I would also say that the tailwind ui library is facing stiff competition from free offerings like shadcn.
Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
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Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#82> The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products
I know nothing about marketing, but why would you rely on one single source? Or interpreted differently (as a statement of fact): allow that situation to occur?
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#83The paid products Adam mentions are the pre-made components and templates, right? It seems like the bigger issue isn't reduced traffic but just that AI largely eliminates the need for such things. While I understand that this has been difficult for him and his company... hasn't it been obvious that this would be a major issue for years? I do worry about what this means for the future of open source software. We've lo…
AI's going to be a whole lot less useful when it doesn't have any open source component libraries to crib from.
They already pay people to generate training data.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#84That's sad to hear, if true, and I'd have gladly paid for Tailwind if they'd had a "OK, so you use our CSS indirectly" program in place. I'm aware of "Tailwind Plus", but that seems to be React-only, and thus the opposite of where I want to be.
You can actually use tailwind via the script tag in a plain HTML file. Not for production, but great for whipping up prototypes
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#85As a avid user of Tailwind and one who purchased Tailwind CSS Plus, it's very sad to hear.
OSS without founders having it's own managed software company is always a difficult position. (e.g. database vendors open source but also have their own company providing managed service and support allowing sustainable development). Hope of getting strong support from companies is unsustainable.
Curious what should be the business model for a library something like tailwind?
They could add a premium features but entry users not allowed to use certain features is a bad experience
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#86Tailwind Plus was always tricky since most people would use it for commercial products and that seemed like a grey area based on their licensing. Then shadcn came along and all the Tailwind Plus alternatives (many times recreating the same UI elements that plus has) and then people just copied and used those components and polished further using AI.
Before Tailwind got big, Adam released an amazing book about UI/UX called Refactoring UI[0] and it really helped me become better and understand subtleties of design. I even considered printing a personal physical book for my coffee table. If you want to support Adam and don't need Tailwind Plus, this ebook could be a good way.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#87Sadly, selling pre-made components and templates was never a sound business model, especially in the wake of AI. One thing I learned being on HN for so long and launching my own products is that a product is not a business. Don't conflate the two, at your peril.
Lots of people make great products but actually turning that into a business is fundamentally a different skill. It seems like Tailwind grew too fast, having 2 million ARR a few years ago and almost 10 employees (200k each is probably the all-in cost anyway for an employee if they're full time with benefits, so I suppose there was barely any profit), whereas they'd probably have been fine with running a Patreon like Evan You did for Vue, and cutting down the number of devs drastically, which I suppose is what they're doing now.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of open source projects attempt to become a business in some form or another (or vice versa). Great examples of this include Astral (creators of UV and Ruff), TursoDB, TigerBeetle, etc etc etc. People want to get paid for the project they work on. Some of their business models will fail. This is probably a case of tailwind growing their engineering team faster than they should have when the AI writing was on th…
I think a problem is that tailwind has no moat compared to most of those. If it never received any further updates today it would still be effectively feature-complete, save for the occasional new css features.
I don't disagree, but I think differentiating between Tailwind CSS (which is free) and Tailwind UI. Tailwind UI (Tailwind Plus) is a different story I think. It's extremely useful in its current form, but could benefit from more
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#89Very sad to hear, I bought Tailwind UI years ago and although it was a lot more expensive than I wanted, I've appreciated the care and precision and highly recommend buying it (It's now called Tailwind Plus) even still (maybe even especially now). Mad props to Adam for his honesty and transparency. Adam if you're reading, just know that the voices criticizing you are not the only voices out there. Thanks for all you'…
Tailwind Plus is great - I love the lifetime access, but I always wondered how sustainable that model was. Even without AI, how many of those memberships could they sell?
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#90It's just too ironic and such a shame that LLMs have railroaded the business model of Tailwind when LLMs have made it so much more popular. Does anyone have any backseat driver ideas for how tailwind could make enough money to hire a team to work on the framework?
I was going to say before LLMs Tailwind UI helped me get moving much faster on front-end code. Now I wish there was some kind of context I can provide to use the Tailwind UI instead of hallucinating its own. Tailwind UI still looks better than the generic stuff LLMs generate.
(Open to any suggestions to feed existing ui components from Tailwind into my projects/llm).