How Candle Grew Conversion to Paid by 75% with Helium
5min Read
Candle helps people stay closer to the friends and partners who matter most. Here's how they grew conversion to paid, without taking their focus off the product.
Alex & Parth
Cofounders, Candle
Context
Candle's mission
Candle exists to strengthen the relationships that matter most. Whether it's a couple staying connected through a busy week or friends showing up for each other across distance, Candle gives people a simple, personal way to be present in each other's lives every day.
That's what the team thinks about. That's what they spend their time building. The product is deeply personal, and the people who use it love it. Engagement has been strong from the start, with users finding Candle organically and making it part of their daily routines.
Monetization was never the focus. But it needed to be figured out.
The reality of building a sustainable business
At a 2% conversion to paid, the vast majority of Candle's growing user base wasn't subscribing. The app was clearly working: people were using it, coming back, building habits around it. But the subscription experience wasn't keeping pace with the engagement.
This is a tension a lot of mission-driven teams feel. You want to spend all your time making the product better, strengthening the connections people have with the people they care about. But if the business doesn't work, you can't keep doing that.
The Candle team knew the paywall needed work. Different designs, different offers, different ways of presenting value. But every test required engineering time they'd rather spend on the core product, and every iteration meant waiting on app store review cycles. It wasn't realistic for a team that wanted to stay focused on what they were actually building.
Helium handled the monetization so Candle could focus on the product
Candle integrated Helium and immediately got back to what they cared about. The paywall experimentation that had been a drain on engineering time was now happening in the background: new designs, discount structures, and product layouts shipping remotely, without app store submissions or pulling anyone off the core product.
Helium let Candle test paywall experiences that simply weren't possible to build and iterate on with their existing tools. New layouts, new ways of presenting plans, new approaches to surfacing value: experiments the team had wanted to run but couldn't justify taking time away from the product to build.
The Helium team worked closely with Candle throughout, handling integration and supporting each testing round. When issues came up, they were resolved quickly and directly.
Conversion to paid up 75%
Through systematic testing, Candle saw a 75% increase in conversion to paid.
Same organic user base. No changes to acquisition. No new marketing spend. The lift came entirely from optimizing the subscription experience: what users saw, how plans were presented, and when offers were surfaced. This included custom views for trial vs. non-trial users, multi-step paywalls, pricing experiments, and winback offers, all launched and tested quickly through Helium.
For a team whose focus is on helping people strengthen their relationships, this was the best possible outcome. The business got healthier without the team having to shift their attention away from the product. Significantly more users were now supporting Candle with a subscription, which means more resources to keep building the features that help people stay close.
Back to building what matters
Candle's story is one that a lot of mission-driven teams can relate to. You've built something people love. The product is working. But monetization is lagging, and you don't have the bandwidth (or the desire) to make it your focus.
Helium gave Candle a way to solve the monetization problem without it becoming the team's problem. The result: a 75% lift in conversion to paid, a sustainable business model built on the organic growth they already had, and a team that gets to keep doing what they set out to do: helping people stay closer to the people who matter most.
