Michel Lieben is the 🏷️#founder and CEO of 📝ColdIQ, a 📝GTM agency that has grown to $7M in revenue with 35 employees since launching in January 2023. Before the agency he spent years in marketing and growth roles at startups and built affiliate businesses on the side, including a directory of GTM tools. Posting about those tools on LinkedIn to drive directory traffic grew a following, people began asking him to run their outbound, and after he said yes to one client, ColdIQ was born. Today the agency runs outbound, LinkedIn content, and LinkedIn ads for B2B companies, syncing all three into what he calls a GTM flywheel.
The flywheel is the mechanism worth copying: ColdIQ runs LinkedIn ads against target accounts one to two weeks before cold emails land, expanding top-performing organic posts into ad formats, then identifies which companies engaged so reps can follow up referencing that content — identical templates convert far better once accounts are warmed. He argues most LinkedIn content fails because operators trust their own format instincts instead of studying what already performs; make the packaging 10% better, not the substance, for a 5x reach effect. He leans on repeatable formats like tech-stack breakdowns, and feeds performance data and copy from 80-plus client campaigns into a central knowledge base built on Cursor and Claude Code that surfaces what worked for similar clients and flags templates that should be sunset — the long-term moat for a niche agency.
I had Michel on the gtm engineer to get into LinkedIn content, tech stacks, and how ColdIQ uses Cursor and Claude Code across the agency.