YC founders, this axis 5 times before building a social application that connected 300 thousand users and more than a million dollars in 6 months

Two months ago, the founders behind the social application supported by YC candle They were in “Pivot Hell”, riding bicycles across more than ten ideas after joining the Y Combinator Fall 2024 batch, while the watch fell on their seed money.

Alex RobertPreviously, engineer in Apple, and Barth ChopraHe was a former engineer in ASana and Twitter, who has built many projects together, including Encore, a conversation shopping tool that paid them to YC and that raised two million dollars.

However, while technology succeeded, unit’s economies were not, according to Robe.

“The shopping space used is a difficult market to start,” Robert told Techcrunch in an interview. “To win, either you become like Google Shopping or building a truly strong market like Whatnot or Ebay. This was not a goal that we wanted to follow.”

What followed is the most famous of the quick experiences between last December and April, with axes on ideas in areas such as fashion and sports, nothing is stuck. “We have tried more than 10 different ideas in a period of four or five months,” said Robert.

The pressure began to overcome their own relationships with friends and partners, which is an familiar story of many of the founders of the early stage. Ironically, this tension sparked the idea that will ultimately click.

The first version was simple: a set of beating questions designed to raise conversations with its partners. Then the trainee, who is now in marketing, participated in the startup, TIKTOK about the application that got a wound in Europe unexpectedly.

The downloads rose, the comments flow, and the team bowed to the momentum. This early initial model has evolved since then candleA lightweight application, helps couples and close friends to stay in contact.

After six months of launch, Candle grew to 300,000 users, including 150,000 pairs. The company says that more than 250,000 activists every month, with the Dau/MAU ratio of about 50 %, is a strong signal to participate in the social application of the consumer and an early signal for daily habit capabilities. Candle has also occupied a classification in Apple App Store Top 25 several times.

Candle’s wedge maintains relationships with small daily claims and games instead of helping people find new relationships. Users answer quick questions, compare results, share photos, and keep a “chain” showing how continued access. Mechanics is the sharing of mobile devices in textbooks targeting the young Gen Z and Millennials.

In another non-stereotypical step for the social application of the consumer-but it is more common among the latest products of artificial intelligence-its liquefaction has become early. Candle’s monthly revenue recently exceeded $ 150,000, which implicitly means an annual operating rate exceeding one million dollars.

The application works in the free feature: The Free Tier provides daily claims, photo updates and basic games, while Premium opens additional content and features.

While growth still represents a priority to start operating, the income early is a strong signal to suit the product market. “At the end of the day, this application helps people enhance their connections. Most of it is free, but when users pay for additional content and features, it shows a suitability for the real market for the product,” the CEO said.

The most famous platform is one of the few applications in space, along with Associated Zan Farah, designed to make relationships more enjoyable. These applications benefit from a cultural pledge, as work habits returned after birth, individual meals, and endless social feed to daily contacts and He left people in the United States alone from ever.

For the candle, the bet is that the next wave of social on a large scale will be less than broadcasting to strangers and more about facilitating the appearance of daily for a few close people. This insight, along with its founder and the distribution engine led by creators via Tiktok and Instagram, is how the team hopes to avoid the fate of many social applications for consumers that rise quickly to months only.

However, the big questions remain: durability and depth. Can you apply photo and daily play to maintain retention curves 12, 24 or 36 months? Can the candle expand from lightweight claims to a wider set of “contact types” without swelling of the experiment? This is the road map: adding more ways to earn “sparks”, the application points system, for a wide range of reactions, and the introduction of more richer features that enhance consistency.

The seed money collected for the previous shopping app for the Candle team will give resources to bring more engineers, accelerate experimentation, and measure faster. The current supporters, including goodwateer Capital, Pioneer Fund, Progression Fund and Y Combinator, are completely behind the new trend.