If you're a few weeks or months into building something with barely any audience, one question tends to circle round and round: is this actually working, or am I wasting my time?
I want to try and answer that properly today; here's a calmer way to think about it.
Here's the trap almost everyone falls into, me very much included.
You start something. You publish a few things. You check the numbers: views, subscribers, followers, whatever your version is.
They're small. So you conclude, reasonably enough, that it isn't working.
The problem: you're looking at the wrong things, at the wrong time, and drawing a conclusion the data can't support yet.
Early numbers are noise, not signal.
If you've published five things and one gets 12 views and another gets 3, that difference tells you almost nothing.
At small numbers, randomness dominates - who happened to be online, what the algorithm felt like doing that day, whether someone scrolled past at the right moment.
You need volume before numbers mean anything. Below that, you're reading tea leaves and calling it analysis.
So here's the reframe: early on, judge your inputs, not your outputs.
Outputs are things you don't control - views, subscribers, sales, growth.
Inputs are things you completely control - did you publish, did you show up, did you do the thing you said you'd do?
In month one, two, three of anything, your inputs are the only honest scoreboard you've got, because the outputs genuinely haven't had time to exist yet. Nothing looks like it's working right up until the moment it does.
So the actual question isn't "are the numbers up?" It's:
Did I do what I said I'd do this week?
If yes, it's working. Genuinely. Not glamorous, not satisfying, but true.
That doesn't mean fly blind, though. There are useful early signals, just quieter ones. Here's what I'd actually watch:
Is anyone taking the next step? Not "how many views" but: of the people who found you, did any of them act - click through, reply, sign up? One person doing that tells you more than a hundred passive views. It's the difference between people saw this and this connected with someone.
Are you getting better? Compare what you're making now to what you made at the start. Visible improvement is real progress that will eventually show up in the numbers. Skill compounds before results do.
Can you keep doing it? The one nobody mentions. If your current pace is sustainable, if you can genuinely picture doing this in six months, you're in a stronger position than someone with better early numbers on a pace that's about to burn them out. Longevity beats intensity, and it's measurable right now.
Does it still feel honest? If you're not drifting into things that make you uncomfortable just to keep the numbers up, you're building something you can stand behind. That's worth more than a spike.
Four signals. None of them require an audience to measure.
The last thing, and the one I keep having to remind myself of:
The genuinely dangerous move isn't going slowly.
It's changing direction based on data that isn't real yet - deciding your idea's wrong after four weeks, rebuilding because a video flopped, chasing a new angle because the old one "didn't work" when it never got a fair test.
That's how people end up with five abandoned projects and no idea why none of them took off. Not because any were bad, but because none were given long enough to become anything.
So if you're in the stretch where nothing looks like it's happening: check your inputs, check the four signals, then stop looking for a while.
Give the thing enough runway to tell you something true.
The verdict is coming. It's just not due yet.
I send a calm, honest email like this most weeks - no hype, no pressure, just the quieter way to build something of your own. You're welcome to come along.