🇺🇸 SA’s Hidden R72bn Student Play…

A safer swim? Check out this new ocean rescue drone that doubles as a lifebuoy — it even carries and delivers extra life jackets in an emergency.

In this Open Letter:

• Fair game: Giving foreign students the full SA experience.

• G’bye Shell, Africa’s only YC Top-50 startup & a huge solar investment.

• Get growing: How to outbound-sell like a boss.

• The future of SA freight: Your results are in.

• Free stuff? Share The Open Letter & get business tools.

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TRENDING NOW

Giving Foreign Students the Full SA Experience

Is a R72bn+ game…

In South Africa, a major challenge for graduates is landing that first job. 

No work experience means no point of reference regarding skills and no references to vouch for your work quality. 

Graduates need jobs…

In a previous Open Letter, we spoke about how South Africa’s graduate unemployment rate was only 10.6%. Seems pretty low and inconsequential, right? Not if you consider that 10 years ago it was half that. And with nearly 340’000 new grads entering the job market each year, you can see how that number could spiral out of control.

But it’s not just an SA thing

4.8% of Ivy League university graduates in the USA struggle to find work (40% are under-employed, i.e. working in low-skill, low-pay jobs just to get by). And, after paying roughly $90’000 per year for their education, those grads are desperate to put their degrees to work and start getting some ROI. 

What’s worse is, most early 20-somethings have no idea what work is like and deciding what job to go after with zero work experience isn’t ideal. 

So getting your teeth stuck into a project at a top firm is a great way to discover what you like and don’t like, in a lower-risk environment.

Get an experience with your experience

iXperience is a local startup using the need for work experience, the demand for travel experiences, and the cost of living differential to make it happen for US students. Their 6-week program takes students from mostly Ivy League universities and offers them 2 weeks of training coupled with a 4-week internship at one of 250 global companies. 

Combining work experience with travel experience, all while building that resume with a practical project that has outcomes and deliverables, all for between $9’970 and $12’750 per participant – cheap by American standards… 

And for iXperience, this is simply the start of a relationship with a professional that will likely end up at a global firm and is likely serious about his/her career. This means they will likely have money to spend and a desire to spend it on further career development later in life.

So opportunities that naturally evolve out of this is…

• Paid courses and coaching for job interviews.

• Finding and placing candidates for a fee (recruitment).

• Other training courses such as AI prompt engineering, leadership development, etc.

• A community of alumni that has many ways of monetising – like advertisement, affiliate sales or upselling future courses and experiences (excursions).

We crunched some numbers

And it’s a fairly good market, this… If you consider that, in the US, UK, Germany and Netherlands alone, at least 5–20% of students take part in some form of work-integrated learning programme. And their numbers are pretty good…

• US: 18.58m students per year, used to paying $5’000—$20’000+ per programme.

• UK: 2.86m students per year, used to paying in the £5’000—£15’000 range.

• Germany: 2.92m students per year, used to paying €3’000—€10,000+.

• Netherlands: 340k students per year, also used to paying €3,000—€10,000+.

That’s at minimum a 1.2m size market, with over R72bn to spend.

Experiences in the context of professional development are a very unique way of solving professional and personal desires. And with Cape Town becoming more and more popular as a global destination, we are sure there will be many more like this. We’re watching this space…

IN SHORT

Your coffee-time reads are brought to you by CryptoCoffee.

🛒 Ready your wallet. Amazon.co.za officially launched this morning and is open to orders from South Africans.

🐧 Wave the Competition Goodbye. African FinTech, Wave, is the first startup from Y-Combinator’s 92 African startups to crack their prestigious Top 50 companies by revenue list.

☀️ Solar Investment to the Moon. Local energy startup GoSolr is set to invest R10 billion in its solar generating capacity, 7x’ing it over the next 4 years with backing from African Rainbow Capital Investments and Standard Bank.

🐚 Go Well, Bye Shell. Shell is packing up shop and leaving SA shores after more than 120 years of operating in SA.

🗳️ Coughing for Votes. With elections around the corner, the DA is spending R2.7m a month on Facebook and Instagram ads. Their opposition? Not so much.

🤖 AI’s Trending Cliff Notes. X is using Grok to summarise trending stories (called Grok Stories) under the guise of helping users catch up on relevant content — which sounds like a fancy way of saying they gonna flip your content and sell ads off it without giving you anything.

A WORD FROM TODAY’S SPONSOR PARTNER

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BUILDER’S CORNER

How to Outbound Like a Boss

by Renier Kriel from The Open Letter

Talking to strangers… It’s one thing when it's at a bar or a startup event where people likely want to talk to you. A whole nother thing when contacting people out of the blue, trying to convince them to buy your product. 

But if you are serious about business growth, cold outbound is likely unavoidable. 

Whilst the pain (or discomfort) of doing this won’t go away, there are some things you can do to at the very least increase your chance of success. 

4 Rules for Outbound Success

1. Work on your personal brand

The first thing most people will do when getting an outbound message that interests them is Google that person. And what they find will likely spark their interest or have them close that tab and move on. 

So a good place to start is your LinkedIn Profile.

Now, some things you can’t change – like work experience, qualifications etc. But there’s quite a bit that’s totally in your control:

• A high-quality profile picture.

• A profile page that’s set up (with a banner, some links and all the relevant information).

• You actively engage on the platform and connect with people you meet. 

• You share posts and updates about what you’re up to, building or learning.

2. Personalise your message

The more personal the better.

Yes, it doesn’t scale, but in a world where everyone is using AI to generate their outbound messages, writing up something personal stands out from the crowd.

The channel you pick also results in a higher degree of personalisation, in order of preference it should be:

• In-person: Either at a place they hang out (but don’t be creepy, tho) or at an event.

• On a call: Yes we all hate telemarketers, but it's because they don’t care about you, they care about a sales target. Don’t be a telemarketer; phone, connect and engage.

• LinkedIn connection request + message: This one is great. They can see your face (and your nicely set up LinkedIn profile) and people have the incentive to accept – their network/follower count grows. So connect and add a note. Once they accept, it automatically becomes a message to them – the first touch point to form a connection. But don’t pitch in this note, or they might ignore your connection request. Try to use this to get a reply of some sort.

• Email: A well-crafted email will still have a chance to get a reply. But just remember, people’s email behaviour differs. Some people inbox zero and are likely to reply. Others might think “I’ll get back to this later,” (and then promptly forget) so be sure to follow up politely until you get a “yes” or “no thank you”.

3. Increase your reading

The more you read, the higher your chances of being able to add value to a conversation and your prospect. This includes books, newsletters and social media.

Everything you take in becomes ammunition you can use to keep conversations going by adding value.

Add value long enough and, should an opportunity arise to sell, you’ll be perfectly positioned.

4. Get organised

If you’re going to engage multiple people at once, know that personal relationships have an asynchronous and dynamic nature, so it will become really hard to keep track of what’s happening where.

Getting the right tools to help you stay on top of things is crucial.

When you’re small-scale, you can start with something simple like a Google Sheets or a Notion table. As you level up and do more outbound, consider Attio or even HubSpot. 

Bonus Tip – It’s very similar to dating

While it has happened and worked before, the chances of someone accepting a wedding proposal on a first date aren’t great.

In fact, do that often enough (propose to random people you just met) and you might even get into trouble. 

If you want to build long-lasting, mutually beneficial relationships, though, take the time to get to know the person, engage and add value to their life

Once the processional song starts playing, you’ll know the wait was all worth it…

Got a startup hack or insights to share? Hit reply and we might feature you here, too.

YOUR VOICE

We asked what you think should be the future of freight, and we’re all for trains…

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🚛 Even more trucks – it's the most practical. (0)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🚉 Get the trains back on track! (83%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🚫 Fewer trucks please, can’t drive a car on national roads because of them. (10%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🚢 How about boats? (0)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🏭 Local manufacturing is the way to go – less fossil fuels. (7%)

Your 2 cents…

Indeed, Herman — not to mention local industry tends to offer better benefits than service-based employment, meaning our blue-collar workers will have such better quality of life, which means more spending power and all-round healthier economic options for every South African.

Couldn’t agree more! Love the enthusiasm for efficiency.

If only SA had more people like you over at Transnet and Prasa — love it, thanks!