Need some SA inspo {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? In 1990, a corporate lawyer from Jozi named Rodney Sacks bought a bankrupt US natural juice company and built it into the ~R146bn-a-year brand we know today as Monster Energy. Never underestimate a driven South African.

In Today's Open Letter

In SA, the acquisition cost of a new customer (CAC) has tripled in the last 13 years, as ad costs climb (Meta ads alone rise 15-20% a year) – so this Cape Town FinTech's building a new way to reach them and only pay for successful sales…

SA online store operators know every new customer costs more than the last one. 'Cos e-commerce is growing, but only 34.2% of SA's adults actually shop online, meaning every store, Amazon now included, is bidding for the same slice of the country, and it's driving up CAC.

Meanwhile, the big retailers are cashing in on their own shoppers. They’ve got millions-strong lists, which they even sell to their suppliers: Shoprite's marketing, media and insights business is almost worth R1bn. Pick n Pay, Takealot and Checkers' Sixty60 all sell ad space on their own platforms too.

So what do you as a new or growing store do?

One BNPL scale-up thinks it has an answer…

The local scale-up helping SA stores scale too

Happy Ads is the new digital marketing platform by Cape Town buy now, pay later platform Happy Pay. And the big thing is: you don't pay for impressions or clicks; you only pay a small commission when you get a completed sale.

That's not even the best part: They have 800k of their own registered users for you to market to, plus 2 million on partner networks and Happy Pay co-founder and CEO Wesley Billett told us they are busy adding 6 million more soon. Phew, that's 8.8 million peeps to market to, and you don't pay until they buy. Goeiste.

All of this after they managed to generate R100m+ in merchant sales in a pilot, some even generating 20x ROI. 😳

What we like is where the risk sits: if a campaign flops, Happy Pay eats the cost, not you. For a store with no loyalty programmes to mine, that's a lekker cheap way to test whether targeted ads can pay off.

What we'd like to know is, if this new platform acts as a kind of digital mall for SA online retail, how is Happy Pay going to ensure people keep coming there? Much of the reach is borrowed: their own base is 800'000, up from 600'000 when we covered its raise in March. The 2 million sits on partner apps, and the team hasn't said yet where the 6 million is going to come from.

We actually sent Happy Pay a few questions about this, and intend to follow up with a web post on this very soon.

In the meantime, you can apply to Happy Ads here.

We're watching this space…

Finance builds an internal tool over a weekend, marketing spins up a campaign app, and an AI agent deploys a service nobody asked IT about.

None of that is hypothetical anymore: Gartner expects task-specific AI agents in 40% of enterprise apps by the end of 2026, up from under 5% last year. Deloitte found only 21% of organisations have a mature governance model for agentic AI.

The build is the easy part now.

The hard part is what happens next:

For a listed company, those aren't IT questions. They're governance concerns, and the maths escalates fast: 1'000 staff, 10% start building, that's 100 applications IT never commissioned, running somewhere.

You can't stop it, so how do you use it to your advantage?

Win by being best at the one thing customers care about. More people fly between Cape Town and Joburg than do between New York and Los Angeles. That's why FlySafair made being on time its product, and was named the world's most on-time airline twice. It now flies over 60% of SA's domestic seats. See how.

Grow by renting your setup to your rivals. Takealot now runs warehousing and deliveries for Woolworths, Mr Price and Pepkor. That fulfilment business nearly doubled its revenue in a year and helped Takealot post its first full-year profit in 15 years. Extra parcels, same warehouses. See how.

Turn your card machine into a credit line. Trade on a Capitec Business card machine for three months and you can qualify for credit, without a stack of paperwork. You also get free next-day settlement and low commission on every payment. See the card machines.

🛒 SA Wins Money20/20. Cape Town-founded Omnisient took the Banking Grand Prix in Las Vegas for using grocery shopping data to help SA banks lend to people with no credit history. It says 3.2 million of them qualified.

🧬 Joburg Takes On Novartis. BioInformatiCo's Leova, which builds and tests clinical trial databases, placed second to a Novartis and AWS team in a global AI challenge. A seed round opens in the next few months.

🚀 A SpaceX Share For Every Kid. Musk says he'll give one SpaceX share to every child in America in 2027, roughly R168bn worth. Doing the same for SA's 21 million kids would cost about R50bn. Don't hold your breath, though.

💼 Global Structure, Less Drag. Finance Isle of Man supports SA founders moving offshore with 0% corporate tax, UK VAT access and easier access to international capital — a smart base for global growth.*

⚡ Zero Downtime, 20% Faster. When a Cape Town manufacturer re-engineered its infrastructure with Cloud On Demand, the cutover ran without a minute of downtime, and IT performance jumped more than 20%, while the budget moved from CAPEX to OPEX. That's cloud tuned to do more. See what optimisation looks like.*

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

We featured more YC startup ideas to steal and asked which one you'd take. And most here say they'll just forward it to someone…

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🐮 Cattle drones, obviously. My farm needs this (0%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 🛂 Visa AI. I've been rejected twice already (43%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🛋️ None. I'll just forward this to someone (57%)

Most businesses say a person checks their AI's work, but Capitec goes further: that person has to know the specific job. So we asked its head of data science why any human won't do, and how to set it up properly.

And it turns out, there are 5 steps to put an expert in the loop on your AI.

Black-owned business with a founder aged 18 to 35? Absa's R12m Youth Entrepreneurship Fund offers grants you don't repay, and that take no equity, plus mentorship and market access. Closes 31 Oct. Apply now.

Agritech startup with an MVP? UNDP's timbuktoo Launchpad takes African agritech teams into structured incubation, mentorship and investor-readiness support, with a new cohort every quarter. Apply now.

Need more than just advice? The Founder Collab bundles R40k+ in tools, cloud credits, legal sessions and a curated founder community into one membership for SA tech builders. Join now.

Want free AI skills training? Google Hustle Academy 2026 offers one-day bootcamps and 60-min webinars for SA entrepreneurs and SME owners. Register for free.

Want to promote your event/programme here? Let us know.

Biotech & Beers, 23 Oct, CPT: OneBio's quarterly evening for scientists, founders and biotech fans. Get tickets.

SA to the Netherlands, 4 Nov, online: Nic Haralambous and Andy Golding on building a life and career there. Register free.

Beyond Survival Mode, 6 Nov, CPT: Why resilience and high performance aren't the same as thriving. Get tickets.

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: Watch a 60-year-old set a new strongman world record, with each pillar weighing around 200kg. Respect.

🌍 Wow Site: My Earth Toy is an interactive cartoon map of the world packed with games and things to do, built by a dad and his two sons.