Level up in your living room {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? A developer rebuilt Mario 64 into fully playable AR – you can literally pull him out and make him walk on your table. 🎮🕹️

In This Open Letter

Awesome data and tech to help empower you for the local elections on 4 November…

As you know, The Open Letter doesn't get involved in politics, but our country, cities and provincial rules and regs impact how our businesses can function and grow. And one thing that's true about SA is that our politicians and parties (bless them!) have never been really good at communicating clearly and simply.

Most of us have no clue who of the 620 registered parties stand for what – which is why so many feel disenfranchised and trapped, as if their vote doesn't matter.

The lekker news is that now we have the tech to go find that data, and a lot of locals are doing insane side projects to help SA find out who's really for what in SA. We hope you'll spend a few hours exploring what's out there before casting your vote next week – and forward these on to a few friends who'll appreciate it…

1. BallotBox makes wards, candidates and voting stations super clear

Our good friend and personal hero Alastair Otter from The Outlier collaborated with The South Africa Brief to create one of the handiest tools for local elections we've seen. Enter your street or suburb, and it'll show you where your ward is, who the candidates are, the history of voting in your ward, council seats – they'll even show you the nearest voting station.

Also worth mentioning, they're the ones who explained the elections so we can understand: in local elections, you'll get two ballots, one for your ward, one for a party. The ward elections impact the share of seats a party can get, so never think your vote doesn't count. Even if your candidate doesn't win, each ward vote impacts how much say they or another party can have in your city/region.

2. Two quick quizzes to know who represents you best

A local software dev named Justin Abrahams created WhichParty, a tool that lets you answer 30 questions to see which parties align most with your views. And, if 30 is too many, there's another tool called Political Compass (we're not sure who created this one, though) that does the same in only 20 questions.

3. CivicLens for the bigger picture

Bag Drop founder Kyle Brijder built CivicLens (click through from his LinkedIn post) as a complete, nonpartisan website with all of SA's political landscape in one simple, easy-to-understand interface. Every SA party, their ideologies and policies, the entire cabinet, past election results, info on parliament, SA's budget – everything there in one place for you to explore.

See you at the voting stations next Wednesday!

PS: If you’re up for a giggle, check out the comments on the hackjob chatbot pilot SA Gov published on X this week. 🤭

Have your say…

Remember a few years ago when everyone was like "Facebook, blegh…"? We all wondered if LinkedIn would end up there, too.

Well, it was kinda almost there, wasn't it? LinkedIn added that button to report AI slop because so many people were dumping low-grade rubbish on there. And we'd bet that's what your CEO and execs saw when they went onto LinkedIn; that's what they think of when you say "we should build out our social profile a bit…"

Thing is, LinkedIn is still the place to make real business connections. 98% of Fortune 500 CEOs gather on LinkedIn, and they get 7x more impressions and 4x more engagement than their company pages.

And you don't even have to force your CEO and execs to pretend to like social media.

FDC has helped many CEOs, partners, directors and entire business teams grow their influence, make real connections, build trust and, yes, get actual high-value business leads organically via LinkedIn.

The trick is using real people who know how, and have done it before, to advise, guide, and help your team make LinkedIn a powerful channel. And they won't let your exec team talk to an intern; FDC sets them up with a strategic business session directly with the company's MD.

Legacy systems, long procurement cycles, security review and trust that takes months to earn. So many SA founders complain about the friction of landing a local enterprise customer. So we asked Sizwe Nxumalo of 3 Capital Ventures why that same friction is worth building for on purpose.

And it turns out, what makes selling here hard is exactly what makes leaving you hard, but only if you design for it deliberately.

🎰 SA Tops the Betting Table. SA ranks first of 48 markets for online gambling: 32.3% of internet users visited a betting site or app last month, ahead of Norway and Greece. That's household money not going to retail, savings or debt.

🔍 Google Feels the Pinch. Google's search ad growth slowed more than expected, and Alphabet blamed people using AI Mode. It also burned about R150bn in cash. If your site lives off search traffic, plan for fewer clicks.

💻 Apple's Touchscreen Mac. Apple launched its first OLED touchscreen MacBook Pro, plus an M6 MacBook Pro, iMac and an OLED iPad mini. No SA prices yet. A straight conversion puts the new Pro near R47'700, before VAT and markups.

📈 Pipeline Switched On. Growing SA software consultants IQ Business needed leads but didn't have the in-house muscle to run effective campaigns. So Cloud on Demand funded and ran full social media campaigns, turning marketing spend into qualified leads and real sales.*

🛡️ What's in It for Everyone. The business gets AI investments that actually ship. IT sets the rules once and stops drowning in hosting tickets. Builders go from idea to live app without joining a queue. That's three wins from one governed lane, built by Salus Cloud. See what Salus unlocks for your teams →*

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

A founder ships an app in three days and gets a spike of sign-ups from the launch hype. A week later, daily users are down to single digits. By day thirty, nobody's opening it.

That's why OfferZen asked Mike Fisher, former CTO and Head of Engineering at Etsy and PayPal, how leaders keep outcomes in view as AI speeds everything up. His answer: across Google, Microsoft and Etsy, only 10 to 15% of experiments ever move the needle. Here's how to stay outcome-focused in a ship-fast culture.

Yesterday, we showed you the StrokePath rehab app, asking how many of your doctor's instructions you actually followed. A perfect split, and nobody admitted to forgetting everything…

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 ✅ All of them. Model patient, thank you (50%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🤏 The first week, then life happened (50%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🙈 I nodded, left, and forgot everything (0%)

Your 2 cents…

Exactly, yggaba. We should have this for even more conditions. 📄

🌾 Agricultural Technologist @ IMPI Farm Technologies

💻 Intermediate Full-Stack Software Engineer (Contract) @ Decode

🚀 Software Development Engineer @ Amazon

🤖 AI Analyst Programmer @ Old Mutual

📊 Senior Data Scientist @ Momentum

Raising Local Seed Capital, 5 Nov, Online: Alexandra Fraser and Cape Town founders who just closed pre-seed and seed rounds on what raising really takes. Register free.

AI Video Masterclass, 6 Nov, Online: Aldo Calitz builds an animated product explainer live with AI, from script to final edit, no design team needed. Join to get full access.

Founder Padel with Cell C Business, 13 Nov, Cape Town: An afternoon of padel, drinks and founder chat on Bree Street, capped at 36 players. 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.

🧩 Tool to Try: Zuzo lets your team thank each other in Slack or Teams, with credits that turn into real rewards. Built in Cape Town.

🛣️ That's Interesting: Ever arrived home with no memory of the drive? That's highway hypnosis: your brain drives on autopilot, reacting to the road as normal, while your conscious mind is somewhere else entirely.