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

Sep. 24, 2025

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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 […]