Bokang Sibolla
Founder 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.
Founder, Sola Travel · Building Other Travellers, a video series · Selective digital growth and AI product consulting
How I build
I'm a builder. The thesis came out of the work.
A decade of building things with 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 carried across all of it was not what I learned in each room. It was how. Stay curious about how the thing actually works underneath. Figure out how it reaches the people it is meant to. Build the system that does that consistently. Be patient with the part where you fix what does not.
What changed in the last three years is what a single builder can carry. Cold outreach to find the right people. Lead generation to surface the ones already looking. Customer acquisition to turn attention into users. UX and UI to design what they meet. SEO to be found on Google, and now GEO to be cited by the AI engines that are quietly replacing it. Each of those used to be a separate specialist sitting in a separate room. With AI-native tools, they have collapsed into one connected practice that a single person can actually run. That collapse is the world I have been tracking, and the one I am building inside.
Sola is the first product I am building from this stance. Three things follow from how the work actually runs:
I make the company legible to AI
Every user conversation, every support thread, every product signal, every decision note goes into one store an agent can read. The point is not productivity. It is that once the company itself is legible to AI, the intelligence layer becomes a partner in the work, not a tool I pick up between tasks.
I ship the loop, not the feature
Most teams optimise for the next thing they ship. I optimise for the loop that ships things. User feedback in, triage, work, ship, next loop. Most of that runs without me. I sit at the edges, where novelty or stakes earn a human in the room. The features are the by-product of a system designed to keep producing them.
I build for the people the platforms missed
Big platforms do not decide a customer does not exist because nobody wants them. They decide because the cost of reaching that customer, far from the median, was too high to justify. AI-native rewrites that math from the ground up. Sola is the first proof for me, built for women travelling solo. The next products will be for other groups the same logic has been quietly skipping.
What I care about beyond what I build is making this practice legible to the next people who want to run it. Especially the ones who do not look like the default founder.
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
Founded and ran a digital growth firm for nearly three years. End-to-end outsourced marketing across financial services, education, FMCG, and e-learning.
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.
- 22 May 2026
Why Women Pay More to Travel
The single supplement, the planning premium, the safety tax, and the information gap. The hidden costs travel asks women to pay, and why products built for women matter.
- 21 May 2026
Welcome
First post. A short note on what this writing space will be.