DIY everything {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? Apparently, people have been seeing ads on Instagram for a home pet incinerator. As in, if your pet dies (we think/hope?), you can cremate them yourself. Turns out it's real: Alibaba sells it for only R91k before import tax. What next? 🫠

In This Open Letter

For the ~13 million workers relying on public transport, it's only useful if you work in central business hubs and normal working hours; those working shifts/irregular hours on uncommon routes cost employers a fortune in special charter transport, so this local team built a smarter system…

Minibus taxis and buses are vital for SA transport, but their services are demand-driven: the routes that serve the most people at the busiest times. It's the same with ride-hailing services, only way more expensive.

For companies that require employees to work in shifts or in outlying areas, they have to organise special charter transport, which can cost 2 to 4x as much per person as public transport. Yet Stats SA records only 7.9% of SA's workforce [~2 million or so] benefiting from company transport; while UCT research shows over 65% work outside of normal hours and the International Labour Organisation says 21% work on extreme overtime schedules.

So, clearly, not all companies that should can/do provide special transport, which is where this new SA venture comes in…

The platform treating the morning commute like a maths problem

Etapath is software-powered workforce transport: On the front-end, it's a service that moves whole teams door-to-door, home to office and back, at a price that's comparable to public transport, dropping employees right outside their front door, not on the corner.

Co-founders Ben Gordon and Jarryd Bands (a lawyer chasing more creative range and a born entrepreneur) spotted the gap in Uber's model: it owns none of its cars and barely vets its drivers (increasing employer risk), and SA's public transport time and area coverage gap.

By owning a slice of the fleet and controlling the drivers, they use a clustering-and-routing engine to crack the travelling-salesman problem by working out per-shift rides, vehicles and routes, and packaging it as a smart bulk-booker that can dispatch 1'000+ employees in seconds.

The data play

Etapath is turning transport into intelligence, where each trip becomes a report to the company showing where their bill leaks, which routes cost more than they should, and which employee is costing more to transport than they earn.

And this kind of optimisation won't drive companies to stop hiring from certain places; according to Ben, it helps companies increase the area, and thus pool, that companies can hire from.

We like that the safety is designed-in and not bolted on, and the tech can clearly grow beyond current scope into taxi-owner territory, but naturally (not forced).

We're watching this space…

You've seen where SA's online sales leak (checkout failures), and you've seen what closes it (onsite checkout, no more gateways). Here's the part that catches people off guard.

Paystack Onsite is free to install:

You’re not migrating. Your store stays your store: same theme, same products, same collections, same Paystack account if you already have one. You are just switching payment methods from one that sends people away and kills sales, to an on-site checkout that's boosted others' conversion by up to 90%.

And the date matters. Black Friday falls on 27 November, the heaviest trading day of the SA online year. And every point of checkout success you gain before then compounds across the busiest week you will trade all year.

Even if you sell in person, connecting Paystack Terminal to the same Shopify account gives you all the same benefits.

It's a quick 10 minutes now, so you don't have to watch Black Friday carts die at checkout — your call.

🚆 Octoco Invests in SA Rail Sensor. Cape Town's HisWay Labs makes TrackView, a track sensor with no copper and no batteries, so there's nothing worth stealing. Octoco just took a stake in it. Built for SA's cable thieves, sold to the world.

📱 Gauteng's App Gets a Do-Over. The province relaunched Visit Gauteng with a free-to-list marketplace, built by the same company as the original, which had a few thousand installs. The real test is simple: publish the sales numbers.

🗽 New York Makes Quitting Easy. NYC became the first city to fine businesses R8'900 per violation if cancelling a subscription is harder than signing up. Normally, only countries and regions can make such laws, but this is the first city doing os by itself. Hello, gym contracts.

🧠 UX That Pays Back. Bad UX kills conversion, retention and revenue. Isoflow is a 32-person, founder-led design studio that has spent 16 years building intuitive, high-performing digital products for fintech, ecommerce, insurance and healthtech teams.*

🔒 One Stolen Laptop Later. Remember the founder whose staff records all lived on one laptop that got stolen? He's now on a POPIA-compliant cloud platform with staff on a VPN, because Cell C helped him discover that improved connectivity can enhance security. "It shouldn't have to take something going wrong," he says. See how Cell C can help you →*

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

Four years ago, Orca Fraud was two founders and a laptop. Today it screens around $5bn (~R80bn) a month across more than 70 countries with a team of about ten. So we asked its co-founder and CEO what she did differently, from the first customer to the fifth market.

And it turns out, there are 6 lessons from building a global fraud platform from SA that run against most of the usual startup advice.

Bitcoin pushed above $87'000. BTC opened Friday at $84'850 and climbed through $86'000, its second time at that level in two weeks, while ETH broke out of the $2'600 range it had held since 24 September.

Absa is the first bank in Africa to offer crypto custody. Its corporate and investment banking arm launched a digital asset custody platform for SA institutional clients, built on Ripple's technology, supporting bitcoin, ether, XRP Ledger assets and USDC.

Crypto teaching how stocks work. With crypto formalising and allowing you to buy normal stocks on exchanges, Binance helps teach you how shares and markets work. Also learn to stay safe with a guide to spotting fake payment scams in SA.

Disclaimer: Digital asset prices can be volatile. The value of your investment may go down or up and you may not get back the amount invested. You are solely responsible for your investment decisions and Binance is not liable for any losses you may incur. Not financial advice. For more information, see our Terms of Use and Risk Warning.

Last week, we showed you Meta AI and smart glasses coming to SA, asking whether you've tried Muse yet. The verdict? Keep that agent away from the bank card…

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🕵️ Yep, I VPN'd my way in (5%)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ ⏳ Nope, waiting for it to land in SA (32%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🙅 Not letting Meta's agent near my bank card (63%)

Startup Stories: Biomine, 14 Oct, CPT: How Biomine is taking microbiome testing beyond the gut into skin, oral and infant health, over lunch. Get tickets.

Scaling Globally, Managing Locally, 15 Oct, CPT: OCFO, Sudor, Ruby Digital and Travelstart on growing offshore without losing control at home. Get tickets.

Optimising Operations in Notion with AI, 27 Oct, CPT: A live Notion and AI build session for ops people, backed by Notion, at BBD in Century City. Apply 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: This incredible sight of thousands of birds synchronising in a cloud is called a murmuration. Some say they do it to ward off predators, but the name comes from the droning sound of all their wings beating together.

🎂 Wow Site: This site tells you how rare your birthday is using 85 million real births from official records.