David Cramer

GTM Is You - Victoria Melnikova, Evil Martians

Jul 7, 2026 · 12:35

Victoria Melnikova argues that a founder's personal brand is the most underrated competitive advantage for developer tool startups in 2026, citing interviews with Sam Lambert (Planet Scale), Zeno Rocha, and David Cramer. She presents the Product-Market Fit Compass, a framework from Evil Martians that analyzed 37 successful DevTools, finding that 9 out of 10 times product signal is stronger than revenue, making distribution the bottleneck. Key tactics include moving to San Francisco for network effects, using banners and billboards to signal credibility (as TypeCents did with hundreds of billboards), hosting events like Supabase's user conference, and embracing failures (Zeno Rocha walked away from 300k ARR to start over). Melnikova emphasizes being unapologetically yourself, as AI can amplify but not replace unique personal brands, and notes that founder-led sales builds trust in early-stage startups.

MCP Is Not Good Yet — David Cramer, Sentry

Jul 3, 2025 · 16:41

David Cramer, founder and engineer at Sentry, argues that the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a pluggable architecture for agents, not a simple API overlay, and that it is not yet good but worth experimenting with. He stresses that exposing existing OpenAPI endpoints as MCP tools yields terrible results; instead, developers must design context specifically for agents, returning Markdown rather than raw JSON to improve model reasoning. Cramer details Sentry's MCP server, built in two days using Cloudflare Workers for OAuth 2.1, and notes that remote OAuth is essential for B2B SaaS, while standard I/O introduces security risks. He highlights the need for careful token and cost management—citing a single request that produced 20 API calls to Sentry—and advocates for building dedicated agents (like Sentry's root cause analysis tool) that wrap MCP, giving the provider control over prompts, models, and error handling. Despite ongoing issues like lack of streaming responses and unstable client support, Cramer concludes that MCP's core concepts (plug-ins, agents, tools) are just familiar software patterns with new names.