The Green Sheet Online Edition
October 26, 2026 • 26:10:02
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From product to brand – A multilevel game
A few years ago, I became fascinated by the idea of payments as a form of multilevel chess. My three-part series, "The extraordinary life of a payment transaction," ran non-consecutively in August, September, and November of 2023 in The Green Sheet.
In the final installment, I described a multilevel game "where every move simultaneously impacts players on every board. Over time, players are eliminated, leaving only the most strategic who can execute three-dimensionally." Three years later, I wrote a sequel. "Redirected: From in-house to interconnected," the lead article in issue 26:09:02, highlights three industry leaders who execute three-dimensionally every day.
Three leaders, three brands
These leaders manage multiple firms, some of which began life not as companies but as products.
- ISO Amp is an instant merchant statement analysis tool built by James Shepherd, CEO of CC SalesPro, Full Stack Payments, ISO Amp, CC Storage and the Merchant Sales Podcast, designed to help ISOs and merchant level salespeople close gaps in the sales cycle.
- ISOhub is an ISO-centric customer relationship management (CRM) tool with a single sign-on built by Dee Karawadra, CEO of Impact Techlab, RevUp and Impact PaySystem, designed to connect gaps in operational technologies
- PCIDSS Dashboard is a compliance management tool built by Josip Povreslo, CEO of Field39 and Oneiric IT, designed to simplify PCI compliance while allowing users to work with their preferred managed service providers and Qualified Security Assessors.
From aha to jaha
At the outset of this story, I had envisioned a design and execution process similar to what I have seen on Shark Tank, where an entrepreneur solves a need, reduces friction or closes a gap in the market. Suddenly a light bulb flashes—aha! But, as I learned in these interviews, aha moments are few and far between when a game is staged on multiple playing fields.
The design process is more evolutionary than revolutionary. Instead of a lightbulb suddenly illuminating a darkened room, a series of small trials lead to bigger developments as disparate parts are reordered into a cohesive, interoperable framework.
Shepherd observed that in software development, aha moments don't always pan out. "I think building a software company is a series of aha moments that turn out to be wrong," he said. "It's a lot of testing things and then realizing you're wrong, and you look back at a thousand times when you were wrong and three times you were right."
Instead of replacement, there is augmentation. Instead of aha, there is "jaha" – a Swedish phrase that is hard to interpret but means a revelation that occurs only later when something has been proven.
From idea to product to brand
In mapping the timelines of these three innovations, I became curious about how solutions that began as in-house products became commercialized. And once again, I learned it was not a linear process where someone revamped an in-house product to make it viable for a broader market. All three CEOs designed their solutions for themselves and their addressable markets from the start. For Shepherd, a key takeaway from building ISO Amp was the challenge of building good software.
"It takes a lot of thought to make flexible and easy software that everybody can use," he said. "It's hard but totally worth it to make simple but fully functional systems, and I think that's the ultimate challenge in software design."
For Karawadra, creating ISOhub meant thinking more broadly about how the solution would serve the ISO community. "Once we decided ISOhub was going to be a commercial product, we had to start thinking about how other ISOs operate," he said. "Every company has its own processor relationships, agent structures, commission arrangements, workflows, permissions and ways of managing merchants.
" For Povreslo, designing a PCI DSS v4.0.1 dashboard required flexible, adaptable design thinking. "If I had continued using the PCI DSS Dashboard only within my own company, I wouldn't have needed the same level of flexibility," he said. "Working with outside customers has broadened my understanding of what the product needs to support."
That's truly a multilevel game.
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