Build Your Own Data Moat or Die Trying

Why infra is for rich kids—and the rest of us need street-level data hustles.

Author

The Lazy Growth Hacker
July 29, 2025

VCs fund latency porn. You? You need a pile of proprietary bytes that compounds while you sleep.

Cloud costs don’t scale for mortals. But data that improves itself? That’s a perpetual motion engine strapped to your startup. Beat the infra haves by out learning them every hour.

7 Dirt Cheap Data Moats to Steal

  1. Mapillary – Two founders, two bikes, infinite leaderboard clout. 5 M crowd snapped street photos in 18 months. Google would’ve burned ~$500 K for the same pixels.

  2. IPinfo – Bootstrapped IP API. 40 B monthly calls feed it fresh carrier + VPN breadcrumbs, live map no newcomer can cold-start.

  3. Midjourney – Discord prompts + emoji votes = human labeled art pairs, 24/7. Opinionated dataset → opinionated images.

  4. BuiltWith – Solo crawler running 15 years. Every pass fingerprints more sites; nobody else has the patience (or coffee budget).

  5. Ahrefs – Self funded crawler downloads 8 B pages a day. Backlink ledger rivals Google’s, minus the existential ad biz.

  6. Hotjar (by Contentsquare) – One JS snippet streams user rage clicks from millions of sites. UX footage private to the hive.

  7. Surge AI – Big tech clients pay for labeling; Surge keeps a copy. More jobs → bigger label pile → wider gap for rivals.

The Flywheel Formula

  • Low Friction Capture – Piggy back on actions users already crave (prompting, clicking, querying).

  • Immediate Incentive Surface – Give points, insights, or solved pain today. Don’t ask them to donate data “for science.”

  • Self Reinforcing Accuracy – More usage tightens the signal: freshness, coverage, label density.

  • Delayed Imitability – Re crawling or re labeling costs cash and months. Fast followers start in a hole.

Keep the Curve Up and to the Right

Two levers decide whether your loop accelerates or stalls:

Lever

Why It Matters

Nail It Like…

Feedback Speed

Users must feel the improvement fast.

Mapillary shows new photos on map in minutes.

Gradient of Novelty

Each datapoint should teach, not duplicate.

Ahrefs dedupes spam so novel pages matter.

Bonus Playbooks

  • Hardware Trojan Horse – Subsidize a gadget; harvest telemetry. Whoop bands, Samsara dashcams, John Deere tractors.

  • Synthetic Sweatshop – GPUs label fake worlds. Waymo’s Carla streets, AlphaGo self-play.

  • Regulatory Wormhole – Unlock data trapped behind compliance. Plaid (bank APIs), Particle Health (EHRs).

Pick the cheapest loop your balance sheet can stomach, and run it faster than anyone else can replicate.

A 13th-Century Reminder

Hanseatic merchants mapped trade routes each voyage. Better charts → safer trips → more voyages → even better charts. Swap “voyages” for prompts and you get Midjourney. Be the guild that owns the living chart, not just the ships.

Takeaway

Start compounding a dataset competitors can’t afford to rebuild.