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Wanna kick a robot? This university professor’s bot can take roundhouse kicks like a champ. How fast it gets back up… Sheez. 🥊

In Today’s Open Letter

Users sticking with inferior products just ‘cos it’s too much bother to switch? Here’s an idea to get them moving…

A friend of The Open Letter (who may or may not be the same person who picked up those sweet Lumineers pre‑sale tix we wrote about) surprised us by saying, despite having an iPhone, they still pay for Spotify and won’t switch to Apple Music.

It’s not money: Apple Music for individuals goes for around a third (R21.99 per month) of a Spotify sub (R69.99 per month). Spotify just has one of the lowest cancellation rates among audio streamers at less than 1% churn. 

And of their 500 million paying subscribers (as of Jan 2025), 61% across most countries said they’d stay loyal despite numerous price increases in 2024 and 2025.

But at circa R500 annual revenue per user (times that by 500M), snatching a subscriber’s super valuable. And you’d think Apple’d be making a dent in Spotify by now, so what’s holding peeps back?

Maybe it’s the sheer schlep of having to make the switch…

The cost of a switch

People avoid switching even from products they dislike simply because of the sunk costs: Missing tracks, hours curating playlists, losing shared playlists and even learning where things sit are real. 

Habit and inertia push hard. People spend effort to learn a product and then stick with it, even if alternatives offer clear benefits.

Here’s where the opportunity lies

Imagine product makers offering Migration-as-a-Service: A tool or agency that takes on all the hard work, transferring playlists, matching metadata, migrating shared content, preserving offline tracks and handling the edge cases.

You know, like consulting firms Deloitte, Accenture and Capgemini – enterprises pay them billions to migrate core systems, just for the average music user.

Apple has cottoned on to this.

Apple Music’s Transfer Tool first launched in Australia and New Zealand in May 2025, before expanding it to another 7 countries, including Brazil, Mexico, the US and the UK in August, expanding globally less than a month later.

The tool is powered by SongShift, with the 3rd party tool still available as a standalone that can – get this – migrate between a whole bunch of different platforms, including Apple Music. It remains to be seen what Apple does to potentially close that off.

For the longest time, SaaS products locked people in with data and the inconvenience of switching. But what happens when tools make it easy to switch? After all, data on the platform does belong to the user…

We’re watching this space.

And turn innovative thinking into second nature

On Tuesday, the ops room felt familiar: Long agenda, longer sighs.

Then Mbali rewrote the whiteboard from “Q4 growth plan” to “What’s the customer tripping over today?”

The room shifted. Debate-as-sport gave way to revisiting the problem, a tiny test, a two-step tweak to sign up, measured by Friday. The result? The following week, conversions ticked up.

That rhythm is creative leadership, not luck. And it’s teachable.

Red & Yellow Creative School of Business’s Postgraduate Diploma in Creative Leadership turns strategy into weekly behaviour. You’ll:

✅ Practise design thinking
✅ Run practical experiments
✅ And lead people-first teams, with assignments you apply directly at work.

This is the course to consider for you and your workforce to think differently and creatively impact change.

Every week on a Friday, we pick an up-and-coming SA e-commerce store and feature it here for you to explore…

As long as there have been board shorts, water-loving teenagers like 16-year-old Tom Mitchell have been faced with the timeless dilemma: Regular underwear just doesn’t keep up with an active lifestyle — it stays soggy under board shorts and doesn’t work under a wetsuit.

So Tom and his mum Sandra created something better – Kecks underwear that is quick-drying, anti-chafe and exceptionally comfortable, designed for movement, water and adventure.

Proudly worn by Springboks, surfers and grade one champions, Kecks are so confident you’ll like them, they’re giving Open Letter readers a sweet 15% discount on your first order.

Use code TheOpenLetter15 over at kecks.co.za to grab yours.

The code is valid for 14 days (i.e. expires on the 3rd of October) and gives the user 15% off. One use per user.

🌿 Green Boost. South Africa is about to see a ZAR150 million ($8.6 million) clean tech debt fund, thanks to a partnership between Impact Amplifier and UNIDO's GCIP to empower SMEs by filling crucial early-stage financing gaps. Very nice.

🌍 Connecting Africa. Google is plugging Africa into the future with four new connectivity hubs. The subsea cables will power up digital corridors and strengthen resilience, potentially spiking GDP by billions. Lekker.

🚧 Pothole Power Play. Discovery's Pothole Patrol, a collaboration with Dialdirect and Joburg city, has already fixed over 300k potholes in Jozi (like 60’000 a year). Probs have the claims data of exactly where the potholes are, hahaha.

👓 Meta's Smart Specs. Meta has launched their $799 Ray-Ban smart glasses with a display and wristband controller. The AI-infused specs promise smartphone functionalities through eye-level lenses and gesture-controlled bands. Interesting.

😎 The Stack. Founders need reliable tools and suppliers. That’s why our Founder’s Stack gives you 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.

Yesterday, we showed you how Kasi Money’s building a bank for side hustlers in SA, asking about your payday. And most are on the monthly roll…

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 👔 Monthly, of course (61%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 👩‍💻 Weekly, but I’m not a driver (8%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 💰 Cash in hand daily is king! (3%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🎯 Once a year – owner-investor vibes (3%)

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🤔 Pay? What is this pay you speak of? (25%)

Your 2 cents…

Eish, we feel you, Leoni. It’s like the first months of building a new business — Corn Flakes for supper. Hang in there. 💚

Hmm, OK, Nikita, we’ll allow it. Daily, she is. 🎯

☁️ Head of Go To Markets @ Cloud on Demand

🎨 Senior Brand Designer @ DoubleShift

🐮 Key Account Manager @ Flash Group

💎 Senior Account Executive @ Jem

🧑‍💻 Software Engineer @ Octoco

🦖 Head of Sales @ OfferZen

💼 Business Development Consultant @ Outsourced CFO

🐒 Senior Software Engineer @ Rafiki Works

🤓 Rockstar Developer @ TaxTim

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

🛠 Tool to Try: VIGI lets you turn any URL into a slick marketing video in seconds.

🤯 That’s Interesting: In 1981, a pardoned 100-year-old prisoner refused to leave his cell, saying, “Don’t be silly, I live here now.”

📸 Next Level: This dog spotted herself on a billboard… and posed for a picture.

🧠 Hack: Try swapping “I know” with “You’re right.” Makes you sound less arrogant.

🌏 Wow Site: Tour an island? TAS360 is a series of 360° panoramas of Tasmania.

Hey, Renier here 👋, co-founder of The Open Letter.

I’ve spent 17 years in SA tech and seen hundreds of startups rise and fall. The ones that made it all had one thing in common: a strong community.

That’s why I started The Founder Collab — a space where 100+ SA founders connect for:

☕ Meetups & events

🎓 Weekly masterclasses

📚 35+ expert sessions on-demand

🤝 A network unlike anything else

Come build your startup alongside me and 100+ other SA founders in The Founder Collab. Spaces are limited — new founders join weekly.

Help us make The Open Letter more useful to you.

Vote in the poll, leave a quick comment, or hit reply — we read every single one.