Laura Alotaibi

Post-pitch story

Laura Alotaibi, a former teacher and a parent of multiples, started Venues N More after one too many frustrating attempts to book kids' parties. Her idea was a marketplace that made it easy to find and book party venues and services in one place. She launched it in the Dallas area and built it on Sharetribe, a popular platform for marketplace startups. The company produced a podcast and a blog, and Alotaibi was featured in local outlets as a "mompreneur" to watch. But Venues N More never grew beyond the Dallas market. Its Medium and LinkedIn updates stopped around late 2019 or early 2020, just before the pandemic shut down parties and events everywhere, and the company's LinkedIn page now says the marketplace is no longer available. Alotaibi has moved on from the venture. Two-sided marketplaces are among the hardest startups to build, because they need lots of buyers and sellers at the same time, and a local event business had the bad luck of hitting 2020. Venues N More didn't make it, but the problem it tackled is one plenty of parents will still recognize.