Are you both working 'normal' salaried jobs? If you were and you were to do contracting, the usual guide of how much to charge is to double your normal rates, i.e. 100% raise.¹
So getting 100k customers/transactions per month should be seen as a big success, and hence you should be getting much more than a 50% raise.
¹: This is to cover sick days, holiday, dry spells, etc.
I expect the time investment to be less than a full time job (though at first it will probably be a lot more!) and flexibility and independence is very valuable for me.
Don't only think of the classic "poor", think of: - people earning 500 dollars/month (lower middle class here) which Visa and Mastercard don't accept as customers;
- young people (under 18 or 20) and women (that's A LOT of people);
- people in informal work agreements (that's 1/3rd of the population here), black and gray market, which cannot demonstrate their income and avoid taxes.
We're specifically NOT targeting the global rich, 2/3rds of the population here in Uruguay don't have a credit card and are left out of internet payments, and the same or worse happens across Latin America (the so-called "Base of the Pyramid" approach http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottom_of_the_pyramid ).
I do worry about legal implications, the virtual currency approach is probably what we'll end up implementing not only because of the payment infrastructure, but because of legal reasons as well.
We've met with the legacy payments structure (to get money into the system) and the response has been largely positive, but we're facing some serious challenges in not having more overhead than that.
By the way, if we found 100.000 paying customers and made 0.01 off each transaction that would be a 50% raise for both of us :) , that's how low we're being paid at the moment. And we hope to make money off the financial market as well (off the time between the money entering the system and the money leaving the system), which is how my current company makes money.
Does it sound reasonable or is it still a pipe dream? We still need 100.000 more customers, but we teamed up with a nonprofit to get the first 2000.