💚 When Love is a R144bn Business…

Canva cringe… some people are losing their minds at this clip of Canva’s cornier-than-corn corporate rap presentation (warning: max cringe), but you just know there’re gonna be others who are like “Is this the future of all tech showcases” 🤩🤩🤩?

In this Open Letter:

• All heart: When love becomes a R144bn business.

• Woolies tech, presidential deepfakes & SA game dev boost.

• Social play: How to 10X your startup LinkedIn game.

• SA’s favourite internet tech: The latest poll results are in.

• Giveaway time: Win a R1k Takealot voucher & The First Kudu!

TRENDING NOW

When Love Becomes a R144bn Business

Six out of every 10 South Africans are single and not looking to get married anytime soon. 

And while dating websites have been around since the dawn of Web 2.0, Tinder popularised it with its intuitive interface on mobile, matching algorithms and ease of onboarding. 

The global dating industry was estimated at $7.9bn (R144bn) in 2022 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 7.6% from 2023 to 2030. And, as a romance time saver, the concept makes sense. 

For most working adults, meeting enough new people to assess their suitability as a romantic partner takes an inordinate amount of time for the results you get. Studies show you’re more likely to meet a romantic partner online than through your network.

But it’s not all puppy eyes and roses… the business of dating platforms is complicated. 

For starters, customer success is murder on your churn rate. Because when a dating platform helps their customers succeed romantically, well they essentially lose the customer forever (mostly). 

And that’s where Tinder has faced backlash for being focused on hook-ups rather than a long-term romantic partner. Hook-ups reduce churn and increase stickiness… May have been unintended, but that's how it turned out nonetheless. 

So where to go to find true love?

Many professionals, especially entrepreneurs, entrench themselves so much in the problems they’re solving, that most of their interests are just that – building a business or growing a career. So it makes sense that many professionals would connect mainly with other professionals with similar interests.

That’s where the local dating app, Boardroom, comes in. Targeting busy professionals seeking long-term relationships, within 9 months they have sparked over 10,000 matches between professionals in South Africa – leveraging LinkedIn verification, which offers some additional insights and trust. 

With an estimated 261 million single professionals aged 25 to 49 in the world with an online presence, there’s a massive opportunity for a new incumbent to focus on this niche. 

The dating platform game is competitive and crowded. But hit the right niche with a good offer, and it might be a match made in heaven. We’re watching this space and especially this local player making the moves…

IN SHORT

🐳 A Whale of a Time. Orca, a local startup building a central AI-driven fraud orchestration platform has just raised a $550k pre-seed round.

💻 The Woolies Connection. Woolworths launched its new online tech store, WConnect recently. Selling everything from smartwatches and cellphones to consoles and laptops. PEP also followed suit, launching PEP Cell as an online cellphone store.

🥧 Listed Pi. Microcomputer manufacturer Rasberry Pi is set to go public on the London Stock Exchange in June 2024. It’s expected that the company will raise $40 million which will help accelerate its engineering efforts to capture a larger share of a $21.2 billion market.

📲 RoboBiden? The FCC has handed down a $6 million fine for a scammer who used a voice cloner to impersonate Joe Biden in a series of illegal robocalls. Hopefully, the robocall is better at sticking to its script… 

🎮 Next Roblox? Aspiring South African game developers can now apply to join the 22 on Sloane Game Development Programme which helps Devs leverage new technologies and resources to develop and launch new games.

🏡 Behavioural Home Loans. Discovery Bank has launched a new home loan product offering its clients personalised interest rates based on their risk profiles, with a further opportunity to decrease this rate by up to 1% through its “behavioural banking” model.

🎟️ Cape Town Startup Event. In Cape Town this Thursday and looking to hang out with some of the coolest people in the city’s startup scene? StartupclubZA is hosting a Cape Town Connect event featuring Jonathan Smit (ex, Payfast) and Kiaan Pillay (Stitch). We have 3 tickets to give away — to stand a chance to win reply “I’m in Cape Town on Thursday!” to this mail and we’ll put you in the lucky draw!

BUILDER’S CORNER

How to 10X Your Brand on LinkedIn

by Renier Kriel co-founder of The Open Letter & Stream

One of the best network investments I ever made was becoming more active on LinkedIn – in today’s world, personal branding is a superpower. Just look at Elon Musk, his personal brand helps him raise billions, sell billions and recruit the best talent out there.

And it works. Personally, I have seen how LinkedIn can be used to generate leads, get in contact with otherwise unreachable people and build genuine connections in business. All things that make doing business a bit easier.

But for me, starting was daunting, so let me help you get going…

4 Steps for Founders to Get Value from LinkedIn

1. Get into the right mindset

One of the biggest mistakes on LinkedIn is to rely on your company page to do anything – it’s a dud, LinkedIn is about connecting people, so if you want to have an impact and get traction, you will have to use your own, personal profile.

For startups, you basically have two worthwhile approaches:

1. Executive content: Founders and leadership build up their personal brands and use that to accelerate growth through partnerships, opportunities and sometimes even direct sales.

2. Employee-led content: Once the founders/execs are on their way, get the rest of the team going. Clear vision and alignment here are key (see point 2 below).

(Not that company LinkedIn is useless, it’s just that it’s better geared for big brand building, i.e. corporates.)

2. Build your strategy

Next up, there’s a lot of noise out there, so to be successful you have to get really specific.

I quite like the steps Morning Brew founder Alex Leiberman lays out in this video, specifically:

• The Audience of One: Think about that one person you create content for that represents all the people you want/need to talk to. Everything you write, write as if you are writing for that person. Pick an influential leader and it will motivate you to write things they will find interesting. Chances are, many other people will too.

• Finding the middle ground: Writing down “what you know”, “what excites you” and “what your audience needs/wants” and then only focusing on the topics that overlap, ensures you become laser-focused.

3. Save your sanity with a content plan

Now that you know your niche and topics, you need to know how to create a HUGE amount of content that actually adds value.

For that, I really like the content brainstorming method in Justin Welsh’s LinkedIn course – Justin built a simple content framework table that lists types of posts at the top and topics you want to write about on the left. That way you can mix and match types with topics to create a whole roster of things to talk about.

Types of posts that are easy and effective include:

• Comparing A to B

• Lists

• Lesson learnt

• Contrarian observation

4. Automate the most draining parts

Anyone who’s ever tried this before will tell you the biggest stumbling blocks are:

• Actually writing the content

• Keeping it consistent (rain or shine).

It’s not a 1 or 2-week game, LinkedIn delivers rewards, but it takes time and consistency. You have to bite the bullet and commit to making this a part of your life for the next 3 months, then 6 months, then year 1, 2 and so on…

Or you can get help… put in a few hours of strategy and planning and then automate all the grudge bits like so:

• Content writing – use Stream to brainstorm content strategy and ghostwrite for you.

• Posting – automate it with Buffer.

YOUR VOICE

We asked what internet tech will rule future SA, and fibre’s the tech to beat…

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⚡ Fibre (30%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️ 📡 5G (28%)

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🛜 Wi-Fi (12%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️ 🛰 Starlink (26%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🤫 Something new I’m working on (4%)

Our team are just wondering how we can get our hands on some of the sweet, sweet R5 loadshedding-proof fibre…

ENTER TO WIN BIG THIS FRIDAY!

This Friday, we’re announcing the winner of this week’s R1’000 Takealot voucher and a copy of SA startup unicorn must-read, The First Kudu (check out the new audiobook here).

To enter, simply reply to this email and tell us what you think of The Open Letter. That’s right, give us a review (good or bad) and you will get entered into Friday’s draw!