from Hacker News

Tailwind CSS: From Side-Project Byproduct to Multi-Million Dollar Business

by adamwathan on 8/2/20, 8:09 PM with 109 comments

• by kemyd on 8/3/20, 7:12 AM

  They deserved it, and I'm pleased with their results.

  When I started my paid online editor for Tailwind CSS ( 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!

• by _AzMoo on 8/3/20, 5:23 AM

  I 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.

• by andrewstuart on 8/3/20, 5:27 AM

  I 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-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?

• by deltron3030 on 8/3/20, 5:16 AM

  Adam, 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.

• by kanobo on 8/3/20, 3:16 AM

  Wow 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!

• by idkwhoiam on 8/3/20, 11:37 AM

  Everybody 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!

• by mmckelvy on 8/3/20, 5:44 AM

  Great 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.

• by muska3 on 8/3/20, 3:37 AM

  Played 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.

• by habosa on 8/3/20, 7:25 AM

  Really 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.

• by rjknight on 8/3/20, 7:50 AM

  TLDR: 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.

• by bloudermilk on 8/3/20, 7:07 AM

  I 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.

• by orliesaurus on 8/3/20, 4:44 AM

  Good job on the milestone: personally I have never tried Tailwind, still on Bootstrap... Guess I am old-fashioned...

• by skrebbel on 8/3/20, 8:23 AM

  I'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.

• by alexellisuk on 8/3/20, 2:38 PM

  As 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 :-)

• by hmexx on 8/3/20, 7:52 AM

  Has 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?

• by aoeusnth1 on 8/3/20, 3:08 AM

  What a feel-good story.

  TailwindCSS and TailwindUI have been huge time savers for my project. It’s nice to hear the origin story!

• by qilisiang on 8/3/20, 7:10 AM

  Wow, 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.

• by AlchemistCamp on 8/3/20, 10:33 AM

  > "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.

• by rikroots on 8/3/20, 10:02 AM

  Thank 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.

• by artellectual on 8/3/20, 3:06 AM

  I'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!

• by vinrob92 on 8/3/20, 3:54 AM

  We used Tailwind for our newly launched SaaS, so thanks for that!

• by jmuguy on 8/3/20, 12:40 PM

  Congrats Adam and team! We've only been using Tailwind for a few months but honestly its completely changed how we approach design.

• by christiansakai on 8/3/20, 1:17 PM

  Amazing. I'd never expect that a CSS library can make so much money. Maybe there's always a market for UI libraries.

• by calferreira on 8/3/20, 3:57 PM

  How do they handle the licensing of JS and CSS ?

• by Giorgi on 8/3/20, 8:29 AM

  to be honest it is top-notch product, I am using it since "utility-first CSS framework" era, and it's awesome.

• by adamzapasnik on 8/3/20, 9:16 AM

  Good for them, tailwind is a great lib :)

• by greenie_beans on 8/3/20, 2:27 PM

  i suck at design and good css. tailwind has made my frontend work not suck as much. love it, thank y'all

• by Frontendor_Team on 8/3/20, 6:44 PM

  Hello 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 HTML Library and keep going to the end and not giving up about our dream.

  Thank you so much. Frontendor Team

• by itwy on 8/3/20, 9:43 AM

  Tailwind 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.

• by ablekh on 8/3/20, 6:52 AM

  Congratulations! 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 :-).