R19.5m in Jamestown?! 😳

Scientists will probably blame hormones, microplastics, diet, stress and people keeping their phones in their pockets.

I have another theory.

Look at the cars.

Our dads drove vehicles with no power steering, no aircon and a gearbox that required the upper-body strength of a Springbok prop. If it broke down, you opened the bonnet, hit something with a spanner, swore twice, and carried on to Paarl.

Now the car detects that you're slightly tired, warms your bum, parks itself and gently reminds you that your oat-milk flat white is still sitting in the cupholder.

The old Land Rover looked like it had just returned from fighting a small war.

The new one looks like it wants to discuss its Discovery Vitality points.

Coincidence that male fertility has dropped over the same period?

I'm not a scientist.

But I think we need to bring back manual gearboxes before it's too late. 😂

Gmail is free, but you pay with your data. Proton Mail is different.

We don’t scan your messages. We don’t sell your behavior. We don’t follow you across the internet.

Proton Mail gives you full-featured, private email without surveillance or creepy profiling. It’s email that respects your time, your attention, and your boundaries.

Email doesn’t have to cost your privacy.

Ditch the Gmail data grab

AI is coming for a lot of tasks. Admin, bookkeeping, customer service, copywriting, coding… increasingly, if the work happens entirely on a laptop, there's a decent chance AI will be able to do some of it.

Yet every young person seems to be heading in exactly the same direction.

They want to build an AI startup, work remotely from a coffee shop, drink matcha, wear noise-cancelling headphones and stare intensely at a MacBook while Spotify plays Deep Focus.

Meanwhile, there is a dog in Stellenbosch that desperately needs grooming.

And therein lies the opportunity.

Young people: look where nobody else wants to look.

Pet grooming. Pool cleaning. Pest control. Plumbing. Aircon servicing. Carpet cleaning. Solar panel cleaning. Garden services. Painting. Gutter cleaning. Mobile car washing. Appliance repairs. Waste removal. Moving services. Upholstery repairs.

The boring, sweaty, slightly dirty businesses.

Nobody is making TikToks titled “Day in my life as a drain-unblocking entrepreneur 😍.”

And that's precisely why they're interesting.

While 4,000 people are trying to launch the next AI productivity app, Mrs van der Merwe still needs someone to clean her pool every Thursday. Her toilet is still going to block. Her Labrador is still going to smell terrible. Her gutters will still fill with leaves.

And AI isn't climbing onto her roof anytime soon.

Use AI. Learn it. Let it make you ridiculously efficient.

But don't let Instagram convince you that the only exciting opportunity left in the world involves a laptop and a matcha.

Sometimes the better opportunity is hiding inside a blocked drain.

Unfortunately, the Wi-Fi down there is terrible. 😂

I saw a property for sale in Jamestown this week for R19.5 million and nearly spat out my coffee.

Then I read the description.

Okay… this isn't exactly a three-bedroom Jamestown house with a Wendy house out back.

It's an agricultural smallholding with a five-bedroom guest house, heritage chapel, vegetable farm, chef-training kitchen, bakery, offices, borehole, river access and event facilities. Basically, you buy the property and accidentally become a farmer, hotelier, wedding coordinator, chef and baker on transfer day.

It even has a trademarked farm-to-fork business called Voedpad®.

So perhaps R19.5 million needs some context.

But still…

R19.5 MILLION. IN JAMESTOWN.

Remember when Jamestown was where you bought because Stellenbosch was too expensive?

At this rate, by 2035 we'll be writing:

“Rare opportunity in Klapmuts. Two-bedroom fixer-upper. Slight damp. R14.7 million. Offers from R16m considered.” 😂

Moving house is strange when you think about it.

We happily spend hundreds, sometimes thousands, of rands buying cardboard boxes whose entire life purpose is:

Get purchased → get filled → get crushed → sit in the garage for six months → eventually get thrown away.

There is a much smarter option.

Stack Box lets you rent proper heavy-duty plastic moving boxes instead.

They arrive ready to use. No building boxes. No fighting with rolls of packing tape. No bottom suddenly collapsing while you're carrying the good wine glasses.

Pack them. Move. Unpack. Give them back.

They're sturdy, stack neatly on top of each other and can be reused again and again instead of sacrificing another small forest every time someone moves from Stellenbosch to Somerset West.

And perhaps the greatest benefit:

When the move is finished, they're gone.

No flattened Pick n Pay boxes staring at you from the garage in 2029 because “we might need these one day.”

Rent the boxes. Move your stuff. Return them.

Sometimes the simplest business ideas make you wonder why we haven't always done it this way. 📦🙌

A little local success story worth celebrating.

Stellenbosch-based Carla Venter, better known online as Money with Carla, has just released her first book, Money with Carla: Your No Bullsht Guide to Building Wealth*, published by Penguin Books.

And what a journey it's been.

Carla only started Money with Carla in 2024 and has already built an online community of 140,000+ people, clocked up more than 2 million video and podcast views, and taught over 1,600 students around the world.

Her whole approach is refreshingly simple: money and investing shouldn't require a finance degree or 14 spreadsheets that make you want to lie down afterwards.

The new book tackles everything from investing and ETFs to fees, property, TFSAs, RAs and working out how much you actually need to become financially independent. In other words, the stuff we probably should have been taught at school instead of spending three weeks learning how an oxbow lake forms.

It's pretty cool seeing someone from our little corner of the world build an audience like this and turn it into a book published by one of the world's major publishing houses.

Huge congratulations, Carla. 👏

And if your current investment strategy is still “hopefully my house in Stellenbosch doubles again”, this might be worth a read. 😂

Have a look at Money with Carla here

Hopefully. 🤷

Yet you haven’t cleaned your carpets since Zuma was president!

Do something you're bad at.

As we get older, we become very good at avoiding things we're not good at.

We play the sports we know. We socialise with people we know. We work in industries we understand. We order the same thing from the same coffee shop.

And slowly, without realising it, our world can get smaller.

Kids don't do this.

Give a child a skateboard and they'll fall off it 30 times in an afternoon and still announce that they're basically a professional skateboarder.

Adults fall off once and immediately decide: “Cycling is actually better for my knees.”

There's something valuable about deliberately being a beginner again.

Learn to surf. Try padel. Take a pottery class. Learn another language. Start a vegetable garden. Pick up a guitar. Build something badly.

Not because you need another achievement.

But because being terrible at something reminds you that you can still learn.

We spend so much of adulthood trying to look like we know what we're doing.

Maybe occasionally it's good for us to have absolutely no clue.

☀️ Friday: 22°C / 10°C
Long sunny spells, with a bit of a breeze. A beautiful Stellenbosch Friday.

☀️ Saturday: 24°C / 13°C
Plenty of sunshine and pleasantly warm. Braai weather officially activated.

☀️ Sunday: 27°C / 14°C
Very warm with lots of sunshine. Spring has apparently skipped the meeting and sent summer instead.

🔥 Monday: 30°C / 18°C
Hot and mostly sunny. The shorts that have been sitting in the cupboard since March can report for duty.

🌦️ Tuesday: 25°C / 15°C
Cloudier with a couple of showers possible, particularly earlier in the day. A cooler change after Monday's heat.

As always, thanks for reading. If you spot something in town worth knowing, reply and tell us. Half the best Stellenbosch stories begin that way.

See you around town,
Stellenbosch Brief

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