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Tailwind UI has made over $500k in sales in its first three days

• skiabox 7y ago
  Is it easy to use it in a react js app?
• AlchemistCamp 7y ago
  It's worth noting a bit about how he was so successful. I don't believe it was the pricing. He's selling two modules at $149 each or a bundle with both for $249, which is fairly typical. I wouldn't be surprised if somebody with a user name ending in eleven showed up saying "charge more", but I believe that rallying cry has already pretty thoroughly saturated HN and the bootstrapper world in general. So much so, that most of us are blind to what actually does differentiate Adam and leads to his success. A more under-valued takeaway than "charge more" would be "the power of free". Adam built a massive following by giving devs what they wanted for free while contracting. This ranged from sharing countless useful tips on Twitter to blogging and then later podcasting. During his excellent interview with csallen on IH[1], he described this practice of helping people for free as a "spring" that he was pushing down on. When he finally sold something, that stored commercial energy was released! Each cycle he's pressed the spring down harder and longer. His earlier courses came together relatively quickly. His design book was started on the back of a longer free campaign of tidbits on his blog and twitter. This time, he started by building Tailwind CSS into a top-notch open source library with extraordinary growth for multiple years before he monetized it with Tailwind UI. 1) It was csallen's helpful post on IH that sparked me into disagreement to write this one! See: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/adam-wathan-just-made-500k-in-3-days-from-his-new-product-603feefe61 https://www.indiehackers.com/post/adam-wathan-just-made-500k...
  • blackandblue 7y ago
    > Adam built a massive following... say no more. that was my first thought. online popularity is a real thing and most people tend to ignore that. i want to say it's less about what you are building but the number of people you can convince. the result of years of online socializing... in fact, i have been, sometimes, utterly impressed by people who build large followings and supporters on patreon. having people believe in them while they are still figuring out their journey. and on the other hand, i have seen i have seen people i have admired for years and considered role models try to build an online following and fail. things have changed...
    • AlchemistCamp 7y ago
      Yes, and I'd say his following was earned and his methods can be copied... they're just a lot of work and take time. The quality of his work has definitely been a key factor, too.
      • nkrisc 7y ago
        The age-old magical formula of: high quality content + good marketing + loads of effort = success. Seems as though he's put it lots of effort over the years creating valuable content (and giving much of it away for free) and marketing it widely and effectively, and he's being rewarded for that.
    • Kovah 7y ago
      Totally agree on that. Popularity is the major factor for selling things. There are so many articles out there about people selling their ebook, making 200k from it and then tell you how to properly write an ebook. It's way easier to make a large figure in sales if you have 20k followers. If just one percent of your followers buy it, you have 200 sales out of nowhere. If you are noboby, nobody will buy your stuff.
  • dominotw 7y ago
    > Adam built a massive following by giving devs what they wanted for free while contracting. This ranged from sharing countless useful tips on Twitter to blogging and then later podcasting. Just a counterpoint. I had never heard of tailwind before it front page of HN couple of weeks ago. I bought it because it looked pretty and I need to revamp one of my sites. And yea price point was super attractive to me.
• bilekas 7y ago
  I remember reading about this here, and I did take alook at the project, but maybe I missed something major. I genuinely didnt see the big appeal, especially at the 149$ price range etc. Just didn't scream to me. What did I miss ??
  • brtkdotse 7y ago
    If you’re into Tailwind/utility-first CSS, this gives you what amounts to a UI builder for the paltry sum of 1 hour of developer salary.
    • dstaley 7y ago
      I think a better way to phrase it is that you can get a UI builder for dramatically less than it would take to pay a developer to build one, rather than saying it's "one hour" since, statistically speaking, hardly any developers are making $300,000 a year.
      • niorro 7y ago
        And there's no interactions/javascript, all that has to be built out..
        • cglace 7y ago
          I’m really glad there aren’t any interactions tied to a JS library. Building out the interactions are the easy part.
      • dlsso 7y ago
        I know he didn't phrase it this way, but one dev hour is probably about right as far as what it actually costs a company. You have to count the overhead of the system that gets the work to the devs, and 30% on top of salaries for benefits and such.
      • belltaco 7y ago
        Cost to company for an employee is not the same as their salary.
• madamelic 7y ago
  Can't wait until every site ever looks exactly the same, just like the Bootstrap 3 era. With that said, probably still going to buy it.
  • deleted 7y ago
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  • blunte 7y ago
    Maybe if they all looked the same, there would be a net improvement in internet website utility.
• dangerface 7y ago
  My first thought is why? It's a dumb business idea simply because it has already been done better by others for free. The whole utility css style is bad design but new and trendy so I guess its got good adoption from that. edit: $150 is a perfectly reasonable price for a template, people saying they should charge more are wrong you cant charge more than $200 for a template.
  • asdkhadsj 7y ago
    I'm a dev who generally dislikes design. I'm picky, I notice all the bad things, but design is simply not what I want to be working on. This offering was tempting for me. Maybe worth noting, I did not buy it however. Namely because of how I'm writing my UIs atm. I can't use this product to quickly prototype - I'd instead have to hand copy layers of DOM elements and classes. At that point the buy-in of quick prototypes seems less valuable to me. Still though, I'm definitely a target audience for this type of thing. Design, fiddling with the fine UI details, choosing colors, etc - all of that is not my area, nor do I desire it to be. I see the value in it.
  • mrkurt 7y ago
    Boring cynicism is boring. Tailwind has been great for me as a non designer. If the components are as helpful as just the css has been, $150 will seem like a steal. And “design of css classes” isn’t something that seems very important.
    • dangerface 7y ago
      > And “design of css classes” isn’t something that seems very important. The lack of name spacing in css is a big issue on any non trivial project. Tailwind was made specifically in an attempt to address this, but I guess that isn't very important? $150 for a template is pretty average, checkout themeforest.net its got loads of components and templates many of them free. As a non designer I use designers resources all the time and modify them to fit the purpose great value to me and my customer. Thats kind of my point, at first you think "How can you make half a million with such a dumb cookie cutter business model?" Then after thinking about it for five seconds the answer is obvious. Just the same way as everyone else on theme forest make a theme and sell it to 3000 people job done.
• nickjj 7y ago
  I just wonder if this means every single site will look the same. The UI is already very heavily inspired by Stripe's UI, which is ok because it looks awesome. But if this product is targeted towards non-designer developers who want to make nice UIs quickly, that means using the components as is with little modification. In order to really customize things to the point where it looks unique would require being a designer in which case, you probably have your own components already. And since it's closed source, we likely won't see a huge influx of custom looks to these components like we do with Bootstrap. I hope Adam addresses that by eventually making multiple variants of each component in each kit so we have some variation. Even just a few well tested color palettes would help initially.
  • dan1234 7y ago
    Even if everyone bought the cheapest deal ($149), $500k in sales works out at around 3,300 orders, which isn’t really a large number of devs.
    • cglace 7y ago
      And how many of those are going to actually going to have something that makes into production? Probably less than half.
  • dchuk 7y ago
    Is that necessarily a bad thing? If it means every site has clean, consistent UI/UX at the expense of originality, that’s not the worst trade off.
  • deleted 7y ago
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  • pier25 7y ago
    > I just wonder if this means every single site will look the same. It's weird because in the web world we expect sites to look different and have a unique look and feel. But in the native world (mobile and desktop) devs are lauded when using native OS GUIs. I've often wondered if browsers should ship a standard UI kit with everything taken into consideration (performance, accessibility, etc).
• danmostudco 7y ago
  For what it's worth - I saw the value of Tailwind UI as its connection to the Refactoring UI product from Adam Wathan (tailwind) + Steve Schoger - https://refactoringui.com/ https://refactoringui.com/ The tips, screencasts, and eventual book they offered gives a superb, distilled, crash course on making stuff "look good" when to the untrained eye it can all seem arbitrary. They take a lot of guess work out of adding polish to your product. Taking a look at Tailwind UI, it's clear they have baked in all of the tips and tricks into the components offered, adhering to preached principles like good visual hierarchy, layout and spacing, color theory, and typography. Therefore, while TailwindUI may seem like just a bunch of utility classes, the components they have constructed tap into a lot of solid design principles that a large community has bought into and studied. I'll for sure be buying and trying it out in future projects of mine. Previous discussion on Adam and Steve's book here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18655224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18655224
  • AlchemistCamp 7y ago
    I encountered Tailwind first, but actually bought their book (and Adam's older stuff) during Black Friday last year. Mostly, I bought those because of liking Tailwind and liking the podcast, Fullstack Radio.
  • kmf 7y ago
    +1 on all of this. refactoring ui is an awesome resource for developers who want actionable ways to improve their design skills, was a must-buy for me. in the same way, tailwind UI has been really useful over the last week since i bought it. some of the integration stuff isn’t ideal - you have to copy-paste huge snippets of code w/ alpine.js code you need to manually remove - but overall i’ve already found it to be useful to help me get unstuck on designing my apps. i made a little vid on my channel about getting started with tailwind ui if anyone wants to see what it looks like in practice: https://youtu.be/quhvuOTlrwA https://youtu.be/quhvuOTlrwA (note that since then i’ve added a lot more of the components in this project: my feedback has stayed pretty consistent, and i think some of the copy-paste problems are easily solvable)
    • 7y ago
• pier25 7y ago
  I'm glad for his (their?) success but in my personal subjective opinion I find that flooding the markup with CSS utility classes is an absolute aberration. I totally see the convenience of having everything in the same place but: 1) It's much harder to read than regular CSS files. 2) It adds so much noise to the markup 3) By trying to solve everything via utility classes some situations need convoluted markup that wouldn't be needed otherwise.
  • ianwalter 7y ago
    Extracting/composing utility classes into component classes using @apply has worked well for me. I was surprised that the Tailwind UI code examples don't include examples of how you would do that especially for things like buttons. Maybe they will add that at some point.
    • pier25 7y ago
      They actually have it in the Tailwind CSS docs: https://tailwindcss.com/docs/extracting-components/#extracting-css-components-with-apply https://tailwindcss.com/docs/extracting-components/#extracti... I'd never heard of @apply before. It sounds like a great approach.
• mrfusion 7y ago
  Can someone explain what tailwind is assuming I’m a bootstrap and jquery guy from 2014?
  • snorremd 7y ago
    Tailwind CSS is a JavaScript library that produces css with utility classes that allows you to build a consistent look and feel in your web page. Unlike Bootstrap which exposes components like buttons, cards, input elements, and other components, Tailwind CSS gives you utility classes that handle padding, margins, colours, shadow, etc. Typing in Tailwind CSS utility classes feels very much like writing CSS. Each utility, e.g. mr (margin right), comes in various forms including sizing and with media queries. So mr-4, sm:mr-2, etc. The value of the Tailwind CSS library lies in its templating and plugin system. You can very easily change what mr-2 means. You define it once in your template and it affects your entire app. If you see repeated components in your app you can opt to create css components using Tailwind's JavaScript based configuration, though you can just as easily create the component as a React, Vue, or Angular component. I used Tailwind CSS in a project and my favourite thing about it was how little I had to fight with Tailwind to get things to look the way I wanted. Tailwind does not dictate what kind of components you can build, it simply gives you good base utilities. With bootstrap you will need to build components from scratch as soon as you need something different from the ones that bootstrap has provided. And if you want a navigation bar, but want it to look slightly different you will have to try to override Bootstrap's css somehow. Tailwind UI is simply a collection of finished Tailwind CSS components that demonstrate useful compositions of html and various tailwind utility classes to build common components. Instead of figuring out how to build a navigation menu yourself using Tailwind utility classes you can simply copy the example in Tailwind UI and customise it if you want. Edit: Tailwind CSS only produces CSS. It does not provide any JavaScript for you components. That you will need to build yourself. There is no Tailwind.js to run in your browser to handle multi-select dropdown inputs, etc.
    • wdb 7y ago
      Personally, I don’t like the utility classes aspect of Tailwind. I can’t explain why but it feels wrong. I know it’s silly but it’s a feeling
• wolco 7y ago
  Probably the most famous laravel dev outside of Taylor with Jeffrey kinda slowing things down. Really good laravel online talks. Refactoring to collections book sold well. Kinda sparked this movement against for loops (which ended up being too cargo cultish). But he changed the php world with that book. Test driven development was pretty popular. Tailwind is now following this path. Good for him. Many have tried to copy his style but it is hard to teach his natural presentation style. All success that follows that is only the piece that shows on the surface there is a lot of hard work and timely execution. And I personally don't even like Tailwinds but I look forward to the nexy arena he will conquer. Postgres? AI?
• bunchOfCucks 7y ago
  Reinventing the wheel.
• dfee 7y ago
  Having built UI frameworks myself, this looks so well put together. Is there anything like this for iOS / SwiftUI? Having begun playing cross platform, I feel like I’m needing to reinvent every non-trivial element.