Enough worth? Elon Musk’s been benefiting from Trump’s US win — the former boy from Pretoria now has a net worth that eclipses South Africa’s GDP by almost R600bn, sheez!

Anyway, forget Friday the 13th, it’s Fast-Five-Friday and we have a list of awesome startups doing great things — let’s go…

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1. ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL

Underneath the Christmas tree…

Named the world’s most valuable toy brand for the 10th year in a row, LEGO is beloved by kids, parents and adult collectors alike. Chances are there’s a LEGO set or two on Santa’s letter this year.

However, some brand-new sets can also have a pretty heavy price tag (like this Star Wars Millennium Falcon, which costs a cool R16199). Not unlike everything else, LEGO can't escape price increases due to inflation, with an average increase of around 5%.

Enter BLOCK Shop, an online LEGO store started by Anton de Kock and his family during COVID Lockdown. They sell pre-loved, rare, and retired LEGO sets, Minifigures, individual bricks, and other LEGO pieces. 

So, whether you’re keen building a set from scratch or need some individual pieces to create something from your imagination, BLOCK Shop might just be the right place to look…

2. RUNNING REPAIRS

Mobile mechanics at your service…

In last week’s Fast Five Friday, we had a car maintenance riddle for you. While the answer we were looking for was Michanic, our friend DJ put us onto another startup in the space, making some moves called Fixxr. It’s a mobile mechanic platform that services cars at your home or office (or wherever you are, really). 

There’s probably a good reason why startups like these are finding customers. Over the last 5 years, roughly 2.4 million new cars were sold, totalling an estimated 13.1 million cars on the road. That means that more than 80% of the cars on the road in SA are older than 5 years and likely out of service plans.

Also, if you stick to guidelines, cars need to be serviced annually, meaning there are over 10 million services up for grabs.

Narrowing it down even further, an estimated 54% of workers still work hybrid, meaning servicing a car at home while you work from home could be very convenient. Assuming that all of the people who work hybrid have cars (and that they own all the new cars), that means that roughly 1.25 million of the car services out there per year could likely be interested in a home-based car service. At R1000 a service, that’s R1.25 billion market.

Talk about a perfect storm of conditions to make a business viable…

3. KEEP AN EYE ON THESE

Housing SA’s Class of 2025…

In 2023, over 2.5 million students enrolled across all of SA’s tertiary institutions. Which is great. But for a significant chunk of these students, trying to find student accommodation is a real headache – in fact, there’s only accommodation for about 20% of those who enrolled in universities (never mind those at other tertiary places of study)… 

Founded back in 2018, DigsConnect is Africa's largest student accommodation marketplace. It connects landlords, estate agents, and property managers with students searching for housing, making the process of finding and offering student accommodation simple and seamless.

They’ve already connected 161,000+ landlords and tenants across Cape Town, Pretoria, and Jozi, so if someone you know is heading to university in February 2025 and still looking for a place to stay, check them out.

4. FROM THE OPEN COLLAB COMMUNITY

Locals supporting locals…

We’ve written about SA’s semigration trend before (mid-2023 to be exact). Big city slickers finding the allure of small-town living enough to move their whole family to coastal areas and small towns across SA.

While things like Fibre Internet or Herotel have made it possible for people to work from anywhere, big-city comforts like MrD, Uber Eats, and even grocery delivery are in short supply in smaller towns (if any).

New local player, Bzaar is making it easier to buy from local shops, artisans, restaurants and other services in your local community and get it delivered to your doorstep. It’s big city convenience with a small town touch.

And we think Gustav and Elouise might be on to something… just check how something similar played out in the USA into a $20m a year business.

Instagram post by @bzaarza

Want to build with founders like Bzaar’s Gustav and Elouise? Come join SA’s premium community for tech startup and scale-up founders.

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5. A TEAM OF ENGINEERS TO HELP YOU BUILD

Build with the leaders

The more complex the problems you solve, the higher the likelihood of great margins. And with margins on SaaS businesses under pressure due to AI making it easier than ever to code, many are shifting their attention to hardware.

But hardware’s a different ball game, an engineer’s game, in fact…

And most SA founders don’t have direct access to that level of hardcore engineering talent. It’s normally reserved for the big guns developing aerospace or deep tech in Stellenbosch.

Until now, that is…

The venture engineers (so-called because, well, they are all actual engineers) at Octoco, whose outsourced CTO work normally only aligns with big players that want to build serious new tech, have just launched Yenza, a new venture studio that helps founders with a vision go from zero to the stratosphere in record time.

‍

It’s like having a team of hardcore engineers join your team, so it's a definite must for founders with SpaceX-level dreams to get going.

We’d try to get in early because people are going to be clamouring to get accepted – apply here.

IN SHORT

Something juicy for the road…

🌿 Green Tech Gear Up. Local hardware tech incubator Savant has just launched the 3rd Cohort for its Build Programme, a 6-month accelerator aimed at early-stage startups solving complex green economy challenges through science and engineering-based technology. Apply now.

🤖 Google’s 2nd Gemini. Google has released a new version of its AI model: Gemini 2.0. It’s said to be twice as fast as its predecessor, will power virtual agents and can generate images and audio across languages. Google also launched “Deep Research” which allows users to use Gemini to dive into topics with detailed reports.

🔎 What We Searched For. SA’s Year In Search 2024 was released and showed the stuff nearest to our hearts, and Google Search trends. From “Dricus du Plessis” in Athletes to “Baby Reinder” and “Inside Out 2” in TV and Movies, South Africans liked to stay in the know, keeping their finger on the pulse of events like both SA & US Elections, the peanut butter recall, the ANC coalition and the two pot system.

💻 DStv Byting Back. MultiChoice revealed some DStv Stream data from the last year, with users streaming over 560 petabytes of content. The recent Bok game against Scotland was the most-streamed live sports event, “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” the most-watched movie, and “Yellowstone” and “My Brother’s Keeper” the most streamed international and local series respectively.

🏗️ CAT’s out the Bag. SA construction equipment company Barloworld has received a R22.8 billion offer from Saudi Arabian heavy machinery group Zahid Group and its local partners. Barloworld is the official Caterpillar dealer in several African nations including Zambia, the DRC, Malawi, Angola and South Africa.

🎯 The Stack. Founders need tools and suppliers they can trust. Check out our Founder’s Stack with the best in business strategy with Metavolve, investment, offshoring and startup legal insights with Dommisse Attorneys and 12 more vital startup tools & services.

JOBS IN TECH

We know it’s Friday the 13th, but do ya feel lucky?

🧱 Senior Product Manager — Ecommerce @ Yoco

👨‍💻 Solutions Architect @ FlySafair

🤝 Co-Founder @ Veevo

⚡️Product Engineer, Technical Procurement Agent and Hardware Engineer @ Plentify * who we featured in the newsletter on Tuesday)

Hiring? Get in touch, and we will feature it here.

GAME TIME

3 Lies and a Truth

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Tired of phone scammers? Stick a granny on them… Virgin Media O2 has launched the ultimate anti-phone fraud weapon: an AI granny to talk scammers’ ears off. She wastes their time and, in doing so, reduces the chance of them getting to you.

In this Open Letter:

• Smart moves: New energy tech to take the price fight to Eskom.
• Grok gets artsy, gaming gets going & Home Affairs’ big career move.
• Dream come true: The truth about getting high-quality inbound leads.
• The startup that sends a mechanic to your door: See who got it right.
• Lonely building your startup? Join The Open Collab and get support.

Together with:

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TRENDING NOW

Taking the Tariff Fight to Eskom

Remember loadshedding? 

What started way back in 2007, came and went in ebbs and flows before peaking in 2023 with nearly 7’000 pretty dark hours throughout the year (almost 3x the amount of loadshedding than the previous year). We all hated the dark, but in the macro picture, it led to the birth of an entirely new industry.

Here Comes the Boom

In 2023, South Africa experienced a solar boom, with a record-breaking R17.5 billion worth of solar panel imports (3x what it did in 2022). 

Interestingly, these solar panels have a combined nominal capacity of around 5’000 MW, more than both Eskom’s largest coal-fired power stations, Medupi and Kusile, which have a nominal capacity of 4,800 MW each.

But suddenly, out of the blue, loadshedding was suspended on 26 March 2024… 

And despite many people around the country thinking SA would get plunged into Stage 8 darkness sometime after the last votes got counted after election day (29 May 2024), it remains suspended to this day (259 days and counting)...

All is not lost…

For consumers, the name of the game went from keeping the lights on during bouts of loadshedding to trying to maximise your solar savings by minimising your reliance on the grid.

And now that loadshedding might not really be a thing anymore, solar owners might be left wondering what to do with the R60k to R250k white elephant sitting on their roof.

Eskom has been increasing its prices steadily, with Eskom’s tariff hikes staying below inflation until about 2008 when it started to climb sharply. 

Between 2007 & 2022, inflation in SA was 129%; Eskom’s tariffs, on the other hand, increased 5x the rate of inflation: a staggering 653%.

And in 2023 and 2024, Eskom hit consumers with another 18% and 13% respectively. 

And there’s another multi-year increase on the cards:

• 36.15% from 1 April 2025
• 11.81% from 1 April 2026
• and 9.10% from 1 April 2027

Like some sort of sick multi-year April Fool’s joke if you ask us… 

The cost-benefit of using as little as possible electricity from Eskom is becoming substantial.

The local player helping SA get more bang for their electricity bucks…

Plentify is a home energy management platform that provides intelligent ways to optimise consumers’ home energy and load management. For starters, by looking at that energy-guzzling geyser – chowing between 40% & 60% of your electricity usage.

Plentify’s HotBot controller is a smart device that helps reduce your geyser’s energy usage. But the real magic happens when you have solar installed: Plentify’s SolarBot device helps your solar system optimally utilise generated electricity (when it’s free during the day, of course) by analysing weather patterns, human behavioural data (i.e. when and how you use electricity) not to mention loadshedding schedules when that was still a thing…

And with 8 years' worth of insights from tens of thousands of installed smart devices, Plentify knows what they’re talking about, allowing them to back it up with a solid software offering: 

• App: How you control your energy usage by getting real-time insights to optimise your home’s energy usage and save up to 30% of your water heating costs.
• Platform: Using data and insights to minimise your electricity usage over time.

And it’s the platform’s intelligence that gives it an edge. For example, Instead of programming a geyser timer, just tell it when you want hot water (say 6 AM or whatever), and it’ll do the calculations to make it so every time.

They also have big future plans for smarter energy usage: Plentify founder, Jon Kornik told us about “shiftable appliances” – i.e. one you can connect and decouple depending on its electricity needs at different times. Think geezers, pool pumps etc. 

And it’s this way of thinking that’s core to their business. 

With tech platforms like Plentify enabling more people to use their energy more optimally, we’re watching this space.

IN SHORT

Some lekke facts to gooi around the watercooler…

🎮 Gaming Africa. Local indie gaming studio Yellow Lab Games has just been acquired by ReForged Studios. This is ReForged’s third acquisition in the last few months after it acquired Ground Shatter and Extra Mile Studios both from the UK. We recently discovered the SA game studio space is quite big, with more than 60 active studios, nice.

👔 Legal Bot. African law firm Bowmans has become the first in Africa to integrate Generative AI platform ‘Harvey’ into its operations. ‘Harvey’ uses advanced AI algorithms to assist lawyers in efficiently and accurately reviewing contracts, summarising and translating documents, and performing redline reviews. If it’s as quirky as Harvey Specter, we might actually want to use it for something else…

🎨 Grok’s Artistic Side. xAI has just gotten its own AI image generator called ‘Aurora’. While it’s still unclear if ‘Aurora’ was trained by xAI, built on top of existing image generators, or built in collaboration with a 3rd party, Elon Musk has alluded to it having its own ‘image generation system’. It’s still in beta, but some of the initial images we’ve seen look pretty cool. Time will tell.

🎥 Speaking of AI creations. OpenAI released its video creation capability called Sora yesterday. Available everywhere, except, of course, Europe. The first videos look pretty slick, and if you have a ChatGPT subscription, you can go make some videos.

💼 Government Gigs. Fancy a job at Home Affairs? Well, the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) has launched an eRecruitment platform that allows prospective job applicants to view and apply for all departmental vacancies online without the hassle of paperwork. Say what you will, but HA is making big strides in adopting digital solutions, we just wonder if it also takes a 2-hour lunch break…

😎 The Stack. Founders need tools and suppliers they can trust. Check out our Founder’s Stack with your own fractional CFO for less with OCFO, the easiest way to manage your finances with Xero and 12 more vital startup tools & services.

CHECK THIS OUT

How to Get Better Quality Business Leads

When it comes to lead quality, nothing beats a solid inbound lead. Zendesk found that 59% of marketing professionals believe inbound strategies deliver the highest-quality leads, while only 16% think the same about outbound.

And let’s be honest – it makes sense. If someone’s actively looking for what you offer, they’re already halfway to buying.

But here’s the catch: How do you ensure those buyers find you first? The answer lies in three key areas: Presence, Awareness and Nurture.

Presence: Can They Find You?

This one’s simple – if they search for your solution, do you show up? Your SEO game needs to be on point. But it doesn’t stop there…

Does your website have enough substance to guide their decision? When they check your company’s socials or even the founder’s LinkedIn profile, does it look like things are happening? 

Your online presence is your credibility, so make sure it says, “We’re the ones you’ve been looking for.”

Awareness: Are You the First Name They Think Of?

When their problem becomes urgent, are you the first to come to mind? You need to be visible – everywhere they are.

Are you sharing insights that resonate? Are you showing up on social, not just as a business, but as a founder who’s passionate about solving their challenges? Consistency builds familiarity, and familiarity keeps you top of mind.

Nurture: Build Trust That Lasts

Even the best leads need a little guidance. Does your content help them understand their challenges better? And, more importantly, does it tie their solution back to you?

This is where things like blog posts, guides and case studies shine. Drip campaigns can keep potential customers engaged, and a newsletter can keep your brand relevant. 

The goal is to create trust – trust that your solution isn’t just a fix but the fix.

The problem is most scaling B2B brands do one of the above, but it’s really when you do all three that the inbound magic happens. 

But “it’s a lot of content to create”, I hear you say… that’s why there’s Stream, your unlimited content generation subscription service delivered by the team behind The Open Letter.

Want to get yourself set up for inbound leads in 2025? 

Book a FREE content strategy session with us before 17 January 2025.

Reach out now

BUILDING TOGETHER

Happening over at The Open Collab

In the last few days alone, in our online community, we…

• Discussed some of the most outrageous HR practices.
• Voted on where to get out free coffee — hmmmmm… 😊☕
• Connected Elijah to a potential partner/collaborator.
• Helped Sebastian with some fire website payment options.
• Got our first glimpse of OpenAI’s Sora — now available!
• Ordered some beautifully marbled wagyu steaks via Christiaan’s new online portal.
• Had fun playing Laurie’s word game, Kwartel.
• Discussed YC’s move out of Africa and the Western Cape’s GDP potential.
• Welcome so many new members! (The consensus being that The Open Letter and Open Collab offer such a fresh local perspective as opposed to all the normal US-based startup fare.)

Thinking about joining The Open Collab?

• Supercharge your network in the SA startup landscape — get that introduction, get that customer, or meet that partner.
• Get feedback on your products, services and/or offers from others who have built and are building their own products right now.
• Join all our online and in-person events for free!
• Exclusive 1-on-1 sessions with startup consultants.
• All for only R500 a month!

SA’s only dedicated tech startup and scale-up founder community.

Join The Open Collab

HAPPENING SOON

Upcoming Events

11 December 2024 — Year-End Reflection Workshop — Online: Our friends at Metavolve are teaching founders their super-strategic ideal way for startups to end off the year (to enable them to dominate in Jan) — register for free here.

13 December 2024 — Sales Masterclass — Online: Part 3: Keep your B2B sales pipeline filled with this Masterclass session with sales expert, Sebastian Chapman — Join The Open Collab community to attend for free.

View all our upcoming events here.

WHAT YOU SAID

The wheel deal…

We asked a vehicle startup-based riddle in the last Fast Five Friday, and not a lot knew that Michanic services your car at your house…

🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨 🛠️ WeFixCars: 38% 

🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜️⬜️ 🛻 Michanic: 25% 

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 🩺 CarDok: 31% 

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🧘 RideGuru: 6%

Your 2 cents…

Solid bet, William. Not this time, though, right answer is Michanic. 🚨

Thanks for the intro, DJ, we gonna go check out Fixxr. 👀

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Long drive? Car manufacturers have been building so many luxury features into cars that more drivers are getting sleepy behind the wheel. The solution? Dash cam-style AI’s to detect and wake up drowsy drivers.

Happy Fast-Five-Friday! 5 startups, local, all doing big things. Let’s go…

Together with

1. EARLY DAYS

Letting the Cat Out of the Bag…

The average visitor spent just over 2.5 days in Cape Town between January and June this year. And this festive season, expect Cape Town to be heaving with 27 airlines flying folks to and from 31 global destinations, not to mention the nearly 200k passengers and crew pulling into Western Cape ports.

With most accommodation check-outs happening mid-morning, visitors may have some time on their hands before leaving, so a quick trip to Table Mountain, Kirstenbosch, Robben Island etc. could be on the cards. But nobody wants to schlep their luggage around (least on a ferry). 

That’s why we think local luggage and logistics company Bag Drop is on to a cool idea. Simply book a time for your luggage to be collected, Bag Drop securely stores your luggage and then drops it off whenever you need it (more than likely at the airport), all the while letting you track your bag, and see the live driver location.

Don’t be that weirdo that rocks up at Cafe Caprice with your suitcase

2. A WORLD LEADER

12 Years till Launch

Over 12 years ago, South African Guy van der Walt and a team from UCT set out to create the world’s most medically accurate and ethically developed 3D anatomy models.

The team at Atomedge dedicated over a decade to this project due to the immense complexity of precisely mapping every component of the human body — 206 bones, 100,000 km of arteries, and millions of nerves. Creating a model of this calibre required an extraordinary amount of time, effort, and resources — talk about a competitive edge!

Accurate arteries

This model captures every detail of the human body, from muscles and nerves to bones and arteries. And recently they started selling it to academic institutions, researchers, and organizations worldwide, changing the way anatomy studies and medical education is performed.

They recently won the Xero South Africa Beautiful Business Award, and the money is going to go a long way in getting the word out.

3. WATCH THIS SPACE

Leading the Charge!

The local EV scene is hotting up. Strangely, it has nothing (or very little) to do with that oke from Pretoria who also wants to send humans to Mars. This year alone we’ve seen the launch of SA’s first electric minibus taxi, a couple of international brands dropping their electric trucks on local shores, not to mention SA’s first solar EV charging station in the North West province…   

We recently caught up with Zimi CEO Michael Maas to hear about what’s next for the Zimi Team. And it’s also been a bumper year for the turnkey EV charging platform, from closing their pre-seed funding round with Anza Capital, their Startup of the Year nomination for mobility from Startup Club ZA, not to mention the imminent launch of Zimi Pay to EV users back on the road.

Instagram post by @theopenletterza

4. FROM THE OPEN COLLAB COMMUNITY

Data – Awareness – Action

Sustainability is tough, especially for large, multi-location companies with thousands of employees and countless data sources. But by centralising that data into an easy-to-understand format, you can drive awareness, cut costs, and benefit both the planet and your bottom line.

HYDRA, a software solution built by The Awareness Company, turns complex data into clear insights to drive sustainability. It collects and organises data from sensors, cameras, and systems, to improve efficiency, predict problems, and boost collaboration (so that everyone in the org understands its data).

Oh ja. The Awareness Company was the Climate/Sustainability Tech winner at last week’s Startup Club ZA’s South African Startup Awards.

PS. Two of the co-founders of The Awareness Company, Priaash & Shazia is part of The Open Collab community. Come join them in SA’s founder community for startup and scale-up founders.

Join The Open Collab Today

5. ON THE POD

Building Ventures Ground Up

This Global Startup Studio Report claims that startups developed within venture studios tend to outperform those following traditional paths. They have a 30% higher success rate, with 84% securing seed funding. Of these, 72% progress to Series A funding, compared to 42% of traditional startups.

Venture studio startups also reach Series A in about 25.2 months, significantly faster than the 56 months typical for traditional startups. Additionally, they achieve an average internal rate of return of 53%, surpassing the 21.3% average for traditional startups.

That’s likely why the teams at Next176 and ByteOrbit have teamed up to form NextOrbit, a venture studio that combines the best venture-building capabilities from both entities.

We had Nonjabulo Zondi from Next176 and Liz Ras from ByteOrbit on the podcast this week to share the reasoning behind this venture as well as talk about some of the challenges that Venture Studios faces.

IN SHORT

How’s this for a Conversation Starter…

🇿🇦 Really back the Bokke. A consortium of Altvest Capital, RainFin, 27four and EasyEquities put forward a proposal to SA Rugby to create the means for the public to own up to 40% of the Springbok commercial rights. Now that’s an idea we’d throw some money behind even if it’s just for “gees”.

❤️ In the REd. The Good People Data Company has secured a major investment from REdimension Capital, to fuel its fuel growth, innovation, and expansion across Africa, as the continent navigates the challenges of a digital-first world. Lekker to see some deals flowing to close off the year.

🤖 And then there were 5. At AWS re:Invent, Amazon revealed new AI models for automation, content creation, and multimedia tasks, alongside plans for a massive AI compute cluster. And the real big news is that these models are up to 75% cheaper than competitors. As these costs come down, highly doubt we will see AI categories at startup competitions as all startups will eventually incorporate it.

🚙 Uber Bakkie.  Uber announced that South Africans can now start requesting “Bakkies” for loads up to 1 ton. Now you can go crazy in your neighbourhood WhatsApp buy and sell group.

🏦 Neo Bank Returns. Those who participated in European bank Revolut’s crowdfunding round in 2016 at $2.14 a share can now sell their shares at a whopping $865.42 per share in a secondary offering leading up to their upcoming IPO. Nothing like a sweet 400x return in 8 years.

😎 The Stack. Founders need tools and suppliers they can trust. Check out our Founder’s Stack with your own CTO for remarkable tech builds with Octoco, all your accounting sorted with Xero and 12 more vital startup tools & services.

END-YEAR POWER

The Right Way to End Off 2024

(and supercharge your 2025 at the same time…)

Year-end is always a little bitter-sweet for startups and founders — you did a lot in 2024, but there’s so much more still to be done… so you fall into the “can’t switch off” trap and one of two things happen:

• You either refuse to admit you’re burned out and try power through the holidays, never resting and potentially crippling your business for 2025.
• Or January 2025 conversations keep creeping into your year-end meetings and work, muddying your end-of-year and leaving everyone frazzled.

The problem with those is both will stop you from hitting the ground running in Jan.

The solution: Business strategy consultants Metavolve have developed a tailormade Year-End Reflection toolkit, and you and your team can log in on 11 December at 12:00 for a free 2-hour workshop on how to end this year off right.

The aim is to teach you the most business-savvy and psychologically advanced way to close off 2024 so that you’re on fire again in 2025.

It’s free — register for the LinkedIn Live event here.

JOBS IN TECH

A Change is as Good as a Holiday…

🧱 Product Owner @ Deel

👨‍💻 Senior Full Stack Engineer @ MoonPay

🎨 Creative Leader @ Mr Price

🤳 FinTech Operations Manager @ SnapScan

Hiring? Get in touch, and we will feature it here.

LET’S PLAY A LITTLE GAME

Riddle Me this, Batman…

I fix your ride without the stress,

A motor guru in your pocket, no less.

No need for calls, or waiting in line,

I send a mechanic right on time.

Who am I?

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Less noise? The UK’s University of Birmingham has unveiled a new design of urban wind turbine that produces energy 7 times more efficiently than any current model and revealed it was designed by AI.

In this Open Letter:

• New Types of Advice: Get advice without the hidden commissions.
• SA’s biggest back is in black, drop the VAT on the protein, pain from two pots.
• All the Finance Help: Fraction of the cost.
• Fake startup book: The results are in.
• Last chance for 40% off.  Join The Open Collab today.

Together with:

TRENDING NOW

Putting the Trust Back in Your Fin Advice

SA has a financial literacy rate of only 42%... 

When compared to the UK’s 67%, Australia’s 64%, Canada’s 68%, and Denmark’s 71%, it would make sense that many in SA would need help navigating our finances, especially when it comes to risk and retirement. 

This lack of financial literacy gave rise to an entire industry of financial advisors. 

In fact, in SA there are roughly 3,500 practising Certified Financial Planner (CFP®) professionals whose mandate is to advise on products their clients can buy from registered Financial Service Providers (FSPs).

The same goes for the nearly 200k reps we have working for the 11’750 of SA’s FSPs. All out there to sell you products…

Now, while there are certainly good financial planners who help people, a challenge with the industry is that the incentives are often misaligned. Financial advisors are often rewarded with large commissions for selling certain products over others and it’s hard to think that such an advisor might sell a product that offers less commission. 

And the problem for many investors is that there is no transparency into exactly how much commission or kickback such an advisor will get when selling said product. And some of these commissions can range between 3 and 8.5% of the total cost of the product - upfront!

(Never mind the ongoing payments and performance-based bonuses, alongside perks like trips and professional development…)

But what this commissions-based model does is create an obligation towards the financial institution - i.e. the organisation helping the advisor put food on the table. In other words, not necessarily you and I…

‍

One can imagine that quite a few people have been tricked into buying products they don't actually need simply because their cousin Jimmy started a new job as a CFP and needs money for the December holidays.

This begs the question: When you go see a financial advisor, how do you know anything they try to “sell” is really right for you?

The local player swimming upstream

Doshguide is a local platform looking to bring credibility back to the financial advice game by changing how advisors earn a living: Instead of commission on financial products you don’t need (or aren’t suited to your financial situation), Doshguide connects consumers with advisors for flat-fee, 100% unbiased, personal finance and investment advice.  

How it works is:

You book an initial 20-minute consult with Doshguide’s founder Rory Brachner (he’s been burnt by a financial advisor before, so you just know he’s gonna connect you with the right person…).

You then get matched with one of the advisors on Doshguide’s panel for between R450 and R6’000 per month, depending on the complexity of your finances.

And because the advisors work on a flat-fee basis (this is where your month-to-month sub comes in) - they’re not here to sell you any product. They help you find something that’s the right fit for you and your financial situation. There is no commission on products sold, just 100% unbiased advice.

They’re also able to work with all the major financial institutions as well for those products that need a financial advisor attached to them - they simply zero out the commission.

SA sorely needs more high-net-worth and money-savvy citizens. And platforms like Doshguide that enable 100% unbiased financial advice might just convince more South Africans that it’s worthwhile speaking to an advisor again. We’re watching this space…

CHECK THIS OUT

Close the Year Strong with Smarter Financial Planning

A 2024 report by Xero revealed that 24% of small businesses in South Africa face cash flow challenges, with 72% of them resorting to personal funds to sustain operations. Additionally, 46% of business owners spend one to two months chasing late payments, further highlighting the extent of the problem.

For many founders, these challenges are at their worst in December. Fewer workdays mean less income, and in many sectors, December feels like a standstill. It’s often the time when founders dip into personal funds to keep their businesses afloat—bye-bye holiday plans.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

With the right planning during busier months, you can ease the stress and build reserves to confidently navigate the holiday slowdown. And let’s face it—strategic financial planning isn’t as simple as “just make more money in the good months.”

That’s where a CFO can make a world of difference. A seasoned CFO doesn’t just look at the numbers—they help you make the right strategic decisions to keep your business resilient, ensuring you can enjoy the holidays instead of stressing over cash flow.

Here’s the best part: You don’t need a full-time CFO.

With fractional CFO services, you can access world-class financial expertise without breaking the bank. Whether it’s maximising profits in busy periods, building reserves, or setting realistic strategies, a fractional CFO can help you navigate the complexities of financial management while keeping costs low.

Contact OCFO today to learn how their services can help you finish the year strong (or make sure next year is a strong one) and spend your holidays the right way.

Contact OCFO now

IN SHORT

Some lekke facts to gooi around the watercooler…

🍯 Two-Pot Pain. JSE-listed financial services group Alexforbes has seen an increase in operating costs since the implementation of SA’s Two-Pot retirement system, with withdrawals seeing the company’s tech costs (two-pot system implementation, software and licensing costs, and an increase in outsourced services) increase by 13% Y-o-Y, and personnel expenses up by 12% to handle increased claims volumes.

🧱 BRICS Brickwall? SA’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO) has said there are no plans to create a “BRICS currency” in response to incoming US President Trump’s tariff threat to impose 100% tariffs on BRICS nations that support the creation of an alternative currency to the US dollar.

🍗 VAT-Free Chicken. SAs might feel the pinch of rising food costs lessen if a proposal to remove VAT from frozen bone-in chickens & portions, and fresh and frozen chicken offal, is successful. The proposal, submitted on behalf of the South African Poultry Association (SAPA) and the Association of Meat Importers and Exporters (AMIE), aims to expand the basket of essential foods free from VAT, and those that would benefit poorer households.

👆Back in Black. Naspers-owned Prosus has announced half-year profits with group adjusted earnings (before interest and taxes) hitting US$60 million. This comes off the back of the group selling stakes in Trip.com in China, food delivery company Tazz in Romania, and Superbalist back home in SA.

⚔️ Musk v OpenAI. Attorneys representing Elon Musk and his AI startup xAI have filed for a preliminary injunction against OpenAI to prevent it from converting into a fully for-profit business. Musk’s legal team is arguing that OpenAI should be prohibited from “benefitting from wrongfully obtained competitively sensitive information or coordination via the Microsoft-OpenAI board interlocks.”

🎯 Founder Focus. Every year, more than half of entrepreneurs put their company’s future at risk by failing to take a proper break over the holidays. Our friends at Metavolve are hosting a free, game-changing, hands-on 2-hour workshop on 11 December with practical steps to end off 2024 in a way that allows you to take a good break this Christmas so that you can come back on fire and ready to dominate again in January – register here for free.

BUILDING TOGETHER

Happening over at The Open Collab

Our community of SA founders have been buzzing…

• We welcome 12 new members who made most of our schweet Black Friday 40% off.
• Helped Pieter find the best international SMS provider.
• Coordinated to meet at AfricArena this coming week.
• Discussed the current trends of ghost engineers and heard some horror stories.
• Had a great time in chat roulette brainstorming how to overcome challenges together.
• Thinking about joining The Open Collab?

• Supercharge your network in the SA startup landscape — get that introduction, get that customer, or meet that partner.
• Get feedback on your products, services and/or offers from others who have built and are building their own products right now.
• Join all our online and in-person events for free!
• Exclusive 1-on-1 sessions with startup consultants.

SA’s only dedicated tech startup and scale-up founder community. 40% off the annual plan until midnight!

Join The Open Collab

HAPPENING SOON

Upcoming Events

4 December 2024 - In Stellenbosch? We are partnering with the Stellenbosch Network for a business speed networking event. It's going to be a great deal of fun, and there are only a few tickets left; come join in!

6 December 2024 — AMA with Alan Knott-Craig: After our LinkedIn Live with Allan, you voted to an Ask Me Anything session — Join The Open Collab community to attend for free.

13 December 2024 — Sales Masterclass — Online: Part 3: Keep your B2B sales pipeline filled with this Masterclass session with sales expert, Sebastian Chapman — Join The Open Collab community to attend for free.

View all our upcoming events here.

FRIDAY’S GAME RESULTS

The Books That Founders Need

We asked which book is NOT a SA startup/business book, and you almost got it… 

🟥⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Stalking Giants

🟥🟥🟥🟥🟥⬜️ Life Lessons 

🟥🟥🟥🟥🟥🟥 Upstart 

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜️ Township Tech 

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ The First Kudu 

Correct answer: Township Tech… man, we wish it was real though.

The others are all real:

• Stalking Giants is also new: A look at how Capitec managed to take on the Big Four Banks.
• Life Lessons is the new book by Alan Knott-Craig, known for CellFind, iBurst, Mxit, Herotel and now fibertime.
• Upstart is a book by the then-25-year-old founder of DigsConnect.
• The First Kudu is the remarkable story of SA’s first would-be unicorn, HouseME.

And you should totally get yourself a copy – all great stories!

Your 2 cents…

You nailed it, Karabo! 💡 It’s actually not a book — well spotted! 🎯

Us too, Nashe! 🙌

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Sparkling health? A group of scientists found a gold-derived medication slows cancer tumour growth by 82% — way more effective than chemo. If this goes mainstream, who knows what will happen to the price of gold; might be a good time to go buy some TroyGold.

If you missed last week Friday, welcome to Fast-Five-Fridays. 5 startups, mostly local, all doing big things. Let’s go.

PS: Happy Black Friday — we got a special deal on The Open Collab membership. Get 40% off and 3 top SA startup books! Join now.

1. JUST LAUNCHED

New Life for Old Clothes

Fashion is cool. Until it’s not. Humans produce 100 billion garments a year (13 pieces of clothing for each of us on planet Earth). And 70% of it ends up in landfills.

Local re-commerce platform Thrif wants to help online shoppers think “buy secondhand first” by bringing quality-checked, affordably-priced (50—70% off), sustainable secondhand clothing (including a bunch of major brands) right to your phone — no need for dodgy Facebook Marketplace meets.

It’s early days for them, but they are making great progress and you can already pick up some great bargains here.

Check out Thrif’s elevator pitch…

Instagram post by @theopenletterza

PS: Thrif Founders Micaela and Nick are part of The Open Collab along with 68 other SA founders – keep reading for more on this community.

2. AN INTERESTING STARTUP NOT FROM SA

No More Weird Voiceover Sitcoms

If you’ve ever watched Money Heist on Netflix, (which you should btw), you would’ve noticed that it wasn’t originally filmed in English. Yep, this hit show that’s been one of the streaming giants’ biggest shows of all time with 3 of its Parts (seasons) in the Top 10 Most Popular Non-English TV shows, was originally filmed in Spanish.

Case in point to prove that there is money to be made in repurposing localised content for other audiences. Enter Flawless AI, which has built a tool to translate videos in a way that makes the lips of actors sync better with the sound.

And with Netflix (and others) continuing to invest in the development of localised content, this could be the kind of tool that makes it even more viable!

And with Netflix (and others) continuing to invest in the development of localised content, this could be the kind of tool that makes it even more viable!

3. REACHING FOR SCALE

Empowering the Peeps that Help You Succeed

By the end of 2026, corporates around the world are set to spend nearly $100 billion on corporate wellness solutions to boost productivity, reduce absenteeism, lower healthcare costs, and create a healthier, happier, and more engaged workforce.

Locally, Strove an employee well-being and engagement platform is building a solution that offers employers the ability to provide health and well-being support for their employees including 

• physical activity tracking
• mental well-being resources
• nutritional health support
• health reports and insights

And those participating can claim employee rewards from 4’000+ rewards partners.

It’s a positive-behaviour-reinforcement platform and Startup Club ZA’s 2024 Startup of the Year HealthTech winner.

4. WHERE ARE THEY NOW

The ZA Stablecoin

A year ago we shared the story of the riches in stablecoins and how local startup ZARP is trying to capitalise on the rise of these tokens.

Stablecoins that work are big businesses: USDT’s market cap is $133bn, making $1.3bn quarterly profit (Q2 2024) with only 100-odd employees.

The concept is pretty straightforward. For various reasons, people doing trading and other activities on blockchains want to be able to swap in a “stable currency” such as the US Dollar without having to exit the ecosystem. So in comes USDT, a crypto token that is pegged to the US Dollar.

How is it made? Well, people deposit real US Dollars in exchange for tokens and Tether (the company behind USDT) then uses the real US Dollar to buy US government bonds that give yields of a few %.

Owners of USDT can at any point exchange their USDT for real US dollars, but here is the thing… no one really does. Leaving USDT with $118m+ in reserves just sitting there earning interest on those US government bonds.

Local stablecoin ZARP is still going strong and has seen usage of their token increase, and so has the total amount of ZARP created. Should there be mainstream adoption of a ZAR-backed stable coin, these guys will be ready.

5. ON THE PODCAST

Free Wifi on the Way to Work

SA’s 15 million daily minibus taxi commuters spend on average 126 minutes travelling to work, school and such daily – that’s nearly 16 million hours per day!

Imagine if we could get them all free internet while they travel. Yeah, we could fund it through brands paying to tap directly into an audience in a host of different ways, rewarding them for reading the news, playing a game, or even completing a survey… 

Well, that’s what the team at Sebenza is building: An intuitive, gamified platform that brings content, brands, products, and connectivity together in a single digital ecosystem that connects and rewards commuters in over 8’000 taxis across SA.

We had Sebenza co-founders, Wesley Dorning and Calvin Le Mottee, on the latest episode of the pod (yes, it’s back after a short hiatus!). See how they’re building it, the unique challenges they had to overcome and get some powerful insights into building in this exciting space…

BLACK FRIDAY!

Get 68+ Founders to Help You Build

Startup can become a lonely game and it’s easy to get stuck…

But when you surround yourself with others who’re also building businesses, you unlock a certain kind of magic you can’t get anywhere else… insights, ideas, honest people to bounce off of, trustworthy pilot testers, valuable connections, key introductions and maybe even a partner or two.

We know, that’s why we started The Open Collab (TOC) a few months ago to give founders a space to support each other.

And does it work? Dunno, you tell us…

Magic for founders, just another average Tuesday at the Collab…

And we’d love for you to join in, so we’re doing that Black Friday thang and giving you 40% off a year’s subscription, plus the first 10 signups get a bonus gift of 3 of the most must-read SA startup books right now.

That’s right, Stalking Giants, Life Lessons and The First Kudu absolutely free for the first ten people to take up the offer — they’re all must-reads for any SA founder and just in time for December.

Get 40% off

IN SHORT

Well, well, lookie here…

📰 Funding Local News. A new R114 million fund to support the digital transformation of small, independent SA news publishers is in the works. The Digital News Transformation Fund (DNT Fund) is a partnership between The Association of Independent Publishers (AIP) and Google and will be administered independently by Tshikululu Social Investments.

🌿 Vine Connections. On Wednesday 4 December, The Stellenbosch Network and The Open Letter are hosting a business speed networking jam with lekker snacks and drinks at the University’s Botanical Gardens to help startups connect more with people in other business sectors and vice versa – B2B networking with established players, anyone?

📺 Memory Lane. SA’s first TV museum, the Tevolution Museum, was just launched in Cape Town by Hisense SA, The Western Cape Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport, and the SA Sendinggestig Museum. Visitors can see everything from a nostalgia-giving wooden box TV, right the way through to the R400k Hisense 110-inch UX TV built at its Atlantis factory.

🌍 African AI. OpenAI, Meta, and French telecom Orange are working on a collaborative project that’ll see them training AI programs on thousands of African dialects spoken on the continent to address the shortage of African language models. The project will kick off in the first half of next year, focusing on two West African languages, Wolof and Pulaar.

🇿🇦 Flying High. SA’s state airline South African Airways is showing signs of a turnaround with its recent announcement of profits to the tune of R252 million for the first time since 2012. And it seems like some of the banks are taking notice, with some already approaching the SOE to fund its route expansion plans.

🎯 Founder Focus. Every year, more than half of entrepreneurs put their company’s future at risk by failing to take a proper break over the holidays. Our friends at Metavolve are hosting a free, hands-on 2-hour workshop on 11 December with practical steps to end off 2024 in a way that allows you to recharge over Christmas so that you can come back on fire and ready to dominate again in January – register here.

JOBS IN TECH

Makin’ Moves O’Clock?

Retail Product Manager at Superbalist

Senior Dev (2x roles) at KHULA!

UI/UX Manager at Derivco

Talent Advisor at OfferZen

Hiring? Get in touch, and we will feature it here.

GAME TIME

Been paying attention??

We love the South African non-fiction category, particularly books about startups. So it's quiz time…Pick the correct answer, and you could win a copy of Alan Knott-Craig’s book!

WHAT YOU SAID

Time applies…

We asked what’s worth the effort of a credit application, and it’s just the big stuff…

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🏡 Property and cars only. (57%)

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 📱 Maybe the odd credit card or phone contract. (20%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🛍️ Everything! Clothing accounts, furniture – never pay cash for anything. (3%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🧔 Nothing, I will remain credit-free, forever! (9%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🦄 Mainly lines of credit for my business – gotta keep growing. (11%)

In case you missed it, on Tuesday, we took a deep dive into startups democratising your financial data.

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Time to optimise? BMW released another video of ChatGPT partner Figure 2’s robot army working in their factory. Apparently, the bots have boosted their efficiency by 400% in just 3 months.

And if you wanna laugh at some silly humans, the Reddit comment thread on this video is quite fun too.

In this Open Letter:

• Democratising data: Giving everyone bank-level financial insights.
• Innovating Jozi, AI Pokémon trainers & Africa’s cybercrime conundrum.
• Finances sorted: Get 90% off your business accounting right here.
• Fake startups and learnership impact: The results are in.
• Lonely building your startup? Join The Open Collab and get support.

Together with:

Did someone forward you this email? Join {{active_subscriber_count}} South Africans reading The Open Letter by signing up here.

TRENDING NOW

Democratising 40+ Million’s Financial Data

If you’ve ever tried applying for any credit, you’d know it needs A LOT of paperwork… 

Payslips, addresses, bank statements, and all that budgeting and expenditure info — you know the drill. Then you apply to two providers for the same product, and guess what? You have to do it all over again. Yep, that same handwritten budgeting sheet… twice.

In fact, given that the number of overall credit originations (how many new accounts opened) increased by 15.2% in Q2 of this year alone, it’s likely that this process happens countless times per year. And this doesn't even include the two-thirds of applications declined by the banks themselves.

Yet, all of this financial data has given banks a bit of an unfair upper hand: SA banks have managed to capture the business of 50% of credit products in SA. 

They know exactly what people need, what they can afford, and they control most of the key credit-related communication channels. It’s basically a law-backed moat — hard to break into, even if someone else comes along with a better product.

‍

But whose data is it anyway?

With AI making data more valuable than ever, it begs the question: who really owns it?

A solid case can be made that data belongs to the person who creates it. Now in banking, that’s not the bank — it’s the person making the transaction and generating the data point in the first place.

Open banking is a step towards giving customers more control over how their financial data is accessed and shared. While it doesn’t necessarily mean you legally “own” your data, it shifts the power back to you, letting you decide who gets access and why. 

And that’s a big deal.

Open banking essentially allows API access to bank accounts that could allow third parties to get deep insights into your transaction data.

Why is this a good idea, you might ask?

Well if they have the same level of detail your bank does, they can offer you competitive or even outright better products than your bank, making it a big win for consumers.

So, how does it all come together seamlessly? Let’s be real — integrating with an Open Banking API isn’t exactly simple. Getting every credit provider on board and pulling meaningful insights from it? That’s a huge ask.

That’s where local startup truID comes in.

Democratising SA consumers’ financial data…

truID is on a mission to democratise consumers’ financial data, enabling them to share their financial information to get better financial services securely.

It works by letting providers securely link a consenting applicant’s account with truID, which fetches financial data from SA’s Big 6 Banks, validates it, and enriches it into detailed insights. Basically, it gives a FinTech the same transparency and quality data that a bank would have.

It even levels the playing field for non-bank providers, enabling them to achieve the same operational efficiencies as banks and FinTechs, improving credit origination from hours or days to just 3 minutes.

And financial enablement for every South African is something truID co-founder Paris Valakelis feels very strongly about: “Access to financial services should not depend on outdated methods of assessment,” he explains. “By using transaction data, we’re not just improving efficiencies for credit providers – we’re empowering millions of South Africans to take control of their financial futures.”

Great for the current 22 million credit-active South Africans, but the real game-changer is what this could mean for the 20 million financially invisible ones.

We’re watching this space…

CHECK THIS OUT

Free Sanction Screening (KYC) for 2025

In the mission to get SA of the FATF greylist, stricter anti-money laundering (AML) regulations now apply for businesses that deal with individuals where the movement of an asset is involved — think investments, sales of property or sales of any other assets.

Central to this AML process is checking whether individuals appear on international sanction lists — even better is ongoing monitoring to see whether any of your customers appear on these lists in the future.

That’s where local startup ZenDetect sorts you out. They onboarded Pioneer Finance within 2 weeks and helped them reduce their KYC overhead by more than 50%.

Whadda Deal

And to make it really easy for you to get going, they are offering FREE sanction list screening for a year for anyone onboarding sanction list screening before 15 February 2025.

All you have to do is book yours by 15 December, and BOOM, you got 1 year’s worth of savings to outprice your competitors with for Mahala.

Get Free Screening for a Year

IN SHORT

A couple o’ fast facts for your water cooler chats…

💡Innovate Jozi. Jozi gets a new hub to stimulate innovation and support SMMEs thanks to networking & security technology company Cisco, and business incubation hub Forge X.

🗺️ Pokémon No. Niantic the company that developed Pokémon Go is building a new “Large Geospatial Model” (LGM) using millions of scans from the smartphones of Pokémon Go players.

🕵️‍♀️ Cybercrime Hotspot. Africa’s growing digital infrastructure is providing fertile ground for cybercriminals with African organisations suffering 3’370 attacks per week, 2x that of their global counterparts.

🥊 Punching Up. Pick n Pay is set to list Boxer on the JSE after raising an R8.5 billion IPO with 157.4 million shares allocated to qualifying investors at R54 per share.

🎯 Black Friday. Xero is offering 90% off the first 6 months of their packages. That’s right, get the world’s leading cloud accounting software starting at just R45 per month. Offer expires this Friday, so hurry!

BUILDING TOGETHER

Happening over at The Open Collab

In the last few days alone, in our online community, we…

• Learnt about a whole whack of awesome business/startup games to play together…
• Gave Joel some veteran insights into the LinkedIn ads network.
• Celebrated Laurie’s computer vision project with Skeg.
• Adored Jo’s new comms agency website 🤩.
• Helped proofread Danei and Elijah’s fin board game rules — it’s almost time!
• Were the first in SA to learn of an exciting new partnership that might just shake up the local e-delivery bike game.
• Organising comp tickets to a Stellenbosch event for Elijah.

Thinking about joining The Open Collab?

• Supercharge your network in the SA startup landscape — get that introduction, get that customer, or meet that partner.
• Get feedback on your products, services and/or offers from others who have built and are building their own products right now.
• Join all our online and in-person events for free!
• Exclusive 1-on-1 sessions with startup consultants.

SA’s only dedicated tech startup and scale-up founder community.

Join The Open Collab

HAPPENING SOON

Upcoming Events

29 November 2024 — Chat Roulette — Online: Voted as one of the best-loved founder community exercises of 2024, The Open Collab community gets together to connect, work together and help each other succeed — Join The Open Collab community to attend for free.

4 December 2024, 17:30 — 20:00: We are partnering up with The Stellenbosch Network to host a speed networking event. This is going to be an awesome opportunity to meet some local Stellenbosch startups. Come join in!

6 December 2024 — AMA with Alan Knott-Craig: After our LinkedIn Live with Allan, you voted to an Ask Me Anything session — Join The Open Collab community to attend for free.

13 December 2024 — Sales Masterclass — Online: Part 3: Keep your B2B sales pipeline filled with this Masterclass session with sales expert, Sebastian Chapman — Join The Open Collab community to attend for free.

View all our upcoming events here.

WHAT YOU SAID

Spot the fake…

On Friday, we ran a special startup trivia in our first Fast Five Friday edition, and it was quite stellar: Spot the fake startup (or Boulderdash — startup edition)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ Rent-A-Chicken: A service that lets you rent egg-laying hens and coops for a farm-to-table experience. (25%)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ Ship Your Enemies Glitter: A company that anonymously mails glitter-filled envelopes to your foes. (20%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Plant Therapist: AI-based “therapy” sessions for your plants to “understand their emotional needs” and ensure optimal growth. (40%)

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ I Do, Now I Don’t: An online marketplace for selling and buying second-hand engagement rings. (15%)

Wanna know which one was the right answer? Go to Friday’s letter and vote to unmask the fake startup.

Prepping the next generation…

Then, last Tuesday, we asked about your experience with learnerships, and most don’t want the bureaucracy…

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 🎓 I’ve completed one myself. (17%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️ 😉 We regularly use them to get new employees. (21%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 🍎 Well, now I’m strongly considering offering one. (17%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️ 🙌 We tried it once with interesting results. (21%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⛔ Nope. Too much red tape. (24%)

Your 2 cents…

Such an inspiring story, Mike! 🙌 Kudos to you for making such a lasting impact!

Great perspective, Rudolph! 😊 It’s fantastic when programs align to give a win-win all around!

Ha ha, not everyone’s journey is the same, hey Chris? But, ja, the couple of success stories shine. 🎉

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Coca-Cola dropped their annual Christmas ad, a remake of its 1995 classic. It was well received until people saw it was made by AI, with one TikTokker saying “Coke ruined Christmas”. Annnd of course, someone posted their unhinged version to Reddit…

In this Open Letter, we’re trying something a lil different on Fridays by featuring Five startups that you need to keep your eyes on — we call it Fast-Five-Friday… and it includes an all-new Jobs In Tech section and a new game, so be sure to keep scrolling!

Once done reading, hit reply and tell us what you think (even if you don’t like it).

1. EARLIER DAYS

Training That’s Actually Fun

Keeping your employees at the top of their game is crucial, but in many cases, traditional training methods that are slow and expensive just don’t cut it. Besides, modern ways of learning on mobile phones have proven to be very effective.

Take Duolingo, the world’s favourite language app, studies show that their learners can achieve similar levels of proficiency to students who have done four semesters of university in half the time.

So what if we take the power of mobile-first, reinforced earning and bring it to the workplace? That’s exactly what local startup Beeline does.

Beeline enables companies to create — or collaborate with their team to develop — fun, Duolingo-style training programs tailored to their needs. The result? Staff who not only complete training but actually enjoy it. Say goodbye to boring workshops and hello to the future of workplace learning.

2. GROWING NICELY

Mountain Bikes are Expensive, Insure it!

There are anywhere between 500k and 800k+ mountain bikers in SA. And it’s quite the money spinner, globally, bringing in a tidy $101 billion in 2023. With the average cost of a bike knocking you back R55’000 and a handful of change, it makes sense that these bikes need insurance… 

Enter Two Three Bird, a bicycle insurer with operations in the UK, South Africa, Australia, and the US. They recently acquired Project 529, a comprehensive registration and bicycle recovery service with more than 3 million searchable bikes on its database.

With the industry set to more than double to $228.90 billion by 2030, we think Two Three Bird might be onto something…

3. THE TIME IS NOW

Connect the World

When it comes to internet connectivity, South Africa is still very much unequal.

Leafy suburbs typically have access to fibre lines that cost anything from R350 to R1000 per month, and looking at household fibre data usage in Australia, it’s likely that South African households consume between 350 and 500 GB of data per month. That makes it less than R1 per GB.

Now, take mobile network data prices, which are the only option for many South Africans living in townships; we are talking about R40 - R100 a GB. That is 40-100x more expensive.

But fibertime is changing that. They install fibre infrastructure in townships and then sell daily uncapped vouchers for as little as R5. Depending on usage, the price per GB could be under R1.

With an estimated 11.6 million people living in townships in SA, this is a massive market. So, it is not only a lucrative business opportunity but a great way to provide more affordable access to all South Africans.

We had the founder of Fibertime, Alan Knott-Craig, on our podcast, How Would You Build It, recently. He shared stories of their failure at Mxit, success at Herotel, fibertime, and lessons they learned along the way. Listen here:

4. FROM THE OPEN COLLAB COMMUNITY

Grad Recruitment Sorted

Roughly 200k-300k university graduates hit the South African job market every year, and top companies scramble to find the best candidates. You have to market to various campuses, filter through hundreds of applications and under immense time pressure (the best candidates find jobs quickly).

Local scale-up Leaply tackles this HR pain head-on.

It offers built-in psychometrically pre-assesses and vets and recommends top graduate talent instantly and on-demand – simplifying the grad recruitment process into a simplified platform. What’s more, once you are registered as a grad on the platform, future jobs that appear that match your profile can also be sent your way.

Think of it as a lifetime recruitment friend — but not the annoying LinkedIn recruiter who slides into your DMs every six months asking if you’re “open to new opportunities”.

Wanna build with founders like Tiaan from Leaply? Come Join The Open Collab.

5. SUPPORT YOU NEED*

Now Anyone Can Sanction List Screen

In a mission to get SA of the FATF greylist, stricter anti-money laundering (AML) regulations now apply for businesses that deal with individuals where the movement of an asset is involved — think investments, sales of property or sales of any other assets.

Central to this AML process is checking whether individuals appear on international sanction lists — even better is ongoing monitoring to see whether any of your customers appear on these lists in the future.

That’s where local startup ZenDetect sorts you out. They onboarded Pioneer Finance within 2 weeks and helped them reduce their KYC overhead by more than 50%.

And to make it really easy for you to get going, they are offering FREE sanction list screening for a year for anyone onboarding sanction list screening before 15 February 2025.

All you have to do is book yours by 15 December, and BOOM, you got 1 year’s worth of savings to outprice your competitors with for Mahala.

Get the Deal Now

IN SHORT

Some SA tech gossip for the braai…

⛰️ No Sloane Down. Africa’s largest startup campus and entrepreneurship hub, 22 On Sloane, has just opened its second local hub in Cape Town (Jozi has the first one). With co-working spaces, innovation spaces, a Game development studio, ecosystem events and networking opportunities, the hub is set to support Africa’s growing startup ecosystem.

🙅‍♀️ Anti-Spam. WhatsApp is testing new ways to let users provide feedback about whether or not they wish to receive marketing messages from WhatsApp Business accounts using ‘Interested’/’Not Interested’ for 4 specific categories of messages: marketing, utilities (order and account related), authentication (OTPs), and service (customer service).

🪙 Crypto House Hunting. In a first for the local property market, South Africans can now buy property using crypto thanks to a solution built by Broll Auctions and Sales, Schindlers Attorneys and Schindlers Digital Assets.

🇿🇦 Mission Impossible? Gauteng is getting new aluminium license number plates that can self-destruct when tampered with in a bid to clamp down on criminals making fakes. These new vehicle plates require an SABS certification mark, the SA flag, ZA, and a 1cm by 1cm security feature (a barcode) that will self-destruct if someone attempts to remove it.

😎 The Stack. Founders need tools and suppliers they can trust. Check out our Founder’s Stack with your own CTO for remarkable tech builds with Octoco, all your accounting sorted with Xero and 12 more vital startup tools & services.

STARTUP JOBS FOR DAYS

Got an itch for that switch?

• Senior Product Manager at Flash Group
• Full-Stack Engineer at Sweepsouth
• UX Designer at Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• MD/GM South Africa at Moove.

Hiring a Tech/Startup role? Reply to this email, and we will feature it here.

*Zendetect has a paid partnership with The Open Letter

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Shop like an astronaut? China has unveiled Haolong, its new unmanned reusable space shuttle which some say looks like a knock-off of NASA’s retired one 🤭. We can only imagine that’s what happens when you buy a spaceship from Temu.

In this Open Letter:

• The local play: How to unlock R15bn+ in SA learnership budgets.
• SA’s young science guns, GitHub’s billion dev plan & Naspers’ earnings.
• Founder’s secret weapon: From MVP to massive scale in 5 months.
• How good SA is at growing food: The results are in.
• Short on ideas? Share this and get 100+ SA startup ideas.

Together with:

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TRENDING NOW

Solving SA’s Jobs Crisis with 4.8 Million Subsidised Employees

The youth in SA are up against it…

Youth unemployment is at 45.5% – nearly 5 million of SA’s youth (between the ages of 15 and 34) are sitting at home. And while some of them may be hustling it out, they’re not part of the formal economy.

Concerningly, nearly 1 million of them have given up hope of ever finding a job, with unemployment introducing a whole host of other social challenges. 

A solution right in front of us…

Many matriculants aren’t able to study at a university. But when they hit the job market, they’re asked what experience they have – which is obviously none.

‍

So they’re caught between a rock and a hard place – which is where learnerships come into play. Together with the qualification component, they can also gain meaningful work experience. 

The government actually has a plan for that

In SA, we have a Skills Development Levy imposed on companies with a salary bill of more than R500k per annum – worked out at 1% of the total amount paid in salaries. This SDL is meant to develop and improve employee skills.

80% of this SDL levy is disbursed via the various Skills Education Training Authorities – SETA’s. 

There are more than 20 SETA’s, each with its own sectors and sub-sectors and comprising a variety of economic activities that are related. So you’d have the BANKSETA for the Banking Sector, the MICTSETA for the Information and Communications Technology sector, the TetaSETA for the Transport sector, and so on…

But here’s the thing…

There’s a nice incentive for employers running learnerships in the form of an annual allowance and a once-off completion allowance, once the learner has completed their learnership.

Depending on the NQF (National Qualification Framework) level of the learnership (matric is level 4, BTW), employers can claim between R40k and R80k per learner per year, and as much as R120k for disabled learners.

That’s between R3’333 and R10’000 per month per learner – not bad for someone who’s getting a qualification and some on-the-job training – not to mention the extra set of hands your company has to get the job done…

What’s more, companies that run learnership programmes can get 6 points towards the 20-point skills development component of their BEE scorecard…

With between 2.4 and 3.5 million small and medium enterprises (SMEs) operating in South Africa, imagine what SA’s youth unemployment rate would look like if each SME took on just one job seeker…

The local player bringing learners, trainers, employers and more together…

But with government processes comes admin and know-how. That’s where the local training management system Inala comes in. They built a platform for connecting and enabling this ecosystem of government programs and the private sector (both training programs and employers):

• The Learner: an unemployed youth from a previously disadvantaged background
• The Host Employer: hosts the learner in the workplace.
• A Training Provider: the organisation that will provide the training.
• The Facilitator: to conduct the training.
• The Workplace Mentor: offers guidance and support in the workplace.
• The Assessor/Moderator: ensures that the learners are actually growing their skills.
• The Funder: funding these learning projects.
• And lastly the Skills Development governing bodies: SETA/QCTO.

The platform has a whole host of features including: 

• The ability to build out your programmes, and track learner attendance, progress and competency to identify learners at risk of dropping off.
• Manage programme facilitators and training scheduling. 
• Manage a digital portfolio of evidence submissions in a paperless environment (good for the actual environment).
• Advanced customised dashboards for reporting and compliance.

We recently chatted to Inala Co-Founder Jason Schwegmann and only 52% of SA’s SMEs are actively claiming back their SDL contributions, leaving billions in unclaimed funds on the table each year. Unreal…

With platforms like Inala, stakeholders in the training industry can scale operations, train more learners, and reduce dropout rates through a centralised platform, bringing key role players together to boost employment opportunities for SA’s youth.

We’re watching this space…

CHECK THIS OUT

From MVP to Scale in 5 Months

Remember in June this year when we told you about LeaseSurance, the startup that’s making rental deposits a thing of the past? 

They’re now an SA Startup of the Year finalist.

But here’s the part you didn’t know: Just a few months before we wrote about them, the product was basically still an MVP – good enough to get some initial validation, but nowhere near ready for scale.

And scale is what they needed… in PropTech, margins are low, so you need high volume and fast, but you also need to trim admin and operational costs down to the bone.

So founder Paul Schaefer did something not every SA founder knows about…

The new way to build in SA

Instead of doing the obvious: Getting a dev agency on board or (eek!) trying to build a team internally, Paul opted to get a crew of engineering devs on the job…

He went to Octoco (which stands for outsourced CTO) and, as the name suggests, it’s your next step up from your average developers – a distinction we don’t make readily enough here in SA, but Paul knew that if he wanted to build an actual business fast, engineers were the way to go.

From March to July this year, Octoco rebuilt LeaseSurance from the ground up, enabling real-time data integration, streamlined claims automation, and seamless user and transaction management – see the full details of the project here.

The special forces of SA Tech

Within 5 months, LeaseSurance was streamlined, operations optimised enough that Paul could see a route to profitability and – most importantly – it was set up so that Paul and his team could focus on one thing: scaling.

“The results are immediately visible,” Paul explains. “We’re servicing existing clients faster and onboarding new ones with ease. Our ability to handle client portfolio growth has significantly improved, all while maintaining financial viability.”

Serious about ensuring your greatest chance of success?

Get Octoco in your corner

IN SHORT

Some tech titbits to enjoy…

🇿🇦 Young Science Guns. Two Grade 11 South African scientists will fly the flag at this year’s İzmir International Innovation Science Energy Engineering Fair (IISEEF) taking place in Turkey from the 30th of November to the 3rd of December. The two projects they’ll be showcasing set out to enhance our understanding of exercise physiology and present a viable alternative for sealing wounds respectively.

🛒 Soaring e-commerce. The tide is turning for ecommerce in SA according to new data from Absa. The average value of e-commerce transactions has increased from R350 to R430 from the start of 2023 to Q3 in 2024, while the average value of physical store transactions has dropped from R350 to R340 over the same period.

🤖 DevBots. GitHub’s CEO Thomas Dohmke has shared that the integration of AI tools into the collaborative development platforms toolset will help it grow its user base from 100 million to a billion (human) software developers over the next 10 years.

💸 MVC. SA’s most valuable company, Naspers, is expecting strong results for the 1st half of the 2025 financial year. The expected strong headline earnings per share jump of between 87.2% and 84% is attributed to the growth and enhanced profitability of its e-commerce operations and equity-accounted investments, especially Tencent.

🎯 The Stack. Founders need tools and suppliers they can trust. Check out our Founder’s Stack with easy-apply R5M business funding from Lula, next-level authority building with Stream and loads more vital startup tools & services.

BUILDING TOGETHER

Happening over at The Open Collab

In the last few days alone, in our online community, we…

• Discussed the Checkers Sixty60 driver controversy and speculated about SA’s true unemployment levels.
• Discovered that HubSpot offers significant discounts to startups 😮.
• Shared a list of 26 startups that YC thinks the world really needs right now.
• Delved at tech to solve government efficiency concerns VS long pay cycles in that space.
• Got our invites for Friday’s product masterclass 🚀.
• Discussed Norway’s questionable startup taxes and how this can dampen innovation.
• Helped Enrco find a solution for blocking unwanted WhatsApp calls.

Thinking about joining The Open Collab?

• Supercharge your network in the SA startup landscape — get that introduction, get that customer, or meet that partner.
• Get feedback on your products, services and/or offers from others who have built and are building their own products right now.
• Join all our online and in-person events for free!
• Exclusive 1-on-1 sessions with startup consultants.

SA’s only dedicated tech startup and scale-up founder community.

Join The Open Collab

HAPPENING SOON

Upcoming Events

22 November 2024 — Product Masterclass — Online: Part 3: The tools, frameworks and habits of exceptional product teams with SA product legend Roger Norton — join The Open Collab community to attend for free.

29 November 2024 — Sales Masterclass — Online: Part 3: Keep your B2B sales pipeline filled with this Masterclass session with sales expert, Sebastian Chapman — join The Open Collab community to attend for free.

6 December 2024 — AMA with Alan Knott-Craig: After our LinkedIn Live with Alan, you voted to an Ask Me Anything session — join The Open Collab community to attend for free.

View all our upcoming events here.

WHAT YOU SAID

Home-grown greens…

We asked if you had ever tried growing your own veggies, and at least we all tried…

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 😅 Yeh, no that didn’t go so well. (47%)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🍅 Of course, you should see my 2-pound tomatoes! (25%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🥗 Why on Earth would I? The Spar is like, right there. (10%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🍃 Oh I’ve grown a LOT – just not the edible kind. (12%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 😮 Oops, just remembered I forgot to water mine, since Covid! (6%)

Your 2 cents…

That’s awesome, Jason! 🌱 Even tiny pepper plants are a win. Replanting can be tricky — maybe AgriLogiq needs to expand into backyard SOS kits! 🚜

Wow, you’re doing great, Sakhile! 🌿

Thanks so much, Lara! That’s high praise, and we’re honoured to make the cut. 😊

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Money sense? Yes, Donald Trump named Elon Musk part of his administration. Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are going to head up the new US department of DOGE (Department Of Government Efficiency), and they have one goal: to reduce wasteful government spending.

Lucky Americans; just imagine if we could get that in SA… 🇿🇦

In this Open Letter:

• Fertile soil: New SA tech helps farmers increase crop yield by 50%+.
• Jozi’s R90M space dome, OpenAI’s helper bot & SA’s Google Boost.
• Early Black Friday: Win a year’s worth of free KYC for your startup.
• What needs real-time data visualisation: The results are in.
• Short on ideas? Share this and get 100+ SA startup ideas.

Together with:

Did someone forward you this email? Join {{active_subscriber_count}} South Africans reading The Open Letter by signing up here.

TRENDING NOW

Helping Farmers Put 50% More on Your Plate

Since that one guy decided enough with the hunting and the gathering, and started farming 12’000 years ago, it’s been a tough gig…

At the mercy of drought on the one end of the weather, and flooding, hail and frost on the other, weather patterns have always played a significant part in the success, or failure, of a farm.

In recent years, however, there has been more extreme weather, more frequently, and with more intensity.

‍

How we gonna feed all these people?

There are nearly 8.2 billion of us on planet Earth (including the 10 astronauts in space right now), and we’re set to add just under 2 billion people by 2050, requiring a 60% increase in food production…

But that’s not all. The world’s arable farmland is decreasing with at least 100 million hectares of healthy and productive land lost each year to urbanisation, degrading soil and soil erosion, pollution, deforestation, and desertification to name but a few.

Some areas are already experiencing food insecurity with nearly 240 million people in 48 countries experiencing high levels of acute food insecurity.

In essence, our food requirement is up (and rising), and arable land is down, meaning farmers need to produce double the amount of food with half the land…

And while we’re not at post-apocalyptic levels (just yet), it’s important to figure out some innovative solutions to help farms offset the effects of extreme weather, and maximise their crop yields…

Helping farmers produce more with less…

Local AgriTech AgriLogiq focuses on smart farming solutions for protected cultivation that reduce resource needs and increase crop yield. 

Protected cultivation offers ways for farmers to control the impact of the weather on crops growing under anything from shade netting to polytunnels, and inside warehouses. This allows for protection against fungal growth, plant diseases, and pests and an increase in yield by as much as 50%.

But the thing with this is it changes the environment under the covers, introducing a whole host of new variables the farmer has to cater for – it needs to be constantly managed. Temperature and humidity changes, light is impacted, and air and soil composition changes. 

That’s where AgriLogiq’s solution, which comprises hardware and software, offers: 

• Automation controllers for precise climate control
• Agricultural sensors to pick up rainfall, Co2 levels, soil probes and more
• Data analytics to provide farmers with data to help create optimal growing environments, improve plant health, and enable data-driven decision-making
• Automated irrigation, mechanical drive, and greenhouse automation components
• All accessible remotely, so farmers can monitor and control their systems from anywhere in the world. 

More green for your capital

AgriLogiq is helping its customers reduce their capital expenditure by 52% and save as much as 86% on operating expenses.

In one instance, AgriLogiq was able to turn a Green Pepper farm in Mpumalanga from a 35% YoY crop loss to a zero loss and a 50% increase in crop yield.  

But what’s really interesting is that AgriLogiq is allowing farmers to farm produce in regions they previously weren't able to be farmed. 

Building solutions to help farmers maximise their crop yield, making a play for sustainable farming solutions, and helping secure food for our people; we can't help but watch this space…

CHECK THIS OUT

Save R100k+ in Anti-Fraud Monitoring

One of the most insidious risks FinTechs, PropTechs, Marketplaces, FreightTech, LegalTech and a whole host of GamingTech ventures face is money laundering- and terrorism fraud…

Because South Africa is a major target – we lose over R1.1 trillion in illicit financial flows every year and hundreds of illegal millions more is estimated to flow through SA, which is exactly why SA is on the greylist (remember that?).

We’ve warned about this before – last year one of our most-read posts was on the risk this poses to both corporate SA and new ventures.

It’s important to protect your company. To recap:

• You need to do sanction list screening as part of your KYC on every potential new client BEFORE entering into a business relationship with them.
• The penalties are severe: This year, the SARB fined Grindrod Bank R10M for non-compliance.

And you can bet they’re going to be doubly attentive now that SA’s Jan 2025 greylist deadline is approaching.

Get 1 year of free sanction screening this Black Friday*

Local sanction screening provider ZenDetect knows how painful it is for a new or scaling venture to take on additional KYC costs…

That’s why they’re giving away 1 year of continuous sanction screening (monitoring) worth over R100k+ (depending on your database size) for free, gratis and mahala this Black Friday, so you can stay compliant AND keep your pricing competitive.

To qualify, simply hit the button below and engage ZenDetect sanction screening and monitoring right now…

Save R100k+ Zendetect

IN SHORT

Some lekke facts to gooi around the watercooler…

🇿🇦 Google Boost. Google has announced the 2024 cohort of SA startups to participate in the Google for Start-ups Accelerator Africa: Black Founders programme. They include online marketplace Aveade, on-demand delivery platform Breaze Delivery, Mapha Logistics a BusOps digital tools provider, Swagshack an online street fashion service, e-commerce and fintech platform Vuleka, and Wisi-Oi a video-based resell fashion reselling platform.

📽️ Dome mind if I do. The Johannesburg Planetarium has received a facelift to the tune of a R90 million ‘digital dome’ thanks to The University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) and Anglo American. The largest of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere - the dome will offer a 360° immersive experience via its state-of-the-art- projection system.

🤖 Helper Bot. OpenAi is getting ready to launch ‘Operator’ in January. ‘Operator’ is OpenAi’s latest AI that can use your computer to perform certain tasks on your behalf like booking travel tickets or writing code. Hmmm. What could go wrong?

👷‍♂️ Big Data. Big Expansion. SA’s largest data centre operator Teraco has received R8 million in funding to build a new data centre. The 40MW critical power load expansion will be completed in 2026, bringing the company’s Islando Campus in Ekurhuleni’s total critical power load capacity to 110MW.

😎 Domain Plays. Local e-commerce player Bash was quick to pounce on the exit of Zando and snapped up the Zando domains. Old Zando customers (and those heading to the site) will now instead be redirected to Bash.

🎯 The Stack. Founders need tools and suppliers they can trust. Check out our Founder’s Stack with the best in business strategy with Metavolve, investment, offshoring and startup legal insights with Dommisse Attorneys and 12 more vital startup tools & services.

BUILDING TOGETHER

Happening over at The Open Collab

In the last few days alone, in our online community, we…

• Made sure that Jesse and Jo had a lot of friends and support at last night’s startup mixer.
• Celebrated with Richard as he secured funding, found a niche to exploit and changed the game in 3 (tough but oh-so-worth-it) weeks.
• Got Bobby a potential local client, wink wink.
• Gawked at Tyler’s legal-docs assistant proto — and waiting eagerly to test it out… 🤩.
• Sourced Gustav about 3’500 Mailchimp alternative options.
• Learnt what’s in Danei’s “secret pink juice” and got her and Elijah to commit to driving across the country for a happy sale.
• Locked in loads of Startup of the Year votes for our fam.

Thinking about joining The Open Collab?

• Supercharge your network in the SA startup landscape — get that introduction, get that customer, or meet that partner.
• Get feedback on your products, services and/or offers from others who have built and are building their own products right now.
• Join all our online and in-person events for free!
• Exclusive 1-on-1 sessions with startup consultants.

SA’s only dedicated tech startup and scale-up founder community.

Join The Open Collab

HAPPENING SOON

Upcoming Events

Join us this Friday for the second in a 3-part series with The Open Collab exclusive on B2B Sales Series. Want to learn what it’s about? Watch the video on IG below…

Instagram post by @theopenletterza

22 November 2024 — Product Masterclass — Online: Part 3: The tools, frameworks and habits of exceptional product teams — join The Open Collab community to attend for free.

29 November 2024 — Sales Masterclass — Online: Part 3: Keep your B2B sales pipeline filled with this Masterclass session with sales expert, Sebastian Chapman — Join The Open Collab community to attend for free.

6 December 2024 — AMA with Alan Knott-Craig: After our LinkedIn Live with Allan, you voted to an Ask Me Anything session — Join The Open Collab community to attend for free.

View all our upcoming events here.

WHAT YOU SAID

Food for thought…

We asked what you need real-time report visualisations on, and investments need more eyes…

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🍽️ What’s in my fridge at home. (14%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ ❤️ My spouse's mood levels so I know when to wash dishes or take them for dinner. (17%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🎮 My ‘Diablo 4’ player rank in relation to Elon. (9%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 📈 When to buy/sell my stocks/currencies/crypto of choice. (51%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🛒 The value of specific Checkers Mini Shop collectables to lock in the best swaps. (9%)

Your 2 cents…

Ha, K, now that's some real-time reporting we could use too! 🥶📊

Love that, Nollie! Adapting old-school ways to modern tools is where the magic happens. 🚀📈

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Best in SA? Startup Club has made its 44 finalists public for SA Startup of the Year. There are quite a few Open Letter family members there. You can now vote for your friends and favourites — voting is open until Friday.

In this Open Letter:

• SA’s latest R1bn exit: The startup that makes businesses smarter.
• 5M Mzansi hotspots, Woolies’ Dash(ing) results & SA slacking off.
• Go with a bang: Fill your B2B sales pipeline for 2025.
• Which games you like to play: The results are in.
• Lonely building your startup? Join The Open Collab and get support.

Together with:

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TRENDING NOW

Helping Business Make Better Decisions (Faster)

— Insights from the startup that lead to SA’s latest R1bn+ exit

Having your finger on the pulse of what’s going on in your business is mega important…

For many businesses, keeping finances up to date is mostly a compliance thing. But what if your financials could empower you to make better business decisions quickly?

A major pain for many founders is that management accounts normally only tell part of the story, and what’s more, not everyone in leadership has a background in finance. 

The data guiding your business's decisions…

Companies have anywhere between 5 and 20+ data sources meant to inform decisions, dictate next steps, and determine if business objectives have been met…

Pretty simple, right?

Not so much.

Seems like in this rich world of data at every turn, businesses have developed a brand new thing to be worried about: data fatigue…

And it’s a real thing. 

Data fatigue occurs when a business or individual has too much data or doesn't know what to focus on and is overwhelmed by the complexity or sheer volume of data a business collects, processes, analyses, or reports on.

And when the data quality is poor it has all sorts of ramifications on decision-making, reputational risk, and missed opportunity – not to mention the 10 to 30% of revenue spent on handling data quality issues.

Eina…

What’s more, in a recent survey of 1’300 finance and accounting C-suite and senior leaders across North America, Europe, Aus, and Singapore, 40% of CFOs reported they do not completely trust their organisation’s financial data. And ONLY 2% expressed complete confidence… 

Simply put, we have too much data that makes us go, “So what?”

The local player turning your financial data into pretty pictures (and actionable insights)

When Vangelis Kyriazis was building his accounting firm in JHB back in 2016, he wanted to offer his clients reports that made sense rather than reports showing profits and loss and a balance sheet.

To do this, they went to great lengths to build their clients’ very time-consuming Excel documents with rich graphs and insights. Clients loved it, but it wasn’t scaling well.

But turns out this was the start of Syft Analytics, an interactive & collaborative financial reporting tool providing businesses with insights into their accounting data to help them make better decisions.

8 years after launch, and this isn’t just a local business anymore. Syft has managed to sign up more than 100’000 businesses from more than 80 countries and that’s when Xero took note and purchased Syft for a whopping $70 million in September this year. 

What’s it do?

Syft integrates with Xero and others to extract data and make it simpler for a non-accountant business owner to understand using visualisations and summaries which can be presented in either pre-built report templates or fully customisable reports that provide real-time financial analysis catered to your specific business needs.

And if we consider that the human brain processes images 60’000 times faster than text, generating business reports and insights into cool-looking, insightful visuals is a no-brainer…

But the product really flexes when it provides businesses with forward-looking projections & forecasts, combining data from other 3rd party non-financial data sources like your CRM, and Google Analytics, etc.

As with most SaaS products these days, AI gave it a real boost. Users can ask AI how to improve certain things, and because Syft has access to more data like the underlying transactional data and data from other sources it helps the AI better answer those questions.

And Syft’s comprehensive visual dashboards are live and fully interactive, so even Beryll in HR can take a look without messing anything up – no offence, Beryll…

Businesses aren't going anywhere soon and reporting and visualisation tools will become ever more important in staying competitive. But if anything, the team at Syft have proven once again that SA can build tech that scales well across the world.

We’re watching this space.

CHECK THIS OUT

Start Building Your B2B Sales Pipeline for 2025

The key to closing more B2B sales is building authority and trust.

When Forrester Research found earlier in 2024 that B2B buyers are twice as likely to recommend companies they trust, their chief analyst Ian Bruce said it’s because they’re buying on behalf of the organisation, so they want to be double and triple sure you can deliver.

The New York Times goes a step further to say that Edelman and LinkedIn data shows that 54% of companies make purchasing decisions based on your thought leadership content.

Why?

• When you reach out, it helps if they already know you (ice cold sucks).
• It reinforces their trust and belief that you have authority in the space.

And, of course, it’s not easy: It takes time, dedication and consistency to build, but here’s how you can start…

Step 1: Establish trust & authority with content creation

Develop a content engine of consistent, rapidly written, high-quality content that’s on-brand, positions your product and speaks to customers’ pain points.

Step 2: Disseminate content online

Through social media with highly authoritative, efficient and automated ghostwriting for founders and execs.

Step 3: Engage in targeted outreach

Using tools like Apollo, reach out strategically to engaged targets who’ve come to know you already through your content and build high-quality leads for your funnel.

Stream has launched a 6-month, fully automated authority and trust pipeline for B2B SaaS founders and executives who know they have a product-market fit and are looking to solidify their positions in their space.

Get My Automated Pipeline Now

IN SHORT

The latest SA and tech gossip…

🤳 Connecting Mzansi. A local consortium of Internet Service Providers called JUMP launched its WayaMore WiFi network which is on a mission to build 5 million hotspots around SA and have a fully operational network by 2030.

🌍 Funding Africa. Visa is investing in 4 African Startups that graduated from its Africa Fintech Accelerator programme. The startups include: Oze, a business banking platform from Ghana, Orda, a restaurant technology startup from Nigeria, WorkPay, an HR and payroll management firm, and OkHi an AI-powered address verification service, both from Kenya.

🏖️ World Champion Slackers? Turns out we’re not such hard workers after all… According to data from the International Labour Organisation, SA ranked 79th in terms of average weekly hours (42.6 hours), percentage of the population working excessive hours (17%), and only produces 21 International dollars (Int$) per hour, 7 times lower than winners Luxembourg.

🛵 Dashing Results. Woolworths has seen some great performances across various business divisions for the 18-week period ending on 3 November 2024 with a 54.4% sales growth for its Woolies Dash on-demand food delivery service leading the charge.

😎 The Stack. Founders need tools and suppliers they can trust. Check out our Founder’s Stack with next-level lead finding with Apollo, your own CTO for remarkable tech builds with Octoco and 12 more vital startup tools & services.

BUILDING TOGETHER

Happening over at The Open Collab

In the last few days alone, in our online community, we…

• Discussed how to get going with a SaaS product with zero funding.
• Attended another stellar product masterclass with Roger Norton.
• Supported each other in the SA Startup Awards.
• Celebrated BTC all-time highs 🤑.
• Celebrated some success after the sales masterclass.
• Helped Sebastian find an online payment solution.
• Delved into WhatsApp-based commerce solutions for SA.

Thinking about joining The Open Collab?

• Supercharge your network in the SA startup landscape — get that introduction, get that customer, or meet that partner.
• Get feedback on your products, services and/or offers from others who have built and are building their own products right now.
• Join all our online and in-person events for free!
• Exclusive 1-on-1 sessions with startup consultants.

SA’s only dedicated tech startup and scale-up founder community.

Join The Open Collab

HAPPENING SOON

Upcoming Events

14 November 2024 — TechSafari is coming to Cape Town! Join Caleb and team for a memorable night at Yoco to talk all things Tech and Startup in Africa. Get tickets here. Use OL20% code to get a sweet 20% off!

14 November 2024 — OCFO is hosting their 2024 Founder’s Conference with over 200 entrepreneurs and investors present. Get your tickets here.

12-14 November 2024 — Cape Town: Africa Tech Festival: Including AI Summit and so many tech must-sees — remember you can get a limited free pass, or get access to everything by applying for a startup pass early.

15 November 2024 — Sales Masterclass: Part 2: How to spot opportunities to increase conversion rates — Join The Open Collab community to attend for free.

6 December 2024 — AMA with Alan Knott-Craig: After our LinkedIn Live with Allan, you voted to an Ask Me Anything session — Join The Open Collab community to attend for free.

View all our upcoming events here.

WHAT YOU SAID

Game on…

We asked about your go-to game, and, as expected, SA’s not that into mobile gaming…

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🧱 Puzzle games (30%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🎰 Casino games (10%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🏌️‍♂️ Sports games (3%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🔫 Battle Royale games like PUBG and Fortnite (5%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🙅‍♀️ I don't play mobile games (52%)

Your 2 cents…

Classic, DJK. Nothing like getting into desktop games 🎮.

Smart move, M. All the fun, none of the risk 🃏.

Powered by beehiiv

Clean air? When a group of Norwegians built a reactor to soak up CO2 from the air, a US startup’s Estonian deep-tech founder answered with these weird light towers that do the same thing plus then convert the CO2 into fuel. Great to see the green race going.

In this Open Letter:

• Game on: Enabling new ways to build in this $300bn industry.
• Home Affairs Premium, Wooden Spaceships & chuck all your cards.
• Growth unlocked: How they funded their next expansion phase.
• The future of last-mile deliveries in SA: The results are in.
• Lonely building your startup? Join SA’s only tech founder community.

Together with:

Did someone forward you this email? Join South Africans reading The Open Letter by signing up here.

TRENDING NOW

Bringing Data-Driven Decisions to Your Gaming

Mobile gaming is a big deal.

Around the world, there are more than 3 billion mobile gamers, with mobile games contributing about half of the $300 billion total gaming market size – more than consoles & PC games combined.

And they’re not just playing free games…

Player spending hit $41.2 billion in the 1st half of 2022, with massive mobile games like Diablo Immortal and Pokémon GO pulling in $100 million each in just 8 weeks and 2 weeks respectively.

Whilst it is a big industry, games are mostly B2C, which means lots of work and money to get the word out there. And it’s expensive…

Building in Hard Mode

The thing about gaming is it’s infinitely harder to create a profitable game with a lifespan anywhere near as long as most other tech products – ask any founder why they’d switch from B2C to B2B any day.

Why? Modern games are mostly online, and a large amount of people expect them to be free. So, to make the game successful, you need a large number of players (online games only work well when enough people are playing), but you also need to make money, which most games do by offering in-app purchases. Finally, you have to balance the game to make sure the free players are still enjoying it. It’s complicated.

And the complexity is taking its toll. 2023 was a blood bath for the gaming industry, as shown in the mobile gaming platform SuperScale’s white paper:

• 32% of mobile game studios had major layoffs in 2023
• 27% permanently downsized
• 24% almost shut down
• 29% had to cut their user acquisition budget
• Some sectors report 62% job losses
• And 40% started outsourcing development and publishing

  Why?

• 83% of games die within 3 years
• 47% of games die within the first year
• 17% die in 6 months, while 76% of games hit peak revenue in 1 year (and then it’s downhill from there).

Remember that the next time you complain about how hard it is to monetise your 1 tech product – building SaaS software is a bit less complicated…

The cost and complexities

But it’s not only in game design and development where things are complex. The fact is, it often takes an enormous amount of money to have a chance at success with a game. How much? Well, at one point, Candy Crush was spending $1M per day on marketing.

Keeping track of the return on investment (ROI) can get very complicated, especially when you are dealing with freemium games that have in-app purchases.

• Gamers from certain demographics (or cohorts) spend more on in-app purchases than others, leading to higher revenue.
• The cost to market to different cohorts varies.
• It changes over time (some cohorts play the game longer and spend more, others spend more over shorter periods, etc.).

The challenge? Constantly iterate to ensure the margin is as high as possible by adjusting where you spend your marketing money based on evidence from previous campaigns and some predictive analytics.

The local team revealing the map…

A cohort-based forecasting tool, Kohort, helps game studios forecast future events or trends with a much higher degree of accuracy, optimising and balancing marketing spending to help the specific game get better ROI on spend.

It works by categorising users by segment (sharing common characteristics like gender, country, age, platform, etc.) and cohort (a group of players who installed the game on the same day) to give game developers a more accurate view of players’ behaviour in the game. Basically, it tracks and reports if a specific ad results in a player with a specific demographic spending more or less than their average gamer on in-app purchasable content.

Then Kohort uses Machine Learning to produce extremely accurate forecasts should the current targeting and campaigns continue.

Before in-app purchases became popular, this problem didn’t exist, and we love how South Africans are pouncing on this opportunity. We’re watching this space…

CHECK THIS OUT

Enabling Growth: It’s the Little Things that Make or Break You

When Capetonian co-founders Theresa Ward and Edwina Butterworth set out to make their mark on the security systems industry, they thought their biggest battle would be against gender norms in this male-dominated space.

They were wrong…

The good news is their play worked and they grew their company Manyene Holdings from just 2 people in 2018 to 50 by 2024.

The bad news is the cost of such rapid growth depleted their cash flow and Theresa and Edwina battled to get financing with any of the traditional banks.

It’s an all-too-common story in South Africa, where 62% of SMEs struggle to access funding – making it the No. 1 barrier to growth in SA.

Fortunately, Theresa and Edwina found a lifeline…

With Lula, they got their approval within 24 hours or less.

Yet it is that easy, get access to a capital facility or capital advance of up to R5m from Lula.

Come Get Your Lula On

IN SHORT

Some titbits to drop at the braai tonight…

🌍 African Tech Fund. A new $250 million startup fund specifically for African tech companies is in the works. Tech accelerator Startup bootcamp, British-East African business tycoon Ashish Thakkar’s Mara Group and Blend Financial Services will target startup hubs in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Ivory Coast and Egypt.

🪵 You wooden believe it. Japan’s Kyoto University and Sumitomo Forestry, have launched a new CubeSat made primarily from wood. Named after the Latin for “wood”, LignoSat consists of the scientific internals encased in a wooden box, with solar panels on the outside, and caught a ride on SpaceX’s latest Falcon 9 launch.

🧙 One ID to rule them all. South Africans could be getting a single digital identity that can be used to consolidate everything from your ID number, tax number, and medical aid number. This as Home Affairs is considering Home Affairs Plus — an expedited document processing and home delivery service for your NB Home Affairs docs. *Not really called Home Affairs Plus. Yet…

⚡️Instant Cross-Border Money. FNB has partnered with BankservAfrica to enable immediate processing of low-value payments within the Common Monetary Area of SA, Namibia, Lesotho and eSwatini.

😎 The Stack. Founders need tools and suppliers they can trust. Check out our Founder’s Stack with your own fractional CFO for less with OCFO, the easiest way to manage your finances with Xero and 12 more vital startup tools & services.

BUILDING TOGETHER

Happening over at The Open Collab

In the last few days alone, in our online community, we…

• Met for our first LIVE (in-person) Office Hours with good coffee in two locations: Stellenbosch and Cape Town. ☕
• Supported and celebrated our EdTech members making big plays at Injini EdTech this week.
• Ran into a whole bunch of familiar faces at Innovation City's startup speed dating — The Open Collab peeps are everywhere these days!
• Helped Gustav find the IoT dev connection he needed for his next steps.
• Started looking for a unique WhatsApp solution for Corne — this could be big.
• Getting ready for the next Product Masterclass with Roger Norton today.

Thinking about joining The Open Collab?

• Supercharge your network in the SA startup landscape — get that introduction, get that customer, or meet that partner.
• Get feedback on your products, services and/or offers from others who have built and are building their own products right now.
• Join all our online and in-person events for free!
• Exclusive 1-on-1 sessions with startup consultants.

SA’s only dedicated tech startup and scale-up founder community.

Join The Open Collab

HAPPENING SOON

Upcoming Events

Join us today (Friday 8 Nov) at 12:00 for the second in a 3-part series with The Open Collab exclusive Product Series. Want to learn what it’s about? Watch the video on IG below…

Instagram post by @theopenletterza

8 November 2024 — Product Masterclass: Part 2: How to keep shipping truly great products, fast — Join The Open Collab community to attend for free.

14 November 2024 — TechSafari is coming to Cape Town! Join Caleb and team for a memorable night at Yoco to talk all things Tech and Startup in Africa. Get tickets here. Use OL20% code to get a sweet 20% off!

12-14 November 2024 — Cape Town: Africa Tech Festival: Including AI Summit and so many tech must-sees — remember you can get a limited free pass, or get access to everything by applying for a startup pass early.

15 November 2024 — Sales Masterclass: Part 2: How to spot opportunities to increase conversion rates — Join The Open Collab community to attend for free.

6 December 2024 — AMA with Alan Knott-Craig: After our LinkedIn Live with Allan, you voted to an Ask Me Anything session — Join The Open Collab community to attend for free.

View all our upcoming events here.

WHAT YOU SAID

Special delivery…

We asked about the future of last-mile, and drones are the way…

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🕹️ Drones. (40%)

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🤖 Autonomous Robots. (16%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️ 👩‍🌾 Trading with others once we’re living in post-apocalyptic, self-sufficient compounds brought about by today’s US election. (37%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🖨️ 3D printing what you need. (3%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🚀 Supplies every 6 months to Elon’s Colony. (3%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 💡 No, wait, I have a better idea... (3%)

Your 2 cents…

Haha, Barry – ja it could feel a bit like trading in the Wild West. 🎩

Good point, Henry! Airspace security qualms keep us grounded (literally). 🚀

Ah, welcome home, sir! 😂

Powered by beehiiv

Time to play? If you ever wished you could just prompt an AI: “Make me a game like Minecraft…” we’re almost there. In fact, you can test-play this AI-generated Minecraft game right now.

Tip: Drop some fences and then turn around… it’s freaky…

In this Open Letter:

• Next level: The missing piece of e-commerce in SA.
• Finding co-founders, SearchGPT & business owners with funding.
• Game changer: How to spot founder burnout (and counter it fast).
• How to prevent employee burnout: The results are in.
• Lonely building your startup? Join The Open Collab and get support.

Together with:

💡In Cape Town 14 November? We are going to Tech Safari’s Mixer event. Come join us. Use the code OL20% to get 20% off your ticket!

Did someone forward you this email? Join 15,085 South Africans reading The Open Letter by signing up here.

TRENDING NOW

The Missing Piece of SA E-commerce

E-commerce in South Africa is slowly becoming big business…

In 2023, SA’s online retail market hit R70 billion and is expected to reach a cool R100 billion in the next 2 years. Noice!

And, of course, Covid helped (or rather forced) it along as locals like Takealot, Checkers and Massmart doubled down – the space attracting international players like Shein, Temu and Amazon.

But it’s not all smooth cruising…

The Complexity in Delivery

Geographically South Africa is much more disbursed than some of the large metros of the developed world.

Just compare population densities:

• Paris: 20’000 per km2
• New York: 11’314 per km2
• Hong Kong: 6’900 per km2
• Cape Town: 1’530 per km2
• Johannesburg: 2’900 per km2

In fact, our richest and most populous province, Gauteng, only has 831 people per square kilometre. With only about 49 people per km2 in South Africa, to serve 1’000 customers, the average distance to travel is around 142.86 km versus just 7km in Paris or New York.

That’s likely why e-commerce historically had a slower uptake in SA than in many developed countries. In SA, e-commerce accounts for only 6% of retail, whereas in places like the US, it’s 16% and in the UK as much as 30%.

But where there is a problem, there is an opportunity…

‍

Delivering on your promises…

If you can’t deliver in key areas, well you can’t really sell online in SA (at least not well).

But having a delivery vehicle active in an area with unpredictable order volumes simply doesn’t make business sense.

So what if you could pay for a delivery on demand? Such a provider could aggregate a host of deliveries for that area, schedule them one after the other and in doing so provide the e-commerce a way to deliver there, whilst still making a schweet margin.

It’s the last mile as a service.

Hyper-local delivery drivers on call

Depending on how you look at it, local last-mile delivery provider Picup, is either a tech-based logistics company or a logistics-powered tech company.

Picup offers adaptable delivery options to suit various business needs. For example, it allows for both multi-collection routes, which is ideal for sequential deliveries, as well as on-demand, single-stop routes within short distances.

Imagine you own an artisanal soap-making business… Picup’s system can receive orders, generate optimised routes, and allocate drivers based on location and driver preferences. If you have a larger service area, Picup integrates with third-party couriers to expand your delivery reach even further.

Getting the scope and scale right

Picup has a flexible driver network of around 4’000 active drivers weekly using anything from motorbikes to large vans (and everything in between). And, as these drivers are independent contractors, it helps keep overheads (and by extension delivery costs) down.

With an impressive list of clients like Ucook, Dischem, Pick n Pay ASAP, iStore, Nando’s, McDonald's, Clicks, OneCart, and Waltons, Picup is expecting to hit 950’000 orders over this year’s Black Friday (a key date in Picup’s history), with order numbers set to continue into the new year.

Picup’s services include:

• field service (collections & deliveries)
• on-demand delivery
• third-party solutions (giving clients a white-label delivery solution to utilise within their existing applications)
• TMA (Transport Management as a Service)
• all packaged in a Delivery-as-a-Service (DaaS) model and SaaS platform with a bunch of powerful features to support end-to-end logistics.

With companies like Picup taking a tech-forward approach, it allows their clients to focus on scaling their business, rather than scaling their logistics. And is yet another key piece in the SA e-commerce puzzle.

We’re watching this space…

IN SHORT

Start a tech conversation…

📱 Business WhatsApp. Local startup Tetafi is leveraging AI to build a financial management platform that lets informal businesses, startups and entrepreneurs track their daily business transactions via WhatsApp. The platform also helps connect business owners to loans and buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) services.

🌍 African Connection. The Paratus Group has just completed its new East-West terrestrial fibre route running from the east coast of Africa in Maputo, through Johannesburg and across Botswana, to the west coast of Africa at the Cable Landing Station in Swakopmund, Namibia.

🤝 Co-Founder Connect. An app to connect cofounders called CoffeeSpace exhibited at the Startup Battlefield 200 at last week’s TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. The app’s algorithm aims to connect founders in a way that goes beyond the traditional CV, by presenting a sneak peek at their personalities and working styles, to help best-matched co-founders connect.

💸 Long after loadshedding. SARS is feeling the pinch due to Eskom’s decreased diesel usage as a result of more South Africans’ switch to rooftop solar. This R8.4 billion shortfall for SARS from the fuel levy is part of the total R22.3 billion shortfall SARS is expecting.

🔍 SearchGPT. Last week OpenAI announced its search model, available for paid users, (at least for now), with the ability to search the web for answers and provide links to the sources it comes back with. ChatGPT will reportedly use AI to decide when your query requires a search based on your request.

😎 The Stack. Founders need tools and suppliers they can trust. Check out our Founder’s Stack with easy-apply R5M business funding from Lula, next-level authority building with Stream and loads more vital startup tools & services.

BUILDER’S CORNER

How to Spot the Signs of Founder Burnout

And then treat it effectively…

Written in conjunction with organisational psychologist and Metavolve co-founder Cam Coutts.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that entrepreneurs are quite prone to burnout.

Building a new business creates the perfect environment for it: Long hours, high uncertainty, lots of moving parts, complex problems to solve with minimal resources…

That’s why news sources report that:

• 54% of founders are very stressed about their businesses
• 81% try to hide their stress, fears and challenges
• And 77% are reluctant to seek qualified professional help.

“What many of us entrepreneurs don’t know, though,” says organisational psychologist and Metavolve co-founder Cam Coutts, “is that we have access to a unique burnout ‘cure’ that doesn’t work in most any other industry…”

But to understand how it works, you need to know how to spot burnout…

The Symptoms of Burnout in Startup

1. Emotional Exhaustion

Unlike physical exhaustion, you end the day feeling completely drained and almost unable to cope with any of your normal night-time routines.

Or if you normally work till 6, but the last while you’re “done” by 3 and just want to “lie on the floor” in an attempt to force yourself to take a break.

And it kicks off a vicious cycle by triggering the next symptom…

2. De-Personalisation & Cynicism

“Your brain's internal self-defence mechanism to emotional exhaustion is, in lieu of being able to take a real break, to try and separate your empathy centres from your reality. I.e. make you care less,” Cam explains.

This plays out as, when you’re focused on a specific task, and an employee comes to you with an issue or you hear about a new customer query, you try to turn it away by saying “I don’t care” or “I don't have time for this now”.

You basically start ignoring personal and relational concerns, or fobbing them off as unimportant (when we all know they’re the real things that create flywheels in this game), leading you to make poor decisions and sometimes ruin relationships.

3. A Lack of Personal Accomplishment

The third symptom of founder burnout is when you are so overwhelmed by all the things that need doing, you don’t feel like you are getting anywhere.

Even if you are hitting major victories, they’re downplayed by the fact that there’s “so much more that still needs to be done”.

Basically, you are so exhausted that you don’t recognise small victories anymore. And you know you need to take a break, but you feel so much shame/guilt about it, that you can’t rest, so you end up going on holiday and coming back in an even worse state than before.

“Burnout is a syndrome (not an illness), that eventually becomes an actual illness,” Cam explains. “Left unchecked, burnout eventually leads to depression, anxiety, panic attacks and even physical illness – like when you suddenly get an extremely severe flu, that’s your body giving you a warning.”

The Founder-Only Burnout Cure

In most other professions, the treatment for burnout is reducing workload and taking a break. When doctors or nurses experience burnout, all they usually need is a holiday and time to recharge.

That doesn’t always work for founders, though – see, a doctor doesn’t need to care about the running of the entire hospital, but we founders do, so just going on holiday could actually stress you out even more when you can’t switch off.

The ideal treatment for a founder is to start with strategy. See those 3 burnout symptoms are a vicious cycle of one reinforcing the other, so the first step should be stopping the cycle – and out of all of them, number 3 is virtually the only one you can directly influence for immediate impact.

If you can win back your sense of personal accomplishment by clearing some of the chaos and giving yourself a measurable way to track that you’re improving by 1% every day, you break the burnout cycle. This should enable you to switch off a little over the holidays (i.e. tackle the first symptom), getting you fresh for the new year.

“We touched on this in a recent webinar,” says Cam, “and anyone can view it. Plus, I’m an organisational psychologist by training, so I am personally and professionally extremely passionate about helping founders deal with things like burnout.”

“All Open Letter readers are welcome to contact me if they have any questions or want to talk about burnout.”

You can reach Cam on LinkedIn here and connect with the rockstars at Metavolve here.

BUILDING TOGETHER

Happening over at The Open Collab

In the last few days alone, in our online community, we…

• Learned to keep the customer pipeline filled in Friday’s sales masterclass.
• Sorted out who’s going to Stellies and who’s in Green Point for our first LIVE office hours this Wednesday.
• Got a sneak preview of Friday’s upcoming product masterclass on why product-led companies win out, with Roger Norton.
• Started the week with a Tesla Beetle beating a Porsche on the quarter mile 🏎️.
• Got intro-ed to a good-looking new virtual assistant to try out.

Thinking about joining The Open Collab?

• Supercharge your network in the SA startup landscape — get that introduction, get that customer, or meet that partner.
• Get feedback on your products, services and/or offers from others who have built and are building their own products right now.
• Join all our online and in-person events for free!
• Exclusive 1-on-1 sessions with startup consultants.

SA’s only dedicated tech startup and scale-up founder community.

Join The Open Collab

HAPPENING SOON

Upcoming Events

Join us this Friday for the second in a 3-part series with The Open Collab exclusive Product Series. Want to learn what it’s about? Watch the video on IG below…

theopenletterza

View more on Instagram

theopenletterza

Add a comment...

• 7 November 2024 — JHB: TechSafari is hosting its first JHB mixer. Get tickets here and use OL20% code to get a sweet 20% off!
• 8 November 2024 — Product Masterclass: Part 2: How to keep shipping truly great products, fast — Join The Open Collab community to attend for free.
• 14 November 2024 — TechSafari is coming to Cape Town! Join Caleb and team for a memorable night at Yoco to talk all things Tech and Startup in Africa. Get tickets here. Use OL20% code to get a sweet 20% off!

View all our upcoming events here.

WHAT YOU SAID

Good for people…

We asked about preventing employee burnout, and you know best…

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🍕 Pizza parties (15%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🏓 Foosball/Table Tennis/Air Hockey leagues (4%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 💆‍♀️ Office massages (5%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️ 🏖️ “Unlimited” leave days (31%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🪂 Team-building exercises (9%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🔥 Hmm, no I have a better idea… (36%)

Your 2 cents…

“My partner has just experienced a burn out at the company we both work for. What I have learnt from it is that companies need to listen to their employees more, take note of behavior changes and have open discussions around ways to make jobs easy and more efficient. Check in with staff on a monthly basis and even offer an industrial psychologist to those that are struggling.”

Michelle

Completely agree, Michelle! Recognising changes early and supporting staff with open conversations is the kind of proactive care that can really make a difference. 🙌

“It could be all of the above but the fact is you need to match it to the need of the individual. We all have different ways to re-centre, ask employees what they need.”

Freda

Exactly, Freda — meeting individual needs is so key! 😊

“Treat them like the adults they are. Give people a sense of purpose, let the output they receive more or less match the input they give. Might be idealistic, but I don't think burnout has to do with what you put in. But rather what you get out, or in this case don't get out, for what you put in.”

Andersen

Absolutely, Andersen! Purpose and fair recognition for input are such powerful antidotes to burnout. It’s not idealistic at all — just real talk on what makes work meaningful. 🔍

“Relaxed working hours...i currently have an intern work half day. No problems”

Private

Nice, a flexible approach can make all the difference! 👍

“Set clear expectations – Ensure everyone knows their role and goals to reduce ambiguity and boost confidence. Poor job clarity is shown to be a massive contributor to stress. Encourage open communication – Create a safe space for team members to discuss workloads and any stress points. Support work-life balance – Offer flexible hours or remote work options to help balance personal and professional lives. Schedule regular check-ins – Managers should touch base frequently to spot and address stress before it builds. Celebrate wins – Recognise achievements to keep motivation high and everyone feeling appreciated. Involve employees in decisions – Allow team members to help shape their work environment, building ownership.”

Jo

Great breakdown, Jo! Addressing stress and job clarity can prevent so much burnout — and celebrating wins keeps motivation strong. Spot on! 🎉

“Above the basic leave allocations, assign leave by interview. Let employees make their case based on their productivity, their value added tasks and their personal growth markers. Award the best employees with better leave opportunities - autonomy to decide when to go, vouchers for spa days/getaways/tanks of petrol. Instead of burning out those who are the backbone of the company, give them a little more stretching room to value them”

David

Such a thoughtful idea, David. Rewarding employees with meaningful leave options could be a game changer in making people feel valued. 🎁

‍

Home office? Well, it’s official, companies who want to force employees back to the office are crazy. A new working paper by an Australian finance prof shows that companies with WFH policies post better financial returns.

Can we get an “I told you so”, anyone?

In this Open Letter:

• AI for Wellness: The quest to save SA R161bn in burnout tax.
• African VC connections: Come join our JHB and CT events next week.
• Boston Dynamics creeps, a new Mac mini & free POS for err’body.
• What SA’s townships need most: The results are in.
• Lonely building your startup? Join The Open Collab and get support.
  ‍

TechSafari 🤝 The Open Letter: Big news! Our friends over at TechSafari are coming to SA for two gatherings, and we are partnering up to offer you all a great deal to get there! Check it out here.

Did someone forward you this email? Join 14,172 South Africans reading The Open Letter by signing up here.

TRENDING NOW

The Quest to Save SA Companies R161bn in Burnout Tax

Can you believe it’s November already? 

What are we saying, of course, you can – we feel the moeg in our bones this time of year.

It’s been a fun but tough one: A lil less loadshedding but economic up and downs, interest rates, elections, a new GNU, Siya and Rachel’s divorce – not to mention hard work and looking forward to a well-deserved break soon…
‍

And it’s needed, South Africans work hard, VERY hard. You can see it in the numbers as we approach burnout season:

• SA ranked 69th out of 71 participating countries in a recent Mental State of the World report – only the UK and Uzbekistan did worse than we did.
• 36% of the SA workforce experience excessive daily stress, with 71% either disengaged or actively disengaged – all signs of burnout.
• And it all costs the SA economy a staggering R161 billion every year due to lost days of work, presenteeism (being at work but unwell), and premature death.

‍

But what can HR do?

Staff are normally your most important business “asset”, but by far the most complex and expensive to manage.

And it doesn’t help that HR is notorious for overestimating employee wellness levels (i.e. in surveys more than 75% of HR leaders tend to think “our employees are super happy” but, when asked, more than half of those same employees are miserable and struggling).

It’s an expensive over-estimation. Employee turnover costs between 1.5 and 2 times an employee's annual salary to replace them – so it's in everyone’s best interest to keep our workforce happy and healthy.

The local player with a global mental health reach...

We’ve featured mental health scale-up Ollie in previous editions of The Open Letter, but they’ve added something new worth checking out – a global 24/7 AI Mental Health Coach…

Having established their B2B employee mental health platform (complete with a network of therapists, psychologists, counsellors and coaches), Ollie has introduced a custom-trained AI called, well, Ollie, that can chat with employees (via chat or voice) in over 21 languages to either:

• Coach them through a situation itself (AI)
• Pick up where the time is right to escalate it to a human, where they can chat with one of over 150 mental health experts around the world.
  

Ollie was trained by a research team using psychological methodologies. And, as a basic feature, can determine a baseline of where someone's mental state is at, giving a score out of 100 that indicates potential for burnout.

And it seems to be working…

Already making an impact

According to Ollie Health, Ollie the AI is already having over 1’000 daily chats with employees in need, with an average duration of 230 minutes (nearly 4 hours). So that’s like having a work bestie that you can dish with – except Ollie won't use anything you’ve told them to throw you under the bus for a promotion. 😊

This way, Ollie helps employees track and manage their own mental health score and build good habits – only using pro resources like therapists when it’s really necessary.

But then it becomes really interesting: The AI conversations are anonymous, but the data from conversation topics can be correlated with data points like sick leave and then give an overall burnout predictor at an organisational level.

Ollie then reports this in the company’s HR dashboard, which, together with their talent acquisition algorithm, can help HR identify which teams need more resources.

With companies like Ollie leveraging AI to give companies (and their HR teams) powerful insights into areas that were previously unseen spaces, we’re watching this space.

PS: A little over a year ago, we had Ollie’s founder, Marc Gregory, on the How Would You Build It Podcast. And some things have changed, of course, but it’s cool looking back at his founder’s and growth journey, with some insights on:

• Creating your own brand “currency” to grow your business.
• The hardest sell: growing when you’re selling a grudge purchase.
• Why AI is not about following the AI trend, but following human behaviour.

CHECK THIS OUT

Come Make African VC & Startup Connections

The Open Letter is happy to be collaborating with our African tech newsletter friends, TechSafari, when they come to SA next week.

We’ll be there, happy to welcome them to SA — and we’re inviting all of you to come along and meet some tech players, from founders to VCs from the wider continent setting.

We even organised you 20% off as an Open Letter reader…

The JHB mixer is happening on 7 November — Get your tickets here.

And the Cape Town event is at Yoco on 14 November — Get your tickets here.

And remember to use the code OL20% for your Open Letter discount.

See you there!

IN SHORT

Sound Smart at the Braai Tonight

💳 You Get a Point of Sale! Local online & e-commerce payments provider Payfast is planning to roll out FREE Point of Sale devices to SA merchants to make it easier for them to process payments.

🤖 RoboMechanic? Creep Factory Boston Dynamics has released a video of its robot Atlas sorting car parts. And while Atlas’ walking does seem a little awkward, it gets the job done. Hmmm. Wonder how it will react to getting shouted at by his Dad for holding the torch wrong, though.

🍎 Mini Apples. Apple announced the new Mac mini this week. A new M4 chip upgrade, iPhone Mirroring and Apple Intelligence, not to mention being Apple’s “first carbon-neutral Mac” — the 5 x 5in Mac truly is tiny but mighty. Check out the cool Mac mini launch video.

🍞 Smart Shopper eBucks. Hot off the heels of 99c bread for qualifying FNB customers, Pick n Pay announced that FNB Private Clients and eBucks members from RMB Private Bank can get as much as 30% of their spend back in eBucks when using PnP’s asap, and 20% back for those shopping in-store, as well FNB account specific rewards when shopping at PnP clothing.

😎 The Stack. Founders need tools and suppliers they can trust. Check out our Founder’s Stack with sustainable scaling and growth strategy help through Metavolve, your own CTO and tech team at a fraction of the cost with Octoco and 11 more vital startup tools & services.

BUILDING TOGETHER

Happening over at The Open Collab

In the last few days alone, in our online community, we…

• Helped connect Trevor with leads for a full-stack developer.
• Celebrated Sebastian’s moves into the Portuguese property market.
• Got excited for our first LIVE and in-person Office Hours next week 🔥.
• Helped Danei with the ultimate sales deck template.
• Celebrated Sabeeha’s 4 new clients.
• Celebrated Gustav’s first revenue & closing partners!
• Had a lekker discussion around mugging detection for bike riders.
• Secured our seats for today’s collab-exclusive Sales Masterclass.

Thinking about joining The Open Collab?

• Supercharge your network in the SA startup landscape — get that introduction, get that customer, or meet that partner.
• Get feedback on your products, services and/or offers from others who have built and are building their own products right now.
• Join all our online and in-person events for free!
• Exclusive 1-on-1 sessions with startup consultants.

SA’s only dedicated tech startup and scale-up founder community.

Join The Open Collab

HAPPENING SOON

Upcoming Events

Join us at 12 PM today (Friday 1 Nov) for the first in a 3-part series with The Open Collab exclusive B2B Sales Series. Want to learn what it’s about? Watch the video on IG below…

‍

1 November 2024 — Sales Masterclass — Online: Keep your B2B sales pipeline filled with this Masterclass session with sales expert, Sebastian Chapman — Join The Open Collab community to attend for free.

4-6 November 2024 — Injini EdTech Week — Cape Town: This is where EdTech entrepreneurs, the broader ecosystem members, government and policy stakeholders come together in Cape Town — PS: entrance is free.

7 November 2024 — Cape Town: Tinder for Business: Meet 20 investors, corporates or potential customers at Innovation City. Sign up here.

7 November 2024 — JHB: TechSafari is hosting its first JHB mixer. Get tickets here and use OL20% code to get a sweet 20% off!

8 November 2024 — Product Masterclass: Part 2: How to keep shipping truly great products, fast — Join The Open Collab community to attend for free.

14 November 2024 — TechSafari is coming to Cape Town! Join Caleb and team for a memorable night at Yoco to talk all things Tech and Startup in Africa. Get tickets here. Use OL20% code to get a sweet 20% off!

View all our upcoming events here.

WHAT YOU SAID

Kasi deliverables…

We asked what you think townships need more of, and services are the key…

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⚡️ Infrastructure (electricity & running water). (32%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️ 🦺 Safety & security initiatives. (27%)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🌐 Inclusion in the digital economy. (14%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 🎓 Education. (23%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🚐 Last-mile delivery solutions. (4%)

Your 2 cents…

“The Taxi Connect idea sounds good but it won't work in places like Thembisa, Alexandra and Diepsloot. Taxi drivers feel they can do whatever they want because they have support from the government and taxi associations. They treat customers poorly and people only use taxis because they have no choice.”

Sakhile

Nice one, Sakhile, it’s that kind of user insight that can help tech companies know where to put their efforts. 🙌

“I think this could differ from one township to another, depend on which province it's in and on people's mindsets. Education should be coveted, infrastructure should be implemented and safety and security a rule. Once those 3 are settled, the rest comes automatically.”

Liesl

We certainly hope so, Liesl, and love that so many startups are trying to make a difference here. 🇿🇦

“I wish I could choose more than one here. It would be in the following order of importance from my perspective: Infrastructure-Safety-Education.”

Ayuballie

No probs, in our books you selected all 3. 😊

“Answer the safety and security issues and then they will be able to access electricity (without it being fed off to multiple illegal places) and water and sanitation staff will be able to enter and fix issues as and when they happen. Right now their lives are in danger, besides the people living there, it is when they need electrical and water support, the most basic needs, the workers get targeted by criminals, putting their lives in danger.”

Lynn

‍
Keen observation, Lynne. Safety and security is NB. 🔐

Boring humans? While recording demos of their AI taking over an entire computer (a new feature they’re working on), Anthropic’s Claude stopped in the middle of the recording, opened Google and started browsing pretty pictures of Yellowstone Park instead.

Moral of the story? Even AIs find work boring enough to wanna go climb a tree. 🤷‍♀️

In this Open Letter:

• Double bill: A two-pronged approach to this R200bn+ market.
• Apples for health, AI watchdogs and PDF podcasts.
• Worth a shot: Win R300k back in business expenses.
• Time to network: 7 SA tech events you don’t want to miss.
• What makes you walk out of a restaurant: The results are in.
• Lonely building your startup? Join SA’s only tech founder community.

‍

Together with:

Did someone forward you this email? Join 14,138 South Africans reading The Open Letter by signing up here.

TRENDING NOW

Selling Direct to this R200bn+ SA Market

SA’s townships are alive with opportunity…

Unsurprising given that around 12 million of SA’s people reside in townships, with the bustling township economy worth nearly R200 billion – though in the past we said it could be worth over R400bn.

Opportunity. And challenges…

Now, if you’re thinking about the phenomenal rise in grocery delivery in SA – we wrote about this earlier this year – your big retailers and corporates recognise the opportunity to serve township communities but haven't been able to solve last-mile delivery yet.

And, in some ways, their need is more dire than us in the suburbs…

In the township, the local spaza shop is only really suited for small purchases – snacks, beverages, data and such.

Your basic monthly household shopping is a massive shlep – catching a taxi into “town” and lugging 3’000 bags back with you.

So, why haven’t Checkers Sixty60 and Woolworths Dash jumped on these?

Well, they have, kinda.

They’ve just run into some more uniquely South African challenges…

Challenge 1: Criminals have started targeting last-mile

We knew it would only be a matter of time right? Attacks on delivery vehicles have tripled from 2023 to 2024, with as many as 65 attacks per day in June this year alone. (And this month it’s around 20-25 hijackings per day – sheez!)

Also this month, Woolies Dash suspended its services in Hout Bay due to driver safety concerns. Not to mention retailers’ worrying trend of hiring mainly foreign drivers, further eroding trust in townships who would want to see local drivers benefit more from Checkers and Woolworths.

Hmm, OK so if you can’t send armies of little bikes to every home, what about using the existing spaza shops as distribution centres or something?
‍

Ah, and therein lies the next problem…

Challenge 2: Manufacturers lack basic market data

See, when you create a product in SA and distribute it to retail chains and wholesalers, the stores typically can give you sales data, so you can plan your plays in the market.

But the spaza owner who buys straight from wholesale doesn’t report back on what happens to your goods on their shelves, making it super hard for the producer to get a handle on the buying patterns in those markets and plan logistics accordingly to ensure healthy margins and reduce risk.

All of this leads to a bit of stagnation in solving the last-mile-to-Kasi conundrum.

Except, of course, for this one local startup that’s klapping both at once…

A two-pronged approach to township deliveries

Taxi Connect connects spaza shops and households with suppliers using – you guessed it! – minibus taxis for last-mile logistics.

They’ve got time to fill: Peak passenger times are 4–8 AM, with a money-wasting 8-hour break in between and a mad rush again 4–8 PM. So Taxi Connect lets drivers use those 8 hours to earn extra income from product deliveries.

And they know the township game: Drivers already know the safest and best way to drive through the township, to get to the specific spaza shop with maximum efficiency – and criminals know better than to try target taxis in the township. 

But the magic really starts when you combine it with shelfline. This unique platform empowers (mostly unemployed) youth to become traders supplying their local spaza shops (within a 10km radius). 

If you’re an entrepreneurial young person looking to make some cash, you can register on shelflife and become an agent who orders products from wholesale (the platform connects you to some really good ones) and supplies them to you using TaxiConnect after which you hop on your bike and deliver to whoever is ordering.

This goes a long way to creating opportunities for the youth, but the platform also sends much-needed trading data back to the wholesaler, retailers and ultimately producers, closing the data loop nicely.

With companies like Taxi Connect and shelfline creating unique opportunities in townships alongside established role-players, we’re watching this space…

THE OPEN COLLAB EXCLUSIVE

The Deep Dive

Join The Open Collab

IN SHORT

The latest SA and tech gossip...

👁️ Keeping an (A)I on it. Local artificial intelligence and computer vision solution provider visionAI has raised an undisclosed funding round from Kalon Venture Partners to continue its growth of innovative AI solutions that integrate with existing CCTV feeds in the manufacturing and supply chain sectors to increase operational efficiency.

🍏 Keeping the Dr away. Apple is continuing with its healthcare play with an app that helps pre-diabetic patients manage their food intake and make lifestyle changes. Apple tested the app on select employees earlier this year, and while it may not be released, reports suggest it could form part of Apple’s future healthcare products including the non-invasive glucose tracker that’s been in the works for years.

🎙️ RoboPod. Hot off the heels of Google’s NotebookLM “generate-a-podcast” feature, Meta has released an open implementation called NotebookLlama using Meta’s Llama models for processing. The project can generate a podcast-style delivery of text files uploaded to it using the guide for the PDF to Podcast workflow.

🤑 Healthy Funding. Absa has secured a R2.6 billion trade financing facility from British International Investment (BII) to help the SA lender provide liquidity to small- and medium-sized businesses in Africa, particularly in the agriculture and healthcare sectors.

😎 The Stack. Founders need tools and suppliers they can trust. Check out our Founder’s Stack with your own fractional CFO for less with OCFO, expert offshoring, company structure and legal advice from Dommisse Attorneys and 12 more vital startup tools & services.

CHECK THIS OUT

Earn Rewards for Doing Business

Not many banks really get the small business game. None, in fact, until the likes of Lula came along…

They know it takes more than most people have to build something from scratch… and that’s why they’ve decided to reward you a little for doing business… For the next few weeks, Lula will distribute R300k simply for trading using a Lula business account.

So, in case you don’t know yet, Lula lets you:

• Open a business account for free with no monthly fees 
• Earn interest on your positive balance
• The fastest way to access a credit facility — money becomes available within 2 hours of a successful application.
  
  

And now, for every transaction, you get a chance at a slice of R300k in rewards.

A better startup banking solution, anyone?

Get Lula now

HAPPENING SOON

Upcoming Events

Join us this Friday for the first in a 3-part series with The Open Collab exclusive B2B Sales Series. Want to learn what it’s about? Watch the video on IG below…

View more on Instagram

theopenletterza‍

30-31 October 2024 — AI Expo Africa — JHB: Join over 2’000 industry insiders for Africa’s largest AI and automation trade show at the Sandton Convention Centre in JHB.

1 November 2024 — Sales Masterclass — Online: Keep your B2B sales pipeline filled with this Masterclass session with sales expert, Sebastian Chapman — Join The Open Collab community to attend for free.

4-6 November 2024 — Injini EdTech Week — Cape Town: This is where EdTech entrepreneurs, the broader ecosystem members, government and policy stakeholders come together in Cape Town — PS: entrance is free.

7 November 2024 — Cape Town: Tinder for Business: Meet 20 investors, corporates or potential customers at Innovation City. Sign up here.

7 November 2024 — JHB: TechSafari is hosting its first JHB mixer. Get tickets here and use OL20% code to get a sweet 20% off!

8 November 2024 — Product Masterclass: Part 2: How to keep shipping truly great products, fast — Join The Open Collab community to attend for free.

14 November 2024 — TechSafari is coming to Cape Town! Join Caleb and team for a memorable night at Yoco to talk all things Tech and Startup in Africa. Get tickets here. Use OL20% code to get a sweet 20% off!

View all our upcoming events here.

BUILDING TOGETHER

Happening over at The Open Collab

In the last few days alone, in our online community, we…

• Had the most powerful product masterclass with Roger Norton.
• Discovered the most remarkable use case for the Vision Pro 🤩.
• Discussed big new blockchain moves by Stripe looking ready to replace traditional finance.
• Developed a game plan for when potential big corporate clients want you to tweak your code.
• Got a sneak peek at Friday’s upcoming sales masterclass — it’s gonna be 🔥.
  
  

Thinking about joining The Open Collab?

• Supercharge your network in the SA startup landscape — get that introduction, get that customer, or meet that partner.
• Get feedback on your products, services and/or offers from others who have built and are building their own products right now.
• Join all our online and in-person events for free!
• Exclusive 1-on-1 sessions with startup consultants.

‍

Join The Open Collab

WHAT YOU SAID

Food for thought…

We asked about your most unforgivable restaurant faux pas, and it’s all about food hygiene…

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 💅 Something gross in your food. (48%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🥜 Not removing something you’re allergic to. (8%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🍽️ Forgetting to order one of the meals. (10%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🙉 Loud/stupid music. (15%)

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🤑 Charging extra for sauces and sides. (19%)

Your 2 cents…

“If a restaurant plays loud stupid music, it doesn't get the opportunity from me for any of the other faux pas. I go somewhere else, and take my chances on finding something gross in my food.”

William

Ha ha, ja William, some places just hit the wrong notes. 📯

“Not removing something you’re allergic to. They're all annoying but only one can potentially kill you....”

Yeh, no that’s serious business. 💉

🍟 Taking Food to the Cloud...

Plus: Checkers’ Hyper60 play 🛋️, no AI Getaway, why it’s clicking for Clicks & 7 SA tech events you don’t want to miss.

October 25, 2024

Something to say? A Japanese team is trying to learn to talk to fungi, and so far they’ve deduced that fungi can recognise shapes. Why? They’re looking for ways to use “dumb” lifeforms to build biological computers.

In this Open Letter:

• Food to the cloud: Welcoming restaurants to the 21st century.
• Checkers’ Hyper60 play, no AI Getaway & it’s clicking for Clicks.
• See you there: 7 SA tech events you don’t want to miss.
• How SA homes are growing in value: The results are in.
• Lonely building your startup? Join SA’s only founder community dedicated to tech startups.

Together with:

Did someone forward you this email? Join 14,102 South Africans reading The Open Letter by signing up here.

TRENDING NOW

Welcoming SA’s Restaurants to the 21st Century

Years ago, restaurant operations were run with pen and paper – orders scribbled down, and cash counted out by hand.

Internationally, IBM introduced the first fully computerised Point-of-Sale (POS) system in 1973. And it took a few decades, but most people reading this will be familiar with restaurants having at least a Pilot or GAAP POS system.

You know, those static terminals your waitperson needs to run to every time you order a refill.

‍

And for a time it went really well… they eventually added touchscreens and card machines (oh, we’re flying now!) in the mid-late 1990s, then other smarter payment solutions like SnapScan and such.

But turns out many restaurants are still pretty dumb…

Here’s the thing… as culinarily “avant-garde” as that posh eatery is, tech-wise restaurants haven’t evolved much in the last 20 (probably more like 30)-odd years.

It’s still basically a static POS terminal in a closed system (not connected to the net) – meaning online orders are tricky, table ordering impossible, and even your Uber Eats orders all need to be added entirely separately.

And switching out is a big mission. Hardware to buy and training on new systems often keep busy restaurants just moving along with what they’ve got.

Eateries are due for a cloud update

During Covid lockdowns, Uber Eats in South-Saharan Africa saw a 1860% increase in demand. And it never really returned to normal – much like grocery delivery, the food delivery market has been growing steadily Year-on-Year, expected to be in the R21bn range in 2024.

Online bookings have also skyrocketed, with bookings app Dineplan showing a 9.3% rise in web, a 50% rise in app bookings and steady declines in telephone bookings, noting that diners like to plan further and further in advance and prefer tech to help them do it.

And don’t even get us started on intelligence! What data-driven decisions can a restaurant make with a closed system that can’t pull big data from the cloud? Just look at the kind of menu-planning decisions a simple data extract like Uber Eats’ annual cravings report can deliver – and now imagine what a local restaurant can do with that level of insights on your palettes, in your neighbourhood.

Nah, it’s definitely time we welcomed the restaurant industry to the 21st century, and one SA startup is on the job…

The future of SA’s restaurants

Local cloud software platform Munch is developing a comprehensive suite of tools designed to streamline restaurant management, covering everything from POS and Inventory to Kitchen Management, Online Ordering, and Self-service Kiosks. Their cloud-based platform moves beyond the limitations of traditional POS systems, freeing restaurants from bulky, outdated setups.

Their suite of products include:

• Mobile POS: Enables waitstaff to take orders directly at the table, reducing errors and delays and allowing payments to be processed on the spot.
• Standard POS: Handles dine-in and takeout orders with a user-friendly tablet interface, eliminating the need for expensive, specialised hardware.
• A Customer-Facing Munch App: Lets diners browse the menu, order, and pay using their phones, all in one seamless process.
• Kitchen Display: Keeps the kitchen team in sync with real-time updates, streamlining meal prep and reducing wait times (no more lettuce and tomato sitting under the hot light while the burger patty is cooked to perfection…)
• Back Office: All the above (and more) are managed in Munch’s Cloud Portal (even remotely from your phone).

And with a 30% reduction in wait times, a 90% decrease in incorrect orders, and ordering happening 50% faster, the proof is in the pudding that Munch is eliminating inefficiencies in the restaurant space one table at a time. 

We recently chatted to Munch on the latest episode of the “How Would You Build It” podcast. And they’re frying up some pretty cool stuff all along the restaurant value chain building a consolidated Menu, Inventory, and Order Management system – processes that typically are run by separate disjointed systems.

‍

Catch the full episode or jump to highlights:

• How to land that first customer in B2B SaaS — Munch’s early track record.
• How to know what features to build next.
• How to simplify complex problems when building.

THE DEEP DIVE

Learn How This Startup Works

The Deep Dive is exclusive to members of The Open Collab. Join SA’s only founder community dedicated to tech startups and scale-up founders.

Join The Open Collab

IN SHORT

Say something interesting…

🍊 Code Orange. Jozi-based entrepreneurs are invited to apply for the 2025 cohort of the Orange Corners Designs (OCD) programme run by the Craft and Design Institute (CDI) and supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands. The 12-month programme supports the 20 participants to grow their businesses and a chance to access R1 million in funding.

🤔 AI Cover Art? Local travel mag Getaway published an image of Mpumalanga’s Blyde River Canyon on the front cover of its October 2024 issue. But it would seem that it might be an AI-generated image from Shutterstock submitted by a Pakistan-based photographer who joined the site in August. Hmmm… Interesting…

🚚 Hyper Delivery. Checkers has updated its Sixty60 app by adding Checkers Hyper products including electronics, camping gear and more — making an e-commerce play to compete with Takealot and Amazon. Products vary from region to region though, are limited to specific time slots, but qualify for free delivery with R100 spend.

💊 Healthy Results. Local pharmacy retailer Clicks seems to be hitting it out of the park reporting on double-digit growth in its full-year results filing, and plans to open around 50 new stores and pharmacies to edge closer to reaching the 1’000 store mark.

😎 The Stack. Founders need tools and suppliers they can trust. Check out our Founder’s Stack with your own fractional CFO for less with OCFO, easy-apply R5M business funding with Lula and 11 more vital startup tools & services.

CHECK THIS OUT

Work more on the things that matter

A scaling business normally equals chaos. Staffing, operations, clients, finance and more all need attention and all seem equally important. But what if they aren’t?

Metavolve’s Scale programme has helped agriBORA double their customers with only a 25% increase in employees – in just 4 months.

“Confidence is the win that I can really talk about here.

I'm now able to assert where the company is headed, be more firm with shareholders and guide my team with certainty.

And the main reason why I'm able to do this now is because of the clarity I got from the strategy process we went through.“

agriBORA CEO, Kizito Odhiambo

If you want to grow with a mission, sign up for the Metavolve scale program and start focusing on the stuff that matters most!

Want to learn more about Metavolve’s framework that has helped more than 100 founders and business leaders develop sustainable scaling strategies?

Book a free strategy session now

HAPPENING SOON

Upcoming Events

25 October 2024 — Product Masterclass — Online : SA’s very own “product legend” Roger Norton is here for the first in a three-part product building series — The Open Collab community exclusive.

30-31 October 2024 — AI Expo Africa — JHB: Join over 2’000 industry insiders for Africa’s largest AI and automation trade show at the Sandton Convention Centre in JHB.

1 November 2024 — Sales Masterclass — Online: Keep your B2B sales pipeline filled with this Masterclass session with sales expert, Sebastian Chapman — The Open Collab community exclusive.

4-6 November 2024 — Iniji EdTech Week — Cape Town: This is where EdTech entrepreneurs, the broader ecosystem members, government and policy stakeholders come together in Cape Town — PS: entrance is free.

7 November 2024 — Cape Town: Tinder for Business: Meet 20 investors, corporates or potential customers at Innovation City. Sign up here.

7 November 2024 — JHB: TechSafar is hosting its first JHB mixer. Get tickets here.

8 November 2024 — Product Masterclass: Part 2: How to keep shipping truly great products, fast — The Open Collab community exclusive.

View all our upcoming events here.

BUILDING TOGETHER

Happening over at The Open Collab

It’s all happening at SA’s only founder community dedicated to tech startups and scale-ups. In the last 48 hours alone, in our online community, we…

• Helped Tiaan find a fast and simple, local card payment solution.
• Got such good feedback from the in-person check-ins with members.
• Helped Laurie connect with potential partners for his wife’s startup.
• Helped Erhard gain some traffic and traction for his new product.
• Tried to get Roger to pose more like Steve Jobs for his Product Masterclass cover shots.
• Celebrated Sabeeha’s four 🔥 new paying leads.

WHAT YOU SAID

In case of emergency…

We asked how happy you are with your home’s growth in value (as an investment), and ooops…

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Well, everything was fine, until I read that post… 😬 (31%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Nah, I keep a handle on these things, it’s growing lekke 😎 (8%)

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Dunno, better get Hoom for my sale 🏡 (13%)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ Not worried, I bought it for my family, no need to profit ❤️ (18%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ Haven’t bought yet, dreaming of one day… 💒 (25%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Yeah, that’s why I choose to rather rent 💰 (5%)

🏡 Getting 7M Homeowners the Best Deal

Plus: SA’s CO2 cloud, AI interview coach, SABC’s streaming numbers & lessons from an SA product legend.

October 22, 2024

Lunar fashion? It looks like the next generation of NASA astronauts will be wearing Prada to the moon. Thankfully those visuals are just to create some hype — the final new design is set to be unveiled soon.

In this Open Letter:

• Big moves: The startup helping SA homeowners get better deals.
• SA’s CO2 cloud, AI interview coach & SABC’s streaming numbers.
• Building things that matter: Join our SA product legend Masterclass.
• The emergency services you really want: The results are in.
• Lonely building your startup? Join The Open Collab and get support.

Together with:

Did someone forward you this email? Join 14,008 South Africans reading The Open Letter by signing up here.

TRENDING NOW

Helping 7M+ Homeowners Get the Best Deal

How hard/easy is it to lose a lot of money selling your house in SA?

Because selling seems simple enough, there are estate agents everywhere…

Nearly 4’000 Estate Agencies are listed on Property24, with some 40’000 Property Practitioners moving and shaking in SA’s R7 trillion residential property sector. 

And house prices seem to be skyrocketing, so it must be booming, right?

Uhh not quite.

SA’s big property dilemma

See, what you might not know (and likely neither do many estate agents) is that SA’s property sector has actually been battling to deliver real returns for quite some time.

We had a decent boom between 2000 and 2006 where prices rose by around 20% annually, and it’s kinda gone downhill from there:

• The 2008 financial crisis and a new credit act saw prices fall -16.5% in real terms.
• A decent-seeming 51% boost between 2011 and 2019 was brought down to just 0.4% due to inflation.
• During lockdowns, a brief 8% uptick was deteriorated to 1.1% by inflation.
• And we’ve had negative growth of -4.28% in 2022 and -4.19% in 2023.

So, you might be selling your house for more than you technically paid for it (or owe), but there’s a good chance you’re not getting what it’s really worth.

Remember that, unlike investing in unit trusts, where the diversification you get from a suite of shares tends to balance each other out for growth, a property is just one asset – if it depreciates, that’s a solid loss.

And in that scenario, you don’t just want an OK-ish agent, you want the best representation money can buy.

The moral? Estate agent choice can be make or break

Estate agents typically charge between 4-7% and at that fee, you want to be sure they are fighting for the best price for you, have access to the right kind of buyers and top of their game when it comes to the administrative side.

And considering property is often the biggest investment (or at least one of the biggest) most people will ever make, so, no pressure… 

‍

The local player connecting you with your ideal agent

Enter Hoom. An online marketplace for sellers to find the perfect estate agent for their sale.

It all starts fairly simply; as a seller, you:

• List your property details in 6 simple steps 
• Specify agent preferences (ages, agent category, languages, gender) 

Then, within 24 hours, Hoom matches you with up to 5 estate agents in your area, based on your requirements, complete with pic, bio, value proposition, full disclosure on their commission rate, plus any additional services they offer (like photography, video tours, international market exposure, ID verification for viewers, etc.)...

All in the name of helping you find that one agent who will get you the deal you’re after.

Plus, if you sell your home using one of the estate agents you found via Hoom, you get some lekker seller-perks – most notably cashback (anywhere between R6’250 and R20k+, depending on the value of your house), for yourself, or to donate with one of the causes Hoom partners with.

And estate agents also benefit

From the agent’s perspective, it pays to bring your A-game when listing on Hoom, because: 

• The platform acts as a constant funnel for new listings
• There are no upfront fees or monthly costs for agents
• Hoom’s back-end and admin means all the leads are qualified and warmed up for sale.

But what’s really cool is that Hoom offers great opportunities for new entrants into the market to help transform the real estate industry. You no longer need a R1 million marketing budget to compete with the big agencies to get in front of sellers.

They’re currently only operating in Cape Town, with plans to gradually expand to the rest of SA over time. And, they were recently a PropTech finalist, and "Most Innovative Real Estate Company" contender at the 8th African Property Investment Summit. 

With more and more innovative startups shaking things up in an old-school industry, we think PropTech is ready to take some serious ground. We’re watching this space…

THE OPEN COLLAB EXCLUSIVE

The Deep Dive

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IN SHORT

Sound smart at the watercooler

💼 Ready. Steady. Job. MindCiti, a local mental health, soft skills, and job readiness app has launched its AI Interview Job Coach to help job seekers prepare for their next interview using personalised coaching and feedback, that simulates real-life interview scenarios.

💨 Carbon Clouds. Carbon Mapper has released the first methane and carbon dioxide detections from the Tanager-1 satellite including a 3-km-long carbon dioxide plume in South Africa, and methane plumes in both Texas and Pakistan.

📦 Go for Africa. Local click-and-collect delivery service Pargo is set to launch into more territories across Africa as it builds on its 4’000+ strong South African pick-up points and the 150 pick-up points in their trial program in Egypt that launched last year.

👀 StreamingABC. After launching a little over 3 months ago, the SABC’s free streaming service has racked up more than 500k registered users. The revamped platform offers catch-up content, on-demand video, as well as live streams of all SABC radio and TV channels.

😎 The Stack. Founders need tools and suppliers they can trust. Check out our Founder’s Stack with sustainable scaling and growth strategy help through Metavolve, your own CTO and tech team at a fraction of the cost with Octoco and 11 more vital startup tools & services.

CHECK THIS OUT

One less thing for Small Business Owners to stress about

According to a recent Xero study, 24% of SA small businesses reported cash flow problems, with 72% of them using personal funds to keep their business afloat. 

A major cause is delayed payments, with businesses spending an average of 1–2 months chasing late invoices. But, even with on-time payments, it’s tricky covering the salary run when your customer payments runs don’t line up.

It’s a pain Sports & Corporate owner Allistair Bunding has experienced firsthand…

“We pay staff on a weekly basis, but we only get money from our clients at the end of eight weeks.”

Add to that the need to buy raw materials upfront, and it’s easy to see why cash flow becomes a pressing issue, particularly around month-end.

Allistair describes how stressful it is to juggle these financial demands:

“You don’t want to be telling your staff on a Friday, ‘Sorry, we can’t pay you,’ especially when December comes around, with holiday pay and bonuses on the line.”

Like many entrepreneurs, Allistair initially tried to rely on traditional banks to fill the gaps.

But the process of getting funding is so complicated and time-consuming that 92% of small business owners do not even attempt to get funding from traditional banks anymore.

“Dealing with these commercial banks, nothing is basic, and most of the time, it’s not functional.”

Traditional banking often adds unnecessary complexity to an already hectic schedule, and the last thing a small business owner needs is additional stress over funding.

‍

That’s where Lula steps in

With its Revolving Capital Facility, Lula offers a streamlined and efficient way to secure funding – quickly. 

“The transaction was done in five minutes.”

With Lula, there’s no complicated paperwork or endless waiting. Just a simple, functional solution that gives you the cash flow you need when you need it.

So if you’re tired of banking headaches, there’s a better way to get funding faster.

Get Lula – and make month-end a breeze.

Get Lula now

HAPPENING SOON

Upcoming Events

Join us this Friday for the first in a 3-part series with an SA product legend. Want to learn what it’s about? Watch the video on IG below…

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25 October 2024 — Product Masterclass: SA’s very own “product legend” Roger Norton is here for the first in a three-part product building series — The Open Collab community exclusive.

1 November 2024 — Sales Masterclass: Keep your B2B sales pipe filled Masterclass session with sales expert, Sebastian Chapman — The Open Collab community exclusive.

8 November 2024 — Product Masterclass: Part 2: How to keep shipping truly great products, fast — The Open Collab community exclusive.

15 November 2024 — Sales Masterclass: Part 2: Learn to improve your conversion rates with sales expert, Sebastian Chapman — The Open Collab community exclusive.

View all our upcoming events here.

BUILDING TOGETHER

Happening over at The Open Collab

In the last 48 hours alone, in our online community, we…

• Had an incredible chat roulette experience that made us feel at home 🤗.
• Got some last-minute tickets to SA Future Trust Summit.
• Helped John get AI to process all his looooong docs in seconds.
• Marvelled at how far AI has come with insane generations with Google’s ImageFX.
• Celebrated some remarkable Open Letter growth over the weekend.
• Got a sneak peek at Friday’s upcoming sales masterclass — it’s gonna be 🔥.

Coming Up This Week

• Wednesday 10-11: Office Hours, where we all log in and work together, + the whole Open Letter team is at members’ disposal.
• New: Free monthly startup strategy calls for all Open Collab members.
• Support: All day, every day: unlimited introductions, recruitment, service provider referrals and business-building insights.

Join The Open Collab

WHAT YOU SAID

In case of emergency…

What other emergency services would you like at the push of a button?

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 🍫 Midnight snacks (19%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 🤓 A helping hand so I don't have to work late (19%)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ ☕️ Caffeine hit (your drink of choice, of course) (14%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 💐 Instant gifts (for those forgotten anniversaries, birthdays, etc.) (29%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 🔋 Charger delivery (when you’re running low on juice) (19%)

Your 2 cents…

“It would be amazing to have an app that offers different categories of gifts and prompts for certain occasions, wraps them, and hand delivers them to your person of choice.”

Culpepper

Ooh, sounds like we’d support, Culpepper 🎁.

“I have a great coffee setup at home, but it would be lekker to hit a button and have a fresh Cortado at my gate within a handful of minutes...”

Jason

Not bad at all, Jason ☕.