Victoria Melnikova

Victoria Melnikova is Head of New Business at Evil Martians and host of Dev Propulsion Labs, where she helps developer-tool companies turn technical differentiation into sustainable businesses. Her specialty is the commercial problem confronting technical founders: how to find customers, establish trust, and build distribution as AI makes software easier to create.

Melnikova studied economics and Portuguese at Smith College before pursuing business development. At Evil Martians, she helped expand a Rails-focused consultancy into a design and engineering partner for developer-tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. She now advises early-stage founders on positioning, developer experience, distribution, and acquiring paying customers.

Her interest in sustainable software businesses predates the generative-AI boom.

Through Dev Propulsion Labs, Melnikova interviews founders and operators from companies including Sentry, Supabase, PlanetScale, WorkOS, Chroma, Resend, and Daytona. Their conversations explore fundraising, product-market fit, founder-led sales, open-source commercialization, and how AI agents reshape developer tools.

• Technical advantage before AI features. Melnikova argues that AI products should amplify an existing advantage in infrastructure, domain expertise, distribution, or workflow knowledge. Her analysis of StackBlitz and Bolt.new shows how StackBlitz’s WebContainers enabled browser-based development environments that AI could make immediately usable and shareable. Evil Martians contributed engineering work; StackBlitz owns the underlying technology and product.

• Founder-led distribution. Melnikova believes technical founders must personally articulate their product’s value and cultivate relationships with users. As automated outreach floods developer channels, distinctive communication, community events, recognizable branding, and founder credibility become competitive advantages. Her go-to-market framework emphasizes validating a precise customer problem with paying users.

• Product Market Fit Compass. This Evil Martians framework compares product signal with revenue to distinguish product weaknesses from distribution problems. Strong interest without corresponding sales can indicate ineffective positioning, customer development, or channel selection—not necessarily a missing feature.

• Agent experience. In a conversation with Netlify founder Matt Biilmann, Melnikova examines how developer tools must become discoverable and usable by both engineers and AI agents, with implications for interfaces, distribution, reliability, and security.

• Human-directed AI workflows. A coauthored account of Evil Martians’ illustration process describes replacing unreliable end-to-end automation with human editorial direction, AI-generated drafts, and professional illustration—preserving visual consistency and creative accountability.