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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

#841

Post by johnnyanmac »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #270
risyachka wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What most don’t realize is that this will happen to most businesses in all categories as more people rely on ChatGPT and Claude for discovery. No discovery - no business. And same with ads.if OpenAI decides not to add ads - prepare for even faster business consolidation. Those businesses preferred by llms will exponentially grow, others will quickly go out of business

Underscoring the parent comment and adding to it: watching technologists on a site called Hacker News cheer on the centralization of power is really something.

Last 3 years of discourse in a nutshell. Sinclair's quote rings true once again... Just a shame people don't think of the long term cost to this trend chasing.

But then again, it wouldn't be a trend if people thought long term, would it?

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

#842

Post by johnnyanmac »

Aperocky wrote: post #353
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Underscoring the parent comment and adding to it: watching technologists on a site called Hacker News cheer on the centralization of power is really something.

I don't think any power is as centralized as Google is to search about 10 years ago? Or Facebook is to social media in the same time frame? What has changed other than the players?

The dynamics. Discovery benefits all parties, and the middle man can take a cut in several ways (Google chose ads). The middleman never had to open up but that tube spread value instead of extracting it (at least, until they started renting seeking with the tube).

Being the one stop knowledge hubs that sucks from everyone else only benefits the leech long term.

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

#843

Post by aurareturn »

fantasizr wrote: post #805
aurareturn wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had a business model good enough to employ a few people. Not every business needs to be Google’s Adsense. LLMs are clearly to “blame” here. You can make any component with LLMs from scratch or it will expertly use one of the many existing UI frameworks.

they were never positioned as a unicorn, the question becomes can you be a small business/SMB in software/tech

Most software/tech is a small business.

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

#844

Post by dpedu »

srameshc wrote: post #10

> 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.

I don't buy it. They failed to build a sustainable business model and are now suffering the consequences. Everybody is leaning into AI because it works (in the sense that it pays the bills). Saying the layoffs were because of AI offloads the blame.

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

#845

Post by camdenreslink »

nickjj wrote: post #830
camdenreslink wrote: post #828

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, do you think the decrease in revenue for your tech course business is due to lack of demand (i.e. potential customers just ask an LLM rather than learn from a course now), or due to disruption in your acquisition channel (i.e. reduced traffic from SEO to your blog due to potential customers seeing Google's LLM answers at the top of the search results page)? Like for example, do you have other market…

I think it's both but I think the end result is less traffic means less sales. I don't have paid ads, everything has been organic with the blog being the main funnel into everything. For quite a few years I tried creating a podcast and also have 5+ years of weekly YouTube videos but the traffic back to the courses from those are close to nothing. Conversion percent rates haven't changed, they have remained consistent…

Thank you for sharing, I really appreciate it! I've been working on my own tech course/education platform for the past couple years, and the landscape seems to be moving beneath our feet!

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

#846

Post by gloosx »

3rodents wrote: post #95

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 Catal…

I don't even know who the hell uses them systems for components.

Just trowing a flex-box and a few good ol' css rules does 99.999% of the job usually.

$300 for UI blocks? For what? A div with flex, gap, and padding?

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

#847

Post by xnx »

Google now sponsors Tailwind:

"I am happy to share that we (the @GoogleAIStudio team) are now a sponsor of the @tailwindcss project! Honored to support and find ways to do more together to help the ecosystem of builders."

https://x.com/OfficialLoganK/status/2009339263251566902

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

#848

Post by lifetimerubyist »

paxys wrote: post #644

While I'm sure AI is partially to blame, I feel like the real problem is that (1) they don't have a sensible business model and (2) they have saturated their market. There are relatively few individuals and organizations out there with products that are worth spending vendor money on, especially for something like a CSS library. Companies that do have this need are ready to spend BIG. Tailwind charges a one-time fee…

They had a sensible business model UNTIL AI came around. As usual, AI is just destroying everything it touches.

Not every business should need hyperscaling mega-exit unicorn enshittification.

Lifestyle and small businesses are good and of course these are being crushed by our new oligarchs.

> It's because everyone already bought their library in its first few years of existence

Literally everyone? No new developers being trained? No new tailwind users?

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

#849

Post by grokys »

altmanaltman wrote: post #756
grokys wrote: post #725

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Or maybe ask yourself why are you doing open source in the first place? I, like everyone started work on OSS because it's fun. The problem comes when your project gets popular - either you try to make it your job or you abandon the project, because at a certain point it becomes like an unpaid job with really demanding customers.

That makes sense but doesn't answer "why do open source" though. In fact, it only shows that there is little incentive to pursue a serious open-source project and just stick to hobby projects while ackowledging it'll never go anywhere. I struggle to answer that myself.

Lol, I never in a million years expected my project to get 100 users never mind the tens of thousands it now has. Sometimes others make the decision for you ;) it's still your baby though.

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

#850

Post by zapnuk »

hbn wrote: post #788
zapnuk wrote: post #764

Seems like their whole business model was based on the fact that tailwind was difficult to use, and now with llm we have a simple way to use it in a good-enough way. They, and other companies, should rather depend on corporate users. Don't let multi-billion revenue companies use your tech for free. Seems like many companies leaned it a bit late, we always have the same news every fewe years (docker, mongodb, terrafor…

> Seems like their whole business model was based on the fact that tailwind was difficult to use Uhhh no... People already struggle with CSS. No one would use Tailwind if it made it even more difficult. I've used and loved Tailwind for 5 years and some without ever having any components written for me. At worst it's as difficult as CSS (centering a div is not any easier, you just write it in a different place), and i…

Nah. Plenty people struggles with the use of tailwind or at least were interested in shortcuts. Thats the whole what tailwind plus offers. In some ways tailwind is like matplotlib/pandas/numpy. Increadibly powerfull but some methods/classes are difficult to remember to you keep googleing the same things.

Doesn't matter anyways wether their customers are people who search for shortcuts or people who search for "the best designs".

Their problem was and is that tailwind is used by many of the most profitable companies in the world for free.

Thats so unbelievable stupid. You have corporations paying millions for MS 365 subscriptions, confluence, and other software and basically nothing for a totally optional ui library. If the use of tailwind saves 10 engineering hours per month then it's worth it to pay a few hundred $ for a licence.

Given that their team isn't big they don't even need that many customers. Add a bit consulting for a decent hourly rate and they should be golden.

The more I think about it the more I blame the CEO for poor decisions.

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