How Prime Train went from $250K to $350K a month with an AI setter in the DMs

Tom Baulch runs Prime Train, an online fitness and weight-loss coaching business with clients in Australia, the UK and the US, and more than 500,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok. His lead magnets pull thousands of DM replies, and before we started, a lot of those people were left on read. About six months after Tom signed with us in February 2026, Prime Train went from $250K to $350K a month. The AI runs his Instagram DMs now, and his setters spend their day on the phones.

3,000 comments on one post, and too few setters to answer them

Picture one post on an account that size. Tom puts out a lead magnet, people comment and reply to get it, and by the end of the day that single post can have more than 3,000 comments. The lead magnet pulls 2,000 to 3,000 DM replies. Every one of those is someone who raised their hand.

His setters were supposed to get through all of it, and they couldn’t. Tom describes the DMs back then as messy. Leads were left on read, and the setters were overworked. He put the whole problem in one line:

“It’s impossible to sift through three thousand leads.”

Tom Baulch, Prime Train, on his DMs before the AI.

So the lead magnets, built to start sales conversations, brought in close to nothing. Nobody followed up with the people who asked for them. Tom knew exactly what that meant: “I was leaving a lot of money on the table.”

I see the same pattern whenever content takes off. Every viral post lands on the setters at the same moment, and the replies pile up faster than anyone can read them. A Harvard Business Review study found that firms who tried to reach a lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify it as firms that waited longer. With thousands of replies landing off one post, most leads wait a lot longer than an hour.

You can’t hire your way out of that. Every new setter is another person to hire, train and manage, and setters only reply while they’re on shift. If you run a setter team now, my guide on how to manage setters and closers shows where that setup breaks as you grow.

Why the AI took the DMs and the setters took the phones

Texting thousands of leads is a job the AI does better than a person. A phone call is still a job for a human. So my team put our AI appointment setter on Prime Train’s Instagram DMs and left the calls to Tom’s people.

On every account we run, the AI answers in about two minutes, day or night, with the timing varied on purpose so it reads like someone typing. It qualifies each lead on the coach’s own criteria, which it learns from the past DMs and from onboarding. When someone grabs a lead magnet, the AI follows up with something relatable and an easy question to answer, so the conversation keeps going after the download. And it keeps the same rules in the thousandth conversation of the day as in the first.

His setters moved off the DMs and onto the phones, where a human voice still wins. The money Tom saved on setter commissions went into fulfillment and ads.

What changed	Before	With OmniFusion on the DMs
Lead-magnet replies	2,000 to 3,000 per lead magnet, more than the setters could read	The AI answers them in the DMs
Leads	Left on read	Qualified on Prime Train’s own criteria
Setters	Overworked in the DMs	On the phones

When your DMs outgrow your setters: here’s how my team takes them over →

The question that got Tom’s account restricted

At one point Prime Train’s Instagram account got restricted. The cause turned out to be a single line in Tom’s sales script: a qualifying question that asked leads how much they had in savings. Once that question came out of the DMs, the restrictions stopped.

“Had nothing to do with AI, had everything to do with our sales script.”

Tom Baulch, Prime Train, on the account restrictions.

Account safety is one of the first things coaches ask me about when we talk about AI in their DMs. Tom’s story shows where the risk usually sits: in what gets said. Money questions are the classic example. How much do you earn, how much do you have set aside to invest. Those are the questions that get accounts flagged, so once you’re at scale, I’d never ask anything about money there.

This is where the AI is the safer setter. When a question comes out of the script, it’s out of every conversation. With a team of human setters, you retrain every one of them and then check they actually stopped asking it, and a setter can always go rogue and say anything. With the AI, my team controls exactly what gets said. We connect through Meta’s official API and never need your password, and money questions move to the booking form. When Tom’s money question had to go, it was one change to the script. In his words: “snap your fingers and you get rid of it.”

$250K to $350K a month, with setters on the phones

In Tom’s words: “we went from two fifty K to three fifty K a month.”

Tom brought the audience, the offer and lead magnets that already pulled thousands of replies. My team brought the conversations. What that looks like in his business today:

• Setters on the phones. They moved off the DMs and spend their time on calls, the part of the sales process where a person matters most.
• Commissions back into the business. The money saved on setter commissions went into fulfillment and ads.
• Restrictions stopped. One money question came out of the DMs, and the account restrictions went with it.
• Lead magnets get answered. The replies a lead magnet pulls turn into conversations in the DMs instead of sitting on read.

Instagram DMs are still Tom’s first source of organic leads. The difference is that the replies get answered now.

What I’d take from Prime Train if your content already pulls replies

If your posts pull thousands of comments and replies, the money is already in your inbox. A reply that sits on read is a lead your content earned and nobody worked.

Put the AI on the texting and keep people where a voice matters: the phones and the sales call. Your closers stay human. Your best setters do more of the work that actually needs them.

And if your account ever gets restricted, read your script before you blame the tool. In Tom’s case, one money question in the DMs was the whole problem.

Two more stories: Kneehab Academy had about 6,000 new followers in one day and didn’t miss a single DM, and Jordan Pham took his DM funnel from $0 to $117K in 45 days. You can follow Tom on Instagram at @primetrain.