29 creators' chocolate wet cakes on one page: HemDem, a Turkish recipe app with a sharp idea, no traction yet

HemDem pulls Turkish home-cooking videos from Instagram and TikTok into recipes with exact quantities and steps. For each dish, it puts the methods from a dozen or twenty creators side by side, in Turkish, German, and English. It launched in 2026 Sep 20, and by Nov 6 it hit #37 on the Turkish App Store Food & Drink Top Grossing chart. But that chart is so easy to crack that a few subscriptions can get you on it, so the rank doesn't prove much. What's worth studying is how it works, not how well it's doing.

One page, 29 chocolate cakes

On HemDem's website, the "Islak Kek" (Turkish chocolate wet cake) page reads "29 versions, 29 creators": Sevda Çelik's version has 13 ingredients and 8 steps, Gülcan Tekin's has 8 ingredients and 5 steps, Sema Cookin's "for two" version has 12 steps, and another is a marble cake "nobody can tell was made with a premix." Each version carries the original creator's video. Click into a creator's page and the first line reads "X shares Turkish recipes on Instagram; here are the videos, ingredients and every step," with a link back to their Instagram (apphemdem.com, 11-06).

The same page has 23 versions of cheese poğaça, 21 of plain poğaça and 20 of rice pudding. The site is sorted into breakfast, soups (30 dishes), meze and salads (47), meat and fish (81), vegetarian (45), pastries (72) and desserts. The homepage says "100+ creators, thousands of recipes," and the most-featured creator alone has 45 dishes included.

Turkish home cooking is a cuisine where every household does it differently. For someone looking for "my mom's version," seeing 29 ways to make one dish is genuinely useful.

What it is

It's a recipe app. Each dish shows the creator's short video on the left, and on the right clearly written measurements (grams, spoons, grouped as "for the marinade") and steps. Cook mode shows one step per screen, keeps the screen awake, reads steps aloud, and offers a built-in timer wherever a step has a time. Ingredients go into a shopping list in one tap, and the same item across several dishes is merged automatically. You can save recipes, build your own recipe books (the store description gives examples like "Ramadan," "Sunday breakfast," "Must try"), and plan a week of meals. There's also an AI kitchen assistant that knows which dish you're viewing and can answer things like "Can I swap butter for oil?" or "What is salça?"

The monetization design is worth noting: all recipes are free forever, and Pro only sells convenience: reading steps aloud, unlimited AI assistant use, unlimited recipe books, with weekly, monthly and annual subscriptions and a lifetime one-time purchase (App Store description, 11-06). The content belongs to others, so it doesn't charge for the content.

The maker is Musa Tasci, an indie developer in Germany. His App Store listings currently show 6 apps: the halal restaurant map Halal Maps (2022 years old, 113 ratings, his biggest), AnyHome for AI interior design, a resume builder, a reading tracker, a gold jewelry app, and this one, HemDem (App Store Germany, 11-06). Nearly all are utilities plus subscriptions. HemDem's German-store name is "HemDem – Türkische Rezepte," and its Instagram download links point to the German store. He's targeting Turkish-origin people in Germany and Germans who want to cook Turkish food.

What does rank #37 actually mean?

Almost nothing.

• HemDem has charted on Turkey's Food & Drink Top Grossing chart on only 11-06. Its only earlier chart appearance was a similar free chart in Malta, 10-28 to 10-30, where it ranked #122 → #192. It has never charted on any country's overall chart.
• On that same day, on that same chart, #25 and #26 were new apps launched 11-03 and 11-04 earlier with zero ratings; #10 had only 1 ratings. Among the top 60, 28 apps had fewer than 20 ratings.
• Over the 10 days from 10-28 to 11-06, the top 50 on this chart turned over 140 different apps.
• Inference: Turkey's pricing is low and few people pay in this category, so one lifetime purchase or a couple of subscriptions is enough to hold a top-40 spot for a day.

Other numbers: iOS ratings are 6 in Turkey, 2 in Germany and 0 in the US (App Store, 11-06); Google Play 50+ downloads; TikTok 94 followers; Instagram 667 followers, following 935 accounts. It hasn't taken off yet.

Where users come from

What's visible so far is free and slow:

1. Posting daily on its own TikTok. @hemdem.app has put out 169 videos, three or four a day, cutting the recipes it catalogs into short clips. The caption is always "More recipes by 130+ creators in the HemDem app" plus #turkishfood. From Nov 3 to 6, that's 10 videos, each getting between 270 and 780 views, with likes in single digits up to 26 (TikTok, 11-06). That's baseline traffic for a new account. None of them took off.
2. Instagram follow-for-follow. It follows more accounts than follow it, which looks like follow-for-follow growth. 11-06 has one video featuring creator Kübra Demirel, possibly a collab post.
3. Website SEO. Every dish, category and creator has an English landing page titled "Turkish Recipes with Video" and "Islak Kek: 29 Recipes with Video." I couldn't confirm whether they rank.
4. Creator reshares: it uses content from 100+ creators, but I found no evidence that any of them promoted it. I also found no evidence of paid ads.

Who it's competing with

In the Turkish food space, I found no second product combining "we organize the creators' videos for you + multiple versions of the same dish + three languages." But Turkey has established players like Nefis and Yemek.com with tens of thousands of ratings, Germany has Chefkoch, and it's completely unknown how many people in the middle segment, Turkish-origin people living in Germany, would pay for a recipe app.

There's also an unavoidable question: whether these 100+ creators have given permission can't be determined. Creator pages link back and credit the author, but whether the videos were included with consent can't be verified from the outside. If a creator complains, what gets taken down could be a single dish or the entire app.

If it were you

One-line verdict: worth learning from, not worth chasing. Its approach is more interesting than its results, and the approach itself hasn't yet been shown to bring in users or money.

Who it suits: people already making recipes, food content, or with an existing network of creators; or members of a migrant community themselves (Turkish-origin people in Germany, Latin American or Indian Americans in the US, overseas Chinese) who know which creators their community turns to for "home-cooking flavor."

Who it doesn't suit: anyone hoping to make quick money. Recipes are a category where big players and established brands are everywhere and willingness to pay is very low. Also avoid it if you aren't willing to negotiate creator permissions one by one, since the content isn't yours and the risk falls on you.

How to do it: don't build "another Turkish recipe app." Three things are worth borrowing. First, the "N versions of the same dish side by side" format, suited to home dishes that aren't standardized. Second, "all content free, charge only for cooking convenience" (reading steps, the AI assistant, timers, merged shopping lists), which reduces content-source disputes and makes the app easier to download. Third, the "migrant community + home cuisine + native-language creators" angle, which sidesteps the big players like Chefkoch and NYT Cooking. Get written permission from creators first, ideally having them link their own accounts and sharing revenue with them, which turns copyright risk into creator reshares.

How to get users: HemDem's current route (cutting its own videos for TikTok, follow-for-follow, SEO landing pages) has run for six weeks, and the account is still stuck at a few hundred views. What's more likely to work is having the featured creators share "my recipes are here": each creator brings an audience that already trusts them (inference).

Timing: no obvious window. The period before Ramadan (starting early February 2027) is when Turkish recipe searches peak each year, so if you want to test it, launch before then.

What would mean I got it wrong: HemDem hitting several hundred ratings around Ramadan and staying on the Turkey or Germany charts for weeks would show this model really converts to payments and is worth a second look. Conversely, if a creator publicly complains or it pulls a batch of content, that would mean "aggregating other people's videos" doesn't work.

Data as of 2026-11-06. HemDem's revenue isn't public; chart rank only shows it has had some paying users.