Laila didn’t begin as a startup idea on a whiteboard. It began as a quiet frustration that grew louder over time.
For most of my career, I’ve worked with video. I’ve built streaming platforms, produced content, worked with creators, and helped stories reach millions of screens. Video has always felt like the most powerful medium we have—emotional, immediate, universal. But the longer I stayed in the industry, the clearer something became: video had become incredibly accessible to watch, but still painfully inaccessible to create.
A small group of people decided what stories got made. Everyone else watched.
That model worked for entertainment. It didn’t work for imagination.
The gap became even more obvious when I started paying closer attention to kids. Children don’t lack creativity. They are full of it. They ask questions constantly, often questions without simple answers. Why does the moon follow us? Can animals have feelings? What happens if a robot gets lonely? These aren’t just curiosities—they’re attempts to understand the world, emotions, and themselves.
Yet the tools we give them mostly lead in one direction. Search, scroll, watch. Someone else’s story. Someone else’s explanation. Someone else’s imagination.
Even the best kids’ platforms are still libraries. Vast, colorful, well-intentioned libraries—but libraries nonetheless. They answer the question, “What’s available?” They rarely answer the question kids are actually asking: “What about my idea?”
That realization stayed with us.
We didn’t want to make another content platform. We wanted to build something fundamentally different. Something that didn’t start with a catalog, but with a child’s thought. Something that didn’t reward endless watching, but meaningful engagement. Something that treated imagination not as entertainment, but as a starting point.
That’s where Laila came from.
Laila is built around a simple shift: the story starts with the child. A question, a feeling, a small idea spoken out loud. From that moment, the experience unfolds around them. The story adapts to their age, their language, their curiosity. It doesn’t ask them to fit into pre-made content. It meets them where they are.
This is where AI entered the picture—not as a goal, but as an unlock. For years, what we imagined simply wasn’t possible. You couldn’t pre-produce stories for every question, every language, every age, every emotional nuance. AI changed that. It allowed stories to become dynamic instead of static, personal instead of generic, alive instead of fixed.
Suddenly, video wasn’t just something you streamed. It was something that responded.
That’s when we stopped thinking in terms of videos and started thinking in terms of story worlds. A story world isn’t just a clip you watch from beginning to end. It’s a space where ideas turn into narratives, where curiosity turns into exploration, where learning happens without feeling like instruction. In a story world, a child isn’t a passive viewer. They’re the spark.
Building for kids also forced us to slow down and be intentional. We didn’t want loud, frantic, addictive experiences. We didn’t want infinite loops. We wanted calm, focused storytelling that parents could trust and kids could return to. One good story, at the right moment, matters more than ten forgettable ones.
That philosophy shaped everything—from pacing to visuals to how stories end. Laila isn’t designed to keep kids hooked. It’s designed to make screen time feel complete. A beginning, a middle, an end. A moment that can naturally stop.
In many ways, Laila is the natural continuation of everything we’ve built before—but turned inside out. Streaming platforms changed how the world consumed media. We believe imagination platforms will change how people participate in it.
For kids, that participation starts with stories. Stories that reflect their thoughts. Stories that speak their language—sometimes literally, across cultures and countries. Stories that help them make sense of big emotions and big questions.
Laila today creates short story videos. But what we’re really building is a foundation. A new way of thinking about media where creativity doesn’t belong to a few, and imagination doesn’t need permission.
We didn’t build Laila to replace books, parents, or teachers. We built it to support curiosity at the exact moment it appears—before it fades, before it’s redirected, before it’s lost in a scroll.
If there’s one reason Laila exists, it’s this: imagination is too important to be passive. Stories should belong to the person who imagines them.
And this is only the beginning.
Sali Igbal Ferad – Founder
If Netflix is what you watch,
Laila is what you create.
Prompt → Video → Magic.
🎬 For kids. For parents. For play.
Try it for yourself, with free credits to create videos https://tellmelaila.com
#AIFuture #StorytimeReimaginedsalihaksu
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