The idea came after Mostafa spent 6 years self-studying Japanese by watching YouTube. He went deep into language learning communities and even had the most liked post in a 2 year period on r/LearnJapanese, the biggest language learning subreddit. He found that there's no app that is both fun and educational. Apps like Duolingo are fun, but there is mass frustration with them being ineffective for actual learning. The best method to language learning is immersion, or listening to native content, but that gets really boring if you don't understand any of it.

Initially, he spent a year building a language learning app that let you immerse by talking to your favorite characters in other languages, like SpongeBob, Spider-Man, etc., but found that people didn’t inherently enjoy talking to AI on a day to day basis.

So how to make immersion fun? Combine it with what Gen-Z DOES want to do on a daily basis: doomscrolling. And that’s how doomersion was born!