🚘 They Service Cars Where?

Gone bananas? US zoos are fighting a terrible scourge of smartphone-addicted gorillas that’s breaking up ape families and causing zoo feuds. The only recourse? Limit those big apes’ screen time.

In this Open Letter:

• Roll with it: Bringing trust and transparency to SA roads.
• Shein’s SA mall play, Zuck’s Llama fight & censoring China’s video AI.
• All the action: Community events & engagement for you.
• The MedTech that’s got you excited: The results are in.
• Startup fuel: Share this and get 100+ SA business ideas.

Together with Outsourced CFO

TRENDING NOW

Keeping Millions of Used Wheels a-Rollin’

With the current economic climate, more South Africans are opting for used cars that are often outside their warranty/service plan.

But, of course, regular servicing is essential to keep your car on the road – whether once a year, every 15’000 kms or as the need arises (like some of our cars in our student days).

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The road to reliability is filled with potholes

While there are many options for servicing, challenges remain:

• Downtime: Waiting for your car to be serviced can leave you stranded for a few hours.
• Cost Transparency: Oh, an SA favourite; unexpected high bills and hidden costs are a biggie – whatcha gonna do, after all, just leave your car there?
• Quality Assurance: If issues resurface shortly after service, there isn’t much you can do about it, so you’re never really assured it’ll be fixed properly (or if someone just disappeared with your money).

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You’re not alone…

And it’s a big potential pool of other people facing the same sort of challenges. In 2023 alone, nearly 400’000 used cars changed hands – up 4.6% from 2022. 

Not to mention the 2020 Competition Commission ruling that found the way car dealerships handled new car service plans as uncompetitive – forcing them to unbundle service plans from finance and denouncing the practice of voiding warranties if you don’t service it with the dealer themself.

This opens the door to motorists being able to save up to 40% on their servicing costs. If you can trust the mechanic, that is…

A mechanic that's just a few clicks away

A local start-up, Michanic, is revolutionising this space in 3 ways:

• It’s mobile – the mechanic comes to you
• More accurate, transparent pricing – on both labour and parts
• Quality assurance and giving you recourse if the job’s done badly.
  
  

How? Well first off, Michanic lets you book a mechanic to come to your home or workplace. Then they leverage clear and transparent pricing based on six years’ data on job times and also integrate with their parts suppliers, ensuring more accurate quotes, with no nasty surprises.

Lastly, once you accept the quote and make payment, they ensure a mobile mechanic in your area arrives at your doorstep at the agreed-upon time. And, once the service is complete, Michanic acts as an escrow intermediary that can hold onto the payment to provide recourse, if any issues arise.

Offering convenience, transparency and accountability, innovative solutions like Michanic are taking a lot of good steps toward keeping more of SA’s wheels turning. We’re watching this space.

Plus: We had Michanic’s founder Lesetja Dikgale on the podcast this week, and he shared some valuable insights, including:

• How car owners save 40%+ on services and repairs
• How to build a hands-free tech product overnight
• And so much more – check it out:

Want to understand how startups like Michanic make money? Or do you want to get access to up to 3 opportunities with them or in the space they operate in? Then, sign up for The Open Letter Pro and get access to our Pro Deep Dives in every The Open Letter Newsletter that goes out.

PLUS join our community of 30+ South African founders building high-value tech-enabled businesses.

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IN SHORT

🍑 Expanding the Orchard. Peach Payments has acquired custom software development firm Operativa to help the local FinTech grow more effectively and efficiently.

🤬 Chinese AI Censorship. A video-generating AI model Kling from China seems to be censoring topics like “Democracy in China” and “Chinese President Xi Jinping walking down the street” or anything else that could rub the Chinese government the wrong way.

🦙 Zuck’s Fighting Llama. According to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Meta Platforms’ newly debuted “state of the art” model Llama 3.1 is set to take the AI fight to OpenAI and Google after taking several months to train Llama’s models and spending hundreds of millions of dollars on computing power.

🎟️ Get yer tickets… The world’s largest ticket marketplace Ticketmaster has acquired SA-based Quicket to support the rapidly growing African live event market.

👗 Fashion that Pops. Shein is popping up in SA at the Mall of Africa for a 10-day Pop Up Shop event from 2-11 Aug offering an “interactive experience” where customers would be able to “assess the quality for themselves”. Could also just be a way to assess having a local brick-and-mortar presence…

😎 The Stack. Founders need tools and suppliers they can trust. Check out our Founder’s Stack with tools like Apollo that help you find new enterprise leads and Metavolve which helps founders dodge a lot of the pain of scaling a business.

CHECK THIS OUT

When you need more than compliance

Scaling companies need more than just tax and regulatory requirements.

You need maximum return for the areas where you spend money – that’s where strategic financial decisions can play a major role in helping you grow healthily.

You need a CFO.

McKinsey & Company says startups with top-performing CFOs tend to see a 60% higher return on equity than their peers.

But what does a highly experienced CFO cost?

Likely between R90k and R110k per month… worst still you likely don’t need this person full time.

That’s why we created our Outsourced CFO model at OCFO – get highly experienced strategic financial inputs at a fraction of the cost.

Keen to explore how OCFO can help you grow?

ENGAGE

What You Missed in the TOL Community

We’ve been diving into 5X-ing your builds with AI, and people are doing some amazing things…

Coming Up This Week

• Next Wednesday 10-11: Office Hours, where we all log in and work together, + the whole Open Letter team is at members’ disposal.
• Put on your dancing shoes! Our first-ever in-person event is coming soon! Time, date and place coming your way next week…
• Support: All day, every day: unlimited introductions, recruitment, service provider referrals and business-building insights.
• Plus: Book free consulting sessions with The Open Letter team to help you grow!
  
  

Want to join a group of South Africans building high-value tech-enabled startups? Start your free trial now!

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What You Said…

We asked what MedTech advances you’re excited about, and affordability is a big one…

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🏎️ Rapid testing (14%)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🤖 AI-powered screening (25%)

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🩺 Portable diagnostic tools (16%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🥼Affordable healthcare technology (43%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 😏 The big patient data we can gather from these devices (2%)

Your 2 cents…

“I think if this type of tech is constantly improved to make better diagnosis, then the lessons learnt from this tech can be applied to a variety of areas, some even outside of medicine.”

Panache

Nice catch, Panache. Yes, that could unlock a whole lot of NB lessons.

“Most poor people cannot afford medical aid, so such devices can assist in providing medical care.”

Vakele

Indeed, Vakele. And hopefully, it can get to the point where you can run tests in places where there’s not even a clinic — it would be so great.

“If run correctly, AI-powered screening could result in rapid testing, be a portable diagnostic tool and early diagnosis will lead to affordable healthcare. Big patient data will ensure accuracy in the AI-powered screening and diagnostics.”

Feda

Yes, Freda, just imagine how advanced our medicine can become with that kind of dedicated processing power.