I'm Adam Wathan, I created Tailwind CSS and built a multi-million dollar business around it. AMA!

Hey! I'm glad it feels like we don't do any marketing — it's something we generally think about and work on a lot but we try to do it in a way that doesn't feel like advertising and is instead just interesting and valuable.

In very recent times (say the last couple of months) I feel like we aren't thinking about it or doing it enough, and I don't tweet as much, don't create video content, and don't write newsletter updates consistently which is a source of stress for me — it's something I think we need to be doing more. But we've had a really busy summer working on the Tailwind UI templates/all-access launch and all of the thinking that went into that is what has taken up most of my time.

I definitely spend most of my time on product strategy, and am not really in the code or anything day to day, but all that strategy work sort of is marketing to me. Deciding what to make next and what we think people will be excited about, thinking through pricing (this is the most time consuming and challenging activity on earth), and copywriting (for our own sites, documentation and release notes, placeholder content for templates, newsletter updates) is what I'm generally focused on these days.

Back when we were working on Refactoring UI (and the two years leading up to the book release), we did a lot more tweeting and those tweets took a ton of time, they weren't just a quick "oh I'll tweet a little thing". Many of those tweets took two weeks of near full-time effort to craft and make perfect, but that's why they would get like 5000 RTs and 15,000 likes. We also put tons and tons of effort into blog posts like 7 Practical Tips for Cheating at Design which for a long time (years) was the number one post of all-time on Medium.

These days I feel like we are coasting too much in this department and it's something I hope to work on more.

Some of the most important marketing we do I think though is our documentation. Making Tailwind as easy to learn and easy to be as successful with as possible is what makes the entire business able to work. Any effort I put into that I expect to have a much higher pay-off than paying for a Facebook ad for Tailwind UI or something, but it's absolutely marketing, and I think that's probably part of why it doesn't look like we are doing a lot of marketing from the outside. I try to put our marketing effort into things with a long-term pay-off, which is why we don't even do things like Black Friday sales anymore or anything either.

Sorry feels like I'm rambling a bit here because it's a hard question to answer! But I guess the TL;DR is I feel like my job is almost 100% marketing, but with a maybe a wider definition of marketing than a lot of people have in their heads.

I could be mistaken, but I believe he spent a few years building up a large twitter audience before launching his first product. That's why it generated so much money in a relatively short amount of time. So technically he did do a lot of outbound marketing. Again I could be mistaken so please fact check.

The only real failure that I actually launched was Nitpick CI, all of my other failed projects I actually failed to finish/launch, but they likely wouldn’t have worked out if I did either. One was an app for creating your resume, another was a social network for sharing links with your friends and your team, another was a checkout as a service tool for people who needed to collect sales tax when selling things online.

Hey @channingallen!

How'd you get the idea for Tailwind? e.g. did your prior book/course projects give you a "lightbulb moment" of insight, etc.?

It sort of fell naturally out of just working on my own side-projects and trying to come up with a CSS approach that felt maintainable to me over many years. You can read the full history of the project on my blog for more details.

TL;DR — build side projects, live-stream working on them, everyone keeps asking about the CSS approach I'm using, decide to open-source it because people are asking so much.

Do you think running Tailwind as an open-source project creates any interesting limitations on (or benefits to) how your develop the software or how much you can grow?

I wish I had a good answer for this! I think for the most part it's benefits — the free CSS framework creates a huge user base for us that wouldn't be possible if we tried to just charge for the CSS framework, and as long as some percentage of those people see the value in paying for our premium templates and components then it all works. Our open-source stuff and commercial stuff is quite separate, so we don't have the types of challenges someone might have making their actual commercial product open-source.

It's pretty cool being able to fund a team to work on the open-source stuff though, again because of how much reach something can have as OSS. Most OSS projects start strong but the maintainers get burned out working evenings and weekends, and the project kinda dies off. We get to put tons of sustained effort into our OSS stuff which just helps us build a bigger audience for it and keep all those people really happy, and then via word of mouth more people start using the tool, and some percentage of them become customers.

There are some downsides like feeling pressure to do a lot of stuff in public that I'd rather have the space to work on in private, and managing GitHub issues and PRs from the community is an enormous amount of work that we're constantly trying to figure out how to deal with, but overall I think the OSS side of things is a big net positive for what we're doing.

I think building a CSS framework isn't a challenge nor its unique. Any megatech with design team should have few design frameworks. Many public frameworks came and left, so anyone with experience probably would only stick with megatech's frameworks to ensure not getting burned by 3rd party projects that are abandoned. Then you get people who still wants to pivot away from megatech for various reasons.

I think the most impressive part is how consistent Tailwind CSS seems to be able to hold up the past few years.

Personally, I used bootstrap, bunch of react frameworks, Apple designs, Material designs, Fluent (Microsoft) designs. I used bunch of my own frameworks. I prefer to have components act on css directly but there are times I get lazy and just want to pick a good framework. I've switched all my projects to Mudblazor the past 3 years. It's a framework at component level and it's performance is as good as mine acting directly on CSS. The only drawbacks: 1) the flexibility (as design is tied to material design), 2) slight learning curve for a new framework, 3) project not by a megatech (though it's now well funded). That said, my latest project is on Tailwind CSS with components modifying the css directly. I do use daisyUI at times. Since I am on blazor stack, I can't gain much by getting TailwindUI. I like it so far, but when I have missing components I'll need to write that myself and probably have inconsistent UI styling... maybe I'll switch back to Mudblazor.

Edit: sorry, I am switching back... It was fun learning Tailwind CSS though.

About 3500, and my email list that I built for the book was about 1500.

Hey! I think the best thing to do here would be talk to potential customers, hard to speculate. My gut feeling is that it will be an uphill battle and would depend on what the tool is. Something like Laravel Nova is a package but feels easy to sell as a product, whereas something like a filesystem driver for Dropbox or something is going to be a harder sell.

I've never done either option myself though so unfortunately can't speak with any experience, sorry!

The only way I know how to do it successfully is to build an audience first, so I'd start there if it were me. When me and Steve decided to work on Refactoring UI, he had basically zero Twitter followers and we spent two years growing his following and building trust before we released the book.

I gave a talk on my approach to launching info products, I'd recommend giving it a watch for lots more tactics:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajrDxZRpP9M

One big one I'd actually change is the spacing scale — I regret the cryptic mapping of mt-4 being 1rem (16px), pointless abstraction. In hindsight I 100% would have had mt-4 be 4px, but represented as 0.25rem for accessibility reasons.

Other than that honestly not a ton, there are a few utility names I would probably change now like leading-* and tracking-* but we made quite a few changes from v0 to v1 and overall pretty happy with where things are now.

There are lots of little legacy things internally that we have to manage for backwards compatibility, but at this point I don't think I'd change any of that stuff unnecessarily. A lot of the time there might be a better name for something but it's not better enough to warrant a breaking change. Breaking changes are extremely painful and can be the death of a project if not handled carefully, so it's something I take pretty seriously.

I'm never building anything that has to calculate sales tax or talk to the PayPal API.

My top 3:

• Jeff Hanneman (Slayer), not the most technically impressive but wrote the best riffs of all-time.
• Dan Mongrain (Martyr/Voivod), super underrated, incredible player, can play anything and play it perfectly.
• Vogg (Decapitated), just the most inhumanly tight guitarist I've ever seen.

I haven't used react-bootstrap but I have always been a huge fan of just Bootstrap itself and learned a ton from that project. The only reason Tailwind exists actually is because Bootstrap switched from Less to Sass and I really had a strong preference for Less, so started rolling my own framework.

I think Bootstrap solves a different problem than Tailwind personally — it's much more batteries included and makes it easy to build things super fast if you're happy to sort of "color inside the lines" that Bootstrap gives you with its components. The problem Tailwind tries to solve is "how can I build this totally custom design I got from our design team faster than just starting from total scratch with an empty CSS file?", which I don't think is the problem Bootstrap aims to solve.

It's hard to measure how long Tailwind took because it sort of came into existence organically. It started in 2015 and was released in 2017, but didn't actually have any plans to open source it until just a few months before it was released. Check out this blog post for a full history of the framework.

I didn't really do any deliberate "try to grow the framework" type marketing, but I am a bit of a marketer by nature, so I created a lot of content around the framework when it was released, like screencasts on recreating popular websites with Tailwind. I never set out to create a popular open-source framework though — I only released it because people saw me using it in my live-streams and asked me how they could get their hands on it to use it in their own projects.

I think the biggest change has been going from just me and Steve to having a team. When it was two of us we didn't have to do a lot of planning, and just sort of worked on whatever we felt was the most important thing to work on at any given time. Now with a team I have to spend more time making sure there is enough clearly defined work out there for everyone to work on, so I am in the code a lot less and working a lot more on strategy.

In terms of actual butt at the desk hours, it hasn't changed much. I have a young family so I stick to a 9-5 work schedule and take weekends off unless there's something really important that needs to get done. There are usually 2 or 3 times a year where I'm working a couple of hours in the evenings for 3-4 days straight to get something out the door in the time we want to ship it by, but nothing crazy.

Before I had kids I worked in the evenings and on the weekends more, and I couldn't have written that first book without working on it in the evenings for a couple of months straight.

I worked on Tailwind quite a bit before going full-time on it, but I had the space to do it because the income from info products is quite passive and the work is mostly in bursts. I worked on Tailwind a ton in the summer of 2018 for example between my Vue course and writing Refactoring UI, and then focused almost 100% on Refactoring UI from September to December.

I decided to go full-time on Tailwind because it was growing really fast as an open-source project, and it felt like I had an opportunity to really "put my dent in the universe" with such a high impact project. Wasn't a specific milestone but more just noticing it growing, and the convenient timing of just having released Refactoring UI which bought me a lot of time due to the success.

Look into Twind it is similar to Windicss and unocss but follows Tailwind (so you can always exit).

I self published them just as ebooks and sold them on Gumroad.

For the marketing, the key for me was building authority in the area I was writing about for a long time before starting on the book, and then building a list of people interested in it before it launched.

I gave a whole talk on creating info products that I would recommend:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajrDxZRpP9M

Hey! We just tried to create really fantastic content that fit in a single tweet. Here are all the tweets we put together over the years when building his audience:

https://twitter.com/i/events/994601867987619840?s=21&t=CBx2pirG82hmVeToYqnHKw

Probably not I’m afraid, in hindsight I wouldn’t have added Vue support even, it really slows us down and limits what we can build because any JS behavior needs to be in Headless UI so that it can work in both frameworks, can’t ever use any existing third party libraries. For example if we wanted to add a kanban board component we’d have to build our own drag and drop stuff from scratch so that it could be part of Headless UI and work in both React and Vue, instead of just using a popular established React library.

Man lots of stuff but almost all of it never even got released or went anywhere. Lots of getting excited about something, building the first 25% but never taking it over the finish line.

A bunch that lead directly to Tailwind are captured in this post:

https://adamwathan.me/tailwindcss-from-side-project-byproduct-to-multi-mullion-dollar-business/

Nitpick CI was my first attempt at starting a SaaS app and the only one I ever actually launched, but it went nowhere. I talk about it a bit in this MicroConf talk I gave.

I worked on tons of open source stuff too, none of which is maintained or anything any longer — mostly little libraries that didn't have a lot of actual users.

Nowadays I only work on Tailwind-related stuff 👍

I think the biggest thing we had going for us was the trust in the community we built when leading up to launching Refactoring UI. Steve was basically a celebrity designer at that point, so people were a lot more excited about what we were doing.

I think it also helps a lot that they are official and come from the Tailwind CSS team.

On top of that of course we really just tried to make a great product, and structure everything in a way that's a little different than a typical theme and more just like a giant toolbox of stuff that will hopefully be useful on all of your projects. Not charging per project I think helped convince people to pull the trigger too.

Hey thank you! I gave a talk that covers everything I know about launching info products, I'd definitely recommend giving that a watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajrDxZRpP9M

Hey thanks so much! We still do lots of work on Headless UI, we just released a new version last week:

https://tailwindcss.com/blog/2022-09-09-new-personal-website-heroicons-2-headless-ui-v17#headless-ui-v1-7

Generally we only add what we personally need though, because it could become a really huge distraction otherwise. It's an absolutely brutal project to maintain because of all the weird accessibility and browser quirks you have to worry about, so we try not to just add to it for the sake of adding to it.

It's super important to us though and we take maintaining it very seriously, because it's the foundational layer for React and Vue support in Tailwind UI.

What would you love to build out using Elixir?

Haven't touched Elixir in a long time and don't have any great ideas right now I'm afraid. Really enjoyed learning it though — learning a functional programming language really was an amazing workout for my brain.

at what point did you guys embrace the idea of start adding more team members?

Right after Tailwind UI was released we realized we were gonna be totally overwhelmed trying to maintain and improve that project while also maintaining and improving Tailwind CSS. Hiring was definitely the right decision and has been a life-saver, but I am still very conservative about it and probably wait too long to hire people. I don't think I'm a great manager even though I try hard at it, and it's very draining for me.

Just want to keep making our existing stuff better and better. Tailwind is used by so many people now on such big projects that I think it's really important to dedicate lots of time to just making it as bulletproof, reliable, and fast as possible.

I hear the website builder thing a lot but really don't have any interest. I think that's a seductive thing to build as a developer because it sounds like a fun and interesting project, but we make things for developers, and I've yet to meet a developer who wants to build a website with a WYSIWYG tool instead of their editor. I would never use it myself, so even if it's an interesting technical challenge, I wouldn't want to pursue it as a product.

Hey! Wow thank you, that's amazing to hear.

I am in my office Monday to Friday 9-5, pretty regular working hours. When it was just Steve and I there would be some big pushes a few times per year when we worked really hard to get something out for some self-imposed deadline, but even though I had a lot of fun doing that we don't really work that way much anymore with a team.

In terms of balance, thankfully our products aren't the sort of mission critical things where you have to get up at 2am on a Sunday to fix some problem like you would if you maintained the API at Stripe or something. I do still need to pay attention to things and have a sense of any issues basically 24/7 like any business owner does, but it's very rare that real emergencies happen, I think it's happened maybe twice.

There's always an endless amount of good ideas to pursue and things to work on, so it's also really important that we try to stay very focused in terms of what problems we actually pursue, because otherwise it would be easy to end up overwhelmed. The natural state of any business with product market fit is to grow grow grow, there's like a gravity of opportunities begging for you to take advantage of them, but if you do then you start feeling overwhelmed, like you need to hire more people, manage more people, and I've realized that that doesn't make my life better. Better to just try and do as few things as possible and avoid taking on too much.

what motivates you to keep building?

Honestly just have to do something right? I don't think I have the same motivation as I used to, but I've found that just forcing myself to do something gives me motivation and is rewarding. On the days where I don't feel motivated and don't do anything, I feel like crap and like I'm not doing anything with my life except watching the universe pass me by. So better to just do something, no matter what.

How do you overcome burnout?

Take some time off but find something to do in that time that is fulfilling and enjoyable, don't just vegetate. Then figure out what caused you to burn out and try to put things in place to prevent it from happening.

Great talk I come back to all the time when I'm thinking about this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kn5MbZoSRNM

What would you be doing if you sucked at design? (learning design doesn’t count)

Honestly I'm not a very good designer, Steve is the real designer in our partnership! So for me, finding a designer as a partner was really key. I would still learn design though, I love design and have always strived to learn about it and get better at it.

Name 3-5 websites/tools you cannot live without.

• Figma, it's like our company whiteboard and I don't think I could even think properly without being able to work with other people at the company in a Figma file
• Excel, best software ever made
• Tailwind CSS ;)

Hey thanks!

In what ways did refactoring ui (or other big influences) influence the core principles of tailwind css?

The ideas we put into Refactoring UI influenced the default design system in Tailwind CSS a ton, literally everywhere. The type scale, the shadow system, the color palette, the spacing scale — all of that stuff was designed using the principals we wrote about in the book.

How did you test or what Moment convinced you that tailwind css is something that should be build ?

I actually only decided to open-source it and turn it into a real "project" because I was live-streaming a lot of work on a SaaS app I was building, and the most common question I was getting was "what is this CSS framework you're using?"

Until then it was just some stylesheets I was copying and pasting between projects, but I was getting so much feedback on it that I decided to open-source it. Originally I intended for the framework to be open-source sort of as a marketing play for the SaaS business and to help get the word out, but the SaaS ended up being abandoned and the framework itself is what turned into a business.

This feels like borderline spam but I'll give an answer here that's maybe useful to readers.

We get so, so, so, SO many messages about partnerships and integrations and stuff like that, and we say no to every single one. Lots of them would probably make us more money, but money isn't what we are really optimizing for at this point, I'm optimizing for maximum freedom and a fun and happy life. Pulling more people in an any way doesn't help us get to that goal. It's more people to co-ordinate with on things, more people expecting things from us, and it slows us down. So I really doubt we will ever partner with anyone on anything.