PlanSpace — a SaaS built for the messy reality of running an event venue.

The event venue industry is bigger and messier than most people realise. Wedding halls, hotels, conference centres, banquet rooms, restaurants with private dining — every venue is essentially a small operations business with high-touch sales, custom packages per event, contract negotiation, vendor coordination, and a calendar that cannot double-book.

Before PlanSpace, a typical mid-sized venue ran its business across a website contact form, a spreadsheet for the lead list, a separate calendar tool, a CRM that wasn't built for events, an email template library copy-pasted from a Google Doc, and an accounts package that didn't know an event from an invoice. Leads dropped through the cracks. Bookings got missed. Staff spent more time reconciling tools than running events.

Three specific problems we set out to solve:

• Lead capture lived outside the booking system. By the time a lead became a booking, half the context was lost in email threads.
• Every venue had a slightly different workflow. Generic CRMs forced standardisation that nobody wanted; bespoke builds were too expensive.
• Online presence was an afterthought. Venues had brochure websites that didn't drive enquiries — let alone bookings.

"We don't need another CRM. We need software that understands what an event actually is — from the first enquiry to the final invoice." — Operator interview, third venue we shadowed

This was a 0→1 product, with a small co-founding team, against an industry whose existing software actively annoys its users. The temptation in that situation is to rush to wireframes. We didn't.

I spent the first six weeks doing field research — sitting in three venues across booking conversations, contract sign-offs, vendor coordination calls, and the post-event wrap-up. I built a workflow map per venue, then layered them to find the genuinely shared structure underneath each operator's quirks. That map became the IA.

Then we sequenced the build in three phases:

• Phase 1 — Lead capture + enquiry pipeline. The most-broken part of the workflow. Get this right first; everything else hangs off it.
• Phase 2 — Booking, calendar, and event tracking. The operational core. Cannot ship a product that double-books a wedding.
• Phase 3 — Automation, templates, and customizable workflows. The differentiator. This is where bespoke meets SaaS.

PlanSpace's users are venue managers, sales coordinators, and event planners. They are not power users of software. They use a phone in one hand and the laptop in the other. They want the screen to tell them what to do next.

That meant the design system had to optimise for two things: clarity at a glance (what's the next action?) and forgiving inputs (because data entry happens between phone calls). We built ~60 canonical components, dual-density (comfortable for screen, dense for the booking calendar), with a token architecture that meant theming a venue's customer-facing booking page took minutes, not days.

A venue's week is not 100 different tasks; it's four heavy ones repeated. Get those four right and the rest of the product can be plain.

This wasn't a "design lead at a startup" role. It was a co-founding role with design ownership.

Illustrative numbers — verified figures will be swapped in before publishing.