Posted by kevlened 4 days ago
Man, you can really feel the anxiety and desperation in Adam's reply.
Part of me wants to say "look what evil VC money does to devs", but that's only a harsh critism of a bystander.
Monetization is a normal path that the successful OSS projects would take. Tailwind went big on the startup route, took a bunch of VC cash a couple of years back, but despite the massive impact on the dev world, they clearly didn't hit the revenue numbers investors expected. Now the valuation bubble popped, and they're forced into massive layoffs. Though to be fair, maintaining a CSS library probably doesn't require that many people anyway.
I really feel for Adam here. He didn't really do anything wrong. Eagering to build a startup after your project blows up is a totally natural ambition. But funding brings risks. Taking other people's money makes you go from being the owner to just another employee real quick. And once you hop on that VC train, you don't really call the shots anymore. Sometimes you can't stop raising or scaling as your own will.
If you find a solid business model, that's great. But if not, well, honestly, a 75% layoff is getting off lightly. At least they still have a chance to keep on.
But he obviously didn't foresee this coming. He’s getting torn between being an OSS maintainer and a CEO who have to be responsible for stackholders and employees. That internal conflict must be brutal. It’s pretty obvious he didn't reject the PR for technical reasons. It's just because the reality hit him hard, and he has to respond to it, even if it goes against his mind as a developer.
Really hope Tailwind pulls through this. Also, this is a lesson worth noting for the rest of us. As indie devs, if you ever get the chance to take VC money, you really gotta think hard about whether you're truly ready for the strings that come attached.
> Here's a friendly tip for the Tailwind team that you should already know, but I will repeat anyways: If your goal is monetizing your software, then making your software as easy to use for people's workflows, is paramount.
I made the horrible life mistake of starting a company around developer tools, and I would never, ever repeat the experience because of “friendly” stuff like this. I don’t know why software developers are so entitled, but it’s a serious culture problem.
[1] https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#is...
> It's insane to blame everybody else for not being able to create a viable business model from an OSS project. Everybody who is using Tailwind is actually SUPPORTING Tailwind. Everybody who is reporting bugs properly is SUPPORTING Tailwind. Everybody who is collaborating and PRs changes is SUPPORTING Tailwind.
> Tailwind grew a lot due to community acceptance and support, and collaborations.
> The only person to blame here is the CEO/Main maintainer of Tailwind. They've made bad decisions, hired coders without knowing how to make enough money to pay them.
> If you want to monetize a free service, you either know what you do or you make mistakes and lose what you've built. It was always a risk; we are not at fault.
> @adamwathan I respect you for everything you've done, but you need to take a few breaths, take a walk, think, sleep, and come back, ask apologize of the community, and start working on solutions/crisis management.
And you always know that when you open the GH profile of people saying such things, you'll see an empty timeline. This particular user has a single repository which he's committed to a handful of times over the last year and has setup a GitHub sponsorship for it.
I try to remind myself that these types of people are a (loud) minority but it's absolutely soul destroying.
As you note, the tire-kickers were the worst -- people who forked the Linux kernel (with no additional commits) trying to process the entire repo on a free plan, for example, then complaining (loudly) when cut off.