A friend and I have been working on building out a service to help connect organizations looking for custom software development-related services with organizations that provide them. At the time I first started on HN, I was looking for a company to do additional dev work for the company I was working for, so I posted this Ask HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2787364. I got a few helpful responses (one of which I followed up with and hired) but it made me think about what was missing, and that was a service that provided comprehensive/well-organized listings (with all the stuff you would expect like case studies, work examples, contact forms that weren't buried, the ability to just "start a project" with one, etc.) of custom software development companies/consultancies/shops/agencies/your favorite term here.
You can Google for all this stuff, but sifting through the mounds of results takes way too much manual effort; you can ask on forums like this, but that's not going to work for a lot of people; you can look through LinkedIn or the ones that AdAge and friends use, but I didn't find anything I would consider thorough/useful on the former (and I find the searching and filtering system to be very poor), and the latter only really had advertising companies. I also thought about things that companies I've worked for that have provided custom software dev work would find useful (like having a single place to point customers with examples of everything - for various reasons, so many companies just can't/won't update it on their own web site - it even happens that the people who work at the company have to send an email around asking for examples of previous work.) So it's better than all that (we hope!) That's why we'd consider it cool.
At the moment, we're pretty far in to initial development of what we consider the MVP and hope to soft launch it in the next few months. Right now, we just have a splash-type page up:
http://www.gildedox.com/