My product was featured on Hacker News, without doing anything other than posting. But two Product Hunt posts failed miserably. Is it not enough to be a good product to be featured in PH? Should I play something with the system? Or is it possible to be featured only by people with a large audience?
I don't think any post any where is guaranteed success. Sometimes people just get (un)lucky.
It's certainly possible to be able to get support that helps in the run up to Product Hunt launch, I don't think it's possible to game it.
From what I see it really ends up being the PH community that decides. So your product really needs to appeal to the type of people they are.
There's quite a few posts / stories about Product Hunt launches here on IH, it might be worth a browse.