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Got a temperature? Donât fall for this fake TikTok doctor who conned almost 300k followers, Radio 2000 and even the Gauteng Dept of Health into thinking heâs an actual doc.
In this Open Letter:
Drone wars: Solving business logistics the KFC way.
Soaring solar, time to de-list & Amazonâs new satellites.
Get growing: 5 Steps to optimise your pricing page.
The results: How school impacts your day.
Free stuff: Share this and get cool tools + coffee on us.
TRENDING NOW
Lowering the Cost of Delivery
If youâve been following some of our analyses of business trends like the viability of SAâs e-commerce sector, what Checkers Sixty60 gets right and even SAâs absolutely massive township economy, you might have picked up a general theme that plagues a lot of businesses trying to do something new⌠Logistics.
Man, moving anything â stuff or people â is expensive here in SA. And you can bet a lot of that comes from having to use actual drivers, with salaries and needs. Donât get us wrong, people should have jobs, but you canât ignore the potential price benefits we could unlock with more automatable solutions.
Life was simpler in the 90âs
Itâs in the numbers
Takealot, for example, do about 25â000 parcels per day. And, unless youâre spending more than R500, delivery can cost between R70 and R95 â which means SA is spending upwards of R1.75m just on deliveries per day. Yet the companyâs not showing profit. Well, maybe if we helped put that R1.75m back in the consumerâs pocket, it could be.
Even Uber Eatsâ R15 delivery fee is just a mask for the astronomical hidden costs they need to build in just to get you your burger on time. Why? Because, again, the delivery is so expensive.
See the trend?
What about the next frontier for business in SA: Bring down the cost of deliveries.
And, of course, there are a number of options for doing this. Autonomous vehicles. Sidewalk-crawling robots. And, of course, drones.
Time to fly?
Itâs not as far-fetched as it seems. Remember Zipline? The drone company that started out as an NGO and got the contract to deliver blood to hospitals in Rwanda? Well, theyâve pivotedâŚ
Seems Rwanda was a great training ground, because they entered the commercial space with a storm, raising $250m at a $2.75bn valuation in 2021, and another $330m at $4.2bn in May this year. This is on the back of their partnering with Nigerian retailer Jumia in 2022, hailed as Africaâs biggest e-commerce player. Not to mention having been the first to start commercial drone deliveries for Walmart in 2021.
You can bet itâll keep growing. Amazon recently completed its first 100 drone deliveries in the US, and is setting its sights on overcoming regulatory hurdles to expand the operation.
Local plays in this space
After 5 years of effort to get clearance from SA civil aviation, SANBS is ready to start using drones to transport blood in emergency situations. Itâs small, at first, limited to transit between two hospitals. But it has legs, since the SANBS has plenty of locations, meaning they should be able to expand â a vital service, too, since you normally have just a 1-hour window when a patient is identified as in need of blood, and drones could really help save lives.
On the commercial side, KFC recently delivered its first order by drone to no-doubt hungry cricketer David Miller during a T20 match against Australia.
Catching the fine leg on fine leg
Just how far are we from drone deliveries going mainstream? Well, there are probably still some regulations to get sorted with Civil Aviation. But with these kinds of players getting on board, itâs definitely a space to keep an eye on.
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OVER TO YOU
Will drone deliveries work in SA?
IN SHORT
đ Hi Speed. Zambia just became the 6th African country where SpaceX has launched its high-speed, uncapped Starlink services. Starlinkâs satellite internet services are suited for rural areas and areas underserved by traditional internet infrastructure and could see millions of Zambians getting high-speed internet for the first time.
𼸠Stealthy Privatisation. A recent study by RMB & Morgan Stanley shows that Eskomâs electricity generation will be replaced by the private sector within the next 2 years! This is off the back of record-breaking solar panel imports and installations in 2023.
đ Delisting Trend. SA Billionaire Businessman Patrice Motsepeâs African Rainbow Capital Investments (ARC) is considering delisting from the JSE as it evaluates whether or not there is value in remaining listed on the JSE. In 2022, 20 companies delisted from the stock exchange, with at least 32 set to delist in 2023. Scary stuff for your retirement annuity.
đ° Going Liquid. Steinhoff Internationalâs liquidators will (finally) liquidate the company this coming Friday (13 October) when it will delist and its shares will no longer exist. Around 99% of shareholders had voted to dissolve and delist the company from both the Jozi & Frankfurt stock exchanges back in July of this year.
đ°ď¸ Forest Satellites. Amazonâs reply to SpaceXâs Starlink, Project Kuiper, just launched 2 prototype satellites. The e-commerce giant is looking to deploy over 3â200 more satellites over the next couple of years after initially vowing to invest $10 billion into the project back in 2019.
đŽ Going Postal. The South African Post Office (SAPO) has been forced to close another 80 branches â bringing the total number of closures to 396 since 2020. As it stands SAPO is technically insolvent with only R4.5 billion in assets and negative equity of R7.9 billion.
ÂBUILDERâS CORNER
5 Steps to a Killer Pricing Page
Once your product and plan move along the comms and website stage, you run into the big pricing page dilemma: Should we advertise our price?
Soon, it will cost you a customer.
And itâs not just in SaaS. We see a lot of startups unwilling to list prices. Some clearly even consider their pricing page as the END of a sales funnel when itâs actually not. See, pricing has a bit of psychology to itâŚ
The case for pricing awareness
Weâre going out on a limb here and betting that most (or at least a lot of) South Africansâ behaviour flow when checking out a new product online goes something like this:
Check the Landing/Home page, read a little bit, maybe watch a quick video.
Click through to pricing page first to see if this is even in your league.
Only then go to product page and maybe check features or some testimonials.
Why? Well, weâre conditioned that most overseas products are out of our price range, so a quick price check will tell you if you should even bother engaging further with this or not. And weâre also willing to bet this behaviour translates to looking at local products, too.
The lesson? Your pricing page is probably VERY important to any market. And itâs not the end of your sales funnel, itâs close to the start. So, how do you build a killer price page?
Optimise your pricing page
Lead with your Value Proposition (and repeat it)
When the price pointâs important, people are probably going to click here first before your fancy sales pages. So why not consider your pricing page close to the start of your funnel? Show and remind them here what problem you solve, how you solve it and why itâs better than the alternative.
Make it super clear and super simple
Pricing tables, options and feature lists are often SO clunky! No one can read 4pt font, and you donât want to bore people â remember your goal is to get someone to buy or jump on a call, so optimise your page for that. Itâs not an info dump.
Emphasise the Benefits, not Features
Everyone always says âSell on benefits, not featuresâ, but what does that mean? Well, it's a bit complicated, but hereâs a practical exercise to help you do it right:
Get two columns on a page, label the first one âFeaturesâ and the other âBenefitsâ. In the Features column, list your productâs features like you normally would have done on a pricing table. Now, next to each Feature, in the Benefits column, write down 8â10 ways that single feature will enhance your customerâs life â âIf you have this feature, you willâŚâ
Example: If your product is a little cheaper, thatâs a Feature. Your Benefits will be really obvious ones like âbecause itâs cheaper, you save moneyâ, but also include more creative ones like: âbecause itâs cheaper, youâll have more money to spend on chocolates, therefore this product helps you eat more chocolateâ.
See what we did there? Thatâs selling on benefits. And if you can match the benefits you imagined with actual needs and fears from your user research, youâll know exactly which ones to use to convert more.
Talk to their fears directly, calm them
Your pricing page is actually where your testimonials and lists of B2B brands youâve worked with come in most handy. See, people hesitate to buy because something is still bothering them.When Slack started, they had a âWall of Loveâ on their pricing page â a rolling compilation of tweets from users saying âthank youâ and fawning over âwhat an amazingâ product this is. This helps new users feel like âWell, if others like it so much, maybe I should try itâŚâ
Use some psychology to convert
Depending on what youâre selling, you might want to have tiered pricing with decoys to make your actual price look attractive. Or maybe you have an up-sell, down-sell presentation to push people to the product youâre really trying to move.
You can A-B test different options on the page, and see what converts best.
Got a pricing hack that works? Hit reply and let us knowâŚ
THE RESULTS
Last week, we asked how school affects your daily life. And itâs a three-way split between soccer mom-ing, no kids (yet) and kids outa schoolâŚ
đŠđŠđŠđŠđŠđŠ đ
Not at all, avoiding having kids as long as possible (26%)
đŠđŠđŠđŠđŠđŠ â˝ Directly, doing school runs every day (26%)
đ¨âŹď¸âŹď¸âŹď¸âŹď¸âŹď¸ đ Only sports days, fees and parent-teacher meetings (6%)
đŠđŠđŠđŠđŠđŠ đ Thank goodness mine are out of school! (26%)
đ¨đ¨âŹď¸âŹď¸âŹď¸âŹď¸ đŚ Just get stuck in school traffic a lot (11%)
đ¨âŹď¸âŹď¸âŹď¸âŹď¸âŹď¸ đ Hardly, we home school (6%)
Your 2 centsâŚ
âMy kids are all grown, and I miss their school days, I enjoyed the hell out of it. Sports, plays, functions, the lot. Thanks, kids!â
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