Today, thanks to a discussion in Skool games, I remembered something I had completely forgotten about—an Excel spreadsheet with 1 million FB groups, including direct links and member counts for each group. It all started one day when I stumbled upon a tool called Gripper on Reddit. Gripper was supposed to be a better filter/search engine for FB groups than Meta’s own, but it mysteriously vanished from the internet within 14 days. Luckily, I managed to catch it just in time, quickly organized a weekend hackathon, and with eight friends, we created a 250MB Excel file.
For context, it’s commonly known that Facebook has over 5 million groups, but even back then, only about a million of them had more than 500 members, while the rest were hardly worth mentioning.
Today, I uploaded this document to Google Drive and realized the following:
A) Google Sheets won’t upload more than 200,000 rows at a time. Even with 200,000 rows and just three columns, it’s still cumbersome to navigate.
B) All first 200,000 communities have over 3,000 members, which is probably all I need.
C) Some groups no longer exist, suggesting Meta has been cleaning up.
OVER THE NEXT WEEK, I'LL THINK ABOUT HOW TO MAKE THE MOST OF THIS TREASURE. SO FAR, I’VE COME UP WITH THE FOLLOWING IDEAS:
A) Updating the list: I’ll flag the groups where it might be worth collaborating with the leader or even buying the community if it makes sense.
B) Reaching out to leaders: I’ll gradually contact the leaders of the top 1,000 communities to see if they are monetizing their groups, and if not, I’ll offer them help to monetize through Skool.
C) Recycle old content/doc as a community reward: I’ll offer the list as a super reward in my business community Acquire4exit. I haven’t decided yet whether it will be for sale, for reaching a certain level, or for an annual payment, but it will most likely be for level or annual payment.
Why am I writing this? Go through your Google Drives, old hard drives, and forgotten documents from your past projects. You might find that you’ve already created something in the past that just needs dusting off and can be used as content or rewards for your communities today.
How do you deal with digital decluttering and recycling old things?