Themba, Before You Decide

The relationship comes first

The investment is not more important to me than the relationship.

You and I did not meet because I was trying to sell you something. We are neighbours. We have an existing relationship, and we will continue living in the same community regardless of what you decide here.

So there is no outcome at the end of this page where I want you feeling that you were talked into something you were not comfortable with.

If your answer is no, it is no. That is perfectly acceptable.

Why the underlying idea matters to me

I believe one of the significant financial challenges facing people today is that most income remains tied directly to time.

You work. You get paid. You stop working. The income normally stops.

For many financially functioning people, building an additional source of income that is less directly dependent on the hours they personally work is therefore a rational objective.

That does not mean every income opportunity is good. It certainly does not mean every opportunity is right for every person.

In fact, that problem is one of the reasons The Careful Optimist exists.

What a list of participants would actually prove

I understand why seeing a list of the other participants might initially provide comfort.

But there is an important distinction.

To turn a list into meaningful verification, somebody would ultimately have to go behind the list and examine agreements, payment records or confirmations from the people involved.

So I understand the request. I simply do not think circulating a list of names is, by itself, the protection it may first appear to be.

What about independent verification?

This deserves a straight answer.

An independent verification process could theoretically be structured without publishing everybody's details publicly. I am not going to pretend otherwise.

However, I have chosen not to introduce an external attestation process into this participation structure at this stage.

Any process involving identifiable participant information would also need to be structured properly around confidentiality and the lawful processing of personal information. South Africa's POPIA framework requires personal information to be processed lawfully, for a proper purpose, and with regard to minimality. Consent is one possible basis for processing, but it is not accurate to say that every disclosure automatically requires consent in every circumstance.

The protection I have chosen instead is contractual:

If an independent third-party attestation is something you personally require before you can invest with confidence, I do not want to talk you out of that requirement.

It may simply mean that this particular opportunity does not meet your threshold.

Why I will not use other people's private lives as proof

There are participants who have deliberately structured their personal and financial affairs privately.

Some have particularly strong reasons for doing so.

I know those reasons. But I am deliberately not putting them on this page.

Because the moment I use somebody else's private circumstances to make my proposition more convincing, I have undermined the very privacy I am saying I want to protect.

I would not do that to them. And, if you participated, I would want to treat your private affairs with exactly the same respect.

Early opportunities are difficult to value

There is a business story that illustrates something useful here — but I want to be careful about what it does and does not prove.

In 2009, Travis Kalanick approached Mark Cuban about investing in Uber at a valuation of approximately US$10 million. Cuban liked the concept but wanted a lower valuation and did not invest. He later acknowledged that a US$250,000 investment at that point would ultimately have become enormously valuable.

That story does not prove anything about The Careful Optimist. Uber's success is not evidence that we will succeed.

The point is simpler: even very experienced businesspeople sometimes have to make early-stage decisions before the outcome is knowable.

Who we are actually trying to serve

Our target customer is not somebody trying to decide whether they can afford fuel this week. That person should not be spending money with us.

The customer we are building for is more likely to be someone who:

• already earns an income;
• has some discretionary or investable capital;
• wants to improve their financial position;
• is considering an additional-income opportunity;
• may start or acquire a small business; and
• will face a series of decisions involving meaningful amounts of money, time and risk.

The first decision may be, “Should I enter this opportunity?”

But if they proceed, that decision quickly becomes many others: how much to invest, which supplier to use, whether to advertise, whether to take on a partner, whether to employ somebody, whether to put more money in, whether to stop, and whether to scale.

That is the environment in which The Careful Optimist is intended to become useful.

The two ongoing service levels

Neither service promises to make somebody successful.

The purpose is to improve the quality of the thinking that happens before money, time and trust move.

The economic weight of a dollar

There is another point that is easy for us as South Africans to miss.

We naturally see a US dollar price and multiply it by the exchange rate. That is understandable because we live here and earn and spend in rand.

But a currency conversion is not necessarily the same thing as comparing the economic weight of spending in two different countries.

Over many years, through business discussions and comparing what people earn and what everyday life costs in the two economies, I have personally used a rough three-to-one or four-to-one economic-weight rule of thumb.

Using the four-to-one analogy simply to illustrate the point:

Again, this is an analogy about relative economic weight — not currency conversion.

Put the guidance beside the decision

Imagine somebody in the United States is considering putting US$5,000 into a business or income opportunity.

The important question is not whether US$99 exists in isolation.

It is whether paying US$99 to bring a structured decision process alongside a US$5,000 — or US$10,000, or US$20,000 — commitment makes economic sense to that person.

They are not paying us to make the decision for them. They are paying to become more disciplined about:

• what they know;
• what they are assuming;
• what could go wrong;
• what evidence they have;
• what questions remain unanswered; and
• what they can afford to lose.

That is the value proposition.

We do not need millions of customers

One of the concerns appears to be whether reaching approximately 2,000 paying customers is realistic.

That is a fair question.

Our internal ambition is considerably higher than that, but I deliberately do not want the commercial model to require spectacular growth before it works.

It is intended to represent a relatively slow acquisition curve.

The model does not require The Careful Optimist to become a mass-market household name. It requires us to find a relatively small number of the right people consistently over a long period.

The projection remains a projection. It is not a promise.

Customer acquisition is not foreign territory to us

This part matters because the product can be excellent and still fail if nobody discovers it.

I have spent approximately 35 years building businesses and taking products and services to market.

Across those years, my teams and I have repeatedly worked with the practical disciplines that sit behind customer acquisition:

• different audiences;
• different offers;
• different messages;
• different advertising channels;
• different creative approaches;
• measuring response;
• identifying what performs better;
• stopping what does not work; and
• allocating more resources behind what does.

That history does not guarantee that this particular business will acquire customers economically.

It does mean we are not approaching the problem as though marketing begins with placing one advertisement and hoping for the best.

Economic pressure changes behaviour

There is another commercial reality worth recognising, but I would describe it as a market hypothesis, not a certainty.

As household costs rise and businesses come under pressure, some people look for additional income. Some begin freelancing. Some explore work-from-home opportunities. Some start small businesses. Some existing businesses close, and their owners or employees look for the next source of income.

We are not relying on economic hardship for the business to succeed.

The point is that the desire to improve one's financial position is not a problem we first have to invent. It already exists.

The challenge is earning the attention and trust of a very small part of that market.

“So you're the ‘Antichrist’?”

A US business consultant I have been working with looked at The Careful Optimist for the first time and started laughing.

His response was: “So you're the ‘Antichrist’?”

He was not making a religious statement. His joke was about where we sit in the market.

There is an enormous industry devoted to telling people:

We stand on the other side of that conversation and say:

Before you put your money in, examine it properly.

Some opportunities are bad. Some are perfectly legitimate. But even a perfectly legitimate opportunity can still be completely wrong for a particular person.

That is the pattern we are trying to break.

Money can quietly become consumption

Let's use R40,000 as a round number.

If you decide not to participate, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

But there is another reality we all recognise.

Money that remains available in an ordinary bank account tends, over time, to become part of life: fuel, a repair on the car, something at home, rates, maintenance, an unexpected expense.

All of those may be entirely sensible things to spend money on.

The point is not that the money was “wasted.” The point is that once it has been consumed, it has not become an asset intended to generate an additional income stream.

There is an opportunity cost on both sides of a decision.

The safe alternative is genuinely safer

Suppose instead that the R40,000 goes into a 12-month fixed deposit.

That is a legitimate alternative, and it carries a materially different risk profile from participating in an early-stage business.

As checked in October 2026, 12-month fixed-deposit rates for an amount in this range are around 7% at major South African banks. Absa publishes 6.90% nominal for R1,000 to R100,000, while Nedbank publishes 7.00% nominal for its electronic fixed deposit between R25,000 and R249,999.

South Africa's latest published headline CPI inflation rate is 4.4% for August 2026.

But headline CPI is an economy-wide average. It does not mean that every household experiences exactly 4.4% inflation across the things it personally buys.

So I would look at the fixed deposit for what it is:

There is real value in that.

But the question is not merely whether the bank balance is bigger next year. It is whether the money's real purchasing power, after inflation and any applicable tax, has grown meaningfully.

Security and wealth creation are not always the same objective.

And I would never pretend that the risk of a fixed deposit and the risk of this participation are equivalent. They are not.

There is something you can see about me personally

There is one subject I would rather address directly than wonder whether it is sitting quietly in the background.

We live in the same street. You now play an active role in the security structure.

You may know that I have fallen behind on my security contributions.

And if you have ever thought, “If Lance is behind on something as ordinary as his security fees, how does that fit with him building this business?” I think that would be a perfectly reasonable question.

For most of the almost nine years I have lived in this street, I played an active role in the security of the area and contributed materially, often in ways that were not publicly visible.

Then I experienced a substantial financial setback. A major piece of business that I had worked toward and committed heavily to did not materialise. It affected virtually every area of my financial life.

I am not telling you that as an excuse. The outstanding fees are my responsibility. I intend bringing them up to date as my cash flow recovers.

What I am proud of is something different. When things went badly wrong, I did not simply lie down and stop. I took what I had left and started rebuilding.

You are entitled to know that part of the picture as well.

Is the offer itself legitimate?

There may be an even more basic question sitting underneath everything else:

“Is this whole thing actually legitimate?”

Again, that is a fair question when somebody is asking you to part with money.

Being my neighbour does not prove that a business will succeed. Owning a house in the same street does not prove that an investment is safe. Knowing me personally is not due diligence.

But those things do change one part of the risk picture: accountability and traceability.

• You know who I am.
• You know where I live.
• We have known each other independently of this transaction.
• The agreement is with an identifiable South African company.
• You have a written contract.
• I remain personally accessible to you.

I cannot disappear behind an anonymous website, a Telegram account or an unknown identity.

None of that is proof of future commercial success.

But it does mean you know exactly who is standing behind what is being proposed.

What you are actually buying

This is worth stripping back to its simplest form.

Bitflow Investments 296 (Pty) Ltd is not buying shares in the company.

It is acquiring a contractual Revenue Participation Position.

The agreement provides that:

• there will be a fixed maximum of 20 Revenue Participation Positions;
• no more than 20 may be created or allocated under the structure;
• Position No. 19 carries an entitlement to 1% of Qualifying Revenue;
• that 1% may not be diluted by simply issuing additional participation positions or equivalent economic rights;
• revenue participation is calculated from Qualifying Revenue as defined in the agreement; and
• reporting and payment obligations are set out contractually.

What the agreement does not give you is a guaranteed amount of revenue.

The right can be contractually fixed. The commercial outcome cannot.

The real decision

I do not think your decision is:

“Can Lance prove that there is no risk?”

I cannot.

Nor do I think it should be:

“Can Lance persuade me that this definitely works?”

I cannot honestly do that either.

That is ultimately your threshold. Not mine.

If the absence of an independent participant-register verification means the answer is no, then that is important information about your decision criteria.

It should not be argued away.