Here's the updated post. I changed the narrator to a friend, swapped the title, and adjusted the "we" parts so they read naturally coming from someone outside the project.
Boost Your Product by Pushing Others
c4c.club was built by a friend of mine. I've watched him launch side projects for years, and I've also watched the same thing happen every time: the building part goes great, and then the project sits there with almost no visitors.
Launch directories give you one spike and then silence. Paid ads have minimum budgets and you're up against companies with real marketing teams. SEO takes months. After seeing so many indie founders struggle with exactly this, he built something to fix it, and I wanted to share it here because I think a lot of you will find it useful.
The idea
c4c.club is a club where indie founders show each other's ads on their own sites. The motto is: we'll show your ad first, return the favor later.
How it works
- Add your app. Paste your URL, and it picks up the name and icon automatically. No code on your site and no domain verification to get started.
- Your ad goes live. Write one line of ad copy, and your project starts appearing on other members' sites. New members get 50 free credits, enough for up to around 200 visitors depending on where they come from.
- Host to keep it running. If you like the results, add one snippet to your own site to show an ad slot. Every genuine click you send to another founder earns you 80% of that click's value in credits for your own ad.
What I like most about this is that you get value before you're asked to give anything back. Most ad-swap networks make you host first and hope it pays off later.
Pricing
No subscription. You pay per click, priced by the visitor's country:
- Clicks cost between $0.06 and $1 (0.25 to 4 credits), so you don't pay premium rates for traffic that's unlikely to convert.
- 1 credit = $0.25. Credit packs range from $10 to $100 as one-time Stripe payments, and purchased credits never expire.
- When credits run out, your ad simply pauses until you top up.
- Only clicks that pass fraud checks are charged.
📢 The club is looking for publishers!
This is where my friend would really love your help. The club grows when more founders host an ad slot, so if your site, blog, tool, or side project gets any traffic, you can earn from it while helping other indie builders get seen.
How it works for publishers:
- Paste one snippet. You get a single ad slot on your site showing projects from other indie founders. No flashy banners, no tracking-heavy ad networks.
- Every ad is approved by hand. You won't end up showing spam or anything sketchy to your visitors.
- Keep 80% of every click. Each genuine click you send pays you in credits.
- Spend it or cash it out. Use your credits to promote your own project, or withdraw them. Earnings clear after 30 days, and from $25 you can cash out through Tremendous, a payout platform used by thousands of businesses.
- Earn a backlink. The top 50 publishers by clicks are listed on the publisher leaderboard with a dofollow link to their site.
What one click pays you, by visitor country:
| Tier | You earn per click |
|---|---|
| Premium | $0.80 (3.2 credits) |
| High | $0.60 (2.4 credits) |
| Standard | $0.40 (1.6 credits) |
| Emerging | $0.20 (0.8 credits) |
| Developing | $0.05 (0.2 credits) |
You can see which countries fall into each tier on the rates page. Every click goes through the fraud checks described below before it pays, which also protects you as a publisher: the network stays trustworthy, so advertisers keep coming back.
Whether you run a dev blog, a free tool, a newsletter archive, or a directory, one small slot is all it takes.
👉 Add your site as a publisher
The "bouncer"
A click-exchange only works if nobody games it, so credits never move the instant someone clicks. Each click is held and checked first:
- Self-clicks and traffic between sites owned by the same person
Your original text cut off partway through "The bouncer" section, so I left it as is. Paste the rest and I'll finish it in the same voice.
If you want a punchier title, a couple of alternatives: "Grow Your Product by Promoting Other Founders" or "Push Other Founders, Get Pushed Back."
Top comments (1)
The "nobody came" moment is close to universal. What usually helps is going back to the few people who did show up and asking what they expected to find. Three honest answers beat another launch post. I built chatform.in for that kind of question: a short form that asks a follow-up when the reply is vague.