Revisiting the Tailwind Labs business model

Adam Wathan (0:00)

Good afternoon, Mr. Orenstein.

Ben Orenstein (0:02)

Good afternoon.

Adam Wathan (0:03)

How are you doing today?

Ben Orenstein (0:04)

I'm doing pretty well. How are you?

Adam Wathan (0:07)

Did you participate in any Black Friday Commerce this year?

Ben Orenstein (0:11)

I did not, actually. I bought nothing.

Adam Wathan (0:14)

I bought some stuff from Rogue Fitness. This is how we usually start off our podcasts, I believe.

This would be the fitness equipment update.

Ben Orenstein (0:23)

Yeah, give me an update.

Adam Wathan (0:24)

Nothing that was on sale. I bought things that were full price because I was in a buying mood.

I need to organize my garage a little bit. I like to dumbbells laying on the ground and kettlebells on the ground and stuff like that. So I wanted to put them on a shelf. So I bought their universal storage system with a couple of different shelves. So that'll be here, I don't know, next week, maybe. Then I got to build that thing. And I got like a rack to put my bars on the wall instead of leaning them up in the corner, like some sort of chump.

And I got a little thing to hang, like my weightlifting belt and chains and bands and stuff. So it's gonna be nice and organized in there.

Ben Orenstein (1:02)

Yeah, you've reached the organization phase of your gym setup.

Adam Wathan (1:06)

Yes.

So I'm excited about that. But that is all I did. We did like a little Black Friday deal thing for Tailwind UI, which we kind of do most years, where we just kind of... Yeah, one thing that like, Black Friday stuff is kind of interesting. Well, I don't think we were really planning to talk about this, but I think it's an interesting thing when I have some opinions on that I'll share.

Ben Orenstein (1:28)

Yeah, do it.

Adam Wathan (1:28)

I always get nervous about discounting things on Black Friday, because I don't want to devalue things. I hate training people to wait for a sale. It kind of sucks. If you compare that to what Apple does on Black Friday, they just find some way to reward you for buying then, instead of later, that doesn't necessarily devalue anything. Although, the way that they specifically do it is usually it's like, buy a MacBook, get a $100 gift card to buy more Apple shit or whatever.

So the computer still costs the same thing. Technically, like they're not making as much money, of course, because they are giving you this gift card that is whatever, but it's not like the price went down, which yeah, that kind of makes me nervous. So what we do is this, we do like Tailwind UI and refactoring UI, you can get them together as a bundle for like a discounted price. And then throughout the rest of the year, we just don't even sell the bundle.

And that's been like, yeah, a good way to do it for us. We had like a pretty solid week, did like an extra 250 grand or something compared to what we'd normally do for the month or something, I don't know. That was the number I'm trying to think like, what scale, I mean, it must have been for just the week, really, but we ran it from Monday to Monday, just wrapped that up and sales are back to like what they were before the sale, which is always the fear, is that they're just gonna like go to zero.

But I think that's like one of the nicest things about having like a product that has like a real distribution channel that's not like, when I was just doing courses and stuff, it was like only people who sort of knew me and were like paying attention to me sort of knew about it. They weren't like really SEO focused discovery channels or anything, but with Tailwind CSS, it's like people find it from the docs, you know? So there's plenty of people who visited the docs today that didn't look at it last week and had no idea that there was any sort of like promotion going on. So, you know, it's not like there's a big banner there that says you just missed this and you should have bought last week, sorry, you know? So anyways, that's a relief that things are back to normal.

Ben Orenstein (3:37)

Yeah, did you email a list?

Adam Wathan (3:38)

We did. Yeah, we have like 200,000 people on our ConvertKit account and we segmented that down to just people who haven't bought Tailwind UI or refactoring UI, so have bought nothing, that's like 40,000 people or something.