The Co-founder Who Made Venue Hire Feel Like Booking a Hotel

In 2015, Maksim Kondratjuks had a small, ordinary problem. He needed a room. Not a hotel room, which he could have booked in about ninety seconds from his phone, but a space for a business conference. There was no ninety-second version of that. There were phone calls. There were agents standing between him and a price. There were site visits scheduled around other people's diaries. He was working in equity capital markets at the time, a world that runs on fast information, and here he was in the slow lane over something as simple as a room.

Then it happened again. He started planning his wedding and ran straight back into the same wall. Different occasion, identical friction: no way to just search venues, compare them, and book. He mentioned it to his friend Artur Stepaniak, and the conversation turned into the kind of observation that sounds obvious the second someone says it out loud. You can book a hotel online. You can book a flight, a car, a table for dinner. You could not, in any real sense, book a venue.

That gap became Tagvenue.

01 / The InsightA whole business hiding in one sentence

The best founding stories tend to be unglamorous, and this one is no exception. There was no lightning bolt, no whiteboard covered in market-size projections. There was a guy who got annoyed by the same task twice and decided the second time meant something. Kondratjuks and Stepaniak, both Lancaster University alumni, did not have a background in running companies. What they had was a problem they had personally lived, which turns out to be a more durable asset than experience.

They did the unfashionable work first. Market research. Risk assessment. Actually checking whether the gap they had spotted was a gap or just their own bad luck. Accommodation had entire industries of booking platforms. Venues had agents and phone trees. The asymmetry was the opportunity, and it was sitting in plain sight because it was boring enough that nobody with a finance CV was supposed to care about it.

02 / The SignalWhen strangers arrive before the marketing does

Early on, something happened that most founders spend years and budgets chasing. People started finding Tagvenue without being told to. No ad spend, no growth team, no launch playbook, and organizers were still turning up and using the thing. For a two-sided marketplace, which is one of the harder business shapes to get moving, that is close to a miracle.

Kondratjuks read it correctly. Organic pull, before you have paid for a single click, is the market telling you it wants what you built. Plenty of founders would have kept their heads down and pushed their own plan. He noticed the pull and leaned into it, which is a quieter kind of discipline than it sounds.

03 / The BuildFrom one city to six countries

Tagvenue did not begin as a global ambition dressed up in a deck. It began as a UK venue search engine solving one city's version of the problem. That restraint is worth noting. Scale is mostly a rumor until you have solved the core problem once and solved it well. Get the matching right, earn the trust of venue owners on one side and organizers on the other, and the model becomes something you can copy into a new market rather than reinvent.

So they copied it. Ireland. The United States. Canada. Australia. Singapore. The team grew past eighty people. The catalog grew past twenty thousand verified spaces. And the monthly audience settled into the region of seven hundred thousand organizers looking for somewhere to hold a meeting, a party, a launch, a wedding of their own.

04 / The RoleThe title kept changing, the job did not

Kondratjuks has worn a few labels along the way, from co-founder to Chief Product Officer, and depending on where you look you will see him described as CEO too. The labels matter less than the work underneath them, which has stayed remarkably constant: make booking a venue feel simple. Everything a product leader does at a marketplace flows from that single sentence. What supply to trust. How to verify it. How to match a nervous first-time organizer with a room they will not regret.

His route into product is a decent argument against the idea that you need to start in product to be good at it. Before Tagvenue he lived in spreadsheets and stock exchanges, including capital markets work tied to Russia, the CIS and Mongolia. That background is not a detour from what he does now. It is the reason he was allergic to the friction in the first place. Finance teaches you to hate a slow, opaque process, and venue hire in 2015 was nothing but slow, opaque process.

05 / The TakeawaySolve your own problem, then copy-paste

If you are looking for something to steal from Kondratjuks, it is not a growth hack. It is a posture. He treated his own recurring annoyance as data. He did the boring diligence before he did the exciting launch. He watched for demand he had not manufactured and believed it when it showed up. And he expanded only after the first version genuinely worked, city by city rather than continent by continent.

There is a version of this story that gets told as a tidy myth about vision. The truer version is smaller and more useful. A man needed a room, twice, and refused to accept that finding one had to be hard. Ten years and six countries later, a lot of other people no longer have to make those phone calls either.