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Comment by argentinian

1 day ago

Yes. Maybe their business model was never sustainable and now they are unfairly blaming IA as a scapegoat to justify layoffs.

7 comments

argentinian

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camdenreslink  21 hours ago

I think their business model was sustainable, but depended on SEO. AI made it so people would either use the LLM generated tailwind syntax, or the "AI Overview" at the top of the Google search results and never land on the official tailwind documentation site. Less visits on the official docs meant less people would see the paid offerings, which means less people would buy.

It's possible they could have explored other marketing channels (youtube?), but it seems like the death of SEO for this sort of content lead to the main issues.

mrsilencedogood  18 hours ago

I'm not sure if everyone in this thread is familiar with what their business model was. It wasn't "selling tailwind premium" or selling "tailing enterprise support". They sold a library of react components that happened to use tailwind for styling. So their competitors are DIY, Mantine, React-Bootstrap, and similar.

  • esskay  17 hours ago

    I'm not sure they'd even be classed as competitors to be honest. They floundered massively with the ui kit, most sections of it were very dated and untouched for several years whilst they piddled about with a failed new ui kit that never took off, for which they blamed ai.

    The reality was that a big chunk of their initial audience came from Laravel, and as other players emerged and made what was Tailwind UI irrelevant it all seemed to compound into them panicking and making some rather silly business decisions. At one point they had a sizeable team and shipped nothing for a good 8 months, and when they did it was a couple of beautiful but completely impractical landing pages. They just didn't convert it to a sustainable business.

    Oh and to add to it, they alienated their paying customers by dropping support for basic js based components in favour of making the entire ui library reliant on heavy js libraries, killing off any interest from most of the Laravel customers who'd been their initial target audience.

nonethewiser  17 hours ago

If nothing else, it definitively proves AI produces real value.

I hear the contrary a lot but Im not convinced anyone actually believes it.