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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

#91

Post by thundergolfer »

satvikpendem wrote: post #87

Sadly, 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, havin…

It is a business. Envato was a billion dollar business in 2017. I agree that AI makes these kinds of businesses vulnerable, but it's overstepping to say that these things aren't businesses.

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#92

Post by freedomben »

theturtletalks wrote: post #86

Tailwind 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 c…

(IANAL) Using it for commercial products isn't grey area at all, it's explicitly allowed. Pretty much all you can't do is create a component library based on it. You can also freely use it in open source as long as you aren't making a component library.

If it wasn't usable in commercial products, I don't think anyone would pay for it.

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#93

Post by freedomben »

stevoski wrote: post #46

As a fellow business owner, I’ll always feel bad when business owners need to make these types of decisions. I bought Tailwind UI - I always thought it was a critically bad business decision from their end to keep giving me additional new stuff for free. It seemed to me that it should have been a subscription. However, knowing nothing about the inside of their business, I have no idea how that would have affected the…

> I always thought it was a critically bad business decision from their end to keep giving me additional new stuff for free. It seemed to me that it should have been a subscription.

Maybe. One data point isn't all that useful, but I never would have bought it if it weren't for the model he chose. I will never, ever do a subscription for something like that.

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#95

Post by 3rodents »

The biggest miss from Tailwind is ignoring the rest of the ecosystem. Rightly or wrongly, everyone has moved on to using shadcn's system for components. Tailwind hasn't. Tailwind has excellent components available through Plus which are worth paying for but they're not available where people are, which pushes people towards other libraries built on top of Tailwind. I have paid for Tailwind Plus and I like their Catalyst UI and I have used it on a project but it's a pain to use compared to alternatives, so, I don't bother.

I'd go as far as to guess that their revenue isn't down due to AI but because of their lifetime access model combined with shadcn's registry system being much easier to use.

Prediction: Tailwind acquired by Vercel.

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#96

Post by css_apologist »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #83
spzb wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

this is news to me, how does this work? who is getting paid?

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#97

Post by aaronbrethorst »

prodigycorp wrote: post #24

It'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?

Make Tailwind Plus an annual subscription, not a one-time purchase.

Corporate sponsorships.

In-person training focused on big corps.

Acquisition.

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#98

Post by freedomben »

james2doyle wrote: post #84
ZeroConcerns wrote: post #4

That'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

Indeed, I've done this quite a few times myself. It's also a phenomenal way to be able to start poking at UI immediately without messing with build pipelines or anything besides just pointing your browser at `file:///...`. Then if the prototype is useful it's very easy to just delete the script tag and get it set up "properly" for a prod build and you know your prototype will pretty much "just work"

Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

#99

Post by tschellenbach »

sosodev wrote: post #26

The 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…

Well.. there are many fast growing companies that provide UI + APIs for certain components of your app. Sure you can build things easier in-house, but the opportunity cost of doing so also went up. Supabase, Stream, Clerk, Stainless all growing very well.
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