Why I started a 5am club for creators & indie hackers, & what I learned after hitting 110 members

Imagine being feeling helpless on how to be a parent to a baby, being sleep deprived, having little cognitive capacity for work (even less for indie projects), and stressed about a pandemic unfolding outside of your front door.

That's the situation I was last year. I knew I had to do something to solve the sleep deprivation issue, since everything else—parenting, work, managing a crisis—pivots on me having enough energy and capacity. But I don't know how to sleep better. I knew I had a window of undisturbed time from 5-8am (while mom + baby were asleep) that I can have for deep work on my projects, but I was a night owl all my life, and didn't know how to switch chronotypes to early birdie. Most of all, I wasn't sure I could do this alone.

That's how I came to starting a 5am club for fellow creators and indie hackers, to learn about sleep biohacking and early morning productivity hacks.

The 5am club is actually a chat group on Telegram—now 110 members—where we chat async about:

🛌 Sleep biohacking
🔥 Early AM productivity tips
🤝 Public accountability
🙌 Mutual encouragement
🏗 Build in public at 5am

Members can:
⏰ Post wake times here daily for public accountability and mutual encouragement
ℹ️ Ask questions about sleep hacks
👥 Pair up to be accountability buddies if they live in same timezone, etc

Set a new goal by starting a chat group

What began unintentionally as just a way to socialize with others around a topic is becoming a habit hack—an intentional intervention—to ensure accountability, learn from others, and to grow collectively.

I had always thought that setting a goal is a personal affair, and an individual's struggle. But the concept of a community banding around a common goal that everyone is individually gunning for, is novel for me. It's not me running alone in a race of one, but a group running together as their own races of one converge and run in parallel for a period of time.

A goal that is social, not just personal. Socially personal.

Some benefits I learned about after setting up the 5am club:

• Social/Public accountability – starting a chat group is a forcing function against stagnation, for me to keep reading and learning new stuff, so that I can share them in the group. It's also a way to post my streaks, like my wake times in my 5am club. Accountability for compounding. I really enjoyed the social aspect of pursuing my goal of 5am and sleep biohacking, and this group is the key pillar to the joy.
• Learning from others – There were so many occasions where I learned new and interesting things I would have never learned had I not been part of the group. For example, learning from someone who tried polyphasic sleep in my 5am club group. I would have never tried it myself, so being able to hear his experience had been insightful and interesting. Seeing what sleep tracking tools others were using had also been helpful.
• Collective growth – It's also heartening to witness how the floor gets raised when everyone learns together. You see someone posting their wake time once, twice, and by the third time, you might feel inspired to finally take the plunge. The multiplier effect of collective learning and mutual support/inspiration are so underrated.

Tangential learnings for an indie hacker in community-driven product development

The experience of collective learning is was what I initially loved about this project. But there's another one, a more meta aspect which I love just as much: it's a great learning opportunity on community-driven product development.

I started the group chat not thinking about a product, but just as a way to learn collectively about sleep. But in the back of my mind, I always knew the possibility of building something for it in the future. So this is my own way of learning by doing, for community-driven products. I'm slowly getting a better sense of the common challenges we face when starting out as beginners in sleep biohacking and 5am mornings. A low hanging fruit to address that is through a short ebook/email course for beginners on quick actionable tips to get started on sleep biohacking. Info products are always easy to start with.

What I found challenging about the project

Engagement. And patience. Thankfully it seemed to have reached a threshold at 100 where more members are active, posting their wake times, and chatting about sleep. From 0 to 70, it felt like messaging into the void. I was probably the one who's active on the chat.

There's this 90-9-1 rule about online communities called the Rule of Participation Inequality:

• 90% are consumers/lurkers who only read, observe but don't create or contribute anything.
• 9% are contributors who reply/comment on content others created.
• 1% are creators, the most active members of the community who create, contribute and consume.

So following that rule, it probably takes 100 and beyond to start having a handful of contributors and creators in the community! It really does take patience for the community and engagement to grow.

What my hopes are looking ahead

The funny thing about sleep biohacking is, it's an infinite game. You're never done, or can ever be done done. So there's always something to work on, some new or old lesson to learn and share. So likewise, I'm not sure there's a endgame here for the community. It can keep going and growing. People will come and go, but everyone still needs to sleep, everyone can benefit from sleeping better, so there's always a need for it.

So how's your sleep recently?