Lose your first 50 games as fast as possible

There's a famous proverb in the world of Go:

"Lose your first 50 games as fast as possible."

At first glance it sounds like resignation. It isn't. It's an instruction: don't try to win; try to understand why they captured your stones, how your opponent managed to surround so much territory. Each defeat teaches you a shape, a strategy, a pattern you hadn't seen before.

I came to Go after reading Maniac by Benjamín Labatut. Beyond the incredible story it tells, I got hooked on the mysticism surrounding this ancient game. What fascinated me most was the duality: rules that are almost childishly simple (place a black or white stone on an intersection), paired with a level of complexity that borders on the infinite. Computers solved chess decades ago. Go didn't fall until 2016, and even then it took a revolution in AI to do it.

Since then, the more I learn about Go, the more I realize the board is full of concepts that map perfectly onto what it feels like to build side projects.

The board as a school

Lately I've been applying the Framework Agave to how I build and manage my projects. One of the most valuable side effects of that methodology is that I now conceive almost everything as a learning process. I'm no longer chasing immediate success — I'm chasing the lesson.

That shift changes everything. Having that proverb burned into your mind — accepting that you have to lose those 50 games as fast as possible — is the real key to not quitting.

Building side projects is sitting down at the board knowing your stones are going to get captured, but understanding it's the price you pay to understand the game:

Losing to learn how hard distribution is. I launched SusanaHR, a SaaS for managing time off and absences. I've had 2 trials. Two. Neither converted. The product works, the MVP is live — but none of that matters without a real distribution strategy. It's like placing stones on an empty board with no idea where you want to expand. Writing code or having a good idea is only 20% of the work. Without an audience, there's no game.
Losing to learn how hard selling is. Those two SusanaHR trials taught me something more painful: people came, looked around, and left. The product solved a real problem, but I wasn't communicating its value in the user's language — I was speaking the creator's language. Those losses force you to stop talking about features and start talking about problems people recognize as their own.
Losing to learn how hard focus is. Because resources and time are limited. 6-8 hours a week is what I have. Failure teaches you to cut ruthlessly, to stop trying to do everything perfectly on the first try, and to ship faster.

Each of those "losses" isn't failure. It's a stone strategically sacrificed on the board. It's literally the only thing that lets you see the full pattern and improve for the next game.

What Go teaches about side projects

The more I study Go, the more I find concepts that seem written for people who build things. Three of them have changed how I think:

Sente and Gote: initiative is everything

In Go, having sente means you set the tempo — your opponent has to respond to your move. Having gote is the opposite: you're always reacting, always one step behind.

Applied to side projects, sente is launching fast, even if it's ugly, even if it has bugs, even if you're embarrassed by it. Because launching gives you the initiative: you collect feedback, iterate, move forward. Gote is spending three weeks polishing your landing page, perfecting the onboarding nobody will see yet, waiting until it's "ready." While you polish, the market moves. You lose your turn.

With SusanaHR I learned this the hard way. I launched the MVP relatively fast, but stayed in gote on distribution. I had the product, but not the initiative to put it in front of the right people. That's still the battle.

Strategic sacrifice: killing to grow

In Go, you sometimes sacrifice stones on purpose. It seems contradictory — why let yourself be captured? Because sometimes losing a corner of the board gives you a dominant position at the center. A calculated trade.

This is exactly what the Pruning phase of Framework Agave describes. When I killed the standalone Slack bot I'd been building, it wasn't a failure — it was a strategic sacrifice. Everything I'd learned about the Slack API, approval workflows, interactive modals — it went straight into SusanaHR. The stone died, but the position on the board improved.

Ko: the loop you need to break out of

Ko is one of Go's most curious rules. It happens when two players could capture each other's same stone in an infinite loop. To prevent it, the rules require you to play somewhere else first before returning to that spot.

Sound familiar? It's the loop of productive procrastination. Pivoting without advancing. Rewriting the same code a different way. Redesigning the landing for the third time. You're stuck in a ko, repeating the same move without realizing it. Go's solution is elegant: step away, play somewhere else on the board, and come back with perspective. Sometimes the best way to unblock a project is to let it breathe and work on something else for a few days.

Which game are you on?

I'm on game 11. Eleven side projects at different stages: two being actively watered, three in production on maintenance mode, four on conscious pause, two that already bloomed and are archived.

In Go, every game you lose gets studied afterward. You review the moves, note the mistakes, find the moments where everything went wrong. That's exactly what the Compost phase of Agave does: document, release, and feed the next project — what the tech world calls a post-mortem.

Go isn't played to win the first games. It's played to understand the game. And building side projects is exactly the same: you're not here for your first SaaS to hit six figures. You're here to learn how to place stones on the board with intention.

Which game are you on? And what have the ones you've already lost taught you?