I think these kinds of posts are a bit deceptive:<p>"You can keep your day job. Just two months of nights and weekends. Then launch it. Maybe it’s not perfect yet. But get it out there."<p>I mean I'm all for releasing early and often, but it actually does take a lot of work to make a good application. From the Tapbots guys themselves:<p>"We are going to write simple but incredibly polished applications that are created specifically for the iPhone/Touch devices. Two guys, lot’s of passion and a lot of hard work..."<p>How do you reconcile this? These guys want to spend a lot of up-front time building polished apps whereas the 37signals guys are saying get something out there even if it's not perfect. Seems like a contradiction to me.
The tapbot products really are awesome. These two guys wanted to create their own interfaces for their products from scratch, and they succeeded.<p>However, I think it's worth noting that the tapbots programmer has been writing objective-c since the 80's. Even with that amount of experience it took two months of "nights and weekends" to create their weightbot app. If you're just starting with objective-c / cocoa / iphone development, I think it's unrealistic to expect to achieve their level of quality in as short a time.
But did they get paid by Apple yet? Cashflow is king and depending on one customer or partner for the majority of income doesn't make for a healthy company.