Comment by satvikpendem
2 days ago
Sadly, selling pre-made components and templates was never a sound business model, especially in the wake of AI. One thing I learned being on HN for so long and launching my own products is that a product is not a business. Don't conflate the two, at your peril.
Lots of people make great products but actually turning that into a business is fundamentally a different skill. It seems like Tailwind grew too fast, having 2 million ARR a few years ago and almost 10 employees (200k each is probably the all-in cost anyway for an employee if they're full time with benefits, so I suppose there was barely any profit), whereas they'd probably have been fine with running a Patreon like Evan You did for Vue, and cutting down the number of devs drastically, which I suppose is what they're doing now.
It is a business. Envato was a billion dollar business in 2017. I agree that AI makes these kinds of businesses vulnerable, but it's overstepping to say that these things aren't businesses.
I never said Tailwind the company wasn't a business, when I said "a product is not a business" I meant that as advice to creators in general, not in specific to Tailwind; of course it is, it made millions in revenue. What I meant was that even though businesses may exist, having a long-term, durable business model is not always viable.
"selling premade software assets" is a business, and it's the business both Tailwind and Envato were in. Both businesses got hit hard by AI. Check out Envato's homepage now. It's unrecognizable from what it was in 2017, and completely genAI oriented.
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Definitely more than 200k per head. I remember seeing a job posting for Tailwind Labs for a (design?) engineer which was 250-300k TC.
Seems like it was an insanely profitable product, but a risky business.
It’s still pretty profitable, more than $100k a month
Revenue is not profit
Telerik, DevExpress, and a lot of other companies have made profitable businesses that have lasted well over a decade on that business premise. Selling solid and easy to integrate pre-made components has been a pretty good business for a while.
I wonder how they're doing too then, as we don't have public stats about them (Telerik was acquired by a public company Progress Software but they do not break down revenue by Telerik specifically). Ultimately, this business of selling components is not sound in the age of AI.
Another thing to consider, it seems JS devs use more AI for work than .NET devs for example, which might be in more old-school companies and industries. I can't verify this but there seems to be a correlation between companies who use hip new CSS and JS frameworks, and their AI usage, thus accelerating Tailwind Corp's cannibalization by AI, as most vibe coders are building web apps from what I've seen and Tailwind and React are very well represented in the training set.
> Another thing to consider, it seems JS devs use more AI for work than .NET devs for example, which might be in more old-school companies and industries.
Speaking from years of .NET work in state and federal government, the sort of dev groups that lean on Telerik or DevExpress have less leverage to build new things for themselves than you would expect, so the use of AI inside of them is predominantly for maintaining existing software. Decisions on how things get built at most public agencies still revolve around MS Access and WebForms due to a whole bunch of BS ordinances that legislators put in place; for those sorts of places a reliable vendor can absorb the blame if concerns surrounding accessibility, compliance, or security of your ancient web services crop up, while Claude and Codex put the liability back on your org.
Yeah I don't disagree that selling components is going to be hard business in the age of AI. Just mostly pointing out that it was a good business previously.
PrimeTek components (PrimeReact, PrimeNG) are MIT licensed open source.
They also have a CSS utility library (like Tailwind).
Tailwind had several times more than 2M / ARR at their peak.
you have 2 comments in total and a super popular name :-(