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Effie Athanassiou

Effie Athanassiou

Founder & CEO of Cyprusays, the first mobile app for learning Cypriot Greek; Australian-born Greek-Cypriot and former advertising creative.

Sep 15, 2026

AndreasHOST
5:47
When you were creating this app, did you have any particular learners in mind? I know there's that very personal story of UFE, but did it begin with just people who had somewhat of a foundation and then it just kind of ballooned into something that anyone with absolutely no background knowledge of Greek could and should pick this up and be able to learn Cypriot.
6:14
Like you said, the original idea was I wanted something to learn and that was ongoing for my family and people that had been in Australia or the UK or, you know, in other countries in the US.
6:25
That was sort of my top ones that I was thinking that there's people like that.
6:29
There has to be other people like me who want to learn and use this app.
6:33
So is it worth making? And then after that, Once we started chatting about, you know, is this worth pursuing? How big is that amount of people? We started rolling into the foreign workers and tourists.
6:45
And I mean, people go, they learn Spanish when they go to a Spain trip.
6:49
You know, people sort of learn that sort of stuff just for a holiday.

11 MINS LATER

AndreasHOST
18:13
Like what goes into designing that? So what were some of the challenges in doing that? Or maybe there's other features that you can tell us that were very difficult to build from a technical perspective.

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