Hi there,

Think you’re green? A startup has designed solar trees that can charge EVs’ batteries using nano photovoltaic tech, hoping to replace the UK’s 40k public charging stations in the near future.

In this Open Letter:

• By the numbers: Opportunities in the semigration trend.

• Cheap eggs, China’s big hole & how to get hired as PayPal’s CEO.

• Builder’s Corner: How to validate ideas super fast.

• Watch: Medicine in the time of AI.

TRENDING NOW

Just How Much Opportunity is there in Semigration?

Hey, so you know how the media’s been filled with stories of semigration – people moving from one part of the country to another? Turns out no one knows the exact figures, because we don’t actually track them. They’re just throwing fancy percentages around.

And it’s important because you can’t launch a new PropTech (or any other venture) on percentages alone. So we set out to put a figure to it. And the best place to look was the total annual sales registered at the deeds office, which in 2022 was 373’894. And FNB’s estate agent survey recently said that about 13% of total sales are semigration related.

That gives us about 48’000 semigrators per year. Could be more, could be less, but we’ll use it as a North Star for now.

But it gets better

Now, that’s not bad if you consider that 35% of semigration goes to the Western Cape that’s ±15 000 moves to the Western Cape per year. And it’s here where the average home sells for between R1.8m and R2.2m – yeah that’s somewhere between R30bn and R37bn just on the property alone.

And it’s probably much the same story everywhere people semigrate to – coastal areas, small towns etc.

But here’s the kicker, only 40%-odd of South Africans own their homes, the rest are renting (6.6 million residential properties at the deeds office, 17.9m households – you do the math). This means the real number is probably way north of 48’000 – according to internal bets among our team, maybe as high as 100k or even 120k per year.

OK, that’s a market.

Now, how do we build a business around it?

What semigrators need

Now, with most PropTechs focusing on serving the industry, we thought with semigration it makes more sense to look at the individual. So, yeah, a commercial B2C approach. And what better way to start than by looking at what almost all new neighbours need:

1️⃣ Houses – 5% agents commission for sales, up to 10% for rentals. Niche in on on the semigration market – R1.5bil market 😎

2️⃣ Home loans – Ooba and BetterBond are well-established bond originators. But niche in here and you could take a bite out of the cherry. 🍒

3️⃣ Moving and storage – Storage is a massive business with some of the best returns in the property segment. No surprise then that highly tech-enabled companies such as Storage have grown to a R6bn public company. 📦

4️⃣ Admin and setup – Moving is wrought with admin. Whether it is changing addresses or sorting out the garage/packing out the house. Whilst a host of these declutter and organise businesses have popped up, niche on the semigrators and you might capture a larger market share. 🧹

5️⃣ Finding service providers in the new area – The best way to find a service provider or get a question answered is on the local neighbourhood Facebook group. Whilst most of these are run as community service, if you do it properly you can actually make a business out of it. And if that doesn’t solve the problem, a hyperlocal classified site focusing on this niche could be a nice side hustle. 🔨

And likely many more. Remember, where there’s a trend, there is opportunity. Spotted a trend that has a lot of opportunity? Hit reply and let us know….

IN SHORT

🤔 Grab your tinfoil hats, Facebook ‘bout to go wild. Last week, ICASA announced the opening of the 6 GHz spectrum band for Wi-Fi services.

⚡ The world’s first fusion energy purchase. Microsoft backs yet another Sam Altman project by pre-buying energy for 2028.

🍳 How do you like your eggs? Checkers beats out other retailers for the cheapest basket of breakfast foods.

😎 Got the right stuff? PayPal is looking for a new CEO, and they paid the last guy R434 mill plus about R400 mill in shares. The only catch is you have to be able to prove you can reverse their R5.7 trillion share price slump.

🌋 Still not deep enough. Spurred by President Xi Jinping’s orders to explore the “deep earth,” China started drilling 10km into the Earth’s crust this week. That’s deep enough to reach rock layers from the Dinosaur times.

­BUILDER’S CORNER

This week’s Builder’s Corner is brought to you by Specno. Need help validating your idea? Book a free 30-minute session with a Specno venture specialist by clicking the banner below👇🏼

10-Minute Idea Validation

Sift a lot of ideas super quickly

OK, so you have a couple of ideas, which one has the most legs? Or maybe you’re a techie still in the “dating” phase with a co-founder and you need to know if the ideas on the table have actual potential.

Either way, you want to get a quick sense of just how big this thing can go before you commit (and before spending money on research/validation).

6 Steps to Desktop-Validate an Idea (Super Fast)

1. Google each one (or Bard) – don’t sigh, it’s the most powerful market research tool in history – instantly get 8 billion people’s input. Just enter a general search like “video app” or “ice cream hat” or whatever (don’t add too much unique detail, keep it very broad and generic at first) and see what comes up. How many people are talking about the general topic?
   
   How many pages/SERP results are there for that topic (check the top-right corner, right under the Google logo where it says “About ….”). Can you spot anyone (competitors) doing something similar already?
   
   Now check the “People also ask” section (usually mid-page) and the “Related searches” at the bottom – any of those in line with your idea?
   

2. How important is it? – head over to Google Trends and search each idea/term or variation of each one there (set it to the location(s) you’re thinking of targeting and set it to the past 12 months), to get an idea of which ones are searched and talked about the most.
   
   Again, check the “related queries” section, both “Top” and “Rising” – are any of those in line with your idea? (For example, when you search “video app”, you can clearly see 63% of the market is looking for an app to download videos with, 16% an app to download music with and 12% for a video editing app.)
   

3. Check the actual volumes – if you have a Google AdWords account, head over to the keyword planner and enter those same searches again to get avg. monthly search volumes. Otherwise, use AnswerThePublic to search them (3 free searches a day) – on the results page, it usually gives you the actual monthly search volumes at the top.
   

   To go even more in-depth, search them in ahrefs’ keyword difficulty checker; the more difficult a keyword, the more popular the topic.
   

4. Now, start drilling down on details – Head over to Reddit (or popular forums) and look for subreddits related to your topics/ideas (either the market, user or subs dedicated to that industry/field etc.). Search them for your idea, see if anyone’s talked about it yet and what they said etc. (Sometimes, searching via Google and just adding “reddit” at the end gets you better results.)
   
   Do the same with the problem your idea is meant to solve – see if anyone’s complained about it. You can even post on there and ask people, “Hey does anyone else find that X.Y, Z is so irritating?”, and see what people say.
   

5. Go social – Then go search all your topics on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter etc. (or use a social listening tool) and see which posts are popular and read the comments below – that’s your market telling you what they want and don’t want.
   

6. Scope out the competition – Lastly, check if anyone’s building the same/similar thing (you’ll pick it up from Googe or during the previous steps). In this case, having competitors is good – it validates that others think the concept is viable too.

Filter it: Now it’s simple. If no one is searching, thinking or asking for the solution, it’s probably a dead fish or so utterly unique, you’re going to have to “cultivate” the market (hard to get funding for this). And, if a lot of people are talking about it, building solutions etc. you know there’s already interest.

Got a sure-fire, free validation method to add to the list? Hit reply and let us know so we can share…

HOW WOULD YOU BUILD IT

Our scheduled guest, Nick Allen who founded Savant Accelerator couldn’t make it and had to postpone to next week.

Ever wondered how the results of a listed company could inspire you with startup ideas? Well, we did just that in the latest episode of How Would You Build It?

Dischem recently released their results for 2023, and we found some really cool ideas from their results. Listen to find out how you can find opportunities within the healthcare industry.

00:22 How to look for new opportunities inside corporates’ annual results.

08:59 Online consultancy as a business.

16:29 When AI enters the medical field.

21:09 Importance of Loyalty programmes for startups.

28:39 Where we see opportunity in the MedTech space.

Or if Spotify is your jam, catch it here.

DID YOU LIKE THIS WEEK’S OPEN LETTER?

TELL YOUR FRIENDS

This Open Letter is brought to you by Renier Kriel, Jason Mill, Elvorne Palmer and Bobby Sequeira.

Are you social? Follow our brand new Twitter, IG, Facebook or LinkedIn Page managed by Mia Visser.

Did we miss something? Hit reply and tell us what trends you’d like us to explore next.

Did someone forward you this email? Sign up here.