What you've actually created here is an advertising platform that helps indie hackers and startups get in front of... other bootstrappers. This is a limited audience, in size, in scope, and in available spend.
If you want to build a community, you may be better off with a Discord server and spreading through word of mouth - or something more personalized and closed like Inbox Startup if you want to monetize it. If you want to sit in the middle of the indie hacker community and collect fees on featured slots, you've got find a way to sell access to an audience that's worth $9. You're competing with product sites which are free and ad networks that give you very fine grained targeting of a wide range of audiences.
People go to sites like PH to be surprised and delighted by interesting new products. Even if the upvote system is borked, users have some faith in the wisdom of the crowd and the PH brand. Why would I, as a user, want to see a list of "everyone who had $9 to give to Filip today" over a list of "products other indie hackers thought were cool?"
Finally, a very diligent user might look at 20 products a day on a site like PH or this one. Let's say you sell out your top 20 feature slots every day. That caps you at $66K gross revenue per year... unless you raise your prices.