As Andrew Tate famously described, money is like a “river” that is “always moving.” If you get closer to the river, you might get wet (make money in this case). Just like someone opens a shop in a busy part of town, Takealot is the busy part of town in the city called the internet in South Africa. You just might get wet on Takealot.
Thousands of people use it. They have established a relationship with and trust it.
They have established pick-up points for their thousands of customers at convenient shopping centers. They charge only R25 for this delivery option, making them the cheapest in the country.
If you sell products similar in type or brand name (e.g., soap), you would want to sell them at retailers like Pick n Pay, Shoprite, and Clicks, right? Takealot is your Pick n Pay, Shoprite, and Clicks. This is essentially Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG, a fancy way to say it).
As I mentioned at the beginning, it’s where buyers are. It’s an option worth exploring. You want sales, so you have to explore it.
Not all my businesses’ products sell on Takealot. Our clothes at 94 Brands Shop don’t sell anywhere but on our site. They are bespoke, and our customers wouldn’t want to buy some of them on Takealot – not all. On the other hand, my books and those we publish at Bula Buka Publishers sell on Takealot. Even some of the bookstores that sell our books sell them through Takealot.
Think about it. A smile is a smile is a smile, and it is a good thing. So, smile. Be a force of meditative smiles to yourself. Smile by yourself, brother, and sister.
This is a chapter from 90 Days to Create & Launch book. Find it on Amazon, my webstore (if you’re in South Africa), Takelot.com, or in South African bookstores (Bargain Books, Exclusive Books, Protea Books, etc.).
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The following serves as a great example to illustrate what prevents people from starting or adopting an “execute at all costs” mindset.
I had the opportunity to speak at an event called Business Insights Circle in 2022. After my talk, I had a conversation with a young man who expressed his desire to start a t-shirt brand.
This is a chapter from 90 Days to Create & Launch book. Find it on Amazon, my webstore (if you’re in South Africa), Takelot.com, or in South African bookstores (Bargain Books, Exclusive Books, Protea Books, etc.).
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The following serves as a great example to illustrate what prevents people from starting or adopting an “execute at all costs” mindset.
I had the opportunity to speak at an event called Business Insights Circle in 2022. After my talk, I had a conversation with a young man who expressed his desire to start a t-shirt brand.
He believed that he needed R5000 to begin with three designs and produce fifty-plus units for each design.
This is an excerpt from my book “Money is Biological: Exploring Money’s Emergence, Evolution, Innovation, and Future.” It’s available on Amazon.
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Barter becomes emergent and natural when cooperation extends across tribes and nations.
Fundamentally, barter is the starting point of money and incorporates other inventions we’ve mentioned, such as clay tablets, paper for cash or gold certificates, metals for coins, blockchain for cryptocurrency, and Hindu-Arabic numerals, etc.
Thus, barter is inherent in credit money and all later forms of money (commodity, fiat, and crypto).
Instead of stating it was a transition from barter money to commodity money, I infer that it was the evolution and stacking of commodity money into barter. All forms of money that emerged along our evolutionary path, such as fiat and cryptocurrency, stack into barter. Barter took on a different manifestation.
Money, in its evolutions and representations—commodity money, fiat, and credit (to be explained in the following chapter)—is barter. Different methods and inventions of representing barter are added, stacked, or infused to make it more agile.
I infer that mere cooperation between tribes or animals is a semblance of a credit system. It is bartering (the overarching term) that will be paid in the future through cooperation. Animals protect their packs all the time (give out credit), and the others reciprocate when necessary (pay back the debt): elephants, orangutans, orcas, lions, wolves, polar bears, emperor penguins, dolphins, chimpanzees, bees, birds, mice, kangaroos, hyenas, and cheetahs. Baby animals learn this and reciprocate when they are older. It’s how they repay the debt (credit) to their tribe.
The need for bartering came first and naturally in animal cooperation and reciprocation. By bartering cooperation, they established a not-so-explicit credit system.
This is an excerpt from my book “Money is Biological: Exploring Money’s Emergence, Evolution, Innovation, and Future.” It’s available on Amazon.
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Money is the neuron in the converse of transacting – i.e., innovation to consumption.
Money is an innovation or invention enabled by biology’s human psychology, as all manmade innovations are.
Money is a biological construct, just like a chair or an aeroplane, innovated by humans with their unique biological psychology. Chairs and aeroplanes are also biological constructs.
Similar to how a chair or an aeroplane has utility for humans, money serves as a utility and addresses fascinating biological problems arising from man’s biological ingenuity in inventing multiplicity. These intriguing problems involve men’s psycho-biological ability to progressively and accumulatively innovate diverse utilities, oftentimes of novelty – with money emerging as the solution for trading those innovations.
This is an excerpt from my book “Money is Biological: Exploring Money’s Emergence, Evolution, Innovation, and Future.” It’s available on Amazon.
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When money evolved arguments
There are mainstream arguments of when money evolved from barter to commodity money and to fiat money.
Perhaps the most contrary but evidential was the late anthropologist and anarchist activist David Graeber’s argument that debt is the first form of money in his 2011 published book, ”Debt: The First 5000 Years[i].”
It posits debt (the credit system, i.e. debtors and creditors) as one of the first forms of money, and probably preceded barter and cash, dating back to about 5000 years ago in Uruk, Mesopotania, present day Muthanna Province in Iraq.
“Money Is Biological” gives frameworks for understanding money as a biological construct and thus explores the evolution of money through an evolutionary lens.
Find this book on Amazon, my webstore (if you’re in South Africa), Takelot.com, or in South African bookstores (Bargain Books, Exclusive Books, Protea, etc.)
This booklet offers a never-before-seen analysis of the billions-worth township economy – including the rural areas and the ghettos, by applying the Adjacent Possible theory.
The book purports that the billions generating townships are a goldmine that now, unlike before, are favourable and ready to be mined by young – especially black – startup entrepreneurs, especially those dealing in B2C (Business to Consumer) and FCMG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods) products.
The booklet shows that understanding the economics of townships through the Adjacent Possible theory can help us innovate and create suitable products that township consumers can support virally and continuously, i.e., products adjacent to township consumer behaviour and consumption metrics.
Its premise is that townships are an Economic Cyclone, (a concept to be explained later in the book). It expands on this concept and explains why young township entrepreneurs are favourably adjoined to this mammoth cyclone of opportunity.
The Adjacent Possible theory has its genesis in evolutionary biology and was coined by Dr. Stuart A. Kauffman.
Did everyone at EFF’s 10-year celebration who sang along with Julius Malema to “killthe Boer kill the farmer” commit hate speech and incitement of violence?
These snippets come from my book “Innovate Like Elon Musk.” It’s available on Amazon, my webstore (if you’re in South Africa), Takelot.com, or in South African bookstores (Bargain Books, Exclusive Books, Protea, etc.)
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The Falcon 9 rocket is designed to land its first stage, enabling its reusability. SpaceX has developed two primary methods for landing the Falcon 9 first stage: landing on land and landing on an autonomous drone ship.
Landing on Land:
a. As the first stage approaches the Earth’s atmosphere after stage separation, it reorients itself using its grid fins for stability and control. This maneuver is known as a boostback burn.
b. The rocket performs a reentry burn, firing three of its Merlin engines to slow down and control its descent through the atmosphere.
