I just created the ##solofounders channel on freenode. As the channel name suggests it's for startups or ongoing businesses created by a single founder. Stop by if you are interested.
When you're a solo founder, the weighting of the same issues would appear to be significantly different -- or, at least that's my impression when talking to partnered founders.
There's also the sometimes-existential question of being solo, which, yes, brings a whole new set of issues to the table around working habits, motivation, funding, etc.
The differences are smaller than the common elements, and besides that, any chatroom that you try to set up around a subset of a slightly larger one will always suffer from the empty room effect.
It takes a significant number of people to kickstart a new community and even though I'm right in the middle of the target audience I'll stick to #start-ups simply because you can only monitor so many inputs.
The same happens to sites that try to run alternatives to HN for some subset of the information (or even for a different kind of information), they invariably have a huge peak on day one and then they die within a few days, months at best.
The one exception eventually died because the owner didn't put in the effort to keep it going.
Starting a new community is not as easy as announcing one.
It probably will peak and then level off, but hopefully it will allow folks to make some connections and when it does level off the s/n ratio will be higher than a crowded channel. Right now there are 25 folks in the room and the conversation is already pretty interesting.
