Markets, data products and strategy
Your data is not a moat. What you build with it can be.
I'm Malcolm Angus: analytics engineer, data product manager, and forward-deployed engineer. I've spent 10+ years owning whether the data a company already has actually changes a decision, and I build the products, not just the roadmap: agentic data systems at Retool, and my own on the side. I write for founders and data leaders about 0 to 1 data products, business strategy, how markets really work, and the loops that make companies harder to catch.
Retool
Atlassian
Organic Growth Marketing
Firecrawl
Start here
AI transformation runs at the speed of data readiness
The person hired to lead AI transformation can design a workflow in a week. Then they wait on the data. Two scoreboards, a stakes ladder, one architecture change, and a process where building is one step of six.
Read the essay →
A field guide
What I write about
Data moats
Why most proprietary data claims don't survive contact with a funded competitor, and what a defensible data asset actually looks like.
Flywheels
The loops that make a company harder to catch every quarter: learning loops, distribution loops, and how to instrument them.
0 → 1 data products
How to ship the first data product inside a company: start with a decision, ship embarrassingly early, resist the platform.
Business strategy
Strategy as the discipline of compounding: separating the work that builds slope from the work that just adds surface area.
Proof of work
I build these loops, not just write about them
The scoreboard for which software the models actually recommend. It asks ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini the same buying question across 39 B2B software categories, scores which brand each model lands on, and refreshes the ranking every month, fully public, ungated, and with no paid placement. Thunderdome is the measurement loop the essays argue for, shipped as a live product: start with a decision that matters, which tools the models push on buyers, grade it with a real three-model pipeline, and give the scoreboard away. The published index is the top of the funnel.
Follow along
I share what I'm thinking about data products, moats, and strategy on LinkedIn. Follow along there.
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