On July 29, 1928, Walt Disney screened Steamboat Willie for a small test audience in Los Angeles.
The sound setup was improvised, a bedsheet hung behind the screen, a microphone wired to a speaker where the audience would sit. The people producing the live sound grabbed whatever was available, Wilfred Jackson on a mouth organ, Ub Iwerks banging pots and pans for percussion, Johnny Cannon handling sound effects. Walt Disney performed all of Mickey's voices in the final film. Total production budget: $4,986.69.¹
Disney had recently lost the rights to his previous character. His brother Roy sold his personal car to fund a second recording session. They had almost nothing.
The audience reaction? Disney described it himself, "The effect on our little audience was nothing less than electric."
Steamboat Willie launched Mickey Mouse. Mickey Mouse built the foundation for what would eventually become the largest entertainment company on the planet.
Not after Disney got the right equipment, but before it.
The Pattern
I've been turning that story over in my head, not as inspiration, but as a mechanism. Because the same pattern shows up across industries and time, and it almost never gets named for what it is.
Sara Blakely started Spanx with $5,000. No investors. She wrote her own patent because she couldn't afford a patent attorney. She cut the feet off her own pantyhose, drove to department stores herself, and stood in the hosiery section to pitch buyers in person. Spanx eventually sold for $1.2 billion.²
John Paul Mitchell Systems launched with a $700 loan. One of the co-founders was living in his car. They printed their packaging in black and white because color was too expensive. The brand now generates over $1 billion in annual revenue.³
These aren't stories about people who succeeded despite their constraints. The constraint is part of why the success happened. It removed the option of buying a solution before they understood the problem. It forced them to figure out what actually worked before they could spend on anything else.
Every one of those companies eventually invested heavily in infrastructure, systems, and equipment. But not first. First came the proof. Second results. Then came the investment in what the proof and results required.
The Progress Illusion
Here's what makes this worth examining.
Buying the tool feels like doing the work. That's not impatience or carelessness, it's documented psychology. Research from the early 1980s identified a specific pattern, when people acquire something that represents the identity they're building toward, the acquisition itself satisfies something. Not the outcome. The symbol of the outcome.⁶ The drive to do the actual work measurably decreases. Not because the person gave up. Because the purchase already delivered a version of the feeling they were after.
I call it the progress illusion. The gap between acquiring and doing that feels, in the moment, like the same thing.
Look at the remote control on your television. Count the buttons. Most remotes have 40, 50, sometimes more. The ones most people actually use, power, volume, channel, mute, pause, rewind. Eight, maybe ten. The rest exist. They just don't get used.
Now look at your phone. Count the apps. How many do you open in any given week? Research across thousands of software products found that 80% of features are rarely or never used. Nearly half of all paid software licenses go completely untouched.⁴⁵
This isn't about careless people. It's a consistent pattern across populations, products, and industries. Acquiring and using are two separate events. The gap between them is where the progress illusion lives.
And it doesn't only show up at the beginning. It shows up every time there's a gap between where you are and where you want to be and a purchase that seems like it would close that gap.
When We Started
When we launched The Soap Box, our pickup and delivery service we had zero orders.
Not slow. Not a soft launch. Zero.
We didn't build a custom platform. We used JotForm, which was free. A delivery app on the free tier. Square on our phones to take payment at the door. The whole operation was held together with tools that cost us nothing, because we had nothing to prove.
Some said the process would have too much friction. I understood the concern. But friction compared to what? We had zero orders. The friction wasn't the problem we needed to solve. Getting the first order was. Then the tenth. Then the hundredth.
We didn't need a sophisticated platform to do that. We needed to find out whether anyone actually wanted the service and would keep using it.
They did. Every upgrade came after we'd outgrown what we had. Not before.
When We Were Growing
The same principle showed up again at a different stage, not starting from zero, but figuring out how much capacity we actually had before spending on more.
We had the self-service store. Wash and fold was running. Pickup and delivery was growing. The question was capacity. More machines? Expand the space? Hire ahead of the volume?
What we did was work through every configuration inside what we already owned.
Stage one: load the machines at close of business. Morning crew fires them up before clients arrive.
Stage two: evening shift washes and dries overnight. Morning crew folds only. No machine conflict between services.
Stage three: orders kept growing. We closed the store to self-service during processing hours and ran orders all day.
Same footprint. Same machines. We ran it through every possible arrangement before a dollar went toward new equipment or additional space.
This wasn't a strategy. It was constraint. We didn't have the option of buying our way out of the capacity question immediately, so we found out what we actually had first.
And here's what I've noticed, this applies whether you're in the first year of your business or you're a veteran operator looking to add a service, upgrade a system or expand a location. The progress illusion doesn't care how long you've been in the business. The feeling is the same. The purchase feels like the solution. Sometimes it is. But sometimes the solution was already there, and the purchase was just easier to reach for.
Is This Actually a Problem, or Is It a Purchase?
That's the question worth sitting with before the next acquisition.
Before the new software subscription. The equipment upgrade. The box truck purchase. The service addition. The platform switch.
Not every purchase is a progress illusion. Some investments are exactly right, exactly when they happen. But the question is worth asking first, honestly, without the excitement of the new thing in the way.
What would it take to fully exhaust the capacity of what you already have?
Thinking about the thinking of laundry:
When you realize that buying something and building something feel identical in the moment, and only one of them actually moves you forward.
The gap between those two things is always there. The owners/operators who close it fastest aren't the ones who spend the least. They're the ones who notice the gap exists.
That's all I got for you today.
Waleed
P.S. Connect with me on LinkedIn, YouTube, or X (Twitter)
Echoing the thoughts of E.F. Schumacher.
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.
Footnotes:
¹ Steamboat Willie — Wikipedia
² Sara Blakely / Spanx Origin — Forbes
³ John Paul Mitchell Systems Origin — Entrepreneur
⁴ The 2019 Feature Adoption Report — Pendo
⁵ 2024 SaaS Management Index — Zylo
⁶ Symbolic Self-Completion Theory — Wicklund & Gollwitzer, 1982 — iResearchNet