Brian Casel: [00:00:00] Hey, you're listening to Open Threads. It's my podcast. I'm Brian Casel. Welcome to it. Today, I've got my buddy Adam Wathan back on the show today to continue our conversation about, open source software, but in his case, managing an insanely popular open source piece of software, plus, uh, several, premium products built on top of it. Of course, with his project called TailwindCSS. I'm a longtime fan, daily user of it in my projects.

But in this conversation, we got into, you know, surprisingly, or unsurprisingly, the, the stress that Adam has felt, you know, dealing with the rapid growth in popularity of this project and his customer base and just trying to keep up with it. You know, we got really into, his need to grow the team, you know, matched with [00:01:00] some reluctance to grow the team naturally.

So, you know, there's a lot of really good stuff here. I think when you, when you know, someone like Adam, or you see it from the outside, it might seem like it's just all roses and a success story, a rocket ship, if you will, you know, but there's a lot more to it behind the scenes. You know, a lot of ups and downs. And so we really got into it.

It was a really honest, open conversation. I appreciate Adam for, for coming on and sharing, uh, you know, what's been going on. So just for reference, we actually recorded this back in, I think it was February of 2022. So it's been a couple months.

Um, but yeah, it was a really good conversation. Here we go. here is my chat with Adam. Enjoy.

So Adam, yeah, I mean, you know, we've been talking about how you've been maintaining the TailwindCSS project how it's become such a massively popular open source project. You said in the last segment we did, it got up to like number 69 on the open source projects and GitHub in the world. [00:02:00] Like that's pretty incredible.

But what you were saying there was we were talking about how the popularity can become. It can start to like overrun a project. We're talking about these other projects out there with like 1200 or so, like open issues. And we want to get into here, like how you can actually build and maintain, you have built a really successful business with revenue and employees and incredible profitability and everything with, I guess you'd call it like talent labs now.

Right. I'd like to get into how do you maintain the focus as a business and being able to keep your priorities. Straight without getting too overrun with the issues. So why don't we start here? What does your team look like today? So we're recording this here in early 2022. You're several years into working on Tailwind here.

So what is your team today?

Adam Wathan: So we're eight people right now. So it started with me and Steve who are founders. And we actually started this business when we started working on the refactoring UI book. So that company is what became Tailwind Labs when we worked on the Tailwind UI product. And all the Tailwind stuff has sort of become [00:03:00] focused since then.

So it started as Steve and I. As the founders with me, technical and strategy and role, and Steve doing the design stuff and us collaborating a lot on marketing and product strategy and stuff. Then we released Tale in July and I think February, 2020, we built the initial version of that just ourselves.

And it was really successful and just became a lot of overwhelmed with just. How much activity there was, there's a discord. Well, the customers are always asking questions. People are requesting new components. There's maintaining Tailwind that needs to happen still there's whatever. And it just quickly felt, man, we are going to be burned to the ground if we don't find some help.

So that's when we started building out a team at this point. Now We're eight people. So there's Steve and I there's Jonathan who actually helped create Tailwind with me in the early days and actually finally joined us back in August. And he sort of has a role of. I'm trying to figure out the right order to explain some of this stuff in, because there's a bit of a story to it.

But Jonathan was sort of brought on to help me and Steve [00:04:00] find the space to do the things that we are excited about doing, because we were just spending so much time running the operations of the business and managing the team and planning out projects and all that stuff, and we just didn't have time to do the things.

That made the business successful in the first place, like spending a week coming up with a good idea for a Twitter refactoring UI tip or something. We just didn't have that space to just be like left alone and be creative and work on things because. We had a team to run, so we brought Jonathan on to really help take some of that stuff off our shoulders.

So he's sort of acting in like a COO type of role, even though that feels odd to me at an 8 person company to have C level titles. I've not been able to think of a better, a better title for it, but very much like. Running the day to day operations of the business, making sure everyone on the team has what they need and helping people get unstuck just for being responsible for knowing everything that's going on and knowing the big picture where everyone on the [00:05:00] team focusing on their own projects doesn't always have that just.

High level view of everything to be able to know when it makes sense to pause on something, because there's something else that's come up, that's a higher priority. So he's working with the team and paying attention to all the different inputs into the business to know when, like, there's a bad bug, we need to pause what we're doing and fix this or, or whatever.

Brian Casel: I think like thinking back to your early success with talent and selling products online. I mean, as you said, a lot of that success came from just being out there publicly sharing your ideas and new concepts and different approaches to building things on the web. And you've been very popular on YouTube and tweets and things like that.

Just sharing knowledge. But I guess it's like visible in the last two or three years where it's just like, it's clear, like your projects and business and products have grown to a point where it seems to have crowded out all of that fun work in public stuff.

Adam Wathan: Yeah, for sure. Definitely. And it took me a while to really realize how much that had [00:06:00] happened compared to how active I was before doing live streams and doing.

Prototyping a new idea just because I had a thought and wanted to hack on something for a couple of days. I think I didn't pay enough attention to that and to let that take over things. And it was starting to make me unhappy. Just finding myself really burnt out and not feeling like I had done anything fun in a long time.

And it's a tough topic because I love everyone that we work with and I love working with the team and helping them be successful on the things that they're Working on and they're all doing incredible work for the company. And I think the quality of the stuff that we do and the amount of stuff that we do, of course, is more better than it's ever been.

But at the same time, like I want space to be able to do the stuff that I was doing before that helped get us to this point. So that's been a really deliberate change in the last few months. That's already paid off a lot. I've been deliberately taking like a pretty serious break for. This whole year so far, since we got back from [00:07:00] Christmas, I helped put a plan in place for some of the next stuff that we're working on and then deliberately stepped back to recharge and wait for something to get me excited that I could work on and have the space to do that.

While Jonathan is in the deep end, trying to ramp up on being able to do my responsibilities and, and that's been going really well for sure.

Brian Casel: And it seems like you grew from just you and Steve up to the, the group of eight. Now, like all that growth just happened in like the last, what, like year or two, two years.

I struggle with this a lot too, especially now my SAS business now is really very different operationally than audience ops was. I just kept hiring people to run the same process over and over again. But this one is like, we're building stuff and we're maintaining stuff. And we're solving new problems for customers all the time.

And so I struggle with this. To where I go to founder friends and mastermind groups and retreats and stuff with founders. And I talk about the struggles in my operation of my business. So often [00:08:00] the answer that comes back is like, all right, well, you just need to hire for that. You have to delegate that off of your plate.

The easy, quick answer is just hire someone so that you don't have to do that anymore. But it's so much harder and more complicated than that. Especially when a. Fundamentally, a creative business where, like you said in the last thing, we have a certain vision for how things should be designed not to say other people can't bring their talents and ideas to the table.

They should, but the process of going from not 0 to 1, but like 1 to 2 or 2 to 3, 2 to 4 is such a hard jump to make to keep the same level of. Ideas flowing.

Adam Wathan: Yeah, I agree. Big time. I think a point I've talked about friends in the past, and maybe this resonates with you and maybe I have this totally wrong, but I'm curious to hear your take on it is I do see there being like two camps in terms of you go to microconf, for example, and I feel like there's two types of founders at microconf there's like the people who are just love the idea of building.

A business and figuring out a way to grow it and make money and [00:09:00] get financial outcome and the actual quality of the product and stuff only matters so far as it helps them achieve the goal of like making the business successful. And then there's like the group of people who are usually not as good at the business stuff.

That just love making things and the drive for them is just making things as good as they can possibly be. And if they're not going to make something that even they're inspired by when they look at it, it's not worth doing. There's no joy in it for them without that craftsmanship. And I'm definitely in that camp.

So for me. It is hard to build like an organization with a lot of different people working on things because if things slip or the quality is bare minimum for the company to be successful, I'm just not going to have any interest in the company anymore. That would have been easier years ago when I still was looking for that business success, but at this [00:10:00] point, I literally don't need to make another dollar for the rest of my life.

And the only reason to do what I do is because I want to make really good things and I want it to be fun. So when you're trying to add people, it's hard.

Brian Casel: I completely resonate with what you're talking about with like the two camps. And I would put myself in that second, like creative camp. And I think the misunderstanding that might come across here is that it's not like the folks who want to stay small and create.

Things that they have a high level of integrity. It's not like they don't want to grow a business and they don't want to make money. Of course, we want to make money. Of course, we want to be successful and sustainable and have a great life for our families and all that. I love the analogy you mentioned a long time ago.

I think we were talking, or maybe I heard you on a podcast or something. You were saying it's like forming a band, like a rock band, you know, like that idea of coming together with a small crew.

Adam Wathan: Yeah, it resonates so hard with me because I don't want to create like an assembly line, you know what I mean? I think I'm learning more and more over time [00:11:00] that it's super important to have systems and stuff in place at Companies to make sure everything's running smoothly and stuff like that But ultimately I don't care about trying to grow this like really complex Organization with all these people doing specific jobs really well I want to be able to come to like a virtual space with people that are really awesome, that inspire me and do interesting, creative things with them, just like being in a band.

And another part of that whole analogy that I've used in the past too, is we've talked about how like code and stuff is art for a lot of people. And the dream of course, is that you can build the things that you're excited about building the way that you want to build them and that enough people out there are willing to give you money for that, that you can keep doing that.

I think there's two. Types of companies in that sense, I see companies like Stripe that I feel like are extremely research driven, like they are always out there talking to customers, taking notes, figuring out what people need and trying to give people exactly what they need. And I think that's a really good way, of course, to build a really great business that [00:12:00] solves a lot of real problems for people.

But in my mind, that's also a lot like. If you were a band and after every concert, you were like out there with a notepad being like, so what song did you like the best? Oh, you like the slower songs better. So we should write more slower songs. Like, fuck that. I want to write the songs that I'm excited about and I just hope enough people buy tickets because they like that music.

So I feel that way. For sure. Yeah. I don't know. That resonates with me a lot.

Brian Casel: I think that they're like a middle ground that we should highlight here where it's like, I find a lot of the creative energy in finding the problem and then coming up with my best solution that I want to see exist to that problem.

Not letting the customers dictate how they want the problem designed.

Adam Wathan: And maybe someone does give you an idea. Maybe you do talk to customers and they say, Oh man, like we so awesome if we could do this. And that's great because a lot of time you hear that and you're like, dude, that is a fucking good idea.

And you get excited about it too. But to me, that's a little bit different than, okay, I'm trying to [00:13:00] build this tool that does this specific thing. And I'm just going to use the most rigid process I can to make sure I extract the right information and build the right solution. I have to be excited about the things I'm building.

I have to believe in the. Solution and the experience that I'm giving people something that you mentioned to even the people who are building products because they love the creative experience of it, wanting to build businesses and make money. I think of course is true for me, at least though, it's because I want to be able to keep doing that and I don't want to spend my time doing other things, not because I have ambitions to build another company, the size of some telecom company or whatever, a quote that I like share a lot.

When people ask me about quotes that resonate with me is this Walt Disney quote, which is, we don't make movies to make money. We make money to make movies. And that's just like, perfect to me. It's a little bit purist, maybe.

Brian Casel: No, you're right on. And I think in my entire career here, especially recently, I've been so [00:14:00] tuned in to just the nature of the work, right?

Not just that I want to create and build cool shit, but also I need to really be. Enjoying the process of what I'm working on every day. A lot of times it's like to a fault where like, I can't stop working. I'll, I'll work on a Saturday or Sunday because it's like, I really like hacking on this product that I'm working on, like, I'll get the question a lot.

I recently sold my productized service business and a couple of other businesses, and I often get the question of like, well, that worked for you. Why don't you just build another productized service business? Because you can 10x the size because you've proven that you're good at doing that. Yeah, I could, but I did that for the last seven years and I'm not interested in doing that every day.

It's just not something that

Adam Wathan: would make more money, so why don't you do that? This is a guaranteed success. It's like, that's not the point. What's the point of like doing something that you don't derive innate joy from 40 years and then Being able to go play basketball when you're 70 and your body doesn't [00:15:00] work anymore.

Brian Casel: Totally. And I think it also speaks to the question that I think a lot of people come to when they're working on a project or a product usually for several years. And it's just not getting over the hump that are getting to the growth level that you want it to, or it's really successful and you just start to lose interest.

But process kit for me, just recently, I sold that business. After three years, it was like, yeah, working and there, I could see certain strategies that that could be used, like adding a consulting piece and all this other stuff to it to grow and be successful with that business. But I was looking at that trajectory is I don't want to spend five more years hacking on this, if that's what that looks like to run it day to day.

Like that's not what I'm going for. So better to sort of cut your losses. I wanted to ask you about. In growing this team with Tailwind Labs and your different products, obviously it's a very technical set of products, right? So do you find that that brings another layer of challenges when it comes to, like you were talking about Jonathan, your guy who's really running the operations, that person has to be a really technical.

Person and [00:16:00] interested in running the team and doing their role on the team. Can you speak to that a bit?

Adam Wathan: Yeah. And it's a challenge. Jonathan is doing awesome in that role and he's super technical. I helped him put together his course on database performance in Laravel a couple of years ago. That's the sort of stuff that he was doing.

And he has his own SaaS app that he built from scratch runs by himself that has customers, but it just. doesn't have the real growth potential to make sense for it to be his focus. So he wanted to come work here on the stuff that we're doing. And for him, like all the management stuff, that is what he's learning that on the job.

Like that's a new skill and it's yet to be seen if like he's gonna really enjoy that for sure long term, you know, who knows? Maybe we haven't solved that problem yet, but I agree. Like you do need really technical people doing this stuff. At a company like this, somebody really understands the products and the problems that our customers are solving and stuff and can be hard to, to find people who can do that.

[00:17:00] I'm super grateful that we have anything in place to try and tackle that. Not at all. And I don't know.

Brian Casel: The nice thing in your case is you have this audience of technical people and thousands of users who could turn into potential.

Adam Wathan: Yeah, I do think like. We have a huge advantage in hiring compared to a lot of other companies.

And even still, I feel like it's very hard to discover people that I really know I would want working here. So I can't imagine how hard it must be when you're an unknown entity. We've only done like one public job posting for out of all the people that we've hired and we had 900 people apply. And at the end of the day.

Only a very small handful of those people, like three or four people really felt like they could have worked out here.

Brian Casel: I feel like a lot of that must come down to like, what kind of stuff have they done and have they published, have they put out there to the world? Right. Like, like you were talking about this in the previous segment about doing open source and how open source software is the sound cloud for developers, right?

Like you put your work out there. [00:18:00] I love talking to young freelancers about this idea of like, look, you don't have to just charge for every hour of work that you do. It's okay. And you should just create things for free, put them out there to the world. You won't make money from them, but you're putting yourself out there by creating products or things out there.

And that's what gets the attention of awesome companies. That's the best way to evaluate someone. Sure. You can like review their code, but you're going to get 900 applicants who want you to review their code. The ones who rise to the top are the ones who have something notable.

Adam Wathan: Yeah. I think I talked about this once on like an episode of full stack rate with Ben Orenstein, we were talking about the inside baseball of what it's like hiring as a small company.

For the benefit of people who want to work at companies like this. And I feel like until your company is a hundred person plus company, where you can afford to have really strong processes for hiring and finding people, otherwise put themselves out there at our [00:19:00] size, there's so many times where. I feel the need to hire someone, but like the idea of running all the whole hiring marathon to find someone and interview tons of people and go through resumes and stuff is, is fuck this.

I would just rather suffer and keep doing this. So the only time, not the only time, but like the way that we tend to hire people is. People that we already know and trust and that we're missing out for sure on lots of people otherwise just wouldn't discover. But again, like all I'm trying to do is optimize this whole operation for my own lifestyle and just be happy and spend the time doing the things that I want to do.

So naturally, the people that you are already exposed to that are already putting themselves out there that are already helping out fixing bugs for free in the open source stuff. Those are the people that get noticed and. It's tough because in some ways, like, I personally feel guilty about looking for people in those pools, because of course, there's people who just don't [00:20:00] have the time to do that stuff.

You're working a full time job and you have young kids, like, you're not hacking on open source stuff in the evening. But at the same time as a business owner, There's so much risk in hiring someone and it's so scary to hire someone because you don't know if it's going to work out or if it's not going to work out and if you hire someone and it turns out that they aren't the right fit, it's awful because like you're constantly just blaming yourself like I didn't do enough work to really validate that this person is going to succeed here and now I'm fucking Throwing a huge wrench into this person's life if we have to let them go, and it's just awful.

So you want to know that anyone that you're bringing on, that it's going to work out. You want to de risk it as much as humanly possible. And anyone who's done a bunch of free open source work for you has de risked that a lot more than someone who can't. And as much as you want to ignore that, it's hard to, because you're a human being with fears too.

Brian Casel: For sure. With these types of. Businesses where [00:21:00] again, it's a creative business. The thing that that Tailwind Labs does is it creates products anything that a potential employee can do to demonstrate their ability to create without you directing them to go create exactly this, but for them to come to the table with ideas of like, here, look at this thing I created.

Just to demonstrate my abilities. I mean, that got to go a long way.

Adam Wathan: Yeah. I mean, it's super important. One thing I always look for is does this person just have ideas that I agree with without being prompted because it just showcases a natural alignment in taste and goals, which is obviously going to work out a lot better because.

You don't have these conflicting ideas for how to solve problems as much.

Brian Casel: Getting back to again, like the size and the lifestyle. I mean, I hate that term of like lifestyle business, because I tend to think of my business as a lifestyle business, but I work 40 hours a week on it because I like those hours and that's my life.

Adam Wathan: Yeah. It's a good 40 hours. Yeah.

Brian Casel: So. Where are you at today?

[00:22:00] I mean, you mentioned like this year started to take a break, take a step back. You elevated Jonathan into this role to give you some space, which sounds like a really tremendous move. How are you thinking now about where this is headed over the next year? A couple of years. In terms of your role in the product and everything.

Adam Wathan: Yeah, it's a good question. A couple things, like one thing is just that towards the end of last year, I really felt like I was in a bit of a crisis in terms of I don't have the life that I want. And that seems absurd because why don't I, there's no reason for me not to have it other than choosing to do the wrong things or something.

And before that, it's easy to look at like, okay, well. I just got to get this business up to making X per month or whatever. And now like I have what I need to be able to get what I want, but financially I've exceeded any financial goals that I actually have ever had. So it's a scary situation to be in and feel like, okay, I have everything that I thought I needed for me to have the life that I want, but I don't.

So shit, I need to [00:23:00] figure that out. So immediately my focus just became. The only thing that matters is that I'm enjoying how I'm spending my time every day. And I need to figure out how to get things back to that point. It doesn't matter if the business never grows from this point. It doesn't matter if the business over time starts to make less money.

It doesn't matter if we shut down the business tomorrow because I don't need any of that. I just need to enjoy what I'm doing on this planet. So that became a very singular focus for me. And that's when I really started investing in. Getting things in place with Jonathan to help out and figure out how to carve that space out again for me to be able to do the things that I like doing.

And I'm only like now just starting to get a bit of that energy back to explore things like new, exciting, ambitious things in the business. There's two elements really to our business that I think is important that's easy to not prioritize is recognizing that at this point, our tools are very popular, used by a lot of [00:24:00] people and depended on by a lot of people.

And for many, many people, more than feature complete, there's just nothing that they need. Urgently for Tailwind to do that it doesn't already do and all they care about is that the experience is good that the tool is maintained that it's reliable that there's no performance problems that it continues to work when a new version of Node.

js comes out or that it's compatible with whatever new JavaScript framework comes out that they want to try somewhat boring just like make the tool as bulletproof as possible. Problems. It's easy to not invest in that. I think it's easy to always be like building new shiny things and sometimes that can be to your detriment.

You can make the tool too complicated or the tool just goes unmaintained in areas that are important to people like the performance slowly starts to get worse because you're adding new features without focusing on keeping the performance great or building some new fun thing When you would have been much better [00:25:00] served, like writing a bunch of new guides for the documentation that really helped a lot of people who are learning the tool or whatever, a lot of more just like boring, strengthen the base, make the base of the business wider instead of building tall and like shaky.

Brian Casel: I often like get bogged down with like optimization tasks, optimizing the code base, optimizing the marketing. Like there's always gaps. And it's always much more fun to just build some new thing than go back and tweak and get 10 percent performance improvement here or there.

Adam Wathan: And I think that became like really obvious to me when I started realizing that we had built some things that were slowing us down.

Like one concrete example is for Tailwinds UI. We launched like a Figma version of it for people who wanted to prototype with those components in Figma. And everyone had been asking us for it, right? Everyone wanted it, wanted it, wanted it. And then as soon as we released it, We started working on the next Tailwind UI update, we designed all the components, we built them all.

And then we kind of realized, like, right at the last minute, like, shit, we gotta do the fucking Figma versions of all these things, because [00:26:00] it wasn't like a byproduct of our workload. The way that Steve and James on the team design, they're not building these, like, UI kit. Level Figma designs with like well named layers and well, it's just like canvas that they're painting on and giving it to us to build and refine and code.

So it was a lot of extra work. So we deprecate that because it was just slowing us down too much. And that was like a reality check for me realizing that this is something I need to think about with every new thing we ever build. Is this going to slow us down in the future? And now. I really try to focus on building things that are going to help us move faster in the future.

So whether that's investing in ways to reduce the amount of GitHub issues that get opened by creating more documentation or creating more educational content or creating more saved replies or whatever, like a project I want to take on soon, for example, is creating like a company wide shared reply. I know like Raycast has like a teams feature coming out soon where you're going to be able to share snippets with your team and I'm like [00:27:00] excited for that because I can just curate like here's all the responses to all the common things that come up on GitHub and now no one has to spend any brainpower writing these because no one wants to just like I don't want to that's an example of something we can work on that helps us move faster long term instead of slower.

So looking for opportunities to do that, and then also just trying to, aside from that, of course, we want to keep improving things, but we're trying to make sure that we're improving the things that people actually want improved. I think with Tailwind UI, at the end of the day, if we could only give people one thing, it would just be more.

Beautifully designed examples to draw inspiration from and use as starting points for their projects. And it's really easy for us to let like three months go by where we don't do a Tailwind UI update because there's so many things that we could be working on. And we have to be careful to not forget like how important that is.

Brian Casel: Yeah. And not to mention like Tailwind itself.

Adam Wathan: Yeah. It's a huge amount of work just to maintain Tailwind.

Brian Casel: Yeah. And then [00:28:00] just to come out with like new versions of it. I can't imagine.

Adam Wathan: Yeah. Like I've heard to do like Tailwind three was extraordinary. Like we did the whole new website and all that stuff, which wasn't really necessary per se, but history has taught me that the Tailwind releases actually grow our business more than anything.

Like when we released tailwind, we saw, I think it was about like a 30 or 40%, just like. Permanent lift in the floor for like what our monthly sales were for the paid product, because there's just a tool is more exciting and popular. And that's our funnel for everything Tailwind three, like the same thing.

It's raised the floor again for what, like the stuff, the growth, just how well the company is doing.

Brian Casel: It's pretty incredible. I wanted to like wrap up this segment with that question about growth, right? Because you mentioned how you've already far beyond like surpassed your expectations on growth or your goals financially.

I know you value like a small team. I mean, how are you thinking about growth? Is that even a lever that you're even interested in pushing over the next few years? I mean, like you're saying it [00:29:00] will naturally grow.

Adam Wathan: Maybe. I don't know. I hope it doesn't drop drastically, but our business is like one time sales products, right?

So there's no, like churn isn't a thing. Right.

Brian Casel: But I think what you're saying is like, as long as the top of your funnel keeps growing, which it will in, I guess, until another,

Adam Wathan: Until like some new, like new hotness shows up for sure.

Brian Casel: Yeah, but I feel like Tailwind has, I wonder what you think about this, but I feel like it has crossed the tipping point where it's just like a unique take on CSS development, where it could just be the circles that we're in, but like the majority of developers that I run into use Tailwind versus not use Tailwind.

It's a more widely accepted tool now.

Adam Wathan: Yeah, I still think like Bootstrap is more popular in terms of it's being used by more people on more projects, but I think Tailwind is winning. And not to be winning in like a competitive sense, like I've always tried to make it clear that I think that Bootstrap is an incredible project.

It's one of my biggest [00:30:00] inspirations and I've learned so much from the people who work on that and I like to consider those, those guys friends of mine. But just as an example of like where I see Tailwind right now, it does feel like in the circles that I care about, that Tailwind is like the default choice for project.

I think everyone who I think could benefit from using Tailwind or. And is building the type of sites that Tailwind is good for at least knows that that it exists for those problems and I don't know how much exposure is really available. I feel like we are pretty exposed, which is cool, but I don't know what that means in terms of like where there is to go from there.

Brian Casel: Well, if you just think about the ocean that you're playing, and I mean, it's, it's not niche, it's the ocean of web developers in there. And every single day, there are new people entering the web development industry. You've got like agency land where you're doing websites for clients. You've got software development land, you've got bootstrapped, you've got VC, you've got like hobby projects, you got everything in between.

And [00:31:00] all of those are web developers.

Adam Wathan: And that's what we're betting on, right? That Yeah, there's new web developers being born every day. And the velocity at which new web developers are being minted is, continues to increase. There's going to be more new developers this year than there were last year. So that's good for us.

Brian Casel: I guess my question though about growth is like, even with all the natural growth and web developers entering the industry, like there are things you and Talon labs could be investing in, like just launching a whole new line of educational. Programs and communities and really fostering the growth of the Tailwind ecosystem.

Maybe like a marketplace of like add on products. I guess you guys already have that. You know what I mean? Other big companies will launch like an app store or launch a whole ecosystem around their thing. It doesn't seem like that is a priority for you. And it's almost, it could be like a benefit for the overall quality of the products and the quality of life for you and your team.

Adam Wathan: Yeah, I guess for me, it's like people come suggest [00:32:00] ideas like that to me all the time. And the answer is always just like, well, why would we do that? If the answer is because you'll make more money, it's like not what we're optimizing for. Is it going to be more fun and we make the same money or maybe more money?

Then we'll do it. Is it going to free up more time for me to practice guitar? Then yeah, I'll do it. But more money is not a goal at all. So it's tough in that sense. The funny thing is, man, when you hit like product market fit on anything, the natural gravity of like the universe is pulling you towards growth.

Like there's just lots of things you could do and more opportunities and more partnerships, and it's just a magnet. And in my mind, I picture it as like this giant magnet that's like pulling in all the fucking nails and screws from like behind your workbench, like stuff that I don't want. And that's how it feels.

So if you're not careful, you can find yourself building a business that's maybe bigger than you actually care for it to be. And getting back to that whole [00:33:00] band analogy, I think like Slipknot is probably about as big as I want this bench to get nine people or something.

Brian Casel: But they're a worldwide, well known group in the world.

It's not like they're just playing in a garage, right? Like they still achieve massive growth without having to get huge on a day to day operational level.

Adam Wathan: Yeah. I think we could do a lot with a little, and I honestly think that we probably want to do More things than our customers even want us to do when I try and flip the tables around a lot of times I do see companies that are just doing so many things that I'm like Why don't you just like focus on like the one thing that people actually want from you people?

And I'm always trying to reverse the lens there on ourselves too and make sure that I'm not falling into the trap of doing things That isn't what people actually Want from us anyways, unless of course I just, that's what I want to do, but there's a lot of things that I don't even really want to do that sound like good ideas that actually people maybe wouldn't really care that much about.

Like people are always suggesting we build like a WYSIWYG [00:34:00] Tailwind website builder, and it's like, I could see a world where like we try to become like a web flow level company, you know, but that doesn't sound. And I don't know, I guess there's definitely things we want to do. Our biggest thing that we need to focus on rather than growth is really just warding off the company shrinking, because just because of the nature of the fact that it's like a one time sales product, we do have to keep doing new and interesting things to sell the product to new people.

Eventually like TailwindUI is going to look. Like it's a 10 year old design kind of aesthetic. So one day we're going to need to do a revamp and be like, how do we make this look like on trend again? That's just naturally going to happen.

Brian Casel: Or you just develop new products that overtake it.

Adam Wathan: Right. Yeah, totally.

Brian Casel: Much different scale, but like Apple started as a computer company, but now they're a phone company.

There could be something else that still sustains the business product wise that doesn't have to feel like, oh, we have to come out with a [00:35:00] fall 2022 edition of the templates and talent. Do I.

Adam Wathan: Yeah, and I think I'm, I'm comfortable just, like, waiting for those ideas to, like, fall in my lap at this point. I think in the past, I used to get a lot more anxious about not planning for five or six steps ahead and not being able to, like, see the future.

I think now I've just gotten more comfortable with, you Recognizing that best ideas, they come to you, you don't like go looking for them. Anytime I found myself like sitting down with a notepad trying to like brainstorm SASS ideas, I know that's a dark place to be in for me. Like the best ideas for tools just like come to you because you're facing a problem that that could solve right now.

When you start sitting down trying to like force stuff, you're better off just like Building something else and using that a way to get exposed to more higher potential problems. I think I wrote like a tweet. A couple of years ago that saw Hill actually quoted in his minimalist entrepreneur book, which was something like, if you're trying to come up with [00:36:00] like an idea for something to build, start a business, literally any business, doesn't matter if the business is a good idea or a bad idea, you will very quickly be overwhelmed by the amount of things that you think you could do better than like the tools that you're having to use and pay for that have like Validated markets, an example that always comes to mind for me.

And like, if we were going to build a SaaS app, I think we would build something in like the hiring space because the tools that we used for that just like we're okay, but I think we could build something super beautiful and modern with like a really great user experience and compete almost entirely on design and get a ton of attention combined with like our existing audience size and stuff.

Brian Casel: I've always had this idea or I've always noticed with new ideas and things that I create and put out there, the best ideas come really, really fast. Like the idea hits you, you create it and put it out there because it's like, I can't even keep up. It's just flowing off the page.

Adam Wathan: Like it's like the best songs get written like in 10 minutes.

Brian Casel: Like the best songs that I ever felt [00:37:00] I wrote, like I can't write it fast enough because they just came out in five minutes.

Adam Wathan: Yeah, exactly. Like you've grown it in the amount of time it takes to listen to it. The best product names, you know, the first one you come up with the best logo is the first one you draw.

Brian Casel: Yeah. And the one that you try it a hundred times and it's just not coming out, you're forcing it.

Adam Wathan: Maybe you get a B plus version eventually in those situations. Right. But like the real home runs are the ones that just like they're begging to exist.

Brian Casel: Yeah. I remember one other, I think this was a tweet you put out maybe last year and we'll wrap this up soon, but it was something along the lines, like, you know what, you won't really know what a market is going to react to until you just put out your ideas.

Like, you still have to come up with something that inspires you internally to create and put out there and put a lot of that stuff out there. And then you'll start to see, like, which things are people actually reacting to in some negative or positive way. And usually both are a good sign that you're onto something.

And that would, you know, rang true for me as well.

Adam Wathan: I was just going to say a good example of that is Tailwind itself. Like I never set out to make a CSS framework. I was live streaming, [00:38:00] building a SaaS app. And I thought people would watch because they wanted to learn about like test room development or how to do like cool stuff with Vue js or whatever. But every single question was what CSS framework is this? What CSS framework is this? And it was just CSS I'd written myself, but people were just fascinated with how quickly and productively I was able to style these UIs. And I never thought once that that was going to be. A thing that anyone cared about.

I didn't even think about that as being an interesting element of it at all. And now that's like my life's work, a business that employs eight people.

Brian Casel: Well, it's an incredible story, man. It's been awesome to get to know you these past few years and just watch you build and create amazing things. And like I said, I personally get so much value literally every single day out of using talent and I know a lot of other people listening to this do as well.

So yeah, thanks so much. I hope you don't lose interest in it anytime soon.

Adam Wathan: Yeah, for sure. Really appreciate it.