Gotta work {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? A YC startup apparently coerced job seekers into getting its logo tattooed on their bodies in exchange for an interview. Not sure what's crazier: that a business would do that, or that 7 people were actually hard up enough to go through with the madness.

Send this to a friend to challenge them to a dumbest tattoo battle. 🖊️

In This Open Letter

Deye, the Chinese manufacturer behind a large slice of SA's inverters, has appointed Cape Town's Plentify to help it turn thousands of SA homes into a Virtual Power Plant (VPP).

Most of us think of solar as either a commercial (big plants, lots of capital outlay) or private (home or business solar) concern, but they now coordinate 160'000 home batteries, which they can convert into one software-controlled plant.

But it's not just a solar story: It's a market opening, and it has two doors: one if you own a battery, one if you want to build something.

You built this: Not Eskom, not a bid window. Rooftop solar has passed 8.3 GW, more than every operational project under REIPPPP and RMIPPPP combined at 2.8 GW. More than 90% of SA systems came with a battery, and now that load shedding has faded, they sit idle most of the day.

For homeowners: Get paid for the idle hours. This is the part with a deadline.

For solar businesses: Nobody has claimed the other three quarters of SA's capacity (yet)

The moat isn't hardware: Ningbo Deye builds both Deye and Sunsynk units, so the box on your wall is much the same whoever's badge is on it. The scarce thing is the software layer that dispatches a fleet and settles the payments, and in SA there is currently one company doing it.

Plentify's route is public and repeatable. It started with 500 households on geyser controllers, scaled to about 9'000 across 13 Balwin estates, then won an eThekwini municipal pilot funded by the EU and the French development agency. Municipalities are the buyers, development finance is available, and the proof points are relatively cheap.

The catch: Nersa says VPPs have no regulatory definition and no licensing category, the compensation question is unresolved, and no rules are being drafted. Early movers will shape that framework rather than inherit it, but nobody can promise you revenue yet.

Two things worth doing this week: Check which app your system reports to, and register your system before September.

We're watching this space…

Cirsten Claassen runs Finvoke, a Johannesburg accounting firm. For years, his team hand-built the same analysis for client after client: pull the Xero data, pull the timesheets, pull payroll, match them up. All manual.

It was important work: What you invoice sits in Xero, what it cost you sits in a time-tracking tool, and neither talks to the other. But that's the number every owner actually needs.

He'd built the report enough times to realise earlier this year that he needed to buy a technical partner a few coffees, so they could rebuild that manual process into an automated one SA founders and agencies can use at scale.

That process became Clarity.

Clarity plugs into your books and answers what the management pack skips: Gross profit per hour by client, which retainers have quietly slipped underwater, who is billing and who is on the bench, whether growth is real or one big account carrying the rest.

Aalia Ganie was sick of spending days chasing supplier rate sheets (PDFs, spreadsheets, Word docs, whatever landed) and then manually retyping rates, policies and levies into the tour company she worked for’s operating system.

So she and her husband built a lightweight tool that let her upload a rate sheet in any format, and AI extracts it into clean, structured data she could build quotes from in minutes.

The lekker clever part:

✅ It put net cost, price and margin on every line
✅ The closest software was Australian and expensive
✅ No more hunting through folders for last year’s Kruger rates.

The tool worked so well, it became its own venture.

What are your employees building with AI, and how are you deploying and leveraging it?

💳 R1 Billion in Six Months. Cape Town FinTech TurnStay has processed over R1bn in travel payments this year, cutting international card costs for lodges and tour operators from as much as 8% down to around 1.6%. Clients include Singita and Londolozi, and a Series A is being prepped. The insight wasn't new tech; it was noticing nobody had arbitraged the fee gap.

🏦 R50.4 Trillion Short. SA's life and disability insurance gap now sits at R50.4 trillion, roughly seven times our entire GDP. 24 million people hold funeral cover, but strip that out and only 19% have actual life insurance. Group life remains one of the cheapest benefits per rand you can offer your team.

💻 RAMageddon Hits Your Laptop. AI data centres have swallowed global memory supply, and MacBook Air orders are now slipping to September. DRAM prices rose up to 98% in Q1 alone. If you're kitting out staff, buy ahead of need and stop treating a three-year refresh cycle as a law of physics.

💉 First TB Vaccine in a Century. M72/AS01E is in phase 3 trials across SA, Kenya, Zambia, Malawi and Indonesia with 20'000 participants, and the Health Department is already prepping registration and local production. TB killed 56'000 South Africans in 2023. Hosting the trial isn't the same as owning the supply chain.

💬 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.

Most SA founders only think about their business’ valuation when they're ready to sell. So we asked the co-founder of an SA valuation firm that's helped thousands of founders increase their multiple how to build the number on purpose instead.

And it turns out, there are 5 specific steps to grow your business's value years before anyone makes you an offer.

☝ Send this to a founder banking their retirement on a number they've never checked.

Yesterday, we featured VaKoop’s safer P2P marketplace, asking why your unsold stuff still isn't online. Turns out it's the admin that breaks most here…

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 📸 The admin (photos, pricing, descriptions) kills my will to live (48%)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 😬 Got scammed once, never recovered (31%)

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🙈 The "Hi, is this still available?"... (21%)

Your 2 cents…

True, Eileen. Safety shouldn't be the price of a side hustle. 🔒

On 4 August 1922, every telephone service in the United States and Canada was silenced for one full minute, a mark of respect for Alexander Graham Bell, who had died two days earlier.

Bell is the name credited with designing the telephone, an honour he now shares with several others as the history got properly untangled. 📞

FinMaster Friday, 7 Aug, Stellenbosch: A social game night where you build net worth by buying spaza shops and surviving load shedding. R50. Get tickets.

New York Global Connection Dinner, 10 Aug, New York: Led By Her kicks off SA Women's Month with an intimate, off-the-record dinner for SA-connected women. Register free.

The Lekker Network Wine Tasting, 18 Aug, Mauritius: Klein Welmoed wines, Carrick Group's Craig Featherby, and founders from across the island. Join here.

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: PATAPIM wraps Claude Code, Codex and Gemini CLI into one project-organised desktop cockpit.

🌍 That's Interesting: After Pixar decided Toy Story 2 needed a full rebuild from scratch, animators had under a year to finish. A third of the staff ended up with repetitive strain injuries.

🎨 Next Level: Players in this racing video game are racing RC cars in real life.

🕹️ Wow Site: LoFi Cloud plays real-time radio chatter from airports around the world, overlaid with chill lo-fi beats.