He got 11,000 users for his new AI Software almost “overnight”
Full name: Sebastian Volkis
Business: ChatIQ AI
Started in: 2023
Website: ChatIQ.ai
Social Media channels: Instagram, YouTube, Twitter.
Role: Founder
Number of employees: 1
Monthly revenue: 🔒 UNLOCK
Who are you, and what’s the SaaS you’re working on?
My name is Sebastian; I’m the founder of ChatIQ.ai. I bootstrapped to over 11.3k users as a nontechnical founder. I built an MVP, launched it, scaled it, learned how to code, improved the product, and kept scaling.
ChatIQ.ai helps businesses reduce churn, increase retention, and scale by managing customer support through AI chats and automated support ticketing.
ChatIQ uses your scraped website data and can read PDFs and text (up to 1 million words of data). Users can embed a chatbot into their website as a widget, and customers can ask it questions and get instant responses.
All support tickets and chat history are saved into the dashboard; users can manage tickets, close them, see average response times, view the customer's chat history alongside support tickets, and use ChatIQ's AI alongside all your business data to generate an email response for the user's ticket, and with the clock of a button populate a Gmail draft ready to send.
^ This is a pic of the first day I went viral on tiktok (752 users in 48 hours)
^ Building the saas
How did you come up with the idea?
I spent a long time working in e-commerce, running ads for large brands and some of my own e-commerce stores. I was doing very well both in my own brands and client brands. Sometimes, they spend over $100k/month on ads for some clients. The best brand I ran ads for on black friday did over $100k (I have a video on my YouTube if it’s useful).
But I noticed that every business that I started/worked on would follow the same trend, regardless of how big that brand was; typically, the launch was very successful and lots of new customers would come on, but most businesses would focus too much on scaling their business and not enough on customer support and making sure those customers would return and keep buying.
There was a huge burn and churn customer mentality because they felt it was easier to find new customers than it was to retain them. But to me, it seemed stupid to spend $100,000 on adverts to bring in thousands of new customers and have to repeat this every single month just because there was no way to make customers feel valued.
All of these businesses had incredibly outdated systems for customer service and learning what it was that the customers wanted. They’d wait over 48 hours to get back to customer emails and have no way of organizing customer support tickets. The business had no idea why people were buying; what people wanted from their brand or the biggest reason people stopped coming back and purchasing again.
Because response times were so slow, these customers would typically leave the business and go elsewhere, or we just get frustrated that they couldn't get basic information quickly.
When ChatGPT3 was launched, I had the idea to train it on website data and essentially create a chatbot that would understand the entire business and be able to give customers basic information instantly. I wanted a way for businesses to be able to reduce the amount of emails that they were getting from customers, and I knew if customers got this info fast and felt like they weren’t being ignored, the chances of them remaining loyal customers would increase.
And now ive been adding in customer support ticketing within AI chats with notifications and AI prioritization to allow brands to learn from their customers and use this data to grow.
How did you validate the product?
I quit working in the e-commerce space and spent six months with no income. A lot of this time, I spent talking to business owners and seeing what problems they had. Then, around January/February 2023, I built an MVP using bubble.io. I then messaged (cold DM) hundreds of agency owners and business owners on LinkedIn, asking if they wanted a demo of the product.
On these calls, I would show them what the product could do, how the AI understood their business, and how it could respond to customer questions. This product was completely useless and not production-ready, but it was enough to get some feedback from businesses on what it was and what they wanted.
I spent the next two months improving the product, making it more customizable, and allowing them to build and create their own Chatbots in their own way. I realized a lot of them wanted to be able to customize the prompts, custom branding, and colors, as well as embed these Chatbots as widgets into their website.
I already had some info from previous clients and had worked in the space that customers would want,but a lot of the features I wanted to add were way beyond my technical ability. So I built the most basic version I could, got it working, and figured. If I could get paying customers, I could either justify the time to learn how to build these features or have the money to hire someone.
How did you launch the product?
I followed up with all the businesses that I've spoken to during my research. Please try to sign them up for the product. I was getting a few people to join in, averaging probably about five per day, using an email called LinkedIn DM. I also spent six months while I was unemployed building a YouTube channel so I had an audience to start marketing to.
This allowed me to start bringing on some early users. I probably managed to get the first 20 or 30 users by doing this, but I wanted to go faster. During my time in e-commerce, I spent a lot of time creating short-form content on TikTok, creating both adverts and organic. So, I thought I would create some adverts for my product and post them on TikTok.
This is also during the time that I was massively trending as well, so I really leant into that. The fifth video I posted started to get some traction, at around two or 3000 views, I was getting quite a lot of people onto the website and started getting quite a few people signing up.
This video kept gaining traction, so I posted some more videos and they also started to get some more traction. These videos were incredibly simplistic, it was just a video of me, pointing at the screen, showing what the product could do. But I would focus on the pain points that people had with chat GPT. For example, token limits, I'm not being able to upload a lot of data.
This video ended up getting 140,000 views, and I brought on over 752 users within 48 hours.
What were 3 ways you got the first customers to your product?
Cold Email
Cold LinkedinDM
Both the cold outreach strategies were quite slow and only really worked for me to get some early feedback. The one that really took off was organic content. I didn't have money to spend on Marketing, and I knew from my experience that I could get organic content working.
The biggest thing that I've learned with organic content is identifying your core customer and working backward. For example, if you create TikTok content that just advertises your product features, you're not going to get a lot of reach. what you should do instead is think about the broadest user avatar and create content to entertain them.
For example, if your product is for college students,
So here’s what you DON’T do:
Hook: “If you’re a student and you struggle with managing your revision, watch this! Head to www.yourproduct.com, create an account, click this, upload your xyz…”
Here’s what you SHOULD do:
Hook: “If Yale was honest: Welcome to Yale, your entire personality as a Yale student is gonna be shitting on Harvard…(fill this in with an entertaining skit)…but really you’re not as special as Harvard, let’s face it, you need extra tuition, so head to www.yourproduct.com and …(insert elevator pitch for your app)”
The most important thing to remember is to include a call to action in your videos, whether it's just showing a link to your website or actively telling people to visit it. This will increase the conversion rates of people visiting your website.
Although I used LinkedIn to get some early feedback, I still believe… 🔒 UNLOCK ALL
What is the SaaS doing right now in terms of numbers?
I saw a very large spike in users and customers in… 🔒 UNLOCK ALL
What’s the best growth hack or tactic to get new customers to your SaaS right now?
Marketing using… 🔒 UNLOCK ALL
What is your biggest lesson learned thus far?
If you think you can't do something, keep telling yourself you can until you find a way to make it work. I started this journey as a nontechnical founder. I didn't think I could build an app, so I found ways around the problems.
I built an MVP in no code, monetized early, and kept trying to learn and improve. Now, as a result I am able to code my app. A lot of the time I hit a brick wall in dev, but I know if i keep at it, eventually I’ll solve the problem, and its not failed me yet.
Really, the overarching lesson is don’t give up. Find something you’re passionate about and keep pushing. Passion is huge in stopping the “give up” mentality. I always used to give up businesses when things weren’t going well because I had no passion for it. But when things are going bad, this is when your business needs you the most. Find something to motivate you other than financial goals/success.
Join a community of people going through the same thing; I’ve met so many supportive people on Twitter who are doing the same as me. It’s helpful to learn from them and share what you’re working on.
What are the 5 tools you use the most?
This is the no-code software I used to build my MVP, and I still use it within the app for some of the UI.
ChatGPT Code interpreter.
At the start, a lot of the code I needed was written using GPT4. I used this to teach me how to code and understand documentation. It’s not perfect, but if you use it enough and prompt it correctly, you can easily build 300-400 lines of powerful code.
After a while, you get to the point where you can read/write and understand the code. I learned by doing.
ChatIQ.ai
I use my own tool a lot in my business. I sometimes use pre-released versions to test out and see how useful they are. One of the biggest things in SaaS is: if you don’t use your own product, no one will.
The latest version will respond to users' questions and allow them to submit support tickets. In my dashboard, I can view these tickets and get email notifications based on the priority of the ticket. Meaning I respond to customers much faster (< 5 minutes), they feel valued, I can track common concerns, and in turn, it improves retention. Users can also submit feedback and ideas for what they want in the app, all within the chatbot.
Loom
Loom is key for me when creating content for the branded YouTube channel. I simply start a recording, pause, and play as and when I need to, and I can create a lot of content very quickly and cheaply. Production quality is low, but quantity is high. I don’t need to spend any time editing. I film for 10 mins, upload, and publish.
I'm building a personal brand at the moment, and from this personal brand, I’m building a newsletter that allows me to share how I build my business, marketing tips, and give a lot more detail for free through my newsletter.
I also have a newsletter/email list for my saas, emailing about updates, sales and launches, etc.
What’s 1 book you’d recommend to fellow founders?
Russel Brunson’s Expert Secrets, if you want to learn marketing, specifically sales and why people buy, this is the book to read. Read it and take notes.
It teaches everything you need to know about sales funnels, webinars, sales calls, live selling, etc. If you can master sales, you can make anything work.
What’s your advice for (aspiring) founders in SaaS?
Once you’ve verified, people will use your product. Build a waitlist. There’s nothing worse than launching and no one signing up. If you've spent months on a product build and have no one to sell to, you will become very demotivated.
The biggest problem saas founders have is diving headfirst into the product but not having a way to market it. Because I was nontechnical, the MVP I launched was very slow, poor, and ugly, but people still bought it. If you’re a technical founder, your MVP will likely be a lot better, so stop worrying about button colors and crazy features. Start focusing on a marketing strategy.
It can be boring for people like us who just love to build and create products, but if you’re building a SaaS, you’re doing it to build a business, not as a hobby.
Finally, retain customers, learn from your customers, see what they need, learn why they are leaving, and make them feel valued so they stay with you. You’d be surprised by the value of good customer service.