Dev Propulsion Labs

Piyush Agarwal, co-founder of Reo.dev, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about why go-to-market is the hardest unsolved problem in developer tools, how companies can have millions of open-source users and still not know who their customers are, and why timing beats volume when selling to developers. He shares how three months of nonstop customer conversations shaped Reo.dev, why their first product was a Google Sheet, and how intent signals turned a 2% response rate into 26%.

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

David Cramer, founder of Sentry, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about how he built a developer tool used by 4 million+ developers without partnerships or enterprise sales — purely through bottom-up adoption and mass-market pricing. He explains why 20-year-olds should stop starting companies and go learn from other people's mistakes first, how he delegated both CEO and CTO roles while keeping immense influence without a title, and why Sentry builds for the Fortune 500,000 instead of the Fortune 500.

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

Abhi Aiyer, CTO and co-founder of Mastra, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about why TypeScript is overtaking Python for AI agents, how education-first marketing turned a free book into Mastra's biggest growth channel, and why they raised their seed round from 120+ builder-investors instead of traditional VCs. He shares why "generosity breeds luck" became a core principle, how YC convinced him to leave LA for San Francisco, and why good documentation means optimizing for not talking to people.

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

Michael Grinich, founder and CEO of WorkOS, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about how WorkOS became the invisible infrastructure powering enterprise features for OpenAI, Cursor, Anthropic, Perplexity, and Vercel. He explains why AI companies need enterprise readiness faster than any previous generation of SaaS, why product always beats sales methodology, and why forcing yourself to talk to users is the only algorithm that burns out bad ideas. Michael shares the moment he fired his entire marketing team, how Webflow's CTO integrated WorkOS over a weekend, and why the best product is one that disappears.

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

Ivan Burazin, CEO and founder of Daytona, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about why he walked away from $300K ARR to rebuild his company from scratch for the age of AI agents. He explains why agents will outnumber humans to the power of ten, how Daytona creates composable computers that agents can spin up on demand, and what it means to race competitors on a moving train. Ivan shares hard-won lessons from 16 years building cloud development environments — starting with Codeanywhere in 2009, a decade before the market was ready.

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

In this episode of Dev Propulsion Labs, Supabase CEO Paul Copplestone reveals why hiring ex-founders with beaten-down egos builds better products, how internal meme workshops became part of their culture, and why vibe coding isn't a bubble that will burst. He shares the accidental origin of Launch Weeks, explains why Supabase is building for a 30-year timeline, and breaks down how they scaled to 5 million developers across 40 countries with barely any meetings.

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

Sam Lambert, CEO of PlanetScale, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about how PlanetScale stayed up during the AWS outage that took down millions of sites, why they grew Vitess usage 61,000% in four years, and what it actually costs to build tier-zero infrastructure that never goes down. He shares the journey from a 750-user consultancy to hundreds of thousands of developers, why operational excellence beats feature velocity, and why vibe-coded databases are a completely different market from what PlanetScale builds.

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

Zeno Rocha, founder and CEO of Resend, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about how he built an $18M Series A email API company by ruthlessly cutting scope to ship perfect products fast. He shares why seeking rejection accelerates growth, how building work so good your heroes want to copy it became Resend's north star, and why a 20,000-person waitlist before launch came from years of building a founder brand. Zeno also breaks down investing $3M in email security, why the hybrid work model is the worst of both worlds, and how open source became Resend's launchpad — not its business model.

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

Jeff Huber, co-founder and CEO of Chroma, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about why RAG became industry brain rot, how context engineering replaced it as the real job to be done, and what it takes to build modern search infrastructure for AI. He shares his framework for commercializing open source — keep the engine open, monetize the car — why consensus is a death blow for great products, and how small opinionated teams with low egos build the best developer tools.

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/

Join us for a conversation with Sarah Wooders, CTO & co-founder of Letta AI, as she reveals why LLMs are not there yet and how stateful agents will unlock the next generation of AI applications. From Berkeley PhD to YC alum to building the infrastructure for truly intelligent agents.

Key insights from this episode.

On the core problem with LLMs:

"It's kind of like if you've seen the movie Memento... if you have a person that just forgets every single day or forgets every five minutes... That's basically what LLMs are."

Why 2025 feels like the early Internet:

"I feel like with AI, this is our version of that. There's just so much opportunity. Everything is so undefined. There's a ton of white space... so much low hanging fruit."

The difference between real agents and marketing fluff:

"A lot of people just added LLMs into [existing workflows] and then called them an agent... that's inherently still very different from something that's like an agent that has identity, that works autonomously, that learns."

On building in the AI boom vs 2020:

"Right now is a much better time to be building a startup... the amount of value that's just being created and that you can capture is so much more."

What's still missing in AI infrastructure:

"MCP is super early... there's a ton of differences in how people implement the protocol. Auth hasn't really been figured out. There's a big lack of standardization."

Why open source matters for AI tools:

"We want to do that agentic orchestration in an open way... allowing developers to have as much control as possible over their context window, being able to see what tokens are going in and out."

Links:

Letta AI: https://letta.com

Sarah Wooders on X: https://x.com/sarahwooders

Evil Martians on X: https://x.com/evilmartians

Victoria Melnikova on X: https://x.com/vmelnikova_en

Evil Martians is the go-to agency for early-stage developer tools startups: https://evilmartians.com/devtools

#AI #Agents #LLM #Startups #OpenSource #AItooling #StatefulAgents