I’ll give the exact opposite of what you ask, just because we could easily have chosen not to do it.
Our business was initially built on analysing data from a commercial provider and selling those insights to customers. The provider required that both we and each of our customers paid a high license fee. It became pretty clear that the provider was moving towards lots of tools and value added features on top of their data that would directly compete with us. At that point we had the choice to either work hard to keep differentiating our stuff, or do the crazy thing and attack their moat by collecting our own data. I will admit I was somewhat doubtful that we could pull it off, it was insanely ambitious for a company that was four people at the time against an incumbent that had been around for more than a decade. Ultimately we worked with another small provider to create a data spec, acquired them and all their human collectors, and now we sell our tools on top of our own data, with its own unique selling points. We went from a fun hobby to a fairly prominent player in our industry. Our competitors have gone on to consolidate and do some exciting stuff too so I hope we were a bit of a kick up the bum there.
I think we could easily have chickened out or waited until we were bigger and the outcome would not have been nearly as positive. So I guess the lesson is sometimes that you have to picture the endgame right from the start, and pursue it as aggressively as possible, instead of with baby steps that might feel safer or more natural.