Who Is Michel Lieben? Seven Failures, Then ColdIQ (2026)

Michel Lieben's story, in his own posts

Lieben narrates his own career on LinkedIn, figures included, and the posts line up into a clean timeline.

The exit. "1 year and a half ago, I got fired by Visium," he wrote in August 2024, then took the blame himself: they "should’ve fired me earlier." Two words close the chapter: "All in on ColdIQ."

The first deals. The opening campaign missed its market, by his own account. "No one understood my pitch," he recalls, and still: "I ended up closing 2 deals... one of them at 1 AM from my hotel room in Bali (it was 11 AM in Chicago)."

The pivot to cold email. Before ColdIQ came a Facebook Ads agency. "To find clients, I sent some... cold emails. These were actually so successful that I realized I'd be way better off offering these as a service than selling ad campaigns." The prospecting method became the product.

The latest chapter. His October 2026 recap lists "Oct. 2026: 83.000+ followers, a $7M ARR agency, launched a SaaS". The SaaS is described elsewhere as "ColdIQ's unified API," which matches the "Turn Prompts into GTM Systems" headline.

The failure story with a live scoreboard

His seven-failures post is a franchise. The clothing brand, the UK lottery, the betting site that "dropped to 0 overnight" in Belgium, the Facebook Ads agency: the list barely changes. The opening line does.

The 2026 edition adds an eighth entry, the SaaS launch, rated "Too early to call this one a win." Each year the list grows a line, and the revenue in the opener grows with it.

The same trick runs a second franchise. A post-by-post log (post 1: zero leads, 20 likes, 14 of them from friends and family) opens four posts between March 2025 and October 2026.

Post 31 is always the breakout, about 147,000 impressions and 25 meetings. What changes is the follower count at the top: 33,000, then 40,000, 47,000 and 83,000.

He names the method himself, in a post about his team: "My team recycles variations of my top performers." The founder does it first.

What does Michel Lieben post about?

Sales dominates: 159 posts, three times the next theme, at 253 median likes, close to his overall 242. Marketing (54 posts) and content marketing (37) follow.

• AI is the small topic that hits hardest: 15 posts, 294 median likes, the best of any topic.

• Entrepreneurship comes last: also 15 posts, at 218 median likes.

The gap is modest, about 35% between best and worst: no topic falls flat.

Sorted by register, the largest bucket is useful resources (108 posts), then best practices (67), lists of rules (37) and analysis (35). Teaching formats add up to 247 posts. Direct offers (selling through value, webinar sign-ups, lead magnets) total 56, fewer than a quarter as many.

The resource posts have a recognizable shape: the full tool stack of a company, layer by layer, with the revenue in line one ("We just crossed $400,000 MRR," or another firm's "$34,000,000 ARR").

Who Michel Lieben writes for

The reader is a B2B founder or go-to-market team that sells through outbound. Lieben's core argument to them is that content warms the cold email: "In the beginning, you should see content as a trust mechanism, before expecting it to generate inbound."

The 2026 version of that idea is shorter: "Your buyer is watching you." He backs it with sales calls where prospects "had never liked or commented once" before booking.

What he sells fits that reader: ColdIQ's outbound services, a coaching program launched "around May 2024," and now the SaaS.

Michel Lieben's best posts of 2026

The three posts that led 2026 so far, each linked to the original (or browse 2M+ posts like these in MagicPost):

2,764 likes. Thirteen words and no number, from a writer who averages 381 words. It is also his biggest post of all time in our data, 11 times his median. A job ad played as a joke at his own expense.

1,038 likes. A product launch reviewed through a team member's 70+ infographics, then a free guide. It drew 3,196 comments, three for every like, the signature of a lead-magnet post.

751 likes. A seven-step workflow with every tool named, from list building to auto-improving campaigns. The 36 reposts are the most of the three: a checklist people save for later.

Is Michel Lieben still growing on LinkedIn?

The median post went from 162 likes in 2024 to 269 in 2025, a 66% jump, as output rose from 62 analyzed posts to 220. In 2026 it sits at 212, about 21% below the peak and still 31% above 2024.

That dip is the reach-compression shape we measure across most growing creators since 2024, and his own posts show the audience still climbing past 80,000.

In our 2026 rankings, Lieben is #10 among the top LinkedIn creators in Spain, #6 among the top LinkedIn creators on demand generation and #11 on lead generation.

Those medians measure engagement per post; for follower numbers, his own posts are the source.

Where do these charts come from? Everything on this page runs on MagicPost's LinkedIn analytics, and it works on your profile too: your best posts, your audience, your benchmark, even a side-by-side with creators like Michel Lieben.

How Michel Lieben writes

*Median across the 3,471 creators in our benchmark.

Nine hooks in ten open on a number, four times the norm: "4,000 cold emails sent," "$4,000,000 ARR," "7 businesses." The hook itself is average length, 11 words. What sets it apart is the figure inside it.

The posts run about twice the average length, yet the sentences stay close to normal at nine words. The length comes from inventory: named tools, steps, monthly figures, one per line.

The single emoji is mostly a list marker (1️⃣, 2️⃣). Two of his most frequent symbols, 👻 and ™, belong to the names of the tools he lists. When our system describes the style in one word, it says: structured.

The "AI tells" in Michel Lieben's style (read this the right way)

Scored on the patterns people now call "AI tells," Lieben's posts show one standout device:

A third of the posts (33%) use the here-is announcement, a line that promises the list and ends on a colon or a down arrow. It is the only device at "characteristic" level.

Further down, about one post in six uses the contrast formula, a closing question or a generic advice frame, and one in ten carries a postscript.

Generic models picked up the list announcement from operators like Lieben, who teach in steps, and now use it everywhere.

For Lieben it does a job: it tells the reader that seven numbered steps and a tool stack are coming.

His postscript does one too: it often carries the offer, such as a free strategy call. Three devices never appear at all: hedging, fake sincerity and the "Moreover" opener. (More on the patterns: how to spot AI writing on LinkedIn.)

When does Michel Lieben post on LinkedIn?

Lieben publishes about 4 times a week, which matches his own line: "I still post 4x a week." His favorite slot is Tuesday at 1 PM Barcelona time. Not one analyzed post went out in the morning or on a weekend.

That is a strict weekday, lunchtime schedule for a reader who works in sales. The best time to post on LinkedIn guide covers the midday window, and his cadence sits well inside our posting-frequency study.

His comment sections run hot: a median of 135 comments per post, more than one for every two likes. If those threads are part of your prospecting, an engagement feed collects his new posts in one place.

What to steal from Michel Lieben

1. Keep the before, update the after. The 385 t-shirts stay; the revenue line moves.

2. Put a number in the hook. 89% of his do, four times the norm.

3. Write long with inventory. 381 words of named tools and steps, no padding.

4. Let the comments do the delivery. A free guide drew three comments per like.

5. Break your own format sometimes. His biggest post is 13 words with no number.

Study the cold email CEO, then study yourself. With MagicPost you can dig into Michel Lieben's numbers the way we just did, analyze your own LinkedIn analytics with the same depth, and write in the spirit of this style, in your own voice. The data on this page is the product.

The posts behind this profile

Every quote above comes from one of Michel Lieben's own public LinkedIn posts. The ones that carry the story:

• Fired by Visium, all in on ColdIQ

• The first deal, closed at 1 AM in Bali

• From a Facebook Ads agency to cold email

• The seven failures, 2026 edition with an eighth entry

• Post 1 to post 31, earliest telling

• Post 1 to post 31, the 83,000-follower edition

• Turning employees into LinkedIn creators

• "4,000 cold emails sent. 1 lead generated." (1,902 likes)

• Every tool behind $400,000 MRR (1,564 likes)

Where this data comes from

Everything in this article is MagicPost's own research. MagicPost analyzed 406 Michel Lieben posts from the last two years: timing, engagement, topics, writing metrics, and the AI-pattern profile from a 30-post style sample.

Every biographical claim is quoted from one of Lieben's own public LinkedIn posts, listed above. Michel Lieben is not affiliated with MagicPost; this style is one of those MagicPost tracks most closely.