Andrew Harris
Data acquisition consulting

I help companies acquire hard-to-get web data at scale.

Andrew Harris · Former ZoomInfo engineering leader · Vancouver, WA

Built and operated systems processing 1B+ pages and 500M+ search results per month. I work with AI startups, data companies, and founders who need crawl reliability, proprietary datasets, or a serious acquisition strategy - not generic data engineering.

Audit · $5,000 Proof-of-Value Build · from $15k Fractional Head of Data Acquisition · from $5k/mo
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1B+
pages crawled per month
at ZoomInfo
500M+
SERP queries per month
through the engine I architected
80+
production endpoints live
across Nodesnack

Who I work with

AI startups that need proprietary data to make their model useful - RAG products, vertical AI platforms, research tools.

Data companies whose crawlers are failing, brittle, or expensive - sales intelligence, recruiting, market intelligence vendors.

Founders sitting on records but no strategy - millions of rows already, no path to expand the moat.

Agencies who need senior data acquisition expertise without a full-time hire.

What I'm not: a general software consultant, a Python contractor, a generic "AI consultant," or staff augmentation.

How to work with me

Three offers, ordered by depth. Most engagements start with the Audit.

Offer 1 · Lead engagement

Data Acquisition Audit

$5,000 · one-time · 20-30 page written report

A written review of your current (or proposed) web data acquisition stack. Built so you walk away with concrete architecture decisions, even if we never work together again.

  • Crawl architecture review - source coverage, scheduling, dedup, freshness, failure modes
  • Cost review - cost per acquired document, vendor spend, where you're overpaying
  • Anti-bot review - detection surface, proxy strategy, fingerprinting posture, sustainability
  • Infrastructure review - reliability, observability, on-call exposure
  • Risk review - legal, compliance, vendor concentration, single points of failure
  • Executive summary - what to fix this quarter, what to build next, what to stop spending on

The Audit is the natural first step. It earns the conversation that produces the next two offers.

Book the Audit →
Offer 2 · Build

Proof-of-Value Build

Fixed fee, typically $15k-$30k · scope-driven · defined deliverable

A focused, fixed-fee build of one critical piece of acquisition infrastructure. Scoped against your audit (or your existing roadmap) and delivered end-to-end.

  • Initial crawler implementation for a high-value source
  • Extraction pipeline with structured output for LLM ingestion
  • SERP acquisition system (the pattern behind 500M+ queries/month at ZoomInfo)
  • Competitor monitoring or market-signal pipeline
  • LLM ingestion workflow - markdown-native, embedding-ready

Fixed fee, written scope, defined "done." No open-ended hourly billing.

Offer 3 · Ongoing

Fractional Head of Data Acquisition

From $5,000 / month · judgment, not labor

A senior owner of your data acquisition strategy without the cost of a director-level full-time hire. Embedded enough to make decisions, not so embedded that I become a ticket-clearer.

  • Architecture reviews and design oversight
  • Vendor evaluation (proxies, scraping APIs, data brokers, infra)
  • Hiring support - JD design, technical interviews, calibration
  • Strategy: what to build internally, what to buy, what to retire
  • Monthly written briefing + ad-hoc async access

What I don't do: sprint work, ticket ownership, staff augmentation. Clients pay for judgment, not labor.

How we work together

  1. Written intake. You describe the data you need, what it costs you today, and the systems it feeds. 20 minutes, async, no call required.
  2. Scope within 48 hours. I send a written scope, deliverables, and start date - matched to the right offer.
  3. Start within the week. Audits typically deliver inside 2 weeks. Build engagements ship first artifacts in week one.

Pre-scoped feeds (productized menu)

Already know exactly what you need? I run 60+ productized, recurring data feeds on the same infrastructure I deploy for clients - each scoped to an input list you provide, normalized, and delivered to S3, a webhook, or your database. If you're not sure which feed, or whether to build vs. buy, start with the Audit.

Browse all 60+ feeds →

Common questions

Why start with the Audit?
Because most data acquisition problems are scoped wrong before they're built wrong. The Audit gives you a written architecture and cost review you can act on with or without me - and it makes any follow-on engagement vastly more accurate.
How fast can the Audit turn around?
Typical turnaround is 2 weeks from intake to delivered report. Tight timelines: mention it in the intake and I'll say upfront whether it's realistic.
Do you sign NDAs?
Yes. Standard mutual NDA, digitally signed before any discovery work. If you have your own template, send it with the intake.
Will the Fractional role cover my engineering team's tickets?
No. The Fractional role is judgment, not labor - architecture, vendor calls, hiring, strategy. If you need someone writing scrapers and clearing tickets, you need a different hire (and I'll tell you what to look for).
Do you work with non-AI companies?
Yes - any company whose business depends on hard-to-acquire web data. Sales intelligence, recruiting platforms, market intel vendors, compliance, OSINT. If you have a real acquisition problem, email me and I'll tell you honestly whether I'm the right fit.

About me

Currently leading dark-web and threat-intelligence data collection at Recorded Future. Before that, a decade at ZoomInfo scaling web acquisition from startup to IPO - SERP engines processing 500M+ queries/month, crawler frameworks handling 1B+ pages/month, agentic extraction on LLMs and domain-specific SLMs, and multi-vendor integration across 600M+ people and 100M+ companies. I run Nodesnack on the side - the same infrastructure I use for client engagements. See resume and portfolio for context.

Get in touch

Most engagements start with a written intake for the Data Acquisition Audit. Email andrew@abharrismethods.com.

Start a written intake
The intake — 6 questions

The button above pre-fills these in your email client. Answer what you can; partial intakes are fine.

  1. 1
    You
    Name, role, company.
  2. 2
    What you're building
    And why web data matters to it.
  3. 3
    The acquisition problem
    What data you need, and what's broken or missing today.
  4. 4
    Current setup
    Nothing yet · DIY scrapers · vendor (which?) · inherited mess.
  5. 5
    What it's costing you today
    Manual hours, vendor spend, or product capability you can't ship.
  6. 6
    Scale & timing
    Sources, volume, refresh cadence, when you'd want to start.

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