I'm spending nearly all my time working on my product, Cammi, at the moment. It's an amazing tool that's going to help a lot of people who are neurodivergent work toward their goals in a more sustainable way. That's the plan anyway, and each month it inches closer to being the product that achieves this.
I'm thinking a lot about opportunity cost at the moment. Opportunity cost is a way of describing missed potential opportunity from one thing, when you're doing another.
When I left my Tech Lead position last year it was to address the opportunity cost of not working on on Cammi full-time. I wanted the opportunity to spend more time building it, to partner with people, to advertise and to give talks. However, as the year has progressed and I still don't have a finished product, I am starting to think about opportunity cost a little differently.
Throughout the year I've become a better solo product developer, gained an even better understanding of what a Minimum Viable Product should be, and… watched my bank account go down. While I've been working on my app that continues to grow in complexity and scope to achieve what it wants to do, I've seen people release the smallest of products that have gained huge traction and attention on the web. And while I've been seeing this happen, I've been having my own ideas for products that I could release in a week, or in a month. I'm really drawn at the moment to building 12 products a year, until I find the one that gains the most traction, the one that sticks.
This is all to say that continuing to work on Cammi presents its own opportunity cost. I've sat still on so many ideas only to have seen them built and validated by a market that did indeed want the low-caffeine coffee products I wanted to produce.
I'm not going to give up on Cammi, or build something else just yet, but I sure do wish I had another me who could be working on all the things that I want to be doing.