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0 pointschrisweekly4y ago0 comments

Hi Adam, I'm a fan of your writing, but your experience in riding and monetizing Tailwind's explosive growth is obviously a massive outlier.

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adamwathan4y ago· 2 in thread

Hey thank you! 3 of 4 of my educational products actually predate Tailwind — I was a millionaire from that business before even releasing Tailwind v0.1.0. Refactoring UI came after but we had built a huge audience for that well before Tailwind as well.

I’m an outlier for sure but $20k is low. If you do a great job at everything that goes into running a business like this you can definitely do much better than that. Josh Comeau did an incredible job building his audience and reputation before releasing his CSS course a few months ago for example and he has done over $500k if I remember right.

timClicks4y ago

You make a good point in here. Being a financially successful author isn't just about being a successful writer - it's being a successful business person.

geerlingguy4y ago

This.

Writing is half the battle—it is a significant hurdle and not everyone can write a great technical book.

But the other half (and I struggle with this mightily) is sales/marketing (and the whole 'business' side). Making it look pretty, getting people to know it exists, promoting it.

Many of the best technical writers I know are not great at the latter, and for them, self-publishing might not be the best approach.

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