It seems likely to me it's a pipe dream scam or troll to me as well, but...

For the sake of argument we'll assume it's legit. It's pretty easy to imagine a set of circumstances where an entrepreneur believed in the future of what was being mined, yet choses to focus on selling the picks and shovels instead. It's pretty easy to believe that designing, debugging and fabbing an ASIC could require capital in excess of what someone would have on hand. The likelyhood of getting a bank loan or angel financing for a venture where you'd do all that only to use it yourself to do "proprietary mining" is essentially zero. However, the likelyhood of being able to get some investment or perhaps a loan to do all of that and sell it to an existing committed list of customers is far greater. The profit involved in making 1,000 picks quickly and selling them to miners might easily outstrip the profit involved in making 10 picks slowly and then using them to mine yourself.

Still, I don't see anyone that's in a position to design, test and commercially fab an asic for this purpose deciding that posting a google docs signup form on reddit is the road to success.