A bit of privacy? Two Harvard students hacked Meta’s smart Ray-Ban glasses to identify people they’re looking at. But, like in the Watchdogs games, it goes a step further and sends insanely in-depth private info about you straight to their phones. Eeek!

Here’s a doc by the creators on how to protect yourself from this type of tech.

In this Open Letter:

• Customer X: Tech that makes sales while you sleep.

• Beer money, scaling local startups & Superbalist’s restructure.

• Shortcut: Get 20 years of hard-earned startup lessons in 40 mins.

• How startup founders approach sales: The results are in.

• Short on ideas? Share this and get 100+ SA startup ideas.

Together with WigWag:

TRENDING NOW

Future-Proofing this R54bn SA Industry

Back in the 1980s, the primary way to buy insurance in South Africa was through brokers. That’s when South African entrepreneur Douw Steyn identified an opportunity to sell insurance to more price-sensitive consumers via telephones — it was a massive success both locally and abroad, giving birth to the telesales industry in South Africa.

Today, the total call centre industry in South Africa employs over 270k South Africans and is estimated to generate somewhere between R35 billion and R54 billion for the SA economy (about 0.4–0.7% of GDP).

And it’ll grow: the government has committed R569M to grow SA’s BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) sector, which is the fancy name for call centres, with an eye on growing it to a R62 billion per year industry by 2027.

Especially the Western Cape, which houses about 60% of SA’s call centres, netting about R21 billion and 10k new jobs per year for Cape Town’s economy… it’s big business.

But how is this game-changing with AI? Well, AI calling bots are here; just check this demo of a close-to-perfect South African accent that could easily act as an insurance salesperson.

And, you guessed it…

Call Centres Need to Evolve or Die

According to McKinsey’s Customer Care Report 2024, voice calls are surprisingly still alive and kicking but facing their gravest challenge yet:

• rising call volumes

• high levels of employee attrition

• and persistent talent shortages

And with AI and automation as an answer, the biggest and best customer-facing organisations are investing heavily in digitally-enabled customer care (like omnichannel, but for call centres) and McKinsey notes that it’s lifting all customers’ expectations from interactions.

Being able to combine live voice with simultaneous chat, video and image-sharing is boosting customer experience through the roof — especially when interaction can be done asynchronously — in, say, an instant messaging format.

Now, throwing Large Language Models into the mix is no doubt lowering costs and doing the same job in a fraction of the time.

So, just how are SA organisations engaging customers in new and creative ways?

The Local Player Redefining Customer Care

Local scaleup, rather.chat helps companies connect with customers in a new and engaging way via WhatsApp – probably the only channel with equivalent penetration to phone.

Originally built as a tool for selling policies on the popular platform, rather.chat has now been spun out as a full-service solution for businesses to:

• Market to potential customers and generate leads

• Perform and close actual sales virtually

• Handle customer care and customer service

• And take over some customer feedback functions

And the proof’s in the pudding: rather.chat has facilitated over 15 million connections between customers and companies and concluded over 150k actual sales (85% of which were entirely automated, and required no human intervention whatsoever).

In fact, they’ve partnered with a host of local companies, from Ackermans to Clicks, Discovery to Cars.co.za, and on average, manage to lift low engagement levels of around 1.5% through traditional branded app channels to over 40% through WhatsApp. What’s more, research has shown that customers are 47 times more likely to engage via WhatsApp than download your fancy app to chat that way.

Customer engagement is changing faster than ever and rather.chat is offering a way for consumers to engage that prefer to rather chat. We’re watching this space…

IN SHORT

Great Openers for Your Next Meeting.

🍻 Scaling with because of Beer. The SAB Foundation’s Social Innovation Accelerator and Fund has awarded a combined R3 million in funding to 3 local startups. They are Respo, an affordable private ambulance service app for low-income South Africans, Syked, an online wellness platform providing secure video counselling sessions, and Word of Mouth, an end-to-end e-commerce platform for informal entrepreneurs.

🐟 Scales and Fins. Local FinTech startup LittleFish has successfully closed its seed investment round, with TLcom Capital leading the financing — marking TLcom’s first venture into South Africa — and Flourish Ventures also participating as a co-investor.

💳 Card Scaling. VCs 54, First Circle Capital and Sunny Side Venture Partners have led a pre-seed funding round for Scale, a South African card-issuing orchestration startup. The  R12 million round will help Scale in its mission to connect FinTech platforms with banks, issuer processors, KYC and payment networks so that they can launch cards faster.

😢 Scaling Back. Local e-commerce Superbalist is expected to retrench around 28% of its staff as it restructures its business after recently being sold off by Takealot. Hopefully, those impacted are able to bounce back quickly.

🪙 Crypto Pay Scale. Thanks to a partnership between Luno and Zapper, you can now use crypto to pay for a bunch of stuff like medicine, petrol, flight tickets, parking and more at more than 30k Zapper merchants - hopefully as quickly as using a credit card.

😎 The Stack. Founders need tools and suppliers they can trust. Check out our Founder’s Stack with sustainable scaling and growth strategy help through Metavolve, your own CTO and tech team at a fraction of the cost with Octoco and 11 more vital startup tools & services.

CHECK THIS OUT

Sell It Now and Let Them Pay Later

When it comes to online payments, it’s become super easy to get up and running to receive payments with WigWag.

Even if you are a small or solo business selling on social or via WhatsApp, WigWag is one of the fastest ways to set up and get paid.

But what if your customers can’t pay right now? 

Let’s face it, some bigger ticket items are just sold better in instalments – but as a small business, you don’t have the option of selling it that way… until now.

From tomorrow, if you are registered on WigWag to receive payments, you can switch to Happy Pay’s Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) solution to allow your customers to pay for your products or services in two convenient, interest-free payments. 

So, if you are collecting payments using Wigwag, you now get:

• Automatic access to Happy Pay through the WigWag platform.

• Seamless integration of BNPL at checkout, increasing customer satisfaction and conversion rates.

• Guaranteed weekly payments, ensuring you can start fulfilling orders immediately after checkout.

• A simple and user-friendly dashboard, showing all payment types — including Happy Pay transactions — in one place.

Keen to get the simplest online payment solution now with the convenience of Happy Pay’s BNPL solution?

Sign up for a WigWag account now.

HAPPENING SOON

Upcoming Events

11 October 2024 @ 12:00 — LinkedIn Live: We chat with author and serial entrepreneur Alan Knott-Craig on his new book, Life Lessons. Join here.

25 October 2024 — Online Masterclass: SA’s very own “product legend” Roger Norton is here for the first in a three-part product building series — The Open Collab community exclusive.

1 November 2024 — Online Masterclass: Keep your B2B sales pipe filled Masterclass session with sales expert, Sebastian Chapman — The Open Collab community exclusive.

8 November 2024 — Online Masterclass: Part 2: How to keep shipping truly great products, fast — The Open Collab community exclusive.

14 November 2024 — Cape Town: In-person: Building SA’s most-used digital products — tickets available soon.

View all our upcoming events here.

BUILDING TOGETHER

Happening over at The Open Collab

In the last 48 hours alone, in our online community, we…

• Got our recordings of legal pros teaching us how to start companies overseas.

• Introduced Chris to the COO of the startup he’s been looking to collab with.

• Helped Trevor get his job spec looking 100% fly.

• Tried out a bit of the new ChatGPT with Canvas ability.

Coming Up Next Week

• Wednesday 10-11: Office Hours, where we all log in and work together, + the whole Open Letter team is at members’ disposal.

• Friday 12-1: Masterclasses, where we either LinkedIn Live chats with startup legends or get masterclasses in practical building skills from industry pros.

• New: Free monthly startup strategy calls for all Open Collab members.

• Support: All day, every day: unlimited introductions, recruitment, service provider referrals and business-building insights.

MEET THE STARTUP

Didn’t know we were looking for love…

We meet a lot of cool SA founders and started doing quickfire pitches where they tell us what their startups are all about.

This is Serisha, sharing how the Boardroom App helps busy professionals find love in a fast, fast world…

WHAT YOU SAID

Show Me the Money

We asked how you make sales for your startup, and it’s DIY for most…

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🎯 I do it myself (cos then I know I can eat) (62%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 📢 Influencers, ads – anything but selling myself (3%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🚀 I hire and train the best salespeople in the world (6%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 👔 I get like 90% of my leads via my LinkedIn (9%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 😎 Very easily since I found Apollo on The Open Letter’s Founder’s Stack (20%)

Great! And remember to check out the sales tools in the Founder Stack:

You can find and contact leads with Apollo via your LinkedIn, build drip campaigns via email with Beehiiv, collect payments with WigWag and automate workflows between them all with Make so it all runs automatically 24/7.

You don’t even have to write any copy yourself, just get Stream to do it for you. 😉