How Kneehab Academy went from $45K to $140K a month with zero human setters

Matthew Maloney runs Kneehab Academy, a knee and ACL rehab coaching business in Miami. Every lead comes in through Instagram and Facebook DMs, with no ads. When we started working together in May 2025, he was at $45K a month with four to five full-time DM setters, and he was taking most of the sales calls himself. Today no human setter works his DMs, and the business has grown to $140K a month.

He tells it in his own words in the interview at the top of this page. Here’s how it played out from my side.

Four to five setters, and leads still waited hours

Kneehab had the demand. What it didn’t have was a way to answer it on time. Four to five setters shared the inbox, and messages still sat unanswered for six to eight hours. Bookings swung from seven one day to twelve the next.

Matthew was stuck in the middle of it. He also took about 70% of the sales calls himself. What he wanted back was the time the DMs and the setter team took, so he could put it into content.

If your own setter team looks like this, my guide on how to manage setters and closers shows where the hours go.

What my team built in his DMs

We built an AI setter on Kneehab’s own conversations, content and sales script, and my team runs it every day. It took over all of the DM setting. Three jobs did most of the work.

• A first message to every new follower. The first 20 to 30 openers we split-tested, over four to six months, took the reply rate from 15% to 36%. By now we’ve run more than 50 opener tests on Kneehab alone.
• Lead magnets that become conversations. A comment on a post starts a DM. Once the lead magnet lands, the AI sends a relatable follow-up with a question that’s easy to answer.
• Follow-ups in Matthew’s own voice. When a lead goes quiet, the follow-up can be a voice note that sounds like him.

Across everything we’ve tracked for Kneehab, that adds up to 353,000 outbound messages and 101,000 replies, a 29% average reply rate.

Sounding like him mattered from the first call. Here’s his answer, more than a year in:

“It sounds more like me than even I sound like me. It’s more me Matthew than Matthew.”

Matthew Maloney, Kneehab Academy

In the DMs	Before, with 4 to 5 setters	Now, with the OmniFusion AI setter
Human setters	4 to 5, full time	0, with VAs overseeing the inbox
Speed in the DMs	6 to 8 hours unanswered	Every new follower messaged, no DM missed
Calls booked	7 one day, 12 the next	20+ on a normal day
Sales calls Matthew takes	About 70%	None in July 2026

The AI appointment setter page explains how the system works.

The day one video brought 6,000 new followers

On December 15, 2025, one of Matthew’s videos took off and about 6,000 people followed him in a single day. The AI sent all 6,000 new followers a first message, and more than 40 calls were booked that day.

“There wasn’t a single DM that we missed.”

Matthew Maloney, Kneehab Academy

The record came later: 75 calls booked in one day, after we had already made booking harder.

The results: Kneehab’s first $100K month and every month since

• First $100K month in January 2026. Kneehab hasn’t had a month below six figures since.
• $45K to $140K a month. Still organic only, still no ads.
• 1,300 calls booked in the peak month. More than 1,000 booked calls a month became normal.

“I didn’t realize this is normal, to get twenty plus calls booked on a daily basis.”

Matthew Maloney, Kneehab Academy

More calls stopped helping, so we made booking harder

This is the part of Kneehab’s story I find most useful for other coaches. At 1,300 booked calls a month, his five closers were booked out days in advance. When a call sits a week out, fewer people show up to it.

So we added friction to the qualification before the booking link goes out. Fewer people booked, and the right ones did. Calls from countries Matthew doesn’t serve now get cancelled automatically.

Here’s what that did:

• Cash per booked call went from $77 in January to over $210 in April 2026. That’s roughly three times as much, with half the booked calls.
• The sales team’s close rate nearly doubled. The closers were talking to people who were ready.

I tell every coach the same thing: a booked call is inventory. What counts is the cash your closers collect from it.

Where Kneehab Academy is now

No human setter works the DMs anymore. VAs oversee the inbox, and the AI runs the conversations. In July 2026 Matthew didn’t take a single sales call. He wanted that time for content. As of August 2026 he has about 600,000 followers and 13 million views in 30 days.

His advice to coaches who are where he was in May 2025:

“You have nothing to lose by giving it a try… you’re gonna think the way you did it in the past was absolutely nuts.”

Matthew Maloney, Kneehab Academy

What I’d take from Kneehab for your own DMs

Fix the DMs first, then expect the problem to move. Once no lead went unanswered, Kneehab’s limit was the closers’ calendar: show rate and close rate. So we changed who gets to book instead of booking more calls.

That’s the order I recommend. If your setters can’t keep up and leads wait hours for a reply, start with speed in the DMs. If your closers are booked out for days, the next step is the quality of what gets booked.

Two other clients fixed their DMs from different starting points. Sam Johnston had one setter who could cover about two windows a day, and Prime Train had thousands of lead-magnet replies that nobody could sort. You can follow Matthew on Instagram at @aclwonders.