In that whole time running manual services like http://www.sharkboard.co ( monthly investor updates ) and http://www.stefanxo.com ( cto consulting, PA services & hosting ) kept us afloat while building it with 4-5k$ + shortterm gigs
backstory: i ran a small mvp 1-2 years ago on a blog of a famous european angel investor. we uploaded his next project's pdf behind a social login - 800 people signed up.
few months later we made a similar page for a fintech firm that was raising a round - this time with email notifications about sign ups and adding them to a CRM. they got about 150 investors signed up and raised the money quite quickly
so we started automating the process and building it as SaaS app step by step. at first with a few customers who we set up manually, then end of summer we finally launched the SaaS version