There's a thing that happens to Arabic-speaking kids who want to make content. At some point — usually around sixteen, seventeen — they make a decision, consciously or not: do I make content for my actual world, or do I make content for the world that has already made it?
Most choose the second option. Because the tools, the courses, the role models, the successful creators they've studied — they're all in English. Or French. Or Modern Standard Arabic that sounds like a government announcement and shares nothing with how they actually talk.
The Darija creator who wants to learn storytelling has two choices: badly translate English frameworks onto a reality they don't fit, or figure it out alone.
I figured it out alone. For six years. It was slow and unnecessary and the reason I built The Story System.
Let me be specific about what I mean by "doesn't fit."
When an American content creator talks about building a personal brand, they're operating inside assumptions that don't exist in Morocco. They assume you have a stable internet connection that can handle uploads. They assume your parents understand what you're doing. They assume your audience respects the concept of someone your age having expertise worth paying for.
None of these are true in Casablanca, or Fès, or Marrakech, or Tangier.
The Moroccan creator is fighting on five fronts simultaneously: the algorithm, the audience skepticism, the family skepticism, the infrastructure, and their own imposter syndrome about whether they have the right to say anything at all.
An English-language storytelling course addresses none of that. Not because it's bad, but because it was built for a different problem.
The language question runs deeper than logistics.
Darija is a language that most of us have never seen treated as serious. It's the language of the street, of the kitchen, of the phone call with your grandmother. It's not taught in schools. It's not in books. For a long time, it wasn't even on the internet in a significant way.
There's a kind of shame that attaches to it. Not always conscious. But it's there. The implicit message from every formal context is: Darija is fine for casual use, but when something matters — education, business, art — you should speak in something more legitimate.
The result is a generation of Moroccan young people who are fluent in multiple languages and feel at home in none of them. Who can discuss serious ideas in French but feel like they're wearing a costume. Who think in Darija but reach for MSA or English when they want to say something that counts.
When I decided to build The Story System in Darija, some people asked me why I'd limit myself. Wouldn't more people watch if I used English?
Yes. Technically. But those people already have ten thousand options. The person who needs to hear that their stories are worth telling, in the language they think in, in the register they actually use — that person has almost no one.
I want to be honest about something: I wasn't strategic about this choice. I didn't sit down and identify an underserved market segment. I made it in Darija because that's how I think, and I was tired of not thinking in the language I think in.
The strategic argument came later, and it's real. The MENA creator economy is growing. The Arabic-speaking young audience is enormous and under-served. There is a real opportunity here for someone who builds trust early.
But that's not why I did it. I did it because I was twenty years old in Shenzhen, building a storytelling framework from scratch, and the voice in my head — the voice that was actually making sense of what I was learning — was speaking Darija.
I built The Story System in the language of my thinking. Everything else is downstream of that.
If you're a young Arab creator reading this: your language is not a limitation. It's the specific thing that makes your perspective necessary. The person who can explain storytelling in Darija, with Moroccan examples, from a Moroccan life — that person doesn't exist yet at the scale it should.
It could be you.
That's the whole letter.