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Tailwind CSS: From Side-Project Byproduct to Multi-Million Dollar Business
by
Rosie Sherry
https://adamwathan.me/tailwindcss-from-side-project-byproduct-to-multi-mullion-dollar-business/
I’m always a bit jealous of stories like this... but I feel like there are a couple of key things for me with this one:
More evidence comes in every day that providing value to an audience over a decent period of time is the key ingredient. Easier said than done of course.
It's a huge investment without a clear ROI
I wonder how many tens of millions of dollars in developer time this crew has helped people save. It's incredible!
It's amazing, and great to see the history summary. A success, but not an overnight one as people often think businesses are.
what a fucking cool story! so inspiring.
With the amount of detail Adam put into this project, I would be curious to hear about how they came up with the price of tailwind ui. Was the number just randomly pick or what criteria they used to come up with that number?
Can't speak for Adam and Steve's strategy but in my experience, when it comes to professional tools, $149 is a pretty safe and popular mid tier price point.
My favorite way to think about price points for professional products is in these rough brackets for reliable conversion:
$250+ decisions gets close to the amount most professionals are authorized to charge on a company card without asking for permission, so it's smart to stay below that on products you intend to have people buy off the shelf.
$500+ is where decision making gets more nuanced and personal, and really starts to depend on the business/person/problem as much as the solution itself.
Thanks for the insightful info.
great stuff here alex!!
Alex, thanks for sharing your thoughts. I am struggle to find a fair price for the plans of my upcoming product (subscription) and I was wondering if you have any book or article that you would recommend on this topic.
Thanks for that great break down. Tailwind UI is a 1 time purchase, do you ranges stay the same if you charge monthly or yearly?
Tailwind is such a great project. I have been using it for my project and it saved so much of my time. I0
This is incredible :)
$2 million selling copy and paste! genius.
10 million total installs ?! that's impressive, but I wonder what does that mean. npm installs ? those are hardly meaningful.
I wonder how other niche frameworks stack up compared to tailwind in terms of user base, like bulma, materialise CSS etc. All I know is that they are all dwarfed next to bootstrap.
I really like tailwind and I hope it keeps the momentum, but so far from my observations it hasn't win the heart of many front end devs. it's popular within the backend devs and the Laravel circle.
how many installs do your npm packages have?
Lets not be dismissive of the achievements of fellow entrepreneurs. 10 million is an insanely high number whichever way you dice it.
Chill, I wasn't being dismissive, I was clearly supportive in my comment.
Just wanted to know where that number came from, cause it does matter.
This comment was deleted 6 years ago
This comment was deleted 6 years ago
Wow thank you for explain this . I was so confusing how Tailwind CSS project earn money.
I think that statement itself confuses things too, though. Businesses are systems, and which includes the products that people pay for, but also the reasons that they pay for them.
Tailwind UI on it's own generates revenue in no small part because of the existence and success of Tailwind CSS.