Episode 825 | Talking Tailwind CSS and Founder Fitness (with Adam Wathan)

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You're listening to another episode

of startups for the rest of us.

I'm your host, Rob Walling.

And in this episode, I welcome Adam Weathern,

co-founder of Tailwind CSS to the show.

And in this show, we actually talk about

two very disparate topics,

because I'd originally invited Adam on

to talk about founder fitness or just staying fit as a founder.

This isn't about lifting a bunch of weights

and spending two hours in the gym every day.

It's actually about how to do it as quickly as possible

and staying in half-ass decent shape

as you're running an all-encompassing company

that takes all your energy, time, and focus.

And I invited him on, and then in the meantime,

he has posted about how they had

to do pretty dramatic layoffs at Tailwind.

And so in this episode today,

we dive into those two topics.

First, an update on Tailwind Labs

and how they're doing as a company

and everything that went down there.

And then we switch it up and head into founder fitness.

Before we dive into my conversation with Adam,

Microconfig Europe tickets are on sale.

This year, Microconfig Europe is in Rekivek, Iceland

at the stunning Harpa concert hall.

It dates our September 21st through the 23rd of 2026.

We've already announced our first couple speakers,

but I would guess we will sell out long before

we announce all the speakers.

Two speakers in addition to myself include Agnes,

Gianna Sonne, of Agelix, and Corey Haynes

of Conversion Factory.

You can head to microconfigEurope.com

to grab your ticket.

Tickets will never be less expensive than they are today.

And as you know, ticket prices go up every month or two,

and we've sold out every event

for the past several years.

So if you want to come hang out with me

and I don't know about 150, 175 of your favorite

bootstrapped founder friends,

you should head to microconfigEurope.com.

And with that, let's dive into my conversation with Adam.

Adam Lavin, thanks for joining me on the show.

Thanks for having me, sir.

How's it going?

It's going really well, man.

I can't believe, is this the first time

you've been a starter for so much?

Yeah, I've never been on this show before.

Ah, that's an oversight on my part.

You've spoken at microconfig, we've hung out,

we've had dinner, we've had drinks,

and talked email for years,

but I just sometimes it's enough.

Yeah, no, I'm excited to be on,

because I've been listening to the show since a long time

before we ever met, or I got to speak at microconfig,

or even a 10 microconfig.

So it's definitely awesome to be on.

And there's a kind of coincidental timing,

because producer Ron had told me,

hey, we should do an episode about founders and fitness,

because there was a tiny seed slack thread

that kind of went wild, people talking about getting in shape,

and not just about lifting weights,

you can get that anywhere, right, or fitness,

but it's like, as a founder, usually with a family,

how do you do this?

And so I went on X and said,

who should I invite on to talk about this,

and several people mentioned you.

So I went to invite you around the holidays,

and then within a few days, you had that podcast episode

where you're like, we laid off 75% of our engineering care

or whatever, and I'm like, oh my gosh.

So it's brutal, it's usually the worst day of a founder's journey

when that happens.

And I feel like I wanna talk about both, basically,

like it would be an oversight, not to talk about your experience.

And then I wanna hear it update, too,

because there was such a kind of a public outreach,

and that podcast episode is called Adam's Morning Walk,

and I think it's episode three or four.

That basically went viral,

and I think Jason Fried was commenting on it,

and it just blew up, and there was this whole people

wanting to sponsor, and people in slack groups I'm in

were like, I'm buying, I don't even use tailwind,

and I'm gonna buy a license right now.

So it was like a real...

Yeah, it was crazy.

So we'll get to that point,

but take us back to,

because when I think of tailwind CSS and tailwind labs,

which is, I think, your company around the open source project,

last I heard publicly, you're doing millions a year in revenue.

It's not recurring, but it is one-time purchases, right?

Yeah.

And you had a small team of six, seven, eight people,

so something like that?

Yeah, we're eight people kind of at our biggest, yeah.

And so plenty of budget to handle people,

but then you described this slide in revenue

that you've seen over the past.

What is it 12 to 18 months?

You want to talk people through what happened?

Yeah, like two years.

Yeah, I guess so, I mean,

I don't know how far back we go,

but basically, you know, tailwind,

obviously the really popular project,

it's kind of become sort of a de facto standard

it feels like for building new front-ends for websites.

You know, we sort of hit a peak, I would say, in revenue

at the beginning of 2023.

So this is kind of like right before ChatsyBT,

first like came on the scene,

people started getting excited about AI.

And also just like right at sort of the peak of tailwinds,

I guess you would say growth,

like it sort of feels like it sort of saturated

the developer market at this point.

Like if everyone's heard of it at this point,

whereas kind of back then,

people were still like coming into it

and switching to it from other things.

So right around that time is like when we were sort of doing

the best, and I think there was a bunch of factors there.

Like again, like our business model was like one-time sales.

So the more new people are finding out about it,

like the better for us versus just like the market saturation

sort of point.

There also wasn't as many people building like competing products

which never lasts forever,

but that's like a nice spot to be in,

especially not as much like free open source competition.

And yeah, the AI stuff hadn't really happened yet.

And then, I mean, we were doing like really, really well

at the beginning of 2023.

Like we've always tried to pay people like more than they'd

probably get somewhere else, you know?

That's something I've taken a lot of pride in is

no one ever asked for a raise at this company ever

and everyone got them multiple times.

Yeah, so we were doing really well then,

and then things like started to sort of slow down

gradually over time.

But the way I described it on the podcast

is it really felt like a sort of boiling the frog scenario

because it was just happening so gradually

that in my mind like every month just kind of felt like,

oh, we sort of hit the bottom, you know what I mean?

Like yeah, we had like this really booming period,

but it's like dropped off and we've sort of hit like a stable floor.

And it sounds like sort of silly to say that

and even just like talk about me sort of like

possibly making assumptions about that.

But I think probably like a lot of founders can empathize

with just like, you're not primarily like a CRO

at the company or a CFO or whatever, right?

Like it's not like I'm spending all day everyday

analyzing spreadsheets and doing forecasts.

I'm like working on the product, trying to figure out

what would she do next, whatever.

As long as like you can pay the bills

and it feels like there's money left over in the bank account

at the end of the day, it just,

I didn't analyze it that deeply, you know?

And eventually towards the end of last year I decided,

you know what, like I should really just like make sure

that my assumptions about things being like stable are correct.

And when I actually like plotted out the trend,

I realized that, you know, revenue was dropping

like pretty consistently by say like 15 grand a month

and it kind of dawned on me that like,

I'm not really gonna feel this until like we cross

that threshold where it's like dropped enough

to be like a real problem.

It feels like a very black and white thing, you know?

It's like everything's fine and then all of a sudden,

you know how enough money to pay people.

And I realized if like they're trying to continue

to like we weren't gonna be able to make payroll

within about like six or seven months.

Yeah, so that's when it kind of became sort of

a bit of an emergency and I realized, okay,

so like what are my options here?

I can either keep trying to sort of like turn things

around and get back to the point where we can still

afford the team that we have,

which obviously that's what everybody wants.

That's what I wanted regardless of what I did,

but ultimately decided like no matter how hard I try

to do that, that's what I've been trying to do

for the last two years and none of the things

that we've tried have really like fixed it

and turned us back into sort of growth mode.

No matter how hard I try to do it,

I can't, I don't actually have control over it, you know what I mean?

All I can do is try to affect it as much as possible.

So it kind of felt irresponsible to me to just not try

to make changes that sort of planned for the worst case scenario

because the last thing I wanted to do was not be able

to turn around and then one day just have to tell everyone,

hey guys, sorry, we can't afford to keep everyone around

and we don't have enough money in the bank

to kind of provide you like with a solid severance

for transitioning to the next thing.

Like I wouldn't be able to live myself doing that

because I just know how stressful that would be for people.

So instead just made the decision, okay, well,

let's cut the expenses now

while we can still give everyone a really healthy severance

and make it not like a stressful situation for them

and help them find like their next thing

and then figure out how to turn it around from there

and in terms of like what I sort of thought happened,

like it sort of blew up because it was like a GitHub issue

where someone was trying to add support

for like markdown LLM endpoints to our docs

and I had sort of like not prioritized it

because I was busy trying to like make the business work

and one day someone just posted like a sort of root

entitled comment and it just saying like,

when is someone gonna look at this?

It's been this many months or whatever

and that was like the same day that I'd laid everyone off

and it just was like the perfect storm of like,

okay, like this has just gotten under my skin.

So I just eventually, so I just replied to it

and just sort of explained like, listen,

like this feature that you wanna add

is going to just make it make less people come to our website

and traffic is already down by like 40%,

which means revenue is down by a lot

because our website is the distribution for our product

and me like spending time working on this

feels like it's in like conflict with our own business model

and right now I'm already in this situation

where we just had to lay all these people off

so how can I justify spending this time on that, right?

Yeah, so that's what ended up blowing up

into the big news story.

It was like, okay, tell them alive,

just lay it off a bunch of people because of AI.

Which I don't think is necessarily the whole story

but I do think is like a big part of the story

and what we've been trying to figure out ever since then

is how can we sort of swim downstream instead of upstream

because AI has basically been our competition ever

since it showed up and I don't really want it to be that way

because I'm a huge, I'm a huge excited about it

and I use it every day and it's like changed the way

that I work and so it's really just sort of like,

man, it sucks to feel like this technology

that I'm personally excited about is in competition

with our business and surely there's got to be some way

to like reimagine what we do to sort of work

in this new world and that's kind of what we're kind

of working on now but yeah, when I put that podcast out

it really, I don't even know why I put it out.

Like I've been doing this podcast

where I just sort of candidly talk about what problems

I'm working on once a week or something like that

and I don't think I had tons of listeners at the time

because it wasn't really intended to be that.

It was really just like, what's on my mind?

I'm walking the dog, he's in like a little

battery powered lav mic, you know what I mean?

It's not a highly produced thing

but that ended up really blowing up

and tons of companies kind of came out of the woodwork

to sort of sponsor the project

which we'd been having trouble sort of finding sponsors

for the project before then

and yeah, like honestly really changed

the direction of our business financially.

Now there's enough coming in from just company's sponsorships

to cover our expenses without us even worrying

about the products so that was nice

but yeah, it was really just a crazy unexpected

sort of whirlwind.

You know, it makes me think of like the whole

just luck surface area thing.

You know, you just like, you talk about things,

you put yourself out there and like things can happen

but yeah, there was no strategic goal

when I've released that podcast.

I was just venting about something, you know?

But yeah, so anyways, whatever.

I'm all over the place with this story here

but that kind of gets us to today.

No, this is good, you recap it.

Yeah, I was gonna joke that in your morning walk podcast

I love your fully working how you insert fake footstep noises

and fake leaves rustling in the background

because I know you're in some studio.

You have a lot of fake neighbors in there.

Exactly, it's great.

You gotta AI go work it for you.

I mean, there's a few things I wanna touch on

and you know, we're also gonna talk about fitness

and how you've like really reworked your body

and you know, in the latter half of the podcast.

But there's a couple things that I'm wondering

and I've heard you talk about them over the years

that I'm wondering if you and I could

Monday morning quarterback them and say like,

if three years ago you had tried this,

do you think as the founder or as the co-founder,

I guess, and most knowledgeable person on this,

do you think this would have changed things or not?

And there's a couple things.

One is recurring revenue.

Yeah, no, let's talk about it.

Yeah, I heard you talk about it on your podcast

because someone wrote in to start up to the rest of us

and said Adam Wathen was talking about this

and Hackers Incorporated, I think, was your show?

Yeah, yeah.

And you were talking about how it wouldn't work

being recurring and then Ruben and I,

here answer the question of like,

here's how we might think about it.

We have like two or three ideas.

Oh really, I should send it to you.

It's probably like a year old now, maybe more.

And all that said, when you posted the episode

about how you had to lay people off,

there were some private Slack groups I mean,

where founders were like,

oh, I wish she just started just subscription

because I would pay yearly an annual fee for it, right?

And I'm not, look, I'm not saying that three people

saying this in Slack groups means you should have

or anything, but of course,

I'm the recurring revenue guy.

Like I believe I've done one-time sale businesses.

I've had them and I remember how swingy they were,

because in the 2008 financial crisis,

I lost 90% of my revenue from one month to the next

and I was like,

it's because it's not recurring.

And I think you've commented that like,

you're down maybe 70% from peak revenue.

And so the thought I have,

and I know it's dicey because you have, it's tricky

because you have a developer component

and should you charge,

because what is it like three or four hundred dollars

one time?

Is that about what it is?

Yeah.

Could you charge that?

The question is, could you charge that every year

or would you charge four hundred up front

and then charge a hundred dollars

or two hundred dollars a year as a maintenance fee,

something like that?

Do you feel like looking back two, four, five years,

do you wish you'd done that?

Or do you, I guess what are your thoughts on it?

Yeah, that's a good question.

I honestly don't think so.

There's some things that I maybe would have done differently.

I think we probably could have done subscriptions

for team licenses from day one,

which would have honestly probably been enough

to make like a pretty substantial difference

because I just don't think businesses are as sensitive

to like the one time versus subscription thing,

especially if it was just like an annual thing

as maybe individuals.

And I think there's more justification for it too

because you have different people joining the company

and leaving the company

and you want to keep maintaining access

for those people, whatever.

But sort of like the strategy for us

when we picked the one time pricing model

was really thinking about how like value is delivered

in the shape of the product at the time.

It's a bunch of website templates and components

and stuff like that.

And you could subscribe and download everything

and then cancel and have everything

and then come back six months later,

subscribe for one month again

and download anything new and then leave, you know.

And that just felt like it's not the same

as like a SaaS product

where you're coming in there and using it every single day.

I think like an annual subscription could have maybe worked

but I also still believe that like our conversion rate

was a lot higher because there wasn't that like

subscription friction.

And a big part of our mentality for it too

was like, I don't know how long tail

it's going to be popular for to have all this developer tool

and goes in cycles.

It really feels like capitalize on the moment

and basically just like sack away as much profit as we can

as a company in case one day this like all goes away.

And maybe that decision like contributed to that outcome

in some ways but also at the same time

like I did get what I wanted out of it.

I've never like made it a secret that like the business has

done really, really, really, really well for the founders

while paying people like extremely well and creating a

I think of really fun and relaxed

and interesting place to work for the people that work here.

But at the same time like, okay, even if I've put away

enough money that it feels like I basically got an exit

out of this business in a lot of ways.

That doesn't mean that once the cash flow

and expense balance is like out of whack, you know,

we still have to make changes at the company which sucks

because it doesn't make sense to like, you know,

personally like subsidize a business

that's like not working on its own of course.

And I think that's like a topic that I think

like the general public hasn't run a business.

I think maybe does have a little bit of a hard time

empathizing with but any business owners I've talked to

of course like understand that.

You know, like you wouldn't invest your own money

into a business that's not working

which is basically what you'd be doing then.

And then you're also stringing people along

like keeping them in a job at a company that isn't working.

You know what I mean?

Like they should be taking different opportunities

than doing something else anyways, you know.

I guess I believe that we would have had to figure

out a way to make it feel more like a subscription product

to really justify a subscription.

And maybe that's like what we should have focused on.

And I'll say like the next thing that we're working on,

you know, we are planning for it to be a subscription revenue.

You'll be happy to hear.

But yeah, I don't know.

I guess I guess I just feel like if we went back in time

and made a subscription for everyone from the beginning,

I still have those same concerns about really high churn.

Like the sort of churn that people have

on like subscription education products, you know,

which I think is a historically really challenging thing.

I also just think like we would have just made

less total in revenue along the way.

And if we found ourselves in this current environment

where like people are still choosing to use AI

to like generate UI stuff instead of paying for a product,

they would have canceled anyways, you know.

So obviously I can't go back in A, B test it, you know what I mean?

But I guess my point is I don't really look back

with regret as if like we made a mistake

because like obviously it sucks to lay people off

and be in this like situation where revenue is dropping.

Like when I really zoom out, I still feel like it's still

been a really great outcome for me

and I'm still like really grateful for how things have played out,

you know, so I don't know.

But I'd be really curious to hear like what you think for sure.

Well, and there's two things.

You said it's a great outcome for you.

I actually would argue it's been a pretty good outcome

for your team.

Even those that got laid off were paid,

I believe above market salaries and they,

and you gave them generous severance.

And yes, it sucks to be laid off,

but you took care of those folks.

Yeah.

So, but yeah, let me weigh on on the subscription.

I think an annual subscription would have worked.

That's my gut.

Is it, yeah, and that it would have given you,

well, here's what it would have done.

You're right.

You would have had probably less of the boom, boom years,

you know, when you were making loads of money,

but I think it would have been more stable.

It would have grown, grown, grown, grown, grown,

and then maybe if anything, it would have plateaued.

And it's just recurring revenue is so, especially annual,

it slides so much slower, you know, than any type of one time.

So do you think we should have just done like the same,

kind of get your foot in the door price

and then either recur at that same price annually

or maybe like a lower amount to sort of...

Somewhere in there, I probably gut feel would have been like,

look, if it's $3.99 upfront,

you get updates and stuff as long as you pay the $3.99 every year.

You can use it in perpetuity,

but you don't get what updates or support.

I mean, that's usually what comes with an open source project.

And then every year, everyone gets to evaluate.

And you're right, I do think your turn would be higher

than like enterprise SaaS or Salesforce,

but I think it would have been significantly low.

It's monthly would have been a disaster.

I don't think you would have done monthly.

Yeah, monthly, I don't think would have worked.

I guess in my head, I had a picture that is like,

well, if the lifetime is this,

then annual has to be less than that.

And you're kind of saying, not the case, you know?

I would be super curious to see.

And even if you were to do a $3.99 upfront,

and then it's $1.99 a year, it's still something,

but I don't know why you wouldn't just do $3.99.

You know, that's probably where I would have leaned.

But the other thing is,

and I want to ask your opinion on this

because I don't know the business well enough,

is one thing I see working,

there's only a couple tiny seed companies

that are dev components.

I mean, maybe it's two or four,

like it's very small.

They're also seeing impact by AI,

being heavily impacted by it, by the way,

because people aren't thinking about a component anymore

when AI can just go right all the code as you're seeing.

But one of the ways that they make quite a bit of money

is they do have their developer two to $400 thing,

but then they have their mid-market,

five or 10 grand thing a year, that's for it.

We'll call it enterprise.

Usually enterprises more like 35K and up,

and maybe you could have that too,

but even just a five or 10,000 dollar package

that is, it's for teams,

but it's also when they want more support,

and they want, there's stuff you throw in, right?

That enterprises care about.

And the turn on those, I think,

would have been very, very low.

It would be my gut.

Yeah, yeah.

Once you got in the door there,

like those contracts,

they collect dust in some folder.

They do for a year or so.

And if you had to go through procurement,

then you make it 35K and up.

I mean, that's kind of a rule of thumb.

But I'm wondering, aside from just not wanting to do that,

because enterprise is not fun, right?

And may I hire a mid-market?

Aside from that reason?

Well, honestly, we're doing quite a bit of that now

with like the partner program.

That's what I was going to say.

Yeah, I was wondering if you wished you'd done that earlier,

if you think that would have worked,

because that was always something I thought, man,

I think these orgs would pay a lot more than 300 a month.

Yeah, we probably should have, honestly.

I think I took like an irrational amount of pride

in trying to build like an open source thing

that was sustained on like real profits

from making a real product that like delivered actual value.

And I hated the idea of feeling like

we were making it work like on donations.

You know, I wanted it to feel like the market

was making it work, which I think

might have changed my opinion on that a little bit

in the sense that I think we are providing real value

to the companies that are part of our partner program.

Yeah, I don't think people tend to just like

give people money for nothing.

You know, if they're choosing to give you money

for what you're offering, then they're seeing value in it.

You know, whether that's like the exposure

that they're getting from the website

or just having a more direct connection with our team

to kind of like skip the line

when they have like bug reports and stuff like that.

And wanting it to exist, man.

I mean, there are companies I've worked at

where when we would implement a technology sidekick,

for example, when we were like,

we can only give him Mike Perham, who runs it, right?

We can only give him $1,000 per sidekick instance.

Like I was like, I actively want to support this more

because we had so much infrastructure built on sidekick.

I think there's that, I want this to exist.

I don't want it to be abandoned.

You know, like the Twitter puts out a UI framework

and we were using it at Drip

and guess what, two years later, nobody's maintaining it, right?

And so I think there's more value.

To me, it was never a donation.

It's A, we do get priority support.

And I remember that being important for us

because we had some downtime

or some glitches on a Saturday.

Yeah, I mean, like for a product like Drip,

like your Q's.

Incredibly important.

That is like some of the most critical infrastructure

for the whole product, right?

So.

And so for you, I think if there's a company,

I mean, if there are companies that want to pay 10 grand

or 35 grand or whatever,

the number is that's significantly more than 400.

I don't see it as a donation, man.

I see it as them.

And it's not just like, who let's support this project?

It's like, no, this product is critical

because it's in our application

and thousands, if not tens of thousands of lines of code

and we want it to exist.

So that's more of what I was thinking.

Yeah, and a lot of people see that, which is good.

It's like an insurance policy, you know, which I think.

Yeah, so I mean, I'm glad to like we ultimately did that.

That's like worked out really well,

especially with that podcast that came out

to just create this perfect storm

where we had magazines writing articles

about the impact of AI on our business

and other businesses now kind of wanting

to be on the good side of that PR

and sponsoring us and stuff.

So yeah, that really was a welcome surprise, of course.

Just having all that stuff set up

to even be able to take advantage of that moment.

So really grateful that that worked out the way it did, for sure.

That's great to hear.

It's kind of a happy ending for now.

Yeah, yeah.

And we've got like stuff that we're excited about now.

Like we're now we're working on,

we kind of pre-announced this like UI.sh is the product

that we're trying to build now, which is the idea is to basically

augment the AI tooling that people already use

to be able to produce better front end code, better design,

sort of take all of what we've learned

building stuff over the years

and sort of teach the robots how to do that

so that you can get some of those benefits

in the stuff that you're doing.

And I mean, it seems like an obvious thing for us to work on.

And it seems more obvious than ever now

that I've been working on it for a while.

I'm feel like I'm making it work and know how to make it work.

But the AI stuff really is such like a black box

full of so much trial and error

that until you feel like you have the secret pass phrase

to get it to do exactly what you want,

sometimes it feels like how am I supposed to make this thing

even do what I want.

But I think we're going to be all right, for sure.

Glad to hear it.

Well, let's wrap up that thread and move on to Founder Fitness.

Thanks for talking us through that, man.

I know it's hard, it can be hard.

Yeah, I think to talk about stuff that isn't working

or hasn't worked, and I appreciate your openness

and honesty both before this and on the show.

It's good to have places to talk about it, honestly,

and have the opportunity to talk to people

with times of experience like yourself

that can help with ideas.

I think suffering and silence is the wrong play

when you're in these situations.

So you need that outside perspective, you know?

So.

Yeah, I'm really glad it turned around.

That was definitely rooting for you.

There were a lot of replies to your Twitter threads,

and I was in there.

I was like, man, I think you're hope people through.

So, well, let's switch it up and talk about Founders

and Fitness, and I had a total right turn.

Yeah, this is so much easier

to talk about.

Realistically, the reason you came across my radar,

I think it's because you talked about it

on your podcast, hackers, incorporated,

former podcast, I don't know that you do it anymore,

but you talked about it, you lost 70 pounds,

you got to about 12% body fat,

and you still benched 315?

Dude, that's, it's a lot of weight.

I can still bench 315, but I'm not a 12% body fat.

Yeah, which is fine, we're not holding you to that.

But the idea is that you are a co-founder of a business,

you care about a lot, you work on it hard,

you have a family or a dad, and most of us are like,

how can we fit this in, right?

And you've talked about having really short workouts,

and this is the thing I want to start with,

because I'm most interested in this,

because I've recently, I don't like working out,

but I like being in shape.

That's just how I'm worked.

Some people really enjoy working out too,

and I envy them, that's not me.

So, I've recently dropped from like three sets

of whatever I'm doing, two sets with higher weights,

to failure, whatever.

It's stuff that I've heard on the internet

and my 15 year old tells me to do,

and so I'm trying to cut it down.

I've been getting it to it down to about 12,

I'm sorry, about 20 minutes.

And it's twice a week for me, man,

of three is big victory, but twice a week is like plenty.

I'm six foot two, and I'm pretty slender.

It's not like I need to work out all the time.

But you've won up to me.

You didn't just six minute abs, you seven minute abs to me,

because you have 15 minute workout sessions.

Yeah, so I'm actually not training that way right now,

but I can talk about a lot of different stuff.

So stop me whenever.

But I'll explain sort of what I was doing there.

So when I was like, I really made this commitment

to sort of like shed a bunch of weight,

because I was very overweight,

and I think like anyone who's ever been overweight,

once a week they have that day,

where it's like, man, I'm gonna turn this around,

I'm gonna like get in shape, whatever.

And for me, how I like got that process started

at the time that really made it happen was,

I knew like, I need to find some way to basically

like be spending money on this.

So I'm taking it seriously.

Like I know like what a lot of people do,

like a lot of people who have a hard time going to the gym,

like signing up for like classes at the gym,

or like group classes,

because it goes in your calendar,

and it's not just like something

that you're gonna make time for,

like, oh, I think Tuesday afternoon,

I like I'm gonna go to the gym

and get in an hour or whatever.

It's like, it's on your calendar like a dentist deployment,

and for a lot of people, like that's enough

to like get them to kind of go, right?

And I wanted sort of the same thing

for sort of just like eating healthier

and controlling my portions better and all this stuff,

because ultimately that's like what,

the losing weight comes down to you.

It's hard to just exercise that way.

A lot of that is changing bad habits

and bad relationship, you have food and stuff.

So I found this service called My Body Tutor,

where it was like a couple hundred bucks a month,

and you worked with a coach who would basically,

you do a phone call once a week,

but they would also like text you every single day,

and you had to fill out like a vlog at the end of the day

and send it to them, but like here's a picture

of every meal I had today,

a bunch of like really interesting questions,

like how well did you sleep?

There's like gratitude journaling in there.

There's a lot of stuff that's just like all kind of comes together

to sort of get you into like a more positive, healthy mindset

and helps you sort of maintain these habits.

And for me, it was just like, okay,

if I need to like send pictures of like what I'm eating

to someone who I don't know every single day,

and I'm spending like a couple hundred bucks a month on it,

my hope is that that's gonna be enough

to like get my ass in gear,

and it worked really well for me in that sense,

because it's really hard to send a picture

of like a blizzard from Dairy Queen

to some like really in shape fitness coach,

you know that you're working with,

and not feel like an idiot.

So that was sort of like the first step for me

that really helped me sort of like get into that habit,

and once you sort of have that chain going,

it's a lot easier to be like, okay,

well, I've eaten like well,

and it's stuck to my like calorie budget for the last two weeks.

So I want to throw that away today, you know,

it's like that Jerry Seinfeld don't break the chain thing,

you know, so that's like the summary of really like

what worked well for me there,

and of course there's like a lot of different strategies

so you can actually implement to do better

like with your eating like things like eat super, super slow,

take a drink of water between like every bite,

don't do anything while you're eating.

Make eating as boring as possible,

so you don't, so you want to be done with it

and get back to what you were doing.

If you're sitting there like eating lunch

and like browsing your phone,

it's way easier to like eat more

because you're sort of entertained,

but if it's like, no, it's just me in this plate,

and I just want this to be over with

because I want to get back to those interesting projects

I was working on, you know, yeah,

you tend to not eat as much,

but when it comes to the workouts,

historically I've done like a lot of heavy weight training

because I used to compete in powerlifting,

and I kind of got into that

because through a bunch of different attempts

at getting into like working out,

I think like most people like get into working out

because they want to look better,

you know, I think that's generally why people do it,

and it takes a lot of time to see visual improvements there,

so it can be hard to sort of stay motivated to stick with it,

but then I sort of got into strength training

over just like working out to look better,

and now you're like keeping track every day

of like, okay, I did this many reps,

I lifted this much weight,

and you can actually see improvements there,

like day to day, a week to week,

and that's actually really motivating

because you can see, okay, well, I benched 185 for 10 reps

last week, and this week I got it for 11,

you know, it's like, yeah, this is awesome,

I'm making progress, you sort of get addicted to it,

because like that feedback cycle is so much shorter

versus like taking pictures every day,

and like hoping that you start to look like you've put

on some muscle or something,

because I could take months and months and years,

and years really, right?

I just really got into that,

and like I'm sort of an extreme person

of like most things that I do,

and sort of like the extreme version of going to the gym,

doing strength training is like competing in powerlifting,

and trying to like lift more than everybody else,

and lift as heavy as you can,

so I kind of got into that,

but that form of training like didn't really work well

when I was trying to cut down a bunch of weight,

because no matter what,

unless like you've never been to the gym,

if you're trying to lose weight,

like you're gonna get weaker in the gym,

because your body doesn't have as much fuel

as it did before,

and your body isn't this perfectly efficient machine

that can burn only fat and not lose

like any lean body mass or any muscle or anything.

So if I was going trying to squat heavy and bench heavy,

and whatever at the gym,

like my numbers were gonna go down,

and I worried that that was gonna sort of like hurt

my excitement and motivation.

So I wanted to restructure my workouts

into something that felt like getting lighter

and losing fat was going to like make my performance

at those workouts better.

So I started doing these like weighted vest circuits,

and it's something I picked up from this guy, Jim Wendler,

who's like a,

anyone who's like been in a powerlifting

when though who this guy is,

but he's just like a really long time well-known

like strength coach guy,

and I've read his stuff for years,

and he talked about doing this stuff,

and basically I just threw on like a 20 pound weighted vest,

and I would do like three to five rounds of a circuit

where I was doing like some planks,

which I incorporated,

because I've had a lot of back injuries over the years,

and I found that kind of really fixed that for me,

and then like weighted pushups or weighted dips

with the weight vest,

and then just body weight squats with the weight vest,

or maybe holding a kettlebell or something like that,

and then like chin ups if you can do them,

which I know not everyone can,

especially with the weighted vest,

but I would do like say 15 squats with like a kettlebell

plus the weight vest, 10 pushups,

and then like five chin ups,

and I would do three to five rounds of that,

and the nice thing was like,

as you get like lighter,

all those movements get easier,

which means you can sort of complete it in a faster time.

So I was like tracking the time

that was taking me to do this,

and it was maybe taking me like 15 to 17 minutes

to do five rounds,

and eventually got that down to like eight or nine minutes

to get through five rounds,

and I would just go for a walk with the dog in the morning

for like 30 minutes with the weight vest on,

and then just go straight to the garage to the gym after

and do that workout,

and I would do that like five days a week.

And I felt like, honestly,

I felt better than I've ever felt in my life

like doing those workouts,

and it's not as heavy,

and I don't think you're gonna build as much muscle

as you're gonna build doing like heavy squats

and stuff like that,

but you can make it harder for yourself

just by just like trying to increase the velocity,

for example, that you're doing a push up,

like if you push yourself up,

like kind of at like a comfortable pace

versus like try to really throw yourself up as hard as you can,

you can make like a set of 10 push ups,

like way harder, you know what I mean?

And you can increase it to up to 10 rounds or something,

if you really wanted to,

but I found like for me the sweet spot was like three to five,

depending on how much time I had that day,

and maybe on the last round,

I would do like more reps of each exercise

and just really try to get like a pump or something, you know?

It was really awesome,

and I felt like it really improved my cardio too,

without having to do like kind of more traditional boring cardio,

like I find it boring anyways.

So yeah, that really worked well for me

because it worked with the weight loss goal that I had,

it kept the workouts nice and short,

and they're not like super intense workouts

that you get super sore from,

so you can kind of do it every single day,

which is good for kind of building that habit,

same with like the eating.

It's so simple and it just,

it worked really well for me.

What I like about it is it beat,

it crashes the, I don't have time piece,

because that's always for me is I don't have time

to do this for an hour or whatever.

We have dumbbells up in the,

we have a rooftop deck and there's an area there

where we have dumbbells,

and the three of us who live here now,

because we have a 15 year old and Sherry and I,

we share them and so I don't have a weighted vest,

but I do similar circuit workouts that are just,

and I'm breathing heavy,

and again, by the time I get to about 20 minutes,

I'm usually like, man, I'm so done with this,

and I always feel guilty about that,

because I used to look when I was in high school

in college, I was an athlete, I ran track, played football,

and I mean, I've worked out two straight hours,

like four days, four or five days a week,

alternating legs and everything,

and I'm just, there's just no chance I'm gonna do that,

and so I always feel like a failure.

So it kinda made me feel a little better of like,

because I'm fine with my results, you know what I mean?

Like, I feel, again, I don't like working out,

but I like being in shape just because I like feeling that.

So I find it really fascinating,

because I haven't heard anyone else talk about,

I mean, you're talking about doing an eight to 12 minute workout,

and that's pretty amazing.

Yeah, I do think like the 80-20 on that stuff is a lot,

you can get a lot more results in a lot less time

than I think people think they need,

and that type of workout, too, you just,

you don't need to go to gym to do that,

you don't need like any equipment,

except for like chin-ups or something, you know,

but you can find some, I mean,

you can get a doorway chin-up bar that you can put,

like over the trim and throw like a resistance band around it

or something, if you're not strong enough to do a chin-up

to make it a little bit easier,

and like that's basically all you really need, you know?

Like you're not gonna get into like,

competitive bodybuilder physique or anything doing that,

but you're gonna be in the 1%, you know,

if you're consistent with it, so.

Did getting in shape, do you feel like it made you

a better founder, like did you notice a difference

in your energy or your decision-making,

how you handled stress?

That's a good question.

It's a little tricky, I think, yes, overall,

but I'll caveat that by saying it,

that specific time period in my life,

I was so focused on dropping all that weight

and getting in shape that it actually made it hard

for me to give the business as much attention

as I was just giving that mission

of just trying to fix my health.

For me, like I've always struggled with eating my whole life,

so the amount of discipline and sort of willpower

that it took really sort of drained my battery personally.

So there was kind of two elements to it there.

Like I definitely, I slept better, I felt better,

I definitely had more energy,

and I'm sure all that was good for me,

but yeah, to be perfectly honest, for me specifically,

that became like my obsession at that time.

I don't think it needs to be that way for people,

but I was in a situation where I just had a problem,

and I just really needed to focus on solving it,

and that became sort of my focus at that time, so.

So wrapping us up on this topic and then I'll let you go,

you've mentioned a couple times

that you no longer do that workout style,

but you've changed what are you doing now and why?

So mostly out of just like,

it's nice to do something new once in a while,

but now my business partner, Steve,

works with me at my house like three days a week.

That's something we started doing at the maybe mid last year,

or early last year, and I have a really nice gym set up at home,

and he likes to train,

but doesn't do a good job of sticking to it by himself.

So now that he works here with me,

me and him will go down to the basement

and work out in the nice gym,

doing real weight training with barbells and stuff

for an hour, two or three times a week.

And it feels like we have the time for it

because we're down there doing it together,

and we talk shop the whole time,

and I think both of us end up coming away from that

with lots of new ideas and stuff.

It never feels like something that we're trying to make time for.

So we've kind of transitioned back to sort of that type of training.

And I think like I do have a hard time doing it by myself.

I think like that's the other tip that I would give anyone

who's trying to like, it's similar to doing a class.

If you can find like a training partner,

both of you might not feel like working out that day,

but unless both of you come out and say it,

you're gonna expect that the other person's expecting you

to be there and say, you know what I mean?

So that accountability I think really helps.

And also just like makes it,

I don't know, maybe not everyone's this way,

but I just find it so much more fun

to just have someone to chat with and to sort of,

yeah, it just creates like a little bit of a competitive atmosphere.

Not that you're competing with each other,

but it's almost like someone's there like watching you,

you want to like put in some good work

because like somewhat sort of observing you,

you know, and you want, yeah.

So I think that's been huge for us

is just like being able to actually work out with your co-founder

is awesome.

Yeah, totally.

That's a nice luxury you guys have,

even if close enough.

Well, man, thanks so much for finally coming on the show.

Yeah, and thanks for having me.

Folks, want to keep up with you on X,

you are Adam Wadden, W-A-T-H-A-N.

And of course, if they want to rapidly build modern websites

without ever leaving their HTML,

tailwindscss.com.

And without ever leaving your terminal now.

That's what it is.

That's what it is.

Yeah, that's our old, that's our age one,

I'm just reading it.

Thanks for ever joining me, man.

Awesome, thanks Rob.

Thanks again to Adam for taking time out of his busy schedule.

To come on the show and tell us about his experiences,

both growing tailwind labs, having to make the hard decision

of letting some of his people go

and about how he's been staying in shape his past couple years.

Thanks to you for listening this week and every week.

This is Rob Walling, signing off from episode 825.

Thank you very much.

Much like the track, Her Majesty by the Beatles,

the Hidden Track at the end of Abbey Road,

this is the Hidden Track of this episode

of Startup for the Rest of Us.

In it, I ambush Adam Wathen with trivia questions, five of them.

And I've picked the topic that I don't know

if he knows anything about, but I ask you at GPT

to give me 10 trivia questions.

We're only going to do five of them.

I'm going to pick them about tailwind CSS.

Oh, God.

And I am fascinated.

I meet you.

I'm fascinated.

Well, sometimes GPT pulls out such random crap

that it's like, what is the this?

Or, you know what I mean, it can go so detailed,

but I ask it for difficulty.

Normally, I go difficulty one to 10, 10 questions,

and then I kind of pick through, and the last one is a 10.

I said difficulty three to 10, because I didn't want any gimmies,

and it gave me free.

OK, no, all right.

It's going to be like, what is the commit hash of the nine-hers?

That totally, totally.

And you're like, nine, a, four, b.

Oh, I know this.

I've got time to become a wrist.

All right, let's go.

I have ambushed many a person with this.

It's always people I feel comfortable with that I like,

that I've met in person, and so I hope you consider it a privilege

and nodded a dick move by me.

All right.

First question, difficulty three.

And if you say these are wrong, that's the other thing is,

there's a chance that GPT is just wrong, you know?

So it'll be interesting.

All right.

What core philosophy differentiates tailwind CSS

from traditional CSS frameworks like Bootstrap?

I don't know how you give like a correct answer to this,

but I would identify, I would say the core philosophy

is heavy reliance on presentational classes

and building things out of tiny utility classes

directly in your markup.

That's what chat.

chat.jpg says it's a utility first framework

instead of prebuilt components.

It provides low-level utility classes.

So nice difficulty four.

What config, oh, so you're one for one.

What configuration file is typically

used to customize a tailwind project's design system,

color spacing and break points?

Yeah, OK.

So prior to January 2025, this would

be your tailwind.config.js file or tailwind.config.ts,

or whatever.

But nowadays, you can figure tailwind in a CSS file,

which can be named whatever you want.

It's just like whatever you decide to call your CSS file.

Dude, that's a great answer.

It just chat.jpg just says tailwind.config.js.

So you nailed it.

You gave the bonus the bonus to answer.

You're like a get current two for two, man.

All right.

What feature introduced in tailwind 2.1

allowed developers to write arbitrary values directly

inside square brackets, like top dash,

square bracket, 117 pixels?

So there's two possible answers.

Like one is just the feature was just

called arbitrary values support.

But the thing that enabled it was our just-in-time engine.

Perfect.

That's the exact answer.

There's arbitrary value support via the JIT engine.

OK, so dude, it's like you know everything about this.

OK, so for the last two, I'm going to go to difficulty 9

and difficulty 10.

We're going to go nuclear because these feel way too easy.

And we'll see if we can stop you.

In tailwind, what directive is used inside a CSS file

to inject base styles, components, and utilities?

So it's at tailwind base, at tailwind, components,

and at tailwind utilities.

But that's also not really true in the latest version.

In the chat GPT world, that's true.

I love this.

You are nailing this, dude.

Did you, does that seem like a difficulty 9 to you?

That seems pretty simple.

That's very simple.

That's, yeah, that's like a getting

started documentation thing.

Like you need to type that to make it work.

Yeah, I don't know what chat GPT killing me.

That one's interesting.

What controversial design decision

did tailwind embrace that many early critics objected to?

Is it just the utility class thing in general?

Like I think that was the thing that people really just,

it's not semantic.

It's not going to be maintainable separation of concerns.

These are the terms that would be thrown around

in general.

That's it.

Writing lots of the answer.

Writing lots of utility classes directly in HTML markup,

arguing that ugly markup was preferable

to context switching into separate CSS files

and dealing with naming abstractions.

Dude, there's no harder ones.

In tailwind version three and later,

what is the purpose of the content key in tailwind.config.js?

And what problem did it replace from earlier versions?

I don't know that ever.

OK, so the content key is where you specify all the paths

to all of the files in your project

that might contain tailwind classes

that we need to scan through to figure out

what utility classes that you're using.

But there was introduced in V2.1, not V3.

And the problem that it just, I mean,

that's the thing that makes it possible for tailwind

to just produce the smallest possible output

instead of being like a multi-megabyte CSS file

that contains every single utility possible in the framework,

which really slowed down development speed

and dev tools performance in browsers, specifically.

So yeah, you nailed that.

And it says it replaces the old purge configuration

from V2 and earlier, is that true?

That's true.

That's true, actually.

Yeah.

All right.

I'll give you everything.

If I had said, what did it replace?

I think you would have gotten to it.

No, you did say that.

And I literally forgot that that was called that before.

So yeah.

That's good.

I think let's try one more.

Why can't you use at apply with every possible tailwind utility,

for example, some responsive or pseudo-class variants?

What's the underlying limitation?

Dude, that's a super data.

Is it?

Question.

Yeah, you can.

So see, I give up.

We give up.

That's it.

Oh, I love this, dude.

Yeah, I think you're like seven out of seven

or something like that.

Congratulations, man.

Well, the purge one, I feel a bit ashamed of purge

You're like, I only get, I get maybe an A-minus on this test.

No, that was great, dude.

Thanks for, thanks for playing along.

Your prize is in the mail.

Cool.

All right, thanks, man.