Komby in 14 Steps: Step 2: Make It Easy, when the world crushes those who don’t have time

It's eleven forty-five. Lunch service has just ended. The owner is standing behind the counter, apron still tied, hands red from dishwater. He has thirteen minutes before afternoon prep starts.

He doesn't have thirteen minutes. He has three.

I've seen that face a hundred times. That fatigue that isn't from one bad night but from a decade spent on your feet. And every time, someone (a salesperson, a consultant, some bloke in a shirt) explains why he should "go digital." Why he needs twelve tools. Why he should spend forty-five minutes on onboarding on a Sunday evening.

The owner closes the tab. He goes back to the kitchen. Tomorrow, maybe. Not tomorrow either.

It's exhaustion on the ground. And me, standing on the other side (sometimes as a provider, sometimes as a developer, sometimes as a friend), I felt something tighten in my chest. A useful anger. A determination too, because I'd sometimes been part of the problem, and I refused to carry on.

Make It Easy was born from that anger. And that determination. And the visceral need to no longer be the one who complicates the lives of people who already have no time left. Later it would become Komby's slogan, a promise, not a marketing sticker: Make It Easy, whatever your IT is.

The trial: carrying other people's complexity

Valérie, my boss at Restovisio, had taught me one simple thing.

People in the field don't want a lecture on digital. I started with restaurants, then shops, then the service sector: what they want is for you to make their lives simpler. Or leave them alone.

I spent years knocking on doors, seeing hundreds of kitchens, hearing the same sentence rewritten a hundred ways:

"Alexandre, I have two minutes. Tell me what you want."

Two minutes. Not forty-five. Not a twelve-step tutorial.

When I founded Digital CHR, that rule was still there, and I forgot it anyway under the volume. Hundreds of clients. Publishing done by hand. Tills that talked to nothing. Calls at eleven at night because a site had crashed, restaurant in service, shop open, office in a rush. Two minutes for them. All night for me.

And the complexity didn't stay with the client. It got into my head. User journeys, bugs, requests that contradicted each other. Layers on layers, like stacked plates that eventually tip over.

One evening, a client in Lyon rings me. No long speech. A problem. He wanted something specific, and the software didn't do it. Or did it badly. Or buried it too deep in the menus.

We fixed it. We added what was needed. The next day, he had the service he'd asked for. Done.

That's how it should work. The software progresses with the clients, not the other way round. Mine to listen, ship, simplify. Not theirs to learn my architecture.

Software is never perfect. Never finished. That's why, later, on Komby.io, I chose the infinity symbol. Not for looks. To remember that the product moves with the people who use it, round after round.

I chose the fight like a wrestling match, simplify, strip out, win this round against complexity.

What I saw in others, and what Komby had to do differently

The problem went beyond my product: it was the whole market.

Around me, competitors stacked tools. One app for bookings. One for the till. One for reviews. One for the site. One for CRM. Each "essential." Each with its onboarding, its password, its invoice. The client still had two minutes, and fifteen tabs.

I watched it the way a fighter watches an opponent: not to copy, to beat it another way. If the field has no time, the answer is removal, not another layer on top.

I started stripping what the market loved to keep. Useless screens. Three-level menus. "Advanced settings" nobody opens. Notifications that scream for nothing. Fifteen-field forms when three will do.

Less jargon too. No "onboarding." No "workflow." Words the field understands, restaurant, shop, office: bookings, appointments, reviews, site, clients.

And less stolen time. An independent shouldn't spend an hour configuring a tool. Twenty minutes, max. Ideally five. Otherwise I'm the problem, not them.

The Lyon client rang me back the next day: "OK. It's good."

Three words. No tutorial. No training. Exactly what he wanted, the service, nothing else.

That invisible win made me clench my fist at the screen, not tears: pride. Proof the software had progressed with him. That I'd stopped crushing people. And that what I'd seen in the others (that race to one tool too many) would never be my model again.

That's where the promise was born. Not a slogan stuck on afterwards. A rule of combat:

Make It Easy, whatever your IT is.

The IT is your problem. Your chaos. Your trade. Your lack of time. Yours isn't the neighbour's. Komby had to make that simple, whatever the it.

Why this title

Why this title? To hold the promise.

Make It Easy is the shortest way to say what Komby must be: we listen to your need, whatever your problem is. Your it. Not ours.

I composed it one evening when I'd spent eight hours redoing a journey nobody would ever see, except the rushed client who would have given up without it.

Amanda Leen sings exactly what I needed to hear, not as CEO, as a creator who'd spent the day lightening others' burden and forgot to lighten his own. Make it easy. Two words. Not "our platform unifies your data flows." Just: breathe.

Writing the title myself was marking a pause, not surrender. Recognising that simplification is a daily fight against pride, against a market that sells "all-in-one" that never is, against that inner voice that says show everything you can do, not a project you finish once and for all.

Sharing this track was also explaining the vision. Amazon's customer obsession. Apple's tech rigour. Red Bull's marketing. And, ahead of us, Starlink-scale mass adoption for mobile and networks, when a tool becomes so simple it spreads because it serves, not because you force it.

This is a standard. Komby must listen the way Amazon listens to the customer. Build with Apple's precision. Carry a promise as clean as a Red Bull slogan. And aim for wide adoption (Starlink will conquer the world on your mobiles tomorrow) because the field hasn't got time to learn fifteen pieces of software.

Shopkeepers. Service-sector trades. Restaurants, offices, nightclubs. All those who don't have thirteen minutes and are forced to find forty-five. The title is for them. To hold the line: Make It Easy, whatever your IT is.

Letting it land

The Komby album documents my trials. Make It Easy documents this one: the obsession of not adding weight to people already under pressure.

It's the founder's victory when he simplifies. In the middle, a promise that became a brand slogan:

Make It Easy, whatever your IT is.

I've told other fragments of this life on France Je Te Quitte, the departures, the exiles, the impossible choices. The story of Digital CHR starts in the same place: a bloke already through radio, media and CHR sales, who still remembers the kitchen field of his youth (sixteen to nineteen) looking at a client's POS software and thinking we can do better. Not to scale. To win the round against complexity.

Komby grew in the shadow of that obsession. One place.

Make It Easy. Two words. A battle mark. A promise. Step 2 of an album where music always translates lived experience, it never precedes it.

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Alexandre Auger, CEO of Komby

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