“I spent $5,000 on a golf course database — every hole, every tee box, GPS coordinates for the entire course. That forced me to get serious about monetisation because I had a real cost. And it made the product meaningfully better than anything free because nobody else was willing to make that investment.”

A $5K data purchase was a forcing function and the feature unlock that changed everything

Buying proprietary course data served two purposes: it created a defensible data moat (competitors using free public data couldn't match the accuracy) and forced revenue discipline. With a real ongoing cost, Duffett had to charge enough to cover it — which in turn required building a genuinely better product. The constraint became a competitive advantage.