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?