Sebastian Volkis is not a developer. Before ChatIQ he had cycled through dropshipping, selling digital products, and running a YouTube channel, and he describes himself as a nontechnical founder who only learned to code later. When ChatGPT arrived in 2023, he saw a specific opening: a chatbot trained on a single company's website data that could answer customer questions instantly and cut down the flood of repetitive support emails. The pitch was retention, not novelty. If customers got fast answers and felt heard, they were more likely to stay.

Instead of building first and hoping for users, he did the reverse. He spent months talking to businesses about their support headaches, then built a working MVP entirely in Bubble, the no-code tool, wiring it up to the GPT API to handle the actual chat. That let him ship without an engineering team and start charging while the idea was still fresh.

The launch looked sudden from the outside but rested on groundwork. He had already spent roughly six months building a YouTube audience, so on day one there were people to tell. He paired that owned audience with direct LinkedIn outreach to the businesses he had interviewed, signing up a handful of users a day. By his own account the numbers climbed fast: close to 1,000 users and a few hundred pounds in MRR in the first week, around 2,400 users by two weeks, and roughly 5,900 users with about £3,500 MRR by day 30. He reported crossing 11,300 users overall and around £7,200 MRR by the two-month mark.

The headline 11,000-plus user count is worth reading carefully. Most of those were free users, and the paid revenue was a small slice of the total, which is the normal shape of a freemium launch riding an audience. Sebastian was candid later about the hard part: as a solo nontechnical founder on a no-code stack, he could not ship features as quickly as better-funded competitors, and churn followed.

By 2025 ChatIQ was no longer his main focus. He moved on to other AI products and an AI coding course, and started building with tools like Cursor instead of no-code. ChatIQ stands as a clean example of audience-first distribution: the growth that looked like it happened overnight was really the payoff of research and a YouTube channel built long before launch.