They built their own solution. That was the problem.

Curis had built their own solution. That was the problem.

Not built in the sense of a formal engineering project with a roadmap and a release date. Built in the way that capable, resourceful teams build things when the available tools don't quite fit: incrementally, pragmatically, one workaround at a time, until the workarounds had become the system.

By early 2024, Curis was running their Copenhagen operations on a combination of a custom Airtable base, three Zapier automations, a shared Notion workspace, and a Slack channel that had become, by default, the primary coordination layer for fourteen technicians across the Danish capital. It worked. It had always worked. That was the argument for keeping it.

Lena Marcussen, Curis's head of operations, eventually found the flaw in that argument.

"'It works' is a very low bar," she says. "The question is whether it works well enough to scale, and whether it works well enough to survive the people who built it."

The architecture that couldn't outlive its builders

When clever becomes fragile

The Airtable base at the centre of Curis's operation was, by any measure, impressive. It had been built over two years by a former operations analyst who had since left the company, and it did things that off-the-shelf software couldn't do — at least, not in 2022 when it was built. Custom views for each technician role. Automated job assignment logic based on proximity and expertise tags. A reporting layer that pulled data across multiple tables and produced a weekly summary without human intervention.

It also had no documentation. The logic lived in the fields, the formulas, and the institutional memory of the two people who had worked most closely with it. When one of them left in late 2023, the base became something the team could use but no longer fully understand.

"We were afraid to change anything," Lena says. "Every formula was a black box. We didn't know what would break if we touched it."

A system that cannot be safely modified is a system that cannot grow. Curis had built something sophisticated and painted themselves into a corner with it.

The Slack problem

The Slack channel — originally created for urgent communications — had expanded to fill every gap the formal system left. Job updates, parts requests, schedule changes, client feedback, compliance reminders: all of it flowed through the same channel, undifferentiated, searchable only if you remembered roughly when something was said and by whom.

Lena ran an audit in January 2024. She picked a random device from the fleet and tried to reconstruct its complete service history using only the tools Curis had in place. It took her two and a half hours and involved reading through four months of Slack messages, cross-referencing three Airtable records, and a phone call to a technician who happened to remember a detail that wasn't written down anywhere.

"Two and a half hours for one device," she says. "We had two hundred and sixty devices."

The decision to stop building and start using

What it took to let go

For a team that had invested heavily in building its own system, switching to a product felt like an admission. Lena is candid about this.

"There's a version of the conversation where you tell yourself that your needs are too specific, your operation too particular, for an off-the-shelf product to handle. We told ourselves that version for about eighteen months longer than we should have."

What changed her mind was a product walk-through in which she spent most of the time not asking how Mediora worked, but checking whether it could do the specific things their Airtable base did. By the end of the call, the answer to most of her questions was yes — and the things Mediora couldn't replicate exactly were things she realised, in the light of that conversation, she didn't actually need.

"We had built complexity because we could, not because we needed it. Mediora forced us to ask which parts of our system were solving real problems and which parts were just impressive."

The migration

Curis migrated their device records, contract data, and service history over four weeks in the spring of 2024. They ran the old system in parallel for the first two weeks, then cut over completely.

The Airtable base still exists. Nobody has opened it since May.

What changed, and what didn't

The things that changed were operational. Job routing is now handled systematically rather than through the Slack channel. Device records are complete and accessible to every technician without a phone call. Compliance documentation — a growing priority under Danish healthcare regulation — is generated from service records rather than assembled manually before audits.

The things that didn't change were the things that had always been Curis's actual advantage: the technical depth of the team, the relationships with clients, the speed of response that had built their reputation in the Copenhagen market. The software hadn't given them those things. It had stopped getting in the way of them.

Lena's summary of the first six months is characteristically direct: "We're doing the same work with less friction. I know that sounds modest. It doesn't feel modest from the inside."

The Slack channel is now used for what Slack is for. The audit that took two and a half hours in January 2024 takes, as of the last time Lena checked, about forty seconds.

The thing they got wrong

They underestimated how much the team would enjoy having a system that simply worked without needing to be maintained.

"The technicians had spent two years being careful around the Airtable base," Lena says. "Careful about what they clicked, careful about how they entered data, because everyone had stories about things breaking. That carefulness had become a background tax on every interaction with the system."

The carefulness went away in the first month. It was, Lena says, the change nobody had predicted and everyone noticed.

"A system you trust is a different object than a system you're cautious around. It takes up less space in your head."