Running 41 niche Facebook groups for two years — the actual numbers

Started one group for a client in 2024, now at 41 across six niches, 612,000 members total. Posting the real figures because every group-based lead gen post I have read was selling a course about group-based lead gen.

The portfolio
41 groups, largest 94k members, median 6,200. Six niches: home improvement, van life, two pet niches, homeschooling, small-engine repair.

Revenue, last 12 months

• Sponsored posts: $41,200 — the bulk of it, and the only reliable line
• Affiliate links in pinned posts: $18,700
• Lead sales to local businesses: $31,400 — highest margin, hardest to scale
• Selling two groups outright: $14,000

Costs
Four VAs at $1,640/mo total, $19,680. Tooling $2,300. Content and giveaways $6,100. Net about $77,000.

What I got wrong

• Chased member count for the first eight months. A 94k group in van life earns less than a 4k group in small-engine repair, because one has buyers and one has browsers
• Automated posting. Reach halved. Went back to VAs posting by hand and it recovered in three weeks
• Left the groups dependent on one platform for two years, which is a single point of failure I am only now fixing with newsletters

Honest caveat: this is a job, not passive income. If the VAs stop, it stops within a fortnight.

The 94k van life vs 4k small-engine comparison is the whole post. Buyer intent beats audience size and it is not close, in any channel I have ever worked in.

Lead sales at the highest margin and the worst scalability is exactly my experience too. Local businesses pay well and churn constantly because they cannot handle the volume you send.

Churn is brutal, about 40% at six months. I now cap how many leads a buyer gets in week one, which sounds mad but halved the churn.

Interesting that automated posting halved reach. Was that a change in their system or did the content get worse because it was scheduled?

Cannot separate those cleanly. The scheduled posts were also blander, because a VA writing live reacts to what the group is arguing about that day.

How did the first group get its first thousand members? That is the part I cannot picture.

Six months of answering questions in three competing groups until people recognised the name, then one post saying I had started my own. Slow, free, and not repeatable at scale, which is why I buy groups now.

Same playbook works on Reddit and has the same ceiling. Being useful in someone else's community is the cheapest acquisition channel and the least automatable.

Did you run a control or is this vibes with a spreadsheet attached?