in the world for vacation rental markets. So for that vertical, that is definitely a competition.

And maybe we want to coexist and not compete too much. I mean, we want to be, I mean Expedia is there. So is booking.com right? So is a goda, so is hotel.com. So they all exist. I mean, Instagram was. why there was a need for TikTok, but they both exist together, right? Yeah. So I think we would like to coexist and we don't want to really see too much of competition as such, but we want to coexist and we want to offer what we believe in and we wanna make travelers, you know, life easier.

Let them have more travel days for less money spent. And we don't care too much about making a lot of money and becoming a corporation, but we just want to be a platform. You come, you book you go and you tell others about it and you know, Keep that way.  

Julian: I love that. I love that. What's tell us a little bit about the traction. How many people do you see have, you know, come to your site, or sorry, into book trips? How many partnerships are you, do you have now what do the growth numbers look like? What are some exciting milestones that you've seen? And then what's some future projections that you're excited about?

Ritesh: Yeah. So, we have not clearly of course started getting into that mode of marketing out loud. , we have not done that. And that is why you don't see tv, you don't see Hoardings, you don't. See Instagram and Face, we haven't done that yet, so the perception going out in the market, it still has to go out.

But in terms of numbers you know, we get couple of million users every year on our platform. We don't really rely on inorganic traffic right now, so we mostly have organic traffic at the moment, but we will be going in to do that. Very shortly here, we are going to start with several Layers of marketing in our funnel.

One of them would definitely be athlete marketing. Athlete marketing, and of course the social media marketing is definitely important for us on Instagram, we see who really connects with us because our really our age group, our first target age group is really between the, you know, the age of like 18 and 40, like the kind of age between and we wanna target that first and then go and to, you know, serve everybody else of all age groups. Of course, even. But right now we're gonna focus on that. So, so yeah, I mean, I believe that this Christmas we are going to we are going to start talking a bit more about our brand in the target market.

We are gonna start with the US first. We are a US company. We are based out of Orlando in Florida. So we are gonna be starting in US first our promotions and then we'll come to Europe, Asia, and so on and so forth. So, , you know, we have projection, depends what we want to do. We haven't raised much funds also, so we will be looking forward to raise our Series a most likely in quarter two next year if not earlier.

And we will plan up our projections depending on how what is the intensity we want to penetrate the markets that we decide to go with first.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. What are some of the biggest risks that that you face, that CuddlyNest face?  

Ritesh: I mean, the biggest mean, we can calculate risk as is possible, but. the biggest that we face, and we hopefully over overcome by now, was this Covid? I mean Yeah. It's like you're trying to build a company in travel and nobody's traveling. Yeah. Yeah. Even if they want, they can't, you can't push them. You can't talk about travel, you advertise travel. You can't promote your company.

You can't explain what your company does. It's all gonna be negative. So that I think, Was really a challenging phase for two years. It was hard. Yeah. But we were able to overcome because of our control expenses, because our remote team you know, we really wanted to make sure that we don't try to go, as you mentioned earlier, like go all red in the scene.

We don't want do that. We, I said we wanna coexist, so we want to say what? And we want to see how you respond to it. So slowly and slowly, we are going to expand. I mean, I told you about what we do, Julian, today on a call we are gonna be doing this in social media in the us and then slowly we're gonna be talking about in other news and papers and then TVs.

And slowly we'll you know, ad you know, advocate people about what we do, how we started. While we are doing this, we will tell the world and we'll see how they perceive us. And, you know, we. Wanna be honest and transparent and wanna make sure you get the exact same hotel room for a cheaper price.

Exact same apartment for a cheaper price. And why wouldn't you take it, ? Yeah, it's the same place. Nobody's loyal to any company. I mean, unless, I don't know if it's a corporate sponsored or whatever, but people, I mean, I care about $10. I mean, if it's $10 less, even though I can afford it, I don't really need to too much think about it. But still I can say, oh, $10 less I'll take this. The same flight ticket, $10 less. I'll take this. Yeah. So that's the still mindset.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. I love that. If everything goes well, what's the long-term vision for cover?  

Ritesh: So eventually we want to become a one-stop shop. So right now we want to perfect our accommodation offering, of course, but we want to get into flights.

I told you next winter, hopefully go into flights. We wanna get into activity, selling attractions, ticket selling. We want to go into car rentals, we wanna go into luggage storage. And then eventually we wanna be able to combine them all together. So right now, you don't have to wander around. Hopefully in the coming.

You just come to pad.com, you book your kind of place, you wanna book whatever budget you have. You book it right here, but then you still go to book flight somewhere else. Yeah. Book attraction somewhere else. So the idea would be to slowly and slowly expand our reach in the travel ecosystem and try to offer everything from discovery.

To the stay and to the motivation to go back again. So the entire process we would like to offer and compile it together. So that's what the funding will go into. Also, it'll start to expand our teams, that offices, you know, give us the flight as first milestone, and then go into other milestone in the coming years.

Julian: Yeah. That's incredible. I would like to ask this question one from selfish reasons, but also for my audience . What what books or people have influenced you the most, whether it was early in your career or now?  

Ritesh: People who influenced me the most? Oh, like the person name or you mean what exactly? Influenced.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. So, the, either the type of book or the book title or the person in your life, whether it's mentor or per, or family member, who knows, people have all kinds of influence partners.  

Ritesh: Yeah, Well, well early, so not too much going back in my history. But I do come from a very humble background. Very small little village. Thousand people in the middle of nowhere in, in India. So I always aspire to, to see the other part of the world and I thought it was really hard because family was not able to support that. But I changed that going to New Delhi. I went there at 17 and I got this company going, and then I thought, we'll, just.

All over India. So I did, and then I thought maybe one day I'll go out of India. So I did go to maybe Asia. I did. So eventually everything just kept on happening and the people involved in the process, I mean you, the flats for example, they motivated me. They're like, you know, we have been backpacking in Southeast Asia for six months.

So the idea was not to be where I am today. Yeah. The idea. Just a step forward. Okay. They saw South Saudi Asia and they loved it. I wanna see it too. But what that really helped me is to meet people, stay in different places, and then give an idea to really build this company. They always kind of like consequence.

Yeah. So I would say these all put together has really influenced and yeah, I mean, I do read books. I mean, we have a lot of. Indian write good writers Robin Sherma is a good writer. I'd like to read this books. You know, I like Peter Theo. I read his book, wrote a nice one, the Startup zero one.

And yeah, I like to read books that are more like, I like to relate it to business and to what I do every day. People find that kind of, not necessarily great, but I don't really like to read non-fiction books or fiction books. I just wanna be into this. Sort of like travel tech oriented sort of. Yeah.

There's so much to read, so much to learn in travel tech. Yeah. There's so much happening, you know, so you're gonna be staying completely updated with what's going on. Yeah. So yeah I, I don't know. I can't point a person who really helped me to just get their like mentor and never really had a mentor. I would say , , it's a lot of people, a lot of people around the world, you know, traveling to all these hun you know, hundreds of countries and then, you know, just over the span of five, six years, you just meet a lot of people.

And this is me. Meeting people is just like a wonderful thing to do. And realizing and traveling is so wonder. Yeah you get to experience things you would never experience in a normal way. So I think it's it's a mix of love things, but can't really point at one person. No, not really.  

Julian: Yeah yeah. No, I love that. I think the being the pre, being present minded and taking a step forward, I love that sentiment because, you know, it definitely, Leads to compounding positive effects, you know, and things that you learn. It really does. And it's also very enriching, you know, and maybe it, it seems to flow well with your personality type.

So, I know Ritesh at the top of our show here and I'm so thankful to learn from your experience and what you're doing in travel and kind of where your philosophy is in terms of building is really exciting to, you know, probably other founders who wanna be, you know, Cash conscious about, you know, what is a simple, efficient way to build and how to reach, you know, loyalty without having to you know, invest so much into external ads and things along that nature. So, you know, I hope you enjoyed yourself and Ritesh, thank you so much for being on the show.  

Ritesh: Yeah, thanks. Julian was really wonderful. I mean, you do understand our industry a bit, so I really enjoy the conversation. Happy to share. I mean, I wanna share more likes of people who are into this this industry and I would like to tell them more.

Yeah. You know, with these talks and there'll be a lot more talks in coming period. Yeah. You know, we are ready to go in there and Christmas around the corner. So we are definitely excited. Thank you so much for digging the time. It was wonderful talking to you. And I think I was able to provide you know, the information you wanted to have, but if I missed something, write me and I'll let you know more.

Julian: Yeah. Tell us your LinkedIns your, your LinkedIns, your Twitters, obviously cuddlynest.com is where we can find you, but outside of that, where can we be a part of the goal and the mission? .  

Ritesh: Sure. I mean, we have, we search for CuddlyNest or Instagram on Twitter, on Facebook, it, CuddlyNest. That's all there.

Do com slash cuddliness, Instagram, Twitter, CuddlyNest you know, LinkedIn, same. You can find us there on CuddlyNest. It's just all the platforms out there. You'll find us there. I'll send you links to all of them and if you wanna post it there completely fine.

Julian:  Absolutely. We'll, Absolutely. Robert, thank you so much and I hope enjoy the rest of your day and when we have hopefully maybe a volume two of these episodes, we'll have you back on.  

Ritesh: Super excited. Thanks, Julian.  

Julian: Of course.

‍