🕺 The new R23 billion way to party

Plus: Apple’s smartphone win, Africa’s 1st profitable neo-bank, “Stillknocks” willknocks & startup marketing 101.

January 19, 2024

Hi there,

Fancy ice? This startup is exporting chunks of glacier ice harvested from fjords in Greenland to exclusive bars in the UAE. Compressed over millennia, frozen without bubbles, and uncontaminated by humans, guaranteed to be purer than the stuff kicking around in ice trays in your deep freeze.

In this Open Letter:

The money in sobriety

Drinking isn’t as cool as it used to be. 

At least that’s what it looks like if you follow movements Sober October (Ocsober) or Dry July. But ask any person who quit booze what the most annoying thing is about quitting – Having almost no options for drinks in social settings – it's either extremely sweet juices and sodas, or water. Until recently…

It’s about time.

Raise a glass for the sober ones

When making beer or wine, the sugar reacts with the yeast to create alcohol and carbon dioxide. So naturally when alcohol is made, the fluid loses most of its sweetness. And it's this natural removal of the sweetness that gives these drinks its unique taste. 

For years, people have attempted to create drinks with a similar taste but without the sugar turning into alcohol. Unfortunately, they were never able to achieve the same result. Alcohol-free beer tastes like cold bitter Horlicks (a malt drink consumed hot in winter) and alcohol-free wine tastes like grape juice (Which is literally what it is. Lol). 

Enter the process of de-alcoholisation

Removing the alcohol post-manufacturing however keeps a lot of the taste intact – or at least it's closer than anything up until now. And this is something many traditional alcohol brands have jumped on. 

Locally Castle Free, Heineken 0.0, and Savannah no-alc are some of the most popular sober versions of otherwise popular drinks. And these sober versions of popular drinks are likely making good money.

When you buy a normal beer or cider alcohol tax (commonly called sin tax) applies to the volume of alcohol in the drink – it results in SARS collecting roughly R2 per beer over and above VAT. Yet non-alcoholics don't pay this tax, and also sell at prices higher than their alcoholic counterparts. Meaning there’s some nice margin to be made.

Just how big is this market?

Unfortunately, as with so many industries, South African data points are really hard to come by, but some assumptions point to a massive and fast-growing market. In the USA for example, the non-alcoholic market is roughly 13.5% of the size of the alcoholic beverage market. With the SA alcohol market at R173 billion, one could estimate that the demand for non-alcoholic beverages locally could be as much as R23.35 billion soon. And it lines up with predictions that it will grow at 8.9% per annum over the next few years.

Saffas are known for their punch

But it's not only beers and ciders

Initially, non-alcoholic beers, ciders, and wines hit the shelves. But recently local manufacturers have started producing non-alcoholic spirits as well (with even less tax to pay, one can imagine the margins are really attractive).

  • Mahala Botanical is a South African distilled non-alcoholic spirit infused with 9 hand-sourced botanicals. As the name ‘Mahala’ (Zulu for free) suggests it’s free from sugar, alcohol, colourants and artificial flavours.

  • Abstinence is a range of non-alcoholic spirits and aperitifs inspired by the Cape Floral Kingdom.

  • Iconic is another distilled non-alcoholic spirit with its Citric Rose offering made from natural and classic London-Dry (yeah, the London-Dry type gin) ingredients. 

But that’s not all. Overnight e-commerce offerings, Drink Nil and Zero Drinks popped up even retail giant Woolworths has fridges stocked with low and no-alcohol drink options.

This space is set for massive growth and there are opportunities across the value chain here. We will be keeping a sober eye on this space.

Refer one friend to sign up to The Open Letter and view our top opportunity pick for this trend (and all future trends we cover).

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IN SHORT

🧙‍♂️ Epic Pass. Private school learners in South Africa (including online learners) who wrote their 2023 matric exams through the Independent Examinations Board (IEB) have achieved a 98.46% pass rate. Will be interesting to see how that compares to the rest of the 2023 Matric class’s results being released today.

🦶 Secured Footprint. Stellenbosch headquartered Entersekt has acquired Modirum’s 3-D Secure payment solutions for an undisclosed sum to help it expand its customer base and secure over 2.5 billion transactions per year.

🍎 Big Apple. Apple has overtaken Samsung as the world’s largest smartphone seller, ending Samsung’s 12-year unbeaten run. Apple ended 2023 with 20% of the smartphone market share, while Samsung grabbed 19.4%.

📈 Good Tymes. TymeBank has become the first digital bank in Africa to reach profitability, and it did so in less than five years. Pretty impressive considering less than 5% of all neo-banks around the world have reached profitability. They are also looking to raise at a valuation exceeding $ 1 billion soon — unicorn incoming.

🛬 Busy Airport. Cape Town International Airport set a new record in December 2023 for the most traffic in and out. Beating the previous record set in January 2020.

🇿🇦 Fight Morning. SA’s very own Dricus “Stillknocks” du Plessis will challenge current UFC middleweight champion Sean Strickland for the title in the wee hours of Sunday morning (thanks Canada) at UFC 297. The main fight will be broadcast on SuperSport (around 5AM) — with English, Afrikaans and isiXhosa commentary. #hulleweetniewatonsweetnie

HOW WOULD YOU BUILD IT?

How to Market Your Startup Like a Guru

If you’re battling with marketing, acquisition, growth, awareness and beating competitors, then this week’s How Would You Build It podcast is for you. We sat down with serial entrepreneur, founder and marketing guru Dave Duarte, to chat about how to market a startup, build the brand and build a community. And it’s solid GOLD.

Some of the best bits…

1. Tell a good story and your marketing is done

Dave jumps straight in with the one hack that does all your marketing for you. He says not to leave marketing to the “arts and crafts” department, build the narrative of what you’re trying to do internally at the core of your product.

Sometimes a single line makes every sale so much easier. Uber’s was so good – “press a button, get a ride/taxi” – that it built the company to mega-scale, and even led to other startups comparing themselves to Uber – “we’re the Uber of the xxx space”. 

It’s your job as founder to figure out what that one line is for your brand. Dave says to make your customer the hero of a story – “They are Luke Skywalker, your product is the lightsaber, get Luke to understand that he needs that lightsaber to save the universe.”

2. Identify your audience by eating your broccoli

Dave says there’s only one reliable way to find your user and that is to get in front of a whole lot of people you think might have the problem you’re solving and have a three-tier conversation: Who they are, What problems they’re facing and then Frame your product as the solution to those problems.

Then comes the acid test: If that person looks you in the eye and says, “Oh my goodness, yes! I want it, right now. Where do I sign up?”. Only then do you have your audience – everyone else is a mom (they like the idea of your product but they will never buy it).

The broccoli part is actually finding those people and getting them to talk to you – via video call or in person.

3. Startup marketing hacks

First off, you gotta actually have a plan and budget to build and test a suite of marketing approaches (channels). Then Dave says you structure it like so…

  1. Truths: Expend some of your budget and effort on doing the basics right: Create your story, have an awesome website, get a great product video, and engage with your audience on socials or wherever. Just make yourself look like a company you’d actually buy from. Clients "Look before they eat”, so make sure things look awesome.

  2. Trends: Test out trending marketing approaches – try TikTok, approach influencers, and run ads and adjust. You never know if you don’t try.

  3. Trifles: Keep a little bit of budget to do crazy, fun stuff you really want to do. The key is to just have fun – host an in-person event, try something whacky with AI – and just have fun with a bit of your marketing.

Then, bring it all together in a channel-based approach: Try different channels, measure them, see where you have success, double down on those and gradually just build a series of marketing channels that actually work for you.

If you are a founder, you have to listen to this one, we promise it will be worth the 40 minutes.

You can also grab the Spotify and Apple Podcast links on our website here.

THE RESULTS ARE IN

We asked what you mostly need help with in your startup, and market fit and acquisition come out tops…we can help with that btw, so hit us up.

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ Securing Funding (23%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Market Fit and Customer Acquisition (37%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Product Development (7%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Scaling the Business (10%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Team Building and Management (0)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Regulatory Compliance and Legal Issues (3%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Marketing and Brand Awareness (10%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Financial Management (0)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Competition and Market Differentiation (10%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Work-Life Balance (0)