Raffler

In order to garner feedback and build some motivation, I added a beta signup form to the site for a "Raffler Pro". My plan is to use the submissions to gauge interest in certain features and also (hopefully) build a loyal customer base that I could bounce ideas off of.

A year after launch, the tool was still receiving consistent, new traffic. I never expected to do much else with it and also couldn't think of a way to monetize it. Rather than just throwing ads out there, I decided to test whether users would be willing to spend a small amount of money to keep it online.

I didn't want to handle payment myself, so the simplest approach I could find was using PayPal's "PayPal Me" feature. This is a hosted solution and only required a link to be placed on Raffler to send someone to it. To my surprise, I got my first $5 donation a couple of weeks after placing the link onsite.

My wife was in love with the idea and thought the others selling Pampered Chef would get a lot out of it too. She shared the link out with her Facebook group and it spread via word of mouth. The first day sent 524 people to the site, all referred from social media.

I built the tool using all HTML and JavaScript. It was very simple in nature and allowed you to enter a list of names along with the number of tickets assigned. After the list was entered, you could click a button to pick a winner at random. The winner would be displayed and their ticket count would get decreased by 1.

Since I already had a personal website up and running, I thought it would be easy to just deploy it under that umbrella. Since there was no data being submitted, there were really no risks to be concerned with. She was able to access it via her phone as long as it had internet.

My wife and I came up with the idea when she was working for Pampered Chef. She was throwing parties and trying to get people excited by doing raffles and giveaways. I watched her do a few by tracking everything on paper and pulling a winner out of a bowl.