This is a great idea, and I bet you could raise a lot more than 3000! Why not just put this on indiegogo or kickstarter or some other similar trusted platform instead of asking people to just paypal you money? I figure many people would feel much more comfortable that way, and you'd probably get a bunch of publicity from just being on the site.

I don't understand the point of the semi-secrecy. There's almost certainly hundreds of MS employees on this site which means you've lost that advantage already, and anyway you're going to have the same problem after you release the software.