I made this point at the time but Tailwind Labs' business model shouldn't exist. It irks people because they wanna blame AI for it but they were coasting and should be happy it lasted this long.

Tailwind's business model existed due to a massive inefficiency in the frontend industry not being able to come to terms with CSS or native components. They surfed the wave of JS frontends becoming ever more complicated. If it wasn't AI and just a human awakening to that fact, realizing that the complexity of modern frontends and Tailwind are not an absolute necessity, they'd have lost business just the same. There are dozens of different ways of writing frontends that have nothing to do with Tailwind.

Providing ready-made UI components and templates has never been a million-dollar business, nor should it be.

I don't agree with "nor should it be" - the market decided it was clearly needed. And this isn't unique to Tailwind. For decades, companies in many ecosystems (like .NET, JS, etc) have made lots of money selling component libraries that save developers and companies a lot of time. And I even bought UI.sh in April, and it really was great until the models just natively got much better.

I happily paid for Tailwind UI because it was worth it. I paid for ui.sh and got plenty of my $130 (or whatever) value. The market spoke in a good way initially, and now it's sending a different message.

They've just got to do the next thing, which is find an AI-resistant steward of the project now.

Providing ready-made UI components and templates has never been a million-dollar business, nor should it be.

Arguably many websites and apps desperately need a good component library because it's very clear the UI sucks without one. Lots of people spending a few thousand dollars on their UX is not unreasonable at all, so the best-in-class library (whether that's Tailwind is a separate point) should be able to make a lot of money.

You could easily level the same argument at any library: "This thing is simple so it shouldn't be worth millions." That's just the wrong way to look at how selling works. If you make something that solves a lot of people's pain point (Tailwind) you're going to make a lot of money until someone else sells something that makes it even easier (AI). That is a tale as old as time, and the fundamental basis of how startups disrupt incumbents in an industry.

Tailwind’s business model was entirely legitimate, pre-AI. Humans can only hold so many ideas in their heads, and panes in their IDEs. Shorthand class names let them stay in their render hierarchy while drawing from a logical and consistent design library, without going to another file for styling… or (the hardest thing in CS) choosing good semantic class names!

Of course, enterprises eventually hit a wall in the covered functionality, need customizations and library management, and an official consulting team is there to help - no different than any open source model throughout history.

That they were more vulnerable than most to agentic coding doesn’t make it a bad idea.

It sounds like your criticism is about their product, not about their business model.

The business model of having a popular product with great documentation, which leads free users to additional paid services, seems like a very valid business model.

Even the criticism you have for their product is along the lines of "the product only worked because they identified a problem in the market; If someone else identified it, this product wouldn't even be needed!". Which is, well, true, but also true for almost any other successful product.

> Tailwind's business model existed due to a massive inefficiency

Yeah, that's why most businesses form.

> Providing ready-made UI components and templates has never been a million-dollar business, nor should it be.

Depends what you mean. I think it’s totally reasonable for a small team with a great reputation to offer a well-made component library and make millions of dollars from it. But I would never expect that to be a reliable source of recurring income, and certainly not enough to support a team of well-paid engineers, designers, marketers, etc. indefinitely.

To be honest, I wonder if AI is even the right thing to blame here, or just a timing coincidence. Is it not the case that they simply sold their UI library to roughly everyone who was in the market for a high-cost component library?

Most of my clients over the years have been very successful businesses in industries and niches that I never imagined could support a multi-million dollar enterprise. A lot of the time I was surprised that the entire business model was even a thing.

My point is that just because you find the success of Tailwind Labs surprising does not mean that it "shouldn't" be a multi-million dollar business. Neither you nor I get to decide that.

I don’t agree. Building a date picker used to be next to impossible. Overnight it was trivial. That’s some serious disruption.

Nah.

Tailwind provides an actual simplifying layer for the (over-)complicated practice of front-end web development.

By being well-though-out, well-designed, and very well documented, it actually made web app styling easier/simpler (without hiding or otherwise making it hard to drop into CSS as needed). And it slotted right into the place most web apps have for a CSS/class mechanism.

The paid templates extend the approach to components. The business model is that the credibility they establish with the free high-quality CSS/class system makes people willing to pay for the templates, which then goes over well because the templates are good and useful, saving a lot of development time. BTW, their templates solves a different problem than native components -- I suspect you're dismissive of their business model due to not actually understanding it.

Of course, it's all moot now. AI can generate the components now at the same time it's doing everything else, so no reason to pay for their templates. (Plus, tailwindcss probably doesn't build the credibility as much anymore either because devs aren't using it (their AI might be, but without the direct contact it doesn't have a chance to build that open-the-wallet credibility.)

It's not really a moral argument that there shouldn't be a business model but more an opinion that you might now consider verified as a correct one that the business model just wasn't there. I agree that there probably never was one.

Selling to developers just is very hard. The reality of course is that this competes in a space full of other people's OSS attempts at solving the same problem. That just puts an upper limit on what you can charge and who is going to even consider paying at all. And whatever that is, it was nowhere close to what they needed it to be.

AI made the whole proposition less valuable. I actually like tailwind as a solution. But it was always a short cut for people who didn't want to reinvent all the low level CSS hackery on every project they did. It's why I like and used it as well. But I stopped doing these things manually at this point. AI coding tools will happily spit out the raw CSS as well. And the irony of course is that because of tailwind's popularity, generating it was easy as well.

According to this logic most businesses should not exists because things should work properly.

Your analysis is fundamentally flawed because you’re conflating the Tailwind’s business model, which is based on the actual realities of the market, and your ideal for how frontends should be developed.

There are millions of Single Page, and other “complex” web apps. You not liking it does not invalidate anything.

I disagree.

Ready-made UI components and templates have been million-dollar businesses for a lot of companies for a long, long time.

Finding space in a development ecosystem to provide a set of purpose-built tools is a common and healthy software business pattern.

It shouldn't exist bc it addresses a massive inefficiency? What do you think markets are for

I think many of the purchases of Tailwind UI were basically donations with extra steps. Many, myself included, wanted to support their work. The prebuilt components were nice, but you can find open source components and/or commercial ones on places like ThemeForest for about $20.

Sort of a weak and dismissive take. Tailwind saw a problem in the market, addressed it, and made money for a while. Why shouldn't that business model exist? It exists across SO MANY other industries.

People pay for aspirin, not vitamins, and Tailwind is aspirin.

I come to similar conclusions when scanning dev newsletters and I fail to skip over an ad link. Based on the value proposition presented in the one-liner I wonder they exist then wonder whether I really understand "tech industry" as it currently is ...

I agree that a CSS library is not really worth a big business. But nobody has woken up: AI makes writing tailwind classes more convenient than ever and that’s what people seem to do.

> the frontend industry not being able to come to terms with CSS

What does this even mean?

There’s nothing wrong with a company taking something complex and making it simple, and they absolutely deserve to be paid for making millions of developers lives easier

This sort of critique could be made about almost any industry or individual business. The whole premise of almost any industry is lubricating some friction between the idealized and the reality.

Having said that, sure they were utterly doomed. For that matter, Shopify is utterly doomed as well. Businesses like that will continue to exist, but in no universe is it a $230B space.

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