About
Cometa provides technological and financial tools to increase access to quality education in Mexico and Latin America.
Website
Founded
Mexico City, 2021
Company size
20–50
Total raised
$5M+
Use cases
Customer onboarding
Team onboarding
Marketing
Sales
As Cometa grew rapidly across schools in Mexico, they needed to quickly scale their 50-step manual customer onboarding process from two to hundreds of customers. Relay.app made it possible.
Mateo Creamer has a clear vision for Cometa, the Mexico City-based company he co-founded: Become the operating system of every school in Latin America. He also has a clear strategy for achieving this vision: Build things that don’t scale first, then build up systems from there. It’s a ton of effort, but it’s working. Today, Cometa’s technological and financial tools enable hundreds of private K–12 schools in Mexico to provide quality education to more students while improving their revenue operations, and they are rapidly growing.
What wasn’t always clear was how Cometa should scale their manual processes once they were working. In the fall of 2022, the process most top of mind for Mateo was customer onboarding. Until then, the founders had been onboarding new customers themselves, and they had a system for it. But they had just hired a Customer Success lead, and it was time to hand off ownership of onboarding from the founders to the team.
The challenge was that Cometa’s customer onboarding was 50 steps and highly manual, and for good reason. Schools had tons of data to import. Data analysts needed to review it. Specialists needed to have calls with various school departments. If any step fell through the cracks, they could lose 2–3 days. Mateo was a little worried someone might go crazy keeping track of it all.
Then, he came across Relay.app.
“Scaling the process wouldn’t have been possible without Relay.app. With automation, people can focus on high level work, build relationships, and do the things they’re really good at, not input data into documents all day.”Mateo Creamer, Co-Founder of Cometa
It started with one person at Cometa using Relay.app for one workflow and things grew from there. For customer onboarding, the CS team automated dozens of actions across Google Workspace, Slack, Jira, and Notion, drastically reducing the amount of manual repetitive work required for every customer.
For the aspects of customer onboarding that still required manual activities (like data cleaning) or a human touch (like personalizing welcome emails), Cometa relied on Relay.app’s human-in-the-loop functionality. They assigned manual tasks and forms within the automated flow where they were needed, and they used role assignments to make sure the right analyst or onboarding specialist was involved with every new customer.
As soon as Mateo saw how easy Relay.app was to use, he spread the word throughout the company. This was a tool anyone could use. Soon after, team members across customer success, finance, accounting, and administration were involved in workflows or building their own automations. Any process that felt redundant, repetitive, prone to human error, or had too many steps to track was a candidate for automation with Relay.app.
“Once I saw how easy it was to use, I had to get more people using it.”Mateo Creamer, Co-Founder of Cometa
With Relay.app, Cometa reduced customer onboarding time from a month to just 2–3 days. This was the stepwise leap they needed to be able to scale their customer success efforts. Previously, an onboarding specialist could be swamped handling 1–2 schools a month. Now that same individual can handle an impressive 20–30.
“Onboarding used to take a month. Now it takes 2–3 days. Sometimes 24 hours. A lot of that is thanks to you.”Mateo Creamer, Co-Founder of Cometa
As a founder who values staying lean while scaling, Mateo also appreciates that Relay.app has allowed them to put off buying more vertical tools, like Greenhouse for their HR needs. Instead, they have been able to accomplish their goals by layering Relay.app automation on tools they were already using, like Airtable. Likewise, by using automation to reduce redundant manual work, Cometa was also able to avoid hiring too quickly.
However, Mateo sees a value in Relay.app that is far more important than cost savings on tools or hiring. He sees it as a platform for empowerment: By giving his teams a tool that anyone can use and encouraging them to think critically about how they work and where they spend their time, he is empowering everyone at Cometa, not just the founders, to think scalably. And that is what Cometa needs to scale to the next level.
“Scaling the process wouldn’t have been possible without Relay.app.”Mateo Creamer, Co-Founder of Cometa
