I cofounded an app that made over $1 million in the last year. We pivoted 5 times and made one big mistake before finding success.

Cofounders Alex Ruber and Parth Chopra.

Courtesy of Alex Ruber

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Alex Ruber, a 29-year-old cofounder and CEO, based in San Francisco. The following has been edited for length and clarity.About five months after being in Y Combinator, my cofounder, Parth, and I thought we might have to give up.We met through Y Combinator's Co-founder Matching Program, a free resource to help people find potential business partners, in January 2024. We were both working full-time. After building some projects together, we launched an AI-powered shopping tool and were accepted into Y Combinator's fall 2024 batch.It became clear that the shopping app was not economically viable and was running at a loss, with no clear path forward. We entered what I call our three-month pivot hell. Within those three months, we tried out about five to six different ideas and almost gave up.Then, we built a very simple game on a whim, and by August 2025, roughly five months after launch, our monthly revenue had reached $144,533.

We did not want to let go of our first app ideaParth and I were both full-time engineers when we met and bonded over our love of building projects on the side. Also, we're both really into fashion, especially thrifting.We thought that the secondhand shopping market would only grow as concerns about the environment grew. Combining that with the advent of AI, we built a basic conversational search engine where users could type anything in natural language, like "I'm looking for a leather jacket under $500 with two stripes, and it has to be a little bit worn in." The engine would search resale sites like Poshmark, eBay, Mercari, and ThredUp, then compile all the results into a single page.