Sometimes an app is just an app. But sometimes it’s a potentially huge business. That distinction isn’t always easy to spot; consider it a variation on “…another man’s treasure” for the phubbing age.

Kathryn Loewen, a former developer and software product manager, had racked up years of experience in financial services by the time she started business school at Royal Roads University in Victoria, British Columbia. When she graduated in 2013, she also had a head full of ideas, and methods for plugging them into business plans, and headed to her hometown of Vancouver.

Back home, she found herself in a good place. She had fellow developers to collaborate with in her home of Vancouver, and together they could build something, test it, and drop it if the app or software didn’t stick. But within months, one did. She’d been tinkering with Stripe, the Paypal-competing payment processor popular among startups. It appealed to her financial-service savvy. Along with another developer, she built an app onto its API that would allow business owners to monitor and manage their Stripe accounts on their Android devices. She called it Control.

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