We get caught up in the numbers. 300 views feels like a failure when you were hoping for 3,000. A video that gets 500 views instead of 5,000 feels like it wasn't worth making.

But then you do the mental exercise: imagine 100 people in a room. All of them sitting there, watching you talk. Listening to what you have to say. Giving you their attention.

That's a lot of people.

Digital Abstraction

View counts are just digits. They don't feel like anything. You see "247 views" and your brain processes it as a small number, not as 247 individual humans who chose to spend time with your content.

We lose the weight of it because it's abstracted. There's no room full of faces. No sense of how many people that actually is.

Try this: next time you're in a coffee shop, count 50 people. Picture all of them watching your video. That's what 50 views actually means.

Now imagine a lecture hall with 200 people. All there for you. That's a "disappointing" video that got 200 views.

Self-Worth against the world's best creators

The problem with tying your sense of value to view counts is that the goalposts always move.

You get 1,000 views and feel good. Then you get 10,000 on the next one. Now anything below 10,000 feels like failure. Your previous success became your new baseline, and you're chasing something that keeps receding.

Meanwhile, you've forgotten that 1,000 people watching something you made is genuinely remarkable. Most people never have 1,000 people pay attention to anything they create.

The dopamine hit of high view counts is real, but it's a trap. It trains you to measure your worth by numbers you don't control, on platforms designed to keep you anxious and posting.

Who's Actually Watching

Here's the other thing about view counts: they don't tell you who watched.

300 views could be 300 random people who bounced after 5 seconds. Or it could be 50 people who are exactly your target customer, who watched the whole thing, who now think of you differently.

If you're making content for your business, the second scenario is infinitely more valuable than the first. But the view count is the same.

When we started thinking about our actual customers, the specific people who use Clipflow and struggle with the problems we solve, the view count mattered less. We knew that somewhere in those 300 views were people we were genuinely helping.

That's enough.

The Room Exercise

When content starts feeling pointless, try the room exercise.

Picture the exact number of views your last video got. Now imagine that many people in a physical room. All of them took time out of their day to listen to you.

Would you feel like a failure standing in front of that room? Or would you feel grateful that anyone showed up at all?

The mental shift is subtle but it changes how you feel about creating. You're not failing to hit arbitrary benchmarks. You're helping real people, however many of them show up.

What Actually Matters

None of this is to say that growth doesn't matter. Obviously you want more people to find your content. More reach means more impact, more potential customers, more opportunities.

But the path to growth runs through consistency, not through obsessing over individual video performance. You keep making things, you get better, you figure out what resonates, and the audience builds over time.

That's a long game. And it's a lot easier to play when you're not demoralized every time a video underperforms.

The influencers you watch have millions of followers because they've been doing this for years, often a decade or more. They weren't getting millions of views when they started. They were probably getting hundreds, just like you.

A Different Metric

What if instead of view counts, you measured something else?

Comments that show someone actually learned something. DMs from people who found you helpful. Referrals that came from someone who saw your content.

These are harder to track. They don't show up in a nice dashboard. But they're better indicators of whether your content is actually doing its job.

Views are a proxy for reach. They're not a proxy for impact.

TLDR

100 views is 100 people in a room. 300 views is an auditorium. 1,000 views is a small conference.

When you frame it that way, the numbers stop feeling small. They start feeling like what they are: real humans giving you their attention.

That's not nothing. That's actually kind of remarkable.

So make content for those people. The specific humans who are watching, who are struggling with the problems you understand, who might find your perspective helpful.

Forget the algorithm. Forget the benchmarks. If you're helping 300 people, you're doing something valuable.