If you do decide to go for a parachain at first then kudos to you. Otherwise, this would be a great use case for Pop Network.
With little overhead you could leverage the Pop API to build an XCM-enabled smart contract.
With Pop Network, you start as a smart contract, find market-fit, then scale to a full-blown dAppChain through Pop Network.
Hit us up on TG. We would love to collaborate.
We are looking to deploy our test network on Paseo in the coming weeks.