Hot stuff {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? Not to be outdone by crypto miners and data centres, CERN has converted parts of the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva to heat a couple of thousand homes in a nearby French town. We would have preferred a heated pool, but c’est la vie. 🛁

In Today’s Open Letter

5 million Airbnb hosts are managing 8 million listings around the world – this local venture wants to get you a free stay in any or all of them…

In hospitality, heads in beds is the primary success metric. 

But in the race to maximise Airbnb occupancy, there’s a thing called orphan nights that creeps in between bookings, i.e. when your Airbnb stands empty and you’re not making money.

In Cape Town alone, listings have surged to over 23’000, klapping other global tourist destinations like Athens, Tokyo and Barcelona. Yet, while peak summer occupancy can hit 70%+, it falls to 40% in winter.

Can we max the 30% deficit? 

The gap only a host would know

Properties can print money when booked: Airbnb alone contributed R23.5 billion to South Africa’s GDP in 2022, and a typical host gets R74’000 for just 38 nights of bookings every year.

But those orphan nights in between mean that, for nearly half the year, thousands of high-end homes sit empty, protected by security systems but devoid of utility. And who’s to bet the owners are often priced out or too busy trying to fill beds to enjoy a holiday of their own.

And that’s where this local venture comes in…

Turning unbooked Airbnb nights into vacation stays

AirhostSwap is an SA-made platform that lets Airbnb hosts around the world exchange their rental’s unoccupied nights for stays at fellow Airbnb hosts' spots.

If your spot’s empty, AirhostSwap lets you host another owner in exchange for HostPoints, which founder Lamont Hitchings, explains is 1:1 with your dollar host price ($1 = 1 HostPoint).

So, your $260 a night Airbnb gets you 260 HostPoints, but it’s a non-reciprocal exchange, so you don’t have to go stay at the host that’s staying with you; you can go stay at any other AirhostSwap host’s place in the world (they have over 2’000+ active on the global platform).

And trust is baked in: Only active Airbnb hosts may join. In fact, AirhostSwap integrates directly with Airbnb calendars (to prevent the nightmare of double-bookings).

What's cool about it is that it’s not about competing with any short-term rental platforms; there’s a small annual subscription fee, helping ensure it stays a community of guaranteed only Airbnb owners reclaiming the utility of their own investments.

A lekker way to leverage your existing asset for a trip to London, Paris, Dubai – wherever.

We’re watching this space…

Tired of managing one coding agent at a time? OpenAI just launched Codex (for macOS) to give you a single dashboard to run multiple agents in parallel. The best part, though, is Skills, which turn them from code-writers to executors that can design, deploy, etc.

Want AI to handle your product copy? ObsessAI plugs into Shopify and generates blogs, descriptions and social posts, straight from your catalogue. Try it here.

Managing CRMs getting too much? Day lets you control your pipeline by talking: ask it to write, filter or search and the UI updates instantly. Check it out here.

Like this newsletter? Your customers would, too…

Hey, we’re the team behind The Open Letter, and we’re going to help a handful of select South African companies build high-growth, high-performance newsletters like this one, for their customers, in their niches.

Want to be one of them?

💰 Lula Lands Lekker Funding. SME bank Lula has just landed R340 million in funding from Dutch entrepreneurial development bank, FMO, to strengthen its ability to expand fast, data-driven lending to SMEs. The clever part is how the funding is delivered — see why local-currency capital matters.

🇿🇦 ZA Gets Its Stablecoin. South Africa is getting a rand-pegged stablecoin, ZAR Universal (ZARU), thanks to a partnership between Luno, Sanlam, EasyEquities and Lesaka. Learn what a ZAR-backed stablecoin means for us.

🛵 Durban On-demand. Takealot is expanding its TakealotNow offering into KZN, specifically in and around the Durban area. Lekker man.

🌱 YC’s Stablecoin Seeds. Startup accelerator Y Combinator is moving towards paying the startups in their cohorts in stablecoins, with the $500’000 seed checks being available as stablecoins. This could be particularly helpful for founders from emerging markets. Interesting.

⏰ Avoid February Tax Chaos. From provisional tax to ITR14, VAT and payroll, this guide shows exactly what SA private companies need to file and when, so you can plan instead of scrambling in February.*

* From our partners. Find all the best service providers for your business in our Founder Stack.

Yesterday, we showed you how tootoo is building a content codex so that AIs know your preferences better, asking how often you re-explain yourself to AI.

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🔁 Every. Single. Chat. (24%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🧱 Every new tool (8%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 😑 Only when it messes up (53%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🧠 I’ve given up explaining (5%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🧘 It is what it is (10%)

Your 2 cents…

He he, ja we actually created the poll just for you, Jason. 😂

EFTs and debit cards still rule SA’s online payments — but friction is killing conversion.

A 2025 survey of 201 South African retail tech leaders reveals how we pay online:

💡 EFTs top the list, used by 94.5% of online shoppers, followed closely by debit cards (93.5%) and credit cards (75.6%).

💡 Instant EFT and PayShap are gaining traction (40.8%), while buy-now-pay-later options (15.9%) and mobile wallets (12.9%) remain niche.

💡 But the real battle is at checkout — 37% of abandoned carts are blamed on complicated checkout flows, and 31% on shipping fees.

South Africa’s online shopping market has grown from R9 billion in 2016 to an estimated R130 billion in 2025. The next leap? Smoother, faster, safer payment journeys.

🏛 Tool to Try: Kurodot lets you build digital museums with 3D spaces, lighting and analytics.

🌧 That’s Interesting: Rain doesn’t actually show up on film, so in the movies, they use backlighting to make the raindrops actually visible on camera.

🌪 Next Level: A supercell storm forming in real time is just amazing.

🩺 Hack: A visual guide showing ideal blood pressure ranges by age.

🗺 Wow Site: ChronoAtlas lets you time-travel through ancient empires.