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Tailwind CSS: From Side-Project Byproduct to Multi-Million Dollar Business
- artellectual 6y agoI'm a customer of Tailwind UI and I have to say I'm very inspired by this post. Great product, solves a real problem. It's bound to reach this point. Great work!
- aoeusnth1 6y agoWhat a feel-good story. TailwindCSS and TailwindUI have been huge time savers for my project. It’s nice to hear the origin story!
- kanobo 6y agoWow 2 million dollars with Tailwind UI, I would never have imagined that would be possible when it was first pre-released with only a few templates five months ago. Congrats!
- AlchemistCamp 6y agoIt's worth every penny! It's saved me so much time on new projects and just been a great resource to study and learn from.
- muska3 6y agoPlayed around tailwind css this weekend, pretty good and enjoyable. There's some quirks that make it slightly annoying to use with a static site generator that takes in markdown files and converts them to html. In this case it becomes annoying to style these files via something like tailwind. For simpler projects there's tachyons as well, which shares a similar philosophy and is a bit simpler in scope.
- timack 6y agoNot sure if this helps for your specific problem but have you tried the typography plugin: https://tailwindcss.com/docs/typography-plugin/ https://tailwindcss.com/docs/typography-plugin/
- muska3 6y agoYes I tried it out, except it's extremely alpha at this stage. It's not at all easy to customize.
- francislavoie 6y agoMaybe I'm misunderstanding, but can't you just use @apply to set up all the classes your markdown parser might output?
- muska3 6y agoYes that's the only way to do it, but then you kinda cirumvent the whole tailwind philosophy. The tailwind typography package is an attempt to fix this, but right now it's annoying to use.
- vinrob92 6y agoWe used Tailwind for our newly launched SaaS, so thanks for that!
- orliesaurus 6y agoGood job on the milestone: personally I have never tried Tailwind, still on Bootstrap... Guess I am old-fashioned...
- nimchimpsky 6y agobulma is better than bootstrap imo, never tried tail wind
- 1123581321 6y agoWe still find Bootstrap unmatched for training content creators and developers, while making completely custom templates. The utility classes in Bootstrap get us far enough that most CSS specificity is flat.
- deltron3030 6y agoAdam, Steve, have you considered building a marketplace for Tailwind UI, and focus more on guidance and quality control on the design side instead of building out all the components yourself? It could help with the creation of interactive components for all ecosystems, like those that are tightly coupled to a specific ecosystem considering that it's not only frontend frameworks, but also backend frameworks that have their own LiveView version or way to do components now (e.g. Elixir Phoenix has Surface which is like writing backend React components, Rails has view components). Supporting all those combination yourself seems daunting, and it would suck to see components for React or LiveWire/Alpine, but not other ecosystems that aren't covered by the skillset of your team.
- countername 6y ago+1 for the marketplace idea
- mariusmarais 6y agoI am personally very happy a company has come along to build something useful while charging a (fair?) price for it. So happy that we just bought a team license for Tailwind UI. Too many marketplaces exist where there is no value-add instead of sitting in the middle.
- deltron3030 6y agoSure, but imagine you've paid for it and they come out with more interactive components, but your language ecosystem then isn't part of that because they don't have the capacity to cover every environment. A curated marketplace would be a smart choice imo.
- lol768 6y ago>instead of building out all the components yourself One of the reasons I bought Tailwind UI is _because_ Adam & Steve knew what they were doing, had good attention to detail and because I'd already purchased Refactoring UI. I'd worry that with a marketplace the quality would drop, no matter how much guidance you give.
- _AzMoo 6y agoI don't understand tailwind. The entire point of CSS is to separate style from structure. How does applying composable utility classes to all of your HTML elements differ from the old days of using HTML attributes for styling? Edit: So after looking into it a bit more, and specifically the section in the documentation about extracting components, I understand where they're coming from a bit better. Extracting repeated compositions of utility classes into reusable components or named classes is exactly how I use other CSS frameworks such as bootstrap or foundation. I'm seeing the major difference between tailwind and other CSS frameworks as being the lack of pre-defined UI components. The minimalism is obviously a big advantage for performance, but otherwise I still see little difference between Tailwind and other CSS frameworks.
- devmunchies 6y agoI don’t get it either. Start putting css in the style attribute while you’re at it. BUT! This proves there isn’t a “right” way to do things and developers have differing preferences—enough to make 7 figures of revenue.
- tbassetto 6y ago> Start putting css in the style attribute while you’re at it. I think everybody reacts like this at first (including me) :) If you put styles directly in the attribute, nothing is preventing your from using a color that's not part of your palette, nor using sizes that do not respect your UI "flow". Tailwind comes with a (customizable at build time) well-defined sets of colors and sizes. I recommend watching the 17-minutes long talk "In Defense of Utility-First CSS" for those curious about Utility-First CSS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R50q4NES6Iw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R50q4NES6Iw
- stanislavb 6y agoSame here. Yet, there are so many people crazy about Tailwind ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Most probably there's something we are missing.
- kalyantm 6y ago
- andrewstuart 6y agoI wonder what they'll do with their money and success. I'm reminded of LogoJoy - a single founder company that started sucking in huge amounts of cash revenue, which the owner spent on employing people and offices and growing a company and getting investors who recommended they rebrand, destroying much of the value and revenue of LogoJoy. I bet that founder is wishing he stayed a single person company and just banked all that cash. https://betakit.com/looka-lays-off-80-percent-of-staff-as-failed-rebrand-from-logojoy-cut-revenue-in-half/ https://betakit.com/looka-lays-off-80-percent-of-staff-as-fa... So I wonder which way these guys will go. Will they bank the cash and buy houses and have a quiet and happy life, or will they spend it on employing people and growing a business and getting investors to try to make more money?
- samrobbins 6y agoThey've already employed a few people
- adamwathan 6y agoNo plans to go the VC route. We've hired three people now — two developers focused almost entirely on open-source, and another who splits his time between our commercial projects and contributing in our OSS community by answering questions, writing documentation and guides, etc. We keep a few hundred grand in the bank as a payroll cushion but everything else gets pulled out and put in our personal bank accounts. We're both millionaires and financially independent at this point, and are only continuing to do what we do because we really enjoy it. We're building a small team so we have more freedom to pursue other fun R&D-style projects while still delivering on what our customers and community are asking for.
- thelittleone 6y agoBig fan of tailwindcss and paying customer of tailwindui also. The decision to purchase was at least in part based on your active engagement with users on the discord channel.
- andrewstuart 6y agoPriority one is get yourselves set up financially for the rest of your life. It's entirely possible that this may be your one and only big financial win in your entire life. So make sure you bank $5M cash each before spending the money ... Consider cutting down to no employees if practical. I'm not saying you should do that, just that you should consider it. Employees cost huge money. Then, once you've got all that sorted out, if you want to do the big expansion thing .... go for it.
- mmckelvy 6y agoGreat story. Also debunks the commonly held belief that developers won’t pay for code / libraries / components. If you’re an open source maintainer, this is a pretty good example of how to monetize your work.
- ablekh 6y agoCongratulations! I would highly recommend removing that extremely annoying, disruptive and useless "Get Early Access" banner at the bottom of every page on your website (including documentation). GitLab used to have a very similar banner (don't remember exactly what it said). I wrote to them and eventually they have gotten rid of it (I like to think that it was, at least, in part, due to my criticism :-).
- bloudermilk 6y agoI sincerely hope the creators avoid falling into the VC honey pot. At their current scale they're on pace to build a sustainable business around the core open source library. Growing beyond their UI component library toward an open marketplace (a la Noun Project) should be easily doable in the low 7-figure revenue range.
- qilisiang 6y agoWow, a huge success from Tailwind UI project. I would never imagine that Tailwind UI could bring in so much revenue. I think Tailwind CSS is a niche CSS framework that's why I am working on project similar to Tailwind UI. More competition is good for customers. Still invite only tho.
- kemyd 6y agoThey deserved it, and I'm pleased with their results. When I started my paid online editor for Tailwind CSS ( https://tailwind.build https://tailwind.build ) in November 2019, and someone posted a link to my Show HN on Discord, Adam replied: "bums me out when other people get stuff released using my tools before me because i have to invest so much time into building the actual OSS its all built on :/" And this ruined my happy launch day :) When I read that they make much more money, I am again in an emotionally neutral state ;) Congratulations!
- hnarn 6y ago> "bums me out when other people get stuff released using my tools before me because i have to invest so much time into building the actual OSS its all built on :/" This seems like such a destructive approach to software development, and especially open source. It seems pretty obvious that having additional tooling will only boost the popularity of the original project.
- SirHound 6y agoYep. How much OSS did they leverage to build Tailwind UI?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- johnnujler 6y agoFWIW, I don’t think it is destructive, in fact, it is a reformative approach i.e., after all we are human beings, not sages and saints, and the real value lies in being able to do it despite knowing your flaws as a human being, and the “congratulations” from OP is an evidence that they realise it is a part and parcel of life. It takes time to digest the fact that someone has progressed far ahead of you using your tool and when your mind is clouded, you don’t immediately think about how that is a net good.
- hnarn 6y ago
- habosa 6y agoReally happy for them. Tailwind is so good that it’s actually made my website designs 5x better. I’m able to translate my thoughts into pixels so much faster and more accurately with Tailwind than with any other CSS system/framework. If you haven’t tried it, you should. It definitely looks really silly (inline styles?!?) but it’s so powerful.
- rjknight 6y agoTLDR: I've written a moderately complex app using Tailwind and only had to write 33 lines of CSS. I've been using Tailwind to build a moderately complex app, and for me the killer feature of Tailwind is that _most of the time I don't have to think in CSS_. It's not that I can't think in CSS - I've written lots of CSS over the years. However, as someone putting together a UI, I want to think in terms of slightly higher-level constructs. With Tailwind I almost never need to think about specific pixels values, weird browser quirks, or how breakpoints are handled. Instead, I can think almost entirely about how to achieve the correct behaviour. I work with ClojureScript so I have hot reloading and fast feedback, and I can build a moderately complex UI component in a few hours. Not having to context-switch into CSS really helps me to stay in "flow". If there's some very specific design feature that I need, then I can still write some custom CSS, but this is sufficiently rare that in a 10k SLOC project there are 33 lines of hand-written CSS.
- hmexx 6y agoHas anyone considered using utility-style CSS combined with semantic class naming? Example: <div class="profile-card"></div> .profile-card { @include tailwind-css-1 @include tailwind-css-2 ...etc... } This way your html has semantic classes but the definition of the classes uses something like tailwind instead of raw CSS. One level of abstraction. Seems the best of both worlds?
- zeusly 6y agoYou mean this? https://tailwindcss.com/docs/extracting-components/ https://tailwindcss.com/docs/extracting-components/
- wishinghand 6y agoI mean, isn’t that just writing CSS classes at that point?
- skrebbel 6y agoI'm very impressed that they sold $2m so quickly. Especially given that these are lifetime packages, not SaaS, it's really impressive. It means ~8000 people became their customer in just a few months! That really blows me away, and I'd love to understand more about how they pulled that off.
- christophilus 6y agoI bought the $150 package. It’s easily saved me $150 in hours I haven’t spent tinkering with design. It’s a great value proposition. I don’t use tailwind CSS; just the designs.
- adsjhdashkj 6y agoYea, i'm already planning on buying it tbh. I'm a backend dev and, while i can do frontend - and i usually am picky about design, i don't _want_ to design, especially during prototyping. I'm planning on learning Tailwind for post-PoC styling, but buying the Tailwind Builder (Lifetime) for early PoCs to get styling out of my way. I really like the offering of not just templates, but transitioning my templates into my final product _when i want_. But, i haven't used any of it yet. We'll see, but it's definitely worth the $99 license (to me) if it even remotely pans out.
- Giorgi 6y agoto be honest it is top-notch product, I am using it since "utility-first CSS framework" era, and it's awesome.
- adamzapasnik 6y agoGood for them, tailwind is a great lib :)
- itwy 6y agoTailwind UI is still in preview with very few components. There's no way it generated 2 millions. No even 10k. This is a gross publicity stunt.
- topoftheforts 6y agoThe bundle is $249. If you don't think 8k people would pay that to have lifetime access to components that look great and allow you to build a great looking website in hours, you don't really understand the dev market. As a developer, Tailwind UI is a god send, I've been waiting for years for a great looking CSS framework with pre-made components (Also, they had a pretty big audience already after selling Refactoring UI which is a really useful book for developers that can't design, like me)
- alessioalex 6y agoExactly. $249 is peanuts compared to the time saved not spent on these components each and every time (for multiple projects even).
- rikroots 6y agoThank you, Adam, for developing Tailwind CSS. I've been using it exclusively for my side projects since the start of the year. The thought of going back to a less utility-based CSS system (and/or SASS/LESS) leaves me cold.
- AlchemistCamp 6y ago> "In classic developer fashion though, I spent the entire week making decisions about the tech stack, and had maybe one full day at the end to actually hack on the real functionality. > One of those decisions was what to do about the CSS." And it worked! Adam is living the dream.
- idkwhoiam 6y agoEverybody talks productivity. I completely agree. I was so much quicker with Tailwind CSS than any other approach I was familiar with. But let's talk about maintenance. I had to go back to a project I completed 6 months ago to change a few things and boy do these classes look like a mess!
- jmuguy 6y agoCongrats Adam and team! We've only been using Tailwind for a few months but honestly its completely changed how we approach design.
- christiansakai 6y agoAmazing. I'd never expect that a CSS library can make so much money. Maybe there's always a market for UI libraries.
- greenie_beans 6y agoi suck at design and good css. tailwind has made my frontend work not suck as much. love it, thank y'all
- alexellisuk 6y agoAs the maintainer of several very popular open source projects in the infra-structure space, I was initially impressed by hearing the team had gotten 2M USD in revenue over three months, but then read they'd already brought in 2M USD in the previous two years, totalling 4M USD over ~2.5 years. If I could figure out a value-stream like these two gents, then my OSS work would be on another level. This isn't your classic "Indie Hackers SaaS" or viral eBook stuff. Hats off to you. I'll be the first to buy your eBook :-)
- mmckelvy 6y agoI think the key leap they took to generate revenue was to build out a fully-baked, batteries-included product based on their open source library. Sure you could build out the components in Tailwind UI yourself, but a lot of people will pay the $250 to have a solution that "just works".
- z3t4 6y agoIts pretty easy. You sell something to your users. And it doesn't even have to be relevant to your product. The hardest part in selling is to acquire users. But as you already have users you can now upsell and cross-sell.
- calferreira 6y agoHow do they handle the licensing of JS and CSS ?
- Frontendor_Team 6y agoHello Tailwind UI, We are really pleased for you. You really are an inspiration to us that made us create the idea of https://Frontendor.com https://Frontendor.com HTML Library and keep going to the end and not giving up about our dream. Thank you so much. Frontendor Team
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