Data products · Moats · Flywheels · Strategy
Your data is not a moat. What you build with it can be.
I'm Malcolm Angus. I've spent 10+ years turning data into an unfair competitive advantage, and I currently build agentic data systems at Retool. I write for founders and data leaders about 0 to 1 data products, business strategy, and the loops that make companies harder to catch.
Retool
Atlassian
Organic Growth Marketing
FirecrawlA 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 to 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.
Start here · The field guide
Data moats and flywheels: how to spot a real one
Everyone claims a data moat. Almost no one has one. The five tests, the five red flags, the Moat Test, and the map: the full field guide for telling compounding intelligence from a big pile of data.
Read the field guide →
Latest essays
All writing →July 7, 2026 · 3 min read
Give away the scoreboard, sell the fix
The strongest distribution move in data products is publishing the measurement your incumbents charge for. If you sell the fix, the score is marketing. If you sell the score, you're stuck.
July 7, 2026 · 3 min read
The bottleneck is not the code anymore
Agentic tooling commoditized the work data teams spent a decade being hired for. The constraint didn't disappear. It moved upstream, to data readiness and product judgment.
July 7, 2026 · 3 min read
Where velocity becomes money
AI made every data team faster. Whether that shows up in profit depends on the distance between the team's output and the work that earns revenue.
Proof of work
I build these loops, not just write about them
Behavioral-economics menu engineering, as software. It reads a restaurant's menu, reviews, and reputation, then rewrites the wording, pricing, and page order using published research, the moves a $10,000 consultant makes. A menu is the purest offer design problem there is: anchoring, bundling, cross-sell, up-sell. Menuomics is business strategy analysis productized as a 0 to 1 data product, built the way the essays say to build one: start with a decision, grade your own advice, publish the work.
Related essay: Your pricing page is a menu →|The strategy behind it →
Advising
Sitting on data you suspect is worth more than it earns?
I help founders and operating teams answer three questions: is our data actually defensible, what should the first data product be, and which loops deserve investment. Straight answers, short engagements.
How we can work togetherGet the next essay
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