Hacker News Reader

Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

While I'm sure AI is partially to blame, I feel like the real problem is that (1) they don't have a sensible business model and (2) they have saturated their market.

There are relatively few individuals and organizations out there with products that are worth spending vendor money on, especially for something like a CSS library. Companies that do have this need are ready to spend BIG.

Tailwind charges a one-time fee in the hundreds of dollars range and pledges lifetime support.

When they say revenue is down 80%, it's because everyone already bought their library in its first few years of existence. And looking at their site there is nothing else to spend money on. So how are they planning to sustain their revenue?

View on HN

They were selling HTML templates. Not even anything else, literally just HTML with Tailwind classes. That wasn't a sustainable business even before AI.

i remember listening to Adam in one of the podcast he was in (I think it was either the Hackers Inc, or the Art of Product, but could've been something else where he was a guest) - and I remember that he mentioned that idea that there are always a new wave of new developers that they can sell the product to.

I still think he was correct. I myself bought tailwindUI as an aspirational purchase, and i doubt people would pay for it as a subscription.

But I think a lot has changed in the last few years. There arent probably as many new developers given the market, and among those there are probably even less that are willing to pay $100+ for a UI library, not when there are competitions like shadcn or radix or many others as free alternative, or when you could just ask an LLM to generate them for you.

Tailwind Labs definitely need to explore new revenue streams, but i dont think UI components is the way to go. Without knowing their internal data, this is just a guess, but I doubt traffic to docs or pipeline to premium products is much of a factor in the decline.

I believe the new UI libraries hit hard more than the AI impact. AI is not always that accurate so eventually if you want to deep dive in, you still have to turn around to the doc. But the new libraries though, they give the market another good choice, especially when shadcn came out, it's so huge that I personally even feels there's no need to go for the raw Tailwind experience, and what's worse is that shadcn is still evolving fast.

I believe the only way to let Tailwind survive is changing the business model.

They had a business model good enough to employ a few people. Not every business needs to be Google’s Adsense.

LLMs are clearly to “blame” here. You can make any component with LLMs from scratch or it will expertly use one of the many existing UI frameworks.

they were never positioned as a unicorn, the question becomes can you be a small business/SMB in software/tech

yes, but you have to size your expectations accordingly and can't assume that the sv model will work for your 1-2 person business.

Most software/tech is a small business.

They had a sensible business model UNTIL AI came around. As usual, AI is just destroying everything it touches.

Not every business should need hyperscaling mega-exit unicorn enshittification.

Lifestyle and small businesses are good and of course these are being crushed by our new oligarchs.

> It's because everyone already bought their library in its first few years of existence

Literally everyone? No new developers being trained? No new tailwind users?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com