Building a Travel Platform for Africans Who Travel
When I started building WeJapa, I thought I was building a travel platform. What I was actually doing was unlearning a decade of assumptions baked into every travel product I had ever used.
The Default User Is Not Universal
Most travel software assumes a particular user. Someone with a passport that opens most borders. Someone whose payment cards work everywhere. Someone who books a flight and never thinks about whether they'll be granted a visa to land.
For an African traveler, none of that is automatic. The visa is often the hardest part of the trip, harder than the flight, harder than the budget. A booking flow that ignores it is solving the easy half of the problem and leaving the hard half to the user.
Payments Are a Whole Product
In a lot of the world, you assume the card just works. Across African markets you cannot assume that. Cards get declined for being foreign. Currencies move. Local payment methods matter more than the global ones the big platforms default to.
If you build payments as an afterthought, you build a product that demos beautifully in a boardroom and fails the moment a real user in Lagos tries to pay. I learned that the expensive way.
Trust Looks Different Everywhere
Who a user trusts, how they want to be reassured, what makes a service feel legitimate, all of it varies. The polished minimalism that signals quality in one market can read as thin and untrustworthy in another. You cannot copy a Silicon Valley playbook and expect it to translate.
Why This Matters Beyond Travel
This is the thing I carry into every product now. The default assumptions in most software are not neutral. They encode a specific user, usually a Western one, and everyone outside that profile pays a tax of friction.
Building for a global audience is not about translating your interface. It's about questioning the assumptions underneath it.
WeJapa is live, it works, and it taught me more about building real products than any project before it. The lesson was simple and uncomfortable. The world your software assumes is smaller than the world it claims to serve.