Stuck in the Stone Age {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? Canadian police wrongfully arrested a man due to a username typo. He spent 18 months in jail before anyone realised they'd left out an underscore and arrested the wrong person. Good grief, Charlie Brown. 🤦‍♀️

In Today's Open Letter

There's a weird gap in accommodations between short- and long-term stays that nobody's fully serving, so this local founder's booking the spot…

Cape Town has one of the densest Airbnb concentrations on Earth, ranking first in the world for Airbnbs per tourist.

That's exactly what happened to Fynn Trompeter, who came to Cape Town from Berlin for a graduate programme, only to find the city offers no five-month flat rentals for him and a load of other interns, remote and contract workers.

You know, those who come to Cape Town for all the right reasons…

So he built the solution…

Turning Cape Town's dead calendar space into lodgings

Roam & Root lets you book a furnished home for anywhere between one and twelve months by syncing with existing Airbnb host calendars and identifying gaps of 30 unbooked days or more.

The beauty of it is: No one leaves Airbnb; it just helps hosts earn on the empty weeks they were writing off anyway. And Roam & Root's cut is only 11% (well under the normal cost), with a fraction of the churn.

And security is top-notch: Roam & Root verifies every host's ID and ownership, watermarks and seals tenant documents, and holds the first month's rent until two days after move-in, so scammers (of which there are more and more in SA) never touch the money.

What we like about it is that it builds on top of Airbnb, not trying to fight it. We've written before how Cape Town hosts lose money on empty rooms, and this is a neat fix. We just can't help thinking that Airbnb itself might get wind of it at some point and try to close the gap themselves.

For now, it's a narrow wedge into an enormous, oddly unclaimed market, built for almost nothing by one person who lived the problem.

We're watching this space…

If you’ve proven your tech and it’s starting to take strain under the weight of actual growth, that’s exactly what Octoco was built for.

Their senior engineers can step in as fractional CTOs to review your architecture and create a technical roadmap that fits your business goals. And then they also bring engineer-level software, hardware, embedded systems, IoT (whatever the product actually needs) for the actual build.

While their Yenza venture studio can help incubate early-stage projects, for established scale-ups across HealthTech, AgriTech, FinTech, EnergyTech and manufacturing, they’ll bring the engineering capability to scale a product so that you can focus on what’s important: sustainable growth.

No RFP or procurement process. Just a direct conversation with engineers who've helped businesses rebuild products for growth, architect complex software ecosystems and scale technology that keeps pace with the business.

🪙 Founders Can, Companies Can't. Treasury and the Reserve Bank want to bar SA companies from moving crypto across the border in either direction. Individuals keep their R10m allowance. So a Cape Town dev shop invoicing a US client in USDC has no lawful way to receive it, but its founder personally does. Comments close 30 September.

🦟 Malaria Is Moving South. New Nature research shows climate change isn't making malaria worse everywhere; it's relocating it. Limpopo, Mpumalanga and KZN are projected among the largest increases on the continent by 2050. If you run farms, lodges or mines in the Lowveld, treat this as a ten-year planning input.

🪪 Green ID's Last Days. Home Affairs launched My Home Affairs Online, a finder tool for the 372 bank branches now issuing smart IDs across Capitec, Absa, FNB and Standard Bank. Up from 32 branches in March. 385'000 applications processed in four months, without extra headcount or budget. Distribution beat technology.

📺 3 Million What, Exactly? SABC+ passed three million registered users after the World Cup, roughly doubling sign-ups. It didn't say how many actually watch. Registration is free and takes one click. With R4.2bn in TV licences uncollected and R59m left in cash reserves, actives are the number that would win the funding fight.

💬 Sales, Not Spam. Poetry already had the brand and the audience. So Chat Inc turned WhatsApp into a high-conversion sales channel that pulled in 14.8k shoppers to generate R1.58 million in revenue at 269% ROI. Ask them to do the same for you.*

* From our partners. Find all the best service providers for your business in our Founder Stack.

A 3% escape hatch from BEE is now on the table. Former Reserve Bank deputy governor Kuben Naidoo has backed Alan Knott-Craig's plan to let companies pay a 3% levy on revenue in exchange for a Level 3 B-BBEE certificate. SAIT's Keith Engel calls it conceptually compelling but warns the gross revenue base wipes out low-margin businesses. Worth working out where you'd land. Read the numbers.

Half of Africa's H1 funding went to seven companies. Startups raised $1.44bn (R23.7bn) in the first six months, marginally up on last year, but across 146 disclosed deals instead of 252. More money, fewer bets. If you're raising in H2, investors are doubling down on names they already know rather than opening new ones. See the breakdown.

Get business banking fees at personal banking prices. With Capitec Business, you pay R1 for payments to other Capitec accounts, R2 to other SA banks and R3 for debit orders. Their online calculator shows you exactly what you'd save against what you're paying now. Check the fees.

We featured Plentify's virtual power plant deal and asked whether you'd let the grid borrow your battery for cash. And most here say nobody touches the battery…

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 💰 At 79c a unit? Take the lot, I'll shower in the dark (36%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🔒 Nobody touches my battery. It carried this family through Stage 6 (57%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🤔 Hold on, I need to find out which app my system is even on (7%)

Stage 6 trauma runs deep, mense. 🔋

Last week we hosted a roundtable dinner with some of SA's sharpest CTOs and engineering leaders. Guest speaker Dan Southwood-Wells, co-founder of ESP (the app formerly known as EskomSePush), spoke on scaling to 10 million users with two founders working part-time.

1. Sell what customers ask for before you've built it. A company asked ESP if they had an API. They said yes (even though they didn't). So they quoted an amount, and it was accepted instantly. They immediately knew they'd undersold it. Customers pay for the certainty you remove, not the code you wrote.

2. Stay close to users, and stay authentic. Some of ESP's strongest trust was built on their worst outage days, because they said "the app is struggling, we're on it" instead of hiding behind corporate language. Keep engineers reading real support emails, not filtered tickets.

3. Design around the spike, not the average day. ESP went from 1'000 requests a minute to 1 million when load-shedding stages changed. Watch your p95 and p99, not comforting averages: the average user is imaginary. Find the one event that synchronises all your users, and protect that moment.

Thanks to Cloud on Demand for making the evening possible.

SA startup building with AI? Google's 2026 Startups Accelerator: South Africa offers 15 growth-stage ventures up to R1m in equity-free funding, Gemini access, cloud credits and 1-on-1 mentorship. Closes 28 Aug. Apply now.

Need more than just advice? The Founder Collab bundles R40k+ in tools, cloud credits, legal sessions and a curated founder community into one membership for SA tech builders. Join now.

Want free AI skills training? Google Hustle Academy 2026 offers one-day bootcamps and 60-min webinars for SA entrepreneurs and SME owners. Zero cost. Register for free.

SA small business ready for the national stage? NSBC Small Business Awards are open, free entry for NSBC Platinum Members across 4 categories including Startup Champion of the Year. Gala on 12 November. See details.

Research team solving alt-protein taste? Coefficient Giving is investing up to $10M in R&D grants ($100k to $1M each) for off-flavour reduction, fat alternatives, egg replacement and fish replication. Closes 10 August. Apply now.

Want to promote your event/programme here? Let us know.

🧩 Tool to Try: TimberCloud is all-in-one business software for custom woodworking and manufacturing.

🦇 That's Interesting: Jack Nicholson didn't just take a cut of Batman's profits; he negotiated merchandise royalties across all the Batman movies, despite only appearing in the first one. Over $60 million. Deal terms matter.

🔪 Next Level: If you think his knife skills are impressive at the start, wait for the end.

🚀 Wow Site: Luna is another gorgeous browser-based space simulator. Go get lost.