In this article
Based on an interview with Iryna Iskenderova
Founder & CEO of Meduzzen.
A couple of weeks ago, I began redesigning the Meduzzen website. The structure, layout, and copy came together smoothly. Then I reached the About Us page.
That page felt different. You cannot fake authenticity there. You cannot just say “we value people and quality,” because everyone does. To write something real, I needed to understand the story behind those words.
So I decided to speak with Iryna, the founder and CEO. My goal was simple: spend an hour with her, collect a few facts about how Meduzzen started, and move on.
But that is not what happened.
Two hours later, I had pages of notes filled with emotion, reflection, and honesty. It stopped being an interview and turned into a story about resilience, about risk, and about something stronger than strategy: purpose.
That conversation changed how I looked at this company. It made me realize that Meduzzen is not just a place where I work. It is a story worth telling. Because once you hear it, you do not just understand the company. You understand the people who built it and why clients keep coming back.
This is that story.
When I first sat down with Iryna, I expected a business conversation. Instead, she gave me a moment of silence, a small smile, and a line that set the tone for everything that followed.
“We had nothing,” she said. “Not even a hundred dollars for basic things. But we had a laptop. And an idea.”
It was 2020. Borders were closing. She came back to Ukraine from Asia thinking it would be temporary. It was not. Jobs were gone, the world stood still, and she had to choose: wait for instructions from life or write her own. She chose the second option.
There was someone else in the story too. Not a public figure. Not the face of the company. Just a quiet presence beside her, a developer who would become her soulmate and husband, and the technical backbone of what they were about to build. He preferred to stay in the shadows. She respected that and moved forward.
Their first idea never made headlines. They built an anti-COVID app with QR tracing, submitted it to a tender, and lost. No drama. No excuses. They moved on. That loss did not define them; the next project did.
A friend ran a small hotel drowning in manual work and mismatched tools. Outdated admin systems. Disconnected devices. Too many tasks falling through the cracks. While most teams were buying cloud credits and fancy dashboards, Iryna’s team went the other way. They built from the ground up, close to the hardware.
“We did not have access to any fancy stack,” she said, smiling. “So we used what we had. Sensors. Logic. Patience.”
They connected real-world hardware: motion and water sensors, temperature monitors, door states, cameras. They stitched it into one intelligent flow with booking and service logic. If the water line spiked, the system raised an alert. If a door stayed open too long, someone got a notification. Energy, maintenance, housekeeping, front desk, all synchronized, not by buying a ready-made platform but by designing one that fit the building’s reality.
Some details she asked me not to share, and I will not. What matters is that it worked. Staff stopped wasting hours on avoidable work. Guests stopped calling for the same issues. The building became calmer. The team learned something important: constraint sharpens creativity, and caring for people is the most reliable architecture pattern.
“When you build from zero,” she said, “you stop thinking about yourself. You think about the people who depend on you, your team, your client. You owe them stability even when you do not have it yet.”
That hotel became their blueprint, not just technically but philosophically. Build what is needed. Respect reality. Ship steadily. Keep your promises.
Work grew. Friends and partners brought small contracts. Iryna carried product and delivery. The quiet partner carried architecture and code. One junior, then another. A designer. A tester. A handful of Upwork clients. Nothing looked big on paper, but it felt real. The team learned to do more with less and to back every feature with a reason.
I asked her when she realised it was no longer a side project.
“When my first real sale on Upwork closed,” she said. “Before that, we worked for friends and friends of friends. After that, we knew we could stand on our own feet.”
I asked her when she reaGrowth was not glamorous. It was a sequence of practical decisions. Hire slowly. Ship on time. Say no to the wrong work. Create rules after being burned. Always return to one principle: clarity first. Get the design aligned before development. Define acceptance before you start. Split milestones so that both sides stay honest. Nothing revolutionary, just discipline.lised it was no longer a side project.
Then came the chapter that tests every founder. A relocation. A new country. A geopolitical storm that no one could plan for. Contracts that looked solid on paper but collapsed in days. One of them involved work delivered through a European partner to a major financial institution. It was meant to last. It did not.
“Overnight, we had people ready to start and nowhere to place them,” she said. “You cannot sell a developer in a minute. And you still owe your team certainty.”
Cash flow tightened fast. Separate clients delayed signatures. One paused a deal, another changed scope mid-sprint. The compounding effect was brutal. It was not failure; it was gravity.
There is a kind of leadership that only appears when everything shakes. Iryna has that quality. She does not raise her voice. She does not dramatize. She keeps the light on and makes decisions the team can stand on. The lesson that emerged was simple and hard: never allow instant termination on large engagements, agree on design before development, and distribute risk so no single client can pull the floor from under your feet.
They left that country. At the airport another contract fell through. In Athens the first new offer arrived, a small one, barely enough to mention. It meant everything.
“Thirty dollars,” she said. “But it was a signal. After a month of silence, someone said yes.”
You could call it luck. I call it momentum. Small yeses are the first beat of a new heart. They took it. They rebuilt. They added structure without losing speed. They learned to protect the team with better buffers, to price risk properly, to keep the pipeline wide and the promises narrow.
Today, the company is not a story about one project. It is a discipline. Remote-first by conviction, not by trend. Officially formed in 2020, operating with partners in several regions, expanding its legal footprint as needed. The focus is where they are strongest: outstaff and project delivery for clients who value calm, honest execution. They work on modern stacks, build automation and AI-driven workflows, but they never sell buzzwords. The selling point is the same as it was in that hotel: reality first, delivery second, pride third.
We talked about the market waves since 2020: the remote rush, the blockchain and NFT hype, the rise of no-code, the AI acceleration. Iryna does not chase noise. She watches the current and chooses lanes where her team can win without pretending. It sounds modest. It is actually rare.
Not every story in her journey is clean. Some clients wanted a month of work in a week because “AI will do the rest.” Others delayed payments for months. There were negotiations where the words were smooth but the invoices never arrived. This is the unglamorous part of running a services company, and most founders avoid talking about it. Iryna does not. She shares it to explain the policies that now protect her people: design approval before development, staged acceptance, clear notice for termination. Respect is a process, not a feeling.
Behind all this, there is still the quiet partner who never asks to be mentioned. He mentored juniors, estimated the hard parts, and helped hold the line when pressure rose. He is not on the website. He does not need to be. But the engineering culture carries his fingerprints: patient, thorough, steady.
What do clients feel when they work with this team? Less noise, more clarity. Problems solved before they grow. Honest communication when something cannot be done as imagined. A pace that is firm, not frantic. This tone comes from a founder who has survived both small and large losses and turned them into structure. Pain matures processes. Processes create trust.
There is also warmth in how she speaks about her people. She names them. She laughs when she describes their ideas. She lights up when she talks about young developers growing into leaders, about a PM who found a smarter way, about a teammate whose humor kept morale steady on a hard day. Some companies market “we are a family.” This one simply shows up and delivers.
I asked her what she is most proud of.
“The team,” she said immediately. “They can build anything. They stay calm in storms. And they care.”
That is the essence of Meduzzen. A company that does not just deliver software, but steadiness. They do not chase hype. They build partnerships. They do not talk about innovation; they live it quietly in every sprint and every stable release.
If you are reading this as a potential client, here is what I learned. You will not get theatrics here. You will not get inflated promises or marketing fog. You will get calm, disciplined execution. You will see it in how they listen before they answer, how they plan before they promise, how they quietly remove obstacles before you even notice them.
Working with Meduzzen does not feel like outsourcing. It feels like finally exhaling. The chaos is handled, the details are under control, and the work arrives on time. This is not a company that sells software; it is a team that builds trust into every milestone.
So if you are standing at the point where your idea needs to turn into reality, if you want your product handled by people who take ownership rather than credit, talk to Iryna. Bring your challenge, your timeline, your vision. Let her team show you what quiet excellence looks like in action.
Because Meduzzen does not just deliver projects. They build partnerships that last long after the deadline passes. And that, more than anything, is what real innovation feels like.
