The approach most SA founders have never heard of, where it comes from, how it works, and the proof that it does.

The instinct with a new product is to get anyone to try it. Say yes to every inbound, sign whoever will sign, and take the feedback you can get.

Thalia Pillay from Orca Fraud did the opposite. When a LinkedIn post about her fraud platform blew up and inbound interest arrived, she turned people away.

“No, sorry, we can’t work with you right now; we’re looking for the perfect design partner.”

She was doing something with a name that most South African founders have never encountered: building with a design partner.

A design partner is a carefully chosen early customer who helps you build the product before it exists, in exchange for early access, influence over what gets made, and usually preferential pricing. They are not beta testers. A beta tester evaluates something you’ve already built; a design partner shapes what you build in the first place.

The idea comes out of enterprise and B2B software, where the gap between what a founder imagines and what actually survives inside a real organisation can be enormous. Silicon Valley funds have formalised it into “design partner programmes,” and the structure is now standard practice for early-stage B2B startups there. It has barely travelled to South Africa.

You pick a small cohort, usually three to six organisations, before you’ve built the thing. They commit real time to structured feedback rather than a casual “let us know what you think.” You commit to building around what they tell you. Both sides expect the relationship to end with them as a paying customer.

Selection is the whole game, and Thalia’s filter was three questions. Is this client representative of their industry, so what you learn generalises rather than turning into a bespoke build? Do they have genuine capacity and time to give feedback, not just enthusiasm in a first meeting? And have they seen the world’s best tools, so their bar is high enough to be worth meeting?

That third one is why her first design partner was the ex-Monzo fraud team. People who had worked inside one of the sharpest fintechs in the world knew exactly what good looked like, and held her to it.

The failure mode is the mirror image: pick one eager partner who isn’t representative, build everything they ask for, and you’ve done a year of custom development for a product nobody else wants.

She and her co-founder Karla gave themselves three months to land a client, and the temptation to take the first yes was obvious. She turned it down because the quality of feedback was the thing that mattered, and she was clear that the ex-Monzo team made the product far better than the two of them would have built alone.

Being selective turned out to be a signal in itself. Saying “we’re looking for the perfect design partner” told the market she was onto something, and the people she turned away in those early months became clients two years later. Refusing business made the business more attractive.

It compounds on the funding side too. Investors read engaged design partners as one of the strongest signals a pre-revenue company can offer, because it proves customers feel the problem urgently enough to give up their own time to help fix it.

Orca Fraud now screens roughly $5bn a month across more than 70 countries, working with banks and telcos to stop fraud in real time. Both funding rounds were oversubscribed, with a $2.35m seed announced in March. The Monzo CPO who came out of that first design partnership is now an angel investor in the company.

Four years, from two founders with a hypothesis to that. Not because they found customers faster than everyone else, but because they were fussier about which ones they let in.

Thalia’s full talk from Founder Collab Live is available to members inside the Founder Collab, where she goes further than we could cover here:

You’ll also get access to 40+ masterclasses from SA founders and operators on sales, fundraising, UX, paid media and more inside The Founder Collab.

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