40aWeek

Hi Indie Hackers,

I’m Antonin, the solo founder behind 40aWeek.

The concept is simple: A weekly contest where indie makers submit their side projects. The community votes, and the top project wins 40% of the site's ad revenue.

I launched Week 1 last Friday and ran smack into the classic "Cold Start Problem."

The Week 1 Failure: Supply without Demand I had plenty of great project submissions (the Supply). Creators are hungry for visibility and the chance to win revenue. But I had almost zero voters (the Demand).

I realized I had incentivized the creators perfectly, but gave absolutely no reason for a random visitor to spend 5 minutes reviewing and voting on projects.

I had to make a tough call: I cancelled the Week 1 winner because the vote count was too low to be statistically representative. It was painful, but necessary to keep the platform credible.

The Week 2 Pivot: Focusing on Engagement I didn't quit. I relaunched for Week 2 with improved UI and clearer calls to action, focusing on getting people to actually use the voting mechanism.

Here is the current reality of Week 2 (Snapshot from my admin panel this morning):

• Projects published: 17

• Total Votes: 28

• Unique Voters: 9

To most, 9 voters is nothing. But looking deeper at the data, I see that 7 of those 9 completed the "Mission" (voting for at least 3 projects).

That metric is my current North Star. It means these aren't just accidental clicks; they are real humans actually spending time reviewing other people's work. The engagement ratio is vastly improved compared to the ghost town of Week 1.

What's Next: The "Voter Prize Pool" To solve the demand-side issue permanently, I am currently coding a "Voter Prize Pool" to launch later this week. The hypothesis is simple: if you vote for the winning project, you also get a chance to win a cash prize.

The Question for IH: I'm navigating the tricky waters of incentivizing voting without encouraging low-effort spam or bots. For those who have built community-voted platforms:

Besides money, what intrinsic motivators have you found effective to get users to review other people's work?

I’ll keep building in public as the data comes in for Week 2!