Hi there,

Got a temperature? Don’t fall for this fake TikTok doctor who conned almost 300k followers, Radio 2000 and even the Gauteng Dept of Health into thinking he’s an actual doc.

In this Open Letter:

• Drone wars: Solving business logistics the KFC way.

• Soaring solar, time to de-list & Amazon’s new satellites.

• Get growing: 5 Steps to optimise your pricing page.

• The results: How school impacts your day.

• Free stuff: Share this and get cool tools + coffee on us.

TRENDING NOW

Lowering the Cost of Delivery

If you’ve been following some of our analyses of business trends like the viability of SA’s e-commerce sector, what Checkers Sixty60 gets right and even SA’s absolutely massive township economy, you might have picked up a general theme that plagues a lot of businesses trying to do something new… Logistics.

Man, moving anything – stuff or people – is expensive here in SA. And you can bet a lot of that comes from having to use actual drivers, with salaries and needs. Don’t get us wrong, people should have jobs, but you can’t ignore the potential price benefits we could unlock with more automatable solutions.

It’s in the numbers

Takealot, for example, do about 25’000 parcels per day. And, unless you’re spending more than R500, delivery can cost between R70 and R95 – which means SA is spending upwards of R1.75m just on deliveries per day. Yet the company’s not showing profit. Well, maybe if we helped put that R1.75m back in the consumer’s pocket, it could be.

Even Uber Eats’ R15 delivery fee is just a mask for the astronomical hidden costs they need to build in just to get you your burger on time. Why? Because, again, the delivery is so expensive.

See the trend?

What about the next frontier for business in SA: Bring down the cost of deliveries.

And, of course, there are a number of options for doing this. Autonomous vehicles. Sidewalk-crawling robots. And, of course, drones.

Time to fly?

It’s not as far-fetched as it seems. Remember Zipline? The drone company that started out as an NGO and got the contract to deliver blood to hospitals in Rwanda? Well, they’ve pivoted…

Seems Rwanda was a great training ground, because they entered the commercial space with a storm, raising $250m at a $2.75bn valuation in 2021, and another $330m at $4.2bn in May this year. This is on the back of their partnering with Nigerian retailer Jumia in 2022, hailed as Africa’s biggest e-commerce player. Not to mention having been the first to start commercial drone deliveries for Walmart in 2021.

You can bet it’ll keep growing. Amazon recently completed its first 100 drone deliveries in the US, and is setting its sights on overcoming regulatory hurdles to expand the operation.

Local plays in this space

After 5 years of effort to get clearance from SA civil aviation, SANBS is ready to start using drones to transport blood in emergency situations. It’s small, at first, limited to transit between two hospitals. But it has legs, since the SANBS has plenty of locations, meaning they should be able to expand – a vital service, too, since you normally have just a 1-hour window when a patient is identified as in need of blood, and drones could really help save lives.

On the commercial side, KFC recently delivered its first order by drone to no-doubt hungry cricketer David Miller during a T20 match against Australia.

Just how far are we from drone deliveries going mainstream? Well, there are probably still some regulations to get sorted with Civil Aviation. But with these kinds of players getting on board, it’s definitely a space to keep an eye on.

OVER TO YOU

IN SHORT

👋 Hi Speed. Zambia just became the 6th African country where SpaceX has launched its high-speed, uncapped Starlink services. Starlink’s satellite internet services are suited for rural areas and areas underserved by traditional internet infrastructure and could see millions of Zambians getting high-speed internet for the first time.

🥸 Stealthy Privatisation. A recent study by RMB & Morgan Stanley shows that Eskom’s electricity generation will be replaced by the private sector within the next 2 years! This is off the back of record-breaking solar panel imports and installations in 2023.

🔌 Delisting Trend. SA Billionaire Businessman Patrice Motsepe’s African Rainbow Capital Investments (ARC) is considering delisting from the JSE as it evaluates whether or not there is value in remaining listed on the JSE. In 2022, 20 companies delisted from the stock exchange, with at least 32 set to delist in 2023. Scary stuff for your retirement annuity.

🚰 Going Liquid. Steinhoff International’s liquidators will (finally) liquidate the company this coming Friday (13 October) when it will delist and its shares will no longer exist. Around 99% of shareholders had voted to dissolve and delist the company from both the Jozi & Frankfurt stock exchanges back in July of this year.

🛰️ Forest Satellites. Amazon’s reply to SpaceX’s Starlink, Project Kuiper, just launched 2 prototype satellites. The e-commerce giant is looking to deploy over 3’200 more satellites over the next couple of years after initially vowing to invest $10 billion into the project back in 2019.

📮 Going Postal. The South African Post Office (SAPO) has been forced to close another 80 branches – bringing the total number of closures to 396 since 2020. As it stands SAPO is technically insolvent with only R4.5 billion in assets and negative equity of R7.9 billion.

­BUILDER’S CORNER

5 Steps to a Killer Pricing Page

Once your product and plan move along the comms and website stage, you run into the big pricing page dilemma: Should we advertise our price?

And it’s not just in SaaS. We see a lot of startups unwilling to list prices. Some clearly even consider their pricing page as the END of a sales funnel when it’s actually not. See, pricing has a bit of psychology to it…

The case for pricing awareness

We’re going out on a limb here and betting that most (or at least a lot of) South Africans’ behaviour flow when checking out a new product online goes something like this:

1. Check the Landing/Home page, read a little bit, maybe watch a quick video.

2. Click through to pricing page first to see if this is even in your league.

3. Only then go to product page and maybe check features or some testimonials.

Why? Well, we’re conditioned that most overseas products are out of our price range, so a quick price check will tell you if you should even bother engaging further with this or not. And we’re also willing to bet this behaviour translates to looking at local products, too.

The lesson? Your pricing page is probably VERY important to any market. And it’s not the end of your sales funnel, it’s close to the start. So, how do you build a killer price page?

Optimise your pricing page

1. Lead with your Value Proposition (and repeat it)

   When the price point’s important, people are probably going to click here first before your fancy sales pages. So why not consider your pricing page close to the start of your funnel? Show and remind them here what problem you solve, how you solve it and why it’s better than the alternative.

2. Make it super clear and super simple
   Pricing tables, options and feature lists are often SO clunky! No one can read 4pt font, and you don’t want to bore people – remember your goal is to get someone to buy or jump on a call, so optimise your page for that. It’s not an info dump.

3. Emphasise the Benefits, not Features
   Everyone always says “Sell on benefits, not features”, but what does that mean? Well, it's a bit complicated, but here’s a practical exercise to help you do it right:
   
   Get two columns on a page, label the first one “Features” and the other “Benefits”. In the Features column, list your product’s features like you normally would have done on a pricing table. Now, next to each Feature, in the Benefits column, write down 8–10 ways that single feature will enhance your customer’s life – “If you have this feature, you will…”
   
   Example: If your product is a little cheaper, that’s a Feature. Your Benefits will be really obvious ones like “because it’s cheaper, you save money”, but also include more creative ones like: “because it’s cheaper, you’ll have more money to spend on chocolates, therefore this product helps you eat more chocolate”.
   
   See what we did there? That’s selling on benefits. And if you can match the benefits you imagined with actual needs and fears from your user research, you’ll know exactly which ones to use to convert more.

4. Talk to their fears directly, calm them
   Your pricing page is actually where your testimonials and lists of B2B brands you’ve worked with come in most handy. See, people hesitate to buy because something is still bothering them.

   When Slack started, they had a “Wall of Love” on their pricing page – a rolling compilation of tweets from users saying “thank you” and fawning over “what an amazing” product this is. This helps new users feel like “Well, if others like it so much, maybe I should try it…”
   

5. Use some psychology to convert

   Depending on what you’re selling, you might want to have tiered pricing with decoys to make your actual price look attractive. Or maybe you have an up-sell, down-sell presentation to push people to the product you’re really trying to move.

   You can A-B test different options on the page, and see what converts best.

Got a pricing hack that works? Hit reply and let us know…

THE RESULTS

Last week, we asked how school affects your daily life. And it’s a three-way split between soccer mom-ing, no kids (yet) and kids outa school…

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🙅 Not at all, avoiding having kids as long as possible (26%)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⚽ Directly, doing school runs every day (26%)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🏈 Only sports days, fees and parent-teacher meetings (6%)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🎉 Thank goodness mine are out of school! (26%)
🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🚦 Just get stuck in school traffic a lot (11%)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🏠 Hardly, we home school (6%)

Your 2 cents…

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