Dev Propulsion Labs

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

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.

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

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

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