The hard thing about scaling a service like this is the social graph, AKA. when users have a lot of followers. So I'm going to use the freemium model and let users follow 10 or 20 people for free, and then start charging.
That way I'll start making money at the same time I have scaling problems.
Sure, I'll give a free premium account to anyone on HN that asks. I have a blog over at http://www.maximise.dk/blog but it's boring and there are definitely no posts that are only 14 characters.
I wholeheartedly second the Murakami book recommendation. It's really nice how he talks about being a hardworking writer in a very personal and unglamorous manner. The analogy he draws with running is also very thoughtful.
It's a rule of thumb: you typically need >= 5 whys to get down to a reasonably useful response.
From the article, you could stop at pretty much any point in the whole 'why does our video suck' chain:
"One problem in Austin was that we couldn't switch video fast enough. Why? Because we were using a cheap switch purchased at an office superstore."
At that point you could've said "Ok, let's not buy crappy switches in future", but you would have missed the better solution (don't do things half-assed at the last minute)
Actually, the Five Whys isn't about finding a solution, it is about finding the core problem. I don't think that Joel's example is a good one, because after four true layers of problems it abruptly jumps to a solution, with absolutely no reasoning why this particular solution would be the best one, while leaving deeper issues just to keep the number of Whys at five.
The correct Five Whys process would continue past five questions, and end in something like "because the team is not prepared" or even "the team doesn't have enough experience with organizing events"; something that could be solved by, among others, preparing a checklist.
My startup Pretty Graph is working on an online graph-making app, which will make such graphs easy to make in the browser. Sign up at http://prettygraph.com or email me at hrishimittal@gmail.com and I will let you know when we go live.
(My usual HN id is revorad, but I'm... err noprocrasting :-)
Good point John. The full site with previews and a trial version will be up in a few days. That's why I haven't posted an Ask HN review post yet. I mentioned it in this thread because people expressed interest in such an app.
(Seriously, this is probably going to be the crappiest day for signal to noise ratio on HN. Time to get some work done.)