Shooting data points {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? Someone rebuilt DOOM as an SQL database (for non-techs: basically a fancy spreadsheet that no game should run on), which works surprisingly well for multiplayer syncing — try it for yourself. 🔫

In This Open Letter

SA's resale economy grows over 13% a year, yet a third of people who lost money to digital fraud last year lost it to third-party seller scams on platforms they already trusted — so this local founder's building the fix…

Using any of SA's numerous marketplaces opens you up to a gauntlet of scammer tricks on both ends: from sellers who want you to come to the dodgy part of town, alone, at midnight, to buyers with screenshots of payments that somehow never clear.

It happened to SA founder Jarrett Booysen, who found gear advertised on Facebook and followed every step in the careful buyer's verification rulebook: asked the seller for ID, phoned the man's employer, confirmed he actually worked there, every box you can imagine, ticked.

And he still got scammed: the seller turned out to be a serial con-artist who cleaned out several victims the same day, his own employer among them. So he built a potential fix…

The startup a scam victim built so you don't have to become one

SEQFLO is a secure digital trust infrastructure platform that wants to remove the gamble for both buyers and sellers using third-party marketplaces by holding the buyer's funds in its own approved banking and payment structure and only paying the seller once the transaction conditions are met.

It sits alongside the places people already buy and sell: from Facebook all the way to WhatsApp, bringing verification, in-platform chat, courier booking and live tracking into a single flow. There's even a specialised transaction journey for regulated categories such as firearms, including access to specialist courier services.

A matter of safety and trust

The platform runs on AES-256 encryption and ID verification, with its data-handling processes built around POPIA requirements. It cross-checks IP addresses against geolocation to catch a buyer claiming to sit in one town while the signal says another, and it even has TPPP approval through sponsoring Nedbank, adding a major layer of credibility.

We like that it brings security in a year when consumers rank data protection as one of their biggest concerns when trading, and that it can work across so many different marketplaces, kind of tryna strengthen the entire industry, without trying to displace/replace any one platform.

We're watching this space…

Almost every AI stat you read is American: nobody knows what actually happens when AI lands inside a South African business.

DayOne, a network of vetted AI professionals SA companies can bring in on demand, founded by Liesel Bester after 20 years in tech and serving as COO and CEO, wants to change that.

Its State of AI Delivery in SA survey asks the people who are building with AI: what's live, what's stuck in pilot, where the budget goes and which skills are missing.

It only takes about 15 minutes to complete, and one person who completes it wins R10,000 in cash. The big win for everyone is that your answers contribute to a full report that lands on 9 November, with a follow-up industry roundtable early next year.

The survey closes on Thursday, 15 October.

A software developer’s company kept losing payment webhooks every time their app redeployed, because providers like Stripe only wait a few seconds for a reply — and it sommer rejects any reply older than 5 minutes.

So he built a free, open-source buffer that sits between the provider and his app.

The lekker clever part:

✅ It saves every webhook and replies "got it" in under 5 milliseconds
✅ Failed events retry automatically, with smart back-off
✅ Old replays get re-signed, so Stripe accepts them hours later

No complex queue cluster, no pricey enterprise relay, just Node.js and SQLite.

What's your team building, and where are you hosting it?

🏠 Is Your Rent Fair? FindHomes just opened free rental data on 156'600 live listings across the Western Cape and Gauteng. Landlords are quietly cutting prices, and how fast they cave will surprise you.

🎮 Milk, Bread and a Gaming PC. Checkers now sells prebuilt gaming PCs on Sixty60, delivered by van. The PCs aren't really the story, though. Watch what the app is quietly turning into.

📉 Africa Rates Itself. The AU will launch its own credit rating agency on Wednesday, with 23 African countries currently unrated. Whether it's worth anything comes down to one uncomfortable test.

💼 Investor-Ready Finances. Founders raising or reporting to lenders need clean management accounts, not month-end panic. Xero gives you P&L, cash flow and analytics visibility your accountant can plug into. 90% off for 6 months for TOL readers.*

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

We showed that hardware is the new moat in tech, but that's only if your product actually works and you can manufacture at volume. One operation's smart pallet tracker went from unreliable to producing 40'000 units a month, with the whole chain owned end to end.

The same path is open to you.

Here's how it works:

The result: a product that works, at a unit cost that makes sense, made reliably at scale.

That advantage is genuinely hard to copy, and now it’s yours.

Which of your processes costs you most? SpaceX used a blunt measure to find where rockets lost money, and one of SA's most famous founders adapted it to help you find business processes that waste time (so you know what to automate or fix first).

He calls it the "idiot index", and there are 5 steps to run it on any process in your business.

Yesterday, we featured Etapath's workforce transport, asking how your people actually get to work. Turns out the commute is a group project…

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🚐 A taxi, two trains and a prayer (40%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ ⏰ "Stuck in traffic" is our official start time (30%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 🚗 I drive, so I'm basically the company bus (30%)

On 6 October 1942, Chester Carlson was issued a patent for a process called electrophotography, which we now know as photocopying.

Nobody wanted it. It took 4 years, until 1946, for a company to show real interest. That company was Haloid, which coined the word "xerography" and made so much money that they changed their name to Xerox.

Crisis in Real Time, 29 Oct, CPT: SnapScan CEO Paul Nel on leading a business through a high-stakes incident while it's still unfolding. Get tickets.

Cocktails & Capital: Backing the Backers, 22 Oct, CPT: Launch Africa's founders on where African venture capital is flowing and where it's retreating. Apply here.

SA to the Netherlands, 4 Nov, online: Nic Haralambous and Andy Golding on what it really takes to build a life and career there. Register free.

Powered by Radi. Want your business event in front of 36,000 The Open Letter readers? Host it on Radi, and it lands here.

🧩 Tool to Try: Open Dots is an open-source kit for building your own always-on AI coworkers, each with its own role, permissions and computer. Clone it and self-host.

🌍 That's Interesting: During WWII, Italy claimed one of its pilots had bombed and killed the Loch Ness Monster. Nessie, apparently, disagrees.