Guide · Michel's Guides

The Real Playbook Behind a $4M/Year Cold Email Agency

The exact sequence Michel Lieben followed to take ColdIQ from zero to $300K months in 24 months: sell the skill you have, use it on yourself, post before it pays, then turn your team into the growth engine.

8 steps · ~12 min readClay · LinkedIn · LinkedIn Ads · Attention

What you will build

This is not a hypothetical framework. It is the chronological playbook of how ColdIQ went from a side-project website in January 2023 to crossing $300K in monthly revenue by January 2025 — first client at $3K/month, six clients and $15.7K MRR by May 2023, $30K/month by October 2023, $150K MRR by July 2024, and a first $200K month in September 2024.

By the end you will have a working acquisition loop for a service business: a validated offer priced by a real buyer, a cold outbound motion that doubles as your social proof, a daily LinkedIn content habit that compounds into inbound, and the delegation sequence (delivery, then sales, then marketing) that lets you scale past yourself without the wheels coming off.

Each step maps to a stage ColdIQ actually went through, with the revenue numbers, team moves, and mistakes (including a client who never paid a $4.4K invoice) left in.

Prerequisites

What you need before you start

01 · A sellable skill

One thing you have done repeatedly across past jobs or projects — for Michel it was running outbound campaigns at every company he worked at

02 · LinkedIn account

You will commit to posting 5x per week for at least 3 months

03 · Cold email sending setup

Secondary domains and inboxes so you can run campaigns for yourself before you have clients

04 · Runway and patience

The first month of posting generated zero leads; the model takes months to compound

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Step 01

Sell the skill you already have, and let a buyer set the proof

Inventory your past work and find the one constant. Michel had run outbound campaigns at every company he touched — a failed Facebook ads agency, an SEO firm, a pet GPS tracker, crypto and AI companies — so cold outreach was the obvious entry point. Then skip the vanity setup: a fancy website and friends' opinions prove nothing. The only validation that counts is someone paying. ColdIQ's first client was a software founder who read Michel's blog articles and asked if he offered the service; Michel quoted $3K/month on the spot and the founder said yes. That yes, not the website, is what started the agency.

Step 02

Use cold email to sell cold email

If you sell a marketing service, acquire clients with the exact mechanism you are selling. It manufactures social proof you do not have yet — when a prospect asks 'how do I know this works?', the answer is 'you're talking with me, right?' — and it forces you to upskill on your own campaigns before touching a client's. Treat yourself as client zero and experiment aggressively. Michel's first winning motion was sending AI-personalized videos to AI agencies, which booked 12 meetings in a couple of weeks (most recipients never realized the videos were AI-generated). His first campaign, pitching vague 'sales automation' to companies hiring salespeople, flopped almost completely — but even the flop produced one weird meeting that closed at $4.8K/month for two months, putting him at $7.8K MRR from two clients by end of February 2023.

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