How Sam Johnston went from $27K to $120K+ a month in 90 days

When Sam and I first spoke, on 30 January 2026, he had one setter left and wasn’t happy with him. Setting was the one part of his business he couldn’t get to hold.

Setters were the part of the business he liked least

Before we worked together, Sam was stuck in what he calls “the frustrating loop of trying to use different setters.” The role kept turning over. “Sometimes we’d have a good setter, sometimes we’d have the opposite,” he told me. “It was definitely the least favorite part of running a business for me was trying to find good setters, training them up, managing them.”

That last setter could cover about two windows a day and worked several other accounts as well, so anyone who messaged outside those windows waited. Tracking lived in a spreadsheet Sam called “extremely messy,” and “there was no real data that we were getting.” In his words: “I felt like I was just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what stuck. I didn’t have a good process from a setting standpoint.”

By the end of that call we agreed on the problem. In Sam’s words: “The one bottleneck is setting, which I agree with.” He also told me where he wanted to end up: “I would love to never take a sales call again.”

He had written off bots years earlier

Sam came into the call skeptical, and he had a reason. “I had worked with a bot before, two and a half, three years ago, and it was terrible, absolutely terrible,” he said. “I had written automated messages off.”

Three things changed his mind. The first was Emil, my co-founder, and how sure he was: “I trusted Emil when he said that we could do it.” The second was other coaches: “You guys had client results and a lot of testimonials of coaching companies that seem to be in my exact situation.” The third was the testing. When he saw that we split-test the first message and the script, he saw something a person in his inbox couldn’t do. “When I had a human setter, when it was working well, even then, I knew this was a job for AI.”

He didn’t have to take any of it on faith. Back then, onboarding meant forms on his ideal client and his offer, plus screenshots of how he and his setters had talked to leads. Then my team gave him a first version on a separate demo Instagram account, where he could message it as a lead himself.

“I think it was a week or two later, you guys had a working V1 where I could go into Instagram and have conversations with it and basically test it to see how it’s replying to different situations. And I remember on V1 being very impressed.”

Sam Johnston, on the first version of his AI setter.

“Day 1 you’re already beating my setter”

Sam sent us that text within hours of going live. From then on the AI handled every conversation in his DMs: an opener to each new follower, qualification on his criteria, and booking for the leads who fit.

It worked from the start, but there weren’t enough leads coming in yet. “Right away it was working, but the lead flow wasn’t high enough to get the result we were looking for,” Sam said. That’s when Emil, who runs Sam’s account, pushed him on content. Sam remembers it well: “The bot was set up but I was still not that consistent with content, and he was like, bro, what are you doing? Like, come on.”

In the middle of February, Sam decided to post every single day. By July he had missed about four days.

Then 125,000 people followed him in a single month

Sam’s following grew from 112,000 in mid-February to about 450,000 by July. He gained 125,000 followers in April alone and about 80,000 more in May.

The order is what made that growth pay. The AI had been live for about 60 days before the followers came, so every one of them got a message. I asked Sam what the same months would have taken with people.

“Send 125,000 first messages, deal with all the follow-up. Like, I’d need 10 different setters. It would be a mess to track. There’s no way to actively do that with human setters.”

Sam Johnston, on his viral spring.

“I’m really grateful that things happened in that order,” he added, “because I think we would have missed out on a lot of clients and sales had we not had this bot in place.”

A viral month is exactly when a setter team breaks. Leads arrive faster than anyone can answer, and the ones who wait go cold. On Sam’s account, about 80% of leads come from new followers, people who never messaged him first. Without an opener for every follower, most of that growth would have shown up as a bigger number on his profile and nothing else.

20,000 conversations in June, without a dollar of ad spend

In June 2026 the AI sent 100,000 messages across 20,000 conversations, about 3,300 messages and 660 conversations a day. June alone brought in $110,000.

None of it came from ads. “We’re not paying a single dollar in ad spend right now,” Sam said. “I’ve had similar revenue months way back, but that’s with like eight K a month in ad spend.”

Volume alone doesn’t do it. My team tested more than 20 different openers on his account in the first four months to find the one his audience answers most. That opener won’t work for the next fitness coach, because a different coach has different followers, so every account gets its own tests.

What runs his DMs now

Before:

• One human setter, covering about two windows a day
• A messy spreadsheet and “no real data”
• Sam reading the setter’s messages to check them
• Sam on his own sales calls

Now:

• The AI messages every new follower and answers every DM, day and night
• Openers and scripts split-tested on his own audience
• Zero setters and two closers, who get every call the AI books
• Sam off the sales calls: “I’m not taking calls anymore either.”

He describes the chain himself: “Getting the bot in the DMs allowed me to just focus on content, and then just focusing on content got lead volume to the point where I could remove myself from sales.” The thing he wanted on that first call in January is the thing he has now. Here’s how we build and run the AI setter for coaches in Sam’s spot.

Sam’s advice if you’re where he was in January

Sam was specific about who this fits:

“If you’re getting a lot of traction on organic content and you’ve got volume and leads in your DMs and you’re working with a human setter and it’s either a headache or it’s not working properly, then this is a no-brainer.”

Sam Johnston, on who should run an AI setter.

He was just as specific about what he couldn’t vouch for yet. When we recorded, he hadn’t run ads alongside the system: “I just can’t speak to that because we haven’t combined ads with this.”

My takeaway from his account: don’t hire a second setter to fix the first one. Get every lead answered first. Then spend your time where Sam spends his, on “the thing that only I can do, which is scripting and recording content.”

Kneehab Academy made the same move with a team of four setters instead of one, and Jordan Pham did it with a DM funnel one setter worked by hand for about three hours a day. You can follow Sam on Instagram at @thesamueljohnston.