Candle

The Problem

Nearly 50 percent of relationships end in a breakup or divorce. For the 140 million couples in the US, daily connection is getting harder, not because of a lack of love, but because of emotional drift, missed communication, and growing incompatibility. Careers, social media, and the relentless pace of life turn quality time into background noise. And this problem will only increase for the next generation of couples and friends.

We believe most relationships don’t end suddenly. They slowly fade from a lack of consistent emotional connection.

The Solution

Candle is a private space for couples or friends to connect every day, simply and intentionally.

What started as a swipeable question game has evolved into a full platform:

• Daily Prompts and Games: Rotating questions, quizzes, audio, and photo prompt challenges!

• Local Date Ideas and Events: 60 curated ideas that refresh every week, usable anywhere in the world and on any date range!

• Canvas and Countdown Widgets: An interactive way to leave notes, doodles, drawings, and status updates directly on each other's home screens, a playful way to stay connected even when you're apart. Set countdowns directly on your home screen for when you see each other next, trips, dates, and more.

• Streaks and Progress: Reward streaks through small daily or weekly moments of connection together

• Adaptive Decks: Personalized, smarter questions over time

• Shared Albums and Memories: A visual log of your relationship

Whether long distance or living together, Candle helps people create daily emotional momentum, the often overlooked key to long-term connection.

YouTube Launch Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PHArmvw4qw

Since launching our beta 5 months ago!

We’re currently at:

• 110k MAUs

• 46k DAUs

(active = someone who’s completed a card connection with their partner)

The Team

Parth (ex Asana, ex Twitter engineer) and I, Alex (ex iOS/Architecture at Apple, ex flight systems at NASA), have been friends for quite a while and have built multiple projects together, including shopencore.ai, a tool to search across hundreds of resale sites in one place.

Candle is the result of everything we learned during our long stretch of pivots and side projects. It’s the first thing we’ve built that people not only use, they come back to daily, and a core problem that we’ve faced ourselves. That’s what makes us excited to keep going :)

Links

• Download the app! —> https://www.trycandle.app

• Join the Community: r/candleapp (https://www.reddit.com/r/candleapp)

• Follow the journey: https://www.instagram.com/candlecouples

• Support email: support@trycandle.app