Jeremy Weisz

How Kelsey Recht Self-funded Her MVP to Fix The Broken Events Booking Space and Went on to Raise $10m in VC Funding

Kelsey Recht is an online media entrepreneur and the Founder and CEO of VenueBook, an event venue booking platform that makes it faster and easier to book events. 

Kelsey has an MBA in Marketing and Entrepreneurship from Northwestern University - Kellogg School of Management. She founded VenueBook in 2010 and has since raised $10 million in Venture Capital funding.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

  • Kelsey Recht shares a fun fact about herself that not many people know
  • Kelsey talks about the target customer her software, VenueBook, serves and the core problem it solves
  • Kelsey explains how coming from a background in finance drove her to start VenueBook
  • How Kelsey funded and built her MVP with no technical background
  • Kelsey discusses the process of getting her first customers
  • How Kelsey raised capital after bootstrapping her MVP, and the biggest lessons she learned along the way
  • The impact of COVID-19 on VenueBook and the event industry in general
  • Where to learn more about Kelsey Recht and VenueBook

In this episode…

The event industry had been facing a significant problem: the lack of real-time availability data to enable reliable online venue booking. Online media entrepreneur, Kelsey Recht, saw this problem ten years ago, and she decided to found her venue management software, VenueBook, to solve it. 

From a self-funded $10,000 MVP to managing over 2200 venues and raising $10 million in VC funding, Kelsey has only continued to grow and develop her platform, and she isn't planning to stop anytime soon. 

In this episode of The Big Break Software Podcast, Geordie Wardman interviews Kelsey Recht about the success of her event venue booking platform, VenueBook. She breaks down how she built her MVP to its software big break, the important lessons she learned along the way, and her strategies for making it through the COVID-19 setbacks.