GTM Is You - Victoria Melnikova, Evil Martians

Picture this. It's a warm summer night in San Francisco. We are at the new PlanetScale office downtown, right off [REDACTED:location]. Sam Lambert, the CEO, is there. He's in a great mood.

New office, room full of cool people. He has a drink in hand. You get the idea. I'm talking to Sam about how PlanetScale gets customers, and Sam says something I wasn't expecting.

He says, "I just love Twitter. You would be shocked if I told you how many customers we get from my own account." I work with about 50 startups every year, and I know just how much founders hate this part of the job.

So I ask, "Don't you ever get tired of it? You can't delegate it, you know. It has to be you."

Sam smiles and says, "I would never give it up. It's my literal favorite thing to do." That conversation has been rattling in my head for days. I think Sam just mentioned the most underrated competitive advantage in startups in 2026.

It's not your model, it's not your team, it's not your funding, it's you. Quick context on why I'm telling you this. I'm Victoria Melnikova, and I run New Business at Evil Martians.

We're a consultancy for developer tools. We 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.

My job is to figure out the business of developer tools. Building software has never been easier, which means that the bottleneck has moved. Now the bottleneck is the distribution.

And today, I wanna talk to you about what works as go-to-market for developer tools in 2026.

I say that go-to-market is you. Well, your personal brand. And I actually have evidence to back that up. At Evil Martians, we developed Product Market Fit Compass. It's this framework that tells us exactly what needs to be done for a dev tool company to achieve product market fit.

W- It's a mathematical formula. We analyzed 37 successful dev tools and derived a graph. Basically, it consists of two axes, product signal and revenue. If product signal is stronger than revenue, we need to work on distribution.

If revenue is stronger than the signal, we need to work on the product. If signal and revenue are the same, we just go forward full speed.

We work with early stage developer tools startups, and 9 out of 10 times, product signal is actually stronger than revenue. Why, you ask me? Well, technical founders really hate marketing. [chuckles]

So distribution is something that we need to fix. And the truth is, in 2026, distribution is really, really hard. AI made our inboxes and feeds unbearable. There is so much annoying outreach and generated slop that it's really hard to tell the real deal, and it's really hard to cut through the noise.

So what I invite you to do is I want you to revisit some of the conversations I had with successful dev tool founders here in SF and learn from them.

And we'll begin with just basic go-to-market hygiene. Uh,

I will walk you through five simple, six simple steps, uh, that will create foundation for our go-to-market motion. First, we need to crystallize our value proposition. We really need to understand the pri- the painful problem that we're solving, and we need to validate that value prop with paying customers.

It's very important that those customers are willing to pay. Then we need to understand where in the life of a developer we live, so we need to understand the shelf space.

Once we understand that shelf space, we understand what channels to use to distribute our product, and we can become the authority on the problem.

Then we need to get a good sense of the ecosystem. We need to friend our friends and cross-pollinate, and we need to know our foes, so we can distinguish ourselves from them.

Finally, this is something that technical founders really hate to do, but this is really something super important. We need to distribute early, sometimes even before the product is ready.

The first big lesson that we can take away from SF-based dev tool founders is come to San Francisco. [chuckles]

San Francisco is great because here you can meet your clients and friends in person.

And there is this whole notion that if after YC you stay in SF, you fundraise twice as much, twice as fast. This applies to fundraising, of course. All the VCs are here, so if you're in the fundraising game, you have to be here as well.

I, I try and talk to folks that are, are, 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.

So I think SF is gonna stay strong for that. It's very hard to unseat those-

And David Cramer, founder of Sentry, put it even more bluntly.

I think there is like a network thing if you can get to SF. Despite what people would like to tell you, SF is unfair. Just do it. Who cares?

Who cares about what the internet memes say? Like SF is like, it's like a network game, right? Like, especially if you wanna like do the founding thing or, or the venture thing, like it is so unfair if you have access to SF.

Once you're in SF, you have to get loud. You have to advertise. SF is big on the banners. You can see them on the Muni buses. You can see them on buildings.

There are banners on the highways. Banners in SF do two things. It's signaling you are sending a strong message to the world that you exist, potentially you even, uh, invented a new category and you want to be loud about that.

Um, and of course, you want to earn mind share. What this means is that they, uh, memorize you on a subconscious level.

And also it helped establish Typesense as a brand that, you know, because we're not a VC-backed company,

we don't have funding milestones to share to say, to say, "Okay, hey, we're on a good trajectory." So we needed to find a proxy for that, and billboards are expensive.

So we realized, okay, this is, this could be one way as, as in our own credibility mechanism to say that, hey, we're not... And, and, 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

didn't realize you were this big that you could do, you know, hundreds of billboards in SF." So-

Once you're in SF, of course, you have to do events, and 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.

When it comes to organizing events, you can do small events, and you can choose whatever format you want. You can play paddle, poker, uh, do breakfast, do dinners, do lunches, do boba time.

Uh, you can do technical meetups. You can do launch parties. You can do user conferences. There is really, really like a lot to, uh, a lot to tackle there.

And now it's becoming more common for earlier stage startups to host their own user conferences. Uh, you can learn from the industry's best, like folks like Supabase are doing their Supabase Select second year in a row.

I think everyone eventually aspires to have their own user conference, and for us, we have discussed it for many years, and we kind of internally have a no conference policy, like as in we don't attend many conferences.

Mm-hmm.

We just put our heads down and do work. And then this year, for whatever reason, it wasn't me who chose it, the momentum built and-

Mm-hmm

... someone [chuckles] decided that now was the year, and I guess there was enough consensus built that we should do this.

And do crazy things. Fly a banner over SF, do a crazy marketing campaign, open a cafe, um, brand your coffee, name an ice cream. I love SF because founders here are just doing crazy things and they work, and I think that whenever you have fun with your marketing, it really, really comes through and shows.

This one is special because failing actually attracts people to your brand. Um, 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. [chuckles]

I invite you to think about your failures as opportunities.

Starting from scratch.

Yes.

You know, because you walked away from ARR of what, three, $300,000?

We were $300,000, yeah.

That's a solid ARR, you know?

Especially pre-AI, not terrible, yeah.

Yeah, it sounds great. You walked away from that. You started from scratch. Now looking back at it, are you happy about that move?

Absolutely. Should've done it sooner. Yeah, it's always like, you should've done that sooner.

I mean, sooner would be too early.

I guess. Maybe, maybe two months before would've been better.

Finally, um, I want to invite you to be unapologetically you. Uh, everyone has unique quirks, and if you think about it, your unique quirks can become your genius zone, something that comes naturally to you, something that you're really passionate about.

This could really become a pillar for your personal brand.

Uh, the good news is the pendulum is kind of running back to the artisanal. People love craft. People love beautiful designs. People love beautiful texts. It really resonates with the audience.

So despite all the AI automation that's available to us, I think people still prefer, uh, beautiful crafted experiences. So for us technical folks, that's, that's a good chance to execute.

And the way I see AI is it cannot really replace you, but it can amplify your signal, right? So whatever you bring forward, AI can amplify, whether that's text, videos, whatever it is.

I 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.

People want to buy personally from you. Founder-led sales is one of the main motions, especially for early stage startups, for a reason. That's how trust is built. People want to see a real human behind the product.

Here's what Dan Arosha says about that.

I feel like I, I try not to overthink my personal brand as much or like have like, "Oh, here's my full strategy," you know? I just try to be myself because that's how I feel like people are, are drawn to, uh, folks that are-- they try not to impersonate or, or, or be someone else.

So I just try to be as organic as possible.

Your personal brand is the moat. Founders that learn to leverage their personal brand will stand out in 2026, in 2030. As AI gets better, we'll only have an ability to amplify that even more, but it's gonna be very hard, uh, for AI to replace our unique brands.

I would like to invite you to think about you. What are some quirks and genius zones that you have? What are some things that come naturally and organically to you?

What are some things that interest you? And think about how that could become pillars for growing your personal brand and therefore your company's brand. I wish you the best of luck winning your share of the pie, and DM me to talk about your go-to-market.

Thank you.