I'm very excited to finally launch Opportunity Cost today!
You can now price the internet in bitcoin!
It's extremely rewarding to take something from a nagging idea in your mind to a working product.
Here's how we did it:
As someone who has been focused on educating people about bitcoin for 8 years, I'm always thinking about the "top of funnel" and how we can bring more people into bitcoin.
As a bitcoiner, I'm always looking for tools to make my life easier.
Opportunity Cost tries to solve for both.
For people to understand why they need bitcoin they need a way to recognize it's value prop quickly. By enabling them to download a simple extension that allows them to track the price of things in bitcoin over time we hope that people begin to recognize the power of hard money.
Those who already live on a bitcoin standard need a simple tool that can easily help them understand how much bitcoin they're spending on a day-to-day basis. Opportunity Cost solves for that.
I've often had ideas for informational bitcoin products/tools that never made it to launch because I never felt comfortable taking the risk to pay a developer to build it from scratch.
AI completely changes the game. In a span of three hours one Saturday afternoon I was able to build a working prototype via a combination of ChatGPT and Replit.
After playing with the prototype in my browsers I was successfully able to convince myself that this product was something worth pursuing. I then found nostr:nprofile1qyx8wumn8ghj7cnjvghxjmcpz4mhxue69uhk2er9dchxummnw3ezumrpdejqqgq4mqax94enxcx4ez5h2sjt4hthkqj3y5vnccj3yv0nn5w03tp5usehgwej here on Nostr, reached out to him, showed him the app and asked if he thought he could turn it into a fully functioning product.
He liked the idea, understood how I wanted it to work because of the prototype I built, and took the reins from there.
Within two weeks of Moses using his spare time to work on the app, we had a fully functioning and stable product.
The longest part of this process has been getting the app approved by the app stores. Google approved this morning and Firefox is still pending.
We're entering a brave new world in which "idea guys" who have been scoffed at historically have agency to bring their ideas to life in the form of a prototype and then hand it off to a dev who can do the rest.
Huge shout out to nostr:nprofile1qyx8wumn8ghj7cnjvghxjmcpz4mhxue69uhk2er9dchxummnw3ezumrpdejqqgq4mqax94enxcx4ez5h2sjt4hthkqj3y5vnccj3yv0nn5w03tp5usehgwej and Ed, Head of Ops at TFTC, for their work on this. Also, nostr:nprofile1qyx8wumn8ghj7cnjvghxjmcpz4mhxue69uhk2er9dchxummnw3ezumrpdejqqgq3hx5fgpxm7vp5ulscs6afm3xx6dm0ywdprqn3h5hv2eag3xzsecaq8aww and Anthony Ronning for their advice along the way.
Go download the extension and let us know what you think! The extension is only the first iteration of Opportunity Cost.
