Artur Stepaniak and the quiet marketplace hiding in plain sight

In March 2015, two friends who had met years earlier at Lancaster University sat down after work and did something that sounds almost quaint now. They wrote out the risks. Neither of them had run a company. Neither had a product. What they had was a shared annoyance: there was a website to book almost everything - a hotel room, a flight, a rental car - and no reliable way to book a room for an event without walking into it first.

The two friends were Artur Stepaniak and Maksim Kondratjuks. The company they weighed on that spreadsheet became Tagvenue. Ten years later it lists venues across six countries and is used by more than a million event planners every month. Stepaniak, its CEO, still talks about the beginning the way he talks about most things - plainly, and without the mythology founders usually reach for.

"We had no prior experience in running or managing a business, but after thorough market research and a few weeks of weighing risks, we decided to take the plunge."Artur Stepaniak

A trader who stopped watching screens

Before the marketplaceStepaniak's résumé did not start in startups. After finishing a BSc in Business Studies at Lancaster in 2009, he went into markets - first as a derivatives trader at Futex, then as a proprietary trader from late 2010 until the start of 2015. It is a career built around a specific skill: sizing a bet, understanding what you can lose, and acting anyway. That instinct shows up in how he describes leaving it behind. There was no dramatic leap of faith in his telling. There was research, then a decision.

The trigger was ordinary. Kondratjuks was organising a conference at the London Stock Exchange and could not get comfortable that he was paying a fair price for the right space without visiting each option in person. Later he hit the same wall planning a wedding. When Stepaniak realised his friend was stuck on the exact problem twice, the shape of a company came into focus.

It helped that the two already trusted each other. They had known one another since Lancaster, and they went in with eyes open about how much the relationship would matter. A trader's habit of naming downside risk before upside is a useful thing to bring to a first company - it keeps the early enthusiasm honest. They did the market research, priced the risk, and only then committed. The restraint was the point.

"Immediately, we both realised that there were loads of websites for booking accommodation, but none for booking venues. The opportunity was clear."Artur Stepaniak

Growth that arrived without being invited

Most origin stories at this point pivot to a growth-hack montage. Tagvenue's does not. What the founders noticed early was stranger and, for them, more convincing than any campaign: venue owners were finding the platform and listing their spaces on their own. No advertising had told them to. That unprompted supply was the signal Stepaniak and Kondratjuks trusted most - if the people who owned the rooms were showing up uninvited, the demand on the other side was real.

The early numbersBy March 2020, five years in, the platform carried more than 8,000 listings across five countries and pulled in over 200,000 visitors a month. It kept compounding from there. Today the marketplace spans the UK, Ireland, Australia, Singapore, Canada and the United States, with roughly 18,000 verified venues and a team that grew to around a hundred people, remote-first, spread across five continents.

A two-sided marketplace is a hard thing to keep in balance. Too many venues and planners cannot find what they want; too many planners and the venues feel like a crowded, low-quality directory. The word Tagvenue keeps attaching to its listings is "verified," which is the tell for where the effort goes - not just gathering supply, but vetting it so the demand side keeps coming back. Getting that flywheel to turn across six countries, each with its own venue culture and pricing norms, is the unshowy operational work that a decade buys you.

The remote-first structure is part of the same logic. A platform that serves planners in London, Sydney and Toronto is easier to run with a team that already lives in those time zones. It is also a hiring decision as much as a logistics one - it widens the pool of people you can bring on, which matters a great deal to a founder who treats hiring as the thing most likely to make or break the company.

The part he keeps repeating

Ask Stepaniak what actually breaks companies and he does not point at markets or funding. He points inward, at the founding team. It is the piece of advice he returns to most, and he means it as a warning about the boring, human failure modes that kill startups quietly.

"It's crazy how many businesses fail mainly because of personal issues in the founding team."Artur Stepaniak

That belief has a practical twin: how you hire. Stepaniak has argued for investing in recruitment rather than settling, for keeping a seat open rather than filling it with someone who is merely okay. It is an unglamorous stance, and an expensive-sounding one, but it lines up with everything else about how he runs the company - slowly, deliberately, with an eye on what a decision costs three years out rather than three weeks out. A ten-year partnership with the same co-founder is, in his telling, the proof that it works.

There is a through-line here worth naming. The founder who insists on weighing risk before a launch is the same one who insists on patience in hiring and the same one who trusted unprompted supply over a marketing budget. In each case the move is to wait for a real signal instead of manufacturing one. It is not the flashiest way to build, and it does not generate many headlines along the way. It does tend to produce companies that are still standing ten years later.

Building for the person on the other side of the inbox

When the pandemic shut down physical events in 2020, Tagvenue built Tagvenue Virtual, having decided the existing tools for online gatherings were flat and hard to tailor. It was a reflex the company would use again: find the specific friction, then build the narrow thing that removes it.

The 2025 chapterThat reflex produced the company's clearest bet yet. On October 28, 2025, Tagvenue launched Tagvenue PRO, an AI-driven platform aimed not at planners but at the venue managers on the supply side - the people fielding hundreds of inquiries, chasing follow-ups, juggling calendars and payments. The pitch is not that AI is exciting. The pitch is that a venue manager drops fewer opportunities.

Read alongside a LeadHub analytics layer, the product is really an argument about where value sits in the marketplace. Planners were the obvious customer for years. But the venues - the supply that once showed up uninvited - are the side that keeps the whole thing liquid, and their day-to-day is a mess of missed messages and slow replies. Building for them is both a defensive move and a growth one. It is also, characteristically, aimed at a concrete headache rather than a trend, which is about the most on-brand thing Stepaniak's Tagvenue could ship for its tenth birthday.

"Venue managers juggle hundreds of details at once, from answering inquiries to closing contracts. Tagvenue PRO was created to relieve that pressure. It's an intelligent assistant that works alongside you, ensuring that no message or opportunity slips through the cracks."Artur Stepaniak

Ten years, measured out

What is striking about the arc is how little it depends on a single lucky moment. There is no viral spike, no headline raise doing the heavy lifting. There is a problem the founders felt themselves, a supply side that showed up on its own, and a decade of not rushing. Stepaniak's own framing of the aspiration is similarly grounded: keep expanding the marketplace, keep building software - AI included - that takes friction out of both sides of a booking.

It is the kind of company that is easy to underrate while it is being built and obvious in hindsight. Booking a venue online feels normal now. Someone had to decide it should be, and then spend ten years making it true.