I'll just offer some counterpoint, as we didn't do this.  We created accounts manually with a script for a long time.  By the time we needed a panel (leads were starting to get out of hand), I knocked out a fugly one in Rails in one 20 hour coding marathon.  Then I banged up an email parser in Perl to add all of our current accounts / correspondences.  That was just a couple months back.<p>The biggest problem that I could see with building a panel up front is that you might be building it for the wrong product.  In my eyes, testing your product to see if you get any traction would probably win.