The pivot, the first customers, the money that didn’t dilute him, and the border he decided not to cross.

Building something physical in South Africa breaks most of the standard startup playbook, which is exactly what makes the workarounds worth stealing.

We asked Zimi CEO Michael Maas, who has raised around R50m across grants, development finance and equity, what he learned getting here.

Zimi started as a public charging network, and almost every variable that mattered belonged to someone else: EV sales volumes, vehicle imports, tariffs, adoption rates. Competitors began giving venues free chargers, and demand was hope-based rather than sold. The pivot to enterprise fleets put the outcome back in his hands, because now the business wins by selling well rather than by waiting for a market to arrive.

Here’s how to spot the parts of your business you don’t actually control.

The first customers came from scraped email addresses and a blunt question: here’s my deck, do you want an EV charger at your location? Replies turned into installs once he pitched venue managers in person. The bigger customer came the slow way, through an intro chain that sat dormant for six months before a contact pulled Zimi into a fleet deal he was already working on.

Here’s how to land your first customers, even before you have a product.

Hardware is capital-hungry, and fewer investors will touch it, so the default equity route is the wrong first move. Climate grants funded R&D without diluting anyone, and development finance carried the capital-heavy builds. His caveat is precise: he wouldn’t send a software founder to the DBSA, but for hardware, they think like a startup investor. His biggest regret is not going after grants sooner.

Here’s how to fund a hardware business with grants and DFI money.

When equity did come into it, he treated fundraising as a pipeline with stages rather than a series of hopeful meetings. The sharpest move costs one question: has this investor actually raised their fund? If they have no capital to deploy, he disqualifies them immediately. And the timeline is brutal, since an institutional round takes 12 to 18 months even when it’s going well.

Here’s how to run fundraising like a sales pipeline.

Every SA founder gets told to go global. Michael looked at roughly 5,000 to 6,000 EVs in a fleet of about 12 million vehicles and concluded the local market had barely started. Crossing a border with hardware means new compliance codes, new installation partners and physically shipping units, while staying put compounds SA-specific expertise into something a later entrant can’t match.

Here’s how to decide whether to expand or go deeper in the local market.

Taken together, it’s a fairly contrarian route: pivot away from the exposed model, sell with a deck before there’s a product, fund the expensive years with money that takes no equity, and grow deeper rather than wider. Which is roughly the opposite of the hardware founder who pitches VCs, gets told the sector’s too capital-intensive, and stops there.

Michael’s full talk from Founder Collab Live is available to members inside the Founder Collab, where he 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.

Get more SA tech and business news, tips and business-building workflows and subscribe to The Open Letter.