Absolutely!

Once I've got it running a seed and build a mock layer for the LN payments the testing on the protocol can start. In parallel I will need to build the deployment for the LN node and the API bindings it requires.

Yeh... it is exciting, and daunting... I've been dreaming of building this thing for ten years, it was only as I went bitcoin maxi and fell in the LN pool that I saw a way to do it, and as if by design, the person who would get me the bootstrapping funds to build the PoC appeared right as I was running out of other options after being epically burned working as a shitcoin dev.