While its true for a lot of Bitcoin users, one of our goals was to make bitcoin more accessible to the public and the average person who is interested in bitcoin but doesn't quite know how to get started.
I occasionally did some consulting jobs. Put it this way, some people make about $500 a month in Malaysia (which is more than enough to survive comfortably on). When you charge $100+ an hour you can make more in a day than the locals make in a month.
Having been in Malaysia on and off for the last few years: you can survive with $500 a month. But you don't wanna put a guy in his late 30s in the kind of accommodation you'd have to put up with for that budget.
Let me put it this way. A 1000$ rental gets you much more luxury than the same amount would get you in the west. But a 500$ monthly budget is pretty poor lifestyle in the long run even in South-East Asia, though I agree not quite as desolate and impoverished as you'd be in Europe or America :))
thats a great idea. We are just testing the concept out right and scratching our own itch/problem. Figured $5 was the simplest thing we could do to start.
We had a few ideas on how to iterate from here. a kick-starter model is something we considered, but wanted to start with something really small for people to try out first.
I have a folder on my computer with a number of unfinished/unshipped projects. We created Sink or Ship to address the problem of following though and shipping what you started.
We are using Facebook as a trust network.