30 volunteer placements, rehearsed on your phone first: how a Turkish nursing exam applicant placement simulator hit the overall chart in two weeks

Atanalım is an app from a Turkish placement consulting company that serves only one group: nurses, midwives and health technicians who have taken the KPSS (civil service exam) and are waiting for the Ministry of Health to assign their posts. You upload your score report, fill in 30 preferences, and it ranks you against all same-major applicants registered in the app to estimate which hospital you'll likely get. The idea is nothing new in Turkey: several web versions already existed, and unions offered it for free. It reached the overall chart thanks to three things: launching in the weeks results came out, backing from a large healthcare-hiring info account driving traffic, and users pulling in classmates themselves. The method can be moved elsewhere, but don't go after the Turkish niche.

The night the scores came out

In 2026 Oct 30, ÖSYM published the KPSS associate-degree (ön lisans) results. Most nursing and health-technician applicants sit at this level. That same day, someone left a five-star review on Atanalım in the App Store titled "Thanks to Ahmet Esmer and his team". Ahmet Esmer is well known in the Turkish healthcare applicant community: 108k followers on X, a Telegram group of 23.8k members, and a bio that reads "Chair of the Volunteer Expert Committee".

Early the next morning, between 04:38 and 05:32 Beijing time, under an hour brought 12 five-star reviews to Google Play: "Thanks to the teachers who built this app", "God bless you". That uniformity suggests someone in the community called for it. The same day, the iOS version hit #1 overall free in Turkey (per AppInsider).

Someone also gave a one-star review that day:

"Deleted it right after downloading. I just wanted to use an app, why should I hand my diploma and KPSS score report over to you?" (App Store Turkey, 10-31)

These two reviews, one glowing and one hostile, pretty much tell the whole business story.

How much it grew

• App Store: listed 10-22. Climbed to #5 overall free in Turkey and #2 in Education on 11-03; 11-06 the store page shows 714 ratings, averaging 4.6. AppInsider estimates 10k+ daily downloads from 11-05.
• Google Play: listed 10-23. Installs were 11-01 (50,11-06 to 24,179). Peaked at #11-05 overall free 41, and #4 to #6 in Education free (Google Play charts, 11-01 to 11-06).
• People are paying. On Play's Education Top Grossing chart it went from #11-01 to #11-06 over the stretch, climbing from #57 to #13, so this is real money.

Combined, installs over the first two weeks are roughly in the 100k range (estimate). For a niche of a few hundred thousand exam candidates, that's very high penetration.

What it sells

It has four features: placement simulation, past placement score cutoffs, institution lookup (it even links to rental listings near the hospitals), and profession-based chat rooms for peers. Registration and past data are free, but seeing "where I'll land" costs money (atanalim.com pricing page, 11-06):

All three tiers are one-time payments with no auto-renewal, timed to cover one placement season. The last tier shows what the business is really about. The company is literally called Anadolu Tercih Danışmanlık (Anatolia Preference Consulting). The 99 TL and 499 TL tiers are the entry point; the real product they want to sell is one-on-one consulting (inferred).

Most of the complaints also target this:

"Everything costs money except the headline." (App Store, 10-30) "Don't waste 500 TL, past cutoffs are everywhere on Google. And you can't even delete your account." (App Store, 11-02) "I'd have bought it at 100 to 200 TL, but 500 TL is too expensive." (App Store, 11-02)

Some people are on the other side: "Two coffees' worth and you get all this, plus someone verifies the data. Great value." (App Store, 11-02)

Why now

The exam calendar is packing all the anxiety into a few weeks. KPSS undergraduate scores come out 10-07, associate-degree scores 10-30, and department rankings for undergraduates 11-04. The Ministry of Health has posted official notice of 26.7k contract medical and nursing positions, and 11-03 the Minister has also said they'll hire 38k non-doctor staff. Download curves line up with these dates: 10-31 hit #1,11-02 on iOS, then jumped again on 11-03 and 11-06. The biggest catch is that preference filing hasn't started yet (media 11-02 reported it, still waiting on ÖSYM to publish the guide), so the real peak should land in the late November to December filing window.

Healthcare hiring news accounts drive installs. The Instagram account @saglikcamiasibilgilendirme ("Health Community Information," 259k followers) has posted Health Ministry hiring news since 11-03, with captions signed "Source: Atanalım preference guide app." A 11-04 Reel said "over 40k healthcare candidates waiting for placement are already using Atanalım" (their own claim). Another account, @furkanaltuksb, posts program score analysis ending with "Data from the Atanalım app; download for detailed analysis." There's even a five-star Play review that consists of just "Sağlık Camiası Bilgilendirme WhatsApp," suggesting the WhatsApp channel is also driving installs. I don't know whether these accounts are in-house or paid. But during the 2025 web promotion, the Facebook "Tercih Hocam" promo video was clearly tagged #Reklam (advertisement).

Users recruit other users. The simulation only uses data from other candidates in the same program inside the app, so the more people there are, the more accurate the results. Reviews say it plainly: "The more users, the more trustworthy the data, so I recommend it to everyone I meet" and "Everyone should download it and fill in their info." The chat rooms also keep people around. One user wrote, "I couldn't find a group for my program anywhere, and here at last there is one."

It's not a newcomer. atanalim.com was registered 2025-09. In the 2025 Health Ministry hiring round, 15,247 people already used its web-based "KPSS Preference Simulation Bot" to pick their placements. The site also hosts a large set of province- and program-level score pages that anyone can view without logging in, and they've been pulling search traffic the whole time. The App is the previous season's data, content, and channels moved onto the phone and run again.

Who it's competing with

The specialist exams for doctors and dentists (TUS / DUS) have had preference simulation for years. The review line "Doctors have had this for years, now finally everyone taking KPSS gets it" refers to exactly this.

What it actually wins on

It's not the idea. "Simulate placements using participant data" is what half the products in the table above already do. The gap comes down to:

1. It's the only one with real installs in the store. Searching kpss / tercih / atama on Google Play, the other app doing healthcare preference simulation has only 73 installs. Candidates searching on their phones only find this one.
2. The people driving traffic are where candidates scroll every day. Hiring-news accounts write "Data source: Atanalım" into their posts, which is far more credible than a hard ad.
3. Verification does double duty. The biggest flaw of web bots is people entering fake scores. Requiring a diploma and transcript upload blocks fake accounts, and it becomes a selling point in itself: "Fake accounts get removed, so it's trustworthy" (App Store, 11-01). The cost: some people see the document requirement and delete the app right away.
4. Collect a small payment at peak anxiety. Registration is free, and you can fill in all 30 preferences for free too. The paywall only appears when you tap "see results."

If it were you

B: worth trying, but not in Turkish healthcare. The data, channels, and reputation in that niche already belong to Atanalım, which also has last season's web version behind it, and there are plenty of free web competitors. What's worth taking away is the playbook: for any exam with centralized placement, where rank depends on score and preference order, build a simulator fed by crowdsourced data, aimed at the few weeks between results and filing. The weaknesses are obvious too: it peaks for only a month or two a year, and the traffic comes from info accounts within the community, so if you have no presence there, it won't take off.

Who it suits: a team of 1 to 2, with at least one person from within a given exam community, or who can work with that community's info accounts and group admins; someone who understands the local placement rules and can get the ranking logic right.

Who it doesn't suit: pure coders with no contacts in the candidate community; anyone planning an annual subscription (downloads will fall off a cliff after filing season); anyone who can't stomach one-star reviews about "everything costs money" and undeletable accounts.

How to do it:

• Start by picking the niche. The conditions: centralized national placement, ranking by score plus preference order, tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of candidates, and only web bots online or nothing at all. Look at Turkish positions Atanalım doesn't cover yet; reviews already ask "Why no PDR (school psychological counselor)?" and "Why no vocational-high-school track?" You could also look abroad for comparable centralized civil-service, healthcare, or teacher placements. Mature markets like South Korea's college-entrance "mock application" tools already have big players, so skip those. You want small, concentrated niches.
• Build the product on the same structure: ID verification → enter preferences → free past data → paid simulation results. Add profession-based chat rooms, since they're what keeps people.
• Copy the three-tier pricing, all one-time: a few dollars for a few results, around ten dollars for a full filing season, with a higher tier for human review of preference lists.

How to acquire users: Skip paid ads. Find the accounts in that community that post hiring and score news, and ask them to write "Data source: your app" into their posts. A data partnership is best if you can get one. Give users a reason to bring classmates in the app: "Your program has 87 participants now; results are accurate above 300" (a suggested approach, not something Atanalım's page says). On results night, push for a coordinated round of reviews in groups to get the store rating up early.

When to launch: Be live at least two weeks before results for the exam you're targeting. Once results are out, you're waiting for the next season. The Turkish healthcare filing window is expected at the end of November into December. Use it as a benchmark: check whether Atanalım climbs again during its filing window, to tell whether this model peaks on results days or during filing week.

Signs you've misread it: ① A month after the Health Ministry filing window, Atanalım drops out of the top 100 on iOS Education and out of the top 100 on Play's Education Top Grossing, meaning the business is one season long, earning only in one or two months a year; ② the exam community you're targeting already has big portals or unions offering free simulations and pulling candidates into their own groups; ③ ID verification drags signup conversion so low that you never reach enough users for the simulation to be accurate, so users never recruit others and the loop never turns.

Sources

• Google Play page com.atanalim.app: installs from 11-01 to 11-06, Turkish chart rankings, and reviews from 10-31.
• App Store id6822465999: Turkey storefront chart, rating count, and reviews (10-22 to 11-06). Rankings and download estimates from the third-party chart site AppInsider.
• atanalim.com pricing page (premium, one-time, preference-review), 11-06.
• ÖSYM 2026-KPSS results publication dates; official gazette and Sabah and Hürriyet reports on Health Ministry hiring (2026-09 to November).
• Instagram posts from @saglikcamiasibilgilendirme and @furkanaltuksb (11-03 to 11-04); @ahmetesmer2121 on X (11-03, 11-04); the "Tercih Hocam" promo video on Facebook from 2025.
• Competitor sites: memurlar.net, saglik.ztakip.com, Sağlık-Sen, tiklaatan.com.tr, Kariyer.net.
• Exchange rate estimated at about 1 US dollars to 41.5 Turkish lira.