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 didn’t, according to Ruber.

“The secondhand shopping space is a tough market to begin with,” Ruber told TechCrunch. “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 pu

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