Truong Thanh Thuy is the co-founder of GreenGar, the creator of real-time collaborative application Whiteboard. She is a 500 Startups alumnus and spends her time between San Francisco and Ho Chi Minh City. Follow her on Twitter at @thuymuoi.

There are tons of things that I learned throughout my time at 500 startups. However, these are the five things that I wish I knew better.

1. Make better use of your mentor’s time

There are more than 200 mentors available in 500 Startups’ network, together with the whole family (mentors, founders, staff) more than 1000 people. That’s a huge network that any entrepreneur could ever dream of. Entrepreneurship is a lonesome road. However, this network give you no excuse to say, “I don’t know how to do abc or xyz”. Unless you managed to invent a whole new problem with your startup, there will always be someone in the network that is an expert in what you are dealing with. If you can’t find anyone who has experienced similar problems before, it will be difficult to address issues like how to scale your back-end performances, understanding term sheets, or decoding investors’ message that is specific to your product.

All mentors offer office hours of at least once per month each batch, or even more. Each ranges from 30 to 45 minutes a session. Make the best use of each mentor’s time by studying their profiles (literally stalk them). Do your homework. Send them an email about your company and a few questions that you want to discuss before the mentorship session. That is how you will make the best use of your mentor’s and your time!

2. Focus on your traction, metrics, and users, instead of product

GreenGar came to 500 Startups with 500,000 monthly active users. What does that mean? I have half a million people to think about every night before I go to sleep, literally. However, we’re not coming to 500 Startups to show off our traction (who cares?), we’re here to make a difference for our company, to take GreenGar to the next level. 500 Startups has a great team that understands distribution and growth hacking. However, it won’t be helpful if you don’t know your metrics. In fact, I think having a great traction like GreenGar has a lot of disadvantages as most people think GreenGar will be doing okay.

We clearly knew how to make apps that people love and we knew how to make money. However, we made a huge mistake. We focused on developing the new product. Our lead developer, myself and my  co-founder spent literally 16 hours per day writing 170,000 lines of code per week. We successfully developed the new Whiteboard. However, our metrics did not improve a bit during the three months here. One thing we did right was to listen to Dave McClure’s advice and do intensive user research about our user database. Therefore, at least we knew that the new Whiteboard is the product that all of our users have been waiting for.

Read Also: [Video] What accelerator programs ask startups? 

3. There will be 1000 pieces of advice. Listen to all, but only choose those that matters.

From the first point, while it is sweet to have 1000 people giving you advice, it can also be the biggest pain in the butt as well. Before Demo Day, we  had a month to prepare our final pitch. We pitched to mentors, investors and to each others. “Fake it until you make it” is the term that we use. Everyday, we pitched like it’s the real pitch at the Demo Day. If there were two people watching your pitch, you will get two different pieces of advice. If there were six, you will probably receive five different advice (likely one of them will agree with some other in the group). I literally worked on my pitch and my  slide deck everyday! It’s about two to three hours or work everyday,  between improving the slides and practice. The bottom line is that everyone will spend time to advice you because they want the best for you. They want you to be able to get right attention on Demo Day. And more importantly, everyone wants you to succeed.

Lesson learned: There are no wrong advices. However, there are only a few that are valid for certain periods of time or at certain stages of your company. No one in this world knows your company, your product or your vision better than you.

4. The greatest asset of 500 Startups is the co-working space

Before I joined 500 Startups, I remember someone told me that, “Dave McClure is the greatest asset of 500 Startups”. In my opinion, the greatest asset of 500 Startups is the co-working space. I spent 14 to 16 hours in the office every single day. In my own apartment, I don’t even have any furniture. It’s more like a place to crash than a home! But being able to work together with my 500 Startups batchmates, high-speed Internet, fully stocked refrigerator is like heaven for any startups!

Batch 6 of 500 Startups has over 70 percent of founders originating from outside of the US. It feels like going back to college again, except the guys sit next to you will spend like 10 to 12 hours per day working. This gave me a lot of motivation and help needed. No one on my team knows how to set up a server before. Adam, CEO of Binpress, is an expert and offered us all the help when he could.

Thuy hanging out with batchmates Tirthesh and Kevin

5. Spend more time with your batchmates and teammates

With the greatest asset of 500 Startups being the co-working space, I have learned from my batchmates as much as learning from the mentors and the staff of 500 Startups. Needless to say, 500 Startups have some of the most awesome staff on earth, with everyone being so caring and giving.

Spending time with my batchmates during the accelerator program helped me forge many great friendships. We spent days and nights together at the office, giving each others a hand, courage, or just a compliment to make the day better. After I got ripped apart at one of my investment meetings, a batchmate said to me, “Don’t worry, he’s just another a-hole or stupid”. It really makes you feel better knowing you are not going through this alone.

For many teams who didn’t have an office before, 500 Startups is probably the first time that they can have their team all sitting together in one place. Better yet, many of us live together in the same building or apartment, making it the a great opportunity to spend time with each other. However,  we had to avoid the trap of turning into workaholics. Something I admit was hard for me. At the end of the day, you’re building the company not by building the product but by building the people who will grow the company together with you.

This post is dedicated to all of my batchmates, 500 Startups’ staff, Christine Herron, Marvin Liao, Jun Li, Maneesh, Deepak, Dave, Christine Tsai, George, Max, Melissa, and everyone!

If you believe you can be the “next big thing”, 500 Startups’ Batch 007 is now open for application.

This post first appeared on Thuy’s personal blog as Things I Wish I Knew When I Joined 500 Startups.

Image Credits: Truong Thanh Thuy