Tailwind Creator on the Challenges of Open Source

0:00 Yeah, I am a little disappointed. I was saying to trash. We should have done a gag where like the whole time Trash talks about tailwind like very authoritatively, but like slightly wrong or something. No, listen. You don't understand Tailwind is the future Like 10 minutes in like and we've got Adam the creator of tailwind and trash just like you two shocked face hangs up Yeah, it just says like that OBS green shows up where it's just like camera gone Yeah, because if you hung up and screwed my entire is it would screw up everything else so we can't You can't have you hang out Anyway, I started all right all right. All right. Let's get started because this actually so this stand-up I am particularly excited about today. We have with us teach as always trash dev and Adam joining us

0:54 Adam being the creator of tailwind may have heard of it Probably Anyways, probably I hear some my favorite form of CSS really, but you said something in a podcast where you said open source is pain I think was your direct Exactly, but open source is pain Wait a minute. There are so many versions of this there is so many people who make articles here There's an article that I just I think I read this one like two years ago open source is broken slash or why I Why I write a useful software or why I don't write useful software unless if you pay me Which I think is a great subtitle is like I'm just not gonna do unless if you pay me money to do it And so there's a bunch about open open source and I think that I know TJ

1:39 You've done a lot of open source Adam. You've done a lot of open source I got burnt out from open source in 2017 and have pretty much never done it since and so I am very Curious about what you meant by that line and then even more so if we can just talk about Yeah, let me let me just imagine myself saying that and try to think of like what I could have possibly meant when I was saying that I Think like I don't know, but I I don't know that I would say mean open source is open source at scale is Is hard, you know To go kind of the to the beginning like I I think Different people think of open source differently I My favorite and least stressful way to think of open source is like I made a thing

2:26 There's no real reason for me to not let other people see how I made it so fuck it here It is on the internet if this Helps get you a little bit closer to something you were trying to build a little bit faster or you can adapt this code to something else or saves you some time Cool, you know, but it's like this very no strings attached version of open source where it's open because why not not because You know, I'm trying to do some Service for the world or solve this problem for everyone. It's like I solve the problem for me If you want to learn from the code like go check it out. I think that's like the best relationship For maintainers and consumers to to generally have with open source and like I think the DHH has done like a

3:13 Good job of really sort of like internalizing it's sort of like espousing this version of things, but ironically like I Make a living doing open source, which is kind of like the the opposite of that, you know But if you if you build something open source that ends up taking on a life of its own and getting used by tons and tons and tons of People it's hard not to sort of feel like a duty and responsibility to like steward it properly and maintain it and Improve it and stuff like that and when you get into that spot It necessitates like working on this stuff full-time and then figuring out how to do that is really is really tricky and a lot of people will say Okay, well, I'm going to like build this open source project make it very popular then I'm gonna like make some little

4:04 Side business out of it where I can maybe work five hours a week on that and then spend the other 35 hours of the week like Maintaining the open source, but that's actually like super insanely hard and unrealistic because what you're actually saying is I want to build a business that I only have to work on for five hours a week that pays me a full-time salary Forget like what else you're gonna do with the rest of the 35 hours and reality is like building A business is a lot of work to get off the ground and you know rarely takes even just like the regular 40 hours That people Put into it whether you're a vibe coder or a handcrafted free-range neo-vim user You still need CI to be able to build your binaries run your tests or make your releases

4:46 That's where blacksmith comes in it takes your GitHub actions and with a one-line change makes them faster and more Cost-effective not only that but you can finally get visibility into your CI pipeline right when things go wrong We're happy to have them as our sponsor for this episode because just like us This one is truly a no-brainer sign up and enjoy faster GitHub action workflows at a much lower price blacksmith twice The speed in up to 75% reduction in cost check them out at blacksmith.sh now back to the stand-up It's something like tailwind scale like just like the issues just keep pouring in and pouring in and You want to stay on top of it even though 95% of them are not even problems It's just like reading it and understanding why it's not a problem and then figuring out where to put it or how to delete it or how to respond to it instead

5:34 You know, but you're basically getting like D-dost by like your By the world in this giant inbox that you They can't can't really control and Yeah, it's it's It's just like a big Responsibility, you know, and I think when I was talking on that pod cast I'm trying to remember like what I would have said about it I think I was talking about this new thing that we're working on which is Kind of like a web components E version of things like radix and base UI and headless UI and react to area because like one of the ways that we make money Would tailwind or that basically the way is we have a website that you can pay for access to that has a bunch of component new UI examples and stuff and those are in HTML or react or in view

6:30 But historically the ones that appear HTML if there was like any interactive bits to them you were just sort of on the hook for doing that yourself and Doing that stuff like properties actually they can insane amount of work with all the keyboard navigation and our attributes and weird Horrible accessibility bugs and stuff So that's been like probably the most common reason for like refunds or people not buying as people who are not reactor view users and just are bummed that I have to write 600 lines of JavaScript to make this fucking hamburger menu work properly or something, you know Or they just do like a shitty job of it and I can relate to that This they still had to do it themselves, right? So anyways, right point is like we're working on this like web

7:14 Components e just a script tag CDN thing you can pull in where you can just use custom elements and get a lot of the same Kind of composable behaviors working in just like a more pure HTML Environment and I was just talking about how in the past it would have been like really obvious to me to just like open source that because that's kind of what you do with code It feels like but now in the position that we're in like trying to make the business sustainable and stuff like that. There's this The incentives are kind of reversed, you know, it's I feel pressure to keep it closed source because if we open source it Then we have people who like build competing products to us that build on our open source stuff

7:53 And they don't have to maintain the open source stuff So they get to pour all their time and effort into competing with us and we have to spend 90% of our time improving the tools they use to compete with us and 10% of the time competing with them and just kind of like a shitty It's just a shady thing because you want when you make something that's open source and used by a bunch of people You want to be like pumped and excited about when people are building cool things within stuff like that But when you're trying to sort of like build a business out of it the incentives end up kind of pushing you the other way And sometimes it kind of feels like you're at odds with your own community And it's just a tricky problem to to figure out how to solve because I don't know

8:32 I love like just making cool stuff and just putting it out into the world And I prefer not to really think about the commercial side of it that much, you know But yeah, I don't know that's kind of just a ramble and rant about You know probably what I meant there, but yeah, I don't know It's just a lot to figure out and wrestle with and Yeah, I always found the like yeah, I'll just make a really successful open source thing And then on the side I'll also do like it's just a little business thing that pays the bills and you're like Bro, that's like lightning striking twice, man. You're just like Well probably my strategy Super successful open source product maybe win the lottery Hopefully it's like lost uncle. I didn't know about with inheritance

9:18 And then I'm also on an oil field on my house and you're like, okay, that's not a business plan guys That's not a strategy When I was watching prime stream the other day and he said something that made me think of the same thing We're we're talking about like how to sort of succeed in an AI dominated world and you know We're talking he was commenting on a comment that I made about like wanting to just lean more into like Having a captive audience and making sure that you have a lot of people paying attention to you So you actually have people's attention and You know prime was saying yeah, you know like that's the strategy like oh first like just be famous That's the first step Yeah, step one

10:02 Well, what you're trying to do this without being famous first like why don't you just go do the famous part first god Like being a movie or something Yeah, exactly wait you tried to release it to Kila without like first being an a-list celebrity. What what do you think? Cool So I actually so I feel like I can embody the YouTube comments because I just like I've read so many of them that I just feel like I can deliver it to you And so I feel like the very first YouTube comment that's probably gonna be one hundred of them are gonna go along the line of something like You should just give away the code. Why are you concerned about making money?

10:44 This is open source. We should be doing this for the good of humanity So why aren't you making tailwind more open and free? I assume that's gonna be like one of the top comments But now that I said hopefully I've now destroyed that top comment because it is so at least I feel Very upsetting internally to me, but I want to hear your thoughts about that because like why aren't you just open sourcing everything?

11:06 Yeah, I mean the goodness of your heart why why even create a business to begin with sure sure It's because like there's costs involved right like I don't know that's kind of like the simple version so No one can like work full-time and Built maintain like open source on the side forever, you know You can maybe do that for quite a while when you're like 21 years old and like single and living in an apartment by yourself But like I have three kids, you know that are like seven and under and I want to spend time with them and I'm You know like I just got a lot of responsibilities outside of um You know Fucking writing open source code and working the full-time job. So uh You want to work on it full-time and then as the project gets bigger and bigger

11:56 There's just more and more work to do so you need help so you hire people and We're like a pretty small team. There's eight of us like three partners and then Four full-time guys and one part-time guy But are we try to pay people very competitively, you know So we have like a million a half dollars a year and and expenses that we have to cover so we have to get paid From somewhere, you know, and yeah, we could try to run the whole thing on volunteer work But someone has to like curate that volunteer work and go through the PRs and merge them and yeah It's just it doesn't work that way the only way for like something to really be like Properly maintained as if people can really devote their full attention to it and

12:39 The only way to be able to devote all your time and attention to something is if you don't have to worry about money because things in life cost money So the logical conclusion of that is you somehow get paid money to do that thing um So yeah, the other thing too is like When you start an open source project, you're just working on the fun parts. So it's like a hundred percent You know, but like it's not all fun parts on v4 You know like no, it's just gets like harder and harder like that is that's all that's left That's all that's left is the unfun parts. So it's like for sure It's also harder to get people to volunteer their time to go and spend 160 hours debugging cross-platform build issues to make get hub actions not get stalled out once a week or something like this right?

13:28 You're like and someone asked like you make like idiotic decisions as I mean Like rewriting like a ton of it and rust to make it faster and now like you have to maintain that And you have to make sure it builds for all these different platforms because you have to worry about This native code running in all these environments when before was just fucking JavaScript You know how much of a difference did that make by the way was that was that like a huge difference a huge difference But we were very strategic about how we Used it so like we didn't just like write it in rust to write it in rust to the main things that we did in rust that had a huge benefit is First of all like the way tail when works in general right is it has to like look at all of the files in your project and figure out

14:11 What all the class names are and pull all those class names out and then generate the CSS for those class names So that work is very very parallelizable work right because you can just like split that work up Look at different files across different cores can't do that in JavaScript So instantly moving that work into something that supports parallelism Makes things like four to six billion times faster, you know depending on how many cores you have on your machine So that is a huge piece of it and then the other piece of it is Just the actual work to look through the files and like figure out what's a class and what's just Bullshit used to just be a bunch of crazy ass regular expressions in javascript

14:56 Because like regular expressions are actually like the only fast thing in javascript when it comes to pulling things out of files But of course like then you're just sort of like handcuffed by What you can express in a regular expression Whereas in rust we're able to write like our own like custom like Bit-level parser That ends up being way faster than the rejects thing and also just like way clearer and expressive and Intentional, you know So that was the other the other big piece But that's kind of like the only things we do in rust honestly is those two things That's why we don't need all that config anymore right because you're just basically Just crawling our entire file system Yeah, like now we can crawl the file system without you telling us where to look a lot faster too

15:43 Because that just happens to be a lot faster in rust So there's a bunch of heuristics around it's mostly based on like the get ignore file So if you've got something get ignored, we don't look at it Which is like a quick shortcut for not looking at node modules and stuff like that But then we also ignore like anything more That's a don't ignore it yet How do you guys get it to reproducibly build?

16:05 Yeah, yeah But then we also ignore like binary files like fucking jpegs and zip files and anything that is obviously nonsense So that yeah that let us remove a bunch of configuration and make a bunch of that stuff faster too But it's still a predominantly a typescript code base now so yeah So with with um with obviously again to kind of going along the lines of people being like wise and in free and all that Before you started a business was there some sort of attempt to rely on say like sponsorship on github Does that actually work out at all because obviously tailwind is arguably probably Top 10 biggest like Twitter sized open source projects I don't think you have a lot of competition as far as like how big you're probably like everybody knows with tailwind

16:54 At this point that doesn't any sort of web type stuff and so one would assume At least I'm sure you'd see this argument over and over again that there'd be a huge amount of people saying oh tailwind must do great with Donations was that a viable option or does that just not exist as I secretly think that sponsorship doesn't Yeah, as you're leading as you're trying to I'm just standing there history is a little A little strange compared to other open source projects because we actually never tried to solicit any donations or sponsorships at all um Steve and I who first built like tailwind UI, which was the first commercial thing for tailwind We did that refactoring UI book back in like 2018 I don't know if you guys ever saw that but it's like a teach developers design sort of thing

17:42 And that that did super well and still continues to do really well honestly for our pdf on the internet and That was like enough for me and Steve to focus full time on tailwind related stuff and then trying to build The templates and UI components business So that's kind of like the path that we took um Interestingly, we're exploring sponsorship stuff now which we weren't Before and I can kind of talk about like what is leading to that I kind of plays on some of the stuff like we were talking about before but yeah, we'll have to see if if that is actually Viable for us or not. Obviously. I hope it is because we Otherwise wouldn't be trying to do it or at least hope it can contribute to You know

18:32 Our revenue in a meaningful way and my hope is that because the project is like so big that there will be Companies that like want to throw in and support but I That to say too. I do think like even then Charity is like very hard, you know to get people to pull money out of their pockets for people need like My belief in it was is people need like Something it doesn't even have to be like worth what they're paying But they need like something to not feel stupid a lot of the time um So that's the other thing that we're trying to like Just sort out is what are the rights incentives to create what can we give people where they can like feel good about supporting us But also get a little something in exchange um

19:22 So that it doesn't just feel like like pure charity even if it You know isn't A product per se but I don't know kind of like you see a lot of people having success with us doing like patreon type stuff You know, you just got to give people enough and hopefully at a big enough scale like we get like 10 million visits a month through the tailwind dox If some like tiny fraction of those people are big enough tailwind fans to just like want that really sort of die hard Sort of extra perky stuff that maybe that'll You know make a meaningful impact on our bottom line So that's an experiment that we're about to run anyways. I want to bring this back more back to like the open source stuff. So I'm obviously not part of the tailwind team the repo. I've worked on art anywhere near as big

20:17 But they are like decently big But I wanted to talk about like some of the pain points which you mentioned like The sponsorships, which is something I've gone down Mainly because like an open source. I find it's kind of just like it really depends on like do you care About code quality and all this because they don't care about code quality You can just start taking contributions like really nearly right. It's like here's like some issue Yeah, go ahead. I trust you implicitly but at some point you hit like Some scale depending on if your repo is actually in popular where you actually have to start caring about this stuff And this is where I hit that threshold of okay Now I got to actually that

20:56 Who I want to take contributions from but also like But also like if it's such a big like high traffic like Like a bunch of contributions coming in. It's like are you good enough? Do I trust you? Or what if they do put something in and I don't like it like I have to deal with these personalities So and that's where sponsorships coming because then you you can kind of pick who you want to and you give them an incentive Maybe not initially because they're contributing because they're just they like your project But then there's just like so many low quality contributions. That's like okay Well at some point I got to get some core team That's kind of like how I feel like was like your team. I think Robin's still in your team. He's like one of my buddies

21:34 Yeah And that's where the sponsorships coming because it's like okay look I know you're not full time and I want to give you some incentive to like Give some high quality contributions. So here's some like sponsorship money to do what you can But this is like when you get to that point That's kind of where I started struggling in these projects because Well, I don't want to like hurt people's feelings like they put some time in and they're just like like look The code quality is not there. I don't have time to like babysit you Learn all this stuff and then it eventually becomes coming eventually turns into a situation like you where you just have like a core Group of people and then it starts feeling less and less

22:11 Like open source because you kind of just like Have like these issues that you have these people assigned to and then you have to trust these people to say Hey, I took this issue. Are you actually gonna finish it? And I just go see her look at this issue for like two weeks and then ping on be like are you gonna do it?

22:26 So it's like I don't know this is these are like the situations I hit We're just kind of frustrating. I don't really know what to do about that outside of just Yeah, I don't I don't have good answers to but I can empathize for sure like For the longest time for me like the hardest thing about maintaining a large open source project was sort of that Emotional side of it where you have all these contributions and stuff and if you just don't like something. It's just draining to Go in there and try to like let people down gently or explain why You know, this isn't really The right fit for the project or where I want to take it or or even like I like this idea But like I think I need to like deeply research

23:10 The problem that you're trying to solve to make sure that this is the right way to solve it versus just like merging it blindly And I can't promise that I can make that like my top priority right now. So the issue just sits people get frustrated and Yeah, that that part sucks You know, we've tried to manage that by setting expectations and like our contributing guidelines and stuff around what are good contributions and what are Contributions that are going to be hard for you to get merged or might take a long time to get merged so people aren't too disappointed if something sits For a long time But yeah to me that's that's kind of the tricky part and and if you Keep going down that route then you kind of end up in the spot that you're talking about which is basically where we are

24:00 Where you just like actually don't get that much in terms of real contributions. It ends up being mostly like support Like people opening issues and stuff like that and our projects a little weird too because our End users are front end developers, but the code base is not like a front end code base at all I'm sure this is true for like a lot of open source projects But there are some open source projects like Laravel for example Where basically anyone you're using it is also like fit to contribute to it or like has the experience to contribute to it So they end up like with a really vibrant active Community of people contributing stuff whereas we don't really have a ton. There's like a couple of people

24:40 um who contribute stuff and then otherwise it's it's just the the core team But yeah, you're right it ends up kind of feeling a little bit less certainly feels less like a community project I think people's definitions of open source kind of differ again. I personally kind of hate that This sort of like social community property Connotation has been like attached to the term open source. It's made open source Just means like you can do whatever you want with the code doesn't mean like anyone else is obligated to entertain like your suggestions or Do work to merge your Changes into their fork or whatever But yeah, I don't know Answer any One thing that I found that was effective because it's really hard if you have like a decent amount of contributors to figure out who should get money because it's like it seems super

25:41 like Difficult because some people put in a lot of work for stuff It was helpful. We did and I think it's still the the case. I haven't checked in a while But like it was only if you were working on neo bit some neo vim thing for like an extended period of time full time That we sponsored people with neo vim funds, which was been like that's how a bunch of big projects got done for neo vim right like oh Like I like I did it. I've done it twice for neo vim actually both times where I was on paternity leave Like I could I was like okay, well I can take a month and I can just work on neo vim full time like that's that's sure I can work on something And like that we've gotten a lot of great features that way and that's like at least a very clear distinction

26:25 So it doesn't feel like oh my work's not getting valued. I'm not getting any money because when you bring money in This is the other thing I think people aren't thinking like about oftentimes from the outside Looking in is then it makes all the people not working for money feel weird Right like I don't know if you totally yeah, no, I think I think we definitely get a I don't know if we actually have that But it's something I feel in my head. I almost feel like uncomfortable like taking contributions from people When there's a team that's getting paid and then other people You know are just contributing stuff. Yeah for free, you know It's weird where money like enters the equation, you know Just kind of like all of a sudden. It's like not a a free volunteer thing anymore

27:10 If anyone's getting paid like everyone should get paid or and again I don't know if people actually people contributing actually feel that way I think if you really think hard about it people are probably just like I want to use this fucking feature So can please just put it in Codebase But it's it's still a dynamic, you know, so Yeah So one thing I found kind of weird because I have obviously a very different kind of Open source experience than you three because my open source was a sponsored one by Netflix And so I did that for quite some time it was conference driven development like the whole nine yards I had a conference scheduled that I had to go and talk about the thing right because this was like

27:50 2016 2017 where you sold your idea via the conference circuit if you remember those days great guys and so for me the hard part was Managing and I Adam I'm actually curious what you have to do with this which is that you had all these users That started using your product and they all came back with feedback and things that they wanted to change but ultimately this was More public source or commercial open source than anything else in a sense that My number one goal was to service Netflix and their needs for the open source project And so therefore when when people would come and ask for stuff It's like yeah, I can go in our backlog, but it's like it's deep in the backlog because really I'm only concerned about Netflix things for Netflix problems

28:33 And all these people that are using it can like start getting further and further kind of frustrations because I'm not servicing what the community wants I service what serves You know the person paying the bills and I found that to be like a really Disheartening thing because it often led to very disgruntled messages that were not the most times In any totally nature. Yeah No, I get the same thing for sure. I think uh, we've tried to mitigate some of that by Like a lot of repos we use issues for tracking both like bug reports and feature requests and stuff We are very hardcore about like issues just being bug reports and if someone has an idea for a feature or ask for something We move that into GitHub discussions and we mostly do that just because

29:17 GitHub discussions even though they did add the fucking ability to close them which doesn't really make any sense to me Just feel like a thing that can just live there whereas like issues You're supposed to deal with them in some way, you know So it's kind of like someone requested this feature and until it's like Closed You know purple or closed red. It's fucking just not done and you haven't done the thing yet Went in reality like no one's even like agreed to do it or accepted the idea or anything like that So I think it has helped us a bit to do that. I think the other thing is just You kind of get a bit of a thicker skin over time Just telling people hey, yeah, this is a cool idea um Not why don't you explore it as a plug-in, you know like that's one option that we have used in the past

30:04 I think that's a good technical solution to that problem anyways is making things extensible And then if that doesn't work, you know I literally just tell people like you can always just like fork this and everyone just rolls rise up you fucking So like I can't focus and maintain it and it's like okay, well there you go now you kind of get it, you know like You're asking me to do the thing that you can't do like we get we're all Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly There too is like sometimes if it's just like oh our policy is that feature request go in discussions Then it's just super easy to close issues and then you filter out all the people that aren't gonna read What you write anyways right cuz yeah, yeah, yeah, I love a good policy in general if anytime you can put something on the policy

30:50 You know, I'm sorry. That's that's policy. Yeah, I can't do anything about that. Yeah, you know It's the policy, right, but it's like it is like a nice gate actually for like like one thing Justin keys who is like the main main maintainer of neovim always says like we can't be afraid to fire users Right, which is like yeah, we we don't have Microsoft budget like we're not gonna compete on every vertical with vs code. Sorry vs Right, you know what I mean like we're just not gonna like have that happen So we need to say no to some things and if for some people that's a deal breaker like they can't use neovim because of that And it's like okay That's okay like it can't it can't be everything to everyone or it's nothing to no one, you know, it's it's

31:35 Yeah, you got to kind of like Pick your position on things because there's a lot of things that you kind of It can only be one way or the other, you know, right? I think the other thing too is like Sometimes you could feel sort of overwhelmed with People's frustration as as if it's like the whole world But the reality is it's just like this tiny tiny tiny tiny portion and everyone who's like satisfied and agrees with the way things are going and thinks it's awesome. They have no reason to say anything So they're just quietly happy and stoked about what you're doing and supporting you Feel like I'm gonna open the tailwind repo. Yeah, no it's a repo, you know what I mean, right?

32:16 They end up installed and they've never looked back ever ever ever ever Yeah, exactly. So it's it's helpful to sort of remember that too because it yeah, it's it's It can be it can be tough in that sense, but I think ultimately. Yeah, you just kind of have to be I mean, there's this book that everyone tells me to buy and read that I bought and never read and don't think I really have to read because just like the title is all The great divorce by C.S. Lewis That's right. No, it's uh, it's called it's called the it's called the courage to be disliked You know and even just like that phrase is just like I'm so courageous But just like even the existence of someone trying to give that advice like makes it easier and in my

33:11 Experience, you know, yeah first like dealing with personalities was very Frustrating for me like I felt like I was letting people down or I just felt like I had to service all these people That were interested in what I was doing I was like, oh you're interested. Let me just make you as happy as I can Yeah, at some point. I was just like I just can't do this anywhere I burned out like super super bad like I went from like crazy. Get up scores. They're just like dark Like like nothing and now like I'm still like feeling the effects from that Um, but yeah, I don't know man People feel very entitled in this world. It's kind of crazy. I actually I think yeah, I apply what you're saying But I apply it to what I do now which is streaming is that for a long time

33:52 I think it's very it's like a very kind of Normal mentality, especially for people who are just getting started when they have like say 10 or 15 people watching them Is that like someone comes in and they're just like Even if they don't like do anything that's like breaking whatever rules you have set forth You just like don't like them And you're just like I don't like to vibe they're bring I don't like and so many people will be so quick to cater to their audience or like Try to make sure that they're Really just fitting to all things and I realized I don't know when it was it must have been two years ago Just like you know, it's way better to fire a user Even if that like that means that something won't be as successful

34:28 I'm just okay with that now and I am much quicker to be like okay This person just like is completely you know left field I'm just gonna have to ask him to leave because it is just easier to maintain a certain kind of feel or vibe in a community By just saying no to a few people because it really can change how people respond because you need just one person To just blow up a conversation a couple times and then also it's just like you have a whole new community coming in getting ready to blow everything up. Yeah So yeah, I think I think the other thing is like People's frustrations are Are not like invalid, you know, you know, I mean But it doesn't mean it's like your fault or your responsibility like it both sides can be true, you know like

35:14 Um to someone who's like running into some big problem. It's hard for them to really like recognize that as a maintainer You've got like 16 other priorities that are big issues to other people But this person who has this other problem like isn't affected by those So it's like sometimes without really thinking hard about it It's hard for people to understand like why are you not fixing this this thing is clearly the most broken thing in your tool right now Um, but it's just for their Situation that it's the most broken thing, but that's still true and still real so You know Yeah, I don't know it's Yeah, it's it's I guess what I'm trying to say is like There is like entitlement and stuff uh in open source, but like I'm still

36:00 General like grateful for the people who use it and the people who raise issues and contributing stuff like I think it's easy to fall into this like Uh Sort of trap of just like hating on like open source consumers and stuff like that The same way like people at fucking Derek we like talk shit about all the customers who come in and buy the ice cream You know, but at the end of the day like you need those people to come in buy the fucking ice cream or you don't have a job You know Is that a real problem? Is Derrick win workers talking shit Yeah, I just I just mean like in general did you ever like work a job when you were a teenager like Every teenager who's the customers, you know So I don't know yeah, I try to be I try to be even more mature version of my teenage self. Yeah these days, you know, but

36:51 Adam, what's the best way for someone to make an issue and have it be something that then you work on and fix and get close and close Mm Yeah, I mean if you open an issue with a very clear minimal reproduction That dramatically increases the odds of a getting fixed, you know, that's that's the big thing Just make it easy just make it easy for the maintainers to make the fix, you know Um So our users don't know a lot about reproduction though. So that might be a bit of a problem We're gonna put that as an issue requirement Mm-hmm I have a other question more about like the tailwind journey if you know mine um So The tailwinds are just I was just imagining you pulling up code and just being like so how can I fix

37:41 So 732 Like this is this has been flashing That's crazy. Okay, so how can I make this responsive on multiple Firefox this So did Tillin start out as open source like initially Yeah, yeah, so it was like I released I think it's like the first version was like I think we released on Halloween in 2017 and it was just like an Extracted by product of me trying to build this other side project Okay, and I was like live streaming on my work on it and people kept asking me about the CSS So I just spun it off into like a little thing and release it on So then I'm curious if the start open source like how did you transition it into like something You could be paid to do like what so I'm assuming like there's a lot of pieces that are just like close source that are like the secret sauce

38:32 But like was there ever like any like ethical Like Friction of like I'm gonna start making money from this project that potentially there was I don't know how many people contributed to But now I'm gonna make this for a living like was there like a decision? We're like oh, maybe we should pay like a little bit to some of these people that help get it off the ground Or like what was like that transition like like I'm just like generally curious Yeah, yeah, no, that's a good question I think in my mind the reason it wasn't like that complicated is because we never charged money for framework or anything related to the framework itself like For a CSS framework like bootstrap has a template marketplace, you know where people build bootstrap templates and sell them

39:10 And that's basically what we did more or less is Designed things build them with tailwind and then like sell those designs So anything that we charged money for didn't have any like Community contributions or anything. We just Take all that those funds and pour them back into the development of the framework because The success of the framework leads to the success of like the the commercial thing You know, so it's a little bit a little bit different. I guess in that sense Okay, that makes sense. That makes sense. Cool Why trash you got Something you're working on right now because that seems like a very specific question I mean, I'm speaking from like actual like things I'm gonna win through. It's fine. I'm like

39:54 I'm like, okay, okay Next week I'm done. I'm done with free every eight nonsense kidding. No, but like yeah, just I've got Things that's going to get you fired at work No, but just things that I've gone through in the open source where like you know, I've encountered Certain scenarios where like is this ethical. I don't know. It's not gonna do it So I'm just like hearing other people's perspective and then just Dealing with people in open source and how others are kind of dealing with it. So You know, yeah, I mean, that's one thing Like I was saying like we're exploring we're experimenting with sponsorships now like that's like something I were trying to launch today and I guess like I haven't thought about it at a time because of what I said earlier

40:44 Where we kind of are in a spot where like the only real contributions to the framework come from people who already work here So it kind of makes it feel a little simpler in that sense and anyone who's like contributing stuff is because they want it so You know, I don't feel feel too bad about it in that sense, but I could definitely understand where It gets tricky and like a project that's been able to build a really active like contributor Community and all of a sudden like the project starts like taking funds like where does that go? It's Yeah, it's it's a that feels like Yeah, I don't know. I can't understand why someone would feel stressed about trying to manage that properly, you know, yeah for NeoVim it's

41:29 I think like good strategies for like more community style projects where it's not like oh I like own this you know like there's not really like in that same way for NeoVim maybe compared to like tailwind where it's more like oh It feels like your and like you know the other people who started it with you Adam like your project You know, I mean like NeoVim it was just like we have you know like there's a few nice sites like open collective and a few other places where you can see Basically like what money comes into a project and then where it goes and then like I'd mentioned earlier For NeoVim it's just like just have a simple policy where it's like if you're gonna work full-time on something for a while

42:07 And it gets approved by basically like the core team then then you can get paid That's easy And like I know people do like there's sort of mixed feelings on bug bounties I'm not really like a huge fan of like bounty stuff It sometimes creates kind of perverse incentives for like people to be like fighting about who gets to work on what And like external people putting Like bounties on stuff can make it very complicated because someone is trying to like Get this PR merge so they can get paid but like they might be at odds with the maintainer I know Andrew Kelly from zig has a few articles. I'm kind of talking about that And prime has a few videos talking about that Andrew Kelly's things So so those those can be kind of complicated, but I think for like a community one if you can set the rules like really clear

42:58 I think then it's then it's obviously like if I if someone just randomly sends a PR to NeoVim They're like yeah, that makes sense. I'm not gonna get paid Like it's chill even if you send a lot of random PRs to NeoVim there's no like expectation Um, but yeah, so that's at least trash from my experience That was how like NeoVim has done it and it seems to have worked like really really well Well, I'm really interested though. You're gonna have to tell us offline. We're gonna keep it We're gonna we're gonna move to we're gonna have a patreon the only thing you're good to hear is about trash's side project That he's not gonna tell us on stream. These are things that happen like these are things that happened before

43:32 I got like severely burned out. So this is like way in the past This is anything that's like currently happened, but like at one point in my life got just standing there Was this the uh, I mean, I okay, I'm just gonna ask a question You can just say you don't want to talk about is this from like type hero?

43:48 Is this your type hero days because that you were playing at that and like things spin off of that I mean, I still we still do like annual events as well Where I have to pay people to help me do these annual things But yeah from those days This is a great. I like this question from the audience. Thanks vegan bot Adam What's the most surprising contribution you've had to tailwind like someone externally contributing to tailwind?

44:12 Oh, there was a good one the other day. I can't even remember what it was But someone like contributed to like a real improvement on like the rust side of things and that feels like the most Distant knowledge a consumer of tailwind would normally have And it was like solid and solved the real problem and was all Great and we merged it and yeah, I don't know. I should go and find it and see if I can pull up the exact link But is that repo in the tailwind labs Organization? Yeah, so if the tailwind CSS repo is like a mono repo. That's got It's I think it's probably only one rust crate that kind of has all that stuff in it and then it's got uh like A bunch of different packages that kind of come together to form the

44:56 Whole thing when you actually install it. Oh, I see it. Okay. Was that was the person who contributed name a vegan bot by the chance? I'll have to go and look Yeah, I kind of would I'd be curious to get your guys like Take on uh Just like a challenge that we've kind of had running an open source business Which is sort of like what we're trying to try and fix with the sponsorship stuff. Honestly. It's like a It's a it's kind of a Sensitive topic in some ways. I guess so we're ready Sensitive. I think like the hardest thing for us as a business has been like what we sell is like UI components and templates and stuff like that um But The thing that a lot of like our biggest most excited users are excited about building our like components and templates and stuff like that so

45:57 We have this shitty situation where When someone builds like a cool open source UI library with tailwind or something It's we can't like champion it because it hurts our ability to fund the project to Promote free alternatives or even paid alternatives to like our commercial stuff, you know And that's like been the case like for for quite a while where there's just people doing cool work that like I want to be Excited about and be able to support but like I can't literally can't because it would interfere with me Like helping put food on the team's table, you know at the end of the day and I really want to like figure out how We can make the projects sustainable in a way where we don't feel like we're competing like with our own community

46:49 At all, which is why I'm I'm interested in exploring the sponsorship stuff and why we're playing with it Um, we're just like the bigger tailwind is the better Forever one and we can be like excited about that But like the reality is you have like all these people building like AI based like UI generator stuff on top of tailwind like there's tons of Those tools out there and then there's like open source versions of things and over time like We had sort of like a first mover advantage and we benefited a lot from that and was able to sort of build up a pretty strong Business from that to keep things sustainable But that for us like peeked at like the beginning of 2023 and everything's just been like down since then

47:32 because A lot of the stuff that we're doing is like being more commoditized as more people try to build similar types of things Or a lot of people are just like content with being able to ask like Jackie bt or b0 or something to just spit out a pricing page for them And even if it's like not up to my standards and I want to build things that are better than that It it's good enough for a lot of people and I just sort of have to accept the reality That for those people is good enough. So I got to figure out Something else to do, you know what I mean?

48:03 um So I don't know I don't know if you guys have like any ideas on that or how that how that's You or if you think I just think I'm thinking about the whole thing the wrong way um But I'm like We're launching this like sponsor thing where we're trying to have like companies who use tailwinds sponsor us and in exchange for that You know, it's like okay get your logo on the website whatever like everyone gets but I'm trying to find things that companies actually Value a bit more than that like okay. We'll we'll create like a shared Slack channel So if you guys are running to issues you can just like Get a direct line to us and maybe that's worth something um to people or um We're also trying to do like something for individuals

48:47 That we that doesn't feel like it has to compete with things other people do where it's just like 12 bucks a month and you get a bunch of perks like okay There's like a private discord that's only other people who are serious enough to be paying 12 bucks a month plus the team So you can Tang out there and ask questions or stuff will make Beta documentation for like our pre-release builds available So you don't have to go like scour through PRs to understand how all the new features and stuff work And again, that's like not that appealing to every single person But the people who are like really like excited about the new stuff that are coming out that really want to support the framework Like maybe that's valuable to them the other thing is like um

49:26 We've been like curating our own set of like cursor rules basically as we've been like getting better at using AI to get like I just spit out better quality tailwind stuff. So that's like another thing that we're gonna throw in that people get and Even like stupid things like We made a bunch of like custom vs code themes because we made custom syntax themes for like the docs site to match our design and stuff And turn those into editor themes and people like always ask about that stuff when you post screenshots on Twitter or you post YouTube videos or something and it doesn't like it's not like an inherently super valuable product But it's a fun perk for people who want like an excuse to Throw you a couple bucks a month to support their project. So like that's like

50:09 What we're trying to do now to sort of diversify things a little bit and see what happens there and like I'd be really pumped if we could turn That version of the business into the thing that sustained it because it would just make it so much easier to be like excited about What everyone else in the community is doing But I'm just curious like from an outside perspective like does that strike you as even realistic at all You know or or what you know So I have just like a few observations just from just like using tailwind for a while And then also just observing the overall ecosystem So like I know you all released like first you got like tailwind UI and then you had catalyst, right? Which I think is like

50:47 Yeah, it's like part of it's just like But it's yeah, it's it's just another fucking Folder full of code that's available to people who bought tailwind UI So like from my perspective, it was just like I felt like that just arrived late because it's like after shats you and like blew up Like oh shats on this and then Bees you came out and then they have shats yet and it's basically spitting out like All this sort of that's just radisk components with tailwind And even then it's like a paid thing, you know, so like you already It's already just like well if there's like a free thing that People like and that's out there and like why wouldn't people choose that you know, so just I get it, you know

51:31 Yeah, and like this is something I've thought about just like what would the future tell them and like where or how can you basically what you're asking now And what I've seen like in the past and I didn't it's just different now just because of like AI and the open source ecosystem was These teams effectively became consultants where they embed themselves in an organization for X amount of time Get things up and running. I think like even like the biggest thing that I think people struggle with is like Creating a custom design system for their like overall component land How can they write these configurations that are like scalable for their team to contribute to That's that's been an area that I've seen people struggle with because at the end of the day these tools

52:09 scaffold all these components that are just you know, what using the baseline tailwind classes But like theming that for like multi-tenant apps and all this other stuff is just like in my opinion like I was never really good at it and it was like kind of confusing and yeah Yeah, I feel like that could be like areas of like scalable design systems. You could sell those Um, I don't know. It's it's a really hard problem. Just like I said because the ecosystem like just spinning out Everything I see is like Ellen I'm spinning out tailwind components and they look good And at the end of the day not everyone like especially for all these like founders that are just trying to spin up apps quickly They don't necessarily care about like actually meet their bar, you know what I mean exactly like this is it's

52:52 Yeah, it's better than a lot of like stuff that you'd see 10 years ago Exactly, so that's like there's the ceiling. I think it's way higher, but it still doesn't matter The no matters is that it reaches the bar, you know, I think like the enterprise thing is like a good target that I've seen work for people But again, I'm not trying to tell you how to run your business Yeah, no, but that's what I'm asking, you know like I'm curious I guess like the hesitation for me on that side has always been just like kind of gets back to what we talked about at the very beginning Which is like man?

53:20 I don't want to set things up so that we don't even have time to work on the open source stuff because like we're working on Uh, all the other stuff, you know, it's like how can we Find that right Thing that gives you like How yeah, I don't know. It's what every open source maintainer wants obviously right? It's like I we're creating all this value for the world. How can we How can we get paid to just do that and like make it free for everyone, you know, but it's Yeah, so I don't know. I I think that's a good Yeah, and I appreciate that advice from do you want to go otherwise? I do I do have one But I'm glad to let you go first TJ. No, no you first you first prime you first. Okay. Uh, I'm gonna say something

54:08 But mine's more of I guess probably a look back in time kind of thing or an observation Into the past, which I don't think is any helpfulness Uh, cuz I do not think you could do it today Which is this is more just future advice. I really think that thinking about the licenses in which you distribute open source code is really important Like if you are planning on attempting to make money off of these things Knowing and understanding your market and how you can distribute your code can be really good because I think this is where All these projects and all their failed attempts happen like you see the one with a Valky and Redis and all this and they just are exploding Because Redis is like oh shit. We need to make money

54:46 We're gonna have to like you can no longer make money without us making money, right? And then it's just like oh well too late you've already had this out there And so I do think having like I don't think there's anything wrong with having open source as a Kind of like step into some sort of commercial adventure other than it's gonna be extremely hard Uh, but I think a lot of it just comes down to licenses and expectation because the reality is that if if there was a Place where tailwind you were always like hey, this is what we're doing And this is how we're doing the commercial side of it And like if you're gonna be a commercial vendor if you're gonna create an AI that uses tailwind then you're gonna have to

55:22 You know, you have to have so obviously you couldn't never see the AI thing coming in 2017 So granted that's just like a free pass for you. I watched Terminator 2 man. I knew yeah It's a different. We all thought AI was gonna be robots and said it's co-generation. It's just really It's fucking text areas man. It's text areas Just throw all the way down. I know it's just curl up. No, I thought so what do you think though?

55:44 Do you think like I guess like my reaction to that is like would Redis have even like been popular at all? If it didn't start with that hyper-farmist People are so allergic to any like anything anything that smells a little like less than like I can just do whatever the fuck I want right now. I'll have to worry about like getting in trouble for anything. Yeah, I think there's a huge part like I I really this reminds me like open source today reminds me a lot of skateboarders and the 90s and the 2000s where if you were a part of that you would look at these Skateboarders and any one of them that took like a sponsorship or became commercial you're like Sell out But really like these are people that are out there putting their body on the line getting like 5 grand a year from sponsorships

56:26 And they're ruining their body and unable to compete here in like four years And they didn't want to be a sell out and now it's like you took all your favorite people Shamed them into not being able to have any form of like protected money making Ability so that when they inevitably don't Unable to skateboard anymore that they actually have something at the end of the day And I kind of feel like there's a lot of that with open source stairwell There's this weird hesitancy for you to make money or turn it into something that's commercial And I really think that we have this problem where we're just like we're just hoisting things on top of people to be unsuccessful and to lead the burnout because there's like this huge hesitancy for commercialism in open source

57:04 And I mean I I personally don't have a problem with it. I think if it's done right But as far as yours goes like the problem is is my thinking is so one dimensional always comes down to consulting education and Contributions and I just don't think contributions are a successful way to go I think like you said it just opens up a whole can of worms where you're just like individuals You should give money a you sound like Wikipedia B I think people are generally I've literally thrown around the idea internally at the company of like what if we put a fucking banner on the site once a year that Just I don't know maybe it would work I do have this problem with that like whole thing I do think there is a huge value

57:45 That could be some sort of like differential amount of money that you could pull in It wouldn't probably cover a one and a half million But like some sort of partnership of You know these are all these different education sites But the reality is that a lot of people are just gonna simply like you know One could imagine fireship has a partnership with the creator of tailwind But then he could probably also just have fireship delivers it and people would buy it So it would actually ever need you to be in that partnership And so I think there's like a huge problem there and so you get back to the you should have just been famous idiot lol Right? Yeah, which is just like not a good business plan. I think it's I think it's an extremely difficult problem

58:19 I do really but I I mean the best advice I could give anyone who wanted to start an open source project This is what I would have done differently I did just want to throw in this last thing which is that I do believe that specifically tailwind Is an exceptionally hard problem to solve commercially Because I think you will you will permanently have computers at least in the component slash additional software space Yeah, we've always like tried to figure out is there some service, you know like if you build like a real Framework, you know, that's like a real backbone of an application like there's always the host and play or you know Yeah type of thing like what am I going to do like oh well host your CSS file for you like that's just gonna make your website shittier

59:04 I like yeah, it doesn't make any sense But all that to say too like I think uh, you know We still have like a great business, you know like we're still profitable But I do think we need to Make some tweaks if we want to kind of things like keep moving in the right direction like I'm insanely grateful for like what Opportunities like tailwind is like created for me like the fact that I've even been building the work on a full-time since like 2019 I think um That's like I don't know I couldn't like ask for anything more Awesome than that, you know, I'm like I got a really great life and These are interesting problems to solve, you know keeps me to engaged and it keeps things interesting but Yeah, it would be cool

59:51 It would just be it would be really cool to figure out a way I've always wanted to be able to just focus on The open source as much as possible and avoid Some of the conflict with the community that we kind of have at the current setup. Yeah, so it's interest Yeah, it's yeah, it's good. I've got a few I've got a few ideas that I can throw out there for you You can say remember leave them as you go um This is some general advice to for like open source projects is you got to decide first. Are you gonna be like A VC opens a project or you're gonna be a lifestyle open source project right in the sense that like when you're trying to make money is it like If we made $500,000 this year am I like insanely happy or do we have to find some way to make a hundred million dollars

1:00:36 Because those are like very different models of like how much money you need and the kind of Like services you might need to like reach there because like You can do stuff that doesn't scale to get to 500k If you don't need to then get to 5 million, right? So like okay, we're chill So like eat I think stuff like um if you had Like you could you could try and get like some of these big corporations that are definitely doing it to like sponsor an engineer It's just like literally like a one-to-one Totally. Yeah, yeah Google you will not miss 250k Yeah, right and it's like maybe if they're I don't know if Google even uses tailwind So like going after because you can't you can't do that for a hundred engineers

1:01:19 But you might be able to do it for like four you know, I'm saying we could find four companies maybe where it's like Yo, this guy we pays entire salary from so and so that's that's like actually like a sick Like actually good marketing they actually get something good back from that It's like interesting. So like that's something that doesn't scale But like could work because you actually are like a vital thing of a bunch of companies Like stuff right maybe even like V0 You know is like yeah, we could we pay for one engineer on tailwind because like yeah for sure V0 doesn't exist without tailwind and there's like that's actually like enough return that it could potentially make sense um A different one that I think like where if if you then find ways where the incentives don't depart for like the paid thing versus free

1:02:06 Is nice like if you did something where you're releasing like How I built xyz component like you because people care like about you personally because they like think this the famous thing again You know and then but you like time box the YouTube video at least for like three months later So like people who are on the paid plan are getting that three you know, it's like They're still giving them something where for these like $12 a month people or whatever for like individuals or for like corporate right that they get Like these ideas where it's like yeah, we actually want to know how to build this so that after V0 generates something for us We can like not be lost Yeah, you know, and so I do think there are some like in that field where it's like

1:02:51 Yeah, you could get People to sign up for those for the early release for like getting it released in some format where there's like Comments and participation from you like in the private discord. It's like here's the video. We released it We start a new thread that thread last for a month and then after that we never answer any questions on it There's like additional ones, but then you're still building stuff that like Now at the end of the year you have 12 sick tailwind videos about building stuff that go on YouTube They're three months delayed right but it's like Tailwinds doing better everyone benefits, but like people get paid and there's like yeah Um, that's like education expense people can people can check bots education at corporate and sick

1:03:31 Now it's not for fun sees. It's like we got this Education thing. Okay. Well people have education budget to spend you can put stuff in there So I think there's some like things in those verticals where like I would explore Thinking like it doesn't have to scale necessarily right because you're like we want to stay at probably like eight engineers forever I don't picture you yeah totally yeah, it's just like there's just like a comfortable threshold that we want to be at words like a great living for everybody involved You know, right and that's kind of like the only goal doesn't need to Doesn't need to be scalable beyond that that can be the ceiling and that's fine right Yeah, no, that's good like yeah, I've done like a lot of educational stuff in the past and we're doing we're working on that too

1:04:13 So it's good to hear that you think that's a good idea like I guess like ultimately what I think we need to do is just kind of Get a little bit over here a little bit over here a little bit over here a little bit over here And instead of just like having all our eggs in one basket like we kind of do right now because when The world changes and that basket gets like threatened you end up Having to figure it out, you know, so just be a little less fragile in that sense Another one is a separate issue tracker for paying people is also a classic that I've seen work really lots of cool idea open source stuff One you get better issues anyways Because the five dollars a month is a crazy filter Like yeah, yeah, you filter out a lot of people who don't read you already got to fire a lot of users

1:04:55 So it's better for you you get like real issues right and stuff like that anyways So there I think there's some there's some stuff there too where like we'll fix the issue it goes into open It goes into tail and open source, but it's like do you as an enterprise want to get on The issue tracker that we prioritize because we got to pay the bills like private issue tracker I think can be good too. Yeah, can you tear out a private issue tracker? Can you like add various levels of Haven't seen that in SLA to this And it's possible with the text area I haven't seen anybody do that prime in like Like you could do it with tags in just like a get hub Yeah, like open source thing, but there there are some other things too where like

1:05:42 There's other options too. I think of like a per company issue trackers Like if you have a high enough tier sponsorship where then they don't have to worry about like a leaking Other personal information like publicly. So there is because sometimes it's like Bro, I just want to paste my stack trace for this I literally can't the name is illegal for me to leak outside Right, so there's like some other stuff where if like for a super tier of enterprise right where it's like yo We're gonna give you super tier enterprise you like Tailwind dash, you know VZero dash issues and it's like the super tier one they can copy post again directly So there's a bunch of stuff too and also Well, we could just be honest. It's easier to talk in private than it isn't public and you don't have to be like

1:06:28 I'm making an issue for my corporation. I need to make sure I'm representing them perfectly blah blah blah like for sure There's you're saving literally hours of developer time for some of these two right where it's like so there I think there's some There's some verticals there where like the support still flows back to the main product like the incentives are really nice and even like You know, I don't know if any of these other oh, I know nothing about front end, you know I mean, I don't know if any of these other like open store or like these other tailwind component libraries are making money But like Some of them probably would like to have a straight line back to you guys. Yeah, yeah, right?

1:07:05 So so yes, I know those are just a few that I was sort of uh thinking Yeah, I like the private issue track or one a lot because it kind of takes something that like we sort of been like Talking about with potential sponsors already, which is like, you know, you have like a direct line with us So yeah, you can raise stuff and we'll actually like notice it because yeah, we're gonna read the message and you know that We saw it, but that kind of takes that and turns it into something like a lot more concrete. Yeah, it's kind of cool You can give us straight up SLA too like I've definitely seen that work like well like we will respond to every issue within one week Like it's not going to get fixed or closed, but like we promise you'll get a response within one week is like

1:07:43 Companies pay for SLA's right so that that works totally. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's a great idea Yeah, that's sorry. I uh, that was not my team licensed idea though, so I will be taking it But there is something that I mean I think TJ what you're kind of what you're kind of nailing is that Uh, when you when you sell something from open source if I were to generalize your rule is like you can't sell something that's easily replicable Meaning like, you know, if you build a tailwind UI library even if it's the best It doesn't matter someone else can build at tailwind library. That's for free and maybe better than what's available And so it's like it's such an easy Replicatable item where it's like there is no amount of replication that you can that that can happen to have Adam

1:08:28 You know Adam respond to a Requast right like that isn't that is a singular payable street and no one else can replicate that And there's something to that that is like that's where the real The real dollars are is not in not in something that can be so easily defeated like you know Even v0 is great, but v0 will only live as long as until cursor is v0 And you never need to go back to v0 because cursors now like we have tailwind specific chat agents Boom, it's just like okay. Well, it's just too replicable right like people can just go in and destroy modes pretty quickly to these days And so I just don't look at it as that like that kind of You know, yeah, I think that's the right way to look at it

1:09:06 I think it like it can be perceived as like Bad in a way to almost be like oh, what's the thing that we can do that has like no moat We're no one can compete with us, but it's not because like you want to like be hyper greedy It's like I want to do something that like Something we can uniquely offer so that we don't have to feel like we're in competition with our community, you know Mm-hmm, and that we can like support everything that everybody does, you know the other thing everything everyone does Oh, sorry The other thing is like there are a lot of people who and like people who work at companies who probably want to give you guys money But they like have to have a thing that they can show accounts payable of why it is even if it's literally like

1:09:49 It's an SLA. They're like sweet That's a thing that companies pay for is to have an SLA. Awesome. So like sometimes it is literally so much as like Like the you seen rant of like stuff all these robotics companies with no buy buttons on their websites Right, it's like so you just have to have buy tailwind enterprise and it's the same thing, you know, but like Enterprise is 100% like where you should go. I am though Yeah, I had java somewhere in the stack for just like a very small moment and boom you're already Enterprise up someone's wearing pleated pants and you're ready to go. Yeah. Oh, I mean the other option tailwind coin I saw that You know, we always I play a lot of Fortnite with Taylor out well, okay

1:10:37 It's daily we play I know you guys could do a skin every single day. Well Just can't Taylor we're thinking is can we do like a tailwind battle pass? You know I don't even know what that mean dude you get a loot box With the utility classes you get for this month boys. Yeah, exactly I love this idea of loot boxes. We're like when you open it just ask a tailwind class somewhere on your thing You'd be like dude you got a loot box man. You got a common M2 that sucks man M2 yeah God that's good. I do love I love like a loot box of tailwind classes And there's like a leaderboard of like who's a hundred percent of the most loot boxes in the application There's something so funny about this idea. Yeah

1:11:32 Oh my gosh now I like the branding opportunities like the dumbest open source cells. Oh my goodness Yeah T bucks, you know, can we like have a micro transaction market there we go where You buy a button for 60 T bucks right and right yeah, and sometimes you pull an ultra rare button Yeah I One of a kind like one of one It shows a reflection of my face using my webcam Yeah, that's crazy or maybe you maybe you can start selling exclusive tailwind classes in the framework Like you want this class you got to buy it. It's yours. You're the only one of one of one Exactly tailwind classes. Yeah, man. You start selling tailwind classes. I turn that monopoly like oh you oh Did you just land on the margin? Yeah, I own margins one through four. So you're using me though. You got pay me rent

1:12:44 I put a hotel there. Sorry. Sorry. It's got up in price recently I There's like a separate thing a hilarious video would be like you have a hundred T bucks and like Classes are different prices and we have to replicate. What's the best UI? I can build like That's actually that's actually I think that'll go did that with effectively you have so much bike code you can run per little robot And you have to verse each other to like on a very minimalized amount of things you're running You could have the exact same things like you got a tailwind budget. You got to build a site no CSS only tailwind like that that is it you can do no other things like who can build the best site and only tailwind hundred classes are less

1:13:32 Best site. It's a character limit on a class. Yeah, yeah, I'd be fine A CSS rogue like deck builder that could be pretty good too Yeah, like dude imagine you get five cart yet to build a component you get five cards You're like dude. I got two margins one padding and all do that is actually That is so good There we go. That's a great idea. That's actually you can make dozens of dollars if we just go all in on entertainment You know like maybe that's really the play just be entertainers did just get famous idiot. Yeah All comes back. Have you thought about working five hours a week and paying for the rest of the week so you can do You know what you actually honestly like this is really real real advice

1:14:18 If you just like vibe code a sass startup you'll make 50 grand a month And so if you just buy that then you can sell it for 10 to 15. Yeah, but uh and then boom like you've just paid for tailwind like a huge amount Do just five two sass startups. That's a hundred grand a month Four that's 200 grand like dude. It's pretty easy spend the weekend. I would Personally, I'd rather get one tomato plant because after you grow one tomato plant those grow more tomatoes from the tomatoes You can play more tomato plants before you know it. I have infinite money So have you guys ever thought about like vibe coding a sass app generator?

1:14:59 I don't think I can say anything right Something's in the works That's what that means Well, I'm excited to see what you guys do. I think yeah, thanks. Yeah, cool. So yeah, I hope you guys buy lots of success By the way, I'm very happy that you recognized everything that everybody went through from like 2008 To 2017 and made it into something that we all now use because I think that anyone who programmed the old web I had left so I'd go float Left Clearfix right boom boom boom get this one. Yeah, yeah, I'm small, you know, you know BG blue right and I just had like all these like named classes that were just like mine But they're only for me and nobody else could know them and I'd make all my websites based off like just this like series of words

1:15:52 That I had memorized and so now it's just like hey, this is a series of words that you have memorized But now everybody has the same ones memorized and it just makes life so much better and you know Yeah, no, it's been a hard battle like getting It's to the point now where like there's not It's not controversial really anymore, but for a while there it was uh is pretty controversial so Yeah, I'm glad that it's taken off and then people are into it. It's definitely a solid problem for me. I'm definitely Yeah, I don't know for me. It's like there's this one blog post by Nicholas Gallagher who he's the guy created normalize CSS I don't know if you guys remember that and he worked at Twitter for a long time

1:16:30 I think he might work at Instagram No, I can't remember but he wrote this one blog post called like about HTML semantics and front-end architecture And it was the first thing I ever read that like finally just gave me permission to write classes this sort of way It's just like some smart person says this is Conceptually the right way to do things is that classes actually should be presentational And that's the only way to build scalable websites and I was like oh man now I can do that. I thought that was a crime, you know and Yeah, so Nicholas man Nicholas really created tailwind which he probably Probably lose his sleep over So true All right, well hey I appreciate you coming on especially on such short notice because I literally watched the video

1:17:24 That all of this spawned from on monday and sent you a text message potentially Late at monday being like hey you want to come up on Wednesday and you're just like let's do it Let's do it Right you're launching your sponsors thing today That's why we did it today because I was like I can't go on this podcast and like not have it Done so it's done now. It's on the website if anyone is a tailwind superfan and wants a sponsor You can just go to on css.com slash sponsor check it out Let me know if any of that resonates if it doesn't will we'll keep iterating on it But hopefully some people think there's some cool stuff in there and And want to support i know it a lot of people have told us like I'd like to give you more money

1:18:03 But like you don't give us a way to give you more money You just charge once for this thing and then there's nothing else you have for sale so This gives those people a chance to do it no obligation But you know if you love tailwind and you want my cursor rules that's really the they're pull here Then consider consider signing up for this like insider thing that we're doing But yeah, dude thanks for having me on man. It's been fun I've never got to chat with most of you guys. I'm a prime at Laircon and we enjoyed a nice dinner together, but It's good getting to connect with the rest you and yeah, thanks again Trash is the real winner in this group. So you got to be so excited I was like I want to talk to him

1:18:45 I was really hoping trash. You were just gonna pull out like a random Component and feel like this is not working My virtual cam just check this out man. I like it is killing me. We're just just complained Just real memes like oh so funny good do that Sounds good. Does that actually never happen deep end? Do you ever get people where you like you walk up?

1:19:06 You're at a conference, which I'm like oh yeah, you created tailwind Hey, why doesn't this work? Not not too bad honestly. I've had a little bit of that stuff like that But not in like a hilarious way usually that usually they're like legit questions and we can have good discussions about you know, so Yeah, well, awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us I am going to shut down the stream. Hey stream. Thank you very much for being a part of the stand-up I don't know what episode number we are on. I think we're like in the mornings at this point. So hey I hope you enjoyed this fun conversation. Thanks Adam for joining us talking about the pain of open source and Business adventures and all that kind of stuff. So hey awesome

1:19:49 TJ we all know where to find TJ He streams by the way trash dead if you want to know where to find him at Netflix Probably heard of it and on Twitter and Adam besides for tailwind CSS.com slash sponsors. Where else do people find you? Yeah, I'm on X, you know, is that what we call it? Do we call it X? Yeah, I don't know if you have to say the X weird you have to say the everything application afterwards Yeah, it's X the X the everything applications. I'm on X the everything application at x.com slash Adam Wathen and that's kind of where I habitually waste time so nice to find me there