What do you think about Tailwind's marketing strategy?
A while ago @csallen made a post pointing out TailwindUIs massive success in making over $500 000 in its first 3 days of launch.
Tailwindcss, the open-source CSS utility framework, has existed for more or less 3 years. And you can watch videos where Adam builds the frontend of popular websites using Tailwindcss.
Now with TailwindUI available, he's added live streams where he builds out a new component which then later becomes available on the TailwindUI website for customers who've purchased access.
By doing this, new customers interested in Tailwind gain;
- Tutorials on how to use Tailwind
- Proof that it can build real-world applications
- Templates they can use for their own projects
And Tailwind gets low if not zero customer acquisition cost.
Now with this being said, I don't think Adam has purposefully implemented this strategy, but I think it's the kind of strategy that works especially well for SaaS products that the user has a lot of flexibility in using, and has to use it on a daily basis.
I'm interested to hear what you have to say about this?
You can’t ignore the unfair advantages Steve and Adam have.
For most people, the strategy of “create a popular open-source library, then build a product off of it” isn’t going to work nearly as well as it has for tailwind.
The two of them had already sold over $1M in design guidance in refactoring UI, and had a massive audience in that space.
Tachyons did something very similar to Tailwind, but hasn’t seen nearly the amount of popularity. While that’s not all due to audience, you can’t ignore the unfair advantage Adam and Steve had in driving adoption.
Ask yourself how much a TachyonsUI project would make in the first three days of launch, comparatively.
I wouldn't call it an unfair advantage, I'd call it the results of working hard for years growing an audience by providing valuable content and services, often for free.
Yes, all of those things resulted in them having an unfair advantage.
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/269816
It's not an term I use in a negative way whatsoever.
I use both TailwindCSS and TailwindUI.
I started using CSS frameworks with Bootstrap. I moved to Bulma for its usage of the flex layout (long before Bootstrap 4 was out).
What I like about Bulma was the simplicity and the naming of each element and component I was using.
I have progressively switched away from Bulma by using TailwindCSS to add some of the missing stuff (some space here, a special button there, everything was too much alike…). I really enjoyed being able to progressively get to a new framework and it built trust that I can rely on Tailwind.
The fact that TailwindUI was sold though an early access, reminded me positively of kickstarter projets and made me fill I was giving back. Trust was already built.
I have decided to buy TailwindUI when I realised the number of hours I could gain from using prebuilt component (compared to making them myself with TailwindCSS).
Yeah I think it has a lot to do with the person/people behind the product. They've talked a lot about how Steve putting out all those design tips on Twitter for a couple of years really built up a sense of good faith with their prospective customers, as well as huge anticipation for Refactoring UI. Taking nothing away from the products of course, which I think are brilliant in their own rights, and very welcome for those of us to whom design doesn't necessarily come easily!
I think an underrated but massively important aspect of the launch is the distinction between a personal and team license. With team licenses costing more than 2X as much, Tailwind UI is pretty good at matching individual customers willingness to pay, thus optimizing their revenue.
I'm a user of both Tailwind and TailwindUI. I don't know how Adam did it exactly, but I somehow wanted to support him (and I also needed something like TailwindUI). My assumption is his openness about the stuff he was building did the trick. There's so much fake these days. Genuine attracts.
And yeah, I also believe it's a legit strategy for everyone else.
Yeah, I agree with that. Transparency makes it attractive