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Reason to boogie? If you like this robodoggie’s dance moves, just wait for the part where the guy jumps on its back and rides it like a limbed skateboard. This agile and it can go 18km/h? The future’s gonna be awesome. 🚀

In Today’s Open Letter

20% of SA’s workforce literally walks to work and back every single day — and this SA startup has a plan, but will it work anywhere in the country?

South Africa has a massive daily demand for personal transportation, with fairly low private vehicle ownership: Only 6.2 million drive a car to work, 10.7M take a minibus taxi (a troubled industry) and 17.4M walk all the way to their destination, every day.

It’s estimated that one in 5 workers in SA walk for between 15 mins and 1 hour to work, daily.

The SA startup trying something new

In late 2020, Stellenbosch founder Bradley Levitan and team launched GONOW on Demand, a novel (for SA) e-scooter rental service that lets you book, grab a scooter from one of their self-service charging hubs around central places like Dorp Street, Church Street, Eikestad Mall, etc., and use it to get around, paying per minute of usage.

Perfect for that quick trip to meet a client or lunch with friends.

They’re big on safety, have an app for you to manage your trips and have, naturally, a strict area of usage – take a scooter outside Stellenbosch and a private security team is dispatched to bring you back to base.

Is this the personal mobility solution SA is looking for?

The European roots

Bradley was clear from the start that the idea came from similar initiatives in Europe. Shared micro-mobility (dockless bikes, e-bikes, and e-scooters) has become hugely popular and successful, growing ~10% year-over-year in places like Paris, Berlin, Stockholm and Milan.

But the choice of Stellenbosch in SA was also a key factor.

See, in Europe, micromobility works because of dense urban layouts with short trips, supporting infrastructure (bike lanes, scooter zones) and government policy and regulation specifically for micromobility.

That’s easier to replicate in a smaller, affluent university town than most of SA, where you have major socioeconomic barriers, poor roads, long distances due to urban form (in Gauteng, it’s not uncommon to drive 20–40km to work and back), security risks and lagging regulation – until very recently, SA didn’t even recognise e-scooters as separate from cars or trucks.

Well, where could this work in SA?

Despite the challenges, there might be opportunities to develop micromobility initiatives here. High-density urban centres and tourist-friendly zones are a good place to start.

Think Cape Town CBD and surrounds, where the municipality wants 8% of traffic to be non-traditional motorised transport by 2030. Nodes in Joburg and Pretoria, like Sandton, Rosebank and Braamfontein, could also be promising.

In fact, university towns, or the areas near campuses, are probably a good call – students are tech-savvy and need to get around town. The same goes for tourist destinations and waterfronts, from Durban’s promenade to Pretoria’s Zoo/Union Buildings area, or maybe even the city beachfront in Port Elizabeth (Gqeberha).

Where would you trial it?

Octoco’s First Hardware Hackathon

Most of tech (especially hackathons) is focused on software.

That’s why the first weekend of August was such a special thing to behold: Instead of sleeping in, 40 engineering students from Stellenbosch University and UCT spent their weekend bringing Playful Machines to life with imaginative concepts and working prototypes built right there on the spot at Octoco’s first-ever Hardware Hackathon.

From gameboy-style devices to desktop games, their ideas pushed the boundaries of what machines can do when fun and function collide.

The event was a reminder of just how valuable that kind of learning can be, and how much creativity is unlocked when students are given the time, tools and space to explore.

We should do this kind of thing more often in SA.

🚀Dialled In. MTN's 12-week Cloud Accelerator promises a sweet $65’000 grant, top-notch mentorship and powerful network support for innovators with real traction making waves in FinTech, HealthTech and more. Get in: Applications close 15 August.

⚡️Powered Up. Johannesburg is juicing up its unemployed youth programs with a new initiative aimed at 1’200 young adults, backed by major partnerships, promising electrical skills and entrepreneurial training. Nice one.

🛰️Starlink’s Stumbles. Starlink's dream to revolutionise urban Kenya's internet scene is fizzling with a more than 10% drop in subscribers, as high costs and slower speeds can't compete with local providers. Sjoe, hey.

🤖 GPT Arrive. OpenAI's GPT-5 is about to drop, with early rumours saying it codes and solves maths and science problems like a whiz. Just don't expect as big a leap as last time. Here we go…

😎 The Stack. Founders need tools and suppliers they can trust. Check out our Founder’s Stack with cloud services and solutions for Azure, AWS, security and AI by Cloud on Demand, B2B tech marketing strategy and execution by Stream, plus loads more vital startup tools & services.

The next few months are make-or-break for e-commerce. South Africans are warming up for the busiest retail season of the year, and when the demand spikes, so do payment failures. In fact, between 5% and 10% of payments fail at checkout, costing businesses more than $20 billion annually. 

And nothing kills momentum like a failed transaction.

That’s why the savviest online retailers are already getting their checkout infrastructure in order. Because this season, you don’t just want traffic, you want conversion.

Enter NjiaPay: a secure and powerful payments management platform that helps online businesses do what the big guys do.

✅ Unified checkout that connects to every payment method your customers trust

✅ Smart routing to reduce failed payments and boost approval rates

✅ Simplified reporting and recons to make sure your admin is minimal.

It’s like having your own payments team, minus the overhead. 

Are you using Shopify or WooCommerce? Then your integration can be done in less than an hour!

So before the orders start rolling in, ask yourself: Is your checkout ready to handle the surge?

There is nothing worse than having downtime or outages during the most important months of the year, and with NjiaPay, you can easily add a 2nd (or 3rd) PSP without the technical or operational complexity.

NjiaPay is offering a 3-month Free Trial (yes, that’s how confident they are in their products) for every new client, and a free payment performance audit to help you prep. We’ll benchmark your setup, identify leaks, and show you how to convert more this high season, without spending more on ads.

Don’t let avoidable payment failures steal your Christmas sales.

🎨 UI/UX Designer @ Lula

🧑‍💻 Freelance Frontend Developer (Svelte) @ RunOS

🛍️ Omnichannel Content & Product Coordinator @ Bash

🏗️ Full-Stack Developer @ The Awareness Company

😎 Senior Brand Manager @ Superbalist

💬 Customer Support Coordinator @ Jem

🧮 Senior Marketing Manager, EMEA @ Xero

Hiring? Let us know here and we will feature it next week.

Yesterday, we told you how FireID helped build some of the most successful startups in SA, asking about the hardest SA startup-building skill to master. And most say fundraising’ the game…

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 💸 Cracking local fundraising (32%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🧠 Hiring truly great talent (6%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 🧪 Finding product-market fit here (24%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🌍 Getting real SA-born building advice (6%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ ⛓️ Surviving long sales cycles (24%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 📦 Scaling beyond SA without burning out (8%)

Your 2 cents…

True dat, Greg. Gold stars to anyone who can find a way to shorten the cycles. 🎯

🛠 Tool to Try: Waitlist.email turns any landing page into a lead magnet with one line of code. Collect emails, track referrals — all for $7, once-off.

🤔 That’s Interesting: Ever wonder why it's called uppercase? Because printers used to literally store the big letters in the upper case. Here’s why.

🔥 Next Level: A drunk guy in flip-flops ran an 8km race in Brazil… and still got a medal. Legend.

🍔 Hack: New to board games or playing with friends? This etiquette guide keeps the table fun, fast and friendly.

🌐 Wow Site: Bold & Easy Coloring offers free, high-contrast colouring pages — old-school, brain-calming relaxation for all ages.

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