What are the few things you would advice a novice to get a successful first launch in Product Hunt?

If you are new to product hunt I would recommend you to get in touch with a hunter to help you out. This is a good website to find a relevant hunter: https://upvote-bell.com/leaderboard

There's a lot of guides that I checked out for how to go about launching, the first one I ever came across emphasized on being active on the community boards the month prior to launching.