What Wile E. Coyote Can Teach You About Chasing the Wrong Metrics

The catalog never once got returned

Picture the gag. You know it even if you haven’t watched Looney Tunes in twenty years. Wile E. Coyote is standing at the edge of a canyon, Road Runner is a speck of dust and a “meep meep” in the distance, and the coyote reaches into an ACME crate for whatever he ordered this week. Rocket-powered roller skates. A pair of spring-loaded boxing gloves. A tunnel painted so convincingly on a rock face that, in the cartoon’s own logic, it sometimes actually works, right up until it doesn’t. Ten seconds later he’s a coyote-shaped smear at the bottom of the canyon, dusting himself off, already flipping to the next page of the catalog.

He never got faster. He never got smarter about terrain, wind, or the fact that a bird with turbo legs was never getting caught by a guy strapped to a rocket he didn’t know how to steer. He just kept ordering. New gadget, same cliff.

That’s the whole bit, and it’s been the whole bit since the 1940s, which is probably part of why “Coyote vs. Acme,” the new movie built around this exact premise, hits theaters August 28. I haven’t seen it and I won’t pretend to know its plot twists. But the setup alone, a coyote and a corporation, is enough to get me thinking about something that has nothing to do with birds or deserts.

Does any of this sound like your marketing stack?

Why buying the tool feels like doing the work

Here’s the uncomfortable part. Wile E. Coyote isn’t dumb. He’s actually a pretty gifted engineer, in cartoon terms. He can assemble a catapult in ninety seconds flat, wire up a rocket sled with two paws and his teeth, and read a blueprint upside down while running full speed. He’s relentless, too. Most creatures would’ve quit chasing lunch after the fourth trip to the bottom of a canyon. If effort and cleverness were the whole game, he’d have eaten well years ago.

His real problem was never his skill with the equipment. It was his relationship to the equipment. Every failure produced the exact same conclusion: I need a different tool. Not once did he sit down and ask whether “chase a much faster animal across open desert using increasingly elaborate contraptions” was ever a sound strategy in the first place. The gadget was always the answer, because ordering the gadget felt like doing something.

That’s the psychology worth sitting with. Buying a new tool is a decision you can make in an afternoon. It has a receipt. It shows up as an action item you can check off, a Slack message you can send your team, a line item you can point to when someone asks what you’re doing about growth. Fixing your actual strategy, the positioning, the offer, the process that’s supposed to turn a stranger into a customer, is slower, messier, and doesn’t come with a checkout page. So the tool wins. Not because it works better. Because it’s easier to buy than to think.

I see this constantly with the small businesses and marketers I talk to. New SEO plugin. New AI writing tool. New CRM that promises to finally organize the chaos. New ad platform that’s supposedly where “everyone” is finding customers now. Each purchase carries this little hit of relief, like you’ve made progress. Then three months later the metrics haven’t moved, and the answer isn’t to ask why. It’s to order the next thing.

Activity feels like progress. It usually isn’t the same thing.

The parallel is closer than it’s comfortable to admit

I’ll be honest with you: I’ve caught myself doing this. When you’re building something from nothing, and I mean truly from nothing, the instinct to reach for a tool instead of fixing the underlying system is strong, and it never fully goes away.

I built DoorLoop’s Websites Division starting in November 2022, from zero, essentially as a team of one. We’ve since published over 1,000 sites. In those early days especially, every time something wasn’t converting the way I wanted, or a process felt clunky, or output wasn’t scaling the way I needed it to, the first instinct was almost always the same: is there a tool for this? A plugin, a script, an automation, some piece of software that would make the friction go away without me having to look directly at the friction.

Sometimes that instinct was right. Tools genuinely do solve real problems, and I’m not writing a love letter to doing everything the hard way by hand forever. But I’ve noticed, looking back honestly at my own patterns, that the tool-shopping instinct got loudest exactly when the actual problem was uncomfortable to look at. It’s a lot more pleasant to research a new piece of software for an hour than to admit the process underneath it was never designed well, or that the offer itself wasn’t resonating, or that I was trying to automate my way around a decision I hadn’t actually made yet.

That’s the real parallel to the coyote. He wasn’t slow because he lacked rocket skates. He was slow because rocket skates were never going to fix a strategy problem. You cannot gadget your way out of a bad plan. You can only delay finding that out, sometimes for years, one purchase at a time.

And here’s the part that stings a little: every individual purchase can look completely reasonable in isolation. Nobody sits down and thinks, “I’m about to make an irrational decision.” The SEO plugin genuinely might help. The new CRM genuinely might be better designed than the old one. That’s what makes this trap so effective. It’s not one bad decision, it’s a long string of individually defensible ones that never add up to an actual plan, because no single purchase was ever asked to justify itself against the strategy underneath it. You end up with a garage full of rocket skates and zero theory of how you’re actually going to catch anything.

I think about this a lot in the context of “scale through systems, retain through humans,” which is more or less how I approach the DoorLoop work. Systems and automation are supposed to create capacity for better judgment, not substitute for having any judgment at all. A CRM doesn’t know who your customer is. An AI writing tool doesn’t know what you actually stand for. Those are strategy questions. No catalog answers them for you, no matter how thick it is.

The Apple lesson underneath all of it

Years ago, working at the Apple Store in Aventura, my manager Steve Caliendo used to say something simple: represent the brand, have fun doing it, make lives better. Notice what’s not in there. No mention of which register system to use, what script to read off, which upsell tool to lean on. It was never about the equipment. It was about knowing exactly what you were there to do, and letting the tools serve that, instead of the other way around.

I think about that line more now than I did when I first heard it. Apple had plenty of tools, plenty of systems, plenty of process. None of it was the point. The point was always the person in front of you and whether their life got a little easier because you were there. Tools that served that goal earned their place. Tools that just existed for their own sake, however impressive, didn’t matter. Small businesses could stand to borrow that filter. Before a piece of software earns a spot in your stack, it should have to answer a very simple question: whose life does this actually make better, and how do you know?

A gut-check before you buy the next thing

So how do you actually tell the difference between solving a real problem and just shopping? Here’s the quick framework I use on myself now, before I let a new tool anywhere near my budget or my calendar.

Ask what specifically is broken, in one sentence, without naming a tool. If you can’t describe the actual problem without describing a solution (“I need better SEO software”), you probably haven’t found the problem yet. Try again: “Our blog traffic isn’t converting into leads.” Now you’re getting somewhere, and notice that sentence doesn’t require buying anything to be true.

Ask if you’ve already tried fixing this with what you have. Most tool purchases skip this step entirely. Before assuming your CRM is the problem, have you actually used the one you’ve got the way it was designed to be used? A shocking number of small business “tool problems” are actually “we never finished setting up the last tool” problems wearing a disguise.

Ask what happens if the new tool works perfectly and the strategy underneath is still wrong. This is the coyote question. If your positioning is fuzzy, your offer isn’t compelling, or you don’t actually know who you’re trying to reach, the fanciest automation in the world just helps you fail faster and more efficiently. Speed isn’t the fix when direction is the problem.

Ask whether you’re buying clarity or buying comfort. Clarity means you now understand your customer, your funnel, or your message better than you did an hour ago. Comfort means you feel like you did something productive today. Only one of those actually moves the needle, and it’s rarely the one that comes with a free trial.

If you run your next purchase through those four questions honestly, you’ll catch yourself a lot of the time. Not always. I still catch myself reaching for the easy fix now and then. But a lot more often than before.

What actually catches the Road Runner

Here’s the thing nobody says out loud about that cartoon: even in the world of the show, the tools were never really the obstacle. A coyote who sat down, studied the terrain, figured out the Road Runner’s actual patterns, and built one well-considered plan instead of forty rushed ones probably stood a real shot. He just never gave himself the chance to find out, because the next page of the catalog was always more exciting than the hard work of thinking clearly.

Small businesses have that same shot, all the time. It just doesn’t look like a new subscription. It looks like sitting with your actual customer, your actual offer, and your actual numbers long enough to know what’s really broken before you go shopping for what fixes it. That part’s slower. It doesn’t come gift-wrapped. But it’s the only version of “catching the Road Runner” that was ever real.

I’d genuinely love to hear where you’ve caught yourself doing this, tool-shopping instead of strategy-fixing, because I promise you’re not the only one, and I’m not either. Send me a message and let’s talk it through. Sometimes the fastest way off the cliff’s edge is just having someone point out you’re standing on painted rock.