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Origen / Work / Startup Club ZA № 05 Community platform

A digital home
for South Africa’s
startup community.

02.1 / Brief

SCZA is the country’s largest tech startup and investor community. We built the platform that powers their events, press, jobs board and membership — and that’s now scaling to support a pre-seed investment fund and a $1M pitch competition.

Startup Club ZA — featured FIG. 05 · Featured Web platform · 2023 — ongoing
§ 02 The brief What they came to us with

One platform, several jobs — events, content, jobs, fund. All of it visible to the founders and the investors at the same time.

SCZA had outgrown the patchwork. Events were being run on one tool, the press page on another, the jobs board on a third. They needed a single platform that could handle all of it — including high-stakes moments like The Big Pitch 2025 ($1M startup competition) and the launch of their pre-seed fund.

The bar was practical: every week we were slow was a week of lost users, lost funding, lost momentum. We shipped to that.

§ 03 What we did Four disciplines
Product strategy

Sequencing what to ship first across events, content, jobs, and a coming pre-seed fund.

Product design

A digital home for the country’s startup community — clear enough for founders, weighty enough for investors.

Web design

A visual system that holds up against high-profile event campaigns without losing the everyday community feel.

Web development

A scalable platform sized for the membership, the fund, and whatever comes next.

§ 04 Outcomes Where it’s landed

The platform is the membership’s daily home, the events team’s operating system, and the fund’s public face. It’s built to scale with whatever SCZA does next — which, on current trajectory, is most of the noteworthy startup activity in South Africa.

§ 05 More from the project 3 images
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