These YC founders pivoted 5 times before building a social app that nabbed 300K users and over $1M ARR in 6 months | TechCrunch

A couple of months ago, the founders behind YC-backed social app Candle were in “pivot hell,” cycling through more than a dozen ideas after joining Y Combinator’s Fall 2024 batch, while the clock on their seed money ticked down.

Alex Ruber, previously an engineer at Apple, and Parth Chopra, formerly an engineer at Asana and Twitter, had built multiple projects together, including Encore, a conversational AI shopping tool that got them into YC and with which they raised $2 million.

However, while the tech worked, the unit economics didn’t, according to Ruber.

“The secondhand shopping space is a tough market to begin with,” Ruber told TechCrunch in an interview. “To win, you either become like Google Shopping or build a really strong marketplace like Whatnot or eBay. That wasn’t a target we wanted to pursue.”

What followed were months of rapid experiments between last December and April, with pivots around ideas in areas like fashion and sports, none of which stuck. “We tried more than 10 different ideas in the span of four or five months,” Ruber said.

The pressure began to strain their own relationships with friends and partners, a familiar story for many early-stage founders. Ironically, that tension sparked the idea that would finally click.

The first version was simple: a swipeable deck of questions designed to spark conversations with their partners. Then an intern, now marketing lead at the startup, shared a TikTok about the app that went viral, unexpectedly gaining traction in Europe.

Downloads surged, feedback poured in, and the team leaned into the momentum. That early prototype has since evolved into Candle, a lightweight, gamified app that helps couples and close friends stay connected.

Six months after launch, Candle has grown to 300,000 users, including 150,000 couples. The company says more than 250,000 are active each month, with a DAU/MAU ratio of around 50%, a strong signal of engagement for a consumer social app and an early sign of daily habit potential. Candle has also ranked in Apple’s App Store top 25 multiple times.

Candle’s wedge is sustaining existing relationships with small, daily prompts and games rather than helping people find new ones. Users answer quick questions, compare results, share photos, and keep a “streak” that shows how consistently they’ve checked in. The mechanics are textbook mobile engagement aimed at Gen Z and young millennials.

In another atypical move for a consumer social app—but one more common among newer AI-native products—monetization has come early. Candle’s monthly revenue recently crossed $150,000, implying an annual run rate above $1 million.

The app runs on a freemium model: the free tier offers daily prompts, photo updates, and core games, while premium unlocks extra content and features.

While growth remains a priority for the startup, monetizing early is a strong signal of product-market fit. “At the end of the day, this app helps people strengthen their connections. Most of it is free, but when users pay for extra content and features, it shows real product-market fit,” the CEO said.

The months-old platform is one of the few apps in the space, alongside Paired and Couple Joy, designed to make relationships more fun. These apps are tapping into a cultural undertow where post-pandemic work habits, solo meals, and endless social feeds have hollowed out day-to-day connections and left people in the U.S. lonelier than ever.

For Candle, the bet is that the next wave of social at scale will be less about broadcasting to strangers and more about making it easier to show up daily for a few close people. That insight, combined with its founder and creator-led distribution engine across TikTok and Instagram, is how the team hopes to avoid the fate of many consumer social apps that surge quickly only to stall months later.

Still, the big questions remain: durability and depth. Can a daily photo-and-game app sustain 12-, 24-, or 36-month retention curves? Can Candle expand from lightweight prompts into a broader suite of “connection types” without bloating the experience? Ruber and CTO Chopra say that’s the roadmap: adding more ways to earn “sparks,” the app’s point system, for a wider range of interactions, and introducing richer features that promote consistency.

The seed money raised for the team’s earlier shopping app will now give Candle the resources to bring on more engineers, speed up experimentation, and scale faster. Existing backers, including Goodwater Capital, Pioneer Fund, Progression Fund, and Y Combinator, are fully behind the new direction, Ruber said.