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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

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.
- chii 7y ago
  > And yea price point was super attractive to me. it's quite cheap for this large amount of polish. $300 bucks is less than a day's wage for a good engineer, but a good engineer would need to spend at least a week to polish bespoke stuff to this level. So therefore, it's worth the price tag.
  - wyaeld 7y ago
    Plenty of us 'good engineers' aren't anywhere near that proficient in frontend either. I can build great backend systems, that's where my interest lies. I can't do CSS like this even with months.
PragmaticPulp 7y ago
> 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. Agreed. $500K in 3 days sounds like a sudden windfall, but Adam has spent a long time and a lot of effort building a quality product and a quality following. > 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. These "charge more" success stories are a prime example of survivorship bias. We never hear about the bootstrappers or freelancers who charged too much for too little and lost their clients. Furthermore, it undermines from the amount of effort that successful bootstrappers invested before they reach success. Frankly, it feels like the "charge more" crowd is trying to downplay the effort of founders and replace it with their own "one cool trick" bit of guru wisdom. Locally, I've seen a lot of beginner freelancers and bootstrappers put the cart before the horse with "charge more" before they have a quality product/service. Charging premium prices for premium products makes sense. Charging premium prices for mediocre work will build the wrong type of reputation very quickly.
mattmaroon 7y ago
That's what Gary Vaynerchuck has been saying to do for years.
_bxg1 7y ago
Even with all that popularity, I'm amazed that there's even a market of this size for a paid UI component library in 2020. There are many more quality, OSS UI component libraries out there these days than could possibly be counted. It seems like such an oversaturated space. Kudos to him for managing to overcome it!
- joshmanders 7y ago
  > There are more quality, OSS UI component libraries out there these days than could possibly be counted. If you think that, then you don't understand why we use and choose Tailwind over the other "quality" OSS UI components. If you name three, I can tell you exactly why Tailwind UI is superior to them.
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    I'm not saying it isn't superior - clearly it must be - I'm just saying the bar is pretty high ("very good" and "free").
  - Papirola 7y ago
    I'll bite: how would you compare this to https://material-ui.com/ https://material-ui.com/ ?
    - joshmanders 7y ago
      There's tons of boilerplate to even customize Material UI to make it not look like all other Material UI sites. Want to change how a component looks? Material UI says you must increase the specificity of your CSS... Tailwind CSS/UI components? Just edit your config, or you're in complete control, so uhhh... just remove `bg-blue-700` and replace it with `bg-green-500` if you want it to be green instead of blue.
      - thrwaway69 7y ago
        I will bite, how is that different from something like theme-ui - https://theme-ui.com https://theme-ui.com ? You can have a theme file with lot of options passed to your provider and then in your jsx, simply use variant. <Button variant="green" text="there?"/> or for css properties, you can do <Button sx={{ background: `primary` }} text="hey?" />

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.

chii 7y ago
> And yea price point was super attractive to me. it's quite cheap for this large amount of polish. $300 bucks is less than a day's wage for a good engineer, but a good engineer would need to spend at least a week to polish bespoke stuff to this level. So therefore, it's worth the price tag.
- wyaeld 7y ago
  Plenty of us 'good engineers' aren't anywhere near that proficient in frontend either. I can build great backend systems, that's where my interest lies. I can't do CSS like this even with months.

PragmaticPulp 7y ago

> 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. Agreed. $500K in 3 days sounds like a sudden windfall, but Adam has spent a long time and a lot of effort building a quality product and a quality following. > 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. These "charge more" success stories are a prime example of survivorship bias. We never hear about the bootstrappers or freelancers who charged too much for too little and lost their clients. Furthermore, it undermines from the amount of effort that successful bootstrappers invested before they reach success. Frankly, it feels like the "charge more" crowd is trying to downplay the effort of founders and replace it with their own "one cool trick" bit of guru wisdom. Locally, I've seen a lot of beginner freelancers and bootstrappers put the cart before the horse with "charge more" before they have a quality product/service. Charging premium prices for premium products makes sense. Charging premium prices for mediocre work will build the wrong type of reputation very quickly.

mattmaroon 7y ago

That's what Gary Vaynerchuck has been saying to do for years.

_bxg1 7y ago

Even with all that popularity, I'm amazed that there's even a market of this size for a paid UI component library in 2020. There are many more quality, OSS UI component libraries out there these days than could possibly be counted. It seems like such an oversaturated space. Kudos to him for managing to overcome it!

joshmanders 7y ago
> There are more quality, OSS UI component libraries out there these days than could possibly be counted. If you think that, then you don't understand why we use and choose Tailwind over the other "quality" OSS UI components. If you name three, I can tell you exactly why Tailwind UI is superior to them.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  I'm not saying it isn't superior - clearly it must be - I'm just saying the bar is pretty high ("very good" and "free").
- Papirola 7y ago
  I'll bite: how would you compare this to https://material-ui.com/ https://material-ui.com/ ?
  - joshmanders 7y ago
    There's tons of boilerplate to even customize Material UI to make it not look like all other Material UI sites. Want to change how a component looks? Material UI says you must increase the specificity of your CSS... Tailwind CSS/UI components? Just edit your config, or you're in complete control, so uhhh... just remove `bg-blue-700` and replace it with `bg-green-500` if you want it to be green instead of blue.
    - thrwaway69 7y ago
      I will bite, how is that different from something like theme-ui - https://theme-ui.com https://theme-ui.com ? You can have a theme file with lot of options passed to your provider and then in your jsx, simply use variant. <Button variant="green" text="there?"/> or for css properties, you can do <Button sx={{ background: `primary` }} text="hey?" />