How Comnyang Went From Zero Sales to 419 Customers in a Few Days

TL;DR

• Client: Comnyang, a pixel cat that sits on your desktop and reacts to what you're doing, built by an indie maker named Simon
• Challenge: A lovely little product with a working app and not a single sale to show for it
• What Happened: Varnan came across Comnyang on Reddit, cut one Instagram Reel, and posted it on Paras Madan's 237k channel. We were never hired and never spoke to Simon before posting.
• Results: $0 to $1,894 in revenue, 419 paying orders in a few days, 2.7M views, 102K likes
• Then: Other creators reposted it, it jumped from Instagram to X, and someone spun up an unofficial memecoin off the name that Simon had nothing to do with

The Product: Comnyang

Comnyang is a pixel cat that sits on your desktop and reacts to whatever you're doing. You're typing, the cat does its thing. You leave it alone, it does something else. It's small, it's animated, and you get the whole idea in about two seconds of watching it move.

The thing that makes Comnyang easy to sell is how fast you get it. There's no concept to explain. You see the cat on the screen, you understand what it is, and you either want one or you don't. Most people who watch it for a few seconds want one.

Simon built it, shipped it, and it ran exactly as intended. It had also sold zero copies.

The Challenge: A Good Product Nobody Was Buying

Comnyang's problem wasn't the product. Anyone who looked at it could tell it was charming and finished. The problem was that almost nobody had looked at it.

A small indie launch gives you a short burst of attention from people who already follow that corner of the internet. After that burst, the page goes quiet and the product sits there. Comnyang had gone through that cycle and come out the other side with a working app and an empty order count.

There was no one posting about it, no video showing it off to people outside the maker bubble, and no reason for a regular person scrolling their phone to ever cross paths with it. A desktop cat is something most people would happily pay a few dollars for once they see it. The catch is they have to see it first, and nobody was showing them.

How We Found It

Comnyang showed up on Reddit, the way a lot of good indie products do. Someone had posted it, a few people in the thread liked it, and then the thread cooled off and the product went quiet again. Shubhranshu, who runs distribution at Varnan, came across it there.

The appeal was simple. Comnyang is a product you understand on sight. You don't read about a desktop cat, you watch it walk across a screen and you get it in two seconds. That's the kind of thing that travels on short video, where most people decide in the first second whether to keep scrolling. A tool you have to read three paragraphs to follow is a hard sell on a phone. A cat that reacts to what you're doing is an easy one.

He picked it for one reason: it was built to be shown. The upvote count and the engineering underneath it didn't matter for what came next.

I was looking for a product that grabs people visually and is easy to convey. Comnyang was exactly that, a desktop cat you understand the second you see it, even with the sound off.

• Shubhranshu Shekhar Dash, Distribution Lead at Varnan

What We Did: The Reel

We cut one Instagram Reel, around 25 to 30 seconds, and posted it on Paras Madan's channel, which sits at 237k followers. No deal with Simon, no outreach, no money either way. The order of those 30 seconds is the whole game, so here's the thinking behind it.

The goal was to give the viewer the most in the least time. On a phone you have a couple of seconds before someone flicks past you, so every part of the video earns its place.

The hook lands first, in plain words. The video opens with language anyone recognizes, words like "cute" and "companion." That does something useful. It takes a piece of software and makes it feel familiar before the viewer has to think about it. You're handing them a feeling they already have about cats, before a single product detail shows up.

Then it says what the thing actually is, and who made it, early. A lot of videos save that reveal for the end and lose people before they reach it. A viewer who still doesn't know what they're looking at fifteen seconds in has usually already swiped. So the introduction lands right after the hook, while attention is still high.

Then the cat actually working. This is the part that carries the most weight after the hook. People need to feel that the thing is useful, so the middle of the video is the product doing its job on the desktop, the cat reacting to what's happening on screen. Showing it beats describing it every time.

Then the close, on credibility. The video ends on the website, so people have somewhere to go. That's the move that turns a view into a save, a share, and an order. The ending is a clean handoff to the place they can get it.

We weren't paid for any of this. Simon didn't reach out and we didn't reach out to him. Shubhranshu wrote the script and put the pieces together because he was fairly sure it would work.

Here's the Reel itself:

The Numbers

The Reel did 2.7M views and 102K likes, reached 1.7M accounts, and pulled 58K shares and 45K saves. Comments stayed around a hundred, but the shares and saves are where the spread lives. People forwarded the video to someone who needed a desktop cat instead of arguing about it in the replies.

Here's the live post it all came from:

On Simon's side, the dashboard went from a flat line to a wall:

• Revenue: $0 to $1,894
• Orders: 419 paying customers
• Time: a few days, not months

The 419 orders didn't all land in one sitting. They came in as a wave that built and then tapered as the video kept spreading:

• June 5: 50 orders
• June 6: 152 orders
• June 7: 95 orders
• June 8: 62 orders
• June 9: 60 orders

The big day was June 6, right as the Reel hit its stride, and the sales kept coming for days after instead of spiking once and dying.

The dollar figure is small and that's fine, because the figure isn't the point. A product that had earned nothing its whole life took 419 orders from real people in a few days. That's 419 strangers who watched a video, went to a site they'd never seen, and paid. For an indie maker sitting at zero, proof that people will pay is worth more than the amount they paid.

The Virality Loop

One Reel reaching 2.7M views isn't the algorithm being generous. The video kept feeding itself, and it did it in a couple of clear ways.

The comments turned into a checkout line. The replies filled up with people asking where to get it and tagging friends who needed a desktop cat. Every tag pulled in a new person who watched, wanted one, and often tagged someone else. The video became something people forwarded.

Then it jumped platforms. It started on Instagram and spilled onto X, where other accounts reposted clips of the cat and described it in their own words. Instagram and X don't share an audience, so landing on both meant the same video reached two separate crowds, and each one treated it like a fresh find.

The Memecoin

Here's where it went somewhere we didn't plan and couldn't have.

While the video was spreading, someone spun up a memecoin off the Comnyang name on Solana. Simon found out the way you'd expect, by seeing his own product's name attached to a coin he'd never heard of. He didn't make it or authorize it, and he had no link to whoever did.

He handled it with a level head. He posted a warning that the coin wasn't official, then noticed something he hadn't expected. Creator fees from the coin had quietly piled up in a Pump.fun account tied to the name, and he couldn't give them back.

It's honestly surprising to see that around $300 has accumulated in my Pump.fun account. I actually looked into ways to return this amount to the platform or the buyers, but due to the nature of the blockchain system, there is no technical way to reverse the claim. Since these fees were generated by using Comnyang's name without permission, I have decided to allocate this $300 entirely toward the development costs of the actual Comnyang project.

• Simon, maker of Comnyang

The coin itself climbed to a $13,300 market cap before it settled, all off a name stuck to a desktop cat that the maker had nothing to do with.

We're putting this in the case study for one reason. It's a clean measure of how far one video traveled. A product goes from zero sales to strangers minting a coin off its name in the same week, with nobody in charge of any of it. That only happens when something has genuinely broken containment. The coin had no connection to Varnan or to Comnyang, and Simon took the one piece of it he couldn't hand back and pointed it at the actual product.

What Simon Said

Simon posted about the sales jump while it was happening. His numbers are from a day or two before the figures above, so they read a little lower, which is its own kind of proof that the thing was still climbing when he wrote it.

Comnyang went viral on IG. I didn't even know they posted this reel, but it reached 2.2M views and 81.6K likes and it gave Comnyang's sales a huge boost. I was expecting around 10 to 20 sales a day based on my previous data. I didn't pay for any of this. Someone just made a video because they liked the app.

• Simon, maker of Comnyang

The part worth sitting with: Simon was bracing for 10 to 20 sales a day, and a video he didn't ask for and didn't pay for blew straight past that.

Why It Worked

Comnyang worked because the product and the format fit each other before we shot a second of video. A desktop cat is visual and easy to like, and a short Reel is the best format we have for showing something visual and easy to like. The job was to spot that fit and then build the 30 seconds so the right beats hit in the right order.

That's the part that's easy to miss. The reach looks like luck if you only see the view count. The repeatable piece underneath it is finding a product that will travel, cutting the video that makes it move, and posting it to a channel already big enough to give it a running start. Comnyang is the version where the result lands as money in a maker's account.

We've Run This Before

Comnyang isn't the first quiet product we've put in front of the right crowd.

A developer built his own text-to-image model and posted it to Reddit. It picked up some attention there and then went quiet, the way most good Reddit posts do once the thread cools. We turned it into an Instagram Reel, Chroma, and that reel pulled 750K views, 22.6K likes, and 318 comments, sending a fresh wave of people back to the project. Same move as Comnyang: find something with real pull, frame it for a wider crowd than the one that first saw it, and post it where that crowd already is.

Before that, we put Git City in front of the right audience and watched its daily signups go from 211 to more than 19,000 new developers in 48 hours off a single Reel.

The same engine has now worked on a pixel cat and a text-to-image model, the same way it worked on Git City. Different products, different audiences, one method. Comnyang's $1,894 is small on its own. The thing that produced it isn't.

We'll say the honest part too. Not every Reel becomes a 2.7M-view event, and we'd be lying if we said we can dial that up on command. We can promise the work that gives a good product its best shot at it: pick the right one, frame it for normal people, and put it in front of an audience that's already there. The big ones come out of doing that consistently.

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