Time for a fight {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? Twitter's former IP lawyer launched the social network Twitter Now, saying that Elon Musk abandoned the trademarks Twitter and Tweet when he rebranded to X. The legal battle is already underway. 😮‍💨

In This Open Letter

SA is food secure at national level, yet ~20% of the population are hungry and underfed — and one local founder says the key is unlocking small-scale farmer intelligence, so he built it…

Unlike most lower-middle-income countries (where smallholders supply ~60% of the food), SA's economy is more like high-income countries’: 95% of food comes from commercial farming, and only 5% from smallholders.

But we actually have more small-scalers than commercial farmers: 2.4 million is 90% of SA's farming households. They're just not that good at producing en masse, some say because SA's mere 3'000 extension officers (the State's advisors meant to assist and train small-scale farmers) are lacking.

And ChatGPT wasn’t being as helpful as you might have hoped…

Farming's tough, and it's something founder Isaac Chikutukutu experienced first-hand growing up cultivating five acres with his mom in Mashonaland (Northeastern Zimbabwe). They could never understand why one year, they'd have a bumper mielie harvest, and the next year, zilch.

Once, Isaac and his mom couldn't agree on what crop to try next, so they planted half-and-half onions ('cos social media said there was a shortage) and beetroot. The onions were a decent harvest, but didn't sell. The beetroot had a bumper harvest and won a district award for its quality. The neighbours said they must be using divisi, a Shona traditional medicine or charm that's believed to boost food crops.

And Isaac's quest to figure out why some crops grow well in certain places and times led him to develop a new tool for small-scalers…

The app that reads which crop each field wants

Divisi (jip, he named it after that Shona magic!) is a free farming companion that tells farmers what crop to grow on which field, when to plant and what to do each week to get it to harvest.

How? Instead of regional or generalised info, you drop a pin on your land and it pulls soil data from national surveys or interpolations of thousands of sampled points from grids around the country (yes, the data exists, we just normally don't have access to it), and combines it with 20 years of climate records, then uses the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO)'s Global Agro-Ecological Zones model to rank 74-plus crops by what will thrive there on that exact field. Genius.

It comes with weather alerts and forecasts, crop guides, a diary to track actions and a ledger for crop yield and income, while a community can help flag local pest outbreaks days before official channels. All of it free for small farmers, working offline, live on Android and iOS, and with multi-language support coming soon.

We're watching this space…

Have your say…

Nothing dramatic happens: The spreadsheet still opens, the freelance bookkeeper still replies, and the systems you cobbled together in year one all keep technically working.

They just start costing you in ways that don't appear on an invoice. Now that you’ve grown, there are extra hours of manual reconciliation, a hiring process nobody owns and three tools that each hold a piece of the truth.

Growth is mostly a series of upgrades you postpone. The Founder Stack is a straight look at what those upgrades are and which local companies handle them, sorted by the problem rather than the sales pitch.

Worth an audit before your next hire.

Most people wait until the product is ready to go find customers. But this SA founder landed his first customers before he even started building.

This is how: 4 ways to land your first customers before you've built a thing.

⚡ Centurion Goes Exaflop. A Dubai-funded consortium is putting 400-plus Nvidia B300 GPUs into a Centurion data centre worth R798m. Catch is, it's built to export compute to Europe, not serve local startups.

🪪 One Job, Two Apps. SITA and the Presidency are each building their own digital ID app, with near-identical features and no stated relationship. Earliest phase one is Q4 2027. Two apps racing to do one job isn't twice the chance of either arriving (or working).

🇧🇷 All Talk, No Poultry. SA and Brazil talked up deeper trade ties this week, worth about R32bn a year to counter US tariffs. But a spat about frozen poultry dumping and subsidised sugar was quietly left off the agenda. Convenient.

✈️ Four in Five Drove. Foreign arrivals jumped 17.3% to 1.27 million in July, though most came by road from SADC. The real spenders are the 19.5% flying in, and 7% of their card spend vanishes into fees. Fix the rails.

🎯 Trust Engineered. In high-trust B2B categories, credibility is the conversion lever. DoubleShift uses its Trust as a System™ approach to diagnose where your story breaks down, then rebuilds positioning, messaging and brand to convert credibility into pipeline.*

🛍️ Taps That Actually Convert. Stop paying for taps that die at the checkout. Gloss turns any message, ad or QR code into an instant, app-like sale, synced to the store you already run. Book a demo with the Chat Inc team.*

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

Yesterday, we showed you TurnStay’s borderless travel payments, asking about your relationship with card fees. Most here don’t even wanna know…

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🩸 No idea what I pay, and I've decided that's healthier (42%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 🔍 I know the exact number and it keeps me up at night (29%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 🤝 I asked my provider for a better rate once. We don't speak anymore (29%)

🚚 Customer Operations Lead @ GoMove

🔌 Backend Software Developer @ Taurine Technology

⚡ Growth-stage CEO @ Cinergy Mobile Power

🧠 Technical AI Strategist @ Kwanda AI

📋 Product Lead, Dark Store Fulfilment Systems @ Takealot

💳 Fintech Product Manager @ SnapScan

We asked the SA ops director at a prominent international AI tooling company what to automate first in your business. The answer makes us want to sommer start retooling right now… ⚙️

Don't miss all the extra operator interviews and insights content we do on our social channels — come enjoy the vibez.

Venture Summit at LeaderEx, 1 Sep, Sandton: Founders, funders and the people writing the cheques, in one room for a day. Free with code TOL. Get tickets.

Startup Stories: Bionuclex Research, 2 Sep, Cape Town: Catching multiple cancers from a single blood draw, and what building that in a lab actually looks like. Lunch included. Register free.

Cape Town Global Connection Breakfast I Led By Her, 2 Sep, Cape Town: An off-the-record morning of SA women leaders at Cafe Sofi, hosted by The Lekker Network's Madeleine Henstra. Join here.

Powered by Radi. Want your business event in front of 36,000 The Open Letter readers? Host it on Radi, and it lands here.

🦈 Next Level: He was diving alone at 100 feet when a friendly giant emerged from the darkness.

✈️ Wow Site: Stowaway lets you grab a digital window seat on planes and satellites around the world.