If you wait for the "perfect time" to launch, you'll still be waiting when we're all paying for tickets with space credits. Most people planning a competition business spend far too long in the planning phase - researching tools, tweaking brand colours, debating whether to go custom or SaaS - and never actually ship anything. This is a 30-day roadmap that forces real decisions, real setup, and a real draw with real customers. Built around evenings and weekends if you're juggling a day job.
Week 1: Foundations and setup
Days 1–2 - Decide the basics. Pick your niche (not "everything") and shortlist your first one to three prizes. Choose a brand name, check .co.uk domain availability and social handles simultaneously, grab the domain, and set up a professional email address. Don't spend three days agonising over the name - pick something clear and move on.
Days 3–4 - Form the company. Register a private limited company directly with Companies House (£100), using a virtual office address rather than your home. Providers like Icon Offices charge around £38–£40 per quarter and give you remote mail access. Select your SIC codes (93290 is the standard starting point; add 45190 if you're planning car competitions). Note: from April 2026, you'll need photo ID for the HMRC verification step, so have your passport or driving licence ready.
Days 5–7 - Choose your website route and start the payment gateway process. Decide whether you're going custom, DIY WordPress, or using a dedicated platform such as RaffleHub. Then begin applications with competition-friendly payment gateways like Paytriot or Cashflows. These can take time to approve (they're reviewing your business model, not just your bank details), so get them moving early - this is the step that most often causes launch delays for people who leave it too late.
Week 2: Website and legals
Days 8–10 - Build and brand your site. Get your site provisioned, upload your logo, set your colours, and configure navigation. Create placeholder legal pages so the structure is in place even if the final content isn't. If you're using a SaaS platform, this is mostly configuration rather than hard graft - you're filling in fields, not writing code.
Days 11–12 - Sort the legal paperwork. Engage a specialist solicitor or purchase a competition legal pack (GridLaw is widely recommended in the sector), then customise the T&Cs, privacy policy, skill question wording, and free entry templates with your company details and operating specifics. Do not copy-paste documents from a competitor site. Do not use a generic terms generator. Do this properly.
Days 13–14 - Connect payments in test mode and set up tracking. Integrate your payment gateway in test/sandbox mode and run a full checkout journey end-to-end. Install the Meta pixel and - critically - verify that View Content, Add to Cart, and Purchase events are all firing correctly using Meta's Pixel Helper browser extension. If the pixel isn't tracking purchases accurately, your entire future ad strategy will be working on bad data.
Week 3: First competitions and testing
Days 15–17 - Create your first competitions. Set up one main competition and one or two smaller ones with clear titles, descriptions (AI tools can help draft these from your product notes), images, ticket caps, closing dates, and any instant win configuration. Keep the caps realistic - a competition that fills to 80% looks busy; one at 10% looks abandoned.
Days 18–19 - Run full end-to-end test purchases. Make real low-value test orders and trace the entire journey: browse → add to cart → pay → email confirmation → customer account history → refund if needed. Don't just test the happy path - test what happens when a payment fails, when someone enters with the wrong skill question answer, and when you process a refund. Fix anything clunky now, not on launch day at 9pm.
Days 20–21 - Launch basic social presence. Create your Facebook page, Instagram account, and optionally TikTok. Post initial content: who you are, what's coming, sneak peeks of your first prizes. Don't wait until you're live - building a small following before launch means you're not starting from zero on day one.
Week 4: Go live and run your first draw
Days 22–24 - Start Meta ads with modest budgets. Launch simple campaigns optimised for purchases, not traffic. Use a couple of solid creatives (clear prize image, strong headline) for your main competition. Start with £30–£50/day and treat this as a data-gathering exercise. Avoid running any free giveaways or freebie campaigns to "warm up" your page - this trains Meta to find non-buyers and is genuinely hard to undo.
Days 25–26 - Turn on email. Import early registrants and testers into a tool like Mailchimp or Klaviyo. Send your "we're live" email announcing the competition, and set up basic automations for welcome sequences and new competition announcements. Even a list of 50 people who already know you is worth more than 5,000 random followers who don't.
Days 27–28 - Build up to your first draw. Announce the draw date clearly, post daily countdowns on social, and consider a short live Q&A session to answer questions, show your face, and build trust with people who are on the fence. Transparency at this stage costs nothing and pays back in credibility.
Days 29–30 - Run the draw and review. Conduct your first draw transparently (live on Facebook or Instagram, using Google's random number generator with your entry list on screen), announce and contact the winner, share proof publicly, and ship the prize promptly. Then sit down with your numbers: how many tickets sold, what ads worked, what questions came up most, what your actual margin was, and what you'll do differently next time.
Common failure patterns to avoid
Most competition businesses that fail do so for predictable reasons. In rough order of frequency:
- Undercapitalised from the start. Not enough runway to cover the first few competitions running at a loss while you build an audience. Budget for failure before you launch.
- No niche. "General prizes for everyone" is not a strategy. You end up spending more on ads to reach a scattered audience and giving customers no reason to follow you specifically.
- Bodged legals. Generic T&Cs, no RMG letter, vague free entry routes. This doesn't cause problems immediately - it causes problems at the worst possible time, usually when something goes wrong.
- Poisoned pixel from freebies. Running giveaways to build followers before the paid ads go live, then wondering why paid campaigns perform badly. The algorithm learned the wrong audience.
- Ticket caps set too optimistically. A competition that was meant to fund a £1,000 prize only sells 30% of tickets, leaving the operator absorbing the loss.
- No email list building from day one. Every customer who buys is a potential repeat buyer - if you're not collecting emails and communicating with them, you're leaving money on the table and making yourself entirely dependent on paid ads forever.
- Treating it as a side project, then burning out. Competition businesses require real attention - draw prep, customer queries, ad management, bookkeeping. Going in expecting passive income is a recipe for resentment. Go in expecting a proper part-time business and you'll be better positioned to actually build one.
The aim isn't perfection in 30 days - it's to get to a real draw with real customers so you're learning from actual experience instead of endlessly planning in a spreadsheet. The first draw teaches you more than the first month of research. So get it done.
Over and out - good luck.