I'm afraid we can't say too much. We've applied for the Launch Conference, and have agreed not to talk about what the company does. You'll just have to wait until Feb 23rd (if we get in) to find out!
We're still underground, for the time being. We'll be expanding the alpha test soon to new cities, so we wanted to make sure there are interested users for each new city.
I don't like your access for 3 signups model, though. Since I have no idea what it is or who you are (other than my intuition that you're a nice guy), you're asking me to bet my standing with 3 others - and more importantly, their contact details - for an opportunity of unknown value at some unknown point in the future. Perhaps it will be awesome, perhaps I'll be splashed all over pathetic-wannabe.com. This is a risk I don't mind taking with my own email address, but which I'm unwilling to subject others to.
While I agree that salary is a huge expense, rent is usually a small fraction of the salaries being paid.
In my experience, teams who work from home for an extended period of time can start to lose focus and productivity. This means it takes longer to build your product, and you end up paying a lot more in salary.
By having an office (usually only a few hundred, to a few thousand dollars a month in expense), you are able to save a lot in salary (tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a month), because your team will be more focused and productive.
I agree with dougludlow and AlexBloom wholeheartedly. It's more a matter of where you are at in the development of your project and/or if you need co-workers at all.
Yeah, and instead of getting an office, work from a co-working space. You get many of the benefits: everyone is in the same place, space to meet, whiteboards to brainstorm. On top of that, you get to be around a bunch of smart people who will be great resources.
To speed things up, I thought it would be fun to have a little prize for the person who refers the 10,000th user.