Can WhatsApp help solve South Africa’s crime crisis?

In this episode of How Would You Build It, we meet Mike Houghton and Nick Mills, the co-founders behind a bold new startup using crowdsourcing, data, and AI to tackle one of South Africa’s most pressing issues — crime.

What started with leveraging the network effects of WhatsApp has now turned into a fast-growing platform backed by $500K in funding. They share how they’re collecting insights from communities, how AI is helping them build faster, and how they’re thinking about fundraising, speed, and scale.

Listen now on your favourite platform.

Or skip to the highlights:

01:00 Community Wolf founder story

04:59 What is Community Wolf

11:00 Tackling crime & safety in SA

12:45 Data as a business model

18:07 Building with AI

27:27 Building in WhatsApp

33:24 Area-based networks

43:19 Marketing hacks

49:31 Building for seed funding