1.59M people just got their civil service exam scores. One app answers just one question: which position can you apply for?

KadroBul is a Turkish indie app launched in Oct 20. After Turkey's civil service exam (KPSS) scores came out, it climbed to #3 in the Business category's free chart on the Turkish App Store. The Android version got about 12k installs in a week. Turkey's job-announcement apps are already crowded. This one didn't compete on announcements; it took the step after them. Users enter their details once, and it tells them position by position whether they qualify. To see every result, you pay 69.99 lira a month. Below: which timing window it caught, where the money is collected, who in Turkey has already copied it, and whether the approach works in another country.

Oct 30, 6:15 AM

On Oct 30 06:15, 2026, Turkey's testing center ÖSYM published the KPSS associate-degree (Ön Lisans) results. Registration for this round was 1.59M people. For the bachelor's (Lisans) round, announced three weeks earlier, 1.59M people actually sat the exam (per ÖSYM). The next milestone is already set: Dec 17 to 24, when candidates fill in KPSS-2026/2 centralized placement preferences.

Millions of people get their scores, and the first thing they want to know: with this score, this major, this age, which jobs can I apply for?

That same day, KadroBul posted on its TikTok and YouTube: "KPSS sonuçları açıklandı! Şimdi hangi ilana başvuracaksın?" (Results are out! Which posting will you apply to?). Also that day, a one-star review appeared on the App Store: "The system works fine, you enter your info and it immediately asks for money to show you 'what fits you', just like a subscription."

The next day, on Oct 31, it reached #3 in the Business free chart in the Turkey App Store, and that same day it entered the overall free chart at #35 (App Store chart, 10-31).

What it is

The first line of the store page says it all: "KadroBul reads public sector job postings for you and tells you which positions you can apply for."

Users enter their info once: education, major, KPSS score, age, driver's license, certificates. The app checks the requirements of every position in every posting against you, and results fall into three categories:

• Match: you meet every requirement;
• Check needed: one requirement needs you to confirm against the original posting, and it tells you which one;
• No match: it doesn't appear in your list at all.

Each requirement sits next to the original sentence from the posting. Majors are matched against ÖSYM's KPSS major code table, and older renamed majors are recognized too. Postings come from six official sources (kamuilan.sbb.gov.tr, Kariyer Kapısı, the Official Gazette Resmî Gazete, ilan.gov.tr, the employment agency İŞKUR, and local governments), updated daily; corrections, postponements, and cancellations are attached to the relevant posting. The apply button links back to the agency's or Kariyer Kapısı's official page; the app does not submit applications for you.

The hard part is on the data side: the requirements for these postings are mostly written in PDFs, with major codes, the P3/P93/P94 score types, age limits, and military service requirements all mixed together. A developer portfolio page online describes a project of the same name that used Gemini to read postings into drafts, then checked them by hand, on a Flutter + Supabase stack. Whether that developer is behind this app is unverified.

The developer, Muhammet Oğuzhan Oral, has only this one app on the account. A post on the Apple Developer Forums says 1.0.0 was submitted on Oct 9 and was stuck in review for about ten days. Two weeks after launch it shipped 4 versions, and on Nov 2 the 1.0.4 added "which profile items are still missing, how many postings each one affects, tap to fill it in."

Where the money comes in

All postings are free to view. In the free version, "positions that fit you" shows only one; the rest require KadroBul Plus: ₺69.99 per month (Turkey App Store, 11-06), under $2 at today's exchange rate. Plus unlocks three things: all matching postings and positions, push alerts when a new posting fits your profile, and reminders for the day applications open and close.

Money is collected at the moment users most want the answer, so the reviews split in two:

"plusını hemen aldım teşekkür ediyorum" (I bought Plus right away, thank you). App Store, five stars, 11-02

"Abonelik aktif oldu detaylar filtreleme çok iyi" (Subscription is active, the details and filtering are very good). Google Play, 10-30

"Plus al canikom" (Go buy Plus, buddy). App Store, one star, and that line is the title, 11-04

There are few revenue signals, but one: on Nov 5 it hit #28 in the Turkey App Store Business Top Grossing chart. The bar for Top Grossing in this category isn't high, so it only shows people are paying, not how much.

Where users come from

Timing comes first. The surge days line up with the score release dates: iOS ratings were 3 on Oct 28, 44 on Nov 6, and in the last three days they added 10, 15, and 11 per day (App Store, 11-04 to 11-06). Same week, the veteran Kamu Personeli Alımı, 9 years old with 14.5k ratings, added only 10, and Memur 365 added 8.

Android is the bulk, and it jumped all at once. Google Play installs were 21 on Oct 31, then 337 on Nov 1, jumped to 10,228 in one day on Nov 3, and reached 11,960 by Nov 6. That's nearly 10k extra installs in a day that its own content accounts can't explain, and no big-account shares, press coverage, or forum threads turned up. Paid ads are the most likely cause (inference, unverified). The timing lines up with the Nov 2 1.0.4 release.

Its own short-video accounts are small, but the material is worth watching. TikTok @kadrobul has 8 followers, and each video gets a few dozen views; YouTube @kadrobul has 109 subscribers, and most of its twenty-some Shorts sit at 1,000 views, with the top one at 18k (YouTube, 11-06). Instagram and Facebook post the same batch. The material is all skits, each hitting one emotion:

• "How I got placed with a 50 on the KPSS, 85 friend is still waiting" (how I got a placement with a 50, a friend who scored 85 is still waiting). This is the most-viewed one.
• "My friend became a court clerk but didn't tell me".
• "Atandığım ilana sadece 3 kişi başvurdu" (only 3 people applied for the job I got hired for);
• "Did you check Kariyer Kapısı today? Don't check it, let KadroBul check it".

It keeps hammering three points: there are jobs even for low scores, postings you missed were taken by others, and niche positions have no competition. Self-posted, this content does only so-so, so it's better suited to paid ad spend (inference).

Search terms in the name. "Memur Alım İlanları" (civil service job postings) is one of the most-searched phrases during score season, and it's written straight into the app name. Before Oct 28 had any real traction, it was already #12 in the free Business chart.

Who it's competing with

The postings-app category was already crowded; in the Turkey App Store alone, dozens of apps have memur, kamu ilan, or kadro in their names. But before October, almost none did "judge position by position whether you can apply."

There's also a kadrobul.com that says "coming soon", with a subscription called Pro and a contact email belonging to someone else; the relationship is unverified. In other words, two weeks after launch, people in Turkey were already copying its name and selling points.

Why this one

Half of it is the selling point: among dozens of "we check postings for you" apps, only this one says "tells you which position you can apply for," a line that works as an ad ("don't check it, let KadroBul check it") and also as a paywall. The other half is timing: it launched between two score releases, ahead of December's preference filing, plus one round of (inferred) paid acquisition.

The selling point is easy to copy. The data is hard: six sources, thousands of positions, a PDF for each, read and structured every day with no mistakes allowed, because one error means a user misses an application.

If it were you

One judgment: following it in Turkey is already late, and what's worth money is the method itself. Take an exam or recruitment process that's publicly documented but messy enough that ordinary people can't parse it, use an LLM to turn the postings into structured requirements, and move from "aggregating postings" to "telling you whether you qualify," with payment at the point where you get the answer. Running this in another country is an opportunity worth testing, but it's a bet on willingness to pay and on data accuracy.

Who it suits: indie developers or small teams of two or three who can build their own data pipeline (scraping PDFs, having a model read them, spot-checking by hand), ideally ones who understand the target country's exam rules or know people who've sat them.

Who it doesn't suit: people who only want a shell and won't check data every day, and people who want to live off a single market long-term, because this demand follows the exam calendar and the seasonality is steep.

How to do it:

• Picking a market: look for three things. One, millions of people take a standardized exam every year. Two, job postings are scattered across several official channels. Three, requirements are written in PDFs with no official screening tool. Candidates to look at first include Indonesia's civil service recruitment (CPNS), India's state public service commissions and SSC, and civil service exams in Vietnam and the Philippines (inference, none of their existing competitors verified).
• Product: the first version covers one exam and one type of posting, for example only central placement; get it accurate first, then go broad. Attach the original text to every judgment; "check needed" is better than a wrong judgment.
• Payment: postings stay free, with only one matching result shown free; charge monthly, priced to match a local cup of coffee; put push alerts and deadline reminders behind the paywall so users stick around.

How to get users: name the app using the phrase locals actually search for postings with; use these three emotions for the short-video material (jobs even for low scores, others applied while you didn't see it, niche jobs have no competition), post the same batch yourself and also run it as paid ads; have material and ad spend ready one week before score release.

When to launch: at least two weeks before the target country's next score release or application window. Apple review can stall for about ten days, and this app got stuck too.

What would show you're wrong: a month after the score season ends, subscription renewals drop sharply and new installs fall back to single digits, meaning it was a seasonal one-off purchase. Or, in a test in the target country, users don't trust the "check needed" results and go read the PDFs themselves, meaning the judgment step doesn't sell.