Trends Podcast

The app that reads fortunes in a million coffee cups a day messaged a reporter one morning to ask whether one of its last readings came out wrong.

Faladdin is the biggest fortune-telling app in Turkey and the man behind it is Sertaç Taşdelen.

He learned to read coffee cups from his mother, Binnaz, who ran a pharmacy in Ankara and read the grounds in her customers' cups between prescriptions. She wrote a book about it. In twenty ten he built her a blog so she'd have something to do in retirement.

The blog became an app with her name on it and two million people downloaded it.

By then he'd worked as a consultant for Ernst and Young in Dubai and modelled for Armani. In twenty seventeen he launched a second app, Faladdin, so the readings could grow without his mother reading each cup. His line for it: we wanted something like a self-driving Uber. We'd get rid of the driver and keep the vehicle.

The driver was the fortune teller.

He fed his readings into OpenAI's platform to see if the model could write one alone. The first results came back like this: The seagull flies. The cat purrs. There is a notebook.

So he hired thirty writers, among them a dramatist, a psychologist and an ad director. They wrote six thousand fortunes by hand and the system stitches a reading for each cup out of that library.

A buyer photographs the grounds in their cup and then chooses: watch an ad and get the reading now or wait fifteen minutes.

The reading addresses the buyer by name. Welcome to the colorful world of Faladdin, Mr Kaya. You will be as productive as a bee during this period.

By twenty twenty the app was serving a million readings a day, seven hundred thousand of them in Turkish, two hundred thousand in Arabic and a hundred thousand in English.

It sat first in the Turkish App Store's lifestyle chart, ahead of Tinder, on five million dollars a year, sixty percent of it from ads.

A twenty-four-year-old pharmacist named Burcu Aydoğdu told the reporter how she felt about a machine reading her cup. It kills the magic, of course, she said. But as long as it predicts what happens in my life, I don't think it matters. The company keeps no number on whether it does.

The nearest thing to a score in the category is a star rating. AstroSage, India's largest birth-chart app with eighty million downloads, put an AI astrologer beside its seven hundred thousand human ones. Users rate the AI four point six out of five and the humans four point three. The AI reading runs at about ninety percent margin against forty-five to fifty-five for a human on the phone.

The buyer rates the reading on how they felt when it ended, so a model that never met them can do the job.

On the sixteenth of July twenty twenty-five Turkish police detained Taşdelen, at forty-two, under a law from nineteen twenty-five that bans professional fortune-telling and a fraud article about exploiting religious belief. Prosecutors called his revenue crime proceeds and seized his bank accounts, his cars, his boats and each share he held in the company.

Faladdin kept running.

It has fifty million downloads and about five million people a month open it. It stays in the top three lifestyle apps in Turkey at five dollars ninety-nine a week or twenty-four ninety-nine a month.

In the United States the regulator went after the price instead of the reading. In June the FTC sued the company behind Nebula, the most-downloaded astrology app in the country. The complaint says Nebula promoted a five-dollar reading with a forty-five-dollar charge every thirty days in the fine print. A federal court froze the operation.

When I mapped this market for the Trends dot V C report, I found fifty-eight apps selling readings and the number I wanted most from each of them was a hit rate. I got star ratings and download counts. The report predicts that no top-grossing fortune-telling app publishes an accuracy metric in the next three years and that the category keeps growing while it doesn't.

The two companies in trouble sold the same reading Faladdin's buyers get and dressed it as something else.

One sold it as a five-dollar trial with a renewal buried under it. One ran it as a business the state could call fraud.

The version that survives says on the page what the reading is: a few dollars for a decision made at two in the morning. It charges per reading, so nothing renews and nothing hides.

If you build one, start with one cup and one language, on a web page with a card form and a photo upload. Apple wrote fortune telling into the list of apps it refuses on the ninth of June, so the store is a channel you earn later.

Read the fortune-telling law of the country you sell into before you pick the language.

Faladdin's Arabic readings, two hundred thousand a day, ran out of Istanbul under a Turkish statute.

The buyer pays to have a decision made for them and the product page should say so.

One app sells a million fortunes a day and grades itself on stars. Subscribe at trends dot V C and get next week's market report.