Cometly marketing strategy - from 0 to $54k revenue per month in the first month (9 min read)

Cometly – a third-party software for tracking, analyzing, and managing Facebook ads. Thanks to Cometly marketing strategy and a successful launch, they generated over $53.8k revenue in the first month, and reached $646k annual recurring revenue since many clients paid upfront for the whole year.

?Strategy & Tools

Cometly History Timeline


  • 2012 – Matt Pattoli and Grant Cooper founded Social Vantage, a digital advertising agency that served over 1,000 clients. In 2019, it was acquired by a larger agency.
  • 2020 – the founders have started their own affiliate marketing activities but had problems with trackers. They came up with a solution that allowed them to generate over $1,000,000 in revenue in 7 months.
  • Pre-launch – setting up an affiliate program, beginning cooperation with an affiliate marketer
  • Apr 21, 2021 – $147.5k generated on the launch day
  • Apr 25, 2021 – by the end of the launch week, another $103.5k flowed in.

Who founded Cometly?

Cometly was co-founded by Matt Pattoli and Grant Cooper. They were both Facebook advertisers with the 10-year experience in the world of Facebook ads.

What is Cometly?

Cometly is a software made for the purpose of tracking and managing advertisements on Facebook. It provides the customers with the real-time ad analytics and aim at optimizing their profits.

How was Cometly created?

Pattoli and Grant’s previous company, Social Vantage got bought by some bigger agency in 2019, and the guys had problems with Facebook trackers, so they thought about their own solution.

Solving problems for yourself

Cometly founders encountered a real problem – they couldn’t scale their affiliate marketing activities past $5,000/day. After identifying that the problem is within the available tracking systems, they decided to find a workaround. They started using Excel sheets with their own system that turned out to be providing much better insight into their activities. These spreadsheets then became the foundation for building a similar solution for others.

Affiliate marketers

Being into the industry, Pattoli and Cooper understood the value of working with affiliate marketers – which are marketers that have the know-how of online advertising and promote your offer for you, getting paid for their effects. This is why they decided not only to promote the product themselves and in online directories but also with other marketers working on a commission.

There are affiliates that are specialized in different activities. Some are online advertisers, who buy ads on Facebook and other platforms and optimize them for conversions and turn that into a profit of both sides. Some build mailing lists for various niches and leverage them with lucrative offers, while others rely on getting traffic with SEO and promoting the offers there. There are also affiliates with personal brands that can do a mixture of all these activities.

Cometly Affiliate program

Affiliates go to affiliate networks to find offers that seem interesting to promote – Cometly used Rewardful for that. A good offer pays well but also has a high potential to be interesting for the audience.

According to Cometly affiliate program pays 20% on each sale coming through the affiliate. The cookies are set to 60 days, so if anyone gets exposed to the ad, clicks it, and pays for the plan within 2 months, they’ll get the commission. It’s paid out over $50.

This is an interesting offer as the product is SaaS and the commission is paid for each purchase – depending on if the buyer pays per month, or on annual basis. The affiliates were likely to promote the annual offer more, as they could get more revenue upfront and didn’t deal with Cometly’s customer retention.

Cometly affiliate program – Picking affiliates

It’s common to put offers up on affiliate networks, but Cometly affiliate program approached few affiliates that had already built their audiences. They could leverage marketers that already had a community of potential buyers. Promoting the product in front of people who can actually buy it is like a shortcut to getting conversions.

Cometly marketing strategy – Targeting

Cometly marketing strategy is based on a well-defined target audience – it is aimed at anyone who advertises on Facebook, but they also position it to Shopify users who also happen to do that. Landing page visitors immediately find out that the product is for them, and they are led to buying the product.

Knowing the numbers

$54k of MRR sounds great but was it that hard to achieve? Let’s break it down.

The plans are $199 or $299 paid monthly or $159 and $239 paid annually. That means they only had to lock-in less than 277-180 users, depending on which plan was chosen most frequently. On the launch day, they cashed-in $147.5k. Assuming all plans were the basic ones and all of them were annual, only 77 people would have to make a purchase to reach this number.

On the other hand, assuming all users came through the affiliate offer, that would cost $10,000 per month to get to that MRR, or about $29,000 to lock the ARR on the first day. When working with the affiliates directly, they could also agree upon some baseline payment.

Cometly marketing strategy – Webinar

The launch happened through a webinar organized by an affiliate, on which the Cometly team could introduce the platform and offer a special „founding user” offer only for the attendees. That offer was open for one week before it expired.

Free trial

To get the value of the platform, users can sign up for a 14-day free trial. However, when signing up, you have to provide all the details and a credit card number. That means less interested users are likely to not bother with the trial while those who get hyped up for using the product will go through all the potential blockers at the initial step. Once in the platform, they only have to not resign from renewing the subscription in order to become a paying user. Of course, people don’t like such mechanisms, but it still works.

Tools
Affiliate network – Rewardly
Digital advertising

?Psychology

Social proof

Cometly’s website has a whole section named „Customer Success” that gathers all testimonials. This is a part of Cometly marketing strategy, which creates the feeling that many people are using the product and are happy with the results. This ensures potential customers in paying for it.

FOMO

The initial offer was limited-time which is one of the oldest sales tricks that play on people’s fear of missing out on a great offer, but it wasn’t that intrusive. Usually, the offers last until the end of a sales webinar, but this time, they had a week to think about it. That FOMO still contributed to the sales on the first day.

Authority bias

People have a tendency to attribute greater accuracy to the opinion of an authority figure, such as an influencer. Cometly has been created by marketers with a solid track record of successful campaigns. Likely, thanks to the Cometly affiliate program, the affiliates that had built communities and promoted the product were also seen as authorities in their fields

Charm pricing

All plans’ prices end up with 9. This is the so-called charm pricing that makes the readers feel it’s a better value.

Default effect

When presented with pre-set choices, people tend to choose the one which is already set. This is the case for Cometly’s free trial.

?Window of Opportunity

Cometly has a great product-market fit – it was created by marketers, for marketers. Thanks to that, there’s this initial alignment on what it is and how to position the benefits. What’s the most interesting is how affiliates can drive your sales up while keeping your advertising budget well under control. They are getting you more sales? You both get more revenue. There’s no blind guessing and the cost per acquisition won’t ever exceed the set 20% – unless they do something extra, which they don’t.

When launching a product, it’s best to calculate the pricing well. With Cometly marketing strategy, they only had to sell it to less than 300 users that paid monthly and less than 100 who paid annually. Of course, with SaaS there’s all the science of user retention, but when talking acquisition – affiliate marketing seems to be working just right – if you know how to make an offer and have a product-market fit.

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