As an AI Product Growth Leader, I’m on a mission to revolutionize how businesses harness data and AI to drive innovation, accelerate growth, and scale impact. I lead with a strategic vision: to make data collaboration seamless, AI adoption intuitive, and business-centric innovation scalable.

At @DataGOL, I drive growth initiatives that position us as the go-to solution for intelligent business enablement. From BusinessOS to AI Agents and Self-Serve Analytics, I build intelligent experience engines that empower business users—not just data teams—to make faster, smarter decisions.

With 20+ years across enterprise SaaS, data platforms, and AI/ML products, I operate at the intersection of strategy, technology, and customer-centricity. My passion lies in translating complex capabilities into simple, scalable value—whether that’s through a game-changing product, a repeatable growth engine, or a transformative AI initiative.

I don’t chase hype. I build real-world, value-driven solutions that solve real business problems.

🤝 Let’s connect if you’re serious about using AI and data to redefine what’s possible for your business.

Vinod SP

Brand & Growth Strategist | Content @ ColdIQ ($6M ARR) | Building LinkedIn Content for B2B GTM | Favikon #2 Meditation Creator on LinkedIn

I lead content strategy at ColdIQ, where we've built one of the most effective LinkedIn engines in B2B.

Our numbers: $6M ARR in 30 months, fully bootstrapped. 250K+ combined followers across the team. 4M quarterly impressions. 356 meetings booked from content alone.

LinkedIn is our #1 acquisition channel. Not ads. Not cold email. But a systematic content that compounds credibility faster than traditional GTM approaches.

My role: I help B2B founders turn LinkedIn into a real part of their go-to-market motion - a system that supports outbound, ads, and sales conversations.

The focus is founder-led content: positioning, messaging, and formats that make sense to people who make buying decisions. Content that builds authority before you need it.

Before ColdIQ, I built my own LinkedIn presence from zero to Favikon #2 worldwide for meditation creators in 6 months, tackling the interection of business and self-awareness.

I bring 10+ years across brand strategy, growth work, and wellbeing businesses where trust compounds slowly and attention is hard-won. Those fundamentals matter just as much in B2B, maybe more.

Alongside B2B work, I maintain a long practice in meditation and wellbeing. That background shapes how I think about attention, clarity, and what makes people stay versus scroll. All things that determine whether your content works or gets ignored.

If LinkedIn is part of how your company goes to market, your content should reflect how you actually sell.
Let's build systems that work before you need them.

Mai-Lan Khong

It's easy to find LinkedIn content advice that teaches you the platform. Much harder to find the one that teaches you the writing.

Jasmin Alić has 350K followers on LinkedIn. He said this in a recent interview: 99% of great writing is psychology, not platform tactics.

Not posting times. Not carousel formats. Not hashtags. Psychology - why people stop, why they keep reading, why they save something, and come back to it three days later.

I've been building content systems for B2B founders for a while now. Pillar maps, voice profiles, ICP matrices, batching workflows. All of it. And what he said makes sense because it points at the thing underneath all of it: if there's no psychological pull in the writing, the framework is just scaffolding around an empty building.

The 6 things he said that changed how I think about writing briefs are in the carousel below.

I'd add one thing he didn't explicitly say: the psychology only works when the voice is real. That's the part many people try to automate away. It's also the only part that can't be.

What would you add?

99% of great writing

I work in B2B content strategy.
And last week I reset my brain by watching a 5-hour film trilogy where nothing happened.
I did not read the latest LinkedIn algorithm report. I did not study a competitor's carousel. I read poems. I listened to music. I watched slow, beautiful movies.
This probably sounds very strange for someone who builds content systems for a living.

But I also realized something.

My creative fuel has never come from my industry. (sorry not sorry 🙃 ) It comes from art. From stories. From things that have nothing to do with pipeline.
I think many of us forget this.

We consume more content to produce better content. We follow more creators to become a better creator. So we spend our "off time" in the same place we spend our "work time."

And then we wonder why everything we write starts to sound the same.
I was doing this too. Posting 5-7 times a week. Consuming LinkedIn to stay sharp. Getting tired in a way I could not quite name.

So I cut it to 2-3 posts. And I stopped consuming the feed as homework.

Now I notice something small but real. The ideas that come after a poem or a quiet film are different from the ideas that come after scrolling.

They have more space in them.

I'm collecting data to prove this point. But I'm quite positive the best B2B content is made by people who are still curious about life outside B2B.

If you create content for work, I want to ask you something honest.
What do you consume that has nothing to do with your industry? (Do you even? haha)

I don't treat Month 1 like a waiting room of:
Write drafts. Build the perfect profile. Choose the right tools. Prepare until it feels safe enough to begin.
After working with B2B founders and GTM teams on LinkedIn, I learned that: the longer you wait to post, the longer you wait to learn anything real.

So when I share this 3-month LinkedIn brand-building framework, I want to be upfront about something: in practice, we always compress it. Month 1 isn't just foundation. It's foundation AND action, running at the same time.

It goes like this:

Month 1️⃣ : Foundation + Strategy 

→ Define your content pillars 
→ Identify your ideal reader (not "everyone in B2B") 
→ Learn the Content Production (let's analyze this one alone in another post on how I do it differently) and draft your first 10 posts 
→ Ship them. Not when they're good. Now.
(Update your profile headline and About section, yes, but it should take you an hour, not a month :)

You can optimize your content strategy endlessly on paper. LinkedIn will only teach you what works when you're actually in the game. The algorithm doesn't reward perfect posts. It rewards consistent ones.

Month 2️⃣ : Consistency + Visibility 

→ At least 15 minutes of commenting per day (I don't want to scare you 😉 so 15 is a good start, but I do spend a bit more than 15 mins, and I know big accounts that spend quite a lot more than 15 mins)
→ Connect with 10+ targeted prospects per week 
→ Start repurposing your top posts into carousels or short videos

The commenting strategy here is NOT optional. 
Fact: a week of only commenting drives more profile views than a week of only posting.
I've seen this with my own account. It sounds counterintuitive, but LinkedIn is a conversation platform before it's a content platform.

Month 3️⃣: Growth + Authority 

→ 1+ case study per month 
→ Personal stories with real lessons (not inspiration for its own sake) 
→ 1+ in-depth guide per month 
→ Start building a lead magnet: a free template, a guide, something people actually want to save

A note on the tech stack in this framework:

ClickUp and Relevance AI for content operations. 
Nano Banana and Opus Clip for repurposing. 
LinkedIn native tools, Carrd, and Instantly for lead magnet distribution

This is my minimum viable version; the right tools depend on your account size, your capacity, and your target - as those variables grow, the stack grows with them.

The bigger point: perfectionism about your tools, your posts, your strategy is just fear wearing a productive outfit.

Ship the imperfect thing. Then make it better.

Where are you in this journey?

20 hours a week you could get back. For learning, sleeping, scrolling your phone at 11pm and calling it research. Whatever - the point is those hours would be yours. Right now, if you're still running repeatable tasks manually while everyone else is building AI assistants to handle them, they're not.

I've never written a line of code. And I just built mine.

There's a specific kind of tired from doing the same task manually, again, when somewhere in your brain you know a machine could handle it. Turns out you don't need to code to build one. You just need plain English.

Mine runs content inspiration round every week before meeting with clients - Reddit threads, YouTube comments, Grok - and hands me developed ideas on what their audience actually care about . It plans my day based on my calendar and priorities. It does research and saves the full report. etc. etc.

→ The GIF below will show you

What would yours handle? For a founder it might be briefing the team, tracking pipeline, or drafting client proposals. For a marketer, monitoring trends and keeping campaigns moving. For a content creator - honestly, whatever version of the above keeps you out of the weeds and back in the thinking.

Now, the setup - shorter than you think:

1️⃣ Download VS Code (free) and install the Claude Code extension from the VS Code Marketplace

2️⃣ Create a folder on your computer and open it in VS Code - this is your assistant's home

3️⃣ Create a CLAUDE.md file in your project folder - Claude reads this before every conversation. It starts as a few lines and grows into the brain of your whole assistant.

Here the important part: 4️⃣ Run the setup prompt - it interviews you about your work, your team (if any), your priorities, then builds your entire folder structure from your answers.

Add skills in plan mode as you go - this was way easier than I thought, literally describe in plain English what you want, Claude builds and connects the tools
Use it every day instead of regular Claude. It gets smarter every time.

The harder part isn't the setup. It's knowing what to build - and that's actually where it gets interesting.

Everyone's assistant will be different. Mine handles things that would be completely useless to you. Yours will run tasks mine never touches. What the building process does - and this surprised me - is force you to really see your own workflow. What do you repeat? Where is your time going? What do you keep wishing just knew already?

That's why the setup prompt matters (and this post is giving it away ⬇️ ). Not just to get you started - it asks you good questions, so you figure out what you need. And over time, your assistant grows with you.

The first version will be clumsy. That's fine - mine was too. A week in, it looks completely different.

The time and effort you save is real significant. The thinking space you get back is the actual luxury.

 DM me with this post and I'll send the setup prompt over (it's big!!) No code needed. 🤖

Empty time isn't wasted time.
It's information. About what you reach for. What you default to when nothing is asking anything of you.

Do you open your phone before you've even decided to? Or do you let the stillness stay a little longer? Do you fill every gap? Or wait for something to surface from the quiet?

What you do in those in-between moments is shaping you.

Boredom isn't absence. It's an opening. To the thought you haven't had yet. To the clarity that only comes when you stop running toward stimulation.

The discomfort isn't the problem.
The escape is.

P.S. Millennials were bored a lot growing up. We didn't know it then, but we were being trained. To sit with nothing. To let the mind wander. To figure out what was interesting to us. The generations after us didn't get that accident.
Maybe we should stop calling it boredom, and start calling it practice.

I posted a joke about a prompt that replaced $500K content team.
"50 LinkedIn experts with 500 gazillion years of experience. Generate viral posts to scale to $100M ARR in ONE day." 🙂 

As long as you are human, you know it was pure satire. 

So when a bot swooped in with "Crazy how one well-crafted prompt can replace a whole team" - fully affirming the joke with zero trace of irony - 

This is the most LinkedIn comment has ever made me laugh 🫠 

That comment did exactly what it was trained to do: pattern match, validate, engage.
It read the words. It missed the entire point.

Teachable moment:

Comments are no longer just courtesy. They're the engine that decides who sees your next post.

Not all comments are equal. The algorithm is getting better at detecting which ones add to a conversation and which ones are just bots clapping at their own reflection.

A comment that adds context, asks a real question, or pushes back on an idea? That one spawns a thread. That thread trains the algorithm on your interest graph. That graph shapes your future reach.

A "Great post!" from an automation tool that misses the entire joke?
The algorithm is learning to make it go away. Fast.

So if you want to make the best of commenting on LinkedIn, the whole strategy is:

- Write like you read the post. 
- Add one thing the post didn't say. 
- Or ask something you genuinely want answered.

Believe it or not, that gap is your edge on LinkedIn now. 

P.S. Ok, I will deactivate my comment bot for today 😉

The 20% vital activities driving 80% of LinkedIn results - most people do 0 of them consistently.

Post something. Wait someone sees it. Repeat.
If you still treat LinkedIn like a broadcasting platform and wonder why it feels pointless, this is for you.

What moves the needle is much simpler than most people think. But much harder to do well.

Here are the 4 activities worth your time:

1️⃣ Engage strategically 

Not random likes. Comment on posts from the exact people you want to reach. Add something real. A question. A perspective. A specific observation. This builds visibility with the right audience before you ever send a message.

2️⃣ Post content that helps 

Not updates. Not opinions with no context. Share something your ICP would save and come back to. The bar is: "would this be useful to the person I want to work with?" If not, skip it.

3️⃣ Send personalized outreach

No "I'd love to connect." Reference something specific. A post they wrote. A challenge they mentioned. A problem you genuinely know how to solve. The goal is a conversation, not a pitch.

4️⃣ Optimize your profile 

Your profile is a landing page, not a resume. If someone curious about your work lands there and can't tell within 5 seconds what you do and who you help, they leave. Fix that once (in a while) and it pays off every time you show up in someone's feed.

The activities that eat your time but produce almost nothing?

❌ Passive scrolling. 
❌ Generic connection requests. (better to send without note at all)
❌ Spammy comments. 
❌ Reading the news.

These feel productive. They're not.

The reason most people avoid the 4 that matter: they require you to be specific, personal, and consistent. That takes more energy than scrolling.

But it's also the only thing that works.

What's one of the 4 you've been neglecting? I'm curious which one is hardest to do well.

It's 2026. Time to treat LinkedIn content as your sales team.
Here's the ColdIQ process that generated 250K+ followers and helped us grow from 0 to $7M+ ARR in under 3 years, with content as the primary driver.

1️⃣ Know exactly who you're selling to.

Not who finds your content interesting. Who you want to pay you.
Most company feeds are accidentally educating their competitors. At ColdIQ, every post is built for revenue leaders and GTM operators - not other agencies. That one decision shapes everything.
If your content is for everyone, it's for no one.

2️⃣ Know who will see it first.

Your ICP is the VP of Sales who books the call. But the SDR on their team might be the one who saved your post on a Tuesday and sent it up the chain two weeks later.
As long as there's a path from wide audience to right buyer, casting a wider net is fine.

3️⃣ Study what's already been made.

Look at competitors - not to copy, but to find the gap. Look at your own past content - what outperformed, and why? Look at thought leaders in your space and ask honestly: is the gap a knowledge gap or a packaging gap?
Usually it's packaging. Good news - packaging is learnable.

4️⃣ Collect what's proven to work.

Before you invent, observe. Tools like Scripe surface what's already performing in your niche.
The goal isn't to copy a viral post. It's to understand the structure your audience responds to - then bring your expertise inside that shape.

5️⃣ Find your pillars. Then repeat them.

The secret to consistent output isn't creativity. It's constraint.
Pick 2-3 topics. Pick 2-3 formats. Repeat the combination to new people, again and again.
The content doesn't need to be new. It needs to reach people who haven't seen it yet.

6️⃣ Decide what each post is for. (very IMPORTANT)

Reach, trust, or conversion - pick one. Very few posts do all three, and the ones that try usually do none well.

7️⃣ Invest in how it looks.

We see 3-4x reach on visual content at ColdIQ, consistently. It's not a nice-to-have.


And the quieter things that make all of this work:

→ Reply to comments
That's where you find out what your audience is actually confused about.
→ Plan ahead
Reactive content feels like reactive content.
→ Stay consistent (strategically)
Most people quit right before the compounding starts.
→ Start real conversations with people engaging
More conversations, more pipeline.

P.S. Want to build a content system that drives revenue? Send me a DM.

There is a story I tell every time I run a meditation workshop for people in business and every-time-it-scores.

Two men are chopping wood.
One works non-stop from sunrise to sunset, never resting.
The other pauses regularly and sharpens his axe.
By the end of the day, the second man has cut way more wood. With much less effort.

That's the perfect story of how meditation can upgrade your productivity.

I have practiced meditation for more than a decade.
And some mornings, when the work is exciting and the ideas are already loud before I even make coffee, I still open my laptop first. (I know. I know.)

To be fair - my meditation sessions are not short. Minimum 30 minutes, often longer. So on those mornings when my mind is already full of things I want to build and execute, it is a real debate. Do I sit-down and do-nothing for more than half an hour, or do I ride the momentum while it's there? Sometimes the dopamine of just starting wins.

But here is what I have noticed, after enough mornings of testing both versions of myself.

→ On the days I skip and go straight to work, I move fast at first. 
Then somewhere in the middle of the day, things get blurry. 
My judgment slows. 
I produce more and notice less.

→ On the days I sit first...
My observations are sharper. My judgment is cleaner. 
In an era where we work alongside AI every day, these are not small things. 
The tools can execute. But the awareness and judgment of what to do with them - that still has to come from us.
And in creative work, one clear idea in that state of clarity is worth days of pushing through a bottleneck.

The axe is sharper. The wood cuts easier. My own data, from my own days.

Knowing the woodcutter story and living it are two very different things.
I think that gap is where most of us live.

It's almost weekend, what does sharpening your axe look like for you?

Your most viral post this month probably didn't bring in a single buyer.
Because there is a difference between audience content and pipeline content - and many B2B founders don't know they need both.

➡️  Audience content casts wide.

It gets likes, follows, views. 
The reader thinks "interesting." 
It works on everyone in your niche. 
Success looks like reach.


➡️  Pipeline content works differently. 

It targets your exact ICP. 
The reader thinks "they get my problem." 
Success looks like DMs, calls, booked meetings.

The mistake isn't making audience content. It's making only that.
When I look at most founder LinkedIn profiles, they're all reach and no precision - relatable, broad, trending topics. The engagement is real. But the pipeline isn't moving.

Pipeline content is specific. 
Named. Problem-first. 
It's not trying to go viral BUT trying to make one person feel seen enough to reach out.

Both matter. One gets you the room. The other gets you the right conversation in it.

If your content is performing but your pipeline is quiet - you're probably only playing the first game.

Dear ghostwriters: you already know the sentence I'm about to describe.

5 lessons from building X. 
What nobody tells you about Y. 
My 6-year-old taught me everything about leadership. 
The barista got my order wrong - masterclass in resilience. 
4:00 AM: cold shower. 5:00 AM: hit $2M ARR. 


These formats took over LinkedIn because they worked - once, then twice, then so many times the format started writing itself. Now scroll any founder's profile and you can predict the next sentence before reading it. The format became the author. The founder disappeared inside it.

The thing that makes content stay isn't the framework. It's the detail that doesn't fit - the awkward part of the story without a clean lesson, the opinion that makes you a little nervous to publish, the moment too specific to feel like "content." That stuff gets polished out first. Because it doesn't look professional enough.

That's exactly what you should keep.

When did you last write something that couldn't have been written by anyone else in your industry?

Claude Code can now prospect, enrich, write copy, and launch campaigns.

ColdIQ builds Revenue Engines for B2B companies. Three channels: Outbound Prospecting, LinkedIn Ads, LinkedIn Content.
I run LinkedIn Content.
And from where I sit - inside the machine - I've been watching Claude Code expand across all three. The copy, the prospecting, the enrichment, the campaign logic, the win analysis. The whole engine, now running on one tool.

The full motion looks like this:

1️⃣ Detect signals
→ Hiring, funding, tech stack, competitor swaps
→ Pull signal data and tag by strength
→ Only move forward on real buying intent

2️⃣ Score and filter against your ICP
→ Read your ICP rules
→ Score each account based on fit and signal
→ Cut the noise before you ever write a line of copy

3️⃣ Find decision-makers via Sales Nav
→ Build the search from your ICP
→ Pull key roles only
→ Map 1-3 buyers per account

4️⃣ Enrich contacts across 3 providers
→ Hit multiple enrichment APIs
→ Fill direct emails, LinkedIn, key firmographics
→ Push clean data back into your table

5️⃣ Generate personalised copy at scale
→ Read your offer, case studies, past wins
→ Write angle based on the signal and role
→ Keep tone and structure from your best templates

6️⃣ Push to campaign automatically
→ Sync to your outbound platform
→ Set multichannel sequences
→ Keep CRM updated in the background

7️⃣ Analyse what converts, and improve
→ Track replies and meetings
→ Write win notes into the record
→ Update rules and templates based on real results

The project folder becomes your GTM brain. ICP rules, waterfall logic, winning copy - all in one place.
We packed it into a cheatsheet: 5 campaign plays, key commands, and when to use Claude Code vs Clay vs n8n.

You can find the HD version of the guide in the comments!

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The Battle

Vinod SP

Mai-Lan Khong

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The Battle

Vinod SP

Mai-Lan Khong

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Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Mai-Lan Khong's LinkedIn Performance

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