Every builder wants the moment when the world shows up at their door uninvited.

Sometimes it happens. A policy changes. A platform stumbles. A competitor makes a mistake. Suddenly you have users you did not go looking for, downloads you did not earn, coverage you did not pitch for. It looks like product-market fit. It feels like momentum.

But before you start scaling, ask yourself: did you build this, or did something else build it for you?

Most platforms that die do not die because the product was bad. They die because the thing that brought the users was never the product. Users arrive for a reason the builder can’t create or replace. The moment the reason disappears, so do the users.

This is the idea I want to sit with in this edition: Borrowed Momentum. What it is, why it looks like traction, and what you need to build while you still have it.

— Prashant

72%

For every paying customer, a social platform needs to sustain itself, it typically needs 25 monthly active users.

That ratio is not a Koo problem. It is a builder problem. It tells you something about what growth actually needs to become: not users who arrived, but users who stayed, formed a habit, and created a reason to pay or recommend.

25 people showing up once does not equal one customer. 25 people who came back every week might. The gap between arrival and habit is where most platforms fail. And the gap gets brutally expensive when the users who arrived came because of something you did not build.

Koo had 7.2 million monthly active users at peak. By the 25:1 math, it needed roughly 288,000 paying users to be viable. It had near zero. The number that mattered was never the download count. It was always what would make people come back on a Tuesday when nothing was happening.

This edition, let's look at Koo, the Indian microblogging platform.

Not because it failed. Because it almost worked. And because the difference between almost working and actually working is the exact question Borrowed Momentum forces every builder to answer.

Koo was a microblogging platform built for India: vernacular languages, regional voices, a market Twitter had largely ignored. The product had a real idea behind it. The team was serious. And for a few weeks in January 2021, it looked like the right product at exactly the right moment.

Let's run it through the Lens.

In January 2021, the Indian government and Twitter had a public standoff. Twitter refused to comply with new IT rules and briefly lost its legal safe harbour. For one week, every politician, journalist and government official in India who needed an alternative found Koo. The platform added 3 million users in days.

Koo did not build that first touch. The government built it for them.

For vernacular language speakers: Kannada creators, Tamil politicians, regional journalists. Koo offered something Twitter never did: a home in their own language. That user had a real belonging moment. The problem was that this user was not the user the platform had attracted at scale. The 3 million who arrived in January were there because Twitter was under threat, not because Koo was irreplaceable.

Ritual is the behaviour that makes a product part of your day whether or not something is happening. For Koo, that ritual never formed at scale. The political users did not build a posting habit. The vernacular users who genuinely belonged were too small a base to anchor the platform. The two groups never became one community.

Koo's growth loop was entirely dependent on external triggers. Each time the trigger faded, engagement fell. The platform peaked at 9 million downloads in the weeks after January 2021, then declined. There was no internal loop strong enough to sustain growth between moments of external pressure.

Koo raised $57 million. Monthly active users fell from 7.2 million to 2.7 million in roughly 18 months, a 62% decline. In July 2024, the founders announced a shutdown. Their own words: "Most of them didn't want to deal with user-generated content and the wild nature of a social media company."

The strain was not a bad product. It was a product whose growth was powered by a force it never controlled.

Koo raised $57 million across four rounds between 2020 and 2022. Its Series B of $30 million was led by Tiger Global in March 2021, at the exact height of the post-standoff wave.

At peak: 9 million downloads, 7.2 million monthly active users. By mid-2023: 2.7 million MAU. A 62 percent decline in 18 months.

At 2.7 million MAU, the 25:1 ratio put the viability threshold at roughly 108,000 paying users or equivalent ad revenue. Koo had neither. The founders confirmed no viable revenue model existed at shutdown. (Source: Aprameya Radhakrishna, LinkedIn, July 2024.)

$57 million in. Near-zero revenue out. The economics of Borrowed Momentum do not compound. They collapse.

When Elon Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022 and began removing accounts, Bluesky added 1 million users in a single week in November 2024. The pattern is identical to Koo: crisis-driven first touch, external trigger, no guaranteed ritual. The difference is scale and timing. Bluesky is still in the phase where Borrowed Momentum looks like growth.

BeReal launched in 2020 with a format demanding authenticity: one photo, front and back camera, two minutes after a random daily notification. It hit 20 million daily active users in 2022 entirely through organic social pressure. By 2023, daily active users had collapsed by more than 60%. The external trigger was the format novelty. Once the novelty faded, there was no ritual underneath.

When Elon Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022, Mastodon added over 1 million users in a single week. (Source: Mastodon.social, via The Guardian, November 2022.) The trigger was the same crisis that sent users to Bluesky, but Mastodon had no single owner to be pressured or shut down. What it lacked was a ritual. Most of those 1 million accounts went quiet within weeks. Borrowed Momentum arrived. The habit did not follow. Three platforms, three continents, one pattern.

Friends of Figma chapters across India ran the third edition of Make-a-thon simultaneously: teams of designers, PMs and engineers building real products in one day.

The Hyderabad edition saw participants let go of their job titles for twelve hours and build as a unit. The signal is not the event. The signal is that the format works across cities, cultures and chapter sizes without losing its core intention: making builders out of people who were not thinking of themselves as builders yet. (Disclosure: Prashant Pandey is co-organiser of the Friends of Figma Hyderabad chapter.)

For years, Indian designers followed Config from a distance: a live stream, a recap thread, a few screenshots of slides. This October, Figma brought Config to Bengaluru. The significance is not the logistics of a global conference going local. It is the acknowledgement embedded in that decision: that Indian design practice has developed its own vocabulary, its own questions, its own concerns that a San Francisco stage was not going to address.

An idea does not need to travel to a room to matter. But when the room finally comes to it, something shifts in how seriously the people in it take themselves.

The most interesting thing at DesignUp is never on the agenda. It is the conversation that happens when an independent designer from Coimbatore and a product leader from a Bengaluru startup end up at the same table and realise they are working on the same problem from opposite ends.

DesignUp has built the kind of room where that is possible: practitioners and leaders, not just headliners. What the event signals is not that design conferences are back. It is that the Indian design community is mature enough to need a place where it compares notes honestly, not just celebrates itself.

The Product Folks built a conference with a rule: nothing gets recorded. No livestream, no recap deck, no highlights reel. At the Product (Un)Conference, the only way to be in the room is to be in the room. That is not a scarcity tactic. It is a design decision about where real knowledge lives.

The unconference format, roundtables of eight to ten people, senior founders and product leaders, no audience, no performance: it treats serious builder conversation as something that cannot survive being turned into content. In a world where every insight is a LinkedIn post, that is a quiet act of resistance.

Kunal Shah has a principle called Delta 4. A product becomes irreversible only when it is significantly better than the alternative, not incrementally better. His exact words:

I keep coming back to this when I think about Koo. The vernacular user had a Delta 4 experience. For a Kannada creator or a Tamil politician, Koo was genuinely, significantly better than Twitter. No question. But for the political user who arrived in January 2021, there was no Delta 4. There was a Delta 0.5. Koo was slightly more convenient than Twitter for about three weeks. The moment Twitter stabilised, there was no reason to stay.

And here is the thing that gets me: you cannot borrow your way to a Delta. Borrowed Momentum can fill your funnel. It can spike your downloads. It can get you into every growth story that week. But the Delta has to come from the product. It has to come from what you built, not from what happened to you. If the users you acquired through the external trigger do not experience that Delta, the momentum drains the moment the trigger does. That is not bad luck. That is physics.

Before you ship the next feature, ask: if the thing that sent users here disappeared tomorrow, would they still open the product? If the answer is no, you do not have retention. You have a waiting room. Map the ritual before you scale the acquisition.

Audit your growth sources. Draw a line between momentum you own and momentum you borrowed. Borrowed momentum is not a strategy. It is a starting condition. The strategy is what you build before the external trigger fades.

A community that only activates around events is not a community. It is an audience with a calendar. The belonging moment has to survive the gap between events. Design for what happens on Tuesday, not just what happens at the launch.

At Make-a-thon Hyderabad last month, I watched designers, PMs and engineers stop introducing themselves by their job title. For twelve hours, they were just builders. That shift did not happen because we told them to think differently. It happened because we designed a container that made their title irrelevant.

The right environment changes what people believe they are capable of. Take someone seriously as a builder before they take themselves seriously that way. That is the only move that matters.

Stop waiting for the right role or the right tool. Start with what you have, in the room you are in, with the people next to you.

(Disclosure: Prashant Pandey is co-organiser of the Friends of Figma Hyderabad chapter, which ran the Hyderabad edition of Make-a-thon.)

Koo is gone. But Borrowed Momentum is not. Every week a new product catches a wave it did not build and calls it traction. The question is not whether you can borrow the momentum.

The question is what you build while you have it.

25:1 platform viability ratio — Andreessen Horowitz, 2021 | Koo's 3M user surge in January 2021 — The Ken, February 2021 | Koo peak downloads and MAU decline — SimilarWeb, via The Wrap, 2023 | Koo's $57M raised — Crunchbase, 2024 | Koo Series B, Tiger Global — TechCrunch, March 2021 | Koo shutdown announcement — Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka, LinkedIn, July 2024 | Vernacular user belonging — Entrackr, 2021 | Ritual failure at scale — Mint, 2022 | Growth loop dependency — data.ai, via Business Standard, 2022 | Bluesky's 1M/week growth — The Verge, November 2024 | BeReal 20M DAU peak — data.ai, 2022 | BeReal 60% DAU decline — Bloomberg Second Measure, 2023 | Mastodon's 1M surge — The Guardian, November 2022 | Delta 4 framework — Kunal Shah, Accel Seed to Scale | Government-Twitter standoff context — Reuters, January 2021