Business Development Associate

Location: Cape Town (in office, with travel across Southern Africa)
Reports to: CEO
Compensation: R20,000 per month base, plus commission on gross profit generated

About Jabu

Jabu builds cash management and payments infrastructure for Southern Africa. Our core product, JabuSafe, is a smart safe that counts and verifies cash on a merchant's premises and credits their bank account instantly, before the money ever moves. We operate in Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa, and we are backed by Afore, Y Combinator and top international investors.

Cash is still the dominant payment method across most of this region, and the way it moves today is slow, expensive and dangerous. We are rebuilding that layer. It is a real problem, with real money attached to solving it.

The role

This is not a support role for sales. This is the person who decides where we point the company next.

You will own the question of which markets, segments and channels we enter, what we say when we get there, and what it costs us to win. You will spend your time building the case for a market before anyone knocks on a door, then testing that case in the field yourself until it either holds or breaks.

Concretely, you will:

• Map and size segments we are not yet serving. Retail chains, fuel forecourts, wholesalers, FMCG manufacturers, banks, quick service restaurants. Work out where our economics are strongest and where they fall apart.
• Build the pricing and unit economics for each opportunity. Per site cost, breakeven volumes, gross profit at different deposit levels. If a deal only works above a certain throughput, you should be the one who knows that before we sign it.
• Design the go to market approach for each segment. Who we target first, what the entry offer is, what proof point we need to open the rest of the category.
• Build the outbound motion. Identify the accounts, find the right person inside them, write the outreach, run the meetings, and hand a qualified, well framed opportunity to sales.
• Develop partnerships with banks, cash in transit companies, FMCG manufacturers and retail groups where the partner distributes us instead of us doing it alone.
• Bring the market back into the building. What competitors are pricing, what merchants complain about, what product gaps keep costing us deals.
• Travel. You will see sites, count the queues, talk to store managers, sit in cash offices. The insight that wins us a category is usually found in a back room in Kimberley, not in a spreadsheet.

Who this is for

You are early in your career, one to four years out of university, and you are impatient with how little you have been trusted with so far.

You should recognize yourself in most of this:

• You think in numbers. You can build a model from a blank sheet and defend every assumption in it.
• You write clearly. Most of this job is making an argument that someone senior can act on.
• You use AI properly. Not to write your emails, but to compress work that would have taken a team a month into something you finish in a week. We want to see what you do with these tools when nobody is supervising you.
• You are comfortable being wrong in front of people, quickly, rather than being vague for a long time.
• You will pick up the phone to a stranger and you will get on a plane on short notice.
• You care about the outcome more than the job title, and you want equity in the result of your work rather than a salary that arrives regardless.

You do not need experience in payments, fintech or cash logistics. You need to be someone who learns a new industry faster than the people already in it.

What this role is not

It is not a strategy role where you produce decks. Everything you propose, you will be asked to go and prove in the market. If you want to think without executing, this will be miserable for you.

Compensation and progression

R20,000 per month base salary, plus commission on the gross profit your work generates for the business. There is no cap on the commission. Someone who opens a category properly should earn several times their base within the first year.

The path from here is to own a market or a business line outright. We would rather promote someone into that than hire it in.

How to apply

Send the following to [email address]:

1. Your CV.
2. One page on a market you think Jabu should enter and why. Any country, any segment, your choice. Tell us how big it is, what we would charge, what our gross profit per site would look like, and who the first three customers we should call are. Show your assumptions. We are not testing whether you are right. We are testing how you think when nobody has given you the answer.

Anything longer than one page will not be read.