Bokang Sibolla
Building AI-native travel companies. Sola, my first, is a travel app for women travelling solo. Previously, ten years building digital growth and sales for global brands across Africa, Europe, and America.
Sola Travel · The Other Travellers, a video series · Selective AI product and growth consulting
How I build
Stay curious. Figure out the system. Build it. Stay long enough to fix it.
I have spent a decade building in digital, in very different kinds of rooms. Global media networks. Behaviour-change work at scale. A telco. A growth firm I founded and ran. Smaller and service businesses. Documentary, training, and a film. The full list is in the work below.
What changed in the last three years is what a single builder can carry. Customer acquisition, the full funnel from outbound and paid through landing pages, lifecycle email, and attribution to conversion. Design powered by AI models trained on the references you give them, so the work that used to need a designer ships from one person. SEO to be found on Google, GEO to be cited by the engines quietly replacing it. Each of those used to be a separate specialist in a separate room. They have collapsed into one connected practice that one person can run.
Sola is the first product I am building from this stance.
How I work
AI does the repetitive part of the practice. User feedback, support signals, product data, decision notes go into one store an agent reads. The loop turns input into shipped change, mostly without me. I sit where novelty or stakes earn a human in the room.
What I am building
Sola for women travelling solo, focused on Southeast Asia. Essays under the same thesis. Other Travellers, a video series that makes the practice visible enough for others to run.
Who I build for
Who do these products actually reach, and who gets missed when the answer is mostly nobody. From a documentary I made on internet access to Sola on travel, the throughline has held. The rest of the market, the part the dominant products quietly skip, is who I want to build for.
Selected work
A few things I have built or run hands-on.
The full set, grouped by the shape of the engagement, is on the work page.
Consumer product
Sola
A travel app for women travelling solo. Live on the iOS App Store. Built solo, AI-native from the start.
2025 / present
Video series
Other Travellers
A YouTube series I am building under the same thesis as Sola. Long-form video for travellers the major platforms have not been built for.
2026 / building
Behaviour-change at scale
MTV Staying Alive Foundation
Digital Director. Set global digital strategy across multi-country behaviour-change campaigns in global health.
2022 / 2023
My own growth firm
Algorithm Hackers
Ran outsourced growth for clients across financial services, education, and e-learning. Three years, end to end, my own shop.
2019 / 2022
Global media agency
MediaCom
Paid media for some of the largest brands in the world. Coca-Cola, Sony, Audi, and others.
2016 / 2018
Writing
Long-form essays on travel, AI products, and the people the major platforms have not been built for. Cited, edited, no listicles.
- 2 June 2026
The Trip Home
You can wire money home in seconds, ship a barrel of goods across an ocean, have groceries delivered to your mother in Lagos, each through an app built for nothing else. The one part of staying tied to home with no product behind it is the trip to be there yourself. This is an essay about why the most frequent trip in the world is served everywhere except in travel, and what gets built next.
- 1 June 2026
How Marrakech Became Marrakech
The story everyone tells about Marrakech runs through a single Vogue photograph, Yves Saint Laurent, and a brief bohemian moment in the late 1960s. The story underneath runs through a French planning doctrine from 1912, a hotel built in 1923, and a Moroccan state that spent the 2000s turning that inheritance into thirteen million arrivals a year.
- 27 May 2026
The traveller Booking.com was built for
Booking.com's search form has four fields. Together they encode assumptions about who travels, why, where they begin, what they want to know, and which currency they think in. Most of the world's travellers fail the schema before they fail the search.