A few months in the past, the founders behind YC-backed social app Candle have been in “pivot hell,” biking by way of greater than a dozen concepts after becoming a member of Y Combinator’s Fall 2024 batch, whereas the clock on their seed cash ticked down.
Alex Ruber, beforehand an engineer at Apple, and Parth Chopra, previously an engineer at Asana and Twitter, had constructed a number of initiatives collectively, together with Encore, a conversational AI procuring software that bought them into YC and with which they raised $2 million.
Nevertheless, whereas the tech labored, the unit economics didn’t, in response to Ruber.
“The secondhand shopping space is a tough market to begin with,” Ruber advised 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 adopted have been months of fast experiments between final December and April, with pivots round concepts in areas like vogue and sports activities, none of which caught. “We tried more than 10 different ideas in the span of four or five months,” Ruber stated.
The stress started to pressure their very own relationships with buddies and companions, a well-known story for a lot of early-stage founders. Satirically, that pressure sparked the concept that would lastly click on.
The primary model was easy: a swipeable deck of questions designed to spark conversations with their companions. Then an intern, now advertising and marketing lead on the startup, shared a TikTok in regards to the app that went viral, unexpectedly gaining traction in Europe.
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Downloads surged, suggestions poured in, and the crew leaned into the momentum. That early prototype has since developed into Candle, a light-weight, gamified app that helps {couples} and shut buddies keep linked.
Six months after launch, Candle has grown to 300,000 customers, together with 150,000 {couples}. The corporate says greater than 250,000 are energetic every month, with a DAU/MAU ratio of round 50%, a powerful sign of engagement for a shopper social app and an early signal of day by day behavior potential. Candle has additionally ranked in Apple’s App Retailer high 25 a number of occasions.
Candle’s wedge is sustaining current relationships with small, day by day prompts and video games somewhat than serving to folks discover new ones. Customers reply fast questions, evaluate outcomes, share images, and hold a “streak” that reveals how persistently they’ve checked in. The mechanics are textbook cellular engagement aimed toward Gen Z and younger millennials.
In one other atypical transfer for a shopper social app — however yet another frequent amongst newer AI-native merchandise — monetization has come early. Candle’s month-to-month income not too long ago crossed $150,000, implying an annual run price above $1 million.
The app runs on a freemium mannequin: The free tier presents day by day prompts, photograph updates, and core video games, whereas premium unlocks further content material and options.
Whereas development stays a precedence for the startup, monetizing early is a powerful sign of product-market match. “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 stated.
The months-old platform is likely one of the few apps within the area, alongside Paired and Couple Pleasure, designed to make relationships extra enjoyable. These apps are tapping right into a cultural undertow the place post-pandemic work habits, solo meals, and countless social feeds have hollowed out day-to-day connections and left folks within the U.S. lonelier than ever.
For Candle, the guess is that the subsequent wave of social at scale might be much less about broadcasting to strangers and extra about making it simpler to point out up day by day for a number of shut folks. That perception, mixed with its founder and creator-led distribution engine throughout TikTok and Instagram, is how the crew hopes to keep away from the destiny of many shopper social apps that surge shortly solely to stall months later.
Nonetheless, the massive questions stay: sturdiness and depth. Can a day by day photo-and-game app maintain 12-, 24-, or 36-month retention curves? Can Candle develop from light-weight prompts right into a broader suite of “connection types” with out bloating the expertise? Ruber and CTO Chopra say that’s the roadmap: including extra methods to earn “sparks,” the app’s level system, for a wider vary of interactions, and introducing richer options that promote consistency.
The seed cash raised for the crew’s earlier procuring app will now give Candle the sources to carry on extra engineers, pace up experimentation, and scale sooner. Current backers, together with Goodwater Capital, Pioneer Fund, Development Fund, and Y Combinator, are totally behind the brand new route, Ruber stated.
