# Lingo.dev co-founder Max Prilutskiy: AI localization, AX, and having a lean team | Evil Martians Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/dev-propulsion-labs-6704290/lingo-dev-co-founder-max-prilutskiy-ai-localization-ax-and-having-a-lean-team-evil-martians Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/dev-propulsion-labs-6704290/lingo-dev-co-founder-max-prilutskiy-ai-localization-ax-and-having-a-lean-team-evil-martians.md Podcast: [Dev Propulsion Labs](https://stenobird.com/podcast/dev-propulsion-labs-6704290) Published: 2026-04-28T03:00:00+00:00 Episode link: https://rss.com/podcasts/dpl/2687386 Audio file: https://content.rss.com/episodes/239660/2687386/dpl/2026_04_03_17_59_28_1432049e-5aa2-4180-affb-92b4afbc8188.mp3 Processing state: not_requested JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/dev-propulsion-labs-6704290/episodes/lingo-dev-co-founder-max-prilutskiy-ai-localization-ax-and-having-a-lean-team-evil-martians Duration seconds: 3054 ## Resource 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 ## Actions - request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/dev-propulsion-labs-6704290/episodes/lingo-dev-co-founder-max-prilutskiy-ai-localization-ax-and-having-a-lean-team-evil-martians/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode. - read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/dev-propulsion-labs-6704290/lingo-dev-co-founder-max-prilutskiy-ai-localization-ax-and-having-a-lean-team-evil-martians.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource. A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed. ## Transcript Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.