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 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, a guy 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 not laziness. It's exhaustion. 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 continue.

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.

The trial: carrying other people's complexity

Valérie, my boss at Restovisio, had taught me one thing: people in the field — restaurants first, then the retail and service-sector businesses I learned to serve — don't want you to explain why digital matters. They want you to make their lives simpler. Or leave them alone.

I spent years knocking on doors. Seeing hundreds of kitchens. Hearing the same sentence, reformulated a hundred ways: "Alexandre, I have two minutes. Tell me what you want."

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

Then Digital CHR. Hundreds of clients. Manual publishing. POS software that talked to nothing. Clients calling me at eleven at night because their site showed an error — restaurant in service, shop open, office in a rush.

Complexity piled up. Not only for them — in me too. My head buzzed with user journeys, bugs, contradictory requests. I felt like I was adding layers on layers, like stacked plates that eventually tip over.

One evening, a client in Lyon sent me a screenshot. "Where do I click to see my reviews?" On my screen, it was obvious. On his, on a phone, between two services, with tired fingers — it wasn't obvious at all.

I sat in front of that screenshot for a long time. Not to fix a button. To ask myself why I'd let that complexity exist. Why I'd accepted that "normal" means fifteen open tabs, fifteen passwords, fifteen invoices for three tools that don't know each other.

That night, something cracked in me. Not the product — me. And I chose the fight: simplify, remove, win this round against complexity.

What I stripped from myself by simplifying

Simplifying for others is also simplifying yourself.

I started removing. Screens. Three-level menus. "Advanced settings" nobody opens. Notifications that scream for nothing. Fifteen-field forms when three are enough.

Each removal was a warrior's victory. Not only for the user — for me. Less code to maintain. Less support at three in the morning. Less useless weight on shoulders already in combat.

I removed the jargon. No "onboarding." No "workflow." Words the field understands — restaurant, shop, office: reservations, appointments, reviews, site, clients.

I removed the time. An independent — restaurant, shop, office — shouldn't spend an hour configuring a tool. Twenty minutes, max. Ideally five. If that's not the case, I'm the problem, not them.

The Lyon client replied the next day: "OK. It's good." Three words. That's all he wanted. Not a tutorial. Not a call. OK. It's good.

That invisible victory made me clench my fist in front of the screen — not tears, fighter's pride. Because it was proof I'd stopped crushing. That I'd chosen to remove weight — his and mine — and win that round.

Why I had to release this track

Make It Easy is not a marketing song. It's a breath after the rush.

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. Eight hours to move a button. Shorten a label. Remove a useless step.

At midnight, head still full of wireframes and screenshots, I couldn't stop anymore. My body was exhausted but my brain kept spinning. It had to come out some way other than code.

The track came soft. Almost soothing. A tempo that drops. A melody that says: breathe. It's simpler now.

Amanda Leen sings exactly what I needed to hear — not as CEO, as an exhausted fighter 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.

Composing was marking a warrior's pause — not surrender. Recognizing that simplification isn't a project you finish — it's 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.

Sharing this track was extending that breath to those living the same overload. Shopkeepers. Service-sector trades. Restaurants, offices, nightclubs. All those who don't have thirteen minutes and are forced to find forty-five.

Free the mind

The Komby album documents my trials. Make It Easy documents this one: the obsession — sometimes unhealthy — of not adding weight to already bent shoulders.

It's not a UX lesson. It's a combat journal — the founder's anger when he complicates, and the founder's victory when he removes.

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 guy 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 — what was to come — grew in the shadow of that obsession. One place. Not fifteen tabs. Not fifteen passwords. The promise that everything I'd build would respect the time of those who don't have any.

But the track didn't invent the approach. It translated it. The lived experience was already there — complexity, anger, determination. I composed because my head couldn't hold anymore. Music emptied what I was carrying; then I kept building. Not the other way around.

Make It Easy. Two words. A musical battle mark. Step 2 of a quasi-autobiographical album where music always translates lived experience — it never precedes it.

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Alexandre Auger — CEO of Komby

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