Most of the Show HNs on HN's front page get there organically. Sometimes we see ones that fell through the cracks and put them in the second-chance queue (described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 and links back from there) or email repost invites.
As lwansbrough said, a small number of reposts is explicitly ok (this is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). Reposts aren't a good thing per se (and can drive the, shall we say, detail-oriented segment of the community crazy sometimes), but it's worse for good submissions to fall through the cracks, so we make the tradeoff that way.
Edit: Taking a quick look at your post, I think you may be falling into some of the traps that prevent a project from attracting attention here: for example, the "I can't tell what this does" problem, and the fact that the intellectually interesting details aren't up front, so curiosity isn't engaged in the first couple seconds. Take a look at
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14841231, which are some tips that we send to YC startups and HN users who email us.
From my experience, things I used to submit 5-7 years ago got to the front page organically. Literally nothing I submit now gets to the front page, and you can see the wide variety of things in my profile, including SHOW HN, ASK HN, etc.
Now one can say that they were just all things that shouldn't have hit the front page, but these days I really believe that you need to ask a few HNers to upvote something for it to hit the front page. I think it's a dirty little secret of reddit and HN. Perhaps it can be fixed with algorithms somehow, but I am not sure how.
PS: there was one exception when I made a clickbait title with the word "hacked" in it, like a year ago. That hit the front page organically.
I would recommend a total redesign of your front page. It sounds like it could be a great tool, but I have literally no impression of it from clicking on any of the non-gated links on your site.
The basic info on https://visualtip.com/tour is closer to what you need on the homepage. But visual-focused instead of text. And absolutely reduce the noise on the page by getting rid of meaningless text such as
"Security: We take security very seriously and have taken measures to protect our customer's data"
and the Deiter Rams quote which looks like a user endorsement needs to go too.
I agree. I clicked to the front page and I see something about annotating images, but then also something about users... and I just don't really get what it does without reading the whole page. The company name is also not very illuminating.
The tour page however tells me almost instantly that it's meant to get feedback on designs (even if that is only made clear in step three out of three). Now going back to the front page, those three steps are there as well, except they're shown as three separate features of the product instead of logical steps (I didn't make that connection) and the "You, the designer" part puts the "so what's that about clients/customers" in place.
Then again, I often feel like I'm thick-witted so take it for what you will. Or perhaps where you link from (e.g. link text / ad text / the search query they entered) gives enough context for them to get it.
I tend to look at HN comments before following a link. As was pointed out by someone else, the web is suffering from an obesity crisis, and I check the comments to see if anyone said anything interesting before risking a visit to the link.
As for your submission, I have no idea what problem it's supposed to solve, and I'm not inclined to "sign up" to try to figure it out. I think screenshots or other graphics to 'show' what your site does would be helpful.
So I clicked on the link in your post in safari on Sierra, and it's literally a blank page. I was curious so I opened the developer console and it says:
"app.initialize is not a function (in app.initialize({"api":"https:\/\/api.visualtip.com","key":"db4430ab8da22455511f9b26963a7151835ef5471b82"});"
I haven't the slightest idea what that means, but would have expected to at least see some sort of header or un-styled text rather than absolutely nothing!
It definitely seems like there's quite a bit of luck in getting to the front page - submitting at the right time when people who would be interested happen to be looking at 'new' and feeling like upvoting. It's definitely worth resubmitting a few times (at tactically advantageous times of day).
That said, you might want to add a few sentences describing VisualTips, and maybe the backstory, on your submission. A lot of people click into the comments to get a bit more context and decide whether or not they actually want to click into the submitted item itself.
Also, it would be helpful to have some kind of visual description on your homepage. I have a pretty good image in my mind from the text, but for such a _visual_ product it would be really helpful to see screenshots or, even better, a gif of it in action. Those visuals would likely help people get more excited about it.
As lwansbrough said, a small number of reposts is explicitly ok (this is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). Reposts aren't a good thing per se (and can drive the, shall we say, detail-oriented segment of the community crazy sometimes), but it's worse for good submissions to fall through the cracks, so we make the tradeoff that way.
Edit: Taking a quick look at your post, I think you may be falling into some of the traps that prevent a project from attracting attention here: for example, the "I can't tell what this does" problem, and the fact that the intellectually interesting details aren't up front, so curiosity isn't engaged in the first couple seconds. Take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14841231, which are some tips that we send to YC startups and HN users who email us.