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

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…