In South Africa’s startup ecosystem, stories of scale tend to follow a familiar trend. A bold idea, a big pitch and a splashy exit.
However, for most entrepreneurs, building in difficult markets means the path is more tactical than dramatic. Progress tends to be measured in hard-won milestones and strategic pivots rather than in investor rounds or industry listings.
Entrepreneur Andre de Wet has spent the past two decades in that space between vision and execution, founding numerous companies despite consistent disruption and South Africa’s unique set of challenges.
“Entrepreneurship in emerging markets is often framed in extremes,” he says. “Either the founder is a disruptor with a game-changing idea, or they’re a survivor navigating impossible odds. Both versions tend to miss what the work actually involves – consistently solving basic problems at scale.”
Best known for building out PriceCheck as CEO, to be Africa’s largest price comparison site before it was acquired in 2015.
Since then, he’s worked across mobile, retail and infrastructure projects and his current company, Flood, focuses on the one part of digital commerce that remains mostly unresolved – how to help small, offline micro entrepreneurs become visible to mobile-first consumers.
Flood, a SuperApp-as-a-Service platform which has raised more than $2.5 million in seed funding since it was established, has given de Wet more lessons in leadership and in running a business during challenging political and economic times.
Success in the SME space comes down to whether a system works under pressure. It’s a mindset that became especially relevant during the 2020 lockdown when micro businesses across South Africa lost access to foot traffic and formal retail channels almost overnight.
SMEs that could move quickly without having to build something from scratch were able to keep trading. However, that period revealed bigger structural issues – many of the most important companies in South Africa’s economy are almost entirely excluded from the infrastructure built to support them. They remain digitally invisible.
Another challenge faced by local entrepreneurs is finding ways of translating opportunities into usable ideas. The threshold for change is lower than most entrepreneurs realise so solutions need to be easy to understand and adopt and not ask customers to do too much. If something works consistently, people will use it. If it requires education and onboarding before it can deliver value, adoption will be slow.
It’s not an indictment of the entrepreneur or their idea; it’s simply the reality of operating in a country where margins are thin, infrastructure is unreliable, data is expensive, and people’s patience runs out quickly. Added to this is the immense value attributed to distribution and trust in emerging markets—without these, the uphill battle becomes even steeper.
“Companies need to rethink what constitutes innovation,” says de Wet. “Most of the frameworks I return to are ones that are grounded in repetition, using what has worked and what still works and applying these to slightly different contexts. Often, success comes down to discipline and repetition.”
Another factor that always dominates the SME conversation is scale. The perception is that a company is only successful because it scales, but this isn’t necessarily true. A business is successful because it’s useful. Customers need the services, and they want the products and they keep coming back for more. In a market like South Africa, staying useful is as powerful as scaling because companies can stay small enough to adapt to unexpected changes. They’re resilient and agile, designed to handle complex market conditions and manage growth carefully.
“These aren’t lessons that appear in pitch decks, they’re ones that have been learned from years of building inside systems that don’t always reward the work,” says de Wet. “They don’t focus on the glam of the big sale or the allure of the Silicon Valley story, but rather on hard work, focus and consistency because those are the qualities that most often bring the customers back, time and again.”