Introduction
When Gamestonk Terminal went viral on HackerNews (HN), the HN community was very critical about our terminal missing an interactive chat. As I started investing more, I realized that I was wasting too much time in group chats by:
- Sharing lots of links – Where the content also changes over time.
- Sharing too many screenshots – Also making my desktop was a mess.
- Copy/pasting data into the chat – This sometimes also messes the format up.
Long story short, we recognized that the HN crowd was right about the importance of a chat where you can discuss finance with your peers.
However, we didn't fully agree with the thesis that the chat needed to be on the same platform. We believed that financial data should come to your financial group chats and not the other way around.
After a couple of weeks of the terminal going viral, a member of our community, a high-school student, expressed his interest in contributing to our terminal.
When we spoke, he told us that he had created his own personal Discord bot to allow him to access financial data directly from a Discord chat. This is regardless of the device he was using (phone, tablet, or laptop) or operating system since he was only relying on the Discord application itself.
From that moment on, we knew we needed to bring a chatting bot concept to our OpenBB Ecosystem. After all, how could we pride ourselves on being an “investment research for everyone, anywhere” when users could not access our features from their phones or tablets?
So, this contributor started working on the Gamestonk Terminal bot with guidance from our team. You can read his story and experience here.
So, how did this lead us to OptionsFamBot?
After setting up the infrastructure of adding features to the Gamestonk Terminal Bot, many contributors expressed interest in wanting to help us build a fully sustainable bot. One person who wanted to help was our, now team member, Juan. Juan started building like there was no tomorrow and very quickly he pushed out several amazing features to our bot.
This led to our Community Manager feeling confident about what we were building, and he started engaging in conversations with other Discord bot creators out there. This is how we met OptionsFamBot and its creator: Andrew.
OptionsFamBot is a Discord bot with stock prices, charting, darkpool data, options, and crypto. The bot has amassed a following of over 1,000,000 users across 14,000+ servers. This is an example of what OptionsFamBot is capable of,
Why partner with OptionsFamBot?
From the start, there was a lot of interest about OptionsFamBot. Not only has it done something different from the competition, but OptionsFamBot’s prices were substantially lower and fair.
Andrew had been working on the bot for 5 years during his spare time, with a full-time job and kids. When we asked him why his prices were so low, he said that his goal was to make financial data accessible to more users (rather than increasing his profits).
This was a perfect match for OpenBB’s mission to democratize investment information and tools. The culture fit that Andrew shared with us was visible from the start.
So, we decided to partner with OptionsFamBot to expand further on this bot concept: add more features, make it more robust, more scalable and support more chatting platforms (e.g. Telegram or Slack).
In the coming weeks, Andrew and our team will begin to deploy the new OpenBB Bot, so you can use the new bot and take advantage of its expanded features and robustness.
What now?
The OpenBB team is very excited to welcome Andrew and his amazing chat bot onboard!
We cannot wait to show you what we have been working on for the past couple of months.
The goal of our new OpenBB Bot (based on Andrew’s bot) is to democratize access to financial information to retail investors and day traders.