Our story

Hi, fellow parents. My name is Iraklis, and I'm the founder of Oli. My wife and I are parents to an amazing, funny, curious 3-year-old.

We're an expat family living abroad — I'm Greek, my wife is Lebanese. I speak Greek to our son, she speaks Arabic — that's the idea, anyway. In practice, when you're running late for nursery and need him to put his shoes on right now, you slip into whatever works. Guilty as charged. English dominates from nursery and peers, and while he understands both Greek and Arabic — can count, knows his animals and colors — he doesn't speak them spontaneously. He replies in English.

We tried books, YouTube, cartoons. For Greek and Arabic, nothing really landed. Maybe because the content is harder to find, maybe because English was already dominant and everything around him reinforced it. Probably a bit of both.

Over the years I've built a handful of online products, so the natural reaction was — could I make him stories he'd actually want to listen to, in Greek? I started with short ones shaped around whatever he was obsessed with that week — diggers, animals, the moon — so they felt like they were made just for him. The tools to make this have gotten a lot better recently — narration that sounds warm and natural, sound effects, music — and the better they get, the more natural the stories feel. That said, the tools are just tools. I'm building this for my own son, so safety and quality aren't a feature — they're the whole point.

I played them at home and on car rides, and he kept asking for more — the same ones, again and again. That was the part that got me: he actually wanted to listen.

I made stories in other languages for friends' and family's children. Same thing — they asked for more.

When I shared it online, it resonated with multilingual and expat families everywhere. “My child understands but won't speak” turned out to be nearly universal.

I started this to get my son speaking more Greek. But the more families used it, the more I saw it isn't only about the language. For some families, hearing their language at home is the whole point. For others, it's simply a story their child loves, made just for them. Both are reason enough — and Oli is for both. That's what I'm building: stories your child actually wants to hear, again and again, in your family's language. If your family is anything like mine, I'd love for you to be part of it.

Iraklis