Oh the list can keep going on. We're only a few people with no external funding. 100% of sponsored prizes go to participants.

Besides this, as a product person, I'd say getting exposure. When we started not many people understood what it is we were trying to do. Why are we playing around with WebLN, why make login so difficult with lnurl-auth, why use Nostr for our comments?

We needed to use these things so we can experience what it's like to go through the development process. We also needed to understand ourselves what the future of lightning app development looks like.

For the majority of developers web programming is the only type they know, so that's a massive market, and they expect to have great development tools, and resources.