GTM Is You - Victoria Melnikova, Evil Martians

AI Engineer · 12 min · 169 sentences · from YouTube's caption track

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00:00Picture this.
00:02It's a warm summer night in San Francisco.
00:06We are at the new PlanetScale office downtown, right off Market Street.
00:11Sam Lambert, the CEO, is there.
00:13He's in a great mood.
00:14New office, room full of cool people, he has a drink in hand, you get the idea.
00:20I'm talking to Sam about how PlanetScale gets customers.
00:25And Sam says something I wasn't expecting.
00:28He says, "I just love Twitter.
00:32You would be shocked if I told you how many customers we get from my own account.
00:38I work with about 50 startups every year, and I know just how much founders hate this part of the job.
00:45So, I asked, "Don't you ever get tired of it?
00:49You can't delegate it, you know."
00:51It has to be you.
00:54Sam smiles and says, "I would never give it up.
00:57It's my literal favorite thing to do."
01:00That conversation has been rattling in my head for days.
01:03I think Sam just mentioned the most underrated competitive advantage in startups in 2026.
01:11It's not your model, it's not your team, it's not your funding, it's you.
01:19Quick context on why I'm telling you this.
01:22I'm Victoria Melnikova, and I run new business at Evil Martians.
01:26We're a consultancy for developer tools.
01:30We have a blog that has half a million technical readers every year, and I run a podcast about the business of developer tools called Dev Propulsion Labs.
01:39My job is to figure out the business of developer tools.
01:43Building software has never been easier, which means that the bottleneck has moved.
01:48Now, the bottleneck is the distribution.
01:51And today, I want to talk to you about what works as go-to-market for developer tools in 2026.
02:00I say that go to market is you.
02:03Well, your personal brand.
02:04And I actually have evidence to back that up.
02:07At Evil Martians, we developed product market fit compass.
02:10It's this framework that tells us exactly what needs to be done for a devtool company to achieve product market fit.
02:17It's a mathematical formula.
02:18We analyzed 37 successful devtools and derived a graph.
02:23Basically, it consists of two axes, product signal and revenue.
02:28If product signal is stronger than revenue, we need to work on distribution.
02:32If revenue is stronger than the signal, we need to work on the product.
02:36If signal and revenue are the same, we just go forward full speed.
02:41We work with early stage developer tools startups, and nine out of 10 times, product signal is actually stronger than revenue.
02:50Why, you ask me?
02:51Well, technical founders really hate marketing.
02:55So, distribution is something that we need to fix.
02:57And the truth is, in 2026, distribution is really, really hard.
03:03AI made our inboxes and feeds unpairable.
03:06There is so much annoying outreach and generated slop that it's really hard to tell the real deal.
03:14And it's really hard to cut through the noise.
03:16So, what I invite you to do is I want you to revisit some of the conversations I had with successful devtool founders here in NASSCOM and learn from them.
03:28And we'll begin with just basic go to market hygiene.
03:32Uh I will walk you through five simple six simple steps uh that will create foundation for our go to market motion.
03:42First, we need to crystallize our value proposition.
03:44We really need to understand the the painful problem that we're solving, and we need to validate that value with paying customers.
03:53It's very important that those customers are willing to pay.
03:58Then we need to understand where in the life of a developer we live.
04:02So, we need to understand the shelf space.
04:04Once we understand that shelf space, we understand what channels to use to distribute our product, and we can become the authority on the problem.
04:14Then we need to get a good sense of the ecosystem.
04:17We need to friend our friends and cross-pollinate.
04:20And we need to know our foes, so we can distinguish ourselves from them.
04:25Finally, this is something that technical founders really hate to do, but this is really something super important.
04:32We need to distribute early, sometimes even before the product is ready.
04:38The first big lesson that we can take away from SF-based devtool founders is come to San Francisco.
04:47[gasps]
04:48San Francisco is great because here you can meet your clients and friends in person.
04:54And there is this whole notion that if after YC you stay in SF, you fundraise twice as much, twice as fast.
05:02This applies to fundraising, of course.
05:05All the VCs are here, so if you're in the fundraising game, you have to be here as well.
05:14Uh I try and talk to folks that are newer in the industry or they're building things and try and chat with them, and and this is a place to make that really easy.
05:23So, I think SF is going to stay strong for that.
05:26It's very hard to unseat those.
05:28And David Cramer, founder of Sentry, put it even more bluntly.
05:33I think there's like a network thing.
05:34If you can get to SF, despite what people would like to tell you, SF is unfair.
05:39Just do it.
05:39Who cares?
05:40Who cares about what the internet memes say?
05:42Like SF is like it's like a network game, right?
05:44Like especially if you want to like do the founding thing or or the venture thing, like it is so unfair if you have access to SF.
05:52Once you're in SF, you have to get loud.
05:55You have to advertise.
05:57SF is big on the banners.
05:58You can see them on the Muni buses.
06:00You can see them on buildings.
06:02There are banners on the highways.
06:05Banners in SF do two things.
06:07It's signaling.
06:08You are sending a strong message to the world that you exist.
06:12Potentially, you even invented a new category, and you want to be loud about that.
06:17Um and of course, you want to earn mind share.
06:21What this means is that they memorize you on a subconscious level.
06:29And also, it helped establish Type Sense as a brand that, you know, because we're not a BC back company, we don't have funding milestones to share to say to say, "Okay, hey, we're we're on a good trajectory."
06:46So, we needed to find a proxy for that, and billboards are expensive.
06:52So, we realized, "Okay, this is this could be one way as an our own credibility mechanism to say that, 'Hey, we're not And and it And that's the feedback we also got now that the billboards have been, you know, around for a couple of months, and that's the feedback we've been, you know, getting is that, 'Oh, I
07:06didn't realize you were this big that you could do, you know, hundreds of billboards in SF.'
07:11So,
07:11Once you're in SF, of course, you have to do events.
07:14And there are different ways to do this, and probably this is like a huge separate topic, but basically, you can organize events, you can come to events.
07:23When it comes to organizing events, you can do small events, and you can choose whatever format you want.
07:29You can play paddle, poker, uh do breakfast, do dinners, do lunches, do boba time.
07:36Uh you can do technical meetups.
07:38You can do launch parties.
07:41You can do user conferences.
07:43There is really really like a lot to a lot to tackle there.
07:47And now it's becoming more common for earlier stage startups to host their own user conferences.
07:53Uh you can learn from the industry's best.
07:55Like folks like Superbase are doing their Superbase Select second year in a row.
08:02I think everyone eventually aspires to have their own user conference.
08:06And for us we have discussed it for many years and we kind of internally have a no conference policy.
08:14Like as in we don't attend many conferences.
08:16We just put our heads down and do work.
08:19And then this year, for whatever reason, it wasn't me who chose it.
08:23The momentum built and someone decided that now was the year.
08:30And I guess there was enough consensus built that we should do this.
08:37And do crazy things.
08:40Fly a banner over a sub.
08:42Do a crazy marketing campaign.
08:43Open a cafe.
08:45Um brand your coffee.
08:47Name an ice cream.
08:49I love a sub because founders here are just doing crazy things and they work.
08:54And I think that whenever you have fun with your marketing, it really really comes through and shows.
09:00This one is special because failing actually attracts people to your brand.
09:07Um everyone wants to be perfect, but perfect is boring and people just love a good fail story, especially if there is like an elegant recovery from it.
09:16I invite you to think about your failures as opportunities.
09:22starting from scratch, you know, because you walked away from ARR of what?
09:283
09:28We had 300,000, yeah.
09:29That's a solid ARR, you know.
09:31Especially pre-AI, not terrible, yeah.
09:32Yeah, it sounds great.
09:34You walked away from that.
09:35You started from scratch.
09:37Now looking back at it, are you happy about that move?
09:40Absolutely.
09:40Should have done it sooner.
09:41Yeah, it's always like, you should have done that sooner.
09:44I mean, sooner would be too early.
09:45I guess, maybe.
09:46Maybe 2 months before would have been better.
09:49Finally, um I want to invite you to be unapologetically you.
09:54Uh everyone has unique quirks, and if you think about it, your unique quirks can become your genius zone.
10:01Something that comes naturally to you, something that you're really passionate about.
10:06This could really become a pillar for your personal brand.
10:11Uh the good news is the pendulum is kind of running back to the artisanal.
10:16People love craft, people love beautiful designs, people love beautiful text.
10:21It really resonates with the audience.
10:23So, despite all the AI automation that's available to us, I think people still prefer a beautiful crafted experiences.
10:34So, for us technical folks, that's that's a good chance to execute.
10:39And the way I see AI is it cannot really replace you, but it can amplify your signal, right?
10:46So, whatever you bring forward, AI can amplify, whether that's text, videos, whatever it is.
10:54I suggest you think about your own personal traits and ways in which AI can amplify that on your personal level and on a brand level, on a team brand level.
11:08People want to buy personally from you.
11:10Founder-led sales is one of the main motions, especially for early-stage startups, for a reason.
11:17That's how trust is built.
11:18People want to see a real human behind the product.
11:22Here's what Zen Rocha says about that.
11:26I feel like I I try not to overthink my personal brand as much, or like have like, "Oh, here's my food strategy, you know?
11:33I just try to be myself because that's how I feel like people are are drawn to folks that are they try not to impersonate or or or be someone else.
11:42So, I just try to be as organic as possible.
11:45Your personal brand is the moat.
11:48Founders that learn to leverage their personal brand will stand out.
11:53In 2026, in 2030, as AI gets better, we'll only have an ability to amplify that even more, but it's going to be very hard for AI to replace our unique
12:06brands.
12:09I would like to invite you to think about you.
12:11What are some quirks and genius zones that you have?
12:15What are some things that come naturally and organically to you?
12:19What are some things that interest you?
12:21And think about how is that could become pillars for growing your personal brand and therefore your company's brand.
12:27I wish you the best of luck winning your share of the pie and DM me to talk about your go-to-market.
12:33Thank you.