My latest web application, LeadNuke.com, seems to be suffering from the all-too-familiar blank canvas problem.
Potential customers seem to love the idea of LeadNuke, and indeed I have several paying companies "using" it at the moment. But I use the term "using" loosely. The biggest problem is that it's a unique kind of application with a unique setup process, and my users aren't necessarily the most web-savvy demographic.
But I digress. Point is, until you get it set up and tweaked, it's essentially useless, and I'm trying to avoid a crippling churn rate. I've already automated as much of the setup process as possible (or at least as much as is plausible for now). I think the best thing for me to do, after talking to users, is to create a simple and elegant "getting started" wizard when users first login. And this comment in another thread referring to Skype [1] has motivated me to move this task up the queue.
I don't want to reinvent the wheel. So, what web applications have already hit this out of the park?
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1569147
EDIT: rmah on IRC pointed out that needing a "getting started" wizard may be an indicator that the app is too complicated. He is right, and I totally agree. In this case, it is too complicated for its target user. But I built it from need, and it does what it needs to. In the future, I plan on making it simpler.