Adam Wathan: A $61,392 First Week Let Him Quit — The OSS Stays Free, the Books and Courses Do $600K a Year

The structure where the thing you give away free sells the thing you charge for is well known. Very few people have run it as long as Adam Wathan has.

Tailwind CSS, which he created, has been open source and free since 2017. His income, meanwhile, comes from the technical books and online courses that surround it, plus a paid UI component library. The framework itself has never been behind a paywall.

The starting point was 2016. His first technical book for PHP developers, Refactoring to Collections, took $61,392 in its opening week. In an Indie Hackers AMA he says that number is what made him quit his job.

The disclosed timeline

Every figure comes from his own year-in-review posts and the AMA. One thing worth flagging: the book that produced the $61,392 opening week in 2016 is not the same book as 2018’s Refactoring UI. The first is about collection handling in PHP; the second is a design guide for engineers, co-written with designer Steve Schoger.

Why free OSS and paid books coexist

The sharpest thing about this business is that what he sells and what he gives away are different layers of the same problem.

Tailwind CSS changes how you write CSS, and it can only spread by being free, charge for a framework and adoption stops. But the developer who adopts Tailwind immediately hits the next question: how do I arrange this so it actually looks good? That is a knowledge problem, not a tooling problem, and Refactoring UI sits there. One step further, “building this from scratch every time is tedious”, and the paid Tailwind UI arrives.

So every time the free tool solves a problem, the problem one level up becomes a market for a paid product. That is why he doesn’t need to buy traffic. The 2020 review contains no discussion of ad spend for customer acquisition. Distribution comes from OSS users and from the audience built over years of writing, podcasting and posting.

Set against a Japanese OSS author supported purely by sponsorships, the contrast is stark. Donations and sponsorships are capped by the total supply of goodwill. Wathan sells not to “people grateful for the OSS” but to “people working with the OSS.” Swapping the motive for payment from gratitude to necessity is what changes the order of magnitude.

What didn’t work

Listing only wins obscures the shape, so here is what he names as failures.

In the AMA he writes that the only real failure he actually launched was a service called Nitpick CI. Beyond that, a resume app, a link-sharing social network and a checkout/sales-tax tool never got finished or shipped at all. Someone who looks undefeated in books and courses has missed repeatedly on the software side, which matters when you’re assessing how reproducible any of this is.

His 2019 review is equally blunt. Financially it was the best year the business had ever had, but he lists as a disappointment that he “didn’t introduce a single new income stream this year.” Existing products kept selling, as a business it stood still.

Then in 2020 he stopped taking podcast sponsorships (roughly $50,000 a year) because the headache of managing sponsors wasn’t worth it. Walking away from $50,000 of reliable annual income on operational-cost grounds is only possible when the other revenue is an order of magnitude larger. You cannot do it in the other sequence.

How the team changed

2020 is also a story about people. The year began with just Wathan and Schoger and ended with four full-time team members. Brad Cornes joined in June and led Headless UI development. Robin (development) and Simon (community and education) joined mid-year. David, an accessibility specialist, came on in late September. By the September 2022 AMA the team was seven.

The same 2020 review notes that a partnership negotiation fizzled out when the terms couldn’t be made appealing to everyone involved. So while headcount grew, no outside capital or alliance was concluded. Seven people, still bootstrapped.

As a neighboring market, a business built on paid UI component collections sits on the same stratum: the spread of a free CSS framework created a market for finished pieces to lay on top of it.

The $61,392 week came in 2016, before Tailwind spread

The sequence cannot be run backwards. Tailwind CSS only spread from 2017 onward, but the $61,392 week happened in 2016. The first capital came not from OSS fame but from readers built through writing and podcasting beforehand. The order is: build an audience → sell a book → secure living costs → go full-time on OSS. He says explicitly that going all-in on Tailwind CSS in January 2019 was possible because info-product sales covered his living.

Price and audience also fit each other. The buyers are developers who book books and courses as a professional investment. Aim the same design at general consumers and these price points do not clear. As a record of eight misses and three hits in paid courses shows, the hit rate is largely determined by subject and audience.

Every figure here is a snapshot at the moment of disclosure: $600,000 for Refactoring UI is the 2020 year alone, and “seven figures per year” for Tailwind UI is a 2022 statement. Recent numbers have not been published. “Mid-seven figures” for the business overall is a range, and it refers to revenue, not profit. What the margin looks like after seven salaries is unknown.

What remains on the record is one thing: the free tool has never been monetized, and the layers around it have been selling for a decade. As long as OSS monetization is framed as a binary between charging for the core and asking for donations, this answer doesn’t appear.