What type of work should I not do before being incorporated?

I'm working on an idea (consumer web) but am not yet incorporated. I am considering farming out some work to free lancers. Is there any issue in doing that before incorporation? What about my own sweat equity?

Edit: I'm also going to register potential domain names as an individual.

Thanks!

JDelage

Make sure that your agreements with freelancers include an assignment of all rights, including intellectual property rights, to you. Please see Independent Contractors: How to Assign Copyrights.

Once you form the corporation, you will want to assign (or, perhaps, license) to it rights to all of the work product that you and the freelancers have produced. This is not a do-it-yourself project - you should retain a lawyer to help you.

Disclaimer: This post does not constitute legal advice and does not establish an attorney-client relationship.

As Dana pointed out, you should probably think about signing some sort of agreement of confidentiality with the freelancers.

If you are still worried about the freelancers hurting your idea, try separating the work into multiple segments and provide it to multiple freelancers. Of course, this will take some managing, and you may need to set same ground rules for the coding, but this will allow you to provide the information to them on 'per need' basis. Harder, but works.

The last option I can give you, is try to do the v1 yourself. If you lack some expertise, hire a freelancer to do some work for you, but code the crucial parts yourself. This is what I would do.