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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

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simonw·

$1M a year isn't a lot of money if you are paying for full-time employees.

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They achieved $2 million revenue in the first 5 months of the first Tailwind UI release.[1]

They had a very good run for such a project.

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

Right, and as a consequence lots of very important software (orders of magnitude more important than tailwind) does not have full-time employees. Good for them if they can manage it, but it's a gravy train.

Given how hard it is to build any form of financially sustainable model around an open source project I think we should actively celebrate anyone who manages to build a model that works, not dismiss it as a "gravy train".

I really just think they got lucky, I don't see anything to celebrate. It's like celebrating one of your friends winning the lottery - good for them, but it's not really an indication the system is working well at all.

9 years of work to "get lucky".

Again, lots of people put in 9 years of work and never get anywhere with it. The success tailwind has had is not a consequence of the work.

The success of tailwind would not have happened without the work.

Just because others have worked nine years without success doesn't mean you shouldn't get credit when you put that work in and are successful.

This was after they laid everyone off, so it was just Adam and Steve left. An they surpassed $2M a year in sponsorships a couple of months after that. They were not struggling for cash at all.

I'm not sure from "they could afford payroll because they laid everyone off" I would conclude that they weren't struggling for cash.

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