How a 'Pivot Hell' Led Two Founders to a $1 Million Revenue App

The duo met through Y Combinator’s matching program in early 2024, bonding over their backgrounds as full-time engineers. Their initial venture—an AI-powered search engine for secondhand fashion—gained traction but proved economically unsustainable. Faced with high operational costs and low conversion, they entered a grueling three-month period of rapid experimentation. They launched and discarded projects ranging from therapy tools to B2B insurance software, maintaining a strict two-week window to test each idea against user retention metrics.

The breakthrough arrived when the founders stepped away from the whiteboard to recalibrate. Realizing their constant industry-hopping had drained their passion, they pivoted to a consumer-facing product designed to combat the loneliness of the startup grind. Candle, which prompts users with one daily question to foster deeper personal connections, grew organically among friends and family before finding a broader audience. Since its March 2025 App Store debut, the four-person team has generated over $1 million in revenue.

Ruber notes that the team’s biggest mistake was abandoning entire industries rather than iterating on specific problems. While they integrate AI for translation and code generation, they intentionally keep the app’s core content human-written to preserve authenticity. They now advise other entrepreneurs to commit to a specific problem space and focus on refining solutions within that domain rather than starting from scratch repeatedly.