I am the CEO of a small startup named Userify (shameless plug: https://userify.com, innovative SSH key management, self-hosted and saas) and when we launched, a few mentions on Hacker News really kicked things off. Ten years and tons of adventures later, we've hit a bit of a growth wall. It seems like we're still valuable and useful to people and people still like to run their own servers/instances, so it seems like a marketing issue (and lots more well-funded competitors, of course!)
Most HN's (and me) have always been a bit adverse to ads (especially bad/irrelevant ads), so most of us run ad-blockers. The people that we want to sell to are actually super technical. We're private and self-funded, so I want to look past the 'enterprise' customers and focus instead on the people who actually use the product.
But this is really the problem: How do you advertise to the very smart and technical users when they run ad blockers? Or should we just give in and become a more enterprise-focused company?
In my opinion your site would need a really good technical write-up on a blog section that walks through how your application solves problems people have been handling manually so that it creates it's own compelling reasons even without having to describe the reasons in sales speak. In other words if the technical people here read your technical write-up they should already have ideas in their heads about how it solves management, audit, compliance and other facets of ssh private key management and public key trusts/identity mapping making their lives easier and freeing up time for them and their management teams.
There should be a way to try out your application and ideally a step-by-step instruction for how to self host it. To increase adoption provide people with Ansible, Chef, Docker, Cloud init and other pre-baked scripts so they can just about drop it into an environment with minimal configuration, fire up the required servers and tie everything into it.