Stagent and Artwin join forces for the future of bookings

Two years into building Stagent, I started reaching out to my competitors. Not to size them up. Just to say hi.

Marlon de Graaf was one of them. He runs Artwin, the market leader in Dutch booking software with over 200 agencies on their platform. We grabbed coffee. We talked.

What kept me coming back to those conversations was something I rarely find: Marlon understands both tech and the industry. Most people I talk to are one or the other. They either know booking agencies inside out but treat software as a necessary evil. Or they're pure tech people who don't really get why a rider matters. Marlon gets both.

We kept in touch. Low key. No agenda. Just two people building in the same space, comparing notes.

At some point, those casual chats became more serious.

From competitors to partners

I started Stagent out of frustration. As a DJ, I watched booking agencies drown in spreadsheets, email chains, and manual processes. There had to be a better way. So I built one.

Artwin had been solving the same problem for years, serving the majority of Dutch booking agencies. They had the relationships. They had the trust. What we had was modern technology: todays tech stack, multi-device accessibility, digital press kits, and payment processing built for how agencies actually work today.

The more Marlon and I talked, the clearer it became. We weren't really competitors. We were building toward the same future from different directions.

What this means

Together, we serve over 150 booking offices in the Netherlands alone. Our combined market share will exceed 50% of the Dutch booking market. But we're not stopping there.

We're projecting 65% growth over the next two years. More importantly, we're planning to acquire additional software platforms. The booking industry is fragmented. We intend to bring it together.

For existing Artwin clients, the transition will be seamless. They'll gain access to Stagent's features while keeping the reliability they've come to expect. For Stagent users, nothing changes except that we're now stronger.

Pablo from BENZ agency put it well: combining Stagent's technological strength with Artwin's dependability is exactly what the industry needs. When your users say that, you know you're on the right track.

Looking ahead

This isn't an exit. It's an acceleration.

I'm still deeply involved in Stagent's direction. This partnership gives us the resources and market position to build faster. To serve more agencies. To finally modernize an industry that's been stuck in the past for too long.

If you're running a booking agency on spreadsheets, or struggling with software that hasn't been updated since 2015, we should talk. The future of bookings is here.

For more details, you can read the official announcement on Stagent or the coverage on Emerce.

Building Stagent has been one of the most rewarding challenges of my career. If you're curious about the journey, I wrote about how I secured the initial funding and why I sold my previous agency to focus on products like this.