Business
How Two South Africans Built EskomSePush Over a Weekend
On a quiet December weekend in 2014, two South African engineers were not trying to change the country. They were simply trying to avoid having their holiday plans ruined by another surprise power cut.
Eleven years later, that side project is EskomSePush, the biggest independent app South Africa has ever produced. It sits comfortably next to banking and retail giants in download numbers, yet it still runs on the vision of just two people.
From university labs to real-world problem-solving
Dan Southwood-Wells and Herman Maritz followed different academic paths but landed in the same world of problem-solving.
Southwood-Wells completed his master’s degree in computer science at Rhodes University in 2009 before joining Telkom in Bellville. Maritz earned a master’s degree in electronic engineering from Stellenbosch University and spent time running Linux systems in the university’s DSP Lab.
Their careers crossed at Entersekt, a financial authentication company where both were exposed to the fast-moving realities of startup life. For Maritz, that environment shaped his entire approach to building software.
He has often said that early-stage startups force you to learn quickly because there is no one else to do the job. In his case, it even meant learning a whole new programming language just to get access to the company’s only Mac machine.
That same attitude of figuring things out on the fly would later define EskomSePush.
When load shedding returned, so did an old idea
By the time Southwood-Wells joined Entersekt, load shedding had largely disappeared from daily life. That calm ended around 2013 and escalated sharply by late 2014, when Eskom’s schedules became increasingly hard to track.
Like many South Africans, the pair started by hacking together their own solution. They used push notification tools to warn each other when power cuts started. Friends and family soon asked to be added.
Over one December weekend in 2014, they turned that private workaround into a public app. The goal was simple. Know when the power is going off and plan your life around it.
EskomSePush was released in early 2015 and spread faster than anyone expected.
An app name that could only come from South Africa
The name EskomSePush reflects the humour that runs through South African tech culture. It combines a familiar Afrikaans expression with the idea of push notifications, a phrase the founders heard repeatedly in their day jobs.
Within six weeks of launch, the app had more than 100,000 active users. Later that year, it won MTN’s Business App of the Year award, cementing its place as more than just a clever side project.
Still, neither founder treated it as a business. Both left Entersekt in 2015 and moved into major e-commerce roles. Maritz rose to director of engineering at OLX. Southwood-Wells worked his way up at Takealot and later became chief technology officer at Superbalist.
EskomSePush ticked along quietly in the background while load shedding eased for a few years.
Load shedding changed everything again
When power cuts intensified from 2019 onwards, EskomSePush usage exploded. By 2021, Maritz committed to the app full-time, followed by Southwood-Wells in 2022.
That focus paid off. In 2023, South Africa’s worst year of load shedding, EskomSePush passed 12 million downloads across the Apple App Store and Google Play. At the height of Stage 6, daily active users exceeded 3.2 million.
Social media during that period often told the same story. Screenshots of EskomSePush alerts became part of daily life, shared in neighbourhood groups, office chats, and family WhatsApp threads.
What surprised many users was learning that the app was still effectively a two-person operation.
More than power alerts now
Despite reduced load shedding in the past year, EskomSePush has not faded. On quiet days, it still sees around 300,000 active users, rising sharply when service delivery problems flare up.
The app has evolved into a community notice board where neighbours share updates about water outages, unplanned power cuts, load reduction, lost pets, and local safety concerns.
That shift reflects a bigger truth about life in South Africa. Reliable information is often as valuable as electricity itself.
Built from frustration, sustained by community
The founders are careful not to tie the app’s future to the country’s energy failures. EskomSePush was born from frustration, but it has survived because it solved a real problem in a human way.
What began as a weekend fix between two engineers now sits at the centre of how millions of South Africans navigate daily uncertainty.
It is a reminder that some of the country’s most impactful tools are not built in boardrooms but in spare hours, by people who simply refuse to wait for someone else to fix the problem.
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Source: MyBroadband
Featured Image: YouTube/Solar Integrations
