Some numbers:
In terms of motivation, this is hugely helpful. The money is nice, but we didn't need the money nearly as much as we needed the questions & feature requests & knowing that somebody actually enjoys the product we're building even despite all the missing features.
A side-note: doing something for the second time is much easier than doing it for the first time. Now that I have the SaaS Mantra experience, I'm going to start doing something like this with all my future projects. (Either that, or finding investors. But hey, need to find investors for Brick first.)