The PR author posted a TikTok link [1] the thread later explaining their position. Their behaviour seems very unprofessional to me. Mayve the just want to increase engagement to their accounts. Tailwind definetly made the right call here.
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
#532Earlier quoted context omitted.
>and he's being honest oh, come the fuck on. it's "AI made us do it" drivel that companies began to justify layoffs with in 2023 (!!!). Tailwind is just another FOTM frontend thing. I saw dozens of them come, gain some popularity, then abruptly disappear once the marketing budget ran out.
He mentions that tailwind is more popular than ever before but their revenue is down 80% so unless he’s lying about that it makes sense rather than tailwind going out of style.
However, why is that even surprising? Tailwind is essentially a frontend css stylesheet. What business could there possibly be around that?
I understand, they have UI kits, books, etc. but just fundamentally, it was never going to be easy to monetize around that long term, with or without AI.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#533Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tailwind did a great job of building a fanbase. Even without LLMs I always thought they were on a collision course with market saturation, though. They generously gave lifetime access for a one-time payment, which was bound to run into problems as free alternatives became better and their core fanbase didn't have any reason to spend more money. Their business model also missed the boat on the rise of Figma and simila…
alternatively, Adam executed the superior pricing strategy. had he charged for recurring licenses, would fewer people have signed up? would his subscriptions also be drawing down? i wouldn't have bought a sub, but i did pay for tailwind premium (and, frankly, didn't use it like i'd've hoped). however, it was a bit of a Kickstarter investment for me. i like Adam's persona, and was happy to see continued investment dow…
Adam presented his case for the lifetime pricing model in this podcast episode in 2023:
https://hackersincorporated.com/episodes/lifetime-pricing-is...
I believe he succeeding in convincing Sam and Ryan to adopt lifetime pricing for their UI course at https://buildui.com/pricing. I've purchased Build UI, and it was an excellent product, but unfortunately it appears to be completely dead for at least a full year now.
Neither the unannounced death of Build UI nor this apparently financial catastrophe for Tailwind bode well for the prospects of lifetime pricing! Although the problem might be more related to the entire market segment (frontend programming and design courses) than to the particular pricing model.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#534I never appreciated tailwind until AI models revealed it as such a token-efficient way transport styles between models and other use-cases. AI aruably hurts demand for their premium offering the same way it hurts demand for junior devs.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#535Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure if this is comparable to the yellow pages vs the internet. Google became profitable in 2001 whereas OpenAI et al are still operating at a huge loss. Even with ads it's not clear whether LLMs can be profitable unless they increase prices significantly.
OpenAI could be profitable (easily) if it stopped training new models. Whether they will make that choice or not, who knows.
That would be short-termist though. So, quite unlikely.
In my usage (code) they are still better than everything else I have tried.
Point being that I am looking predominantly for the one llm that gives me the best code output.
If they risk losing that advantage for immediate profit, guess I will cancel like I did for claude... (I still got a gemini subscription, for some reason it has a good UI, fast for common non technical requests).
Seems to have been my pattern of behavior with all these tools.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#536Earlier quoted context omitted.
If there's anything AI coding is good at, it's writing react components and tailwind css.
I am not 100% sure about that - I usually find AI written CSS to be slightly visually flawed and almost always logically flawed. The way you write websites that actually work imo, is you understand how your chosen CSS layout engine works roughly, and try to avoid switching between layout modes - traditional to flexbox to grid to flexbox again down the tree can drive the most brillant devs utterly mad . But seriously,…
> I usually find AI written CSS to be slightly visually flawed and almost always logically flawed.
Funny, this also qualifies most of the _human_ written CSS I've seen. !important all the things!
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#537Sadly, 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…
Definitely more than 200k per head. I remember seeing a job posting for Tailwind Labs for a (design?) engineer which was 250-300k TC. Seems like it was an insanely profitable product, but a risky business.
It’s still pretty profitable, more than $100k a month
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#538> But the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business. Adam is simply trying to navigate this new reality, and he's being honest, so there's no need to criticize him.
Some of the critics in the thread are… odious. I’ve written down some of the GH handles, because if I’m ever hiring again, I wanna make sure I’d never hire some of these folks. I don’t understand how someone can display such contempt towards the maintainer of a thing they’ve used for free.
I am one of those critics, but I never used Tailwind. A layoff of that magnitude is horrific, but if what they are describing as their business model is true, they really really need to rethink it. I wonder what the size of their marketing team is like, and if they were involved in the layoffs. Seems like they need some help there. I found the "downvote" spam in that thread, for reasonable posts, to be quite off-putting, and that led me to my remarks.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#539> And every second I spend trying to do fun free things for the community like this is a second I'm not spending trying to turn the business around and make sure the people who are still here are getting their paychecks every month. Then step aside as the maintainer of the project then and better yet, make something like Tailwind-foundation etc. which is truly open source. Go spend your time building your business, b…
I urge you to understand what he is going through, he started the project, made it available freely, as more effort was required he added a premium offering to keep the whole thing running and hire more help.
Please pause to think before coming to a rush judgement. How would you react if you had done exactly the things he had done, and you just had to lay off most of your team yesterday. We are humans and not robots, for all he has done, he has certainly earned the right to some times focus on what's affecting him first before he can focus on OSS.
Be Kind, we are all born billionaires with billions of "kindness tokens" in the bank, don't use them sparingly.
Re: Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
#540That’s rough. Respects to the honesty.