Maybe I will just try using unique hashtags. We can always revert later if it doesn't work out.

I'm the founder of BetaList, so I won't share my experience haha. However, someone unaffiliated with me or BetaList compiled a list of 50 people sharing their experience getting featured on BetaList:

Launching On BetaList – 50 Entrepreneurs Share All (2015)

I actually had these printed a bunch and they are quite cute. I need to find a service to ship them as I'm traveling myself and don't want to take care of the logistics.

No. But if I get to read the challenge first, you might pique my interest if I cannot solve it myself. Ultimately I still wouldn't pay for the answer, but I would be more interested in it.

If the user requests a resource from your server you need their IP address in order to respond to the request. So no, I don't think it's possible.

You might be able to put a CDN like Cloudflare between you and the user, and perhaps you can configure the CDN such that it doesn't forward the user's IP address, but then they would still get the IP address. That's probably not what you want either.

The next best thing might be to just scrub your server logs of IP addresses.

Can you share a link with more info? I vaguely remember something about a list of products made by indie makers. Is that it?

In that case my question is what the point of the list is. The revenue model should flow from there.

If the goal is to stimulate purchases for indie makers, then I'd focus on that first before worrying about the revenue model. If you can generate enough sales there will be plenty of options to monetize later on. However if you're just starting out with few sales I imagine it will be hard to get makers to implement an affiliate model (not worth the effort for just a few sales), nor are you able to charge a lot for advertisements (again, not worth the investment if there's only a few sales).

Charging early is generally good advice, but only works when you've established you can provide value worth paying for. For e.g. SaaS products this generally easier than the type of product you're looking to create.

Care to elaborate?

It's tricky to provide very concrete ideas without seeing the product, but here are some generic suggestions:

1. Make them understand the value of sharing
It might seem obvious to you, but people have a million things going on at any given time so you need to get them thinking about this. Instead of just saying something like "share your site with friends" tell them about the benefits of doing so. I don't have a whole lot of information about your product, but it seems like the benefit would be getting more leads? In that case you could use language such as "show off your new site to your friends and get more leads".

2. Make it easy to share
Remove as many hurdles as necessary so it becomes really easy for people to share their site. For example add share buttons with pre-written texts, provide 1-click sharing if possible (e.g. if they oauth'ed their social account), etc.

3. Show them the benefits/results of sharing
You want to create a positive feedback loop where the user gets 'rewarded' for sharing their site. If they know it works, they will keep doing it. So for example you could show website analytics (clickthrough counts, etc).

Yeah the underlying issue is that WIP is focused on sharing your progress with fellow makers, whereas a changelog is generally something you write for your customers. So while they might look similar, the ultimately serve a very different goal and require a different type of content.

Now for some users and products it might still work. If you happen to write nice, readable todo's and/or have a customer-base of makers. But those are the exceptions.

WIP Pro tip: If you go to wip.chat/meetups you get to see nearby people. (Based on your profile location, which you can set by visiting your profile and choosing Edit on the left).