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In this Open Letter:

• Only in SA: All the opportunity in Gov’s shortfalls.

• 93% cheaper PRIME hydration, new InsureTech competition & how Netflix lost 1 million users in 3 months.

• AI movements: Important and fun things happening in the world of AI.

• Building to Solve the Crisis: Getting unemployment down.

TRENDING NOW

The South African Opportunity for the Private Sector.

If you live in South Africa, you may have found something amiss in terms of government service delivery.

It’s no secret that where a state fails (any state), companies in the private sector are able to spot the opportunity and step in and bridge the gap.

And if you don't allow yourself to get depressed by government failure, you’ll spot the massive opportunity in those failings.

And It’s Already Happening.

• Hospital Group Mediclinic built an R 84 billion private hospital group with over 60 healthcare facilities in South Africa and Namibia in 40 years. The opportunity was so big that it sparked other private medical groups and facilities, not to mention the massive R 225 billion+ medical aid industry to pay for private medical care.

• For years now, one could renew your vehicle license via various banking apps and it's expanded to other home affairs services as well.

• When it comes to education, Curro Schools which started in 1998 has grown to a JSE-listed independent schools network with over R 1 billion in revenue, 178 schools across 82 campuses, and over 70 400 learners in South Africa, Botswana and Namibia.

And of course it is happening in the loadshedding space

It's not only corporates, smaller companies are also capitalising. In the first 5 months of 2022, South Africans imported over R 2.2 billion worth of Solar Panels alone. Not to mention the other ongoing loadshedding solutions offered by countless retailers in-store and online.

And the peripheral opportunities are everywhere. Take the team from EskomSePush. What started as an app to help you plan your day 55 minutes at a time has grown into a fully-fledged business used by 7 million unique users with over 20 million impressions per day.

Even in the depths of rural Free State, this company hustled their way into managing and maintaining infrastructure for the Mafube Local Municipal. In the process, they set up solar farms and managed to start supplying electricity to the municipality at rates cheaper than Eskom. Not only are they making the municipality more money, but they also made massive strides to avoid loadshedding. Eskom isn’t happy though and taking legal action. 

Citizen Self-Management

Although there have been several attempts by various teams to get citizen self-management apps going, no one has quite cracked it. Perhaps this could be the start of the super app we are all waiting for.

Are you building this? Hit reply and let us know….we wanna help 💪🏽

IN SHORT

🏋🏽‍♂️Good choices: UK-based InsureTech startup YuleLife has launched in SA with a plan to use advanced behavioural science and gamification to help employees be more proactive with healthy life choices.

🥤 PRIME Hydration without the Premium price tag. Checkers set to launch Logan Paul’s popular energy drink in-store and on Checkers Sixty60 from 1 May at a fraction of the price elsewhere – get it for R39.99 only at these stores.

👇🏼Some price relief? Bloomberg says that SA’s Producer Inflation (how much it costs to produce stuff) seems to be slowing down. Some people believe this indicates lower prices in the (far) future. The Reserve Bank still warns of high prices for a while, though.

🍎 For the spend: SA startup Maholla raised a further R27 million in seed funding for their retail rewards app. What makes it unique is that rewards are not based on the store you shop at – buy anywhere. It’s based on the products – so far they have 35 brands on board, including Rama, I&J, Nola and even Ouma.

🔫 Touché: Fortnite creator Epic Games had lost the 9th round of anti-trust court cases against Apple after the lawyers couldn't make a good enough case why Apple Store shouldn’t take a 30% share of in-app purchases on mobile games. It’s a tough one. In the meantime, though, switch to PC or console and download from the new Epic Store instead – they give away so many free games per week it’s insane!

🍿Policy backfire: Netflix’s password crackdown has cost it at least 1 million users this year alone, according to a report by Kantar (and smart brands listen to Kantar), and that’s just in Spanish-speaking countries, and could be way more worldwide. Yikes!

­AI EVERYWHERE

So much AI stuff going down, we thought it deserves a segment.

Hug Spot: Since we’re all firmly on the AI train, check out this crazy AI-generated pizza ad. Hilariously cringe as it is, though, now we really wish there was a Pepperoni Hug Spot.

Google is testing a new AI tool for Docs and Gmail called Labs. It’s meant to be invite-only but here’s the link. The problem is it’s not available in SA, but if you have VPN…

Create charts in seconds using ChartGPT. Underprepared for that marketing meeting? Smash a sentence in here and your presentation is 80% there. Shout out to Ryan for sharing this.

Fake Drake might sound better than the real one. The music industry is in chaos as AI is busy generating quirky pop songs that sound amazing.

Agent Smith is here. AutoGPT is a new open-source craze that is getting instances of OpenAI to chat with each other and effectively prompt each other (Agent Smith style). Creating agents that not only create lists for you but do them.

Find a cool AI tool? Hit reply and let us know

THE THREAD

On Tuesday we covered SA’s biggest problem, in this week’s podcast, we dig further into this.

Or if Spotify is your jam, catch it here.

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** The email that went out incorrectly stated that Curro was started in 2018 when in fact it was in 1998.