Comment by atonse
1 day ago
I don't agree with "nor should it be" - the market decided it was clearly needed. And this isn't unique to Tailwind. For decades, companies in many ecosystems (like .NET, JS, etc) have made lots of money selling component libraries that save developers and companies a lot of time. And I even bought UI.sh in April, and it really was great until the models just natively got much better.
I happily paid for Tailwind UI because it was worth it. I paid for ui.sh and got plenty of my $130 (or whatever) value. The market spoke in a good way initially, and now it's sending a different message.
They've just got to do the next thing, which is find an AI-resistant steward of the project now.
"nor should it be" is connected to "being worth millions". It's not that it isn't worth money, but it's more of a lifestyle business than the sort of thing that will drive a tech company with employees, marketing, and conference budgets.
I think if you said "couldn't be a venture backed startup", I'd 100% agree with you. Can't support employees or a marketing budget is a much lower bar, and I think that's perfectly achievable by something like Tailwind (or I guess was prior to AI)
I’m a die hard engineer, yet when I see Apple, Microsoft, and Google marketing: it makes me realize the importance of marketing.
There are several graphing libraries that have been businesses for years. Like Highcharts. A frontend framework used by millions and millions certainly has some value to loads of people.
"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent" applies to running a business as well as trading. There is no certainty when you're dealing with the individual whims of millions of people.
I’m not sure what their valuation was but single digits millions sounds totally reasonable for a company you’re describing. Just to hire 10 engineers you’ll need to be in low millions
I don't want to diminish the work that any developers do, but a headcount of 10 seems high to me. (Unless some of those are simply "support engineers" who do nothing but support paying customers, but that would go up and down with revenue)
To hire 10 engineers you only need millions in yearly revenue. And millions in revenue does not imply that the business is worth millions. It very well, quite easily, could be worthless.
Indeed. I saw their job ad just months before this with full remote 300K salary.
What does it being remote have to do with anything?
1 reply →
Millions is a very modest business these days
Just for reference, in the .NET ecosystem there are multiple vendors selling UI component libraries for sums ranging from lower three digits to upper three digits per dev, per year. This was generally considered good value (might no longer be great value post-AI)
As an engineering leader back in the day (2000-2015) I considered it terrific value to license Telerik and others. In fact, it looks like Progress has acquired a large catalog of the most common .NET dev tools over the past ten years.
Problem was tailwind had a very weak component library. I'd have been happy to pay for a more expansive set of components.
I think that “lots of money” needs to be put in perspective when thinking about software that’s used by developers. When you compare the size of the market for these kinds of tools compared to a truly massive market for something like an office suite, it looks pretty puny.
Developers are also very fickle and the one constant is change. Sometimes it seems like change for changes sake alone.
I’m not saying that any businesses easy just that it seems to me after seeing a lot of companies come and go, but this is one of the more difficult markets to capitalize on.
It’s hard to name a more pathological market than office suites. You have Microsoft which is lackadaisical about the subject, like maybe they think Office is a place to stuff with thoroughly unwanted AI features. The rest of the market is German zealots who spend all day with bash and emacs who lobby legislatures to subject public servants to off-brand office suites and then the public sector unions go on strike to get Microsoft Office back.
Bundling is one reason who can’t have nice things. Like in my opinion Excel is a lot worse than the others but if customers are thinking about a “suite” they are still going to buy Office to get Word and PowerPoint and can’t save money by switching to a different CSV wrangler or financial analysis tool.
Funny, my opinion is the opposite. Excel is a much better spreadsheet than Word is a word processor or than PowerPoint is a presentation tool.
Of course it’s got quirks and unfortunate relics of its long history, but I reach for it willingly, and I can’t say that about the rest of the Office suite.
Hey do you have any opinion on the current utility of ui.sh? I wanted to buy it but I'm a bit wary of it just not being useful and they don't have a preview of a single skill.
Wait, you’re thinking about buying “skills” instead of actual components that you can just use? This seems insane to me.
> I happily paid for Tailwind UI because it was worth it.
The business was worth something. But, as the earlier comment questions, was it worth millions? Or was that the free money, tech hype talking? Maybe in a more normal market it would have only been a simple mom and pop.
"The market" for Tailwind only existed due to ignorance and obfuscation fueled by hype for web dev jobs.
Completely artificial market built on propaganda and low interest rate money printing. Same as the rest of SaaS. Nothing about the tech industry since the '08 crash has been organic investment. Was 100% collusion between government and private interests to manipulate public opinion.
> They've just got to do the next thing, which is find an AI-resistant steward of the project now.
Good luck with that:
https://www.openui.com/blog/oui-1
Aside; all the leaked emails, chats, and going back further in time, telegrams, letters, travel logs on display in court yet the myth the economy is an organic free market this whole time persists
Such belief is nought but a quirk of biology that allowed humans to latch onto the idea Benevolent but Punitive Sky Wizard watches out for them; total cope. In Wealth of Nations Adam Smith called it the "invisible hand" and later came to realize he was wrong. He reconsidered and concluded the avarice of man will not be stopped by philosophy of national unity.
No, I didn't mean ai-resistant as far as "don't need coding agents" - I use agents to do all my coding now. I'm saying, AI-resistant in the sense that a company like Shopify isn't going anywhere even in the AI world. If anything, they will thrive with more AI-assisted shops coming online.
That gives the Tailwind folks a more steady stream of income.
this. leftpad as a service bullshit SaaS companies somehow raising millions was a temporary insanity driven by ZIRP and incestuous VC money currents. we see the same thing happening now with companies whose products are paper-thin vibecoded wrappers over someone else's models.
The market didn’t decide it was needed, the users just downloaded a bunch of free files and free docs. There isn't any indication there was ever a real market.
Using something free and paying for a product are entirely different things.