They're both by invitation only.

It's a good question. In my experience as a designer, I can't say I've seen a ton of quality shops that specialize in the web-entrepreneur market. I'm sure this is due to my own ignorance, but I'd say that the general lack of responses in this thread is telling. That said, as for comprehensive resources, I don't have much for you. I can think of a few specific vendors, though:

- Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain of 31Three is damn good: http://31three.com

- Newism does excellent work: http://newism.com.au/

- You could do worse than my own shop, General Projects: http://generalprojects.com

- Weight Shift is hiring, so you know they're doing pretty well: http://weightshift.com

- Airbag Industries did the Postbox site, which is excellent: http://airbagindustries.com

If you've got a monster budget, The Barbarian Group and Huge Inc are some of the best in the web design business. Very savvy, very effective.

http://www.barbariangroup.com http://hugeinc.com/

37signals uses an in-house designers. Fairly certain Wufoo does too.

What's not clear to me is if the $1000 is actually supposed to help fund the Awesomeness, or if it's basically just intended as a reward for doing something Awesome. For instance, should submitted ideas be confined to something achievable within that budget? I assume not, but the whole thing could use a bit more clarity.

Either. We're keeping the whole thing rather open ended, at least to start. That said, we're happy to answer any questions and we'll add a FAQ to the site sometime soon. Also, for those in the Boston area, we'll host an information session at BetaHouse in a couple weeks.

I can say that if this had the double-intention of functioning as marketing for Betahouse, it definitely worked on me. I have every intention of keeping track of your events, etc, from here on out.

Oh god! We're being watched now :)

I'd take him a lot more seriously if he'd stop using the phrase "are now ticking time bombs."

I'm currently doing some surface-level design work for a client who plans to submit.

I've spent upwards of $9k in the last few months on legal fees because I didnt have a written contract with an old business partner.

At the very very least, get a specific list of deliverables, your profit share percentage, and his ownership rights to your code on paper, then get him to sign and date it. Be as explicit about everything as possible. Not being able to afford a lawyer is no excuse for not getting your general agreement on paper.

If he resists, remind him that the paperwork protects him as much as it protects you.

Thanks for posting this. Even if it's not the most detailed report, any light shed on the initial launch process of a product of this sort is interesting to some degree.

Hey that's my app! Funny to see this making the rounds.

I was just telling someone last night that in my experience, 90% of the people using Basecamp are just using it for the threaded messaging, and if we could improve on that and offer it as a separate product, we'd do pretty well.

This is fantastic and I'll almost certainly be using it.

That pretty much describes Google Wave...

Oh, and I agree about Basecamp. I've only ever seen it used for message archive and the odd file sharing task.