Big boom {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? Jeff Bezos' SpaceX competitor Blue Origin rocket exploded spectacularly a few days ago. It’s their first big boom since 2022, after almost 40 successful flights and tests. Eish. 🚀

Send this to a friend who'd still get on the rocket. 🔥

In This Open Letter

The top 70% of professionals already have a job and are not looking to move, so they’re invisible to traditional recruitment – so this local venture’s building a referral-only platform that pays you to recommend the peeps you’d vouch for…

Recruiters not getting access to the right market is a big thing. A bad hire costs a company twice a junior employee's annual salary to fix. It easily skyrockets to six times that at a senior level. 

So, how do you find quality new hires?

Turning your network into a recruiting engine

Vouched flips the whole thing on its head: Instead of paying recruiters (who’re just going to cheat with AI and algos anyway), it pays professionals like you to recommend people you actually know for open roles. 

The idea came from founder Rayno Blomerus's time at employer-of-record startup HireJustNow, where he watched recruitment agencies receive a one-page job spec and send back five "perfect" candidates by the next morning. 

The matching was more about the keywords in the CVs than the humans or the culture fit. And in a world where every CV now gets the ol’ AI spit-and-polish, Rayno figured real people are your best source for real people insights. 

Putting the human back in human resources

Vouched receives a job spec, the role gets distributed via WhatsApp and the Vouched platform, and professionals in the network reach out to people they'd personally back. Vouched screens every referral before it reaches the client. 

And if a candidate gets placed, the referrer earns R12’500+, with the biggest payout to date being R32’500. 

Currently focused on the Western Cape across accounting and finance, law, engineering, HR and marketing, Rayno tells us they’ve got plans to expand nationally and into other sectors. 

The platform also white-labels as an internal employee referral tool for clients who want their own staff to refer first before opening a role to the wider network. (Almost like 2-Factor authentication for your referrals…)

Formalising what already happens when someone WhatsApps a mate? Now that we can get behind. 

We're watching this space…

The Newsletter Company builds and runs email newsletters for B2B scale-ups. But the product isn’t really the newsletter; it’s the warm audience.

Picture a list of 10’000 subscribers, carefully grown from your ICP. A 42% open rate means 4’200 of them read something from you every single week. They’re not cold leads sitting in a CRM. They’re people who chose to hear from you, who open your emails by habit, and who associate your brand with useful thinking in their space.

That changes everything downstream:

The Newsletter Company is built by the team behind The Open Letter, Seed Analytics, The People Insider, Reveal Insights, Built, Mini Millionaires and more — all highly engaged (40-60% open rates) and purpose-built for a defined audience.

This is what a compounding nurture channel actually looks like.

🚕 CPT Taxis Go Cashless. Cape Town's taxis are rolling out cashless payments from today; commuters tap a card or scan and go, probs as a trial for national rollout. Don’t know much about the company behind it (SA Pay), but it’s a huge market, lots of data and obvs so much you can build out from it.

🎬 Hollywood's YouTuber Moment. Two of the biggest US movies this weekend were both directed by YouTubers. We haven’t seen either, TBH, but could the creator-to-blockbuster pipeline be becoming real?

🚗 New Tax on Your Licence Renewal. SA's Department of Transport is proposing higher vehicle licence fees to offset falling fuel levies from the rise of EVs. You know, to enable the RAF to continue managing its ops and cash flow with peak inefficiency.

🇿🇦 Best SA Tech & Founders. Since it's June, we rounded up the coolest new SA tech from May and the founders behind it all. AI compliance screening, AR-powered civic accountability and an AI-native fashion layer — all built right here.

📊 Books Sorted. Spreadsheets don't scale. Xero runs invoicing, bank reconciliation, VAT, expenses and reporting from one cloud dashboard — with direct feeds into FNB, Absa, Standard Bank and Nedbank. TOL readers get 90% off for the first 6 months.*

👷 Kit Beyond the Site. East Coast Radio's Styles Mbatha did the same thing Kwagga did: walked into a Jonsson Workwear store and walked out with proper everyday gear. The brand on the jerseys of some of SA's biggest teams has a full wardrobe waiting for you.*

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

Most automations between tools are tough to maintain (breaking every time the API updates), which is why we brought in an SA automations expert to show us how it's done.

Turns out, most automations are pointless, and there are 4 concrete steps you can take to spot a useless automation before you build it.

☝️ Send this to a friend who's always duct-taping things together.

Yi He makes Fortune's Most Powerful Women list. Binance's co-CEO and co-founder is the first crypto-native leader to land on the list, and she's using the moment to push a bigger message: from 300 million to 3 billion users. Over 34 million people have used Binance Pay for remittances, moving $87bn in cumulative volume and saving users an estimated $5bn+ in fees.

You can now trade pre-IPO companies on Binance. Binance Futures has launched Pre-IPO Perpetual Contracts, starting with SPCXUSDT, which tracks the expected public market valuation of SpaceX. Margined and settled in USDT, it gives crypto traders exposure to private companies before they list.

Disclaimer: Digital asset prices can be volatile. The value of your investment may go down or up and you may not get back the amount invested. You are solely responsible for your investment decisions and Binance is not liable for any losses you may incur. Not financial advice. For more information, see our Terms of Use and Risk Warning.

Last week, we showed you Olarm's smart security platform, asking what the most important feature in a smart home security app is. The verdict? Give us the full picture…

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🔔 One-tap panic that actually gets through every time (13%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 📱 Arm and disarm remotely from anywhere (34%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🏠 See all zones, fences, and cameras in one place (43%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🤖 AI that learns my habits and reminds me to arm (4%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ ⚡ Real-time alerts when something triggers (6%)

Your 2 cents…

Now that's a feature request, DJ. An AI that tells you to stop leaving the garage open at 11 pm. Olarm, you listening? 🏠

AI in Action: How SA Teams Are Using It – 4 Jun, CPT: Three live AI demos, a deep panel and proper networking at Innovation City. Drinks on us. Join the waitlist.

Virtual Investor's Table AMA – 5 Jun, Online: An open AMA with Rajiv Daya from Next 176 — $1bn+ in advisory deals and $200m+ in fund allocations. Bring your fundraising questions. Register free.

Leadership Lessons: Q&A with Mike Fisher – 10 Jun, Online: The CEO of MyFitnessPal and ex-CTO of Etsy on escaping the output trap and why shipping fast in the wrong direction is still the wrong direction. Hosted by OfferZen. Register free.

Stop Building Things Nobody Wants – 11 Jun, CPT: Annu Augustine (NedRock) on product discovery — why 80% of features go unused and how to test assumptions before you burn budget. Save your spot.

The Next-Gen Engineer – 25 Jun, Online: OfferZen's engineering and talent leads on what high-performing teams actually hire for in the AI era, plus panellists from Impact.com and Pollinate. Free toolkit for attendees. Register free.

🧩 Tool to Try: Simply Onno translates medical documents into plain English.

🌍 That's Interesting: The writer of the 2007 film The Bucket List actually coined the expression bucket list after shortening his own "List of Things to Do Before I Kick the Bucket." The first item on the list? Get a film made at a major studio.

🎨 Next Level: Watch her make this entire mask without being able to see.

🕺 Wow Site: Forget Roblox, Hallucinate is a massively multiplayer online rave with no logins, no downloads, no rules.