Yeah, looking back to the mid-aughts you could probably "launch" a "product" in a few weeks. You could stretch that 5K into a few months of runway as your expenses are rent, food, internet, and maybe $150/month tops in SaaS stuff.

Like you said, it was also easier to find people who wanted to work on that stuff. Tech jobs were less kushy and highly paid. Working at that kind of startup was a dream compared to slogging through crufty code at some company where software was viewed as a cost - rather than profit - center. But I think back then market rate for a mid-level dev was something like 70K.