I run a one-person SaaS company and have been using Trello as a simple planning/tracking tool for my work. For simple tasks, each card is just a title. For more complex ones, I add some notes in the description. My board has just 3 columns: Backlog, In flight, and Done. I spent an hour or so getting it all set up a couple years ago (mostly creating all of the cards for the backlog) and usually spend less than 10-15 minutes a week on the board. As customers submit new feature requests or I find bugs, I add a card and drag it to it's appropriate priority spot in the backlog. Besides that, I review the board every 1-2 weeks to decide if the priority of any items has changed. I try to keep it clean, and quickly archive/delete cards if I decide that I'll never work on them. This gives me a lightweight way to keep things organized without feeling like overkill.
My app, https://easyteegolf.com/ is a niche SaaS that I built in my free time during COVID. MRR varies because I don't charge customers during the winter, but it made about $6K last year.
I've used Jekyll on GitHub for several simple landing pages over the years. My experience has been great. The pages are always up, have SSL, load quickly, and don't really require maintenance.
I started building a simple app to let golf courses book tee times and process payments with Square earlier this year. It got some initial traction last spring from a few courses looking to change from other providers, then slowed down during the golfing season. I'm hoping to continue to grow it during the winter/spring off season. Right now, it does less than $1K MRR. https://easyteegolf.com/
Why do you feel like you need to raise funding? Do you have users today? Do you have a plan for getting users to try your app? Without knowing anything about your app or who your target market is, in general, I'd say you should first focus on getting users into your app and getting feedback on the value it's providing to them. At that point, if you need funding in order to scale, you can start down that path.
I'm curious what kind of controls you have in place to ensure that the company choosing the numbers doesn't have an employee go rogue like what happened with the McDonald's Monopoly game. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald%27s_Monopoly#Fraud
First off, very cool idea. I'm a fintech PM and had the idea to build something similar. Glad to see someone doing it!
From my research, it sounds like, because prize linked savings accounts are so new in the US, it's unclear whether requiring someone to have an account would count as consideration. By offering an AMOE are you taking a conservative position on this until it's more clear? Or, has a judge/court ruled on this?
I was involved in a sweepstakes at a bank a couple years ago and we took a similar route as you, offering a mail in AMOE, requiring handwritten entries. Without any marketing, we received several thousand entries, mostly from people who mail in entries to every sweepstakes they find.
The US has a similar repayment program called Pay As You Earn (PAYE). It ties your payment amount to 10% of your income that is above 150% of the federal poverty level. This only applies to federal loans (not private loans) and requires opt-in, which probably causes a lot of people to not do it.