The dependencies that quietly decide your fate, and the four questions that tell you whether you’re building a business or waiting on one.
Founders obsess over the things they can change and rarely audit the things they can’t, which is usually where the real risk is sitting.
We asked Zimi CEO Michael Maas, who pivoted out of exactly that trap on his way to raising around R50m, how founders should stress-test what their model actually rests on…
The move: check who really decides whether you win
Zimi started as a public EV charging network. The logic was sound: put chargers in wine farms and shopping centres, EV sales climb, everyone wins. The problem was that almost every variable that mattered belonged to someone else.
“You just hope and pray somebody comes to that charger.”
How to spot the parts of your business you don’t control
1. List everything that has to go right that isn’t up to you
Write down every condition your model needs to work, then mark the ones you have no influence over. For Zimi, that list was long: EV sales volumes, vehicle imports, tariffs, and how fast South Africans adopted electric cars. None of it was in Michael’s hands, and all of it decided whether the business survived.
2. Check whether you can actually sell it
Growth stalled once other providers and vehicle manufacturers started offering venues free chargers. It’s hard to compete with free, and Michael’s conclusion was blunt: if you can’t sell something, you don’t have a business. If your pricing depends on a competitor not deciding to give the same thing away, that’s exposure, not strategy.
3. Ask whether you’re creating demand or waiting for it
There’s a real difference between selling to a customer who has a problem now and installing something in the hope that traffic shows up. Hope-based demand looks like a business on a spreadsheet and behaves like a lottery ticket in practice. If your revenue depends on people arriving rather than people buying, you’re waiting, not selling.
4. Watch how much capital the exposure costs you
Uncontrolled variables hurt far more when each bet is expensive. Charging infrastructure is capital-intensive, so every site was a significant amount of money committed upfront against demand nobody could promise. The more it costs to place a bet, the fewer wrong ones you can survive.
The big payoff
Michael’s answer was to move to enterprise fleets: vehicles, charging and software sold to logistics, retail and corporate customers who need the whole thing solved. It put the outcome back in his hands, because now the business wins by selling well rather than by hoping the market moves. Around R50m raised this year suggests the check was worth running.
Want the full story?
Michael’s full talk from Founder Collab Live is available to members inside the Founder Collab, where he goes further than we could cover here:
How he landed his first customers by scraping email addresses and cold-pitching venue managers
The intro chain that turned a conference conversation into his first fleet customer
How climate grants and development finance fund a hardware business without diluting you
Why he runs fundraising like a sales pipeline, and how he qualifies investors out
Why he’d sell to the first customer with a pitch deck before building anything
You’ll also get access to 40+ masterclasses from SA founders and operators on sales, fundraising, UX, paid media and more inside The Founder Collab.
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