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Comment by solarkraft | Hacker News Reader

It’s crazy to me that it was ever a business to begin with.

Cool, in a way! But this feels like just going back to normal.

Apparently they were 8+ people, in 2024 team size was 6 and were hiring 2 more [0] and in 2020 they had $2m+ ARR [1].

Honestly, while I feel bad for the people who lost their jobs the news aren't exactly surprising. Overhiring is a game for VC funded OSS like bun, not usually a good idea for bootstrapped companies.

[0]: https://tailwindcss.com/blog/hiring-a-design-engineer-and-st...

[1]: https://adamwathan.me/tailwindcss-from-side-project-byproduc...

Tailwind had several times more than 2M / ARR at their peak.

I believe you, I'm just going out of the figures they have published. If they had "several times more" annual revenue, then not having a warchest for situations like this is puzzling.

> 2020 they had $2m+ ARR

You've got an extra "R" in there. In 2020 their only revenue from was non-recurring lifetime software purchases. Like SaaS if you had a 100% churn rate.

Very good point, and I imagine part of the issue here... everything they sell is one-time payment, more of a reason they should have been preparing for the music to stop

On his morning walk/podcast thing about the topic he said 75% of the team = 3 developers

I wonder if that includes him or not as the remaining 25% as 1 member.

No it was the 3 co-founders, a part-time person and 4 engineers. Now they are 3 engineers down.

But surely the co-founders pay themselves too. I don't understand the logic in not counting them as part of the company.

A lot of open source projects attempt to become a business in some form or another (or vice versa). Great examples of this include Astral (creators of UV and Ruff), TursoDB, TigerBeetle, etc etc etc. People want to get paid for the project they work on. Some of their business models will fail. This is probably a case of tailwind growing their engineering team faster than they should have when the AI writing was on the wall in 2023.

I think a problem is that tailwind has no moat compared to most of those. If it never received any further updates today it would still be effectively feature-complete, save for the occasional new css features.

I don't disagree, but I think differentiating between Tailwind CSS (which is free) and Tailwind UI. Tailwind UI (Tailwind Plus) is a different story I think. It's extremely useful in its current form, but could benefit from more

Yeah, I was referring more to the fact that tailwind didn't have that many other ways to monetise compared to other OSS projects. Their paid templates and courses kinda fulfilled their goal in that way, they made the founders wealthy, but is there a sustainable business there?

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