How a software agency kept 25 Ukrainian teammates paid during wartime

Executive overview

When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, NineTwoThree Studio had 25 of its 50 staff in the war zone. Build hours collapsed from 190 to 60 per day. Paying the team while losing billable output was unsustainable within weeks.

The founder applied the EOS/IDS crisis framework — three sequential issues: keep the team safe, replace lost engineering capacity, find new revenue. Each was solved in days, not weeks.

Entrepreneurs are uniquely equipped to solve crises others wait on governments to fix.

Immediate response

• Spent six hours sending direct messages to all 25 Ukrainian teammates asking: are you okay, where are you, where are you going?
• Built a real-time spreadsheet tracking team movements, then extended it to family members.
• Created a Telegram channel — team intelligence was days ahead of news coverage and far more accurate.
• Committed to pay full salaries regardless of work output.
• Secured $100,000 working capital from the bank when wire transfers to Ukraine were blocked.
• Partnered with Deel to issue 25 virtual credit cards in USD, enabling salary access within days.

Replacing lost capacity

• Utilisation dropped from 65% to 24% on day one of the war — 65% is industry average; 24% was unsustainable.
• Moved all non-Ukrainian engineers off startup projects and onto client work immediately, recovering utilisation to 40%.
• Cold-emailed CEOs of the 10 largest Polish dev agencies, using HubSpot open tracking plus LinkedIn green-light signals to trigger same-second follow-ups.
• Spoke with 8 of 10 Polish CEOs within 24 hours; signed a team-augmentation contract by Sunday.
• Hired one external developer for every two Ukrainian developers — enough to cover billable hours.
• By Thursday of week one, utilisation was back to pre-war levels.

Finding new revenue

• Cost overruns projected losses by April; needed to double revenue in four weeks with no dedicated sales team.
• Called every prospect who had mentioned needing an app in the prior year.
• Doubled revenue within five weeks, creating margin to sustain Ukrainian salaries for at least five months.

What the team did without being asked

• A developer woke at 5 a.m. daily to deliver supplies to soldiers, then coded for six hours from a basement.
• An engineer whose apartment windows were shattered by a missile spent 10 days unable to code due to shaking hands — then built a new app unprompted.
• The COO drove thousands of miles with her family, split at the border, and began working 12-hour days from Croatia to support new clients.