Introduction
A couple weeks ago, we announced our partnership with OptionsFamBot (OFB), you can see the full post here.
But in short, this is a Discord chatting bot that is in over 15,000 servers reaching over 1 million users.
Our vision for OpenBB is to build an ecosystem for Investment Research. With OpenBB Terminal being the #1 open source investment research platform in the world, it made sense for us to simultaneously start working on the OpenBB Bot so we could make investment research available from any chatting platform - starting on Discord.
This was a strategic decision so that we could:
- Use the OpenBB Bot as a marketing growth loop where we can get more users and contributors to join us on building OpenBB Terminal.
- Build strategic partnerships with high-quality premium data providers (such as Polygon and Intrinio) so we can bring better data into our OpenBB Terminal.
- Start working on the OpenBB ecosystem vision
OpenBB Bot Launch
Having seen the success of multiple companies launching new products on Product Hunt, we opted to put all our energy into launching our new bot here. So, 1 hour before the scheduled time of our product launch, we:
- Updated our website to reflect the new OpenBB Bot product
- Pushed our OpenBB Platform to manage subscriptions and customize both charting styles and alerts
- Scheduled all our Social Media posts about Product Hunt on our Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram, Reddit and Discord.
- Updated OptionsFamBot on over 14,000 to our new OpenBB Bot
- Also updated the GamestonkTerminal Bot on over 100 servers (limited to Discord) to our new OpenBB Bot
If you missed the launch, you can find it here.
OpenBB Bot Reaction
From the OpenBB community (OpenBB Terminal users, GamestonkTerminal Bot users and OpenBB Discord members), all the feedback we have received so far about the OpenBB style has been glowing.
Given this is OpenBB Branding, it was a business decision to adopt this style as default for all servers where the OpenBB Bot would be present. This would also help us highlight the moment OFB becomes OpenBB Bot.
What happened after is something that was totally unexpected. Hundreds of users (from the over 1 Million that had visibility to the new OpenBB Bot) joined the OFB Discord and complained about the dark mode, blue candles and overall new style.
Although we allowed users to change the blue candles to green for a more "Classic" style, that wasn't enough.
After listening to the community, we realized that ultimately: people like what they already know.
Introducing OpenbbViz
The next 24 hours after the launch were something like I have personally never witnessed in my career. Our engineers were interacting with the OFB community in real-time and were:
- Receiving feedback from the community on the updated style
- They then began improving style
- Receiving more feedback from community on this
- Then improving style again
- ...
That’s how within the next 24 hours, we had an OpenBB Bot v1.0.1 release. With the main difference being that the OpenBB charting style was no longer default but could still be selected from the platform.
Given our new charting being inspired by Finviz, we like to call our new style "OpenBBViz".
You cannot not listen to the community
What started as a day full of negative feedback from the community, ended up being a very positive day.
The community really realized that we are here for them and won't being going anywhere. Being a retail investor myself, I want to make decisions that would make the old me proud.
This day will always be on my mind as it was the day that, for me, the most engaging discussion on Discord ever happened and "retail investors lost millions due to blue candles".
In the end, everyone came together through the power of memes. A special shout out to linuxboytoo#3193 for turning that day into a lot of laughs.
That day I realized something that is far more important than the position we end up in Product Hunt launch.
I realized that there is no other team I would like to work alongside, and no other community I would like to serve.
OpenBB future is bright, and I hope you keep believing in us.
Power to the players - from a player.