Dev Propulsion Labs

Evil Martians
  • 5.0 (2)
  • Technology
  • Updated Weekly

Dev Propulsion Labs is a podcast about the business of developer tools, hosted by Victoria Melnikova. Victoria is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, working with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. She sits down face-to-face in San Francisco with founders behind companies like Cursor, Sentry, Supabase, Resend, CodeRabbit, WorkOS, Elixir, and PlanetScale to talk about what actually makes developer-focused businesses work. Dev Propulsion Labs is produced by Evil Martians, a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. Enjoyed by 45K+ listeners.

  1. Aug 25

    William Imoh, founder of Hackmamba: AEO is just good SEO | Evil Martians podcast

    William Imoh, founder and CEO of Hackmamba (https://hackmamba.io/), sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about why AI search optimization is mostly just good SEO that has had time to compound, how developer-facing companies end up marketing to an audience that will never buy, and what it takes to cut content production from a month down to a week. He shares why Netlify gets 30-50K signups a day without doing anything special for AI, why Hackmamba deliberately killed its own best-performing traffic, and how they replaced seven tools with a single agent they built themselves. Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. https://x.com/vmelnikova_en Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. https://evilmartians.com/ 00:00 Introduction and guest welcome 01:51 What good writing for developers actually means 05:44 AEO is just good SEO: the Netlify example 08:12 Why 2021-style content now reads as AI slop 11:39 Champion vs buyer: developers read the blog, CTOs sign the contract 15:00 Killing the traffic that came from the wrong audience 17:18 What makes a good article title 23:37 Distribution from day one for early-stage devtools 31:51 Seven tools, four posts a month, and why they built Boki

    William Imoh, founder of Hackmamba: AEO is just good SEO | Evil Martians podcast

  2. Jul 14

    Kate Holterhoff of RedMonk: AI slop, agent experience & the open source crisis | Evil Martians

    Kate Holterhoff, senior analyst at RedMonk (https://redmonk.com/), sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about what AI is doing to open source, developer tools, and the analyst business itself. She also shares her winding path to the role: painting murals in Cincinnati, a Carnegie Mellon Ph.D., a decade in academia, and frontend engineering before joining the industry's only developer-focused analyst firm. Kate explains why open source maintainers are calling this moment a crisis — code is cheap, review is the bottleneck, and projects like tldraw and Ladybird have stopped accepting external PRs entirely. She shares why agent experience is the new front door for dev tools discovery (and why your docs are now your funnel), how vibe coding is pulling non-developers into dependency decisions that keep CISOs up at night, and why she believes design will be the differentiator that separates the vibe coders from the pack.

    Kate Holterhoff of RedMonk: AI slop, agent experience & the open source crisis | Evil Martians

  3. May 12

    Matt Biilmann of Netlify: why agent experience is the new developer experience | Evil Martians

    Matt Biilmann, CEO and co-founder of Netlify (https://www.netlify.com/), sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about why agent experience (AX) is replacing developer experience in developer tools. He also shares how Netlify went from a bootstrapped two-person team to the deployment platform behind Bolt, Lovable, and ChatGPT-generated sites. Matt is excited by agentic coding and explains the addressable market for Netlify just jumped from 17 million JavaScript developers to 3 billion people. He shares the four pillars of agent experience (access, context, tools, and orchestration), why leading with developer experience beat leading with performance or security in Netlify's early days, and why he believes everyone is about to become at least somewhat of a developer. Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. https://x.com/vmelnikova_en Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. https://evilmartians.com/ Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable. https://www.trychroma.com

    Matt Biilmann of Netlify: why agent experience is the new developer experience | Evil Martians

  4. Apr 28

    Lingo.dev co-founder Max Prilutskiy: AI localization, AX, and having a lean team | Evil Martians

    Max Prilutskiy, CEO and co-founder of Lingo.dev, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about why localization is still far from a solved problem in the age of AI, how a six-person team ships 56 pull requests a week, and what agent experience actually means for developer tools in 2026. He also shares his journey from a hackathon with zero ideas to Y Combinator, how 30 cold exploration calls taught him more about messaging than any sales book, and why he rebuilt the entire Lingo.dev platform from scratch in December and January. Plus, Max gives a candid take on what didn't work in go-to-market, why word of mouth remains the only reliable growth channel, and how source code is becoming the ultimate input for AI agents. Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. https://x.com/vmelnikova_en Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. https://evilmartians.com/devtools Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable. https://www.trychroma.com

    Lingo.dev co-founder Max Prilutskiy: AI localization, AX, and having a lean team | Evil Martians

  5. Apr 14

    Firestreak partner Amir Rustamzadeh: what VCs look for in devtools founders | Evil Martians podcast

    Amir Rustamzadeh, partner at Firestreak Ventures, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about how to spot a force-of-nature founder before anyone else does, why most developer tool ideas are no longer venture scale, and what the current state of VC really looks like for early-stage founders. He also shares his journey from interning on NASA's Curiosity Rover at Jet Propulsion Labs to sleeping in his car at SpaceX, to coining the developer experience role at Cypress, to becoming a hands-on investor backing companies like Lovable, Daytona, and Perplexity. Plus, Amir gives a rare, sober take on inflated seed valuations, why big-name firms at pre-seed can hurt more than help, and where he still sees opportunity in the race to build infrastructure for agents. Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. https://x.com/vmelnikova_en Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. https://evilmartians.com/ Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable. https://www.trychroma.com

    Firestreak partner Amir Rustamzadeh: what VCs look for in devtools founders | Evil Martians podcast

  6. Mar 24

    Anuraag Gutgutia, co-founder of TrueFoundry: trust closes enterprise deals | Evil Martians podcast

    Anuraag Gutgutia, co-founder and COO of TrueFoundry, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about how to sell enterprise AI infrastructure when nobody trusts you yet, how TrueFoundry evolved from an ML deployment platform inspired by Meta's FB Learner into a full enterprise AI gateway, and why every Fortune 1000 company now can't avoid AI. He shares why trust is the only exchange currency in enterprise sales, how thought leadership and education sessions replaced cold outreach, and why voice agents are the next big niche to bet on. Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. https://x.com/vmelnikova_en Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. https://evilmartians.com/ Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable. https://www.trychroma.com

    Anuraag Gutgutia, co-founder of TrueFoundry: trust closes enterprise deals | Evil Martians podcast

  7. Mar 10

    Stas Kelvich, co-founder of Neon: $1B acquisition and databases for agents | Evil Martians podcast

    Stas Kelvich, co-founder of Neon: $1B Databricks deal and the agent era | Evil Martians podcast In this episode of Dev Propulsion Labs, Stas Kelvich, co-founder of Neon and member of technical staff at Databricks, shares how he went from quantum field theory to becoming a key Postgres contributor, why Neon bet on building their own cloud instead of just the database, and how the $1B Databricks acquisition closed in 30 days with 90 lawyers. He explains why Neon skipped sharding, how Replit's agents stress-tested their infrastructure overnight, and why the current moment is a gold rush for builders who stay in the loop. Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. https://x.com/vmelnikova_en Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. https://evilmartians.com/ Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable. https://www.trychroma.com 00:00 Intro 00:34 Who is Stas Kelvich? 01:42 From quantum physics to software engineering 05:10 How Stas became a key Postgres contributor 06:08 Early career: Ruby on Rails, MySQL, and Postgres 06:57 Why databases as a field keep pulling him in 09:47 The early days of Neon and the co-founder origin story 13:42 Key bets: building the cloud, separating storage and compute 16:38 Enterprise vs. product-led growth strategy 18:54 Why Neon didn't solve sharding — and why that was right 23:03 Designing for the agent era without planning for it 25:44 How Replit's agents stress-tested Neon's infrastructure 26:42 Agent experience and fraud considerations 32:00 Can you tell if a database was created by an agent? 33:06 The $1B Databricks acquisition story 38:59 Closing the deal in 30 days with 90 lawyers 40:27 Why Neon kept its brand post-acquisition 43:24 Life inside Databricks one year later 47:41 Market trends for technical founders in 2026 51:09 Using AI in day-to-day engineering work 54:15 What makes Stas feel great 54:49 Could AI accelerate theoretical physics research? 58:06 How to get started with Neon

    Stas Kelvich, co-founder of Neon: $1B acquisition and databases for agents | Evil Martians podcast

  8. Feb 23

    CodeRabbit CEO Harjot Gill: going viral in Japan and AI code guardrails | Evil Martians podcast

    In this episode of Dev Propulsion Labs, CodeRabbit CEO Harjot Gill shares how CodeRabbit went viral in Japan before anywhere else, why AI code generation makes code review more important not less, and what it takes to run PLG and enterprise sales at the same time. He breaks down how open source became their best marketing channel, why the old startup playbooks don't work anymore, and why the next Amazon is already being founded right now. Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. https://x.com/vmelnikova_en Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. https://evilmartians.com/

    CodeRabbit CEO Harjot Gill: going viral in Japan and AI code guardrails | Evil Martians podcast
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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
2 Ratings

About

Dev Propulsion Labs is a podcast about the business of developer tools, hosted by Victoria Melnikova. Victoria is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, working with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. She sits down face-to-face in San Francisco with founders behind companies like Cursor, Sentry, Supabase, Resend, CodeRabbit, WorkOS, Elixir, and PlanetScale to talk about what actually makes developer-focused businesses work. Dev Propulsion Labs is produced by Evil Martians, a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. Enjoyed by 45K+ listeners.

Information

  • Creator
    Evil Martians
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2026
  • Episodes
    38
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Evil Martians 2023
  • Show Website
    Dev Propulsion Labs

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