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

Join us for an incredible conversation with Adam Frankl - author, advisor, investor, and the final boss of development marketing. In this episode, we dive deep into the biggest challenges facing developer tool startups in 2025 and how to overcome them.

On the AI boom opportunity:

2025 has gotta be the best year ever for starting a developer tool startup because there is so much chaos, and that's what makes this exciting.

The #1 mistake founders make:

Problem not product. Become an expert on the problem. Talk about the problem. Write about the problem... Too many founders they wanna talk about the product. They want to demo the product... And quite frankly, no one is interested.

Why you need to be obsessed:

You have to pick a problem that the problem also picks you. It's the type of problem that you just can't sleep at night because you're thinking about it... You know when the problem is the right problem because it seizes a hold of your brain.

The social media strategy that works:

Your mechanistic goal is you wanna be posting about this problem every day. Because you want to be the authority on this problem. Authority author, it's the same root. To be an authority, you have to write.

On enterprise sales in 2025:

Budgets are being cleared for AI investments, and this is astonishing... top executives are basically clearing budget line items say we're gonna invest in AI.

Why San Francisco matters:

The reason you come to Silicon Valley is the best customers are here. And you're not gonna be closing these tech 100 companies if you are in Tokyo or Lisbon.

The game-changing AI workflow:

Make a recording. Make a transcript... And then use an LLM to anonymize but consolidate transcripts. And that can be extraordinarily powerful.

Links:

- Adam's book: "Developer Facing Startup" (Amazon #1 bestseller): https://www.amazon.com/Developer-Facing-Startup-market-developer-facing/dp/B0D4KGHQML

- Alchemist Accelerator: https://www.alchemistaccelerator.com/

- 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

#DeveloperTools #StartupMarketing #AI #Enterprise #SanFrancisco #DevTools

Jason Bosco, CEO and co-founder of TypeSense, shares how he and his co-founder built a profitable search engine serving 10 billion searches monthly without taking VC funding. From Dollar Shave Club VP of Engineering to bootstrapped founder, Jason reveals the unconventional path to building sustainable developer tools.

Key insights from this episode:

"If it is hard for you as a founder to convince someone to pay you, it's never gonna get easier from there." Find what people are willing to pay for early - don't build first and monetize later.

"We're opinionated and we want search to work out of the box right from the get-go." TypeSense chose simplicity over configurability, targeting 80% of use cases with zero-config search versus Elasticsearch's thousands of parameters.

"We don't want the gamble on TypeSense the company to end up affecting TypeSense the product." Jason explains why they chose profitability over VC funding to build a multi-generational product without the pressure of 10x returns.

"Doing dev tools in closed source is like playing it on hard mode." Open source creates better feedback loops with developers, leading to faster product iteration and stronger community adoption.

Links:

- TypeSense: https://typesense.org/

- TypeSense Cloud: https://cloud.typesense.org/

- Jason Bosco on X: https://x.com/jasonbosco

- 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

Anna Veronika Dorogush, founder and CEO of Recraft, reveals how she built one of the world's leading AI image generation platforms by solving real professional design problems instead of chasing AI hype. Some key insights:

"My whole back-end team is medalists and finalists of World Championship in programming." Strong people attract strong people, creating a talent density that enables a small team to compete with giants.

"We are just focused on producing the best models in image generation space for designers, for professional use cases." While others built general AI image generators, Recraft targeted designers' specific needs: brand consistency, style control, and professional workflows.

"That's the major differentiator between ourselves and other AI native tools is we are building our technology from scratch in-house. And that allows us to solve for professional tasks." Training proprietary models in-house allows solving for your users' exact problems (controlling styles, brand colors, fonts).

"At the first stage, think investors mostly are evaluating founders and founding teams. After that, investors are evaluating product market fit and retention and later, monetization starts to be very important. We've raised three rounds so far and on every one of those rounds, different things were considered very important."

Links:

Recraft: https://www.recraft.ai/

Anna Veronika on X: https://x.com/avwriting

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

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

Links:

- tambo ai: https://tambo.co/

- Michael Magán on X: https://x.com/mrmagan_

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

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

José Valim, creator of Elixir and founder of Dashbit, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about how following curiosity over market trends led him to build one of the most loved programming languages. He shares why he made technical decisions over adoption-friendly ones, how decentralizing the community let Elixir reach domains he never imagined, and what he's building with Tidewave — higher-level AI tools that understand web frameworks, not just code.

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/