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> A more under-valued takeaway than "charge more" would be "the power of free". Adam built a massive following by giving devs what they wanted for free while contracting. This ranged from sharing countless useful tips on Twitter to blogging and then later podcasting.

Agreed. $500K in 3 days sounds like a sudden windfall, but Adam has spent a long time and a lot of effort building a quality product and a quality following.

> I wouldn't be surprised if somebody with a user name ending in eleven showed up saying "charge more", but I believe that rallying cry has already pretty thoroughly saturated HN and the bootstrapper world in general.

These "charge more" success stories are a prime example of survivorship bias. We never hear about the bootstrappers or freelancers who charged too much for too little and lost their clients. Furthermore, it undermines from the amount of effort that successful bootstrappers invested before they reach success. Frankly, it feels like the "charge more" crowd is trying to downplay the effort of founders and replace it with their own "one cool trick" bit of guru wisdom.

Locally, I've seen a lot of beginner freelancers and bootstrappers put the cart before the horse with "charge more" before they have a quality product/service.

Charging premium prices for premium products makes sense. Charging premium prices for mediocre work will build the wrong type of reputation very quickly.

> Adam built a massive following...

say no more. that was my first thought. online popularity is a real thing and most people tend to ignore that.

i want to say it's less about what you are building but the number of people you can convince. the result of years of online socializing...

in fact, i have been, sometimes, utterly impressed by people who build large followings and supporters on patreon. having people believe in them while they are still figuring out their journey.

and on the other hand, i have seen i have seen people i have admired for years and considered role models try to build an online following and fail.

things have changed...

Yes, and I'd say his following was earned and his methods can be copied... they're just a lot of work and take time.

The quality of his work has definitely been a key factor, too.

The age-old magical formula of: high quality content + good marketing + loads of effort = success.

Seems as though he's put it lots of effort over the years creating valuable content (and giving much of it away for free) and marketing it widely and effectively, and he's being rewarded for that.

Totally agree on that. Popularity is the major factor for selling things. There are so many articles out there about people selling their ebook, making 200k from it and then tell you how to properly write an ebook. It's way easier to make a large figure in sales if you have 20k followers. If just one percent of your followers buy it, you have 200 sales out of nowhere.

If you are noboby, nobody will buy your stuff.

> Adam built a massive following by giving devs what they wanted for free while contracting. This ranged from sharing countless useful tips on Twitter to blogging and then later podcasting.

Just a counterpoint. I had never heard of tailwind before it front page of HN couple of weeks ago. I bought it because it looked pretty and I need to revamp one of my sites. And yea price point was super attractive to me.

> And yea price point was super attractive to me.

it's quite cheap for this large amount of polish. $300 bucks is less than a day's wage for a good engineer, but a good engineer would need to spend at least a week to polish bespoke stuff to this level. So therefore, it's worth the price tag.

Plenty of us 'good engineers' aren't anywhere near that proficient in frontend either. I can build great backend systems, that's where my interest lies. I can't do CSS like this even with months.

Even with all that popularity, I'm amazed that there's even a market of this size for a paid UI component library in 2020. There are many more quality, OSS UI component libraries out there these days than could possibly be counted. It seems like such an oversaturated space. Kudos to him for managing to overcome it!

> There are more quality, OSS UI component libraries out there these days than could possibly be counted.

If you think that, then you don't understand why we use and choose Tailwind over the other "quality" OSS UI components.

If you name three, I can tell you exactly why Tailwind UI is superior to them.

I'm not saying it isn't superior - clearly it must be - I'm just saying the bar is pretty high ("very good" and "free").

I'll bite: how would you compare this to https://material-ui.com/ ?

There's tons of boilerplate to even customize Material UI to make it not look like all other Material UI sites. Want to change how a component looks? Material UI says you must increase the specificity of your CSS...

Tailwind CSS/UI components? Just edit your config, or you're in complete control, so uhhh... just remove `bg-blue-700` and replace it with `bg-green-500` if you want it to be green instead of blue.

I will bite, how is that different from something like theme-ui - https://theme-ui.com ?

You can have a theme file with lot of options passed to your provider and then in your jsx, simply use variant.

or for css properties, you can do <Button sx={{ background: `primary` }} text="hey?" />

Theme ui looks to be similar, except now you need to know the property you want to set the value on. If I want to make a button have a shadow, it doesn't look very straight forward. With tailwind I just add `shadow` class and I'm off to the races.

Plus this looks to be exclusive to React. Tailwind makes no decisions about what you use your styles with, just generates the classes for you. You can use it with vanilla html, react, angular, vue, svelte, etc.

Bootstrap can be used without any JS and has had parameterization for years: https://getbootstrap.com/docs/3.4/customize/

The things you're talking about sound like personal preferences, not killer features that remain out of reach for regular component libraries.

Personal preferences shared by over 3,000 people resulting in $500k in sales in 3 days timespan for Tailwind UI.

Maybe it's not for you, and that's totally ok, nobody is forcing you to switch to Tailwind. It's just another tool to put into peoples toolbags. Use what works for you.

It's plain css so I don't see the reason why you wouldn't know those properties if you are doing frontend work. For example, mimicking the same shadow as tailwind component, you can add box-shadow: 0 1px 3px 0 rgba(0,0,0,.1);

Frankly, I don't see the point in saving a few characters and react/css-in-js solutions make it easy to write reusable components so I don't need a css framework.

Theme UI comes with basic components too.

Using SASS, postcss, LESS, stylus or any popular framework gives you variables/easy setup to make/use themes.

if there is something else unique about tailwind that I missed, let me know. I haven't seen tailwind out of HN circle.

> Frankly, I don't see the point in saving a few characters and react/css-in-js solutions make it easy to write reusable components so I don't need a css framework.

> if there is something else unique about tailwind that I missed, let me know. I haven't seen tailwind out of HN circle.

Tailwind is geared towards people who have the ability to design but aren't really that great with CSS.

Take me for example, I have an eye for design, and can put together great UI's and can do everything needed to build my apps... But on a scale of 1-10, my CSS skills are about a 4-6. I could spend lot of time leveling up my CSS skills so I can hand write all my own CSS, or I can use something like Tailwind that is intuitive and easier to learn and lets me focus on what matters the most... Shipping my product.

That's what Gary Vaynerchuck has been saying to do for years.