The users split it between them! We do charge a small transaction fee, but we'll never take the buy-in amount itself. So for example, if a challenge is $100 to join, and 5 people join ($500 pot) but only 2 people survive, then the users will get $250 each (everyone will pay $5 participation fee to join).

We purposefully limited the group size to max 5 people, as we wanted to keep it small so that real connections are made and people are less likely to lie (just like you said).

And there's the option of letting anyone join (people you don't know), but since the group size is small we're counting on people actually building that genuine connection through a common mission.

A really cool outcome that we envision is that a bunch local people meet through this app on a challenge, then once complete, they meet up for drinks and hang out.