Young forever {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? Scientists just discovered a seafood that reverses ageing called "sea squirts". Elvorne immediately recognised them as tunicates: your closest living invertebrate relative. Let us know if you ever want him to bore you to death with the insane details of how you and your dog are both related to these weird ocean tube things.

In Today's Open Letter

Because SA's Competition Commission recently gave us our first real look at what people inside the township market's actually experiencing…

Last week, we showed you how established SA businesses can go about entering SA's R425-R900bn-a-year township market. Now, we want to reverse it and say: How do we help the smaller businesses that originate in townships grow and thrive, so they can uplift and create prosperity from the inside?

We're working through all 90 pages of the Commission's Rural Township Economy Project, and we can already see 3 clear strategies SA can use to boost township business…

1. Find a way to reverse (some of) the sourcing chain

Small and rural companies buy the goods they re-sell from other small rural distribution businesses. This keeps the money in townships constantly recirculating between small, capital-constrained businesses, which the report says reinforces a low-growth system. The more money moving through the system, the better for everyone involved.

The fix is hard, but not impossible: You need your big established companies to buy from small, rural businesses, too, to introduce outside money into the township economy. 

One proposal was to get your big corporates to source more locally, so you can get township-produced goods or services on supermarket shelves, so they get access to real scale, and that money gets pumped back into the rural market.

2. Introduce scaling tariffs for compliance

Remember when we said SA needs to be friendlier towards small businesses? Well, township businesses obvs feel the same pain:

Smaller and independent businesses find it harder to comply and formalise. And, yes, you gotta have rules and standards, but the real problem is that compliance costs barely move with company size: a small independent needs to pay almost the same fee, fill the same form, etc., as a mega corporate with an entire department for this job. 

Add to that internet access and proximity to the departments where registration takes place, and it's proportionally very expensive. So what ends up happening? No formalisation, and no potential upside from doing it. Worse still, little to no data for government to figure out how, where and what programmes to run.

3. Municipalities need to allow some rezoning of township land

OK, obvs this one's controversial, 'cos informal settlements are often on land they should never have been on. But, since we've formalised the land a bit, most townships are zoned as residential land only. See where this is a problem?

These businesses might do well and grow, but they battle to expand. They can't open up a second site nearby because all of the land is zoned residential. Doing it anyway, they can't get access to capital and services because, well, the business is not compliant.

You know we're watching this space…

In the founder community we created, there's something on every week. And not webinars; we’re talking interactive sessions hosted by experts, with founders who have already done it sitting in the room with you.

All of these happened live, but if you missed it, don't worry. We have a library of more than 60 past masterclasses, founder stories and AMAs.

Coming up: Ben Blaine on early distribution. Wynand Viljoen on building an agent workforce. Kurt Schröder on marketing when you're busy. Henri Bam on GTM strategies.

Join 200+ SA founders building better startups, faster. Only R600 p/m for full access.

SA online retail to hit R159 billion. That's up 22.5% from last year, now making up 10% of all retail in SA. And yes, Takealot still leads usage at 35.3%, then Shein at 21.5% and Sixty60 at 15%, but think about the behavioural change the rise of online is creating and ask yourself what you're doing to ride part of this boom. Read our breakdown.

Clicks built a whole new brand for townships. It was boxed in by Dis-Chem on the upmarket end while Medirite Plus and Spar squeeze in from the sides, so Clicks went where nobody has a format yet and copied the Usave playbook: smaller stores, 30% private label, everyday low pricing, new name. Are you boxed in or boxing someone in? Where should you be looking next? See how they're doing it.

Business banking that costs the same as personal banking. Capitec Business charges R1 for payments to other Capitec accounts, R2 to other banks and R3 for debit orders, and there's a calculator on their site that works out what you'd save against what you're paying now. Check the fees.

🌊 SA Is Getting Another Subsea Cable. Orange is building ReuNION from Réunion to our coast, 320Tbit/s, R1.7bn, live in 2028, engineered to feed Durban and Joburg. We're not paying for it, but SA will benefit. Lekker.

🔥 Denmark Heats 11'000 Homes With Server Waste. While everyone’s shouting about the negatives, Denmark just rerouted one Meta data centre to pump 45MW of recovered heat into the city's network instead of venting it. What a spin.

💇 Wigs Might Be SA's Most Stolen Import. That's the claim from informal economy author GG Alcock, pointing at a R10bn beauty sector where extension imports hit R1.1bn a year, but apparently theft is rife. Sheesh.

📺 DStv Is Blowing Up Its Own Bouquets. From 17 September, Access, Family and Compact go. Cricket, local rugby and the Champions League drop out of Premium into a R479 Sports package. Nothing gets more expensive, but there are some big changes to packages.

📱 Products That Convert. You've probably tapped, swiped and touched their work without knowing it. For 16 years, Isoflow has been designing the UX and UI behind some of the world's biggest digital products, turning strategy, research and data into real business impact.*

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Yesterday, we showed you Üsta's cyber risk quantifier, asking if you'd know what getting hacked would cost you. Most here would have to Google…

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 💰 Yep, we've got a real rand figure, and I'd defend it to the board (24%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️ 🤷 We pay for a policy and hope for the best (35%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 😅 I'd be the one Googling "incident response" in a cold sweat (41%)

The thinking is always to chase every investment "maybe", but then things can drag on for a year. So we asked an SA founder who's raised around R50m how he runs it.

And it turns out it works better run like a sales cycle with stages, where investors get qualified out. Here are the 5 specific steps to run fundraising like a sales pipeline.

Builder who wants 24 hours and a deadline? Builders Table's inaugural hackathon puts 100 people in Woodstock on 18 to 19 Sep for a R50'000 prize pool, and every team keeps full ownership of what they build. Pre-register.

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. 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.

🥋 Next Level: This girl is a modern Shaolin martial arts prodigy.

🎨 Wow Site: Colortrack pulls the colours out of famous music videos across the decades and turns them into vinyl art.