How to grow your open source community from scratch

PROJECT NAMING

The name should be short, memorable, unique and related with the project.

When I started what we call OpenBB Terminal today, the name of the project was “Stock Market Bot” or something silly like that. I knew that wouldn’t be the last name, but I didn’t have any inspiration and in the meantime I was focused on building the platform.

I am an Elon Musk fan, and was a GameStop investor. This meant that once I saw this tweet — I didn’t blink twice and knew this was the name I was waiting for.

That’s when Gamestonk Terminal (now OpenBB Terminal) was born.

KEEP THE PROJECT PRIVATE UNTIL MVP

• There will be less pressure than building in public, and you will be able to iterate much faster.
• No users asking for features or reporting bugs when MVP is still under development.
• Most importantly, this guarantees that when the users see the MVP they know where you are heading with the project.

I worked on Gamestonk Terminal for 2 months on my own. The code architecture changed several times as I was in this experimental phase. And if you look into the source code I even committed API keys accidentally. But I had no pressure…