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
Revenue is wide, profit is tall
U-Haul rents trucks near cost and banks the margin on boxes. Carmaking earns scraps while car lending prints. A field guide to profit pools: mapping where an industry's money settles across the value chain, and why the revenue map misleads.
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
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.
Follow along
I share what I'm thinking about data products, moats, and strategy on LinkedIn. Follow along there.
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