I'm in your boat. I read HN pretty religiously but don't have much time to comment or follow up on comments. Every time I even think about doing that I'd almost always rather spend more time obsessing about my product. Thus I barely have any karma points. But every once in a while, I like to post my latest project.
Ditto. I'm building, grinding on customer discovery, reading HN to stay informed (and maybe a little entertained). Also, most of what I read on HN is stuff that is outside my comfort zone, and therefore I am not as able to comment as I would be if I stuck to reading topics with which I am already very familiar.
You "barely have any karma points"?? Your profile says you have 453... that's going to be far, far, far over any threshold pg is likely to set.
You could ask a community member with an established account to consider posting your startup as suggested earlier.
So here's my counterpoint to that: Then that established community member gets even more karma points for posting that. You still have that same problem where I, the perpetual lurker who occasional contributes a comment or a post every now and then, never gets to build their karma points.
It's still like WoW. You put in the time and you get the exp/karma/level what have you.