It seems more elusive than ever to get over 5 people to click your link and check out your project.
Have you seen the logs? As a rule of thumb, the number of visitors is 50+100*N, where N is the number of upvotes. So a few of your posts should have a few hundred of visitors.
In my limited understanding it is a HN feature. If it wasn't that way, HN would be awash with product announcements and spam.