Mr. Scoble.

"Yo, on my way to SF, I met Bob Scoble at a rest stop on I-5," Walter Chen, co-founder of IDoneThis, the side project that went start-up and is now joining AngelPad, Gchatted Betabeat. "He was talking to my cousin about avoiding speed traps and babies," he continued. "And I was like, oh snap, is that Bob Scoble?"

Wait, Robert Scoble hates babies? Betabeat asked.

"Sorry. Avoiding speed traps, and then babies," Mr. Chen corrected. "So I sauntered up to him and I said, I like your t-shirt. It said, 'I love APIs' or something. And I said, I have a start-up, and he said, 'I love to hear about new start-ups.' So I said, let me tell you about IDoneThis. Which I did."

Mr. Scoble tweeted something too: "Yes, I even get pitched startups at rest stops in the middle of nowhere. Met @smalter yesterday who told me about @idonethis Trying it now." Then: "Oh, @kr8tr will love @idonethis -- it asks you to tell it every day what you got done. Makes weekly reports to bosses much easier!"

Mr. Scoble is an influential blogger (Klout score: 84) as well as notoriously good-natured about being pitched. His capacity for trying new apps is bottomless. "Oh, and, yes, I do answer my own cell phone and I do include that number on the Internet for you to use: +1-425-205-1921 and have for several years. I live in Half Moon Bay near the Ritz and would love to meet up with geeks/entrepreneurs if you are in town and I'm available," he writes on his Google profile.

Baller start-up pro-tip: Raise a seed round? It's fancy sandwich time.

A side project we counseled to turn start-up is headed to San Francisco to join the elite incubator Angelpad, founded by ex-Googlers in 2010. IDoneThis, the productivity hack from Walter Chen and Rodrigo Guzman, told us a month ago they had applied to a few incubators--including New York's brand-new Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator--but it seems they'll be shipping off to Cali even though "New York has been good to us." We look forward to hearing dispatches from the relatively new incubator, which mostly selects start-ups run by more experienced entrepreneurs, and to enjoying the sandwiches at their celebratory open sandwich bar party next week.

IDoneThis is the second company out of new co-working space/incubator WeWork Labs to get funded. CityPockets closed on an oddly-uneven $550,092 about a month ago and moved into a new office. Fast-growing fitness tracking site Fitocracy is sniffing around for investment and could be the next WWL start-up to get capital.

Walter Chen at WeWork Labs. Photo: Michael Tseng / turfgeographyclub.com

"IDoneThis started out as a simple side project to help motivate ourselves to keep New Year's resolutions," local lawyer-turned-developer Walter Chen told Betabeat in an email. He and Rodrigo Guzman built the app, an email-based "done" list, in two days and launched it on January 3. The app's traffic bumped along for a while, a testament to good design and good hustle (cold email pitches to blogs and submissions to sites like Reddit and Hacker News).

Then at the beginning of April, it took off. 

"I moved into WeWork Labs on April 1, and that same day, iDoneThis got written up by Lifehacker," Mr. Chen said.  "Our traffic blew up and we got a few thousand new users."

IDoneThis, a system that builds a running log of completed tasks by prompting users with email reminders, seems to have filled a need. The site now has about 6,000 users who have sent more than 30,000 emails, Mr. Chen says.

"The biggest obstacle in making progress with iDoneThis is the simple mental block of not thinking of it as a project, but as a business," he said.

But tomorrow the team has an interview for the Entrepreneurs Roundtable accelerator, which could mean a leap into start-up mode. "Depending on how our interview with ER Accelerator goes on Thursday, we could both be based out of NYC real soon now," he said.

The shift from side project to start-up started with the good press, but it was bolstered by encouragement from co-workers at WeWork Labs, the tech-leaning freelancer co-working space where Mr. Chen is based, and others in the New York start-up scene.

"NYC has been really good to iDoneThis," he said. "Naveen Selvadurai, co-founder of Foursquare, has been one of our biggest supporters. I met Gary Chou of Union Square Ventures on Ohours, and we've kept in touch and he continues to give us support. We're also connected through people at WeWork Labs, which strengthens our loose ties... a lot of our new users have come and a lot of them have stuck around because of the buzz generated around the site in part by WeWork Labs. CEO of Citypockets Cheryl Yeoh has been one of our biggest evangelists."

Mr. Chen and Mr. Guzman are building some social features that will "build communities around getting things done," which Mr. Chen believes will make the site grow even faster and "turn something of a side project into a legit startup."

But the two founders have already gotten plenty of utility out of iDoneThis, even if it doesn't become a full-fledged company. Mr. Guzman lost 15 pounds using iDoneThis to keep track of his diet and exercise, according to the site, and Mr. Chen used iDoneThis to teach himself Ruby on Rails and remind himself to keep writing entries in his longest-running journal.