Three years knocking on doors
It was raining that morning, I remember. A restaurant in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, the window fogged up, the owner in his apron staring at me through the door like I was yet another salesman come to steal ten minutes of his time.
That was Restovisio. Three years knocking on doors. Three years selling video subscriptions to restaurant owners who couldn’t understand why they needed to exist online. The company’s slogan — « Go there before you go there » — was ahead of its time. Valérie, the boss, had this vision: film restaurants to make people want to visit. Simple, elegant. But in 2013, convincing a chef that his dining room deserved a camera was a daily battle.
Twenty rejections a day. Sometimes thirty. And then one yes, snatched between lunch and dinner service, standing in a kitchen that smelled of veal stock. I’ve kept every single one of those yeses in my memory.
That’s where I met Alain, Sébastien, Adèle. Colleagues who became friends. In 2026, ten years later, we still talk. Those bonds don’t form in air-conditioned open offices — they’re forged in the field, when you share the same struggles, the same slammed doors, the same cold coffees drunk standing between appointments.
And then there was Valérie. A straight-shooting boss. Demanding, but fair. The kind of person who pushes you without breaking you. Three years under her taught me something no school ever could: restaurant owners don’t want digital. They want to be left alone to cook. Whoever understands that has already won half the battle.
The day everything collapsed
2016. The divorce hits like a guillotine blade.
Twelve years together. Two children. And suddenly, nothing holds. The lawyers, the proceedings, the territory exit ban, the court hearings — all of that running parallel to a job that requires you to smile at strangers eight hours a day.
I held on for a few months. And then one morning, I understood I couldn’t anymore. Not that Restovisio was doing badly — quite the opposite. The team was solid, the portfolio was running. But my head wasn’t there. I was a ghost pretending.
So I resigned.
No plan B. No savings. No safety net. The kind of decision everyone calls madness — until the day it works, and then they call it courage.
The risk of ending up on the street was real. I weighed every euro. Every meal counted. And in the middle of that void, an idea was growing.
People are photographing their plates
It’s a detail. The kind of thing everyone sees without really looking.
2016. Instagram is barely starting to explode in France. And everywhere — in bistros, brasseries, Michelin-starred restaurants — the same strange ritual: the phone comes out before the fork. Customers photograph their dish. They post it. They tag the restaurant.
At the time, it was still mocked. « Look at this idiot taking a photo of his steak. » Waiters rolled their eyes. Chefs found it vulgar.
I saw something else.
I saw content. Free. Spontaneous. Authentic. Dozens of customers doing, without knowing it, the marketing work the restaurant wasn’t doing. And I asked myself a simple question: if customers are already posting, what happens when the restaurant does it itself — every day, professionally, consistently?
I looked around. Nobody was doing it. Big chains had agencies at €5,000 per month. Independent restaurants — 90% of the market — had absolutely nothing. Not a single post. Not a single story. A desert.
The first client
I had no office, no website, no business card. Just a phone, three years of Restovisio contacts in my head, and a proposition nobody else was making: I’ll post for you, every day, on all your social channels, so you exist online without thinking about it.
Automated posts. Tools like Buffer. Professional photos. Clockwork consistency. The first restaurant owner who said yes didn’t know he was becoming Digital CHR’s patient zero.
Within three months, his Instagram page went from 200 to 2,000 followers. His neighbour asked how. Then the restaurant across the street. Then the whole neighbourhood.
Word of mouth in the restaurant industry spreads like wildfire. Chefs talk to each other at the market in the morning. Waiters change restaurants every six months and carry good addresses with them. I never needed advertising. The hospitality ecosystem came to find me.
First France. Then the United Kingdom, where the market was even more virgin, even more hungry for simple solutions.
The coding nights
What nobody saw was what happened after midnight.
When the posts were scheduled, when the clients were asleep, when the world was running in slow motion — I was learning to code. Not in a €10,000 bootcamp. Not with a mentor. Alone, facing a screen, with YouTube tutorials and Stack Overflow as my only teachers.
JavaScript. HTML. CSS. Then Node.js. Then React. Line by line, error by error, night after night.
Why? Because I could see the limits. Manually publishing with Buffer for 10 clients works. For 30, it’s hell. For 100, it’s impossible. I needed to automate. I needed to build something. A tool. A product.
Between 2016 and 2019, between flights, between the travels that kept me alive, between the clients piling up — I learned to build what nobody would build for me.
It’s that silent obsession that planted the seed of Komby. But at the time, I didn’t know it yet. I was just a broken man coding at night to solve a problem he was living during the day.
Entrepreneurship doesn’t start with an idea
You don’t start a company because you have an epiphany in the shower on a Tuesday morning. You start a company because you spent three years in the field understanding a problem, lost everything, and no longer have enough comfort to feel afraid.
Digital CHR was born from a divorce, a portfolio built at Restovisio, a boss who taught me the field, and a dead-simple observation: people take photos of their food, but restaurants post nothing.
Sometimes the best ideas are right in front of you. You just need to be low enough to see them.
