The archive · Product Ideas · Product decision · 2015–2020
Tailwind CSS: a dead side project's leftover styles become a $4M business
Utility classes he kept copying between failed projects became a free CSS framework; a paid component gallery then passed $2M in five months.
Tailwind Labs
What it had to solve
In 2015 Adam Wathan spent a week building a side project called Digest; when Bootstrap 4 dropped the Less preprocessor he preferred, he hand-wrote its styles from scratch. The project died, but he kept copying those stylesheets into later projects and noticed the same pattern each time.
How it works
Adam Wathan began the story in 2015 with Digest, a side project where companies could share links with their teams. He took a week off work to build it, spent most of the week choosing a stack, and hand-wrote all the CSS because Bootstrap 4's alpha had switched from Less, his preferred preprocessor, to Sass. The result mixed Bootstrap-style component classes like btn and card-list with a small set of utility classes for padding and margins.
Digest went into the side-project graveyard, but its stylesheets survived. Wathan copied the Less files into at least four or five later projects, and each time the utilities grew and covered more CSS features while the component files got shorter. Components were always too opinionated to reuse; utilities were the only truly portable part. That is where 'utility-first' stopped being a bag of tricks and became an architectural philosophy.
The idea matured on KiteTail, another project he and Schoger took seriously. Wathan live-streamed the build, viewers kept asking about the CSS, and collaborators sharpened it: Stefan Bauer suggested responsive prefixes, Jonathan Reinink redesigned a differently styled SaaS with it — a forcing function for project-agnosticism — and David Hemphill suggested writing the framework in JavaScript with PostCSS instead of fighting Less. v0.1.0 shipped open source on Halloween night 2017.
After a year of free releases and a community, Wathan went full-time, funded partly by the Refactoring UI book he and Schoger had sold, and shipped v1.0 in May 2019. Tailwind UI, the component gallery of hundreds of pre-built responsive designs, launched in February 2020. Within about five months it was near $2 million in revenue, pushing Tailwind Labs past $4 million total in under two years — built, Wathan argues, by working in public on abandoned side projects.
Why it lands
- A failed project left measurable evidence: utility classes grew in every stylesheet copy while component classes shrank, so the portability claim came from practice, not opinion.
- Working in public recruited users early: stream viewers kept asking for the CSS, and adopters supplied the prefix naming plus a second, differently designed project that forced generality.
- The open-source release built a distribution channel free: v0.1.0 attention and a year of releases created demand that a later commercial product could harvest.
- The paid layer completed the philosophy: components were the opinionated part that never transferred, so selling prebuilt ones filled exactly what the free framework left out.
What it did
By mid-2020 Tailwind had passed 10 million total installs, Tailwind UI was about to cross $2 million in revenue roughly five months after launch, and Wathan put the whole Tailwind Labs business at over $4 million in under two years. The August 2020 origin story drew 308 points and 109 comments on Hacker News.
What you can take
The part you keep copying is the product: watch what survives project-to-project reuse, give the core away free, and charge for the layer everyone needs on top of it.
Since then
Wathan posted the origin story as a Twitter thread and republished it on 2 August 2020, the same day it reached the Hacker News front page with 308 points and 109 comments; a customer in the thread said he had just bought a team license for Tailwind UI. Wathan was building out a small team to keep shipping the framework and its paid products. The account of the business ends there: ten million installs, a five-month-old product approaching $2 million, and a two-person studio turning the byproduct of abandoned side projects into a company.
Sources
- Tailwind CSS: From Side-Project Byproduct to Multi-Million Dollar Business
- Tailwind CSS: From side-project byproduct to multi-million dollar business (Hacker News discussion)
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